The Indian Y Chromosome: Historian Gyan Pandey Evaluates the Exalted Status of Men Through the Lives of Women

“I’d be too scared.”

This is how his brother-in-law reacted when Gyanendra Pandey proposed an academic collaboration: a book on the history of the modern Indian family. This appears toward the end of the epilogue in Pandey’s new book about men in the Indian family.

Two decades later, Pandey thinks he understands this hesitation, this fob-off: For “(s)uch a history of domestic morals and practices” comes “dangerously close to the bone; its investigation…liable to lacerate the flesh, the self and self- image, in unexpected ways.”

I am assailed by a similar response, as I begin to review this absorbing and intriguing book, “Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India.” This book is many things: an academic thesis, a series of narrative essays, a history of 20th century Indian intimacy (citing the era somehow feels important), the story of men and women—as spouses, and household partners—and their lives in the domestic sphere, or the home, and as told through first-person accounts, biographies, and memoirs.

To dare “a critical evaluation” which is how a review is largely defined, is scary. It might not encompass the many things this book contains, and the many responses it evokes, especially when these might include ‘dangerously close’ personal interpretations.

Besides, a review might as well begin with a confession: while a teacher at Delhi University, Pandey encouraged his students to ask questions, and perhaps one could review a book in that light, for what it makes one think, and the possibilities and directions (albeit limited), such a review might take.

Could this review then be an evaluation with questions attached? Would it then be a questionable evaluation? So much then for disclaimers.

Women (Always) at Home

In the early 1900s, the American doctor, Emma Brainerd-Ryder, who a decade before, had accompanied her friend, Pandita Ramabai, back to India, lectured on ‘the little wives of India’.

“The condition of the Hindoo woman, was complicated by the added restrictions of caste and creed…They were brought up in ignorance, married in infancy, or at latest before reach nine years of age, and who remained absolutely subservient to their husbands all their lives. They cooked his food, waited on him in silence, and were under the absolute domination of their mothers-in-law…they had learnt to believe that they had no souls, and were born women as a punishment for sins committed in a prior stage of existence, only to be atoned by uncomplaining submission, and with no privilege of escape, except by suicide.”

In the decades since then, the ‘women’s condition’ has shown ‘improvement’ in various spheres, at least as indicated by external markers: for example, education, health, workforce participation; but, has this changed much at home, where most lives are spent, then and even now?

Are lives at home, with roles clearly separated, still the same, or somehow different?

Home and Hearth

In the book’s first part, Pandey provides a sweeping overview of changes in the Indian home early 1900 onward, all fascinatingly related: shifts in family structures, alterations in design and structure of homes, and wider demographic and societal moves with the advent of nuclear families, and increased urbanization. Still, and yet—and always, in many ways, this book brings up these twin coordinating conjunctions—things (appear to) have changed little, in the interior and hidden lives of men and women.

The structure of homes changed—big havelis to smaller, British style ones, for example—and women continued to live their secluded lives, their rooms/quarters separate, and cut off from the outsider’s gaze. Big houses became apartments, and still women, by and large, remained ‘controlled,’ they performed their ascribed roles, with little or no change.

And, in Pandey’s many examples, moments of intimacy, periods of collaboration, were dismissed—by the men writing about them—briefly, almost like a hurried, necessary acknowledgement.

The eminent Hindi writer, Premchand, for instance, praises his second wife, Shivrani Devi, whom he married as a young widow, for being a good learner. She later became a writer in own right. She wrote a memoir, among other works, called Premchand Ghar Mein and took part in the Civil Disobedience Movement of the early 1930s.

Munshi Premchand and Shivrani Devi

India’s (then future) first president Rajendra Prasad, on visits home from Calcutta to Bihar, writes of having to ‘meet’ his wife in the women’s quarters secretly at night.

This secrecy (and/or dismissiveness), forced and conditioned, is almost a negation of a part of their own lives. And was deemed ‘natural’ because men focused on ‘real work’ (svadharma) and the bigger things. Men were conscious of creating a ‘world history’, of a life beyond the narrow confines of home.

Women by contrast were bound by the immediate, the here and now. Multi-tasking was second nature to them: they were little goddesses. From childhood onward, they were already ‘little mothers.’

Amidst this seclusion, and in other cases, limitations of space, women still found a community of sorts. Pandey refers to the chawls of Bombay, where families lived in extremely cramped quarters; like habit, queues formed every morning to collect water, use of the bathroom, where squabbles too broke out like clockwork. No matter, for those who spent their formative years here, such as the career economist, Narendra Jadhav, recollections of times past come laced with fondness and nostalgia. The womenfolk, mothers and sisters, took on the responsibility of running a family, willingly, and unconditionally, to ease things for their menfolk, and for them to be educated.

 Overcoming Class (but not other things)

Om Prakash Valmiki who grew up in the most distressing of circumstances, in a backward Muzaffarnagar village, was supported, encouraged, held up in his endeavours by his family’s womenfolk. In his memoir, Joothan, he narrates a harrowing incident of helping his uncle skin an animal carcass. Later, he carried the remains home, ashamed and afraid of being seen by his schoolmates, his body slowly soaking in the blood and the animal’s smell, and of being met with loud wails of distress from his mother and older sister-in-law.

Pandey writes then of his sister-in-law pawning an item of jewellery to ensure his studies never faltered, met no more interruptions of this kind.

Babasaheb Ambedkar’s stirring slogan to Dalits, to ‘educate, agitate, organize’ inspired men and women equally. But for the women—where it is Sonubai (Narendra Jadhav’s mother), or Purnabai, Vasant Moon’s mother, pursuit of education was hardly possible or encouraged.

In the lives of those we meet in this book, intimacy between household partners (husband-wives, spouses) is limited (only for procreation); it is something to be hidden, even the emotional, mere gestural aspects of a relationship.

Baby Kamble wrote her autobiography on the sly confessing that her husband would discourage, and frown on such an exercise. It is part of their “navrapana”—a word Pandey gleans from Baby Kamble’s memoir—meaning “husbandness”, the assertion of “manly behaviour”, and “male priority.”

Though “good men” they still “considered women to be inferior beings”.

In Narendra Jadhav, and Valmiki’s memoirs, their early world and struggles appear as sadly sweet accounts of journeys made and tribulations overcome. Families and the home provide linkages and support, and even in postcolonial, modern times, caste remains the overweening scaffold on which lives are led. Class barriers may have been broken, a generation may have moved upward, but there is no rupture, not in how caste continues, how memoirs are written.

This is in such contrast to memoirs in translation I encountered in recent months. Annie Ernaux writing about her father, who ran a grocery store and café in rural France, in “A Man’s Place” (1982, translated into English 2020), and Didier Eribon’s more recent “Life, Old Age and Death of a Working Class Woman” (MIT Press, 2025) — a book about his mother who began her working life as a house servant and later worked in a glassware factory.

For these writers, in their later lives as writers and intellectuals, writing of their past is an “act of rupture”. A looking back is only possible by breaking away from earlier lives and identities, by leaving some homes forever behind.

Why Do Men Fear Intimacy?

In the lives of those we meet in this book, intimacy between household partners (husband-wives, spouses) is limited (only for procreation); it is something to be hidden, even the emotional, mere gestural aspects of a relationship—maybe as defined in present-day terms—are absent, hesitantly admitted to.

Rahul Sankrityayan found his young wife, his third, Kamala, indispensable for his work and his life; she transcribed and typed, and she managed him, the home, and their young children. When away in Sri Lanka on a teaching assignment (to ensure security for his young family), he wrote long, restless letters of longing to her, and on his return, he was his usual irritable, irascible, fairly demanding self.

Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s four-volume autobiography details his life from Allahabad to later in Bombay. He talks of his marriages, his ‘other’ relationships, and there is a sense—as Pandey writes—that Bachchan realizes the clear separation of roles, the distinct, ‘secondary’, part that is women’s lot, with duties that are biologically and naturally ordained: the constantly nurturing, ever forgiving, stoic and forbearing ‘little mother.’

Bachchan’s sense of relief is palpable—even if one gets it second-hand in Pandey’s account—when he leaves for a ‘military training’ camp in the mid-forties and later in the early 1950s, for a doctorate program at the University of Cambridge. It is left to Teji Bachchan, his wife, and ‘soulmate’ to manage the home front.

After a whirlwind romance, Akbar Mirza, a police officer who moved to Pakistan post-1947, whisked Khurshid Mirza—an early actor in Bombay cinema and later, a noted Pakistani television personality—away to a new life. As Khurshid Mirza later wrote, he resented her ambitions to be an actor in Bombay. He had to be the centre of her world, or else her “existence was meaningless.”

Wanderers and Others Left Behind

Men will be wanderers, Sankrityayan’s “navrapana” is his automatic being of being a wanderer, given to ‘ghummakadi’ (wandering). The creative spirit, Sankrityayan suggests, is sustained only by a restless wandering—almost as if this condones, Pandey suggests, his abandonment of two wives.

Babasaheb Ambedkar, on the eve of his marriage to Sharda (Savitabai) tells her that “books are dearer to me than wife or children.”

In this withdrawing from intimacy, is there also a related fear of loss of masculinity, a loss of control?

Bachchan again writes of his softer, sentimental side, the face of ‘suffering’ he wears, but is unequivocal about the dual division of roles that nature has thrust on the genders. This unwillingness or hesitation to be in touch with their softer selves, their ‘feminine’ selves could be related to the fear of being seen as “effeminate.” A fear, as sociologist Ashis Nandy suggested in his influential book, “The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism” (OUP, 1983), born from what the British saw as the Indian response to colonial domination; one, they defined as “effeminate.”

As the British had it, as Nandy argued, it was a culture that made its defense by secretiveness, plain servility, and non-resistance; ways of being that were absorbed, and reproduced by early Indian writers of the colonial period (Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is one example Nandy provides). Such perspectives, in a way, also do not tolerate ambiguities (of roles), ambivalences of being, amorphousness of existence. A fact that India’s mythologies and epics have always been comfortable with: Vishnu transforming himself as ‘Mohini’ to steal away the casket of immortality-giving nectar, and Arjuna living a life in disguise as Brihannala, a dance instructor, in the last year of the Pandavas’s 13-year exile, spent in the court of Raja Virat.

New Age Families

Families, gender roles, are arguably in flux in the present-day world, and old iniquities still persist and thrive. To give just a few examples: 

Women are still paid less for the same amount of work across corporates and elsewhere; across countries, women still do most of the housework, and with little support (in most countries), especially from workplaces.

Families continue to mutate, and to assume different shapes. In the near future, the kind of family Kazuo Ishiguro writes about in “Klara and the Sun” (2021)—made up of 14-year-old Josie, her mother, and her ‘artificial friend’ Klara—may no longer appear dystopian, nor the stuff of science fiction.

Will this allow for more understanding, and will men at home, even those ‘working from home’, become, in a way, homelier and be comfortable with this?

And what about the women who wish to wander? 

Will history and the future be kind to them?

I couldn’t help but think of Kiran Nagarkar’s 1999 novel (a work of historical fiction), Cuckold. Maharaj Kumar, crown prince of Mewar (a fictitious version of Bhojraj), who was married to Mirabai, Bhakti poet, and spiritual wanderer in her own right, is the eponymous cuckold of the novel.

Granting his wife her desire to commune only with Krishna, unable to please his second wife Sugandha, Kumar’s liberalism encompasses a far-sightedness, acceptance of modernity and modern-day novelties; but these prove of little avail from saving Mewar from its enemies ranged to the south and east, and soon, Babur from central Asia. All those who wander, Kumar could well be saying, leave a mess of lost causes.

In the last part of his book, Pandey offers the story of his own family—the life of his father and mother, and Pandey’s growing up years in eastern Uttar Pradesh—and the secrets, buried truths and hidden presences that still linger. From the very beginning and especially toward the end, Men at Home, prompts a constant inner questioning, an introspection on the reader’s part. So many things—hidden, unwanted, hard to explain away—come to the fore then.

When a book stays with one long after the act of reading, with all that it makes one ask the self, with revelations that one can’t hide away from, that really makes for an unusual book.

It could almost be the best kind of book.

“Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India”
Gyanendra Pandey
Duke University Press
U.S./Orient Black Swan India 2025

This review was first published in independent ink and republished here with permission.

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Anuradha Kumar is a writer and novelist. She most recently wrote, ‘The Kidnapping of Mark Twain,’ a work of historical fiction, and the nonfictional work, ‘Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India, 1700-1950’, both published by Speaking Tiger Books.