Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources

Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, this new title makes key archival source material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students of Indian imperial history. The collection will be particularly welcomed by those working in women’s and gender studies, and in women’s history, but also by those active in allied and related fields. Selected and introduced by an expert editor, the gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination.

Women in Colonial India is a veritable treasure-trove; it brings together key colonial documents and other materials which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. In five volumes, the collection draws on a wide variety of sources, including periodicals, memoirs, parliamentary, and administrative reports. It covers crucial gendered concerns and topics, such as ‘the woman question’; female infanticide; widow-burning; education; health; and marriage. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which contextualizes the collected works, and this vital reference and research resource also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works.