From the Seams of History
Subtitle: Essays on Indian Women (Gender/Women's Studies)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: March 23, 1995
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780195632262
Description: The ten essays which make up the body of this book are drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and weave a complex pattern of the experiences of women in India over the last one hundred years. The book departs from traditional historiography which has given inadequate attention to women, and in this sense From the Seams of History attempts to 'rewrite' history.

Beginning with the debate on widow remarriage in Bengal and Haryana, the book moves on to examine how the new fashions in clothing of the Bengali 'gentlewomen' in the nineteenth century were tailored according to the values and anxieties of their dominant male counterparts. The argument of male domination is taken further in an essay demonstrating that male oppression of women in Indian society was in fact remarkably similar to that of the colonial masters.