WOMEN IN POLICE IN INDIA: A Journey from Periphery to Core

The police in the contemporary society are the most visible part of the bureaucracy symbolizing authority, stability and order. Policing is one of the world’s most masculinized occupations and the struggle for opening this masculine domain to women has been long and hard. The factors responsible for such change are better education, legal enactments, and changing socio-cultural values. The philosophical root of this ‘integrated model of policing’ is liberal feminism which emphasize that women ought to be treated exactly the same as men and perform all the mainstream police duties like their male counterparts. However, in a country like India, it is still debatable whether an ‘integrated model’ or ‘gendered model’ should be followed while assigning duties to women in police.
In an effort to attend to Jennifer Brown’s western model of integration of women in police to the Indian context, the book Women in Police in India. A Journey from Periphery to Core explores the power structures that define and circumscribe the lives of women in the police force and how women negotiate within the patriarchal structure of the police force in India.
The book deals with the issue of an intersection between class, rank, and gender in understanding the professional lives of women police personnel in India. These issues are not only seen from the feminist perspective, but also from the administrative point of view to understand its impact on the governance of the country. How the presence of women police force will impact the public policy? What problems do they confront in trying to influence decision making? The book addresses all such issues and more.

Tumpa Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Women’s Christian College (affiliated to the University of Calcutta), Kolkata. She is an alumnus of Presidency College and University of Calcutta, Kolkata. She did her doctoral studies on ‘Women Police in Community Policing: A Comparative Study of Kolkata Police with West Bengal Police (Districts of North & South 24 Parganas)’ from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her areas of research interest are Gender Studies, Police and Prison Studies.

She had taught sociology for more than a decade to undergraduate students of Scottish Church College (affiliated to the University of Calcutta), Kolkata. She had served as Guest Faculty at the Swami Vivekananda State Police Academy, Government of West Bengal from 2009–11. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Central Detective Training School, Kolkata, under the Bureau of Police Research and Development, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. She was also invited to deliver lectures on ‘Gender and Community Policing’ to police officers at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy, Hyderabad. Her articles have been published in refereed journals, edited volumes (published from India and Germany), newspapers such as The Telegraph and The Hindustan Times, and also on various social media platforms. Her published works include Community Policing in India: A Sociological Perspective and Indian Prisons: Towards Reformation, Rehabilitation and Resocialisation (co-edited).