Tamil Nadu

Rethinking Social Justice edited by S Anandhi, Karthick Ram Manoharan, M Vijayabaskar and A Kalaiyarasan, with a foreword by Partha Chatterjee, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020, pp 368, `795 (paperback).

Tracing the life and works of Balamani Ammal, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, flags off the aspects of gendered history of theatre. It is a rich history of someone who ventured into many forms—Sadhir, stage dramas, “novels,” Sanskrit plays, and Harikatha. It also reveals her exceptional interest in introducing new technical devices like petromax lighting and creating silhouette through the use of lights. She, along with her sister Rajambal, formed the first ever all-female theatre company in Tamil Nadu. Using Balamani Ammal’s sketchy life available through scant resources, the paper would like to raise issues with the historiographic practices existing in theatre history from a gendered point of view.

The understudied nexus between international migration and caste in Tamil Nadu is examined. The findings indicate that the Backward Classes were the forerunners in benefiting from international migration opportunities. It shows that the trend has gradually influenced the Most Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes. Backward Classes have an edge over the other communities in achieving economic prosperity through international migration. However, left-behind wives who were engaged in income-generation activities were yet to overcome from the practices of caste-based occupation that are still prevalent in villages.

India ranks among a handful of countries in West Asia, North Africa, and South Asia to have the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world. The LFPR has further been declining for women in India in the last two decades. The article focuses on the south Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to understand the proximate causes for these shifts. We combine temporal trends from the Employment and Unemployment surveys of the National Sample Survey Office with the literature on agrarian studies in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to explain the changes in rural women’s labour force participation and summarise the challenges in studying temporal trends in women’s work.