Gender and Politics in South Asia

Abstract

The very construction of “South Asia” is intertwined both with its colonial past and with its intersecting politics shaped by ideologies and conflict over territory. Most of the SAARC countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Afghanistan) have been occupied by at least one colonizer or had treaties between monarchs that ended in massive uprisings, marking the birth of these independent nation-states. In the postcolonial nation-states of South Asia, gender has been used as a frame of reference and as an analytical tool to understand the collective effort in nationalist movements and nation-building as well as in articulating various forms of discrimination. Women forged an alliance on the question of subordination, both locally and regionally. Individuals outside the heteronormative world raised their voices and reclaimed their spaces within the heteropatriarchy. Heterogeneity in race, ethnicity, language, class, caste, age, and nationalities offer multiple narratives of diverse political possibilities in South Asia. As such, the political field in South Asia is essentially intersectional and fraught with contentious debates and strategies. Gender is one of the many components of such a political field, contouring habitus of the agent, that structures and is structured by various social and historical forces. Hence, it is crucial to document the discourses within the movements or any interventions against the heteropatriarchy to make sense of gender and politics in South Asia. A large body of literature has been produced over the past decades on gender and politics by activists and academics from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. This articles aims to provide a genealogy of these efforts in presenting a rich, textured repository of feminist scholarship. However, the chronological (based on the year of independence) organization of the article based on individual nations may give rise to misleading perceptions of an old area studies model. On the contrary, the intention is frame the article around emergent critical feminist-queer voices who are constantly negotiating with regional and transnational forces and, in so doing, redefining the field in the postcolonial nation-states of South Asia.