Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks” (Oxford UP, 2018)

In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking up a geographic organization around global “contact zones,” Mukherjee skillfully guides readers through multiple sites of Indian suffragette networking: from Britain and its commonwealth, to international locales in the US and Europe, to eastern locations like Burma, before concluding in India. This mapping of transnational connections foregrounds the truly global dimensions of the suffrage movement and the ways that Indian women’s locality informed their calls for political equality. Mukherjee broadens our understandings of global histories of suffrage, expanding our focus beyond national borders all while putting Indian women front and centre in the struggle for the vote.

Sumita Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol, where she researches transnational mobilities of South Asians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jess Clark is an Assistant Professor of History at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario). She is currently writing a history of the beauty business in Victorian London.

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