In this book Tanika Sarkar provides an account of gender prescriptions and proscriptions, as well as their operation among various Indian religious communities, beginning with early British rule and concluding in the late twentieth century. Tracking various shifts and displacements in doctrinal thought and practice, she argues that Indian modernity was initiated largely through debates on gender, scripture, custom, and caste, which shaped ideal forms of masculine and feminine conduct.

She demonstrates the organisation of a modern public sphere around the controversies, cultural imaginaries, and political agitations over such issues as the age of consent, child marriage, widow remarriage, rape laws, and intercaste and interfaith relations. Gender norms are shown leaching into social attitudes, labour processes, and legal rights – leading eventually to modern Indian feminism.

Closely analysing the interpenetration and co-constitution of religion, politics, and gender in India, while also comparing parallel developments in Pakistan and Bangladesh, this pioneering work offers a brilliant and synthesising account of the battles between orthodoxy and its opponents over two hundred years.

No historian, no feminist, no student of politics can afford to miss reading this book.

Tanika Sarkar’s books include Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (2001), and <Rebels, Wives, Saints (2009), and Hindu Nationalism in India (2022). She was Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at the University of Chicago, Yale University, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and St Stephen’s College, Delhi.