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The paper is an ethnographic study of an urban Bengali Christian neighbourhood in Kolkata where Hindu women from nearby places attend the two Christian prayer meetings – Catholic and Pentecostal – run by the local preachers of the neighbourhood. Borrowing the theoretical understanding of belief, the paper interrogates the question, posed by Cannell (2006) 'what difference does Christianity make, in the lives of these Hindu women? The paper looks into the experiences of these women in the intimate spaces of kinship, marriage and family as they undergo a form of separation from their Hindu beliefs yet remain largely embedded within Hindu familial ties and obligations without engaging in the practice of baptismal conversion. The study allows us to critically examine the sharp binaries of religious divisions and argues that a focus on baptismal conversion only renders invisible the complex possibilities of what difference Christianity makes on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a case study of Arvind Sharma's thinking on striyaḥ (women), a subject he claims he has not written about aside from the topic of sati, this essay analyzes the epigrams and prefaces found in his fifteen edited books on women as a point of departure to tease out his larger scholarly project: not only to understand why India became colonized and Hinduism moribund, but also how to overcome their lingering effects without alienation from past culture. Toward this end, the essay focuses on how Sharma tackles stereotypes by restoring complexities to the historical record, using the multiple methods of religious studies, taking on the mantle of engaged scholar as a "threshold response," and entering the public sphere on issues of justice and affirmative action. Juxtaposition of pivotal events recorded in his autobiography with these scholarly discussions suggests that his cryptic insights on women's history and liberation is core to his thought, a case of "reciprocal illumination" as it were. All this raises the question of whether Sharma is a Hindu apologist or a reformer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical interventions by black, third world, and/or postcolonial feminists against the homogenizing tendencies of majoritarian narratives of women have led to the emergence of intersectional feminist scholarship and its endeavour to postulate women's stories along the interfaces of race, class, caste, and gender hierarchies. Historicizing social and material bodies has been a constant engagement here, resulting in the analysis of symbiotic processes of subject formation and otherization, thereby entailing a confrontation with the heterogeneous nature of violence and its functioning in such processes. Using such scholarship, this article seeks to comprehend the interplay of various forms of violence in the historical production of given identities and spaces relegated to the bodies of the Other - the Other of Hindu elite women. To do so, this article explores the sub-world of women in the commercial theatre of Bengal during the late colonial period (late 19th to early 20th century). Through a close and critical reading of the writings of one of the most popular actresses of Bengali theatre during those times, Binodini Dasi, the article illuminates the ways in which violence has functioned on the actress to reproduce an otherized body. For the second objective, the article analyses how the actress subverts through the act of writing such subjection of violence. It can be argued that the actresses' writings do not specifically symbolize an unadulterated agential voice; instead, the effect of violence is such that the interiorities of the actress emanate anguish, inhabiting a liminal space between resistance and subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated uteri cervix carcinoma continues to be the 2nd highest cause of death among women in India. This study aims to identify the mode of HPV transmission in different communities such as Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Banjaran women of Bihar, India. Different patterns of life and cultural variations exist among Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Banjarans. For example, Muslim wash their genital parts after urination and maintain genital hygiene, whereas Banjaran tribes, Christians, and Hindu communities do not maintain hygiene. Thus, the present study was undertaken to evaluate high-risk HPV (HR-HPV) infection among healthy women. We access to genuine reason for the cause of HPV transmission in women. Methods: Ethical clearance was obtained from MCS and RC Patna, India. Atotal 154 urine samples have been used for the detection of HR-HPV through a real-time PCR technique. The DNA extraction was done from collected non-invasive urine samples. The estimation and purification of DNA purity was performed by QuantiFluor® dsDNA system and detected HPV-16 and HPV-18. Results: Overall, the prevalence of HR-HPV infection was detected to be 12.34% (19/154) whereas HPV-16 was found to be 9.9% (14/154) and HPV-18 was found to be 3.25% (5/154) in women. The lowest (2%; 1/50) prevalence of HR-HPV was observed in the Muslim community, while higher (25%, 16%, and 14.71%) prevalence was found in the Banjaran, Christian, and Hindu communities, respectively. Conclusion: Our study indicates that personal hygiene possibly reduces HPV infection in women and the evidence suggests that male circumcision has a protective role of HPV infection in Muslim community. Therefore, personal hygiene and circumcision may reduce the risk of HPV acquisition and transmission as well as cervical cancer development in women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a close reading of the intergenerational trilogy by Ashapurna Debi, one of the first-canonized women-novelists of post-independence India: Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise), 1965, Subarnalata, 1967, and Bakul Katha (Bakul's Story), 1974. Reconstituting a history of almost two centuries and countering the colonial/postcolonial grand narratives, these novels act as a saga of Bengali Hindu lower and middle-class women's plight under and resistance against a patriarchal social order operating at the most intimate levels of domestic relationships. Ashapurna Debi's treatment of the intricacies of gender inequality and a woman's response to the violence inflicted on her body in one of the centres of South-Asian modernity and its vicinity intervenes crucially in the twentieth century feminist discourse. At the same time, her narrative closely follows a promise, accompanied by a sense of commitment and responsibility, handed over from mother to daughter to granddaughter to rise as selfconscious individual subjects by overcoming personal and social reservations and taboos. This paper, therefore, examines the micro-physics of power exercised in gender relations as evident in the concerned trilogy. It focuses on the performing bodies of women amidst all sorts of physical and psychological oppressions and how they provide a critique of the broader aspects of social change, like reform and nationalist movements. While considering the intersections between the poststructuralist gender studies in the West--developed as a sustained critique of the mechanism of modern power being proposed by Michel Foucault among others--and Ashapurna Debi's observations, this paper theoretically emphasizes how the factors of contingency in Bengali women's lives posit new insights into what, after Judith Butler, may be called "gender trouble" as they undo many of the morally ordered gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To begin with, the section on the mainstream reformers offers a brief overview of the nature of reform carried out in the late 19th century Bengal and Maharashtra. The second section, on widowhood and nationalism, looks into how the Hindu women in general and the widow in particular were 'recast' by the urgency accorded to the redefinition of the subjectedself as against a 'glorious' Hindu past. This article does not stop with their recasting, it goes beyond into the realm of widows' self-perception and self-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on women of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin in the US diaspora to examine how religious identities unfold within multi-layered transnational structures that range from political histories and events to active webs of family and community relationships that stretch across the diaspora. Our analysis draws on focus groups and interviews with highly educated Hindu and Muslim women in the US. For these women, approaches to religion were marked by multiple points of tension and negotiation, including the work of situating oneself within the intersecting power structures of the diaspora and country of origin, including a transnational sphere that is increasingly crafted through the reach of social media. These women's narratives show they are minorities in the US, and part of majorities in countries of origin, but, sometimes, outsiders to the local politics of religions. Focusing on these women allows us to reflect on the ways in which histories and contemporary events shape contemporary South Asia far beyond its geographic location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindu women's limited right to inheritance in Bangladesh is a story of state-sponsored deprivation; a frustrating legacy of the political authority's systematic indifference and failure in protecting minority women's right to property for nearly half a century. Bangladesh, from its early decades, has experienced the resurgence of religion as one of the driving factors behind gender and minority-sensitive policy formulation and implementation. Under the veil of constitutional secularism, religion has become one of the most pervasive tools in the hands of the political authorities for methodical marginalisation of religious minority groups especially of Hindu community. Consequently, Bangladesh has failed to move forward with appropriate legislative measures for improving the present status of Hindu women's right to property. This article argues that the underlying reasons behind such failure is intrinsically intertwined with power-centric electoral politics rather than normative socio-religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an organized group of middle-class, multicaste Hindu housewives living in the suburbs of Madurai, Tamil Nadu—the Śrī Maṅkala Vināyakar Satsaṅg (SMVS) Group. Hindu satsaṅg groups are common throughout India and revolve primarily around devotional singing, although the word satsaṅg also denotes a grouping/community specifically organized around a guru and their students. Using my experiences participating in and observing this specific satsaṅg group and its practices, I demonstrate how caste, class, and Hindu religious practice intersect in contemporary urban Tamil Nadu. Through an examination of how religious knowledge is shared and learned in the SMVS Group, I show that what are viewed as high-caste Hindu performances of piety (for example, Sanskrit recitation) are formative in many Hindu women's perceptions and constructions of their middle-class identities. Further, I highlight the study of multicaste women's social networks, both urban and rural, as a nuanced and valuable lens through which to study middle-class identity in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through focusing on forms of clothing, this article reveals how educated women from marginalized communities in Pakistan and India made differential claims to being modern. Our analysis of two ethnographic studies shows how the participants mobilized their subjectivities as modern and educated women through a distinction between 'local modern' and 'local traditional'. In this article, our goal is not to define modernity, but instead to illuminate what it meant to be modern in both contexts. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan with those of young, rural Hindu women in India to disrupt the linear telling of the production of universal and homogenous modernity through education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from fieldwork with a Hindu women renunciants' group based in Sakori, a small village in western India, the author shows how their practices of celibacy, renunciation, and ritual performance represent a distinct kind of feminism. Pandya describes their way of life as a challenge to dominant patriarchal norms, specifically, cultural timetables set for women and male hegemony in religion. Moreover, Sakori kanyas ' practices are feminist performances insofar as they reflect individual or communal goals and inculcate an enabling discipline that has social ramifications for the distribution of power and effects on the worldviews of those with whom they come into contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idolized as models of good Hindu women, Indo-Caribbean American women artists—dancers of Kathak and singers of classical Indian music and devotional songs—have the difficult task of performing and maintaining the authenticity of the Indianness of the Indo-Caribbean Americans living in New York. As they all vigilantly preserve and pass down the classical Indian arts, they also inhabit the interstices of their existence. Between immigrant and American, West Indian and East Indian, traditional and modern, religious and secular, these women crave to express their polycultural voice and to articulate an Indo-Caribbean American feminism. To appreciate the contradictions they live, this article examines these tensions to track the continued relevance of the bhadra-mahila or “respectable woman” concept devised during Indian independence to the experiences of the Indian diaspora. Also, by questioning the prevailing understanding of voice as empowering, this article considers how performance is not only transformative, but also disciplining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article presents a critical edition, translation and commentary of a tr̥ca found in book 19 of the Paippalādasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda. The hymn, which consists in a spell against wrinkles, pronounced by a woman who tries to ward off the signs of aging with the help of the goddess Indrāṇī, is remarkable both in term of content and from a linguistic point of view: it is the only hymn directed against wrinkles in the Vedic corpus and the role of the goddess Indrāṇī in the ritual confirms and broadens her sphere of influence related to female charm. Besides providing the earliest attestation of the word for ‘wrinkle’ váli-, the hymn contains two hapaxes, previously unattested forms of the perfect subjunctive and features of women’s speech. The article also includes a stylistic analysis that aims at illuminating the structure and poetics of the hymn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze our experiences engaging in a collaborative ethnographic project. This project brings together two ethnographic studies undertaken independently from the other in Gujarat, India and Punjab, Pakistan. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Hindu women in India with those of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan to depict globalization as a simultaneously interconnected and disjointed project. Our effort is to disrupt the linear telling of the production of global and universal modernity through education, which is often seen through rejecting local culture. We take a critical, feminist, postcolonial approach to challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge and incorporate the scholarship and perspectives of non-Western scholars, problematizing the traditional self–other distinction. This article outlines the methodological process and journey that we undertook to create a dialog between our independent ethnographic work focusing on India and Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Institutional interpretation on Hindu womanhood is one of the vague areas of historical research in modern India. The rise and growth of ‘new’ Indian womanhood in late nineteenth century put forward a number of unresolved issues like domesticity, conjugality, sexuality public service, motherhood, companionate marriages and others into the nationalist arena and a few pamphlets were published in twentieth century to redress these issues from an ultra-gendered platform. One such interpretation came from the Bharat Sevashram Sangha which not only challenged the notions of ‘neo’ womanhood of nineteenth century, but also provided one sanctified ideal of Hindu womanhood based on the alternative mode of Hindutva, if not Hindu nationalism. Swami Vedananda’s Hindu Narir Adorsho O Sadhona (The Ideals and Vows of the Hindu Women) could be cited as an excellent example of how obscure references from classical Hinduism were used to ‘legitimise’ and ‘revive’ the past for the reconstruction of Hindu womanhood at a time when a hegemonic middle-class culture had already been consolidated on the language of nationalist modernity. Bharat Sevashram Sangha and, for example, Swami Vedananda completely rejected modernity as an offshoot of colonialism; a paradox which defined woman both as self-conscious subject and as passive recipients of reform. The present article seeks to analyse the text of Swami Vedananda as a counter narrative of colonial/nationalist modernity on Hindu womanhood and traces the reasons why the Sangh failed to resolve the question of ‘female masculinity’ it had once proposed to work on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how Nepali Hindu women’s oppressive position was created in the past and how they are still struggling for their full liberation – mukti. It also reflects that Hindu women’s long journey towards freedom and equality has been moving through a thorny path. Deriving mainly from literatures, this paper discusses how Nepali Hindu women’s identity ‘Aimai’ was constructed and how, through their continuous struggle, they are getting better condition as dignified ‘Mahila’ yet far from their reach to the position of fully liberated women –mukta Mahila.

This paper unearths the way the late nineteenth and early twentieth century social reform movements and related contestations have endeavoured to (re)assert, (re)sanction and (re)claim male supremacy, male dominance on the one hand and on the other hand ventured to prolong Hindu women's dependence, marginalization and the perennial subdued life. Women's life, role and social status had been what Derrida calls, "under erasure". On the one hand, it has been accepted to exist with equal honour, respect, right and dignity on par with the men in the society and at the same time their dependence on male, marginalization and secondary position has always been practised. Subsequently this play of acceptance and denial has helped patriarchy to persist women's lifelong subdued status and role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious minority constitutes an anomaly within the discourse of national identity in Pakistan. They become an anomaly because their existence as citizens of Pakistan highlights the contradictions within the theory that, the State of Pakistan was created for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Hindus are the largest religious minority in Sindh, but facing discrimination at all levels, i.e., economic, social, political, and legal. They are living as a second-class citizen of the country. While, the women who belong to these minority groups are facing double discrimination, firstly as a woman, and then as a Hindu. It is an exploratory research which was conducted in Narainpur (Karachi), which is one of the oldest residential areas of the city, and represents the largest population of Hindu minority, i.e., 60,000 to 70,000. The entire population of Narainpur comprises of poor and lower middle class, as most of the population works as sweepers, housemaids, laborers in KMC, and sellers. Interview schedule was used to collect data from the respective respondents. Result show that health conditions of the women of this locality needs improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Morgan's theorisation of family life as consisting of political, moral, and emotional economies to examine the interplay of women's control over resources, gender norms, and expectations of intimacy in the context of household food consumption. The research that informs the article focuses on findings from 84 interviews with two South Asian groups: Pakistani Muslim and Gujarati Hindu women with at least one dependent child and from a variety of occupations and household compositions. In examining everyday food consumption, the research demonstrates how gender hierarchies are reproduced by parallel, mutually reinforcing, political, moral, and emotional economies. The women in the study sometimes struggled to subvert gender oppression and negotiate more powerful positions within the household through food management and/or employing manipulative and deceptive tactics. The article argues that, while access to economic resources is important if women are to achieve desirable food and nutritional outcomes, it is not in itself sufficient to meet this aim. Instead, the interplay of resources, gender norms, and conjugal relations are central to household food consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the implications of gender, performance, and transformation in the tale female Hindu renouncer in Rajasthan, India. It analyzes Ganga Giri's telling of "Chaliya's Sacrifice" story as performance through a comparison with authoritative textual versions of the story. Also explored is the religio-cultural trope of the suffering Hindu woman suggesting that women make better devotees than men, and that they are more capable of devotion than men.

Worship of the Feminine Principle was practiced in multiple cultures around the world. Mother Goddesses like Cybele, Gaia, Demeter, Aphrodite, Rhea, Inana, Ihstar, Isis, all represent aspects of the Divine Feminine in their Greco-Roman and oriental contexts. Most of them are necessarily portrayed as the Universal Mother bearing common attributes such as fertility, child-bearing, nurturing and healing. The fertility aspect is commonly depicted using symbolical representations of the snake, vulture and moon. In the Indian context, the cult of the Great Mother with all its regional aspects, is extremely popular owing to the large size of its votaries, as all the sects of Hinduism honour Her, either as an independent divinity or as the consort of any of the Great Gods. The primordial mother is at times depicted as the Adya-Shakti, who has the powers of creation, sustenance and dissolution of this universe and is referred to as the Supreme Being in the Tantric Texts. The appeal of Durga, in both her pacific as well as ferocious demeanour is beyond any compare. This unwed goddess with her numerous incarnations, and attendants has enchanted a large following. However, many primeval modes of Goddess worship have undergone a sea change in the process of Sanskritization, thereby obscuring the original identity of the Mother in the minds of her devotees. This paper aims to ascertain the similarities and the differences between the Divine Feminine and her reflection on the human plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the survey of 3,699 Hindu women renunciants across six Hindu-based orders/faith-based organisations in India that encourage women's renunciation and lifelong commitment to religious life and ascetism, this paper maps their profile, religiosity, spirituality, reasons for joining the order, fears, future plans, strategies of dealing with life in the order and strategies to enhance life quality, as well as their perceived meaning in life. Results of the logistic regression analysis showed that Hindu women renunciants with higher education and higher scores on religiosity and spirituality scales had joined the orders/FBOs by choice and personal inclination or commitment to faith and the charismatic teacher, had a greater propensity to get more involved in varied activities the orders/faith-based organisations, and perceived a higher meaning in life. Substantiating the gap of macro data on Hindu women's renunciation, this paper then stresses on newer nuances of this form of women's ascetism whose crux lies in challenging the prescribed cultural time-tables for women such as marriage and motherhood by emphasizing celibacy, that deem in-depth exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindus and Sikhs, longtime minority religious communities in Afghanistan, have played a major role in the social, cultural, and economic development of the country. Their history in Afghanistan has not been faithfully documented nor relayed beyond the country's borders by their resident educated strata or religious leaders, rendering them virtually invisible and voiceless within and outside of their country borders. The situation of Hindu and Sikh women in Afghanistan is significantly more marginalized socially and politically. Gender equality and women's rights were central to the teachings of Guru Nanak, but gradually became irrelevant to the daily lives of his followers in Afghanistan. Hindu and Sikh women have sustained their hope for change and seized any opportunity presented to play a role in the process. Active participants in the social, cultural, and religious life of their respective communities as well as in Afghanistan's government, their contributions to social changes and the political process have gone mostly unnoticed and undocumented as their rights, equality, and standing in the domestic and public arena in Afghanistan continue to erode in the face of continuous discrimination and harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims to understand determinants of well-being of Hindu women in old age who have committed their lives to religious orders. Data was obtained across eight countries from a sample of 12,082 older Hindu women renunciants belonging to two religions orders: Brahmakumaris and Chinmaya Mission. An e-mail questionnaire was administered comprising basic background profile questions and four scales to measure aspects of well-being, satisfaction with life, and happiness. The analysis of variance, logistic regression, and structural equation models showed that religiosity, spirituality, work done in the order, and length of association positively influenced well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Internal covariances among the independent variables had further compounding effects. Religiosity and spirituality serve to be protector variables for older Hindu women renunciants, influencing their well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Study of older women in religious orders and working with them must form a part of aging studies and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Indian saint Bahinabai (c. 1628–1700) became known to an Anglophone audience largely through A.K. Ramanujan's well-known essay, ‘On Women Saints’. As Ramanujan notes, Bahinabai's life diverges from the standard trajectory of Hindu women saints insofar as she did not reject her husband and family. However, her external conformity to the rules for women contrasts with her literary subversion of normative gender roles. I examine Bahinabai's autobiographical narrative, theAtmacharitra, to demonstrate that she claims spiritual rights for women by undermining the Brahmanical ideal of the devoted wife orpativrata. A rare example of pre-modern women's writing from South Asia, theAtmacharitraillustrates some of the diverse strategies Indian women have employed to circumvent the strictures against feminine self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the object of the beaded necklace worn by married women in Nepal – calledpote– and the ambiguities and layers of meaning surroundingpotein the lived worlds of the women who wear them. The ways women understand and usepoteoffer a view of religious belief as constituted and enacted through lived practices, surrounding and taking place through material objects. To illustrate this, this essay focuses on the ways that knowledge about thepoteis transmitted and the spatial practices ofpotewearing. A new generation of upper caste Hindu women of the Kathmandu valley are negotiating socio-cultural norms in an ever-shifting socio-cultural landscape characteristic of modernity, yet unique to Nepal.Potepractices offer a window into these women’s shifting worlds revealing creativity, agency, and re-invention of new modes of practice informed by traditional codes of women’s religious behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper assesses the socio-economic profile of the women and explore the women's food habits, values and after effects. In this paper, the researcher investigated the phenomenon by using interview and observation technique at a village of Bulandshahr District, U.P. (India). The results revealed that majority of the women are Hindu who belonged to the early age group (25-45) and OBC castes, educated up to secondary and higher secondary level belonged to lower income group, were housewives, lived in middle size houses and in nuclear families, had light, ventilation, toilet and bathroom facility in their house. Majority of the women eat least and last, keep fast for religious and astrological purpose for the wellbeing of the family members. They rarely give their attention towards nutritional diet due to which they are suffering from the various health problems like malnutrition, stress, sleeplessness and other diseases. Efforts are needed to improve diet quality and education for rural women for their upliftment in the economic and health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the postnatal reproductive health care among Hindu and Muslim women, and thrust in mainly on the socio-economic profile of the women and includes attitude towards the age at marriage, pregnancy/delivery and children, attitude of women and their family members after child birth specifically examining the prevalence of post-delivery complications and finally, source of consultation/ treatment for post delivery complications. Keeping all the above facts in view, the researcher has decided to investigate the phenomenon by using interview and observation technique at Bulandshahar City, district head quarter. The results reveal that Hindu women belong to high socio economic profile in comparison to Muslim women, are more aware and careful about their prenatal and postnatal reproductive health, their in-laws take care of their children, still they suffer from various diseases and have weak infant; another contradictory finding is that Muslim women belong to lower socio economic profile in comparison to Hindu women; are not aware and careful about their prenatal and postnatal reproductive healthy but they are living health life and have healthy infants to that of Hindu women which is really surprising and stimulating issue for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Right-wing” movements see significant participation by women who espouse their exclusionary and violent politics while at the same time often contest their patriarchal spaces. Women also serve as discursive and symbolic markers that regularly form the basis of the rhetoric, ideology, actions and policies of the right-wing. However, even as women’s roles and politics within the right-wing remain diverse and important, dominant feminist scholarship has had uneasy encounters with right-wing women, labelling them as monolithic pawns/victims/subjects of patriarchy with limited or no agency. This article aims to question this notion by examining the aesthetics and visual and oral imagery appropriated, (re)constructed, transformed and mediated by right-wing women. Based on ethnographic and visual research conducted in 2013–2014 with women in the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India, I argue that right-wing women use a variety of visual and oral narratives (from images to storytelling) to negotiate with spatialities and carve out independent “feminine” discourses within the larger language of the right-wing. I also argue that these narratives are “ritualised” and performed in various spaces and styles and remain crucial to the “everyday” politics and violence of right-wing women. The “everyday” politics of right-wing women often contest, subvert and bargain with the patriarchal goals of the larger projects, rendering narratives as sites of examining agency. Using specific examples of visual and oral narratives from the aforementioned movement, this article articulates how everyday violence is shaped by the aesthetics of the nation and the body, and how these aesthetics shape everyday violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some multicultural countries, such as Indonesia, that have become parties to international human rights treaties continue to make allowances for personal status of ethnic and religious groups which enable such groups to live in accordance with traditional laws and customs particularly with regard to marriage, divorce, and inheritance, although these traditional rules and regulations are not based on the basic human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination. In this article, the position of Balinese Hindu women is taken as an example to show that by maintaining personal status laws, the land rights of girls and women belonging to the Hindu community are negatively affected and it is very difficult for these women to change this situation themselves as they are caught between their rights and needs on the one hand and their loyalty towards their families, communities, and culture on the other. By accommodating personal status laws, states, including their organs at central, regional and local level, not only violate their international law obligations but are also responsible for undermining women's right to equality. In order to remedy this, they should take all appropriate measures--both legal and extra-legal--to modify laws, customs and traditions in such a way that they are geared to non-discrimination and equality without harming the cultural identity of the ethnic or religious group. For government officials it will be next to impossible to have an impact on people's frame of mind. That is why the authorities should actively and financially support campaigns of non-state actors that support equality, such as grassroots NGOs, local authorities, and academics. Because these actors speak the local language and have intimate knowledge of the religion and culture, they are best placed to bring about a change in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's economic status and social security is influenced by their ownership and control over immovable property. Contemporary Indian society has refused to give up traditional ideologies and perpetuates the age-old pattern of ownership of material assets. Despite some progressive interpretations and statutory law, justice with respect to property has not progressed in a linear trajectory for Indian women, particularly Hindu women. This article examines the scheme of succession for Hindu males and females, its wider implications, the policy of non-interference by the courts, the recommendations of the Law Commission of India and the National Commission for Women and makes suggestions for removing the disparity between Hindu males and females in respect to devolution of property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the story of women's negotiations with social reforms in late colonial urban Bengal through an analysis of private reminiscences of elderly Muslim and Hindu women. Skirting the larger stories of nationalist transformation, conflict and dislocation that so often dominate discussions of Muslim-Hindu relations in the subcontinent, the life stories analyzed here foreground an intimate realm of everyday experiences that captures a 'feeling' for a bygone time and context, and the complex linkages between public memory and individual biography. The article also pays attention to the oral narratives as intersubjective, dialogically produced 'texts' that are fraught with tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines changes to cultural identity when South Asians move around the globe. It focuses specifically on the humble bindi as a marker of one specific South Asian woman’s agency and comes up with wide-ranging suggestions about the scope for using such bodily adornments as a tool for skilled cultural navigation in diaspora. It also suggests avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that in spite of the phenomenal economic progress made by India, the urban Indian Hindu woman still faces major challenges and hindrances in charting the course of her existence, some aspects of which are still located within a very traditional discourse. Women of particular age groups combine highly competitive careers in medicine, management, engineering, and other demanding professions with marriage and motherhood, while simultaneously juggling the eternal roles of the docile, hardworking daughter-in-law and the dutiful daughter. It is, yet again, another sacrifice of individual needs and time on the part of the urban Indian Hindu woman within a discourse that imposes constant adjustment and compromise from one's birth as a female child. The economic context might appear to be very different in this century, and the socio-cultural discourse may appear to have changed along with it, but the expectations and the status quo of the urban Hindu woman has not changed very much, given the underlying historical and socio-cultural discourse that is still extant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]