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Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility, and Women's Status in India. By PATRICIA JEFFERY and ROGER JEFFERY
Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2006, 161 pp. US$15.00 paperback ISBN 81 88789 40 2
This timely collection of three essays makes a contribution that is politically important and pedagogically useful. Two sociologists draw upon nearly twenty-five years of field research in rural northwestern Uttar Pradesh to describe and challenge prevalent Hindu Right - or Hindutva - gendered stereotypes of Muslims in India. Saffron demography, they argue, 'rests on claims that there are essential differences between Hindu and Muslim population dynamics in India' (p 1). Confronting Saffron Demography demonstrates that these essential differences do not exist.
As a political project, this book provides a lucid, empirically rich critique of gendered communalist discourses that represent Indian Muslims as more 'backward' than Hindus, because of low women's status, low educational attainment, high fertility, polygamy,...