This volume about the changing family in colonial South India is a welcome addition to the literature on marriage and family—an area that remains relatively undertheorized in spite of its potential for shedding light on gender, conjugality, sexuality, and the state. The book straddles a variety of disciplines, including gender studies, history, sociology, and the anthropology of family and law. The regional focus on colonial Tamilnadu complements the rich regional specificities of sociohistorical and legal processes through which the family emerged as the focal point for debates on social reform, caste, identity, community, and nation. Through archival data, court cases, and women's journals, Mytheli Sreenivas maps the changes at the heart of the new discourse in the early twentieth century. How agency might be understood by women struggling for property rights in the context of the rising anticaste movement puts into perspective the challenges to caste, gender, and class hierarchies. How the conjugal family ideal transformed the ways in which politics, national identity, and individual subjectivity were conceptualized, and how the family and political economy constitute each other during the late colonial period, are the questions addressed.

Litigation concerning women of the Nagarattar mercantile castes of Tamilnadu under colonial rule both echoes and contrasts with court evidence from princely and landed groups of North India such as Awadh and Punjab (see Rita Brara, “Kinship and the Political Order: The Afghan Sherwani Chiefs of Malerkotla (1454–1947),” Contributions to Indian Sociology 28, no. 2 [1994]: 203–41; and Smita Tewari Jassal, Daughters of the Earth: Women and Land in Uttar Pradesh [New Delhi: Manohar, 2001]). The book documents efforts to establish the centrality of the conjugal bond and assertions by women of wifely intimacy to separate themselves from the stigmatizing label of concubines. Where women were either wives of zamindars, mothers of legitimate heirs, or concubines whose offspring were denied property rights, the success of a female litigant in court could mean the simultaneous exclusion of other women from the status of wife: “Thus, women seeking property and political authority could best assert their claims before the courts by questioning the propriety, sexual respectability, and claims of wifehood made by other zamindari women” (p. 43). It was the discredited and disintegrating zamindari household of the colonial period that gave way to the institution of the family as a private, inviolable, and apolitical space of cultural regeneration, shaped by the middle class.

While companionate marriage became the “ideal” through which existing patriarchal structures could be challenged, it also emerged as the site for the production of new patriarchies. In other colonial contexts, outlined, for example, most famously by Partha Chatterjee for Bengal (see The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993]), the demarcation of the domestic from the public sphere created new patriarchies, new subjectivities, and the redrawing of the domestic. If, in the Bengal case, the family was central to the construction of a sovereign, spiritual inner domain representing the essence of the Indian nation, Sreenivas emphasizes the multiplicity of family forms differentiated by “caste, region and individual circumstance,” and the flexibility of traditions and customs where conjugal ideals were rarely met. The book successfully maps tensions and displacements between the family as ideal institution and as lived experience. The importance of caste histories is highlighted since the appellation of “wife” invariably subsumed rigid, ritualized caste identities (p. 42). Indeed, as feminist researches have increasingly shown, it is through caste identity that gender and sexuality have been reimagined.

As the self-respect movement begun by Periyar sought to reorganize kinship, sexuality, and marriage along contractual, secular, and rational lines, it critiqued and targeted marriage as the site for building a unified Dravidian national community. In seeking to transform weddings as desacralized spaces, the movement critiqued the subservience of women and patriarchal norms, thus politicizing these spaces. By dispensing with officiating priests, a further attempt was made to rationalize conjugal norms, simultaneously critiquing caste and patriarchy. Anandhi and V. Geetha have shown that the support for intercaste marriages and widow remarriage, initiated by the movement, strongly challenged caste orthodoxy (see Anandhi S., “Reproductive Bodies and Regulated Sexuality: Birth Control Debates in Early Twentieth Century Tamilnadu,” in A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, ed. Mary John and Janaki Nair [New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998], 139–66).

Instead of collapsing family into community and nation, Sreenivas suggests investigating historical factors that combine to make familial relationships critical to the construction of new modes of politics and identity in colonial and postcolonial India. The book reinforces regional research on social reform, also pointing to the direction that new research could take in exploring normative conceptions of the modern family in diverse contexts. Here, questions relating to women's and Dalit rights within modernized conceptions of patriarchy will need foregrounding especially, for instance, in the wake of caste-based violence in North India against marriages in defiance of caste norms.