Basu
Biographic Data
| ID | 32552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Basu |
| FAMILY NAME | Basu |
| SIGNATURE | BASU |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kentucky |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5046-6912 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Forgotten by Feminists’: Women Leaders of the Indian Men’s Rights Movement Negotiate Gender and Justice
As women’s organisations have mobilised the Indian state since the 1980’s to institute a slate of laws on intimate violence, men’s rights groups (MRAs) have formed in counterpoint to challenge definitions of dowry, violence and economic restitution. Organised against women’s legal rights in marriage and prominent feminist spokespersons, the groups ironically feature several women MRA leaders, heading auxiliaries such as the Forgotten Women’s Asso…
Beyond Righteousness: Darlings , Desire, and Revenge
The End(s) of marriage: Feminists, antifeminists, and Indian law
Feminist anthropology sought to transform the sex‐gender systems that enabled marriage. This essay considers the complications of that promise in the context of my recent research with antifeminist marriage resisters called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs). Despite a history of marriage resistance in the Indian women's movement, contemporary women's organizations rely on civil and criminal law relating to marriage to secure resources for their cl…
Gender and Law
Postcoloniality
The term “postcolonialism” emerged in the late twentieth century, signifying an impulse among scholars to periodize history and to identify colonialism as central to an understanding of international/global configurations of power. Postcolonial theory has involved a series of engagements with concepts such as colonialism, the state, nationalism, colonial and native subjectivity, development, and subalternity. It has been marked by a tension betwe…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Disclosure, Identity, and the Indian Men’s Rights Movement
Looking through Misogyny: Indian Men's Rights Activists, Law, and Challenges for Feminism
From faint beginnings in scattered solitary actions in the 1990s, Men's Rights Activists (MRA) have emerged in India as a well-organized social movement, with careful political outreach through social media, legislative lobbying, and street action. They represent a range of ethnic and religious groups, include several prominent women leaders, and reflect some diversity of class positions. Their common target is the cynical misuse of civil and cri…
Judges of Normality: Mediating Marriage in the Family Courts of Kolkata, India
When legal reform proceeding from feminist movement demands is institutionalized in courts, there may nevertheless be distinct gaps in delivering substantive gender justice. Can feminist reform be enacted through agents who may be resistant to feminist critiques of marriage? This paper evaluates feminist legal reform around marriage by profiling lawyer-free, mediation-based family courts in Kolkata, India, a much-touted experiment in alternate di…
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory Snmati Basu Because prerogative power appears to its subjects as not just the power to violate but also the power to protect-quintessentially the power of the police-it is quite difficult to challenge from a feminist perspective. The prerogative of the state, whether expressed as the intervention of the police or as incessantly changing criteria for welfare benefits, is …
Impossible Translation: Beyond the Legal Body in Two South Asian Family Courts
The legal realm translates between litigants’ plain-language claims and efficient solutions. In postcolonial courtrooms, there are also some literal translations between vernaculars and formal legal English. Other translations, less literally, involve putting violence and violation into the language of compromise. Through an ethnographic analysis of two Family Courts in Kolkata and Dhaka where litigants directly present their cases to judges, thi…
V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism: Global Feminisms in The Vagina Monologues
Separate and Unequal: Muslim Women and Un-Uniform Family Law in India
Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between 'religious,' cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious …
Playing Off Courts: The Negotiation of Divorce and Violence in Plural Legal Settings in Kolkata
Say the number ‘420 ’ to anyone who has grown up in India, and there is instant recognition of its connotation – it refers to a shady person, a cheat, a thief; the concept refers to the section number for the offence of fraud in the Indian Penal Code, but is so naturalized that the link to the category signified is all but forgotten, making for hilarious cross-cultural misunderstanding on occasion. A more recent signifier, marked also by its Pena…
Book and Film Review: Edited by Savitri Goonesekere. Violence, Law and Women's Rights in South Asia . New Delhi: Sage and Unifem South Asia Regional Office, 2004
Shading the Secular: Law at Work in the Indian Higher Courts
This article examines the ways in which issues of `secularism' are politicized within the nation state, particularly the ways in which women's rights become critical sites of conflict surrounding political hegemony and minority rights. Focusing on judgments related to Muslim women in post-Independence India, it argues that legal solutions have the potential to be powerful instruments for achieving greater gender equity as well as insidious sites …
Response to Miller
The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda
(2001). The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 179-196
The Bleeding Edge: Resistance as Strength and Paralysis
The study of feminism as a mark of feminist agency is examined across a range of feminist schol arship, followed by reflections on the concluding scene of Ashapurna Devi's novel in Bangla, Pratham Pratisruti, and ends with some conclusions based upon ethnographic work on Indian women and inheritance. The explorations of different sites of fiction and ethnography indicate that individual acts of women's resistance should be kept separate from the …
Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History
Book reviewed in this article: Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History , by Srimati Basu
Red cell enzyme deficiencies in the tribal population groups of the Bastar District, Madhya Pradesh, India
A total of 958 blood samples from Muria, Maria, Bhattra and Halba from the Bastar District in Madhya Pradesh (India) was collected and analyzed for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, pyruvate kinase, hexokinase, and adenylate kinase red cell enzyme deficiency using flourescent technique. The implications of findings of the presence of rare enzyme deficiencies are discussed.
Study of finger and palmar dermatoglyphics in primary infertile males
Finger and palmar dermatoglyphic variations have been studied in 160 diagnosed primary infertile males (111 clinically abnormal primary infertile males and 49 clinically normal primary infertile males). It has been observed that loops occur most frequently in primary infertile males. Arches are found to be absent on digit IV and V. Among the clinically normal infertile males the mainline formula 7.5.5--succeeds 11.9.7--instead of 9.7.5--in the or…
Judges of Normality: Mediating Marriage in the Family Courts of Kolkata, India
When legal reform proceeding from feminist movement demands is institutionalized in courts, there may nevertheless be distinct gaps in delivering substantive gender justice. Can feminist reform be enacted through agents who may be resistant to feminist critiques of marriage? This paper evaluates feminist legal reform around marriage by profiling lawyer-free, mediation-based family courts in Kolkata, India, a much-touted experiment in alternate di…
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory Snmati Basu Because prerogative power appears to its subjects as not just the power to violate but also the power to protect-quintessentially the power of the police-it is quite difficult to challenge from a feminist perspective. The prerogative of the state, whether expressed as the intervention of the police or as incessantly changing criteria for welfare benefits, is …
Separate and Unequal: Muslim Women and Un-Uniform Family Law in India
Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between 'religious,' cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious …
Looking through Misogyny: Indian Men's Rights Activists, Law, and Challenges for Feminism
From faint beginnings in scattered solitary actions in the 1990s, Men's Rights Activists (MRA) have emerged in India as a well-organized social movement, with careful political outreach through social media, legislative lobbying, and street action. They represent a range of ethnic and religious groups, include several prominent women leaders, and reflect some diversity of class positions. Their common target is the cynical misuse of civil and cri…
Shading the Secular: Law at Work in the Indian Higher Courts
This article examines the ways in which issues of `secularism' are politicized within the nation state, particularly the ways in which women's rights become critical sites of conflict surrounding political hegemony and minority rights. Focusing on judgments related to Muslim women in post-Independence India, it argues that legal solutions have the potential to be powerful instruments for achieving greater gender equity as well as insidious sites …
The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda
(2001). The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 179-196
V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism: Global Feminisms in The Vagina Monologues
The Bleeding Edge: Resistance as Strength and Paralysis
The study of feminism as a mark of feminist agency is examined across a range of feminist schol arship, followed by reflections on the concluding scene of Ashapurna Devi's novel in Bangla, Pratham Pratisruti, and ends with some conclusions based upon ethnographic work on Indian women and inheritance. The explorations of different sites of fiction and ethnography indicate that individual acts of women's resistance should be kept separate from the …
Hiding in Plain Sight: Disclosure, Identity, and the Indian Men’s Rights Movement
Study of finger and palmar dermatoglyphics in primary infertile males
Finger and palmar dermatoglyphic variations have been studied in 160 diagnosed primary infertile males (111 clinically abnormal primary infertile males and 49 clinically normal primary infertile males). It has been observed that loops occur most frequently in primary infertile males. Arches are found to be absent on digit IV and V. Among the clinically normal infertile males the mainline formula 7.5.5--succeeds 11.9.7--instead of 9.7.5--in the or…
Red cell enzyme deficiencies in the tribal population groups of the Bastar District, Madhya Pradesh, India
A total of 958 blood samples from Muria, Maria, Bhattra and Halba from the Bastar District in Madhya Pradesh (India) was collected and analyzed for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, pyruvate kinase, hexokinase, and adenylate kinase red cell enzyme deficiency using flourescent technique. The implications of findings of the presence of rare enzyme deficiencies are discussed.
Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History
Book reviewed in this article: Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History , by Srimati Basu
The Bleeding Edge: Resistance as Strength and Paralysis
The study of feminism as a mark of feminist agency is examined across a range of feminist schol arship, followed by reflections on the concluding scene of Ashapurna Devi's novel in Bangla, Pratham Pratisruti, and ends with some conclusions based upon ethnographic work on Indian women and inheritance. The explorations of different sites of fiction and ethnography indicate that individual acts of women's resistance should be kept separate from the …
The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda
(2001). The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 179-196
Response to Miller
Shading the Secular: Law at Work in the Indian Higher Courts
This article examines the ways in which issues of `secularism' are politicized within the nation state, particularly the ways in which women's rights become critical sites of conflict surrounding political hegemony and minority rights. Focusing on judgments related to Muslim women in post-Independence India, it argues that legal solutions have the potential to be powerful instruments for achieving greater gender equity as well as insidious sites …
Book and Film Review: Edited by Savitri Goonesekere. Violence, Law and Women's Rights in South Asia . New Delhi: Sage and Unifem South Asia Regional Office, 2004
Playing Off Courts: The Negotiation of Divorce and Violence in Plural Legal Settings in Kolkata
Say the number ‘420 ’ to anyone who has grown up in India, and there is instant recognition of its connotation – it refers to a shady person, a cheat, a thief; the concept refers to the section number for the offence of fraud in the Indian Penal Code, but is so naturalized that the link to the category signified is all but forgotten, making for hilarious cross-cultural misunderstanding on occasion. A more recent signifier, marked also by its Pena…
Separate and Unequal: Muslim Women and Un-Uniform Family Law in India
Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between 'religious,' cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious …
Impossible Translation: Beyond the Legal Body in Two South Asian Family Courts
The legal realm translates between litigants’ plain-language claims and efficient solutions. In postcolonial courtrooms, there are also some literal translations between vernaculars and formal legal English. Other translations, less literally, involve putting violence and violation into the language of compromise. Through an ethnographic analysis of two Family Courts in Kolkata and Dhaka where litigants directly present their cases to judges, thi…
V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism: Global Feminisms in The Vagina Monologues
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory
Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist Theory Snmati Basu Because prerogative power appears to its subjects as not just the power to violate but also the power to protect-quintessentially the power of the police-it is quite difficult to challenge from a feminist perspective. The prerogative of the state, whether expressed as the intervention of the police or as incessantly changing criteria for welfare benefits, is …
Judges of Normality: Mediating Marriage in the Family Courts of Kolkata, India
When legal reform proceeding from feminist movement demands is institutionalized in courts, there may nevertheless be distinct gaps in delivering substantive gender justice. Can feminist reform be enacted through agents who may be resistant to feminist critiques of marriage? This paper evaluates feminist legal reform around marriage by profiling lawyer-free, mediation-based family courts in Kolkata, India, a much-touted experiment in alternate di…
Looking through Misogyny: Indian Men's Rights Activists, Law, and Challenges for Feminism
From faint beginnings in scattered solitary actions in the 1990s, Men's Rights Activists (MRA) have emerged in India as a well-organized social movement, with careful political outreach through social media, legislative lobbying, and street action. They represent a range of ethnic and religious groups, include several prominent women leaders, and reflect some diversity of class positions. Their common target is the cynical misuse of civil and cri…
Postcoloniality
The term “postcolonialism” emerged in the late twentieth century, signifying an impulse among scholars to periodize history and to identify colonialism as central to an understanding of international/global configurations of power. Postcolonial theory has involved a series of engagements with concepts such as colonialism, the state, nationalism, colonial and native subjectivity, development, and subalternity. It has been marked by a tension betwe…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Disclosure, Identity, and the Indian Men’s Rights Movement
Gender and Law
The End(s) of marriage: Feminists, antifeminists, and Indian law
Feminist anthropology sought to transform the sex‐gender systems that enabled marriage. This essay considers the complications of that promise in the context of my recent research with antifeminist marriage resisters called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs). Despite a history of marriage resistance in the Indian women's movement, contemporary women's organizations rely on civil and criminal law relating to marriage to secure resources for their cl…
Beyond Righteousness: Darlings , Desire, and Revenge
Forgotten by Feminists’: Women Leaders of the Indian Men’s Rights Movement Negotiate Gender and Justice
As women’s organisations have mobilised the Indian state since the 1980’s to institute a slate of laws on intimate violence, men’s rights groups (MRAs) have formed in counterpoint to challenge definitions of dowry, violence and economic restitution. Organised against women’s legal rights in marriage and prominent feminist spokespersons, the groups ironically feature several women MRA leaders, heading auxiliaries such as the Forgotten Women’s Asso…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Medicine (5 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Feminism (4 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (4 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (4 works)