Narrating Love and Violence: Women Contesting Caste, Tribe, and State in Lahaul, India

Narrating Love and Violence is an ethnographic exploration of women's stories from the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, in the region of Himachal Pradesh, India, focusing on how both, love and violence emerge (or function) at the intersection of gender, tribe, caste, and the state in India. Himika Bhattacharya privileges the everyday lives of women marginalized by caste and tribe to show how state and community discourses about gendered violence serve as proxy for caste in India, thus not only upholding these social hierarchies, but also enabling violence.

The women in this book tell their stories through love, articulated as rejection, redefinition and reproduction of notions of violence and solidarity. Himika Bhattacharya centers the women's narratives as a site of knowledge-beyond love and beyond violence. This book shows how women on the margins of tribe and caste know both, love and violence, as agents wishing to re-shape discourses of caste, tribe and community.


Author: Himika Bhattacharya
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 12/28/2017
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780813589534

About the Author
HIMIKA BHATTACHARYA is an assistant professor in the department of women's and gender studies at Syracuse University in New York.