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"The Scandal of the State "is filled with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's trademark scrupulousness and full documentation of opposing views, yet also with her characteristic wit and deep political wisdom. Her ultimate indictment of the realities of the Indian state is biting and utterly persuasive. This is a brilliant, pathbreaking book."--Bruce Robbins, author of "Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress"
List of contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Introduction: Women, Citizenship, Law, and the Indian State 1
I. Women in Custody
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2. The Ameena “Case”: The Female Citizen and Subject 41
3. Beyond the Hysterectomies Scandal: Women, the Institution, Family, and State 72
II. Women in Law
4. The Prostitution Question(s): Female Agency, Sexuality, and Work 117
5. Women Between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates 147
III. Killing Women
6. Children of the State?: Unwanted Girls in Rural Tamilnadu 177
7. Outlaw Woman: The Politics of Phoolan Devi’s Surrender, 1983 212
Notes 237
References 279
Index 301
About the author
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Reader in English and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism and editor of Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India.
Summary
Offers an examination of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women's actual needs and lives. This title shows how the state is central to understanding women's identities and how, reciprocally, women and "women's issues" affect the state's role and function.
