Against the Grain: Indian Women Negotiate Land, Labour and Livelihoods in the New Millennium

Abstract

Indian women are positioned at a critical juncture in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The new opportunities of a liberalised, growing economy has produced uneven effects for women, leading to some gains but overall the persistence, and in some cases even deepening, of gender disadvantages. The chapters in this book articulate the multiple modalities of women working ‘against the grain’ of patriarchal values, ideologies, practices and institutions in order to secure land, labour and livelihoods. This introductory chapter signals the need for three important directional shifts in interventions and analyses. First, we argue for a shift in the conceptualisation of the informal sec..