The Indian mosaic

Edited by Manoj Kumar Jena, Ways of Being Indian is a collection of academic essays conceived in honour of Professor Renuka Singh who retired from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Professor Jena as well as the other contributors were her doctoral students at CSSS. Taking on her pioneering work these essays explain "the themes of religion, gender and culture in the contemporary social order... drawing on theory, experiential practice, and research, as well as multidisciplinary approaches." Through it all, a diverse portrait of India emerges that covers the various complex traditions, habits, and systems of belief that are an integral part of the lived realities of people who happen to share a national identity.

In the essay "Disciplined Body of Widows", Nilanjana Goswami probes the "processes that, through religious codes of conduct, discipline and transform widows into docile bodies." Since women are treated as the receptacles of family honour in a patriarchal society divided on gender lines, the death of a husband is seen as a catalyst that "unleashes their sexuality" so they are expected to retreat from public life and adopt a devotional mien. Himashree Sarma's essay, "Menstruation and Ritual Symbolism", takes the idea of religion policing women's lives further, exploring how a perfectly natural biological process attains the baggage of "socio-cultural ideologies of pollution and social stigma", substantially impacting women's health.