Articles by Prem Chowdhry

This study seeks to determine the effect of property ownership and economic independence of women on the reduction of violence, especially spousal violence, in rural Haryana - a state well known for its violent past and equally violent present towards women. Based on extensive fieldwork, the paper argues that the rapidly changed and changing political economy of this region has thrown up certain contradictions in society which have come to pose a challenge to the hitherto established cultural norms that decree infliction and widespread acceptance of violence upon women. Through individual life experiences of rural women, it highlights women's understanding of violence, their self-assertion and resistance as well as the importance given by them to different options in handling or containing violence.

This article engages with the complexity of masculinities in present Haryana, generated by increasing numbers of unmarried, unemployed men as well as elderly men, and the relation this bears to power by uncovering those aspects of political economy in contemporary Haryana that shape these complexities. Operating in the era of new technologies, globalisation and consumerism, this combination is leading to greater aggression and violence, worsening gender equations and encouraging a greater exploitation of other subordinate categories, consolidating repressive social forces and strengthening casteism. Such masculinities also afford an unprecedented role to illegal and unconstitutional bodies like caste panchayats and thereby also strengthen highly regressive trends in society.

An analysis of the Brahma Kumari sect in its initial years enables us to unravel certain hidden aspects of Sindh society which account for an unprecedented but successful patriarchal attempt to regulate and rest rain female sexuality or stimulate its self- restraint under the all-encompassing claims of reforming society. In the later years, with the coming of the partition and subsequent migration to India, this sect, confronting a greatly changed social milieu, assumed a somewhat different focus and identity. Despite this shifting of emphasis and consequent contradictions, the core doctrine of celibacy has remained and its advocacy of female sexual control continues to find receptive echoes.