New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India

Abstract

628 Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Srila Roy Srila Roy New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India The nationwide protests in the wake of the brutal gang rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old student in New Delhi in December 2012 have renewed debates about feminism in India.1 While the nearunprecedented display of public outrage was for some a welcome sign that feminism is alive and well in an Indian context, for others it signaled the absence of a genuine women’s movement that was able to give voice and direction to such public anguish. The latter sentiment has in fact long prevailed among women’s rights activists observing the major transformations to feminist politics in the wake of India’s globalization. Such activists have viewed these transitions as signaling the decline, if not the death, of the Indian women’s movement (hereafter, IWM) in the face of the “coopting” forces of the state, the market, and the project of neoliberal development.2 Discussions about Indian feminism in its current 1. For two recent views on this highly publicized gang rape, see Poulami Roychowdhury,“‘The Delhi Gang Rape’: The Making of International Causes,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013); and Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar, “India’s Winter of Discontent: Some Feminist Dilemmas in the Wake of a Rape,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013). 2. While “feminism” is a contested term in India with many women and activists rejecting the label and its (negative) associations with Westernization and elitism, “IWM” has been employed as an analytical category to indicate “a sum of campaigns and issues of importance to women.” Samita Sen, “Towards a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical Srila Roy 629 “third wave” are invariably motivated by generational narratives about the loss of the radical edge of the IWM.3 . Nostalgic narratives among older feminists continue in spite of contrary empirical evidence such as the largely spontaneous mass protests around the Delhi rape.4 Against the common narratives of loss, this essay considers some of the wider changes in feminist political mobilization in India through a situated consideration of its actors, especially its most recent entrants.5 There are few studies on the contemporary phase of the IWM, and fewer still that explore the dynamics of this phase and the agency of its subjects through thick ethnographic examination. In what follows, activists’ stories are employed to provide a situated sense of the subjects who inhabit and negotiate new feminist spaces as well as the discursive, if not inherited , ideas of feminism itself. Such new feminist spaces include queer feminist ones, which have been partly enabled by the activism of the IWM, not least through the large-scale mobilization around the repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (the antisodomy law introduced by the British in 1860).6 Indeed, as Mary John notes, at a time of increased “self-questioning about the future direction of feminist struggles [in Perspective” in The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity, Gender and Social Inequalities in India, ed. Karin Kapadia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002). For an early exploration and defense of the use of “feminism” in the Indian context, see Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi, The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992). 3. The wave metaphor has frequently been used in the Indian context, with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan delineating three “waves” that constitute the IWM as such: the immediate post-independence period of the 1950s and 1960s, during which time there was little organized activity in the face of a liberal faith in the institutions of the state; followed by the activism by the new autonomous women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s; and the current period of consolidation and retrospection. See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 4. See Srila Roy, “Melancholic Politics and the Politics of Melancholia: The Indian Women’s Movement,” Feminist Theory 10, no. 3 (2009), 341–57. 5. See Clare Hemmings, Why Stories...