A Desi Woman with Soniya Gokhale

Dr. Sreenivas is an associate professor of history and women's gender and sexuality studies at the Ohio State University. Mytheli's work centers on the history of modern South Asia with the focus on women's and gender history, the history of sexuality and the family, colonialism and nationalism, and the cultural and political economy of reproduction. Her first book, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India, 2008, aimed to place the family at the center of early 20th-century history. The book was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian studies. The family was at the center of intense debates about identity, community, and nation in colonial Tamil Nadu, India. Emerging ideas about love, marriage, and desire were linked to caste politics, the colonial economy, and nationalist agitation. In the first detailed historical study of Tamil families in colonial India, Wives, Widows, and Concubines maps changes in the late colonial family in relation to the region's culture, politics, and economy. Among professional and mercantile elites, the conjugal relationship displaced the extended family as the focal point of household dynamics. Conjugality provided a language with which women laid claim to new rights, even as the structures of the conjugal family re-inscribed women's oppression inside and outside marriage.