Marriage, Love and Caste: Perceptions on Telugu Women During the Colonial Period

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This path-breaking study on women in the Andhra region of India during the colonial period seeks to dispel popular misconceptions and stereotypes regarding their status, as well as to seriously engage with academic debates on caste, traditions, and values. It has been observed that the influence of European modernist values in towns brought about considerable changes in the way of love and sex as seen and practised. The spread of education through private schools, the emergence of towns and the agrarian compulsions in the villages also played a crucial role.

The issues touched upon in this work are drawn directly from practical experiences of men and women as they continued to experience and change. A new method has been employed here for the purpose of establishing a possible history - the method of documenting village stories and the private lives of individuals. However, when historical data are required to establish historicity, the same has been used. The stories reveal extra- marital relationships and surrogate parenthoods, indicating independent choices the Telugu women exercised (though covertly and in limited cases) with regard to progeny.

Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this engaging book will interest students and scholars of colonial Indian history, researchers on gender studies in south India, south Indian studies, sociology & anthropology, and the lay reader following many social and cultural shifts in colonial south India. The book is documented by 15 b/w pictures.

Inukonda Thirumali teaches History Lat Sri Venkateshwara College, University of Delhi. He is also Coordinator of the Centre for South Indian Studies. Born in Andhra Pradesh in 1951, he obtained his Master's degree in history at the Osmania University and doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is actively involved in research on South Indian history and has published several papers in various academic journals.

Women generally constitute half the population of any given society. Besides being mothers, daughters and sisters to men, they have another fundamental relationship with them that of a wife or companion. But all these performative roles are also cumulative social constructs of history. Men carefully determined, qualified and sanctified these relations over a period of time, depending upon their physical, social and family requirements. Yet, we often fail to register and acknowledge these gender relationships and the way they are enmeshed within the web of social relations and gender needs.

This study is an attempt to explore the historical production of 'family' in the Andhra region, as an institutionalised living arrangement based primarily on heterosexual relationships, to maintain caste-based traditions and values. These relationships were dictated by traditions, which carried with them defined gender perceptions. They gave conventional rights to women to exercise freedom and assume autonomy, upon the basis of the status of their caste and professional needs. The effort here is to unravel the changing perceptions of women, the prevailing notions of love and sexual practices of colonial Andhra through a scrutiny of historical production and constitution of gender relations in the area.

Women have been constantly redefined in terms of their position, status and relation in the context of men to suit the changing requirements of time and society. It has been argued in many texts that the dynamics of male-female relationships resulted, historically, into mere physiological liaisons between individuals of various social and caste groups. But, in fact, this led to a certain psychological crisis among those women who had no social function outside the domestic sphere.