(Re)Inventing Feminism within the Discourse of Class Struggle: Women and Intellectual History in the Trade Union Movement of Late Colonial Bengal (1920–1947)

Abstract

Abstract This paper envisages (re)constructing the intellectual praxis of women trade unionists in late colonial Bengal. By arguing how political practice habitually translates to political thought, the paper devises a methodology to address the gendered discourse of intellectual history in the Global South. It focuses on intellectual output, primarily journal articles of women trade unionists like Santoshi Kumari Gupta, Maitreyee Bose, and Kanak Mukherjee, to trace a genealogy of how class struggle was perceived by women labour activists across the ideological spectrum of nationalism, socialism, and communism between 1920 to 1947 in Bengal. The piece is an effort to transcend the manifold marginalisations that plague the establishment of feminine political praxis within the regulating structures of colonialism and capitalism. In the process, it bids to unfold an alternative narrative of the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal narrative of the decolonisation of South Asian intellectual thought.