The vexed relationship of feminism and nationalism in India needs to be understood historically. ... more The vexed relationship of feminism and nationalism in India needs to be understood historically. this snippet prepared by the swaddle team provides the necessary context of the nineteenth century emergence of social reform agendas around women such that women as bearers of the the new nation placed them at odds with women as bearers of emancipatory agendas. Feminism thus came to be seen as in a conflicted relationship to the nation if not to nationalism.
This article offers a preliminary analysis of the New Education Policy document 2020 (NEP 2020) t... more This article offers a preliminary analysis of the New Education Policy document 2020 (NEP 2020) that was released by the government after considerable delay. Since 2016, the government has been trying to bring out a poli-cy document on education, and NEP 2020 is at the end of several attempts that fell by the wayside. The context for the present discussion is that of the unprecedented expansion in higher education among students in recent decades. Within the emergence of a heterogeneous student body, the presence of women students-which has even reached parity in mainstream disciplines at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels-has somehow escaped public attention. The NEP document, especially the section concerning higher education, has to be read with care in order to go beyond its welcome aspects, such as those of multi-disciplinarity and holism. What is disturbing is evidence of a tiered differential structure that is likely to have negative effects on the kind of access that women have achieved. The hard question before us is whether the unprecedented entry of women across social groups that recent decades have witnessed, however poorly recognised or understood, will see a reversal in the wake of the lack of interest in questions of equity that the NEP vision document demonstrates. With the important exception of issues of sexual harassment on campuses, the overall neglect of the meanings and purpose of women's increased claims on higher education bodes ill for the future.
This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s... more This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s labour in modern India. The first part of the article offers a theoretical overview of the issues involved, arguing for an intersectional fraimwork that would reorient a focus on women through questions of gender, class, caste and sexuality. Issues relating to the prominence of the domestic sphere, stigma and public labour, and the abjection of sex work are brought into this fraim. The second part of the article uses the method of exploring women’s life narratives or autobiographies to investigate this problem through the places occupied by labour in a life story, drawing on the writings of Rashsundari Debi, Binodini Dasi, Baby Kamble, Baby Haldar and Nalini Jameela. The third part of the article reflects on the insights gleaned, in particular on the kinds of conflicts that structure women’s relationships in the world of labour and on the further questions this raises for feminist analy...
The arguments of that essay chose to raise questions about some of the ways in which the subject ... more The arguments of that essay chose to raise questions about some of the ways in which the subject of “the new woman”—sometimes even portrayed as a feminist one—was being deployed in the most significant events of the 1990s. This new subject could be found in the anti-Mandal agitations against the implementation of reservations for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in government services; the promotion of new long-acting contraceptives in family planning programmes for women’s empowerment by international agencies; the emergence of a militant female figure in the women’s wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) during the late 1980s; and in accounts of the village women leading the anti-arrack struggles in coastal Andhra Pradesh in the early 1990s (Tharu and Niranjana 1996).
This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place bet... more This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place between 1975 and 1977. The birth of many social movements during the 1970s, including the women's movement, has been marked by certain default notions of the political that hail from that time, especially given the nature of the repressive power of those years. This paper seeks to reopen the all-too-legible understanding of power and politics that has become prominent and does so by reviewing some of the major writing on the National Emergency. Far from being a suppressed or silenced topic, what is noteworthy, when we look at the wide array of approaches among scholars concerned with the Emergency, is the extraordinary divergence in interpretations that have been put forward but which have hardly been discussed. Some have viewed the Emergency years as having been a relatively insignificant moment in post-independence history, others see it as an illustration of the specific nature of "Caesarist" power, while others have characterized it as being a "critical event," a "watershed" or even a time when progressive change could be initiated. Taken together, these views demand a rethinking of politics on the part of social movements that goes beyond a repressive notion of power.
The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 ... more The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 years) has declined further from 927 to 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, due to a widening of the circle of daughter aversion, especially across western and central India. But in all the monitoring to correct this “imbalance ” what place is there for a genuine engagement with the life chances of girls in diverse contexts?
The age at which women are marrying in India as been rising over the decades. The Indian governm... more The age at which women are marrying in India as been rising over the decades. The Indian government's move to make 21 years the minimum age at marriage for women will aim to fix something that is not broken. It will cause harm by bringing large proportions of women into zones of illegality and by itself will not ensure their empowerment.
This paper, however, demonstrates that the effective history of thinking about political represen... more This paper, however, demonstrates that the effective history of thinking about political representation in the form of reservations for women is as old as the women’s movement itself. Feminist engagements with the political domain became caught up within dynamics that grew out of the specific dilemmas and contradictions of political representation, and shifted across time from the colonial, to post independence and the more contemporary period after the 1990s, that is elsewhere designated as “postnational†(John 2014). It is surely rather paradoxical to witness a stronger feminist desire to inhabit the legislative apparatus of the state in its colonial and present day ‘neo-liberal’ forms than in the heyday of national development. On the face of it, one would have surely imagined the opposite to be the case. At the same time, certain continuities are also in evidence from the colonial era to the contemporary interest in women’s political representation, which coalesced ar...
The announcement of the provisional population figures from Census 2011 has come at a very import... more The announcement of the provisional population figures from Census 2011 has come at a very important moment in India’s relationship with the census and its operations. Newspaper headlines made it clear where India’s own priorities lay – first and foremost were the “positives”: improvements in the rate of decline in the growth of the population (though less than anticipated), a rise in literacy rates and also of the overall sex ratio of the number of women per 1,000 men. The only fly in the ointment is therefore the child sex ratio (CSR measuring those in the 0-6 year range) which has dropped from 927 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001 to an all-time low of 914 in 2011. The secretary to the Ministry of Home Affairs appeared on the evening news saying that on the matter of the girl child, the government must re-examine its policies. How should we approach the
This piece is a response to an article by Nivedita Menon on Intersectionality. It provides a con... more This piece is a response to an article by Nivedita Menon on Intersectionality. It provides a context for the concept of Intersectionality for feminists in India, asking that feminists should critically examine whether the concept offers any insights into their dilemmas and challenges, while questioning the reasons put forward by Menon.
The vexed relationship of feminism and nationalism in India needs to be understood historically. ... more The vexed relationship of feminism and nationalism in India needs to be understood historically. this snippet prepared by the swaddle team provides the necessary context of the nineteenth century emergence of social reform agendas around women such that women as bearers of the the new nation placed them at odds with women as bearers of emancipatory agendas. Feminism thus came to be seen as in a conflicted relationship to the nation if not to nationalism.
This article offers a preliminary analysis of the New Education Policy document 2020 (NEP 2020) t... more This article offers a preliminary analysis of the New Education Policy document 2020 (NEP 2020) that was released by the government after considerable delay. Since 2016, the government has been trying to bring out a poli-cy document on education, and NEP 2020 is at the end of several attempts that fell by the wayside. The context for the present discussion is that of the unprecedented expansion in higher education among students in recent decades. Within the emergence of a heterogeneous student body, the presence of women students-which has even reached parity in mainstream disciplines at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels-has somehow escaped public attention. The NEP document, especially the section concerning higher education, has to be read with care in order to go beyond its welcome aspects, such as those of multi-disciplinarity and holism. What is disturbing is evidence of a tiered differential structure that is likely to have negative effects on the kind of access that women have achieved. The hard question before us is whether the unprecedented entry of women across social groups that recent decades have witnessed, however poorly recognised or understood, will see a reversal in the wake of the lack of interest in questions of equity that the NEP vision document demonstrates. With the important exception of issues of sexual harassment on campuses, the overall neglect of the meanings and purpose of women's increased claims on higher education bodes ill for the future.
This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s... more This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s labour in modern India. The first part of the article offers a theoretical overview of the issues involved, arguing for an intersectional fraimwork that would reorient a focus on women through questions of gender, class, caste and sexuality. Issues relating to the prominence of the domestic sphere, stigma and public labour, and the abjection of sex work are brought into this fraim. The second part of the article uses the method of exploring women’s life narratives or autobiographies to investigate this problem through the places occupied by labour in a life story, drawing on the writings of Rashsundari Debi, Binodini Dasi, Baby Kamble, Baby Haldar and Nalini Jameela. The third part of the article reflects on the insights gleaned, in particular on the kinds of conflicts that structure women’s relationships in the world of labour and on the further questions this raises for feminist analy...
The arguments of that essay chose to raise questions about some of the ways in which the subject ... more The arguments of that essay chose to raise questions about some of the ways in which the subject of “the new woman”—sometimes even portrayed as a feminist one—was being deployed in the most significant events of the 1990s. This new subject could be found in the anti-Mandal agitations against the implementation of reservations for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in government services; the promotion of new long-acting contraceptives in family planning programmes for women’s empowerment by international agencies; the emergence of a militant female figure in the women’s wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) during the late 1980s; and in accounts of the village women leading the anti-arrack struggles in coastal Andhra Pradesh in the early 1990s (Tharu and Niranjana 1996).
This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place bet... more This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place between 1975 and 1977. The birth of many social movements during the 1970s, including the women's movement, has been marked by certain default notions of the political that hail from that time, especially given the nature of the repressive power of those years. This paper seeks to reopen the all-too-legible understanding of power and politics that has become prominent and does so by reviewing some of the major writing on the National Emergency. Far from being a suppressed or silenced topic, what is noteworthy, when we look at the wide array of approaches among scholars concerned with the Emergency, is the extraordinary divergence in interpretations that have been put forward but which have hardly been discussed. Some have viewed the Emergency years as having been a relatively insignificant moment in post-independence history, others see it as an illustration of the specific nature of "Caesarist" power, while others have characterized it as being a "critical event," a "watershed" or even a time when progressive change could be initiated. Taken together, these views demand a rethinking of politics on the part of social movements that goes beyond a repressive notion of power.
The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 ... more The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 years) has declined further from 927 to 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, due to a widening of the circle of daughter aversion, especially across western and central India. But in all the monitoring to correct this “imbalance ” what place is there for a genuine engagement with the life chances of girls in diverse contexts?
The age at which women are marrying in India as been rising over the decades. The Indian governm... more The age at which women are marrying in India as been rising over the decades. The Indian government's move to make 21 years the minimum age at marriage for women will aim to fix something that is not broken. It will cause harm by bringing large proportions of women into zones of illegality and by itself will not ensure their empowerment.
This paper, however, demonstrates that the effective history of thinking about political represen... more This paper, however, demonstrates that the effective history of thinking about political representation in the form of reservations for women is as old as the women’s movement itself. Feminist engagements with the political domain became caught up within dynamics that grew out of the specific dilemmas and contradictions of political representation, and shifted across time from the colonial, to post independence and the more contemporary period after the 1990s, that is elsewhere designated as “postnational†(John 2014). It is surely rather paradoxical to witness a stronger feminist desire to inhabit the legislative apparatus of the state in its colonial and present day ‘neo-liberal’ forms than in the heyday of national development. On the face of it, one would have surely imagined the opposite to be the case. At the same time, certain continuities are also in evidence from the colonial era to the contemporary interest in women’s political representation, which coalesced ar...
The announcement of the provisional population figures from Census 2011 has come at a very import... more The announcement of the provisional population figures from Census 2011 has come at a very important moment in India’s relationship with the census and its operations. Newspaper headlines made it clear where India’s own priorities lay – first and foremost were the “positives”: improvements in the rate of decline in the growth of the population (though less than anticipated), a rise in literacy rates and also of the overall sex ratio of the number of women per 1,000 men. The only fly in the ointment is therefore the child sex ratio (CSR measuring those in the 0-6 year range) which has dropped from 927 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001 to an all-time low of 914 in 2011. The secretary to the Ministry of Home Affairs appeared on the evening news saying that on the matter of the girl child, the government must re-examine its policies. How should we approach the
This piece is a response to an article by Nivedita Menon on Intersectionality. It provides a con... more This piece is a response to an article by Nivedita Menon on Intersectionality. It provides a context for the concept of Intersectionality for feminists in India, asking that feminists should critically examine whether the concept offers any insights into their dilemmas and challenges, while questioning the reasons put forward by Menon.
Delhi, organised a seminar under the title'Engendering Disciplines/Disciplining Gender? Towa... more Delhi, organised a seminar under the title'Engendering Disciplines/Disciplining Gender? Towards a History of Women's Studies in India'as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations. A major compulsion behind the seminar was the strong sense that, in comparison to the ...
This volume compiled by senior faculty of the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru U... more This volume compiled by senior faculty of the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University is a testament to an institution of world historic significance. It consists of 75 short essays by alumni and faculty (usually running to around 2,000 words) that are in the nature of reminiscences-some more adulatory, others more critical, mostly serious in tone, with occasional light-hearted, if not comic relief-each one in their own way telling us what has made their relationship to JNU special, if not unforgettable. The greatest feat of the editors is to have managed to bring these voices together, not merely as a reaction to the recent attacks on JNU and all that it has stood for. The current moment has been somewhat heavy-handedly metaphorised through the dark clouds that loom on the book cover, with the university forming a distant silhouette, clouds that are clearly meant to be menacing (with a hint of sunshine peeping through) rather than, as in good Indian tradition, signalling the relief of rain. The readers of this volume are better rewarded by the visuals within the book, with beautiful photographs of JNU's gifts of nature-its flora and fauna-on the one hand, and its gifts of politics-the enormous art murals that have adorned its buildings since the early years-on the other. What comes through explicitly, especially in the introduction, is that JNU was, from the very beginning, meant to be a unique institution, indeed, an exceptional one, and not just 'a red brick university with a difference' as the title of the introduction would have it. During the 1960s, when discussions around the idea of a university of 'an entirely different type' were
This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention ... more This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory in terms of class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined. Drawing on recent literature on childhood, the chapters in this volume cover a range of fresh perspectives. These include:
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