Archives: Books

This book presents a brilliant reading of the unanimous decision of the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in the case of Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) and Another vs. Union of India and Others (‘Puttaswamy’). The 2017 judgment protects the right to privacy as
a fundamental right, and guarantees the right to life with dignity, the right to personal liberty and the right to move the court against unconstitutional actions by the state.

The authors examine the implications of Puttaswamy to understanding labouring bodies (in their multiplicity) and their worlds of work. They explore the gendered dimensions of the right to privacy and its relation to labour rights, sexual safety, and bodily integrity, offering a dynamic interpretation of the right to privacy and related rights of dignity, liberty, and equality. Using the Constitution, Kannabiran and Jagani anchor labour rights in Puttaswamy to advance claims-making and emphasise collective struggles for justice and resistance to oppression as the most productive route to conceptualising an idea of justice in the realms of labour.

Further, the monograph emphasises the need to popularise constitutional conversations beyond the courts and holds valuable lessons for women’s and labour rights movements. Drawing from a range of scholarly works and case law to offer a fresh understanding of labour that doesn’t rely on gender binaries, the authors initiate conversations on human dignity, intersectional discrimination, and resistance to reinstating labouring bodies in workplaces. This work opens up new opportunities for feminist and labour studies scholars, trade unions, and courts to explore interdisciplinary intersections and frame claims for more just, fair, and equal working environments.

Kalpana Kannabiran and Devi Jagani’s work inspires both hope and anxiety, as they challenge us to build intellectual and on-ground solidarities that cross disciplinary boundaries, to support those who are most marginalised.
— Navsharan Singh, independent researcher, writer, and activist

Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar spent almost her entire life fighting against the devadasi system in Tamil Nadu, a practice that dedicated young girls to temples, where they were meant to be available for the sexual needs of priests and landowners. Sold off by her parents, and brought up to dedicate herself as a dasi, she managed to escape this fate and make a life for herself. Her battle against the devadasi system was met with considerable resistance, not only by those with vested interests in keeping the devadasis inside temples, but often by the devadasis themselves. But Moovalur persisted, taking her cause, and its wider ramifications into the broader politics of the Congress party, and later the Self-Respect Movement. Despite this, in the annals of recent Tamil history, she was hardly known, until the publication, in 2006 of Moovalur Ramamirtham: Vazhvum Paniyum (translated here as The Life and Work of Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar). Put together through interviews with her surviving relatives and fragments garnered from a handwritten manuscript, this is the first book to document the ‘braveheart’ of Dravidian history, Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar.

Why Would I Be Married Here? examines marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India, unable to marry locally, who travel across the breadth of India seeking brides who do not share the same caste, ethnicity, language, or customs as themselves.

Combining rich ethnographic evidence with Dalit feminist and political economy frameworks, Reena Kukreja connects the macro- political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to analyse the lived reality of this set of migrant brides in cross-region marriages among dominant-peasant caste Hindus and Meo Muslims in rural North India.

Why Would I Be Married Here? reveals how predatory capitalism links with patriarchy to dispossess many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It reveals how, within the context of the increasing spread of capitalist relations, these women’s pragmatic cross-region migration for marriage needs to be reframed as an exercise of their agency that simultaneously exposes them to new forms of gender subordination and internal othering of caste discrimination and ethnocentrism in conjugal communities. Why Would I Be Married Here? offers powerful examples of how contemporary forces of neoliberalism reshape the structural oppressions compelling poor women from marginalized communities worldwide into making compromised choices about their bodies, their labour, and their lives.