In Men at Home, 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.

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University.

Dramatis Personae

Prelude. Fragments of Family

I. LEGACIES
1 The Indian Modern
2 Homes Our Fathers Built

II. PRACTICES
3 Duty
4 Discipline
5 Dignity

III. HISTORY IN A VISCERAL REGISTER
6 The Things Men Touched
7 The Nature of Men

Epilogue. Ym Ylimaf
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index