Gendered Publics

Description

This book is the first comprehensive effort to recover the forgotten histories of the highly impactful women’s association, the Assam Mahila Samiti (AMS, 1926 cont.), and the life and times of its founding Secretary Chandraprava Saikiani (1901–72), who was a celebrated writer, mobilizer and publisher despite being an unwed mother and from a ‘lower’ caste.

The book traverses the individual and collective journeys of Saikiani and the mahila samitis from the 1920s to the 1950s in conversation/contestation with parallel tribal-caste and literary associations, anti-colonial movements and international ideological paradigms such as the Bolshevik revolution. Locating crucial archival documents such as the controversy surrounding the AMS’s serving of a legal notice to a groom in 1934 to stop a child marriage, the book argues how women’s collectives may transform and orchestrate a veritable gendered public, resistant to both native patriarchy and sometimes to colonial authority.

The book makes significant methodological interventions in interdisciplinary studies through the careful interweaving of print sources with handwritten minutes of early mahila samiti meetings, performative spaces such as women’s singing of naam kirtan, women’s weaving and women’s memory (recorded as part of a digital archive of the mahila samitis in Assam). It provides insights into issues related to history and memory, literary studies, nascent vernacular publics in South Asia and women’s studies.

About the author:

Hemjyoti Medhi teaches at the Department of English, Tezpur University, India. She coordinated a project with support from the Sephis Programme, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, to create a digital archive of selected mahila samitis in Assam and has worked towards the spread of these stories to a larger audience through exhibitions, media and a short film Xeito Monot Assey (That, I Remember).

Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Note on Citation, Translation, and Usage

Chronology

Introduction

1. The Making of the Aideo: Construction of Gender
2. Early Women’s Writing, the Mahila Samitis, and the Naam Kirtan Space
3. Poharir Mel! The Mahila Samitis in Assam
4. ‘Weaving Fairy Tales’: The Mahila Samitis and the Sipini Bhoral
5. Mukto Manuh: Chandraprava Saikiani’s Writings

Conclusion

Curating Memories: An Archive of Select Mahila Samitis in Assam

A Representative Bibliography of Chandraprava Saikiani

Assam Kachari Mahila Sanmilanar Pratham Adhibeshanar Sabhanetrir Abhibhashan

List of Interviews

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Index