Feminism In India Research Articles

Introduction to Reader on Sex Work

This chapter is an Introduction to a Reader on Sex Work that I edited for an Indian feminist press for their series on Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism. The introduction provides a critical introduction to and overview of the volume which is organised into four major sections. These broadly relate to the colonial legal histories of sex work, the post-independence feminist debates on sex work, some contemporary ethnographies of sex work and the mobilisational politics of sex workers themselves. The last section includes documents and manifestos from the sex workers’ movement.

Hindu Widows as Religious Subjects: The Politics of Christian Conversion and Revival in Colonial India

This article examines how the Maharashtrian Hindu widow and convert to Christianity, Ramabai Dongre Medhavi (1858–1922), and the students at her widows’ school, Mukti Mission, contributed to early twentieth-century social reform in colonial India. This article specifically examines the 1905–1907 religious revival at Mukti Mission and poses two main arguments. First, the revival constituted a rejection of the constraints prescribed to Hindu widows under an oppressive orthodox Brahmin patriarchy. Second, despite its contestation of patriarchy, the revival narrative adopted by the Mukti women was fraught with imperial and racial hierarchies, limiting the gains wrought by the revival’s resistance of patriarchal constraints. These limitations are evident in Ramabai’s critique of the US and British missionary discourses that questioned the legitimacy of the Mukti revival in imperial and sexist terms. These two arguments provide deeper insight into the role of the religious practices and identities of Hindu widows who converted to Christianity in the emergence of Indian feminism.

Technology-mediated Violence against Women in India

The purpose of this issue paper is to lay out the key legal, institutional and ethical issues concerning technology-mediated Violence against Women (VAW), to raise critical questions for further deliberation and action. This paper draws upon secondary literature in this area, and inputs from Indian feminist scholars and practitioners working in the domains of gender-based violence, women’s rights, digital rights, online violence.

Governance Feminism in the Post-Colony: India's Rape Law Reforms of 2013

Against the backdrop of the phenomenal successes of governance feminism in the US, Israel and internationally, this paper will consider governance feminism in the post- colonial context of India. In particular, the paper uses the wide-ranging law reforms on rape and trafficking in India in the wake of the rape and murder of a Delhi student in December 2012 to make two arguments. First, that Anglo-American governance feminism has a rather limited and contingent influence on postcolonial feminism. Second, that a mapping of Indian feminist interventions on the law of rape over the past three decades suggests that Indian feminism displays key characteristics of governance feminism. Viewing the 2013 reforms as the culmination of decades of feminist lobbying of the state for rape law reform, this paper argues that Indian governance feminism is deeply committed to a highly gendered understanding of sexual violence. Further, that Indian feminism has increasingly resorted to the use of the criminal law to address sexual violence even as its historical suspicion of postcolonial state power has reduced considerably and is now mostly evident in its opposition to the death penalty for rapists. This paper thus tells a highly contextual story of fragmentation, partial reception, partial rejection, and the local production of feminist ideas and stances towards governance. It provides answers, in the Indian framework, to the key questions of this collection on governance feminism.

Tradition Transformation and Postcolonial Feminism in India

Between ‘tradition and transformation’ there is a liminal space of transition with its different aspects of dependencies and interdependencies of power relations, and features that encompass the process of negotiation and opposition of cultures. In the context of Indian postcolonial condition, transition was an arduous one. Tradition was inflected by colonialism and the transformation that took place thereby bore a complex picture of cultural superiority of the colonizer and inferiority of the colonized, especially that of the colonized woman. Considering the vast trajectory of literature in India including the tradition of women’s literature from different socio-cultural groups, this paper argues that it would be wrong to universalize homogeneity. It examines and identifies certain issues relating to the possibilities of women’s literature in India, which otherwise would have remained unresolved at a macro level and addresses that rooted in Indian tradition, feminism in India has shown the route to an inclusive cultural transformation without generating exclusivity or a tendency towards separatism.

Defining Domestic Violence and Women's Autonomy in Law

This paper explores the complex relationship between Indian feminism and the law and legal systems, as reflected in the recent (2015) Bombay High Court judgment on domestic violence. It is divided into two sections. The first section looks at feminist interventions in marital disputes and domestic violence through grassroots efforts, and outlines the multidimensional and hybrid feminist understandings of domestic violence, discusses change strategies and ethical principles that underpinned their action, and addresses the enactment of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) as one such strategy against domestic violence. This section also focuses on feminist dilemmas and foregrounds the issue of women’s autonomy in situations of domestic violence. The mainstreaming of feminist legal interventions through the PWDVA has brought new challenges for feminists and the second section discusses this issue by focusing on judicial intervention in deciding the boundary of counselling and mediation practices by protection officers under the PWDVA. We suggest that as seen in the 2015 judgement, while the judiciary has upheld some aspects of feminist practice and disallowed reconciliation in situations of serious physical domestic violence, its over-emphasis on equating physical violence with domestic violence and its protectionist stance has limited women’s autonomy and gone against feminist counselling principles and politics undergirding feminist interventions in situations of domestic violence. We suggest that this judgment can be read as a dialogue within a section of feminist groups in India who endorse feminist political ideals of liberty, individual rights, and equality and seek to institutionalize these within the law. This paper is an analytical and interpretive piece and not an empirical inquiry into legal practice or a survey of case law developments of the PWDVA. It focuses on normative questions of theoretical and policy relevance arising from feminist engagements with law.

The Sun and Satellite: A Study of Gender Relations in Television Advertisements and its Relationship to the Position of Women in Indian Households

While the contemporary Indian feminists are busy in on-street protests and campaigns regarding woman’s mobility, what is going on inside the Indian households assumes more importance due to its major role in shaping the attitudes and outlook of men and women participating in such events. Advertisements, in a globalized India, act as a major platform for selling the products of MNC’s. The brain surgeons sitting in ad agencies position various products by targeting Indian families and portraying images of their values, patterns of relationship and space shared by the members. And television being a living room mass medium with high reach multiplies its scope of touching different aspects of personal and public life of the families. Gender relations are one of them. Previous studies in this field have been confined to sex roles, stereotypes and portrayal of women as a mother, wife and working lady in the ads. This paper attempts to study the patterns of gender relations portrayed in television advertisements and its relationship to the current positon of women in Indian households. The study is undertaken with broader reference to the division of labor, decision-making, help, advice, mobility and interpersonal communication between male and female partners in the family. Method of content analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, was used to analyze 500 Hindi television advertisements using codes based on these four parameters. For the second part, a survey was conducted from 500 respondents in the metropolitan capital city of Delhi. The questionnaire listed various tasks and decisions of routine family life on a nominal scale. Another Section contained attitudinal statements about women with reference to various roles and decisions involved in domestic, financial and outdoor situations between husband and wife. The agreement of respondents was measured using 5-point Likert Scale. It was found that the position of Indian women in the capital city is like a satellite which depends on the Sun to receive light. And the same pattern is reflected in television advertisements. It was concluded that with the motive of increasing their sales, advertisers are trying to encourage anti-feminist mindset by portraying male dominance in both public and private spaces of the society

“Sober encounters”: the neoliberal logics of human rights documentary and Indian feminist documentary filmmakers

“Sober encounters” examines the market-defined encounters between Indian feminist documentary filmmakers and global humanitarian and media commissioning and funding agencies. Drawing from interviews conducted with Indian filmmakers, the essay looks closely at the seemingly sober aesthetic and ethical imperatives of these agencies and their impact on the production and distribution of rights-based feminist documentary film in India. Further, I present the figure of the “transient subject” and posit that it is one apprehended by market-friendly representational regimes to legitimate a neoliberal rights discourse. I argue for a deeper examination of these representational regimes and their attempts to de-radicalize the visual cultures of women’s rights.

Connecting Activists and Journalists

This article examines how feminist activists, women's organizations, and journalists in India connected with each other through Twitter following the gang rape incident in New Delhi in December 2012. First, the investigation draws on a set of +15 million tweets specifically focused on rape and gang rape. These tweets, which appeared between 16 January 2013 and 16 January 2014, were collected and analysed with the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset. Second, to gain further insight into how Twitter enables and shapes civil society connections, the article builds on 15 semi-structured interviews with Indian feminist activists and journalists, who actively participated in Twitter communication on the gang rape incident. The analysis of the Twitter and interview data reveals how the platform allows these actors to make ad hoc connections around particular protest issues and events. These connections alter both activist and journalist practices, and ultimately facilitate the current transformation of public discourse on gender violence. Twitter helps to keep this issue consistently on the front burner. In this sense, a significant shift from the past has occurred, when media coverage typically died out after an incident ceased to be news. Yet, our study also suggests that connectivity is tempered by Twitter's limited Indian user base, and users’ focus on the “crime of the day.”

Feminism, Feminism Everywhere?

This essay engages with the text The Birth of Chinese Feminism, which centers primarily on the writings of He-Yin Zhen, one of the earliest Chinese feminists, produced at the turn of the twentieth century and translated into English for the first time. He-Yin offered China and the world a unique and forceful theory of women’s enslavement through critiques of conditions in China (past and present), Japan, and contemporary Europe. John’s essay offers a reading of these writings and He-Yin’s arguments in contrast to other Chinese thinkers, as well as the theoretical claims made by the editors of the book. It does so in relation to comparable questions from colonial and contemporary Indian feminism. While endorsing the dangers posed by the current dominance of US academe in terms of its capacity to crowd out alternate concepts and thinking about feminism, especially from colonial spaces, this essay calls for a postnational engagement with the specificities of feminist concepts and vocabularies, whether in the early twentieth century or the present.

The Indian Women’s Movement

The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.

Discovering positionalities in the countryside: methodological reflections on doing fieldwork in South India

Critical reflection on our positionalities fosters a better understanding of our embodied research experiences. Positionalities undergo transformation throughout the process of data collection and analysis. In this paper, we seek to engage with the question of how our situated, fluid positionalities shape relations and the data collection process in the field. To this end we discuss 1) our positionalities as researchers in the research process; 2) field entry; 3) embodied field performances; 4) marital status; and 5) the relationship between research assistants and researcher. Discussion of these interrelated themes is prefaced by a brief introduction to contemporary work on Indian feminism and gendered geographies.

Critical Events, Incremental Memories and Gendered Violence

The ‘Delhi gang rape’ was not only a ‘critical event’, but also simultaneously a part of successive and incremental memories of gendered violence. The protests which erupted in Delhi and across the country against the gang rape, wove an imagined community of citizens around the iconised figure of the raped woman. The diverse strands which constituted the protests, invoked distinct and divergent ideas of the state, drawing upon the different ways in which the modern state exercises power over its citizens to elicit their obedience and consent. At the same time, the gang rape, assumed criticality, by providing the site for the revival and regrouping of collective energies which mobilised against sexual violence and presented a critique of the state and its laws. In the process, the complex relationship between Indian feminism and the state and the manner in which state and law become constitutive sites of contestation were brought out.

The Impossibility of Marital Rape

India is one of the few countries in the world that continues to exempt husbands from being charged with rape committed against their wives. This article describes a brief period of contestation between feminists and the state in India, when this exceptional treatment of marriage was challenged and it was demanded that the husband's legal immunity be ended. Unpacking the responses of the state for retaining the immunity, this article shows how the idea of marital rape as an impossibility is constituted and contested in contemporary India. While the demand for repealing the husband's immunity did not succeed, the manner in which the state framed the issue and internal debates among Indian feminists over the politics and potentials of criminalising marital rape, complicates our understanding of the issues at stake. Consequently, the article emphasises the need for situating the marital rape question within a broader analysis of the legal regulation of marriage, rather than focusing on criminal law reform alone.

Clearing Sacred Ground: Women-Centered Interpretations of the Indian Epics

This article examines a few appropriations of the main women characters in the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , by ordinary women in their folk songs, as well as by women writers and artists in the feminist domain. The appropriations dip into already existing associations about the epic heroines, but rearticulate these to create greater space for the elaboration and positioning of postcolonial Indian feminisms. While the appropriation of the epics carries certain risks, such as unintentional complicity with right-wing conservative projects and the positioning of Indian feminism as exclusive of caste and class concerns, it is contended here that the risk is worth taking because the epics continue to be an important and contested part of the cultural field, and because the feminist appropriations are able to absorb and respond to the critiques to some degree. The appropriations in the folk domain are juxtaposed with those in the feminist domain: those of Sita from the Ramayana are juxtaposed with those of Draupadi from the Mahabharata . In addition, all appropriations are placed within the debate in Indian feminism over the use of traditional narratives in order to garner insight into the potential of the narratives as a resource for feminist projects.

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

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...

Violence against Women

Protesters in Kolkata, India, decry violence against women following the death of a twenty-three-year-old woman who was gang-raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi. Activists in India later criticized U.S. feminists for reproducing colonial discourse in their responses to the attack. When gender-based violence occurs in the Global South, how should feminists in the Global North respond? Sometimes feminists in Europe and the United States say nothing, fearful that their attempts to speak out about gender violence in South Asia, Africa, Latin America, or other formerly colonized regions will reproduce colonial dynamics. At other times they do speak, and their language echoes imperial narratives about needing to "rescue" downtrodden women from "backward" cultural traditions. To move to a more constructive place, we need to foster a transnational analytic of care: one that is not defensive, reactionary, or silencing. We need an analytic of care that is cognizant of the local and global processes that create conditions of vulnerability for women and form the asymmetrical planes in which cross-cultural alliances and solidarity practices must happen. The urgency of our need for more constructive forms of transnational feminist solidarity became particularly apparent in December 2012, when feminists across the globe took to the pen and the streets in response to the gruesome gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi, the capital of India. The twenty-three-year-old woman was returning home after watching the film The Life of Pi with a male friend in a shopping mall in South Delhi. She and her companion that night tried to hail public buses and auto-rickshaws to no avail. Eventually, a private chartered bus stopped to picked them up. There were six men on the bus, including the driver, his younger brother (who posed as the conductor), and four others who worked in various low-skilled jobs in the city and were economic migrants from neighboring states. The bus did not have a permit to be on the roads after-hours; investigations later revealed that the traffic police had been bribed in order for it to pass through security checkpoints. The men on the bus, apparently on a "joyride," beat the young woman and her friend. When the woman and her friend resisted, they dragged her to the back of the bus and took turns raping her. The assault lasted several hours as the bus plowed through the city streets, and involved the insertion of a metal rod into the woman's body, which caused her intestines to spill out. Afterward, the couple was stripped naked and thrown off the bus. The driver tried to run over the woman, but her friend managed to pull her out of the way. Click for larger view A narrow focus on sexual assault can obscure how the structural violence of the global economy is also a central source of women's suffering in the Global South. This photo, Death of Thousand Dreams by Taslima Akhter, captures the final embrace of two workers killed by the April 2013 factory collapse in Bangladesh. The young woman's ordeal did not stop there: for nearly half an hour, passersby ignored the pair's cries for help. When the police finally arrived, instead of transporting the woman and her friend immediately to the nearest hospital, they argued over jurisdiction. The woman fought for her life for two weeks and finally succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in Singapore. Even though the government ostensibly flew her to Singapore for better care, many in India were critical of the move as her condition was too fragile--they saw the move as a gesture by the government to dampen the public outrage and massive protests in Delhi and all over India. The men accused of this brutal crime are currently standing trial in a fast-track court. In the face of mounting civil protests, the government set up a committee that brought representatives from diverse constituencies in India to put forth a set of legal and social recommendations to deal with violence and discrimination against women. Even though feminist groups found these recommendations inadequate, indeed a "mockery... Language: en

Dalit Feminist Perspectives in India

Dalit women are the most deprived and discriminated sections in caste-based Indian society. They have been victimized through the structural hierarchy of caste which perpetuated the ethos of inequality and maintains the segregation of power. In every sphere of life, they are in a pitiable position, worse off than the upper caste women. Dalit women not only suffer gender discrimination and economic deprivation, but also suffer from discrimination and disabilities in connection with caste. The Indian feminist discourse does not cover the aspect of caste and its interface with gender. This paper seeks to investigate the assertion of dalit women :Y organizations both at the national and regional levels, and the main dalit standpoint which has emerged from a dialogue between the practices and struggles of dalit women and the works dalit feminist intellectuals.

Dalit Women and Feminism in India

Out of the 22 million population of the country it is estimated that the total population of Dalits is 20% (CERD !(1997) of which Dalit women occupy half of that population. Except for a few, the total segment of this population leads a miserable life. Dalit women have been active throughout history, though often this has not been recorded. They were actively involved in the anti-caste and anti-untouchability movements in the 1920s. Today they are the strongholds of the Dalit movements in thousands of Indian villages. They continue to play a critical role in the movements for women's rights. However, they are unable to put an end to the structural discrimination and exclusion. Violence and impunity are used to keep them in their place.

Sexuality and Social Reproduction: Reflections from an Indian Feminist Debate

This article tries in a preliminary manner to establish links between sexual labour, the negotiations of everyday life and the reproduction of social relations. The context for this interrogation is the recent ban in 2005 on dancing in beer bars in the Indian city of Mumbai; the attempts by the state to legitimise its action amidst a range of national and international rhetoric on sexual labour, and the voices of women who were disenfranchised due to the state ban. Women’s interrogation of their role in sexual labour and their struggle for dignity and respect in the domain of work is discussed in the light of the negative discourse weighing against them, while also bringing in historical and contemporary accounts of other forms of ‘stigmatised’ labour. The attempt is to understand how notions of dignity and respectability are intertwined with shifts in gender, caste, class locations and the struggles of social movements. Significant in this discussion are various examples of how women choose to ‘move away’ in their constant search for livelihoods and survival. The article is an attempt to illuminate how an expanded notion of social reproduction could recognise labours of different kinds with the voices of those embodying these labours having a say in how justice and entitlements should devolve.