The Indian Modern

Chapter 1 delineates several significant aspects of the historical and historiographical inheritances that have necessitated as well as enabled contemporary inquiries into domestic life in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, including the present study. The chapter begins with a series of snapshots of the domestic world that focus on some unusual features of South Asian modernity, among them the persistence of extreme forms of gender and caste oppression, and the consequences of these for domestic life. It addresses the fluid boundaries between private and public, the personal and the political, which are commonly equated with an intimate, domestic domain and a wider, public one. Finally, it spells out the plan of this investigation, and the way the chapters have been organized to analyze specific contradictions and propositions.