Men at Home

In <i>Men at Home</i> Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men's comportment and conduct in the home and the implications of their ambiguous commitment to this critical part of their lives. The author draws on a wealth of archival materials-autobiographies memoirs fiction and ethnographies-to situate Indian men firmly in the domestic world underlining their dependence on the family and home. He investigates how men negotiate marriage intimacy and conjugality and focuses the effects of the humiliating and constant assertion of gender caste and class power in familial interactions. To uncover the nuances of these relationships Pandey attends to the domestic commitments of upper- middle- and lower-class men across religion and caste. He considers issues of honor and shame rights and responsibilities citizenship and belonging through this exploration of how men across the subcontinent understand themselves in and beyond their domestic relationships. As much as it is a book about masculinity and conjugality this is a book about Indian modernity nationalism and society as seen from the location of men in the home.