Table Of ContentGENDER AND VIOLENCE IN
HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY
PERSPECTIVES
This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related
violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary
perspective, it discusses historical and contemporary developments
that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices,
discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India.
Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional
context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore
the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and
violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and
transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well
as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the
forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in
the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters
deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of
patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes
such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic
representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates
about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender
bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains.
An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be use-
ful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, history,
sociology, and political science.
Jyoti Atwal is Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at the Centre for
Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India and Adjunct Professor, Department of History, Faculty of
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her
areas of specialisation include Indian women in the reformist, nationalist,
and international contemporary perspectives; socio-cultural and religious
aspects of women’s lives in colonial and postcolonial India; women’s agenda
and the nation; and entangled histories of Indian and Irish women. She has
published Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North
India (2016). Currently, she is writing a biography of Margaret Cousins
(1878–1954) exploring the life and work of an Irish suffragette in India.
Iris Flessenkämper is Executive Manager and Postdoctoral Researcher of the
Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster,
Germany. She received her PhD in Early Modern History in 2007 from the
University of Augsburg. Her fields of interest include gender history in Early
Modern Germany, Reformation history, and European Enlightenment.
She is presently in charge of a project dealing with marital conflicts and
competing marriage norms in Early Modern Germany.
GENDER AND
VIOLENCE IN
HISTORICAL AND
CONTEMPORARY
PERSPECTIVES
Situating India
Edited by Jyoti Atwal and
Iris Flessenkämper
First published 2020
by Routledge
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CONTENTS
List of contributors viii
Preface xii
PART I
Introduction 1
Situating India: challenges and propositions 3
JYOTI ATWAL
Researching gender-based violence in India: issues, concepts,
approaches 20
IRIS FLESSENKÄMPER
PART II
Historical encounters and cultures of violence 41
1 Of devotional zeal and patriarchal norms: gender and
violence in the Periya Purāṇam 43
R. MAHALAKSHMI
2 Silenced women, speaking men: locating gendered epistemic
violence in nineteenth century German representations
of India 58
FELICITY JENSZ
3 Gendered behaviour: religious norms and sexual deviance
in the Basel India Mission in the first half of the
nineteenth century 76
JUDITH BECKER
v
CONTENTS
4 Bodies in pain: violence and sexually ‘deviant’ male
and transgender bodies in colonial India, 1862–1922 95
MANJU LUDWIG
5 Sati, child wives, and prostitutes: constituting violence and
criminality in colonial India 110
JYOTI ATWAL
PART III
Minorities and marginalised women: sexuality
and violence 123
6 Unregistered concerns: violence against women with
disabilities in India 125
NILIKA MEHROTRA AND MAHIMA NAYAR
7 Nature of violence against Dalit women 141
VIVEK KUMAR
8 A genealogy of Muslim feminism in Maharashtra: systems
and violence 153
DEEPRA DANDEKAR
9 Hijras: India’s third gender between discrimination
and recognition 169
RENATE SYED
PART IV
Economies of violence and cultural representations 183
10 The Nirbhaya murder case: women as the oddity
in public transport 185
SUSMITA DASGUPTA
11 Gender-based violence of economic globalisation
in contemporary India: an intersectional approach
to gender and violence 200
CHRISTA WICHTERICH
vi
CONTENTS
12 Fifty Shades of Grey : a romance that we cannot resist? 217
MARY EDWARDS
13 Gender, violence, and resistance in Partition narratives 232
BODH PRAKASH
14 On behalf of us all? Violence against women as a subject
of Indian film studies 243
ADELHEID HERRMANN-PFANDT
Index 260
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
Judith Becker is Professor of Early Modern and Modern History of Christi-
anity at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests
include the history of missions and world Christianity, cultural encoun-
ters, change of values, and historical consciousness and Reformation his-
tory, particularly migration and confessionalisation. She has published,
amongst others, on the Basel Mission in South India and on missions in
contact zones: Conversio im Wandel. Basler Missionare zwischen Europa
und Südindien und die Ausbildung einer Kontaktreligiosität, 1834–1860
(2015) and E uropean Missions in Contact Zones: Transformation
through Interaction in a (Post-)Colonial World (ed., 2015).
Deepra Dandekar is a researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions,
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany and is a
historian and anthropologist of gender, religion, and migration. She has
recently published a book on a narrative of Christian conversion from
nineteenth century Maharashtra, The Subhedar’s Son (2019).
Susmita Dasgupta specialises in the sociology of images in popular culture as
well as in everyday reality. She is interested in contemporary events that
are debated in the public sphere. She is also a policy economist addressing
various aspects of policymaking of the Ministry of Steel, Government of
India. She published extensively in sociology and economics.
Mary Edwards is a Teacher in Philosophy in the School of English, Commu-
nication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. Previously, she worked
as an Adjunct Lecturer at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, where
she was also awarded her PhD in 2017. Her research and teaching inter-
ests are in the fields of feminist philosophy, existentialism, phenomenol-
ogy, philosophy of literature, and philosophy of the imagination. She has
published papers exploring the gendered politics of shame and the mean-
ings that are projected onto women’s bodies in H ypatia: A Journal of
Feminist Philosophy and Discipline Filosofiche and is currently working
on her monograph, provisionally titled S artre and Knowing Others .
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Adelheid Herrmann-Pfandt is Professor for Religious Studies in Philipps-
Universität, Marburg, Germany. She studied Religious Studies, History,
Classical Philology, Indology, and Tibetology in Erlangen and Bonn. She
received her PhD in 1992 from Bonn University and her Habilitation in
2001 from Marburg University. Between 1991 and 1994, she was Assis-
tant Professor in Indology and Tibetology in Marburg. From 1994 till
present, she has been a freelance writer and university teacher with teach-
ing assignments in Marburg, Bremen, Hannover, Göttingen, Frankfurt am
Main, Siegen, and Fribourg/Switzerland. In 2009 she was Käthe Leichter
guest professor in Gender Studies in South Asian and Tibetan religions at
the South Asian Institute in Vienna. Her main areas of research and pub-
lications are Buddhism, Hinduism, Tantrism, women in religion, Buddhist
iconography, religion and violence, and religion in Hindi film.
Felicity Jensz is a colonial historian and has worked in the Cluster of Excel-
lence for “Religion and Politics” at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University
Münster, Germany since 2008. She received her PhD from the University
of Melbourne in colonial history. She has published extensively on nine-
teenth century missionary interactions in British and German colonies,
particularly in relation to schooling for non-Europeans. Other publica-
tion topics include book history, migration history, food history, and Ger-
man cultural history.
Vivek Kumar is Professor of Sociology and Chairperson of the Centre
for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, India, where he earned his PhD. He is also
Professor-in-Charge of Dr Ambedkar Chair in Sociology and Coordinator
of “Global Studies Programme”. He has been Visiting Professor at the
Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York and Humboldt
University, Berlin. His areas of academic interests are methodology of
social sciences, Indian diaspora, social stratification, South Asia, and
Dalit studies.
Manju Ludwig is Lecturer at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg Univer-
sity, Germany. A historian of South Asia, she researches on the history of
gender relations, masculinity, sexuality, and criminality in nineteenth and
twentieth century India. She completed her MA in the history and politi-
cal science of South Asia at Heidelberg University and Delhi University.
Her publications include “Britische Sittlichkeitsreform und das ‘Laster
wider die Natur’ im kolonialen Indien” (in B iopolitik und Sittlichkeitsre-
form. Kampagnen gegen Alkohol, Drogen und Prostitution, 1880–1950 )
and “Murder in the Andamans: A Colonial Narrative of Sodomy, Jeal-
ousy and Violence” (in S AMAJ ).
R. Mahalakshmi is Professor of Ancient Indian History at the Centre for
Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She
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