This volume is a comprehensive collection of essays that examines the role of women in fundamentalist movements, as well as the gender policies of these movements and of the South Asian states in which they operate. Divided into three sections, Part I examines gender, nation, and the state; Part II the Everyday and the Local; and Part III the dynamics of agency and activism in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The book addresses fundamentalism from a woman's perspective.

Popular Western images of Indian women range from submissive brides behind their veils to the powerful, active women of Indian politics. In this lively and unique book, Patricia and Roger Jeffery present a different perspective on women's lives. Focusing on the mundane rather than the exotic, they explore the complex interplay between the power of social structures to constrain individuals and the ways women negotiate these constraints to carve out places for themselves.Based on information collected by the authors during their research in villages in Bijnor District, western Uttar Pradesh,...

Degrees Without Freedom? re-evaluates debates on education, modernity, and social change in contemporary development studies and anthropology. Education is widely imputed with the capacity to transform the prospects of the poor. But in the context of widespread unemployment in rural north India, it is better understood as a contradictory resource, providing marginalized youth with certain freedoms but also drawing them more tightly into systems of inequality. The book advances this argument through detailed case studies of educated but unemployed or underemployed young men in rural...

Originally published in 1976, this study analyses the immigration of Muslim and Christian Pakistani families coming into Britain. Dr Jeffery develops the argument to look behind the sharp differences which emerged between the Muslim and the Christian families. Drawing on material gathered in Pakistan as well as Britain, Dr Jeffery paints a picture of the families' lives in Britain from their points of view, and argues that the differences between the Muslims and the Christians must be traced back to the different ways in which they see their positions in Pakistan.