Description
Book SynopsisOffers an examination of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women's actual needs and lives. This title shows how the state is central to understanding women's identities and how, reciprocally, women and "women's issues" affect the state's role and function.
Trade Review“
The Scandal of the State is filled with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's trademark scrupulousness and full documentation of opposing views, yet also with her characteristic wit and deep political wisdom. Her ultimate indictment of the realities of the Indian state is biting and utterly persuasive. This is a brilliant, pathbreaking book.”—Bruce Robbins, author of
Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress"Utterly specific to postcolonial India and its feminist debates, this book is also a significant contribution to general feminist theory and to the fraught question of the relationship of the postcolonial state to the ‘international civil society.’ Rajeswari Sunder Rajan uses ‘high theory’ occasionally, creatively, critically. All feminists (and, indeed, antifeminists) should read this book, if only to discover the one moment in this sober, meticulously researched, analytical text when political passion breaks through to the vision of a chilling dystopia."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present“A valuable addition to the tiny but growing body of work on the sociology of Indian law. The book is a fine-grained feminist reading of postcolonial Indian citizenship, as revealed in its various failures.” -- Kriti Kapila * PoLAR *
"The . . . Rajan volume-appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes as well as the specialist in Indian politics-add[s] rich case studies to the well-established field of feminist postcolonial modernity, paving the way for future works to imagine effective feminist resistance." -- Paige Johnson Tan * Perspectives on Politics *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Introduction: Women, Citizenship, Law, and the Indian State 1
I. Women in Custody
2. The Ameena “Case”: The Female Citizen and Subject 41
3. Beyond the Hysterectomies Scandal: Women, the Institution, Family, and State 72
II. Women in Law
4. The Prostitution Question(s): Female Agency, Sexuality, and Work 117
5. Women Between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates 147
III. Killing Women
6. Children of the State?: Unwanted Girls in Rural Tamilnadu 177
7. Outlaw Woman: The Politics of Phoolan Devi’s Surrender, 1983 212
Notes 237
References 279
Index 301
