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Men at Home

Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Gyanendra Pandey author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Publishing:28th Jan '25

£85.00

This title is due to be published on 28th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Men at Home cover

In Men at Home, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials—autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and ethnographies—to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world, underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage, intimacy, and conjugality, and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender, caste, and class power in familial interactions. To uncover the nuances of these relationships, Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper-, middle-, and lower- class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honor and shame, rights and responsibilities, citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as a book about masculinity and conjugality, this is a book about Indian modernity, nationalism, and society as seen from the location of men in the home.

“This deeply felt book unsettles many of our common contrasts, including those between public and private, men and women, home and the world. By looking at an unusual set of archival and biographical materials from different parts of northern and western India during the colonial period and after, Gyanendra Pandey opens up a new vista for the study of men at home in modernity.” -- Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
“Gyanendra Pandey’s historical account of men’s domestic lives in India breaks a resounding silence on the subject of men in the home, and gender more broadly, in nationalist histories. This allows him to arrive at an understanding of contemporary Indian society that is particularly pointed. This pathbreaking book, written with ease and elegance, makes a significant intervention and is an important addition to the field of feminist studies.” -- Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, author of * The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India *

ISBN: 9781478028154

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 572g

240 pages