The Two Lives of Leela Dube Introductory Remarks on her Life and Work

This essay presents an integrated account of the personal and professional lives of Leela Dube. Born and brought up in a traditional, Maharashtrian, Brahman household, which was urban and in some respects modern too, Leela Dube journeyed from such a home through modern school and college education into a marriage by personal choice and a professional career in anthropology. It is an account of the engagement of an intelligent and highly educated person with two distinct — in some respect discrepant — worlds without completely separating them. Happy to be a home-maker with a family, she also carved out a place of distinction for herself as a scholar of kinship studies and the anthropology of women. Indeed, she came to be hailed as a pioneer in the field of gender studies in India. One of the implications of the interpretation offered here is that the enclosing of complex lives in easy-to-grasp theoretical pigeon holes may well fail to capture in their fullness the struggles and achievements of an extraordinary multi-dimensional person.