The veiled women

by Prem Chowdhry

The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana, 1880-1990, draws on a large range of popular sources such as folk songs, oral traditions and interviews as well as statistical data and archival material to explore certain major issues regarding the position of women in rural Haryana in north India. Covering a period of a hundred years, the author explores the participation of women, specially among the landholding classes, in the process of production and reproduction; the exclusion of women from the control of resources; the consequences of the new agricultural technologies on women and their work; the resistence of patriarchal society to a change in the legal position of women; the upholding of the customary practices relating to marriage and property by the colonial and the post colonial state; and lastly the complicity of women themselves in the reconstruction of patriarchy.