Womens Empowerment in India: From Rights to Agency [Hardcover]

List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Womens empowerment in India 1. Shifting contours of womens activism in India 2. Multi-perspectivity in Indian legal discourse: The Hindu Code Bill debate 3. Womens political participation in India: Alternative paths to empowerment 4. Cyber-activism on violence against women in India 5. The role of Self-Help Groups in rural Odisha: Promoting womens empowerment 6. Speaking up from behind the veil: Womens participation in Jan Sunwai and the struggle for transparency in rural Rajasthan 7. The Sa-chetana Process: In search of frameworks for understanding womens empowerment 8. Corpo-activism: Dance and activist labour in the work of Komal Gandhar, Kolkata 9. Whither Indian womens empowerment? Index.

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The volume brings together readings describing a range of less-traversed aspects and transferences of womens rights and struggles in India and develops a comprehensive understanding of the interface between womens activism and politics.

The book documents and discusses diverse ways in which Indian women have struggled for empowerment, political voice and representation, and rallied against injustice and discrimination. Against the backdrop of womens assertion of rights and negotiations for empowerment, the chapters in this volume explore diverse facets of collective agency, and emanations of womens politico-legal struggles against stereotypes of gender and class in post-independence India. While the donor-driven international community has been eager to celebrate the successes of its global normative agenda-setting and best practices approach, this book - based primarily on field research by the contributors - showcases authentic local ownership and womens own agency, taking seriously the need to understand the cultural context and pay attention to intersectionality. It presents various lÓT