Women in Indian Borderlands

by Paula Banerjee

• ISBN13: 9788132106500
• ISBN10: 8132106504
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-08
• Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd

Summary

Women in Indian Borderlands is an ethnographic compilation on the complex interrelationship between gender and political borders in South Asia. The book focuses on the border regions of West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir and Northeast India. The chapters in the book examine the stories of women whose lives are intertwined with borders, and who resist everyday violence in all its myriad forms. They show how most of the traditional efforts to make geopolitical regions more secure end up privileging a masculine definition of security that only results in feminine insecurities. These essays discuss how women negotiate their differences with a state that, though democratic, denies space to differences based on ethnicity, religion, class or gender. Borders are interpreted as zones where the jurisdiction of one state ends and that of the other begins. What comes out is the startling revelation that women not only live on the borders, but in many ways, form them.

Author Biography

Paula Banerjee is Associate Professor, University of Calcutta, and Secretary, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, India. She is also the Vice President, International Association for Study of Forced Migration. Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury is Research Associate, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, India.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. vii
List of Photographs	p. ix
List of Maps	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction: Resistance in the Borderlands	p. xv
West Bengal
Bengal-Bangladesh Borderland: Chronicles from Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda	p. 3
Narrated Time and Constructed Space: Remembering the Communal Violence of 1950 in Hooghly	p. 40
Jammu and Kashmir
Women's Voices: From Jammu and Kashmir	p. 69
Renegotiating Internal Boundaries by Women of Jammu and Kashmir	p. 94
Northeast
Sanitized Society and Dangerous Interlopers: Law and the Chins in Mizoram	p. 125
Engendered Lives: Women in the West Garo Hills	p. 151
Voices
Voices of Women in the Borderlands	p. 179
Voices of Women in a Border Town Called Moreh	p. 203
Consolidated Bibliography	p. 218
About the Editors and Contributors	p. 228
Index	p. 230
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.