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Men at Home
Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India
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Gyanendra Pandey
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
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 it is 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.
Author / Editor information
Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University and author of A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India, and The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, among other books.
Reviews
“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
-- Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, author of The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India
"Men at Home by Gyanendra Pandey is a powerful, richly layered intervention in the study of masculinity, intimacy, and domesticity within the context of modern Indian society. With an acute sensitivity to historical and social complexity, Pandey interrogates the seemingly private sphere of the home to uncover its deep entanglement with public, political, and structural forces. In doing so, he reframes the home not as a feminine preserve, but as a space where male identities are negotiated, contested, and constantly reshaped."
-- Namrata Kitaab
-- Namrata Kitaab
"Absorbing and intriguing. ... When a book stays with one long after the act of reading, with all that it makes one ask the self, with revelations that one can’t hide away from, that really makes for an unusual book."
-- Anuradha Kumar American Kahani
-- Anuradha Kumar American Kahani
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Dramatis Personae
ix -
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Prelude
1 -
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I. Legacies
9 -
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II. Practices
57 -
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III History in a Visceral Register
133 -
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Epilogue
169 -
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Acknowledgments
179 -
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Notes
183 -
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Bibliography
205 -
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Index
215
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 24, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478060376
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478060376
Keywords for this book
domesticity; male privilege; gender; caste; nation; modernity; domestic hierarchies; feudality; homo-sociality; domestic worlds; men's rights; patriarchy
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
