Contemporary Indian Feminism

Abstract

The Women's Liberation movement in India today is so diverse that it cannot be properly described in a brief article, so the focus here shall be on its main currents and the course they have taken over the last ten years, with occasional digressions into their history. In many ways the development of feminism in India is similar to that in Western Europe or the United States: like them, India too saw a feminist movement in the early twentieth century; like them, again, the movement gradually died away after the winning of certain demands, until, recently, a new feminist movement developed out of contemporary radical movements. The sixties and early seventies saw the development of a whole spate of radical movements in India, from student uprisings, workers' agitations and peasant insurgencies to tribal, anticaste and consumer action movements. These spanned a political spectrum from Gandhiansocialist (that is, nonviolent protest, based on explicitly moral values, over specific working or living conditions) to the far left, in particular, the Maoists. The Gandhian-socialists initiated several of the first women's movements in post-Independence India (e.g. an antialcohol agitation in north India, a consumer action and anticorruption agitation in western India, and a women's trade union, also in western India). Interestingly, however, neither they, nor others, looked upon these movements as feminist, nor did they advance any theories of women's oppression. These were advanced first by two women's groups which were formed in 1975, both of which grew out of the Maoist far left. The Progressive Organization of Women in Hyderabad offered an Engelian analysis of women's subordination, and the League of Women Soldiers for Equality, in Aurangabad linked feminism and anticasteism, saying that religious texts were used to subordinate both women and the lower castes. Although the imposition of a State of Emergency on India in 1975 led to a break in most agitational activities, there was, in many ways, an intensification of theoretical discussion. In 1977, when the Emergency