Women's and Gender Studies in India

Crossings

Anu Aneja

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book frames the major debates and contemporary issues in women's and gender studies in India. It locates them in the context of key theories, their interlinkages, and significant crossings and overlaps within the field while juxtaposing feminist and queer perspectives.

The essays in the volume foreground emerging challenges as well as offer clues to future trajectories for women's and gender studies in the country through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of intersectionalities in feminist activism and theory; gender, caste and class; feminist, masculinity, queer and transgender studies; disability and feminism; feminist and queer pedagogies; and Indian, Western and transnational feminisms. The volume traces how gender studies have shaped established social science as well as interpretative and representational discourses (psychoanalysis, literature, aesthetics, cinema, new media studies and folklore). It examines their strategic potential to draw upon and transform these areas in national and international contexts.

This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in women's studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.

Part I
Stirrings, across time and place

1
(How) ‘to be or not to be’

Women’s and gender studies in India today

Sharon Pillai

Women’s and gender studies (WGS) is at a turning point in India today. At stake is its survival as an ethically charged practice of knowledge. The old ways of doing things will no longer serve – not if the aim is for WGS to remain what it was always meant to be: a driver and catalyst for discursive and social transformation. The challenge for WGS, therefore, is to take honest stock of its situation and reset its course, if not its cause. This chapter is one such attempt at review. In looking back, it seeks to assess the evolving role of the dominant f/actors to have influenced and/or controlled the WGS narrative in India so far. Current conditions, if used well, are rich with possibilities. The ensuing account in closing thus will not only flag significant issues plaguing WGS but also point to desirable workarounds for them with an eye to the future.

Early couplings: examining the phenotype of WGS in India

WGS has a complex pedigree in India. Its germinal impulses can be traced back to the stormy years of the late 1960s and 1970s. Disenchantment with the failures of governance and promises of social welfarism during these years precipitated a marked turn towards radicalization and protest in the general polity. The widespread, vociferous and dissident iterations of participatory democracy forged a critical mood and questioning temper in the age keenly conducive to addressing concerns about marginalization, discrimination and social exclusion on a variety of levels and from diverse vantage points. On a separate track, fortuitous happenstance produced a seminal text that went on to become the sharpest spur for setting up women’s studies (WS) programmes in India (John 2008: 3). Towards Equality, as the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) Report was called, returned a searing indictment of the Indian state’s dismal record at gender equity. The first WS centre, Research Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS), was established in 1974 at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey or SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, as a way of countering the complicity of the university system in masking the systematic dispossession of women through inadequate and partisan knowledge protocols. Meanwhile, the declaration of the Emergency impacted the growth path of WS in India in subtle and far-reaching ways. Activists and intellectuals gravitated towards WS as a safer subject for their intellectual and reformist labours. At the same time, the Indian state’s fostering of WS through the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) (John 2008: 5), served almost in the manner of an alibi for its autocratic upending of constitutional guarantees. WGS in India is a child of these early ‘crossings’, these couplings of political expediency and social reformism, self-serving pragmatism and ethical humanitarianism, co-optative wangles and co-operative sallies. Its developmental track bears witness to the stamp of this ambivalent parentage, this turbid provenance, and demands persistent recall and careful elucidation in order for WGS to refashion itself to current needs and ends.

Crosshatched mandate: WGS and the tightrope act

Since the institution of the first WS centre in 1974, the course navigated by WGS can arguably be analysed as a precarious balancing act on the move between competing claims and shaping powers of three significant f/actors – the state, the women’s movement and, last but not the least, the market economy. This section is a gloss on the impact and challenges their interventions have produced for WGS in India.

Indian state and WGS

In a country where higher education is still very much a state undertaking, carried out under its express writ, stimulus, counsel, funding and/or oversight, the government imprimatur for WGS is clearly not to be discounted. The Indian state played a key part in the genesis of women’s studies in India in the 1970s. In the subsequent years and decades, its quantum of influence has only grown and multiplied. The UN declared 1976–85 as the Decade for Women, soliciting initiatives from its member-signatory nations to work for gender parity and improve women’s access to and opportunities for development. No doubt, with an eye to international appeasement, in part, the government made a concerted effort to support various women’s causes. The Sixth Five-Year Plan (1980–85) delinked women’s issues from the question of welfare. It broke with the past in having a section entitled ‘Women and Development’, which emphasized questions of education, health, employment and so forth. Significantly, in this period, the state through the aegis of the ICSSR and University Grants Commission (UGC) sponsored and participated in the path-breaking deliberations at the First National Conference on Women’s Studies, organized by RCWS, SNDT Women’s University in 1981. It was also involved, once again, via the ICSSR and UGC, in collaborating with UNESCO and the Centre for Development of Women’s Studies (CDWS) in hosting a meeting of experts on women’s studies in social sciences in 1982. Moreover, it was at a joint seminar of the UGC with the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) in 1985 that a demand for separate centres for WS was first mooted. The Seventh Plan (1985–90) picked up and ran with this idea. The National Policy on Education (1986) categorically set out the remit of existing and yet to be established WS centres under four heads: teaching, research, training and extension (p. 103). Taking its cues (and sanction) from this policy template, the UGC programmatically set about instituting and developing WS centres under the Seventh Five-Year Plan. Since then, up to the XII Plan (2012–17), every Five-Year Plan has extended support to the establishment and even mainstreaming of WGS in the university ecosystem in India in one form or another. On current count there are about 160 of these centres overseen by the UGC, of which 116 are categorized as Phase I, 30 as Phase II, 10 as Phase III and 3 as ADVANCED Centres (UGC XII Plan Guidelines 2017).

The women’s movement and WGS

If the state has been crucial in giving formal shape and status to WGS in the field of tertiary education in India, the women’s movement has been a tireless source of inspiration, drive, labour, advocacy,¹ collaboration and critical chaperonage for it. From spearheading the establishment of the first WS centre (CRWS) at SNDT University, Mumbai, to authoring the Towards Equality report, from founding autonomous research institutions (like Centre for Women’s Development Studies; CWDS) or NGOs and trusts focused on research/‘action research’ and archiving (like Institute of Social Studies Trust [ISST] Anveshi, Jagori, Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women [SPARROW] Asmita, Sakhi Collective, Majlis, etc.) to setting up the IAWS, it was luminaries of the women’s movement that were the pioneers. If the IAWS served as a vibrant professional association to advance the cause of WS as an academic discipline as well as a ‘critical perspective’ across disciplines and even beyond the educational bailiwick, then the NGOs and trusts provided intellectual and sociopolitical fillip to WS through detailed documentation, new research material and reference, innovative pedagogical protocols, niche expertise and synergistic tie-ups for meaningful extension work. Those actively involved with the women’s movement also promoted activist publishing in the form of feminist presses (Kali for Women, Stree, etc.), or journals dedicated to women’s and gender issues (Manushi, the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Samyukta, etc.). This provided a platform for WGS scholars not just to theorize in print and firm up personal and disciplinary credentials, or to uncover neglected histories and suppressed narratives through translation and critical exegesis, but also to participate in politically engaged thinking through vital conversations with the wider community of the women’s movement. Additionally, the women’s movement has performed as a sort of soi-disant conscience-keeper and fiduciary of WGS in India. Thus, scholars whether of the discipline or otherwise but with long-standing ties with the women’s movement have periodically scrutinized the trajectory and work of WGS in India² and offered constructive or trenchant criticism, cautionary advice, thoughtful diagnosis, and roadmaps to course-correction when deemed necessary. In many ways, it would be no exaggeration to say that the women’s movement in India has arrogated to itself the task of keeping WGS on the straight and narrow, guarding against its susceptibility to state manipulation and/or market exploitation while soliciting continued space, aid, attention, favour, rewards and benefaction from both.

WGS and market forces

In the early years of its institution, WGS in India was a capital-starved, fervour-fed, politically safe yet socially ameliorative and even radical proposition dependent on substantial state handouts for its survival and growth. Up until the mid-1970s, the state’s interventionism (if not leadership) was solicited and more or less welcomed by the indigenous women’s movement, which sought to work with, rather than independently of government action. Even in the post-Emergency era, the incipient desire for autonomy from state and/or party arbitration resulted only in a limited number of NGOs and trusts addressing women’s issues that depended on local philanthropy and/or multilateral organizations, like the UN and other aid-based agencies abroad, for their budgetary needs. India’s tryst with Manmohanomics and the turn towards liberalization, privatization and globalization in the initial years of the 1990s changed that. Increasingly, India was witness to the NGO-ization of the women’s movement, and the arrival on the scene of the professional or career activist. Not only were powerful transnational feminist alliances built, but also altered national and international trading practices meant overseas funding became available. WGS could hardly remain impervious to the razzmatazz of an autonomous yet fund-flush, globally approved modus operandi (MO) for women’s empowerment. Many scholars of WGS were themselves founder-heads of NGOs. Moreover, as a fledgling academic pursuit, WGS identified in the growing NGO-ization of the women’s movement and the guarded state sanction of NGOs as legitimate actors in development work the promise of disciplinary warrant in the form of gainful employment opportunities and consultancies for its scholars. In time, domains of interest and concerns flagged by NGOs found some reflection in the sorts of syllabi focus and theorization attempted by WGS in India. Of course, the possible and practical symbiosis between NGOs and WGS programmes produced many useful collaborations and skill- and knowledge-sharing exercises as well as scripts of mutual succour and legitimation. Economic liberalization had another important consequence with long-term ramification: the dismantling of license raj and monopoly-capitalism in India precipitated significant changes in commercial enterprise. The newly competitive market space incentivized industries to undertake serious measures to identify, understand, exploit and, ultimately, anoint new consumers to maximize surplus value. Gender came to be recognized as a vital encashable resource. So, the publishing industry, for instance, has witnessed a sustained investment in women’s literature and gender studies. Where earlier only a handful of small, independent and/or feminist presses brought out gender-related books, since the 1990s, those specializing in academic tomes as well as those focusing on trade books have built up impressive catalogues of women’s literature, gender and feminist studies. Likewise, since the 1990s, and especially in the last decade, advertising, mass-media and entertainment industries have been in the forefront of market expansion, stabilization and manipulation through astute strategies of gender monetization. Even the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rules promulgated in 2013 under the Companies Act encourage cashing in on the market valuation and potential of gender as a credit-able and profitable target of investment. The ‘corporate university’ increasingly dotting the higher education landscape in India, with government approval and often as part of a CSR initiative, in fact, is important provocation for rethinking the contours, conduct and concourse of WGS in India in the present.

Ramifications in the current conjuncture

While the troika driving the WGS story in India has contributed immensely to its success, each has also marked WGS in less salutary ways and spawned unique sets of challenges for it. These demand tagging and understanding in order to be countered or turned to advantage.

Nobody can (or will) dispute, for instance, that the government investment in WGS in India, both as a funding behemoth and monopoly licensor of higher educational enterprise, has provided a relatively secure environment for research and scholarship (from 1986 until 30 September 2017, when the extended term of the XII Plan ends).³ But it’s equally foolhardy to ignore some of the not so welcome offshoots of such government patronage and control. Mounting bureaucratization and cosmetic professionalization of educational practices, mandated by poorly thought-out state diktats, have unfortunately made glorified pen-pushers of scholars – a breed more attuned to finding their rewards in meeting arbitrarily set timelines and project goals than delving deep or ranging wide, academically, when tackling complex conceptual and sociopolitical problems that require more than pop-formulaic bromides or prefab solutions. It has also, ironically, engineered an intellectually and imaginatively risk-averse academic culture and classroom dynamic whose radicalism is often so many convenient shibboleths and whose practices are often exercises in deep and even dirty⁴ conformism. While this is a chronic disease afflicting Indian higher education in general, it’s important to underscore that WGS has proved no exception.⁵ Meaningful deliberations on the future of WGS in India will have to confront this uncomfortable facet of its operation. Furthermore, S. Anandhi and Padmini Swaminathan (2006) have noted how the disproportionate preference of policymakers and administrators for extension activities and welfare-outreach has scuttled critical research possibilities in WGS (4444).

Likewise, the de facto moral and intellectual custodianship of WGS by the women’s movement in India has borne mixed results. WGS owes much of its existence, achievements, insights and relevance to the reformist zeal, ethical impetus, political acumen, organizational capacity and intellectual acuity of the women’s movement. Yet, the near-exclusive trusteeship of the women’s movement has, even when all the while protesting its dedication to pluralism, over time contributed to a reductive streamlining of thought, action, agency, expression and empowerment. Deriving from the troubling trend of deeming only some types of participation in the women’s movement kosher, only certain templates for doing WGS in the academy are now accorded ‘critical’ legitimacy and the privilege of representative and leadership roles in inter/national fora. This has resulted in an unnamed but substantive pyramid of power in WGS which is (wo)manned by combative cabals and networking cliques that specialize in mind-numbing indoctrination and demand allegiance to a pre-approved spectrum of ideologies and dogmas as the price of professional advancement and scholarly success. For a robust, socially pluralistic and intellectually vibrant WGS programme, it’s imperative to contest and loosen the hitherto unquestioned moral authority of the women’s movement to be sole arbiters of politico-philosophical value. Only then might a variety of academic goals, subjects, histories, perspectives, orientations and styles legitimately find articulation under the rubric of WGS.

Finally, it’s important that WGS in India acknowledge and understand the changed landscape within which it is now called upon to operate. The shift from a mixed welfare economy to an increasingly laissez-faire system means old dictums need revisiting. At present a two-toned response to capital/ism is observable. One, more ‘highbrow’, response among the WGS sorority is the inevitable knee-jerk recoil from capital and capitalist practices that is often no more than long-held, self-aggrandizing socialist fustian. The other, more ‘demotic’ attitude consists in an uncritical embrace of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: women’s and gender studies at the crossroads
• Part I Stirrings, across time and place
• Part II Interleaves: conceiving theories, theorizing identities
• Part III In-disciplinarities
• Part IV Entwining feminism and pedagogy: inside the institution
• Part V Conversations across borders
• Index