Men at Home

“This deeply felt book unsettles many of our common contrasts, including those between public and private, men and women, home and the world. By looking at an unusual set of archival and biographical materials from different parts of northern and western India during the colonial period and after, Gyanendra Pandey opens up a new vista for the study of men at home in modernity.” - Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

“Gyanendra Pandey’s historical account of men’s domestic lives in India breaks a resounding silence on the subject of men in the home and gender more broadly in nationalist histories. This allows him to arrive at an understanding of contemporary Indian society that is particularly pointed. This pathbreaking book, written with ease and elegance, makes a significant intervention and is an important addition to the field of feminist studies.” - Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, author of The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India

"Men at Home by Gyanendra Pandey is a powerful, richly layered intervention in the study of masculinity, intimacy, and domesticity within the context of modern Indian society. With an acute sensitivity to historical and social complexity, Pandey interrogates the seemingly private sphere of the home to uncover its deep entanglement with public, political, and structural forces. In doing so, he reframes the home not as a feminine preserve, but as a space where male identities are negotiated, contested, and constantly reshaped." - Namrata, Kitaab

"Absorbing and intriguing. ... 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." - Anuradha Kumar, American Kahani

"Through examining the contents of autobiographies of 'famous Men,' Pandey provides us with a register of occurrences and accidents in the domestic and personal lives of these men, which can help us to enrich our understanding of manliness, masculinity and the structure of power relations in the domestic spheres of life." - Atul Upadhyay, Doing Sociology