Multiple Mediations: The State and the Women’s Movements in India

Abstract

Abstract These quotations demonstrate the ambivalent and complex strategy of working in and against the state articulated by the contemporary women’s movements in India. In this chapter, I explicate this strategy in three different phases of the contemporary movement and show how the strategy has shifted in keeping with the changing focus of the postcolonial Indian state. Each phase has been influenced by the earlier phase, and the latter two coexist as dis­tinct strands, even as they interact with each other (Desai 2001). In the first, affiliated phase of the movement, primarily urban and rural students and some Left and Gandhian parties organized nonparty political formations or the Indian new Left to confront the development state. The nonparty political formations were a response to the failure of the state and political parties in reducing poverty in independent India (e.g., Omvedt 1993). Women demanded land reform, minimum wages for agricultural work, and microcredit for self-employment from local bureaucracies.