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PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN AND WORK IN PRE-COLONIAL SOUTH INDIA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2010

Vijaya Ramaswamy
Vijaya Ramaswamy
Affiliation:
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi E-mail [email protected]
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Abstract

Until a few decades ago, most labour histories did not bother to address women as workers in the domestic or public domain who contributed to a household income or the overall economy. Patriarchal spaces of historical discourse rendered women invisible (or effected distortions) that can only be contested by a rigorous study of women's unrecorded presence in the economy of the household and the broader domain of production. This article is an effort to understand the “being” and “doing” of women, and to map the interrelations of women and work over a vast historical span of time, beginning with women's writings on the theme of women and work and going on to plot women's agency historically in labour processes. In order to make the historical evidence more cohesive, it has been written with special reference to Peninsular India, while also drawing comparisons from the regions to the north of the Vindhya mountains that geographically and culturally mark the north–south divide.

Type
State of the field
Information
International Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 51 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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