Wives, Widows, and Concubines The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India [Paperback]

The family was at the center of intense debates about identity, community, and nation in colonial Tamil Nadu, India. Emerging ideas about love, marriage, and desire were linked to caste politics, the colonial economy, and nationalist agitation. In the first detailed historical study of Tamil families in colonial India, Wives, Widows, and Concubines maps changes in the late colonial family in relation to the region's culture, politics, and economy. Among professional and mercantile elites, the conjugal relationship displaced the extended family as the focal point of household dynamics. Conjugality provided a language with which women laid claim to new rights, even as the structures of the conjugal family reinscribed women's oppression inside and outside marriage.

Published in association with the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Mytheli Sreenivas is Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies at The Ohio State University.

This is . . . a well-researched, theoretically informed and stylistically refined study of the articulation of a newthe conjugalfamily ideal in colonial India.Vol. 114. 4 Oct. 2009Winner of the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, American Institute of Indian StudiesSreenivas's discussion points to the importance for feminist scholarship of exploring the links among conjugality, kinship, and capitalisms both historically and today.Rather than settling on one conception of the family, Sreenivas tracks how ideals changed over time through very public debates in Tamil society. She does not settle for quick or easy answers about family values and demonstrates how different social groups engaged the question to advance their interests in political and economic spheres.Vol. 21.2 August 2009Whenever my husband felt amorous, he would occasionally cohabit with any woman and pay her occasionally. This is all. They were concubines.Sreenivass study is, without a doubt, a must read for scholars interested in tlƒ&