Author: Madhu Kishwar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 290
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195668310
Description
This work is an account of a life of contemplation and tireless striving for the cause of a long-neglected half of humanity. This book will be of interest to those concerned about the status of women in India.
Madhu Kishwar is widely renowned as the founding editor of Manushi, the journal that has played a pioneering role in bringing women's issues to the forefront of intellectual and political discourse in India. Some of Kishwar's most path-breaking essays have been compiled in this book to provide readers an insight into her position on such issues as dowry, the denial of inheritance rights to women, beauty contests, and the importance of Sita as a cultural ideal.
Kishwar comes across as deeply reflective, insightful and incisive in her commentary on contemporary India. She charts her own course without recourse to any of the established ideologies of the age. Off the Beaten Track is an account of a life of contemplation and tireless striving for the cause of a long-neglected half of humanity.
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW
Kishwar is known for her free, frank, controversial but original ideas plus a threadbare analysis, almost always on a very different footing from the usual formal and professional academic. The book is a treasure in the sense that it provides a concinnity of her thoughts in a composite collection.
-Indian Book Chronicle
Contents
INTRODUCTION
I. Beginning With Our Own Lives: A Call for Dowry Boycott
II. Rethinking Dowry Boycott
III. Dowry Calculations: Daughter's Rights in her Parental Family
IV. Knocking at the Portals of Justice: The Struggle for Women's Land Rights
V. The Burning of Roop Kanwar
VI. Co-Ownedrship Rights of Wives: A Solution Worse than the Problem
VII. When Daughters are Unwsanted: Sex Ddetermination Tests in India
VIII. A Code for Self-Monitoring: Some Thoughts on Activism
IX. Violence and the 1989 Elections: Implications for Women
X. Out of the Zenana Dabba: Strategies for Enchancing Women's Political Representation
XI. Women's Marginal Role in Politics
XII. Sex Harassment and Slander as Weapons of Subjugation
XIII. When India 'Missed' the Universe
XIV. Love and Marriage
XV. Women, Sex and Marriage: Restraint as a Feminine Strategy
XVI. Yest to Sita, No to Ram!: The Continuing Popularity of Sita in India
XVII. Who Am I?: Living Identities vs Acquired Ones
XVIII. A Horror of 'Isms': Why I do not Call Myself a Feminist