Organizing Against Violence: Strategies of the Indian Women's Movement

Abstract

IN INDIA the challenges to those engaged in building a women's movement are formidable. Activists who seek to capture political space for women's issues must work to have their voices heard alongside and as part of the multiplicity of class, linguistic, religious, ethnic and caste claimants that make up the Indian polity. The purpose of this article is to consider the kind of power and resources that the Indian women's movement has utilized in the struggle to bring attention to women's subordination. I argue that what has given the Indian women's movement influence far in excess of its numerical strength or organizational cohesiveness has been its ability to name issues, to call particular attention to aspects of women's lives that journalists, intellectual and political elites, and a large cross-section of the general population could no longer ignore. Beginning in the late 1970s, women activists undertook to organize around issues of gender violence-rape, dowry deaths, wife-beating, sati (the immolation of widows on their husband's funeral pyre), female-neglect resulting in differential mortality rates, and, more recently, female foeticide following amniocentesis. Raising such issues won the movement its share of critics but without the protest against gender violence, it is questionable whether the growing awareness of gender issues which now exists in India would have developed. Issues of violence against women by no means constitute the whole or even the primary focus of the contemporary women's movement in India. Only recently, at the third annual women activists conference in Patna (February 1988) and at the Fourth National Conference on Women's Studies in Andhra (December 1988), the debates ranged broadly across questions of poverty, employment, work, property, health and ecology, communalism, culture and religion, political representation, law, reproduc-