| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 387 words from this article are provided below; about 729 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Indrani Chatterjee, editor. Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2004. Pp. 302. $60.00.
This thought-provoking collection of essays traces the reproduction of the family through time, adding to recent scholarship reevaluating kinship and gender in South Asian history. The volume's particular strengths lie in the questions it raises about the longue durée history of family, and in highlighting the manifold ways in which kinship was constructed in cultural codes, genealogies, languages, and other discursive and material power structures. The more creative essays straddle the "divide" between the "precolonial" and colonial period and critically assess the extent of change in the constitution of kinship during the transition to British rule.	1
Editor Indrani Chatterjee's precise and pointed introduction asserts that the history of kinship, hitherto a "poor relation in South Asian history," needs to be studied in its own right (p. 1). Chatterjee distinguishes the questions fueling this book from prevailing dominant analyses of the family, which, she suggests, have been preoccupied with the "ideological deployment" of the family against colonialism and the role of the kin group in fashioning nationalism and gendered projects of modernity in colonial India (p. 2). One influential framework cited is that of Partha Chatterjee, for whom the family was a core part of the inner/spiritual domain (as opposed to the outer/material sphere) that, as a sphere autonomous of colonial control, was used by the nationalist elite to reconstitute a reinvigorated masculinity and sense of "self." The editor also refers to Tanika Sarkar's assertion that the family and the conjugal relationship were sites of power governed and disciplined by Hindu males in the latter's endeavor to construct a militant nationalism in late colonial India. While acknowledging the importance of these scholarly contributions, the introduction cautions against plotting such nationalist imaginings of family, intimacy, and gender relationships onto the earlier history of kinship and treating the "family" as a hermetically sealed and static category. The conscious aim of the volume's essays, in contrast, is to show that "the boundedness of the category—the family—was itself a historically produced effect" (p. 33) and that the family as a cultural idea and a political and material unit was constituted through conflict and ruptures and was shaped by state formation and the political economy.	. . .

There are about 729 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.