From Mathura to Manorama (Resisting Violence Against Women in India)

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About the Book

From the late 1970s to the present, feminists in India have had to deal with spiralling violence against women and the alarming ramifications of its forms, as well as assess their strategies to combat it.

This monograph reviews twenty- five years of protest and action by them, in an attempt to take both our analysis and theories forward.

It maps the trajectory of feminist organizing in India in the post- Emergency period, after 1977; the paths of legal reform and the points at which they have intersected with, or resulted from, feminist campaigns; the texture of campaigns and the creativity with which women’s groups have fashioned and sustained difficult struggles against violence; the persistence of feminist interventions and the ways in which different groups have been able to tilt the balance in favour of women in perceptible ways; and the escalation of collective violence, increasingly by agents of the state, against women.

Notwithstanding the diversity of formal political affiliations and theoretical analyses within the women’s movement, the last twenty-five years have seen the evolution of a minimum consensus that categorically rejects any rationalization of violence against women, even while recognizing its complexity.

About the Author

Kalpana Kannabiran is a founder member of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, and Professor of Sociology at NALSAR University of Law. She is co-author of De-Eroticising Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power (2000); co-editor of The Situated Politics of Belonging (2006) and editor of The Violence of Normal Times: Essays on Women’s Lived Realities (2005). She was awarded the VKRV Rao Prize in Social Science Research for 2003 by the Indian Council for Social Science Research and The Institute for Social and Economic Change.

Ritu Menon is a publisher and writer. She is co-author of Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (1998); Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India (2004); and Educating Muslim Girls: A Comparison of Five Indian Cities (2005); and co-editor of In a Minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India (2005).

She has also edited No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India & Bangladesh Write on the Partition of India (2004), and several anthologies of stories by Indian women.

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