I would like to focus on the autonomous women’s movement, and a small bit on the relationship between the movement and Women’s Studies.
To begin with, I would like to quote and strongly endorse a recent statement by Vina Mazumdar, (ABP, 18.3.05), one of India’s most eminent veteran feminists, and one of the contributors to Towards Equality, the epoch making work on the status of women in India. She said that women’s studies cannot survive without the women’s movements. The issue is, are we today able to transmit to the next generation the vibrant movement and the vibrant dimensions in Women’s Studies that women of the generation of Mazumdar or Jasodhara Bagchi gave to us? Speaking as an activist who is also connected to the SWS JU, I find this a very pertinent question today, as on one hand the movement has undergone a disturbing metamorphosis, and on the other hand Women’s Studies is sometimes looking like just one more academic niche enclosed within the University structures.
One question that comes up first, and where Women’s Studies has had a very fruitful interaction with the women’s movement, is in unpackaging the term “woman”. Though we talk about the women’s movement, seldom have women identified themselves as women, beyond certain role stereotypes. Women in movements have seen themselves as dalits, as adivasis, as workers or peasants. In an earlier generation they have seen themselves as Indians fighting the British. So what does it mean to be a woman? Did women’s studies help the movement in questioning this? It can be argued that they also saw themselves as women. When Santi and Suniti wanted to shoot the District Magistrate of Comilla, they were challenging the stereotype according to which women’s role in the revolutionary nationalist movement was that of courier, arms carrier, or auxiliaries. But they were questioning stereotypes without positing any need for a distinct women’s movement.
This is where transformations occurred, though it is not quite the case that there were no changes before the 1970s. To understand the demand of the women’s movement of the 1970s for “autonomy” even as they affirmed a radical perspective and raised radical social demands, we need to go back to the experiences of the 1940s, as well as of the 1950s and 1960s. It is necessary to stress that while the ideas of second wave feminism in the west certainly influenced us, feminism in India had strong internal roots. In colonial India, nationalist as well as socialist/communist agitation had found it necessary to reach out to women, and at times, to build women’s organisations in order to mobilise them when mixed-gender organisations seemed inadequate. But often, these were instrumentalist/patronising, and quite often, there was considerable patriarchal control. Nonetheless, from the days of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samity in Bengal in the 1940s (which was founded in 1942 and had over 40,000 members by 1944), there had been a tradition of mass organisations of women. The MARS was initiated by women members of the CPI, but had many non-CPI leftists and nationalists active in it. Members of the MARS had even, at times, ideas that today would be called feminist. [Manikuntala Sen - In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Story].
But there were clear limits to the space women had. After independence, even the radicalism and the autonomy of those early years was substantially lost, as parties dominated all mass organisations and women’s issues tended to be ignored or marginalized. [S. Niranjana, ‘Transitions and Reorientations : On the Women’s Movement in India in Contemporary India - Transitions, ed. P.R. D’Souza, p.267; Maitreyee Chattopadhyay in Eso Mukta karo, pp.187-188].Even the women’s organisations, after 1947, had less clarity on the issues to be taken up. Vina Mazumdar and Kumud Sharma argued in 1979 [Mazumdar and Sharma, ‘Women’s Studies: New Perceptions and Challenges’, EPW, vol. 14, no.3, January 1979] that there was a national consensus that women’s issues were not political, but only long term social reform and legislative issues. Even there, few people bothered to see the impact of legislation and socials reforms. One example is that after the passage of affirmative laws in 1961 to enforce equal pay for equal work resulted in jute mill owners in Bengal stopped recruiting women. And in case of recruiting a member of the family of a retired worker sons were preferred. Even leftist trade unions seldom protested against this male prejudice that women do not work as efficiently as male workers and that it is also economically non-viable as women workers would have to be provided with maternity leaves and other protective measures. This was where the new women’s movement made a break.
Yet, three decades down the line, the radicalism of the autonomous women’s movement seems to have been considerably diluted. Their intervention or connection with mainstream politics is restricted. [Kumud Sharma in EPW, October 25, 2003] They did not want to be a part of this politics for they felt there were problems of instrumentalism/cooption/subsumption. But refusal to be a part of institutional or electoral politics also had problems. The globalisation and the NGOisation of civil society movements have resulted in crippling their mobilisation capacities. Their rejection of party dictates seems to have resulted in depoliticisation and a gap with mainstream politics. More genuinely today than in the past, in some cases at least, the charge is valid that for many such organisations (though not all, perhaps not even a majority) “women’s issue” is defined so narrowly that many social issues are ignored. Why did this trajectory occur? Did depoliticisation occur due to autonomous women’s movement? While exploring these issues, I also want to discuss class, gender and state interactions within them. Are the terms women’s movement and autonomous women’s movement identical? And can we take the present NGO-dominated phase as an unproblemmatized continuity of the autonomous women’s movement of the 1970s? Finally, how have the institutionalisation of women’s studies and the transformation of the autonomous women’s movement affected Women’s Studies? And speaking personally, I think this is a major problem area. Two developments have created problems for the historian who is a feminist.
The first issue to examine is the evolution of the autonomous women’s movement and a relatively greater separation between it and the Women’s Studies Centres and women’s studies in general, in recent times. When the autonomous women’s groups first came up, their stress on autonomy was based on a perception that parties and institutional politics marginalize women’s concerns. They demanded what we today often characterise as a “space”. At the same time, autonomous women’s movements were concerned about class, caste and community issues from the beginning. Vibhuti Patel, a very familiar name in the movements throughout the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, wrote a contemporary account of the autonomous women’s movement and the context within which it had come up. Entitled ‘Indian Women on Warpath’, it was part of a book Reaching for Half the Sky: A Reader in Women’s Movement. Patel provided plenty of evidence to the effect that class issues were important, and not in some sense of “middle class” women taking pity on lower class women, but because women of different oppressed categories were present. She mentioned the kind of demands raised by various movements, and these included an effective Employment Guarantee Scheme, crèches for children of all working mothers, more hostels for working women and students, drinking water for the rural and urban poor, and so on. At the same time, as Patel stresses, this women’s movement also brought into the open issues of rape, violence on women, sexual harassment, and so on. Patel also highlighted that the women’s movement demanded autonomy from party control but not from class and other struggles.
As Shilpa Phadke pointed out in an article [EPW, October 25, 2003] a couple of years back, “From its inception, the contemporary women’s movement saw itself as multi-faceted, and incorporated many strands under its umbrella. Various women’s groups also made efforts to link up with anti-state, working class and landless labourers’ movements.” This contrasts with the ill informed criticism levelled by Susheela Kaushik, according to whom a belief in an autonomous women’s movement means a movement that is apolitical, essentially feminist, suspicious and wary of patriarchal dominance of other movements. She further asserts that the Indian women’s movement had no significant links with the west, being connected to the national and social reform movements. Thereby she flatly ignores the connections between the Indian feminists and the western ones. According to Kaushik feminist means separatist, and she creates a polarity between the women’s movement and the autonomous women’s movement, and credits the women’s movement, as opposed to the autonomous women’s movement (!!) with Indianness and raising genuine as opposed to useless issues. Thus, according to her, Western feminism was obsessed with divorce, single parenthood, right to abortion, which the Indian movement was not. Only the autonomous, feminist movement, raised a hue and cry about the body, and so on.
The essay under consideration, in Shibani Kinkar Chaube and Bidyut Chakrabarty eds, Social Movements in Contemporary India, is supremely unconcerned about accuracy, and does not provide a single footnote to show where its assertions are derived from. About Western “obsession’ with abortion versus Indian women’s unconcern, she seems to be unaware that population policies were differently conceived in India and in the West. Both the Government of India and imperialism pushed a compulsory population control, very often by targeting women without their consent, indeed without their knowledge. So in India the issue was fighting for women’s control over their bodies and against abortions carried out without their knowledge, a struggle repeatedly documented, including in Gandhi and Shah’s The Issues at Stake. They have a long chapter on women’s health, a part of which deals with the politics of reproduction. As they point out, “the availability of information and medical facilities for middle class and poor women differs.” They go on to argue that reproduction is mediated by social and material conditions. [p.141]
Returning to Kaushik’s article, we find that on one hand she ignores uncomfortable facts to establish her thesis, and on the other hand, manages the feat of treating the struggle against violence on women as peripheral. She claims that feminism necessarily means separatism, and that “left to itself, it would become isolated, different and marginalized, and to that extent its impact on the socio-political system would be reduced.” [Women’s Movement in India, in Chaube and Chakrabarty, p.84]. There have been repeated attacks on Indian feminists for their allegedly middle class urban limitation, and their western bias. Maitreyee Chattopadhyay responds to this in the context of a specific case. When the “third stream” women’s movement developed in West Bengal, the Left Front was newly in power, (after a period of sustained right wing terror) and it seemed to many women that any criticism of the government at all was an objective help to the reactionaries. Indeed, she stresses that this was why it was more difficult for this current to find a base in rural West Bengal, contrasting this with situations elsewhere. [Eso Mukta Karo, p.189] Interestingly, many of the critics (e.g., in recent years Madhu Kishwar, long time editor of Manushi, who now wants to reject the very label feminist on the ground that it is non-Indian) use highly sophisticated western derived ideologies, including post-modernism, to attack the so-called westernism of the feminists.
A number of changes have happened since then, from the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s. Briefly, we can talk about the loss of a coherent agenda by the movement, the NGO-isation process, the rise of communalism, caste politics, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent crisis of political outlook even among critical leftists, and finally, the world capitalist pressure that is going by the name of globalisation. I will not have time to analyse all these in detail. But a few need slight discussion. The development of a women’s rights discourse had led in the 1970s and 1980s to demands for greater gender sensitivity on the legal system. This coherence was lost. For example, women had demanded a uniform civil code as a means of securing gender justice for all women in matters of property inheritance, rights in marriage, guardianship rights, and so on. But by the late 1980s, the rising Hindu communal forces were equating the codified Hindu laws with a uniform civil code and demanding its imposition on all minorities. This resulted in debates within feminism. In 1996, there was an All-India conference, held in Mumbai, where four positions were debated and several specific laws discussed. [I was among those who represented the NNPM and presented a position paper on the reason for our support to UCC, while explaining the kind of UCC we wanted and opposing simultaneously the standpoint of the RSS] But a common strategy could not be evolved. The loss of coherence involved a dialectical process. On one hand it was because there might have been an uncritical usage of “woman” as an overarching category in the early years, which ignored differences, particularly between women of different castes, and communities. On the other hand the excessive tilt towards identities like caste, community etc carry their own dangers, and lead to ignoring the reality that cutting across castes, classes, communities, women continue to be deprived of resources, power, access to property and other rights, and so on.
The rise of NGOs and the problems they pose or can pose needs a more detailed examination. I use the term NGO to designate funded organisations. At the risk of simplifications I would suggest that NGOs were planned and created, not by the movements but by rulers and dominant elites. At the initial stage, when they were still called Voluntary Organisations, one major aim was to steer away radical activists from militant politics to so called constructive politics. At a later stage, funding increased. NGOs were asked to take over many activities previously considered to be the responsibility of the state. This served two purposes. Globalisation called for less state intervention, and at the same time stressed the need for a safety net. It also roped in potentially dangerous activists, gave them “responsible” functions, tied them to the state and imperialist donor agencies, and created a hierarchical relationship between the NGO and the beneficiaries of its activities. The NGOs often claim that they constitute civil society. In fact, with their privileged financial relationship with western imperialist funding agencies, they represent a parasitical layer on civil society. NGOisation of the women’s movement meant the creation of a new generation and new type of women’s rights activists who were being paid for their work.
A member of the NNPM, told us recently of her experience. She has been a radical, a socialist who has also been deeply involved in women’s struggles, for over three decades. She worked part time in the documentation unit of an NGO involved with sex workers. She was suddenly told that her services were being terminated for inefficiency. She wanted to know the definition of inefficiency, since she had never been given an appointment letter which spelt out her duties. She was then asked to become a full time staff. She refused, on the ground that for her this work was part of her commitment to the movement, and though the part-timer’s wage she received was a small one, she did not want to increase it by becoming a 9 to 5 activist. Finally, NGOs and their dependence on donor-driven agendas mean that even when they have the goodwill they are tied down by rules and donor’s needs. All this progressively eats into the radicalism.
This NGO-isation has also resulted in a significant alteration in class-gender-state equations. Over the years, the NGOisation process has led to a transformation in attitudes. Not just in the women’s movement, but everywhere that NGOs have proliferated, one tendency [again with the caveat that this is not true of all NGOs] has been to create a rift between the movement, the people who are struggling, and the NGO. Eventually, in many such cases, the NGO looks upon itself as the real movement. At the same time, its self-image is that of being an urban middle class entity. Its approach to the oppressed has often turned from one where the organisation saw itself as part of the struggle of the oppressed to where the organisation sees itself as dedicated to the upliftment of the poor, the suffering humanity. It would be possible to produce alternative images.
But there exist plenty of examples. I want to provide a few from the women’s movement. I belong to the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha, a non-funded women’s organisation. But we are also part of the network Maitree, which includes a large number of NGOs. Quite often, this leads to complications and limits on our action. In one case, Maitree had decided to take up the question of whether women in government run or government aided Homes were becoming prey to a new kind of oppression. This was even made the key issue during the international fortnight on violence on women in 2001. But threats to an NGO member, its funding and the job security of some women activists hired by this NGO resulted in Maitree not taking up the case. This shows how NGOisation is diluting the movement. Another case of depoliticisation that I want to highlight comes from a leaflet issued by the Indian chapter of the International Campaign to Stop Violence on Women. A leaflet issued by them during the Fortnight on Violence last year (2004) had a box which stated, in full: “We are deeply shocked by the terribleness of the World Trade Centre/Iraq/Afghanistan/Kargil war. Yet the total number who have died in these wars and other unfortunate incidents are far outstripped by the number of women who have been burnt to death in their own homes, garrotted, strangled, beaten or chopped to death or forced to commit suicide.” This counterposition of wars against domestic violence on women is objectionable. Imperialist wars of aggression are not “unfortunate”, rather like an earthquake. And one should not be asked to gloss over one kind of violence just so that another kind is identified and condemned. This has happened, however, because of a narrow definition of what is “women’s interest”. It also de facto absolves oppressive states, since the entire focus is on domestic violence, rape, and so on.
NGOs have an even deeper problem - that of non-accountability. A left party may be condemned for patriarchal heavy handedness. And we can actually take up that issue in public, including at election times. A trade union that ignores the issues of its women members consistently is likely to see them shifting allegiance to a rival union at some stage. Elected leaderships at least have to present a formal account of their deeds to the membership periodically. NGOs, by contrast, are accountable only upwards, to the donors. Furthermore, NGOs as employers can pose problems for women. Since the employee is classified as volunteer, she enjoys very few rights we fight for in other employment sectors. As Sudha Vasan wrote in the EPW, “As an employer, NGOs in many ways emerge worse than the state or many private sector organisations. Under the halo of ‘non-profit’, the people who profit least are NGO employees at the lowest level.” [NGOs as Employers, EPW, May 29, 2004]. At the same time, I want to stress that there can be other faces of NGOs. Parichiti, a small NGO, is running a campaign for one of the most oppressed sectors of women workers - the women employed as part time or full time housemaids. Even girls aged 8-10 are hired and made to work round the clock, given no rights, often beaten up, subjected to sexual assaults, and even where such extremities are not present, they have no childhood, no education, etc. Parichiti aims to help such women organise, and to organise protests against torture of domestic help (a recurrent event).
I would not like you to feel, however, that Maitree has been silent on state violence. Maitree has taken up many issues. These include the Gujarat pogroms, the sustained military terror in Manipur including violence on women, women’s lack of security in local trains in West Bengal, etc. In all of these, the state and its agencies had a role. The problem of women commuters was seen by many of us as equally a problem of working women, and as a failure/refusal of the state to provide security for women even in state run transport systems. During the campaign against the Gujarat violence, we chose 1st May to take out a campaign over an extensive part of Calcutta. Our leaflet and the special bulletin we brought out saw a strong debate inside the network. There were many who wanted to oppose communal violence simply by talking of Hindu Muslim amity. But there was another segment that pointed out the following: i) This tended to put an equal sign between the rampaging mob and the victims; ii) this tended to equate all Hindus with the planned genocide. So the campaign material stressed that this was not a riot but a planned pogrom; that women’s bodies were becoming a site for assertion of so-called community superiority; and also that the politics of community identity was partly aimed at obscuring class unity. At the same time, when mainstream left parties tried to claim that the rise of communalism was due to globalisation, we contested that this was too simplistic, given the long rise of communalism.
So what I am arguing is not for turning our backs on NGOs with the argument that it destroys our purity, thereby isolating a much smaller number of activists, but recognising that they often have limitations and those of us who are aware of the limitations need to find ways to overcome them. We cannot rebuild the movement of the 70s by simply hoping the contemporary challenges will go away. Perhaps a sign of the ongoing debates is Maitree’s decision to have a workshop on this very theme of the relationship between class issues and gender issues.
In recent times, the NNPM has been member of a different kind of network, the Pratibadi Udyog or Protest Initiative. PI sees itself as part of the ongoing class struggles. Apart from NNPM, one constituent of Maitree, the Sramajeevi Mahila Samiti, which is also an NGO, but rather a different kind as it tries to organise women rural workers into a trade union, as a member of the PI. The Sramajeevi Mahila Samity is part of the National Network right to food, right to work. NNPM can take pride in the fact that a relatively ungendered original programme of PI was gendered due to NNPM’s intervention. Some of the demands were very basic, showing to what extent women still lack simple rights in India. These included: separate toilets for women as well as toilets or all in all workplaces; equal rights for husbands and wives in marriage, adoption, property, guardianship etc; joint ownership in agricultural land as well as land for housing, for husband and wife; as well as more contemporary demands like rewriting text books to eliminate stereotyped sex roles from syllabi and text books.
These demands were written in the context of the elections of 2001, when PI took out a campaign, urging working people, that instead of voting for any candidate because they were putting forward nice pre-election slogans, we should compel them to provide an account of what they had done to meet our expectations in the past. The Charter of Demands was not viewed as a complete one, but we urged people to add to it depending on local situations, and not to vote for candidates who failed to respond. PI was greatly involved in the stir against evictions without alternative places being provided to live in - the evictions occurring near Tolly’s Nullah in south Calcutta (2001), in Beleghata in East Calcutta ( Human Rights Day 2002), etc. Other constituents of Maitree were occasionally willing to help, but usually in the form of donations for the homeless, and so on, not by mass mobilisations.
Class-gender relations come up in a number of ways. Again looking at Maitree, when the Supreme Court passed its judgement on the Narmada Case (2000), there were protests all over India. When some of us wanted Maitree to express solidarity with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and the people who were threatened with evictions, one question posed was, this may be an issue of peasants and of the poor in general, but is it a women’s issue? Without exaggerating the role of one or two organisations, or a few persons, I still want to say that the ultimate participation of Maitree in certain struggles, whether support to the NBA or participation in the anti-nuclear demonstration of 1998, had been the result of the work of a small section of people, those who were individually members of the network, or those who belonged to non-NGO sectors of the movement. For them, participation in peoples’ issues remained key to building up any mass women’s movement.
Given the over a quarter century existence of a Left Front government in West Bengal, with its claim that it represents all the genuine aspirations of the oppressed, networks like Maitree and PI, or organisations like NNPM, have a difficult time establishing their relevance. One way this has been done is by clearly identifying class and gender spaces to the left of the left Front. PI, for example, organised a day long programme in Calcutta the day anti-globalisation protesters took the streets in Prague. Maitree and PI constituents all took part in the anti-nuclear rally of 2000. This time there was no benign state government, because the West Bengal government wanted to build a nuclear power plant in the Sunderbans, which would have destroyed the world’s largest mangrove forest. So there was constant harassment by the police, culminating in a brutal and unprovoked baton charge, the beating up of Sujato Bhadra, former general secretary of APDR, of Anuradha Talwar of Sramajeevi Mahila Samity (by a male cop) and the arrest of 47 participants.
Attitudes to the state have also undergone a metamorphosis. In the early years the mobilisations around issues of rape, dowry and amniocentesis not only compelled the state to take cognisance of the women’s issues, but also led to the state often consulting women’s groups while formulating policies. Soon, however, the state created or helped in the process of creating an NGO-structured women’s sector, which it consults as a substitute for actual consultation of civil society. This is not to deny that sites are opening up for fresh contestations. But this is to question whether participation should be based on a kind of symbiosis with the state. When in the 1970s and 1980s, the movement put demands, these were usually the products of demands being formulated as a result of perceptions at the grass roots levels, or at least of activists connected to the grass roots. Subsequently, “beneficiaries” have been ignored in the entire discussion process between state and NGO. Much energy goes into law changing, for example. But if it is correct, as feminist scholarship has repeatedly shown, that while granting formal equality to women, legal discourse has itself been constructing women as gendered subjects (dependent wives or mothers), reiterating ideas of female duty and sexuality and drawing on entrenched familial ideology, [Agnes 1992, Mukhopadhyay 1998], what should be the response?
One response has been to call on the movement to engage less with the state, more with societal institutions. In particular, with the rise of communalism, this has led to a steady stream of debates. Agnes has been a foremost champion of this viewpoint. In the Uniform Civil Code debate, her position, along with [till recently] that of Nivedita Menon has been to advocate strictly reforms from within the community. As I have sought to show in a number of papers, the so-called community laws were themselves creations by the state. And further, such a call is extremely dangerous. In seeking to protect minorities from Hindutva majoritarian fascism, they adopt a line that can actually strengthen the latter. If we say that the state cannot intervene in the affairs of a community, then we also accept the RSS claim that since Hindus are a community, they also have autonomy. This will end in an endorsement of the VHP’s elevation of an assembly of sadhus controlled by itself. Add to that the constitutional definition of Hindu as a non-Christian, non-Muslim and non-Parsi, and you have a grand recipe for the destruction of democratic and pluralist India.
An alternative response would be to question reformism all along the line. When the movement engaged with the state in the 1970s, it did not do so in the belief that the state was basically good and there was only a need for a bit of hard lobbying. This is what has changed and needs to be changed again. We need to refound a radical vision. The socialist perspective has to be brought up to date. Caste struggles, other struggles of the oppressed, have to be integrated. While this is easier said than done, what is even easier is to succumb, as NGOisation has done, to being lobbyists within a bourgeois-patriarchal state, or act as relief providers in the context of globalisation, as standard bearers of what the World Bank calls the safety net, while the state disengages from all welfare activities.
Having already taken up a lot of time, I cannot go into some of the other issues. However, I want to raise two concerns, albeit briefly. As an activist, I have found it argued, usually by younger academic feminists who are less to be found in our demonstrations and such humdrum programmes that women who have written books on women are as much activists as those who go out on demonstrations. I would generally agree that there is no greatness in being ignorant. But the argument as a whole reminds me of the now long forgotten Althusserian prioritisation of so-called theoretical practice, so that the philosopher writing a book was the best activist. Let me again quote Vina Mazumdar: “To me, activism means joining up with mass movements in the fields and the streets.”
The other issue is disciplinary. Women’s Studies, and gender concerns, have contributed much to our understanding of history in recent times. From Recasting Women in 1989 to a spate of books, both by individual authors and works of many hands, we have substantially rewritten history. But it seems to me that all too often, the formal precincts of Women’s Studies Centres tend to be dominated by “culture studies”, and that the one sided stress on reading texts ignores methodological contributions from other disciplines. I continue to hold in an unashamed manner that each discipline has its distinctiveness and its own techniques. To turn archives and sources into texts is often to produce a very thin history. Some of the best feminist history produced has been by historians not working in gender studies set-ups even though they are activists connected to the movements.
Dr. Sudeshna Banerjee made the point most bluntly at the International Seminar, ‘History Interrogated’, organised by the Department of History, Jadavpur University, when she said that while there is a need to cross disciplinary boundaries, this can only be done after learning the nature of the boundary and the tools used for working within it, something that culture studies generated scholars often tend not to do when they enter the terrain of history. Let me illustrate, from my own experience. When I teach M Phil at the School of Women’s Studies, I am assigned Alexandra Kollontai’s The Love of Worker Bees in the paper on Cultural Construction of Gender. As a historian, my handling of the text is resolutely historical, looking at the Russian women’s movements and the Russian socialist movement, the achievements of the early Soviet years, and Kollontai’s feelings that these were not adequate. To do all this you have to have a solid knowledge of socialist history, women’s history, and the history of the Russian revolution and Bolshevism. It would be a poor substitute to simply take up the text and do a literary criticism, even if decked out with the latest authorities and so on.