The Indian Women’s Movement

Abstract

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.

Rethinking NGOization as Postfeminist Practice: Interstitial Intimacies and Negotiations of Neoliberal Subjectivity in Violence Prevention

“…Around the same time, feminist practices and mobilizations, especially on issues like gender-based violence (GBV), have been deeply implicated in regimes of transnational neoliberal governmentality (Merry 2006;Merry 2016). This development-which has unfolded across global and local settings-has most prominently been referred to as the "NGOization" of feminism, or the depoliticization and cooption of critical feminist movements under neoliberalism (Alvarez 2009;Bernal and Grewal 2014a;Roy 2015).…”

Dreaming the Welfare-State: Indian Women-Studies-Movement, Neoliberalism and Feminist Future

“…First, a generational response took stock of the history of women's movement in post-independence India, its thrust areas, and proposed strategies for the future where the legacies of 1970s and 1980s were to be remembered and taken forward. Second response, accepting defeat, bemoaned the loss of women's movement, and the third response took the form of self-blame (Roy 2015). The 'future' of feminist praxis in all three responses appeared 6 See Kumar (1989;1993), Gandhi and Shah (1992), Mazumdar (1994;2007), Agnihotri andMazumdar (1995), John (1996;2008;2014a), Patel (1998), Jain (1999), Ray (1999), Bhagwat and Rege (2002), Sharma, Kasturi, and Sarkar (2002), Pappu (2002), Khullar (2003), Roy (2009;2011;, Sharma (2017).…”

“…While Roy's (2015) response to the crises is to introduce NGO's as necessary research objects and political actors in the contemporary social movement that had privileged 'autonomous collectives' to be the norms of feminist movements, John (1998) offered a conceptual and methodological alternative to re-evaluate the contours of postcolonial feminist knowledges in the given crises. According to John (1998), the fundamental concept that needs re-evaluation to mitigate the crises is 'gender', where she argues that unlike in the 'west', the problem of gender in India is less about the binary logic of sex/gender which has been a concern for multiple authors in the west.…”

“…Or a second response, in its attempt to find a way out of the impasse mentioned above, rests on the binary of west/east wherein it argues that 'resistance' is to be understood differently from the western standards where Indian women become 'entrepreneurial activists' (Gupta 2016) indulge in 'patriarchal bargains' 9 (Twamley and Siddharth 2019) or 'relational reflexivity' as opposed to 'reflexive modernity' (Belliappa 2013). The scholarship, implicitly, comes to follow the mandate laid out by John (1998), (i) they offer rich descriptions of 'meanings' and 'social locations' that women come to occupy and (ii) how these locations, their social and cultural histories allow different modes of resistance, and of Roy (2015), where new arrangements are not to be seen in terms of a 'lack' when compared to the past arrangements but are simply situated in the logic of the present.…”

“…Anglo-centric feminist responses to 'neoliberalism' are too caught up in the immediacy of social movements, politics and intervention which limit it to merely oscillate between recreating, rejuvenating the promise of the welfare state, autonomous feminist movements or accept the present of NGOs as ambiguous actors of the neoliberal market (Funk 2013;Roy 2015). What is needed to arrest this swing of the pendulum is a rearrangement, in our narratives, of the given order of space, scale and time by a different logic that presupposes equality rather than perceive it as an end to be achieved.…”