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Wives, Widows, and Concubines

Wives, Widows, and Concubines The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India - Contemporary Indian Studies

Hardback (25 Jul 2008)

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Publisher's Synopsis

The family was at the center of intense debates about identity, community, and nation in colonial Tamil Nadu, India. Emerging ideas about love, marriage, and desire were linked to caste politics, the colonial economy, and nationalist agitation. In the first detailed historical study of Tamil families in colonial India, Wives, Widows, and Concubines maps changes in the late colonial family in relation to the region's culture, politics, and economy. Among professional and mercantile elites, the conjugal relationship displaced the extended family as the focal point of household dynamics. Conjugality provided a language with which women laid claim to new rights, even as the structures of the conjugal family reinscribed women's oppression inside and outside marriage.

Published in association with the American Institute of Indian Studies.

About the Publisher

Indiana University Press

Book information

ISBN: 9780253351180
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 306.85095482
DEWEY edition: 22
Language: English
Number of pages: 169
Weight: 454g
Height: 239mm
Width: 163mm
Spine width: 18mm