This second edition tries to answer concerns about Mahabharata as a source for history and about continued relevance of patriarchal construct in writing a new womens history. While there is no need to interpret structures as monolithic or beyond changes of time, the scale of that change cannot always be measured in terms of just technology and political formation of a given chronological span. Variations in womens lives will have to be seen at the micro level such as the varieties of households and the domestic, reproductive and sexual arrangements therein. In analysing the mechanism of patriarchal domination the structures of lineage, residence, forms of marriage, property relations and sexuality are subjected to a critical analysis. A systematic attempt has also been made to use the theories and findings of social anthropology for this purpose. Apart from material existence the symbolic valuations given to women in androcentric societies play a significant role in constructing their status as abala. The volume also juxtaposes these emasculated women with raksasi and svairini who inhabit a space that is spatially and ideologically freer of masculinist constructs. This volume will be invaluable to scholars of Gender Studies, Culture, Religion in South Asia and Ancient Indian History.

This book is an attempt to analyse the conception of kama in the early-medieval classical Sanskrit literary tradition from a gender perspective. By reading against the grain, the author has tried to illuminate the sexual status of women within the different genres of these classical Sanskrit sources. The book highlights that far from being a unitary homogeneous category with only a certain kind of sexual status, women and their sexuality have been conceived differently in different philosophical schools, be they dharmasastra, kamasastra, Lokayata, tantric, ayurvedic and the asceptic philosophies. The author has further made a case for seeking the prostitute sexuality diiferently from that of a kulavadhu, i.e. a household woman. The treatment of the sexual desire of mayavinis, raksasis, dakinis, and svairins too places them in an all-together different category from the other women of patriarchy. This book also argues in favour of the validity of talking in terms of love (prema) tradition in contra-distinction to an erotic (srngari) tradition in the classical Sanskrit sources of the early-medieval period. The basis for this binary division is predicated on the fact that in the love tradition, in which we include the poetry of the female poets, Bhavabhutis and Jayadevas work deals with reciprocity and emotions in the sexual relations between man and woman, while the masculine erotic tradition authored by the srngari poets is marked by hegemonic masculinity in which women exist solely as fetishized objects for exclusively male erotic stimulation.