Sociology of Gender in India: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives, co-edited by Prof. Pushpesh Kumar of the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, has been published by Cambridge University Press from Cambridge and Delhi. He has edited the volume with Dr. Rituparna Patgiri, Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, and Dr. Deepali Aparajita Dungdung, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ranchi University.
The book gathers feminist and queer scholarship to trace how gender debates in Indian sociology have shifted over roughly five decades of the discipline’s growth. Its chapters, written largely by a newer generation of scholars, examine the ways gender intersects with caste, sexuality, class and digitalisation in shaping social life today. Alongside foundational concerns such as kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism and pedagogy, the volume turns to areas the discipline has been slower to take up — femtech, queer infrastructures and digital precarity among them. The editors position the collection as both a return to the classic preoccupations of Indian feminist sociology and an intervention in wider global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge and the sociology of everyday life.
Sociology of Gender in India: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives
From a national seminar to a Cambridge volume
Many of the essays in the book began as papers presented at the National Seminar on ‘Sociology of Gender in India: Emerging Issues and Future Agendas’, convened in honour of Prof. Maitrayee Chaudhuri, eminent sociologist and former Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The seminar was held in September 2023 and was substantially supported by the Institution of Eminence, University of Hyderabad.
The trajectory from that gathering to a Cambridge University Press imprint is a useful illustration of what IoE support is intended to enable: a scholarly conversation convened on campus, sustained through peer engagement, and eventually carried to an international readership.
About the editors
Prof. Pushpesh Kumar teaches Sociology at the University of Hyderabad and has written extensively on gender and sexuality. His earlier edited volume, Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India, was published by Routledge, New York and Delhi, in 2022. He received the M. N. Srinivas Memorial Prize for Young Sociologists from the Indian Sociological Society for his essay on gender and procreative ideologies among the Kolams of Maharashtra, published in Contributions to Indian Sociology. He has held a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, and visiting fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, and the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics.
Prof. Kumar serves on the International Advisory Board of the Community Development Journal (Oxford University Press, UK and Ireland) and the Advisory Board of the Indian Journal of Gender Studies (Sage), and was a member of the editorial board of Sociological Bulletin. With Sayantan Datta and Neha Mishra, he guest-edited a 2024 special issue of the Community Development Journal on queer and trans community building in post-NALSA and post-377 India. He was invited by the South Asia Centre, Syracuse University, to present his work on ‘Queering Indian Sociology’ in 2017, and has been offered an honorary visiting professorship by the Impact and Policy Research Institute, Delhi. On campus, he chairs the University’s Transgender Committee and is joint faculty at the Centre for Women’s Studies.
Dr. Rituparna Patgiri works on culture, food, media, gender and pedagogy. She has held the International Centre Goa’s Scholars-in-Residency Award, the Krishna Raj Fellowship, the Zubaan–Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grant for Young Researchers from the Northeast, and grants from IIT Guwahati and the ICSSR. Her monograph Mobile Theatre of Assam: Public Culture, Counter-Public and Consumption was published by Routledge in 2026, and she co-edited Food, Culture, and Society in India (Berghahn Books, 2025). She convenes Ad Hoc Group 03 on Food, Culture and Society of the Indian Sociological Society and is a co-founder of Doing Sociology.
Dr. Deepali Aparajita Dungdung works on development, ethnicity, care work and gender, with recent research on law, language, governance and tribes in India. She is a co-founder of Doing Sociology and serves on the editorial board of Feminist Anthropology.
The University congratulates Prof. Pushpesh Kumar and his co-editors on the publication.