Edited by Radhika Govinda, Fiona Mackay, Krishna Menon and Rukmini Sen, Doing Feminisms in the Academy brings together auto-ethnographic, critical and comparative reflections on doing feminisms in the academy in contemporary India and the UK.
Written by emergent and seasoned academics from a range of disciplinary, social and (geo)political locations, the essays in the book explore the transformative potential, dilemmas and challenges of teaching, learning, researching and working as feminist academics. By engaging with questions of identity, difference, institutional and classroom pedagogies, reflexivity, accountability and the production and circulation of feminist and non-feminist knowledge, the essays in this collection also provide a frame and a lens through which to view the wider landscape of contemporary higher education.
The following is an excerpt from Krishna Menon and Rukmini Sen’s Essay ‘From Perspective to Discipline: Mapping Forty Years of Women’s/Gender Studies in India’.
EDUCATION, CONSTITUTION, MOBILISATION: BEFORE HER STORY WAS RESEARCHED
While tracing the context towards researching women, it is relevant to discuss certain politico-historical moments that (although not directly pertinent to the eventual institutional push towards research on women) were important conditions in which the women question was being created in the nation’s imagination. This context is also important primarily to mark the specificity of a colonial past and the adoption of a new constitution, both of which significantly impacted women’s lives.
The role of women’s education in nineteenth- and twentieth century India cannot be forgotten when seeking to understand the birth of a discipline. We consider this long period as our first moment in the pre-story. Its primary objective clearly was not feminist by contemporary standards, yet women’s education marked an important shift in getting women into public educational institutions outside of their homes, albeit with much resistance, anxiety, persuasion and willingness.
The venerable Bethune College for Women in Calcutta Presidency in eastern India is perhaps the oldest women’s college in Asia. It was established in 1879 by John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune as a result of his pioneering vision of producing better wives and better mothers in their homes’ with the help of education. The first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the 1860s and 1870s, around the same time as Savitribai Phule set up the first girls’ school in western India. Savitribai Phule was one of first women teachers in India and had opened two schools for girls from all caste backgrounds in western India by the middle of the nineteenth century (Madhukar 2016). Queen Mary’s College in the Madras Presidency in south India has been in the forefront of the education of women since 1914, when the Government of Madras instituted the Madras Women’s College. An education at Queen Mary’s College was much sought after by parents of young women and families of high social standing. The SNDT Women’s University, founded in 1916, was the first women’s university in both India and in southeast Asia. Indraprastha College for Women in Delhi was founded in 1924 and is the oldest women’s college of the University of Delhi. The parent school and the college both grew out of the efforts of a group of philanthropists associated with the Theosophical Society of India. They were inspired by Annie Besant, who promoted education for women in north India at a time when women were confined to the home and imagined that their destiny was only marriage and motherhood.
Post-independence India has continued with the assumption that a strong nation requires strong and enlightened mothers and wives. Nehru believed that if you educate a man you educate an individual. However, if you educate a woman, you educate a whole family. Women empowered means mother India empowered (Shetty and Basil Hans 2015). Over the years women’s education and women’s colleges have played a key role in incubating some of the initial ideas on women’s studies as well as offering a site to experiment with ideas.
The presence of women members in the constituent assembly of India (an elected representative body to draft the Indian Constitution which first met in 1946) is the second moment to remember in our trajectory. Among the 299 members of the first assembly, 15 were women who had either been voted for or were chosen to represent their provinces. Durgabai Deshmukh, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Begum Aizaz Rasul, Renuka Ray, Purnima Banerji, Sarojini Naidu, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Ammu Swaminathan, Sucheta Kriplani, Annie Mascarene, Kamla Chaudhri, Leela Roy, Malati Choudhury, Dakshayani Velayudhan and Hansa Jivraj Mehta are not merely names; they represent freedom fighters, lawyers, reformists, suffragettes, politicians, members of women’s organisations and, most importantly, they came from a range of castes, religions and language groups. It is important to underline the contribution that these members made towards the principles of equality, non-discrimination and justice as enshrined in the constitution. Also, in the post-colonial nation-building stage, having women articulate and call for universal adult franchise, equal pay for equal work, maternity benefits and no special treatment to women was historic, to say the least. The political equality that the constitution granted was essential to begin with. It co-existed with special legal provisions for women and children in recognition of the social/structural inequalities that would persist for women, despite formal political and legal equality.
The Hindu Code Bill debates in the 1950s form the third moment of reckoning around the women’s question. If the constitution granted equality and non-discrimination in the public, political and professional spheres, B.R. Ambedkar proposing the Hindu Code Bill initiated discussions around the right to property, divorce and a dowry-free marriage for Hindu women, who were under the shadows of the Laws of Manu. These two interconnected moments of constitution-making and resistance to the Hindu Code Bill were the ways through which women’s lives were being scripted, transformed and contested-all of which had a role in shaping their lives for future research.
The declaration of the internal Emergency between 1975 and 1977 led to the suspension of fundamental rights and the censorship of dissent. It marks a fourth moment in our story when the women’s question of personal liberty and freedom became intertwined with wider questions of civil liberties. The Chipko Movement of 1972-73 marks a fifth moment with the mobilisation of many poor peasant and tribal women against deforestation in tracts of the northern Indian mountains. While this was not framed as a ‘woman’s movement’, women (who were responsible for fuel, food and water for the family) played an important role in preventing forest destruction by timber contractors (Kumar 1999).
Finally, the two campaigns leading up to the 1980s (which is the institutional beginning of research on women) were the Anti Dowry Agitation in Delhi and the Mathura Rape Judgement Protests. The judgement prompted 8 March 1980 to be the first time that feminist groups co-ordinated a national campaign across Bombay, Delhi, Nagpur, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Hyderabad to demand a retrial of the Mathura case and changes in the Indian Penal Code’s rape laws.
This was the first time that rape was drawn out of the closet and rape has since remained one of the rallying points of women’s activism. Autonomous groups like Forum Against Rape (later Forum Against Oppression of Women) in Bombay, Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Platform Against Oppression of Women) in Calcutta, Stri Sangharsh (Women’s Struggle) in Delhi and Stree Shakti Sangathana (Women Empowerment Collective) in Hyderabad were formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by women activists who were sympathisers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or part of radical Marxist-Leninist groups, university and college teachers, doctors, members of study circles or women’s libraries or housewives. Women had to resist the marginalisation of women’s issues as a private matter, to fight for equal participation, to create alternative structures and to develop their own programmes to realise their liberation (Gandhi and Shah 1999).
A key event that marked the anti-rape struggle was an open letter written by Upendra Baxi, Vasudha Dhagamwar, Lotika Sarkar and Raghunath Kelkar after the Mathura Rape Supreme Court Judgement in 1979 that raised poignant legal questions on ‘consent’ (the most difficult evidence to establish in a rape case):
There is a clear difference in law and common sense, between ‘submission’ and ‘consent’. Consent involves submission; but the converse is not necessarily true. Nor is the absence of resistance necessarily indicative of consent… One suspects that the Court gathered an impression from Mathura’s liaison with her lover that she was a person of easy virtue. Is the taboo against pre-marital sex so strong as to provide license to Indian police to rape young girls? Or to make them submit to their desires in police stations? (Baxi, Vasudha Kelkar and Sarkar 1979)
This open letter was an important catalyst not just in the nationwide women’s movement’s demands for changes to the rape law, but also as a text that formed the basis of feminist and legal questions and debates with which women’s studies scholars would later engage.
We end this section with the other iconic text of the 1970s, the 1974 Towards Equality report by the Committee on the Status of Women in India. Vina Mazumdar wrote, ‘the woman’s question in India had to be defined adequately. And this time from bottom up. This could only be done by reviving, renewing and recreating the movement and reshaping India’s history. The question remains, who will take the responsibility?” (Mazumdar 2008). By the 1980s, the stage had been set for research from a feminist perspective to begin on how women led their lives, on what the social conditions were, and about the kinds of struggle and resistance women experienced around survival and the pursuit of equality. Both formal and informal organisations created opportunities for such research to be undertaken.
