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“In much of the modern world, both nation and woman have been imaged as mother – the first calling for sacrifice, the other sacrificing.”  

— Gyanendra Pandey, Men at Home

Over time, women have written and spoken in countless ways about the unspoken labour of being primary homemakers in a married life – the drudgery of housewifery, the scale of sacrifice, the psychological toll and more. We have also read about the many ways in which disempowered Indian women have rebelled, refused and sought to regain control in their lives. What has been written about far less is how men – even ones who’ve perhaps done great things for society and the country – are at home. That is, until now.

Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Gyanendra Pandey, Orient Blackswan, 2025.

Historian Gyanendra Pandey’s latest book, Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India (published by Orient Blackswan), delves into the everyday lives of modern Indian families through some gripping archival material – autobiographies, memoirs, fiction and ethnographies – the behaviours of a few renowned men, their wives, and a few women activists, in an attempt to uncover a masculinity so inherent in our society that it is usually commonplace.

What Pandey describes as “an essay on men’s existence in the South Asian domestic world”, the book moves between a quasi-academic tone and moments of stark self-castigation and rumination on the moral failures of his own kind.

It is divided into three sections – ‘Legacies’, ‘Practices’ and ‘History in a Visceral Register’. Pandey selects his characters across class, caste, gender and backgrounds. For instance, Rahul Sankrityayan and Harivansh Rai Bachchan, who are discussed at length in the book, belong to the ‘upper’ castes, whereas B.R. Ambedkar, Jagjivan Ram and Narendra Jadhav are from the ‘lower’ castes.

He also gives an insight into upper-caste Muslims through Pakistani actress........

© The Wire