• ISBN13: 9780199482900
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Sociology and Anthropology
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: December 10, 2023
• Pages: 352
• Original Price: INR 1695.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 540 grams

This work is the first comprehensive effort to recover the forgotten histories of the highly impactful women's association, the Assam Mahila Samiti, and the life and times of its founding secretary Chandraprava Saikiani, who was a celebrated writer, mobilizer, and publisher, despite being an unwed mother and belonging to a 'lower' caste. The book traverses the individual and collective journeys of Saikiani and the mahila samitis from the 1920s to the 1950s in conversation with parallel tribal-caste and literary associations, anti-colonial movements and international ideological paradigms such as the Bolshevik revolution. It also makes significant methodological interventions in interdisciplinary studies through the careful interweaving of print sources with handwritten minutes of early mahila samiti meetings, performative spaces such as Women's singing of naam kirtan, women's weaving and women's memory (recorded as part of a digital archive of the mahila samitis in Assam). It provides insights into issues related to history and memory, literary studies, and nascent vernacular publics in South Asia and Women's Studies.

Hemjyoti Medhi is Associate Professor of English at Tezpur University, India. She has coordinated a project under the 'Preserving Social Memory' Grant of the Sephis Programme, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, to create a digital archive of select mahila samitis' papers and oral histories in Assam. She is also a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust SOAS Visiting Fellowship and has several articles to her credit. Medhi has been working towards taking the mahila samiti stories to a larger audience through exhibitions, radio and television programmes, and a short documentary film 'Xeito Monot Assey' (That, I Remember).