‘Men at Home’: Gyanendra Pandey’s book on South Asian masculinity leaves much to be desired

Bashir Badr once wrote: Be-vaqt agar jaoonga sab chaunk padenge / ik umr hui din mein kabhi ghar nahin dekha (It will startle them all, if I go at the wrong time / it’s been an age since I saw my own home in the daytime). Perhaps in the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns and the growth of work from home culture, the picture has become complicated, but Bashir Badr’s she’er captures what used to be a commonplace domestic phenomenon: the temporal shift between the ease of the day time on a weekday when the salaried breadwinner, typically a man, is away and the frantic nature of other times when his presence becomes a vortex around which the house must turn: is his breakfast ready, has the towel been laid out for his bath, and so forth.

I recall that when I first read those two lines, I felt a strong urge to hear more about the life of the man in his home, but Badr himself moved on to other things in that ghazal and in his oeuvre. So I was happy to learn that an eminent historian such as Gyanendra Pandey had decided to seek out the Indian man in his home...

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