Celebrate Women's History Month

Out of Partition is a narrative of the Bengali refugee women, both Hindus and Muslims after the Partition of India in 1947. The story of their struggle is not merely a saga of mental and physical trauma, which did exist, but also a portrayal of their hardship experiences for shelter, rehabilitation and employment. In this arduous journey, they came out of Partition and emerged as new women of a distinct category, self-reliant, and soon turned into social, cultural and political activists of a progressive secular dimension. Spaces and roles they could acquire in this new alien situation were earlier denied in their sheltered and secure places in the pre-Partition days.

Revolution Within portrays an important phase in the social reform movement of Kerala, where a major transformation took place within the upper-caste, patriarchal Nampudiri Brahmin households initiated by the youth and women, which challenged the pre-modern Brahminical moral codes, gendering process and modes of reproduction and inheritance, and resulted in a transformation of the Brahmin households. The book also shows how this internal revolutionary transformation later merged with an overall social change in Kerala. It argues that this transformation contributed to the growth of progressive democratic movements in Kerala and helped focus the gender question in this process.

This book is a compilation of papers examining women’s role in rural production systems in India. The book is divided into six sections; the first section explores conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues with respect to understanding women’s work. The second, third, and fourth sections present evidence from primary and secondary data on women’s work in agriculture and nonagricultural activities, and include a discussion of the nature of work among Dalit and Adivasi women. The fifth and sixth sections provide a brief historical perspective of rural women’s employment in the colonial period and analyze women's access to banking.