Demography analyzes datasets large enough to establish rates of basic life events for a population; but I am experimenting with very small-scale, face to face research with women, with the hope that it can inform some of the questions demographers ought to be asking. I call this approach qualitative social demography. Looking for deeper contexts for what is happening to women also takes us into history; therefore, looking at demographic behavior over the long term, my approach can also be called historical demography through a feminist lens.

Large datasets, such as those found in the Census of India since 1872, are required to compute rates of birth, death, marriage and migration for populations over time. Subpopulations such as women can also be analyzed; we could look at the births, deaths, marriages and migrations of female humans alone. However, almost all our scholarship on women aims to view them, instead, in relation to or in comparison with men. But what does it mean that, in demographic terms, every single event of birth and half of all deaths occur to females? Three quarters of all the most basic life course events, being born, giving birth and dying, define women's lives. And women's lives define basic parameters of a population. Fertility and mortality, working together, create all rates of population change, whether of growth or decline. So you might think that women's lives, their goals, thoughts, hopes and disappointments, would be central to the study of demography. It has not been so. Women have been abstracted in demography in such a way that only very general variables are considered in trying to explain changes in their fertility or mortality, to say nothing of their marriage and migration. For example, we know that female education makes a huge difference in reducing fertility and mortality; but why and how? Population journals are full of articles that resort to simplistic explanations based on modernization theory, while performing the most sophisticated statistical analyses. One of the postulated drivers of modernization theory is a variable called female autonomy, vaguely defined.

To get a better handle on the changing actions and motivations of women, including their demographic behavior, and to get more sense of what the actual elements of female autonomy are, we need a more nuanced approach than modernization theory. We need ethnographies of demographic behavior, with its various and sometimes conflicting motivators, at highly disaggregated levels like villages, neighborhoods, castes, tribes, and religious groups. Why do women at these levels do what they do? Do they have real choices? How are their choices shaped or constrained by relationships? What effects do the choices they make have on the overall system of social reproduction, which provides the most comprehensive picture of demographic change? How have the changes in their choices been shaped by historical forces that are still unfolding? I am approaching all these questions by using a very small, semi-ethnographic sample of about 35 young women in college, looking forward to having lifelong careers. My efforts in small-scale, qualitative, feminist historical-social demography constitute an experiment in seeing if qualitative and quantitative research methods can be better combined when we are trying to understand the history of women.

Locating self and lived experience, the paper will attempt to delienate the diverse trajectories today of what is known as the dalit women's movement. It can also be viewed as a dialogue between different perspectives, of journeys of transforming subjectivities, politics, pedagogies, curriculum. This study will initially draw from one such trajectory , tracing one's own initial 'sense of justice' from an agrestic slave backgound in Kerala, drawing from different points of history, location, identities- an identity deeply linked with my parents, my mother Dakshayani who came from a small island off the coast of Cochin, Mulavukad (Bolghatty) andVelayudhan, my father from Kocheril (Kottayam dist ) in feudal Travancore, from two dalit sub castes, Pulaya and Parayan respectively. Briefly, looking at the lives of parents, the process of exploration and interpretation of self and society emerges as also the private life experiences and public practices of anti-caste struggles. As first generation educated dalits, their lives were part of the history of their communities. They were also the changing face of their communities. While the link between knowledge and power (free education by Cochin state and Travancore) and democratic access to education in both their lives- cannot be denied, this was located within certain intersections of social movements in their lives i.e. where social reform and anti caste movements coalesced with varied other movements of 1920-40s. An inter-section of discourses-within specific anti-caste movements as well as across caste boundaries in Travancore and Cochin also touched their lives.Parents political lives, in particular mother's, extended over several modernities- anti- caste, social reform, state peoples movement, freedom movement, Gandhian, nation state ( as member of constituent assembly) Ambedkarite women from different states, including Kaushalya Baisantry ( Secretary of Ambedkar's Student Front in 1940s on Maharashtra), Kumud Pawade,writer/professo of Sanskrit, Dakshayani, my mother organizing a national level dalit women's meeting in late 1970s in Delhi is seen as the emergence of era in dalit politics-1970s to 1990s- a redefinition of self- and cultural identities-the politics of belonging which focused on both historical exclusions and contemporary forms of subjugation as well as assertions ( art, literature) and a discursive re-construction of identities ( eg.Dalit Panthers in Mahrashtra). This was also the context which saw the beginnings of dalit feminism- 1980-1990s- Several state level organizations, women's wing of parties ( eg.RPI) with varied ideological positions and programs emerged and these included Dalit women's groups, writers, literary forums, the platform- National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW-1995) of which I was a part.

1980s-1990s also saw the politics of difference in the global feminist movement- black feminist, third world feminist identities. From mid 1990s, feminist internationalism and 'global civil society' emerged through common actions & other forms of engagements following the identification of specific forms of exclusions - race, caste, and ethnicity. This in turn led to linkages with varied movements, national, international, and the emergence of a new form of historical consciousness, the inclusion of caste in varied UN and international conventions with the UN Committee for Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).Within the feminist discourse itself, the dalit women's movement redefined the concepts of violence, poverty, measuring poverty, work or even the very concept of rights, the dalit women's movement stressing on the new realities needed to be considered, with a shift towards the rights discourse informing dalit women's activism. From late 1990s, dalit rights approach to development centered caste development encompassing dignity, caste identity, claims to resources,etc. The international advocacy role, no doubt path-breaking, the dalit movement's rights discourse mainstreamed all forms of engagements in 1990s'. However, the past ten years have witnessed a shift, the emergence and growth of local and regional groups/.networks linked with varied local transformational agendas and discourses while attempting to find a distinct voice. At the local levels, a point of debate is the tension between the need for assertions of multiple identities and necessity of group politics- how,if at all,was this tension addressed.There does not appear to be any clear cut separation between these different conversations or uniform, consistent discussion. . Is it a loose collection of political projects that each articulated a collective from distinctly different social location, each having its own historical background? Drawng from varied forms and levels of engagements, the paper will attempt to address these complexities.

I wish to situate my argument in the social contradictions that we face in everyday life practice in the present Maharashtra. The caste-gender intersections in the context of the rapidly changing political economy and the depleting as well as commoditized natural resources are scary, especially when we witness increasing violence against dalits, adivasis and women as marginalized groups. Dalit feminism in Maharashtra has rightly problematized the historically constituted opposition between rights of women and those of the so called backward casts and minorities ? the experience of pain and suffering that this stand point brings out is still not recognized as an authentic revolutionary voice ? by the Dalit movement and the mainstream women's movement in Maharashtra.

Since caste-gender issues are entangled and cannot be easily equated, the need to go beyond often assumed binaries of sameness/difference is felt urgently. One way to address this issue is to go back to the rich reservoir of sant women's writings who were communicating with their community, culture and nature. These writings are full of resistance and a serious critique of the socio-religious order. In order to explore this early modernity of Maharashtra we will have to probe into these writings of Muktabai ? whose existence as an orphaned and outcast person produced a sharp critique of Brahmanic orthodoxy? Janabai, a shudra woman kept asking pertinent questions about the society and the environment around her, and Bahenabai, who experienced compulsory early marriage within her caste framework and produced her autobiography and translation of Vajrasuchi ? the Buddhist text written by Ashwaghosha. All these women talked about their experience of pain and produced universal knowledge about human society, culture and nature.

Contemporary Maharashtra is celebrating every year a media-mediated Wari-Pandharpur and Vitthal, and creating spectacles of rituals with increasing crowds. What is missing in this "Utsav" is these creative and critical inputs and contributions of Sant women and men whose embryonic relationship with their toiling masses created beyond doubt the "revolutionary potential of Warkari Sampraday".

In a diverse and stratified society such as ours, formal schooling remains confined to the middle class, which, in itself is heterogeneous. In this context, how do we evaluate representations of the past? Issues of class, community, caste, regional identities, gender, to name a few, provide possible entry points.

The links between history writing and record-keeping in constituting and preserving elite identities are well known. At the same time, there have been attempts to develop alternatives. I discuss chapters from three texts, developed in the last decade, written in English and meant for school going children, to focus on the range issues and communicative strategies at work.

The texts analyzed are: a chapter titled 'The Vedic Civilization' (from India and the World, Delhi, NCERT, 2002), another called 'What Books and Burials Tell Us' (from Our Pasts, Delhi, NCERT, 2005) and a third titled 'Dhobis' (from Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in our Times, by Kancha Ilaiah, Delhi, Navayana,2007/2010).

The presentation will explore questions of gender and labour at the forefront of feminist scholarship today and seek to locate them within Indian historiography. In the last few decades, the category 'work' has been expanded and redefined on many counts. In reconsidering women's work, new terms and concepts such as care work are exerting enormous influence. In this context, we need to reappraise the conceptual complexities of proximate yet different categories such as work, labour and class. The presentation will drawn attention to the implications of some of these new problems of definitions and categorizations. The discussion will address some of ways in which these terms have renewed importance in understanding both contemporary and historical issues.

This paper seeks to analyse the theoretical issue of handling the historical sources in the writing of women's history. The problems of historical sources are manifold, the first being that women are absent directly and indirectly from the largely androcentric sources. Then there is the need to read the traditional sources with a new set of questions in mind, that is, the gender perspective, which as we shall argue on the basis of our Sanskrit texts is possible. The paper also cautions that no set of sources can ever be considered as a uniform one, but should be engaged with to reveal its own ideological bias.

This paper attempts to create feminist archives in India. According to Laymen's words Feminism is a way of life. In India many grass root women are feminist. These women did not learn feminism, feminist theories, and movements. But they are feminist. In creating feminist archives, it's important to add women workers in grass root levels. Politics is an important area for women's political empowerment. Simone De Beauvoir says personal is politics. The history of feminism as political history necessarily embraces women's ongoing quests for educational equity, economic opportunity, civil rights, and political inclusion. It also includes controversies over women's claims to mobility, to control their own bodies and?very importantly?their fertility, and even their critiques of harmful patterns of male sexual behavior. Historians of feminism have argued that, historically speaking, "the personal is political," a slogan that authorizes the wholesale rethinking of the "old" history, including the history of politics, and turns it inside out.

As in the "old" political history, the history of feminism as a "new" political history deals with "real issues" in "real time." It is "objective" in its attention to dates, sequences of events, names, places, and power struggles; but by interpreting the issues far more broadly and inclusively, it changes our understanding of their significance, thus exposing the biases embedded in the seemingly gender-blind earlier accounts. It also encompasses the history of antifeminism with which it remains in constant dialogue. It re-examines gender politics ranging from the realm of intimate personal relations to international and transnational women's organizations and activism, to women's opposition to war and their promotion of peace. In this scenario, gender is indeed "a useful category of analysis" and does provide "a primary way of signifying relationships of power."But gender also specifically highlights the inequalities in the balance of power that have historically characterized the relationships between women and men. Smt. Suman Kolhar is working for women political empowerment in grass root politics. She was elected as Vice President of Zilla Panchayat, in 1997 for the first time Karnataka State reserved seats for women. She was elected and worked for the first time in the history of Zilla Panchayat, Vijayapur, and Karnataka State. Vijayapur is one of the backward districts in North Karnataka State. She struggle lot for her political empowerment and also for other women's political empowerment.

This presentation speaks to women not solely as ?objects? of the archive but also as ?subjects? contributing archival production. We first discuss the political and feminist potential of the digital archive and engage with four main goals: (a) democratizing or ?dalitizing? archival production (i.e., incorporating the voices and texts of historically marginalised people into projects of remembering and notions of belonging; ensuring that those previously denied agency play a full part in the documenting of their lives); (b) developing archives of emotions, feelings and desire (i.e., creating archives of emotions that connect to notions of social justice; archiving accounts that do not overlook feelings and embodied emotions); (c) resisting exploitative archives (i.e., denouncing ?othering? or ?exoticizing the other,? condemning the position of authorial passivity to record the ?authentic? voice of marginal people, arguing for an inclusive space wherein participants and researchers move in solidarity and blur the modernist boundaries often structuring the archive); and (d) politicizing the archive (i.e., establishing the digital archive as a political space in which new intersectional connections can be made, seeing women as central agents of the archive, making the archive central in our everyday lives, activism, and knowledge production). In the second part of the presentation, we present examples of current health research and activism done in collaboration with Concordia's Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, notably a project involving queer women on the issue of breast cancer experience and care, as well as work done around the issue of young women and their experiences of HPV vaccination

"Archival collection includes paper based as well as digital resources. Many times artefacts, mementos, awards and other similar materials are also part of archival collection. As these resources and items are collected from the foundation of the organisation, they are rare and non-replaceable. It is required not only to preserve these materials, but also its surrounding area where it is stored. The present paper is an attempt to provide basic guidelines on preservation and conservation of archival resources."

This paper will take up for analysis the role that an archivist's feminist commitments can play in the setting up of an institutional archives. Taking as a case study my work in creating the Archives of IIM Calcutta this paper will look at the nature of archival practices and the ways in which feminist commitment can yield interesting results when collating material.This paper will focus on women's voices in the IIM Calcutta Archives. It will analyze the role of women in mainstream institutes and how the oral history archives of the Institute creates a resource that is richer than, though often conflicting with or absent from official documents and institutional narratives. The feminist approach to archiving, if it can be called that, attempts to dismantle forms of archiving where women's voices were previously ignored, but in the process also begins to pay attention to other movements which once formed a part of institutional life and are now forgotten.

Classical Sociology did analyze the evolution of modern industrial and capitalist society through a historical framework. So too early anthropology did look at the evolution of traditional cultures through the historical lens, albeit speculative. But subsequently, the powerful canons of functionalism and structuralism, which held sway for a substantial part of the 20th century, were inimical to a historical framework. The dynamics of the present were seen as lying in the present. There were a few insightful exceptions, such as Wright Mills? formulation of the sociological imagination at the intersection of structure, history and biography. It is only from the late 1970s onwards the crisis in social sciences and the advent of interdiciplinarity made sociology and social anthropology open to integrating the historical dimension right into the heart of their analysis.Conventional historical analysis focused on documents and chronologies pertaining to the powerful. But for many decades now, the discipline has been in a state of transformation, expanding its basic conception to include social history, to problematize dominant perspectives and open up to a range of location-based approaches. Methodologically too, with the acceptance of oral history, life history and narratives, inevitably, inter disciplinarity has made a huge impact.The role of feminism and feminist scholarship in this transformation of disciplines towards interdisciplinarity is significant. My paper tracks this journey. I also illustrate the role of history within social anthropology from my own research on women.

Formal documentation related to the film industry is limited, certainly compared to the American or British film industries. The causes of this are readily appreciated: actual or potential archives have either been lost or were never created; much of the business of the industry has been conducted via oral agreement and verbal accounting; and appreciation of Indian film history as a facet of culture and society has until recently been lacking. That there are ?gaps? in what we know about filmmaking is the most obvious, but also the most facile inference to be drawn from this deficit. What exists in the ?archive,? such as it is, also tells us about how knowledge in the industry is understood and curated. An as yet largely untapped resource is the recollections and narratives of film workers, from the very top of the production hierarchy to the bottom. Interviews exist that have been conducted with actors, directors, music directors, and so forth. But these are not part of a searchable database. Of greater concern to me in this paper is the absence of oral histories obtained from technicians, craft workers, and lowlevel laborers. While most set and production workers are by convention men, significant categories of filmmakers have been women (junior artistes, dancers, editors, hairdressers). Doubly disadvantaged by class and gender, women at lower levels of the film hierarchy are even more likely to be omitted from film history. What might the collection of oral histories from female film workers tell us, not just about their work and responsibilities and relationships, but about the operation of power in the making of films, and the making (or not-making) of film history?

The period between 1870 and 1920 may be regarded as the high moment for pushing the conjugality/new conjugality project across India and this is well reflected in Maharashtra too. Women's autobiographies published during this period never fail to hold up the ideology of new conjugality in the form of the husband wife duo, reproducing the new reformed household through their joint effort. In the extreme case a wife might write about the husband rather than herself as we see in Ramabai Ranade's 'autobiography'. Novels too privilege the love that sprouts between two young people suited to each other through similar caste and class locations and ends in the creation of a husband ?wife duo, perfectly matched to each other through temperament, training and culture, creating too the perfect reformed Hindu household for a new moment in history. Other husbands also went on to encourage their wives to write their autobiographies enjoying this public celebration of having led their wives from darkness to light, especially gratified by the wife's defense of the new patriarchy.

I want to shift the focus in this paper from women's writing?even as I continue to draw upon it, to focus on Pandita Ramabai and her use of the photograph to document women's non-conjugal existence, the redefining?even the subversion-- of the family that happens through the photograph.