Using in-depth interviews, this book explores women employed in the Indian IT industry and highlights the gender specific and culturally specific consequences of reflexive modernity in neo-liberal India.

This book is an extensive and thorough exploration of the ways in which the middle class in India select their spouse. Using the prism of matchmaking, this book critically unpacks the concept of the 'modern' and traces the importance of moralities and values in the making of middle class identities, by bringing to the fore intersections and dynamics of caste, class, gender, and neoliberalism. The author discusses a range of issues: romantic relationships among youth, use of online technology and of professional services like matrimonial agencies and detective agencies, encounters of love and heartbreak, impact of experiences of pain and humiliation on spouse-selection, and the involvement of family in matchmaking. Based on this comprehensive account, she elucidates how the categories of 'love' and 'arranged' marriages fall short of explaining, in its entirety and essence, the contemporary process of spouse-selection in urban India. Though the ethnographic research has been conducted in India, this book is of relevance to social scientists studying matchmaking practices, youth cultures, modernity and the middle class in other societies, particularly in parts of Asia. While being based on thorough scholarship, the book is written in accessible language to appeal to a larger audience.

Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies?east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations?Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings?colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.

Based on ethnographic research, this book explores the ways in which elite women use and view money in order to construct identities – of class, status, and gender. Drawing on their everyday worlds, it tracks the intricate and contested meanings they attach to money. Focusing on weddings, travel, and spirituality, Parul Bhandari delineates the entitlements and privileges as well as the obsessions and vulnerabilities that underlie the construction of class, the shaping of elite cultures, and the curating of femininity. As such, this book offers an innovative account of the interplay between money, modernity, class, and gender.

This book analyses the status of women in Bengal, India, by examining the versatile everyday living conditions of women, and how they are represented as individuals and as a category in the media. Contributors to the book start their discussion from the point that women in India have a varied experience of living, thinking, and acting specific to the regional cultural context. Caste ideology specified privileges and sanctions according to innate attributes, differ by sex as well as ethnicity, class, caste, minority status, and marginal position intersect lives and render unique life experiences. With a focus on women and their lived experiences, performances by them and performances imitating women’s roles, the book offers a complex and rich analysis of the reality of women’s lives based on research and reflections by 25 scholars. Organised into two sections, the book presents women in reality, their living conditions, struggles, and women as represented in films, stories, framed in plots sometimes by women and sometimes by men. The chapters provide insights on how institutionalised gender distinctions create subordination and marginality of women and their struggles to survive in a society dominated by heteropatriarchal ideology and its practice. This book improves our understanding of various dimensions of gender and transgender relations in India. It will be of interest to researchers in Gender Studies, South Asian Culture and Society, and Studies on India.

This collection brings together the ideas of key global scholars focusing on the lives of youth and young adults, examining their visual and cultural identity constructs. Embracing an international perspective encompassing the Global North and Global South, chapters explore expressions and performances of youth and young adults as shifting and entangled, in and through the clothed body, gender, sexuality, race, artistic and pedagogical making practices, in spaces and places, framed by new materialism, social media, popular and material culture. The overarching emphasis of the collection is on youth and young adults’ strategies for engaging in and with the world, becoming a someone, and belonging, in settings that include a juvenile arbitration program, an artist community, high schools, universities, families and social media. This truly interdisciplinary and international collection will have resonance not just within cultural and media studies, but also in education, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, child and youth studies, visual culture, and communication studies.

This book is about the most vibrant yet under-studied aspects of Indian writing today. It examines multilingualism, current debates on postcolonial versus world literature, the impact of translation on an “Indian” literary canon, and Indian authors’ engagement with the public sphere. The essays cover political activism and the North-East Tribal novel; the role of work in the contemporary Indian fictional imaginary; history as felt and reconceived by the acclaimed Hindi author Krishna Sobti; Bombay fictions; the Dalit autobiography in translation and its problematic international success; development, ecocriticism and activist literature; casteism and access to literacy in the South; and gender and diaspora as dominant themes in writing from and about the subcontinent. Troubling Eurocentric genre distinctions and the split between citizen and subject, the collection approaches Indian literature from the perspective of its constant interactions between private and public narratives, thereby proposing a method of reading Indian texts that goes beyond their habitual postcolonial identifications as “national allegories”.