| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Ashu Malhotra. Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 231. Rs. 825.00.

This book focuses on the restructuring of class in relation to caste and gender in nineteenth-century Punjab. Arguing that much of the scholarly literature about caste has a long and problematic history in which either gender or class is left out, or caste is seen as primordial, inherited, and unchanging, Anshu Malhotra shows how caste changed in relation to class mobility. She rewrites the history of caste in colonial Punjab, arguing that reform movements enabled certain kinds of class and caste mobility, and that such mobility is especially visible when one examines women's lives of this period. Malhotra claims that both the colonial state and the Indian reformists undertook projects of modernization with the goal of reforming women. They did so while maintaining patriarchal power, for example, by recasting the ideal of the pativrata wife. Thus both the Singh Sabha and Arya Samaj movements altered marriage practices, created educational institutions, and tried to address the "problem" of the "high-caste Hindu widow" without altering the subordinate status of women. Yet Malhotra reveals that women were not without agency in this process; they were subject to these new ideologies but not always victimized by them.

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