Intersections: Theory, Movement, Context: Introduction
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
Issue 22, October 2009

Theory, Movement, Context
Women in Culture and Literature in India

An Introduction


Subhash Chandra

     
  1. Writing an introduction on the topic of gender in the Indian cultural context is a huge and complex task and I feel daunted at the prospect of executing it even to the fractional satisfaction of experts in the area. Full-length studies have been done by specialists in the field, on various aspects of gender, (more in-depth works will be written in time). Gender is located at the intersections of caste, class, religion, sexual orientation, age and ability and this makes the issue of women highly problematic. Given that India is a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-linguistic and multi-ethnic country, trying to unravel how women are positioned in terms of their status, autonomy, empowerment or marginalisation/victimisation, and considering what measures have been taken by the state to empower them, and what efforts they themselves have made to get out of what Naomi Wolf calls 'victim feminism,' by self-empowering,[1] is difficult enough. But considering the obstacles that are placed in the way of their empowerment, and how the patriarchal, religious, national, discourses continually impinge on women's struggle for self-definition, self-articulation, and self-actualisation in an environment which continues to be not quite conducive/enabling, is the vast gendered terrain that needs to be traversed. Hence, the write up that follows would necessarily be inadequate as certain aspects would remain untouched and some others receive a treatment rather perfunctory. The excluded areas include diasporic women and their literatures, historical references to great, brave, spiritual and intellectual Indian women, women in television serials, theatre, performing arts and fine arts, in dalit literature and several Bhasha (regional language) literatures by women—the last constituting the core of Indian nationhood.
     
  2. The Special Issue seeks to explore the positioning of women in diverse Indian cultural contexts. But the title itself is problematic and even might seem flawed, with the use of 'Woman' in the main and Gender in the sub-title. The significations of gender being multiple, it includes a range of categories: women, men, lesbians, gays, transgenders, transsexuals, hijras. And yet I have limited gender to 'woman' while selecting essays for the present volume. Woman is not straitjacketed in the traditional definition. While there is no denying that certain other gender-categories like gays are also oppressed, but gays being part of patriarchy, share certain privileges with heterosexual men and are not as vulnerable sexually as are lesbians. On the other hand, it is undeniable that women are the most oppressed as the mark of femininity sets them apart as a category who face physical violence, sexual harassment at and outside the workplace, rape, and in the Indian context dowry deaths, laws against it notwithstanding. It is for this reason that I have included lesbians, transgenders (male to female), hijra (hijras in India claim feminine identity) in addition to women, since all these peoples experience, more or less, the same vulnerabilities as do women. The mark of femininity is a tattoo that sets individuals apart for an uncomfortable, anxiety-ridden living in India.
     
  3. And this would be the running thread, providing linkages between the different essays contained in the Issue. An effort has been made, as mentioned earlier, to look at the different 'face(t)s of woman' in diverse contexts in India—contexts where they come through as self-conscious, self-empowered and dynamic forces, capable of challenging the discourses that oppress them and also in situations where they are the objects of male desire, domination and male violence.
     
  4. A word about the composition of the Special Issue: it is diverse in terms of (i) genre, as there are essays on fiction, cinema, theatre, and folklore; (ii) language, because literatures in English, and English translation from Bengali, Kannada, and Tamil have been included; (iii) region as there are essays on women's positioning in metropolitan cities, on the one hand and tribal regions on the other, as also from north and south of India; and (iv) gender-variant identities. The Issue contains an article on a transgender theatre actor and an interview with a transgender activist, both located in Kolkata.
     
  5. And yet much has been left out inevitably, because one has to choose from the articles that are received and also because of the limitations of space, howsoever, one might stretch them for a Special Issue—the present volume contains eightteen essays and a few reviews.


    II

    Configuring woman

    What is a woman?'
    'Woman is not one.'
    Toril Moi[2]

  6. After discrediting the Modernist essentialist feminism, anchored in biologism[3] as inadequate and as generating false universalist assumptions about women, the postmodernism-inspired[4] anti-essentialist feminist theory has swamped the feminist theoretical scene in the West since the nineties.
     
  7. The essentialist configuration of woman with unitary subjectivity (identity) was considered misleading because it homogenised women across cultures and spaces, leaving out in the process several categories/groups of women whose concerns were not taken into consideration. Therefore, this position was challenged by postcolonial or third world feminists on the ground that feminists from Western Europe and North America (both radical and liberal) were being ethnocentric in universalising their experience and ignoring the unique experiences of women from third-world countries. Chandra Talpade Mohanty underscores this point when she criticises Western feminism for conceptualising the third world women from their own point of view, ignoring the particularities and pluralities of their situation. She faults the 'production of the third world woman' as a 'singular monolithic subject.'[5] This is reminiscent of Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, which perceived the orient as the binary opposite of the West —that is, the orient was considered as a monolithic construct without internal differences.[6] Questioning Eurocentric assumptions about this homogenised entity—woman—who can be predicated along a line of 'difference' from the 'west, Mohanty sharply highlights the dangerous political implications of bland cultural comparisons. She fears that simplified 'definitions' of such a woman 'might well tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis and might be the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the “non-western" world.'[7]
     
  8. The emergence of 'Womanism,'—though a short lived phase in American feminism —marked a reaction against the monolithic character of traditional feminism in the United States, which centred on white, Anglo-Saxon middle class women and did not take into account the specificities and complexity of black American women's situations, who suffered double oppression —race and gender. They had to fight racial discrimination alongside their men, and yet struggle against men to put an end to the gender oppression. Family being a sacrosanct part of African culture, black women could not be expected to deculturise to conform to 'mainstream' feminism. Separatism was unthinkable for them.
     
  9. The essentialist idea of difference left the dominant patriarchal discourse intact, which otherises woman and frames her in certain fixed parameters/roles, such as, mothering, nurturing, sexual passivity, and as an object of desire and instrument of male support. This approach ignored the differential power positions occupied by women, within and outside the domestic sphere and ignored the fact that some women were more oppressed than others: for example factors resulting in oppression from ethnicity, class, caste (in the Indian context), religion, age, ability, and sexual orientation did not count in the essentialist definition of woman. Those subscribing to the traditional ideas of women's oppression and using the old principles, emanating from the Enlightenment, were alerted to the hazards of configuring woman along the lines of biological difference. It is no surprise, therefore, that postmodern feminism has been hailed as a radical step forward in feminist theory, as it offers a paradigm which is plural, particular/locational and inclusive.


    Subject, subjectivity, agency
     
  10. However, confronted with certain insistent and subversive caveats, the postmodern feminists were led to self-reflect and realise the fault-lines in their deconstructive theory. If gender identity is a social construct,[8] is as unstable and contingent as Judith Butler makes it out to be in her theory of performativity,[9] and if woman is not one as Toril Moi declares[10] then several objections had to be addressed.
     
  11. What happens to the formation of subjectivity, if the subject and its gendering are co-terminous, as they are, in Butlerian dispensation? In other words, can there be subjectivity, without a prior existing subject who comes into being with the act/s of performativity? And without subjectivity, can there be agency, a concept now considered a cliché, as it dates from the seventies? But agency, both individual and collective, remains at the core of not only feminist, but also all radical political projects of the marginalised, be they the colonised, blacks, lesbians/gays or low castes (in India). The issue of agency remains problematic in poststructuralist theory, especially because the subject is decentred/fragmented. For many feminists, one of the attractions of poststructuralist theorising has been its decisive break with logocentrism, because it deconstructs the metanarrative of patriarchy, but then in the process, narratives of oppression and victimisation become a theoretical impossibility. This throws out the baby with the bathwater, because the 'personal is political' which effected a paradigm shift in the field of feminist criticism, and has served women well, assumes a direct correlation with the sign and the reality to which it refers. But poststructuralism does not admit this proposition.
     
  12. For feminism, to make a transformative difference, the reality of the 'oppressive reality' and its narrativisation, are important pre-requisites. Recuperation of narratives of victimised women and the creative writings of women in the past form an important resource to construct an archive which can be accessed to prove: (i) the depressed positioning of women and (ii) the creative capabilities of women. It is well known that women's literature was not categorised as literature, or was considered inferior literature—the term used was ' little narratives'—simply because it was different from that of men's, which concerned itself generally with ambition, strife, war and competitiveness, and because androcentric critical parameters were applied to judge its literary worth. It was only with the formulation of a feminist aesthetic that women's literature came to occupy an equal position with literature by men.
     
  13. Agency is indeed crucial for women because they have to contend with oppression in their day-to-day 'lived life' and have to confront an adversarial male-dominated material environment, devising means of survival and resistance. Without agency woman would be removed from the site of politics and feminism without politics would become a meaningless exercise. The important contribution of poststructuralism notwithstanding, the epistemological and ontological assumptions which are central to poststructuralist theory render it incapable of providing a framework to engage in advocacy and activism.
     
  14. One reason Michel Foucault has been criticised by feminists is because feminist theory is as necessarily political —working to end the oppression of women —as it is committed to a conception of the subject being capable of political and moral agency. Feminist criticism of Foucault has focused on the lack of a normative framework in his theory, for engaging with the hegemonic powers, as also the absence of agency, invested in the oppressed.
     
  15. Social constructionism, with its emphasis on deconstruction and discontinuity, threatens to make the gendered subject disappear altogether, and to dismantle the very identities which women seek to affirm and preserve. Anti-essentialism, with all its positives for challenging the view of patriarchal institutions, such as, male supremacy, compulsory heterosexuality and the family as 'natural' and universal, is nonetheless riddled with certain failings, the most important being making the gendered subject vanish from the site of politics. Besides, in the absence of commonalities across groups and cultures, there cannot be coalitions and it is, as we know, only through collectivity, that pressure can be exerted on the male-dominated establishment to attend to women's concerns and ameliorate the condition of women. Feminism became the powerful movement that it did because it forged alliances across differences/boundaries,[11] pursued a common agenda, and in the Indian context we notice, succeeded in wrenching some important rights for women.[12]
     
  16. Postmodern feminism is not conducive to the feminist agenda, as it negates the gendered body, a material entity, which is subjected to rape, domestic, caste, and racial violence and sexual harassment in and outside the workplace. Postmodern metaphors of dance/play describe the body as fragmented, changing and inviting, according to Susan Bordo, a 'confusion of boundaries. If the body is the metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and, thus, for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.'[13]
     
  17. Nancy Hartsock is highly suspicious that it is at the precise moment when so many groups have been engaged in 'nationalisms' which involve redefinitions of the marginalised others that suspicions emerge about the nature of the 'subject,' about the possibilities for a general theory which can describe the work, about historical progress.[14] The criticism against the advocates of contingent identity being substantial and incisive, concepts, such as, 'Provisional Totalisation,'[15] and 'Strategic Essentialism'[16] have been formulated to make the postmodern critical position more valid and acceptable. But this could be termed as nothing more than casuistry. Nonetheless, the postmodern feminist discourse holds the dominant position in the West and is the favoured methodological tool to analyse, interpret and respond to literary texts.


    Is western feminism relevant to India?
     
  18. Western feminist theory seems to have run into a cul-de-sac. The prioritising of postmodern feminism divests feminism of subject, subjectivity, agency and politics, as argued above. Feminism seems to have turned into an intellectual debate within the academia, thus changing its social-political character into an abstract discourse. It became a wordy rigmarole of essentialism, anti-essentialism, and anti-anti-essentialism, with little or nothing to do with the lives of women as they were lived in the material reality. Martha Naussbaum nostalgically recalls when feminist theory was understood by theorists as

      not just fancy words on paper, when theory was connected to social change, when feminist scholars engaged in many concrete projects: the reform of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving women's economic opportunities, working conditions and education; winning pregnancy benefits for female workers; campaigning against the trafficking of women and girls in prostitution ; working for social and political equality of lesbians and gay men.[17]


    She goes on to flay the disquieting trend in the American academy which marks a 'complete turning [away] from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.'[18] What is more, post-feminism with its backlash,[19] and reluctance to hold patriarchy responsible for women's oppression, believing it is the capitalist system which victimises both men and women,[20] and even questioning the need and relevance for feminism in the new millennium[21] pointed to its demise. Third wave feminism saw the emergence of 'Girlie Feminism' or 'Girl Power' that rejected 'many of the tenets popularly identified with second wave feminism, such as, the notion that the beauty and fashion industry contribute to women's objectification.'[22] The young generation likes freedom of choice, including the freedom to choose femininity. The course seems to have come full circle.
     
  19. Western feminism, as it is understood today, is only fractionally relevant to India. The postmodern feminists' proposition that the specificities of geo-political realities of cultures are important and, therefore, there can be only 'local'/localised feminisms, is useful to the Indian situation. India is a vast and heterogeneous country, with diversity of race, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, tribe, region, sexual orientation etc. and, therefore, the sources of oppression of women differ in nature and degree, necessitating different strategies. It must be pointed out, however, that there are hierarchies within mainstream Indian feminism: the attention and efforts have largely concentrated on the metropolitan cities and hence the degree of empowerment of women has varied between urban and rural/tribal spaces. While women in metropolises enjoy a reasonable amount of independence and freedom of choice in the matter of education, employment, sartorial outfits, women in villages, and backward states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, remain inferiorised and exploited.
     
  20. The Butlerian position of contingent and unstable identity is inappropriate for women in India, who, in spite of differences amongst them have to forge unity to mount and consolidate the movement for rights and against patriarchal oppression and excesses. I would like to invoke Naussbaum again to put Butlerian postulates in perspective. Naussbaum lashes out at the feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type who 'appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance, and so one need not engage with messy things, such as, legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.'[23]


    Trajectory of Indian feminism
     
  21. Indian feminists, wary of the twin dangers of either getting absorbed into the 'universalist' feminist agenda, or turning feminism into an academic discourse, with no awareness of or connection with the 'lived lives' of women, consciously began charting their own trajectory. It is believed that in India there is virtually little or no feminist theorising, and scholarly work and teaching of feminism in India have been heavily dependent on western feminist theory and critical vocabulary.[24] This is largely true, but Indian feminist discourse is in the process of evolving as steps are being taken to incorporate into it Indian social and political imperatives. In fact, Indian feminism prioritises activism over mere theorising to effect women's emancipation and empowerment. Naussbaum credits Indian academic feminists for having 'thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments, such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law…the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality; they cannot live with themselves without addressing it, more or less daily in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room.'[25]
     
  22. With interdisciplinary impulses informing feminism in India, it was not an easy task to forge and consolidate Indian feminist discourse, but was undertaken nonetheless. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita's Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, (two volumes),[26] established the tradition of Indian women's writing—so important for feminism—and also created a rich archival resource, though they did not state any theoretical positions. It is a path-breaking and ambitious work, which illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical and bibliographical head notes in both volumes, supported by an introduction (which Anita Desai finds 'intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical'[27]), turn the work into a valuable contribution to the cultural history of India. The intermingling of literary writing with sociological analyses brought about books of a different genre, which played an influential role. For example, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid's Recasting Woman[28] seeks to create feminist historiography, as the book includes essays by historians and charts out the positioning of women in Indian culture, beginning with Vedic age to the nineteenth century. 'Feminist historiography…recognizes that all aspects of reality are gendered and that the very experience of gender changes according to race, class/caste, nation and sexuality.'[29] The book mainly focuses on north India and Bengal, while other areas have been neglected, which constitutes a limitation of the volume. Real and Imagined Women by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan examines contemporary expressions of feminism, both in literature and in everyday life, and considers the stereotypical images of women as they are portrayed in films, television and advertisements as well as constructed through brutal cultural mosaics like dowry deaths and 'sati.'[30] At times, Occidental theoreticians have engaged in analysing Indian cultural practices from the feminist prism, as for example, Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain (1985)[31] is used to interrogate the connection between pain and agency in Roop Kanwar's sati[32] and Jacqueline Rose's capsule history of feminism in the essay titled, 'The Institution of Feminism'[33] is the 'perceptive analysis of feminism' of which Sunder Rajan seems to approve.[34]
     
  23. A landmark development in feminism in India was the emergence of Women's Studies, which envisioned a twin approach: raising consciousness about women's issues through the academia and coordinating with NGOs and social forums to address the issue of social justice.[35] The 1981 women's studies conference, hosted by Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women's University (SNDT), Mumbai, had undertaken a review of syllabi and courses being offered in a number of universities across the country. It was widely agreed that the absence of women in most of these courses contributed strongly to an unquestioning attitude and an acceptance of gender subordination in society. Any effort to change ways of thinking therefore required changing what was being taught. Syllabi were therefore redesigned across the country to include texts containing women's experiences, epistemologies and 'new knowledge about women.'[36] Pedagogy was modified to sensitise students to examine and respond to texts using the prism of gender. At the same time advocacy work was undertaken in coordination with NGOs, as stated above, to make an intervention in the 'lived life' of women in India. By 1986, when the new National Policy of Education was finalised, the document not just referred to education for women's equality and empowerment, but also specifically mentioned the role of women's studies in achieving this.[37] The University Grants Commission, the highest administrative organ of the government concerned with education, has given the necessary impetus to the Women's Studies programme by taking a broader view of the 'women's studies constituency.' It supported University Women's Studies Centres, facilitating them to become teaching and research departments in the university system, in addition to developing field projects for action, research, evaluation and enhancement of knowledge and partnership across boundaries of caste/class/religion, community and occupations.


    Representations
     
  24. Representation being a political act is linked to the production of knowledge, and exercise of power. And since it involves speaking for the 'other,' it is also an ethical act. The dominant groups inscribe their ideological interests in the representational practices in literature, cinema and the media in order to manipulate social relations to their advantage and perpetuate their hegemony. Unethical representations of the colonised by the coloniser, of women by patriarchy, and of homosexuals by heterosexuals present cases in point. Generations of stereotypes, guided by a discursive economy of patriarchy, and their reiteration tend to naturalise what is otherwise the product of discourse, thereby acculturising the marginalised into constructing themselves as per the received notions of selves. The self-image of the colonised, therefore, as primitive and barbaric, of the woman as inferior in intellect and initiative, and in the same vein, of the homosexual as pervert/invert is the result of such representational strategies deployed by the hegemonic classes. Unravelling the politics of representation involves revealing the location of the speaking subject in gender, class, caste, race, etc. However, the ethical aspect becomes more urgent and problematic, when feminists posit a speaking subject, responsible for speaking for 'others' within the movement, who are different in racial, ethnic, class, caste particularities. The feminist project of transforming power relations and improving the material conditions of people's lives is complicated by the contradictory and difficult problems of representing the subjectivities and identities of 'others,' and in the process, spawning epistemological debates about working towards an ethical involvement with 'others.' Herein lies the predicament of the feminist struggle, which needs to be coalitional and collective, and yet at the same time has to contend with different subjectivities and identities amongst women.
     
  25. In the past three/four decades, the representations of women in Indian literature have been in the process of changing, though slowly and at times marked with ambiguities in their subjecthood. From the traditional helpless and victimised woman, suffering indignity and violence of husband/lover to a subject, she is represented as endowed with self-consciousness and agency, though thwarted at times, and with a will and dynamism to intervene in the material environment that seeks to throttle her self-actualisation. The seventies were marked by both kinds of representations of women in Indian literature—as the voiceless woman turned into an assertive subject. Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve,[38] provides an example, the protagonist Rukmani is the epitome of passiveness, self-sacrifice, and self-effacement whereas in another novel of the seventies, Geeta, an educated girl from the city, in Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli[39] succeeds in transforming her oppressive material environment in her marital home in one of the most conservative states of India, Rajasthan—a home which is ruled by the equally conservative and strict family patriarch, her father-in-law. She manages to change the power relations, while remaining a part of the authoritative home space. The eighties saw a more decisive and noticeable change in the representation of woman. Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1989)[40] engages with the discourse of patriarchy by interrogating the institution of family and points to the possibility of re-writing/re-righting the unequal gender relations, within the patriarchal structures. By the end of the novel, the protagonist Jaya's positioning within the power matrix of the family, vis-à-vis her husband undergoes a radical change: she exercises her choice, becomes a writer despite her husband's disapproval and discouragement. The narrative records her movement from the feminine to the feminist phase inasmuch as she takes up a changed political position vis-à-vis her husband, Mohan. Deshpande continues to subscribe to the idea of resistance from within in several of her novels including the one that appeared in 1993, The Binding Vine.[41] An age-old custom inscribed in Indian culture is the change of name of the newly married bride in addition to her adopting her husband's surname. It is a stratagem to divest the woman of her pre-marital identity and to impose one that brings with it all the incumbent responsibilities attached to woman as wife and mother. In The Binding Vine, Mira's angry rejection of her post-marital name, Nirmala, and her irritated refusal to listen to her mother's advice to never say 'No' to turn her life into a paradise mark her out as a rebel. However, Mira, too like her counterpart in That Long Silence, subverts the patriarchal system, while remaining a part of it, indicating that the terms of the contract can be modified/re-written to suit the interests of women and that separatism does not seem to be the only solution. A large majority of women in India, as in other countries of the third world, caught up in the process of modernisation, want to maintain their way of life and want change but on the foundations of their cultural values.[42] Anuradha Ramanan, a Tamil painter artist who took to writing, sums up the Indian attitude to family, in her answer to a question whether full freedom for woman could be achieved, without walking out of the 'prison' called family:

      Women can come out and live, but for whom? How much ever [sic] she lives for society, she needs a family to support her when she is down, to encourage her when she feels frustrated and to cry for her…Family is like a protective shield. It induces in women an energy and involvement in life.[43]

  26. This is the pervasive cultural thinking among women in India, with some exceptions, of course, with occasional 'live-in' relationships happening. Even in metropolitan centres, where feminist NGOs are located and are carrying on with significant work, a large majority of educated women combine, successfully too, the roles of mother, wife and profession.
     
  27. However, the nineties also witnessed an important advance: woman's desire and its expression in culture or literature had been forbidden and the only category of women who could express their sexuality openly was prostitutes. They are stigmatised as morally corrupt and are made to live on the margins of culture. Any other woman indulging in an expression of her desire is metaphorically lumped together with this scorned category of women and the abusive term randi (prostitute) is used for her. Social taboos and literary silences about a woman's sexual transgressions, therefore, have been nearly absolute in acceptable serious writing by women in India until very recently. Hence, Arundhiti Roy's The God of Small Things (1997)[44] marked a bold incursion into the realm of forbidden sexuality. Ammu, a divorced Christian woman with two children, has an affair with Velutha, a low caste Hindu and makes love to him. However, the obfuscation of sexuality was effected in criticism of the novel through intensified focus on the issues of language, caste and religion.
     
  28. Cultural space being considered a discursive site on which divergent discourses of identity get played out has enabled the representation of hitherto taboo sexualities in India. Shobha De's novels such as Strange Obsession,[45] Starry Nights,[46] Snapshots[47] and films like Fire[48] and Girlfriend[49] shifted the discussion about non-heteronormative identities from the private to the public domain. It may be noted here that in these literary and cinematic representations, homosexuality is either demonised or pathologised as in the case of Shobha De's novels and Girlfriend or at best is portrayed as the result of an exigent situation—the neglect of sexual drives of women by their two respective husbands—as in Fire. It nonetheless marks an important advance in ensuring visibility of this hitherto elided cultural phenomenon. Even the hijra, who is visible and yet invisible in the Indian public space, and who has been given little attention in popular culture, is made the subject of two significant Bollywood films, namely, Sadak[50] and Tamanna[51] and while in Sadak the representation is not sympathetic, in Tamanna, the character is treated quite empathetically.
     
  29. The positioning of Indian women in folklore—an important cultural component—straddles the two ends of the spectrum. We have, for example, Ahilya, the victim of male lust and male power, who is made to suffer for no fault of hers, except that she was a very beautiful woman. Disguised as her husband, sage Gautama, Indra, the King of natural forces, entered the sage's ashram and knocked on Ahilya's door. Even though Ahilya was a devoted and chaste wife, in the dark the disguised King of natural forces tricked her and raped her. Sage Gautama, who had gone for his morning bath in the river Ganga, was told by Ganga to rush back home, as his wife was in trouble. Ahilya had no role to play in the act, and yet she was cursed by her husband, and turned into a stone as a result of the curse, to be redeemed only by God Rama centuries later.[52]
     
  30. However, in Kumaoni folklore, we have examples of women who are assertive, aggressive, empowered even to confront a lusting god and teach him a lesson. One such is the legend of Rajula Malushahi. Rajula is the daughter of Sunpati Shauk who is a prosperous businessman and who, as his name shows, is a Shaka or Bhotia living on the Indian side of the Tibetan border. Malushahi, on the other hand, is the son and heir of the Katyuri king Dulashahi of Bairath. There are several versions of the legend, but in almost all the versions, Rajula is portrayed as being more active in love than Malushahi, thus reversing the stereotype of woman being passive. What is notable in the legend is that during her hazardous journey to get united with her lover Malushahi, she rebuffs a lusting god, Lord Baghnath, whose blessings she had gone to seek at a temple on the way for the success of her mission, and who fell for her beauty. Stunned by her evil intentions, Rajula castigates the god and condemns him for harbouring sinful thoughts. This portrayal of Rajula is subversive of patriarchy, and demolishes its authority, if not entirely overturning it, but this too is done within the social structure of family and conventional notion of feminine chastity, which by and large echoes the representation of women in literature.[53]
     
  31. Caste is an important factor in the Indian cultural matrix, governing social relations between the upper castes and the low castes—the upper castes exploiting and victimising the low castes, at times brutally, to preserve their land interests. Gender plays an important role in the working of the caste system and caste oppression, as Dalit women become doubly oppressed. The ideology of caste is based on the twin hierarchy of ritual purity and land ownership. The reality of the political and economic order is constituted by the caste hierarchy with the upper caste Brahmin at one end of the spectrum and the untouchables on the other. A further complication is introduced into these structures by the patriarchy's need to maintain the caste-land nexus by controlling female sexuality. The upper caste women being perceived as possible sources of miscegenation, discourses of Bharatiya Naree, (ideal Indian woman) Satitva (sexual purity) are generated to maintain the purity of the upper caste, and also their land interests. Since no such danger is involved in the reversed situation, Dalit women become objects of desire for upper caste men. Hence, Dalit women become double victims: experiencing sexual violence from the upper caste men, in particular and caste violence in general. One would expect a proliferation of gendered Dalit discourse and a rich crop of Dalit literature centralising Dalit women's condition. But that has not happened. Perhaps, it can be attributed to the utterly depressed economic and social condition and lack of education among the mass of Dalit women. Just as location of the writer in gender has been instrumental in the generation of feminist literary discourse, it is the Dalit women themselves who, when they attain the requisite level of self-articulation, and take up the pen, can write their caste into their literary works and draw attention to the caste-gender embeddedness and the resultant gender exploitation and violence.
     
  32. Cinematic representation of Dalit women and their plight has also been rather scant, which also signifies the comparative insignificance of the caste they belong to. An early film, ironically titled Sujata (1959)[54] meaning 'well-born' took up the issue of untouchability through the genre of romance. Sujata, a young untouchable girl, is sheltered by a Brahmin family, because her parents died in the plague. She receives love, as does their own daughter, Rama, though she is conscious of her 'outsider' status as well as her low caste. Rama's marriage is fixed, but the bridegroom-to-be falls in love with Sujata and wants to marry her instead. With romance being the film's genre, the film has a happy ending in spite of the outrage of the adoptive mother and other complications. However, along the way, the film interweaves the issue of caste and gender and foregrounds the unenviable situation of low caste girls in Indian society, because the untouchables are considered impure/unclean and the daily hurts they have to bear for no fault of theirs. A scathing attack is mounted on the high caste landed gentry in a 1974 film, Ankur (Seedling)[55] by Shyam Benegal. The film, being parallel/realistic cinema portrays the inhuman treatment that is meted out to low caste women and Dalits in general and contains a sensitive and empathetic treatment of caste-gender exploitation by the landed gentry. The young power-wielding landlord, Surya, who had been forced into child-marriage with Saru by his father uses a Dalit woman to satiate his sexual lust. Since Saru has not yet come of age, and it would take time for her to join him, the Dalit husband-wife duo, Lakshmi, and Kishtayya, are engaged to cook and do other jobs for Surya. But when Saru comes to join her husband, she throws out Lakshmi because she is a Dalit (low caste) and because Saru has heard the village rumours about Surya's and Lakshmi's relationship. It does not matter that Lakshmi is pregnant with Surya's child. A Dalit woman, as powerless as her husband, can only curse the landlord, who has sexually used her and has whipped her husband mercilessly. However, the film has an ending that indicates a paradigm shift in the attitude of Dalits towards the powerful landlords—a young boy is shown hurling a stone towards Surya's house, but this is beside the point that is being made by me.
     
  33. Bollywood commercial cinema, however, has continued, with the practice of objectifying/commodifying woman whether it were the romances of the sixties, seventies and eighties[56] or the ebullient love tangle between the youthful protagonists in the nineties and later,[57] locating the woman in the all-too-familiar axis of male desire. The structure of films, as of old, comprises, with minor variations, the hero (his desire), a heroine, obstructions in obtaining his love in the form of class or caste difference/disparity, or a misunderstanding, caused by a ubiquitous male/female villain/vamp, or a set of circumstances beyond their control—all of these resolving towards the end to the satisfaction of the male protagonist (and also supposedly the female protagonist, who acts coy and happy at being possessed by the desirer). There is no room in mainstream Bollywood cinema for feminist concerns: woman's body, desire, and subjectivity do not form part of the main trajectory of the film. In some films, however—their number is small—in the vendetta genre, there is an ambiguous focus on woman's sexuality, but that in effect, turns out to have been deployed only for a larger purpose of setting up vengeance. In Khoon Bhari Maang (1988)[58] the woman protagonist sets out to get even with the villain who has designs on her property and who uses the children as his pawns, but along the way she comes to a near compromise, though she has no desire for the man and it is only for the sake of her children. Her sexuality gets complicated with the mother's desire to save her children from the designs of the villain. In another film Pratighat (1987),[59] however, the woman protagonist takes on a corruption-ridden system, and confronts a goonda-politician who is a terror and whose writ is the law. She successfully hits back, and holds her own against many odds and dangers, and comes through as a strong, fearless woman, thereby rewriting the traditional image of woman. Without going into details, the post-2000 phase largely continues with the old practice of representing woman as the object/goal, which the hero strives for and attains.
     
  34. It is left to the parallel cinema or off-beat cinema, also called realistic cinema, to realistically portray the empowered women, who have the courage to say 'No.' Bazaar (Market) (1980),[60] for example, shows young women being sold to older men from the Gulf, but the film eventually conveys a feminist message: the main protagonist says 'no' to her long-time suitor, because she refuses to be possessed by a male. In Arth (Meaning) (1982),[61] a similar refusal by the woman protagonist marks her individuality and the power to exercise her choice.


    Movement, reforms, activism
     
  35. In its early phase, the women's movement formed part of the social reform movements from the 1850s to the 1940s, which were in response to colonialism.[62] The issues relating to women were addressed within a broad framework of change in Indian society. The common concern in the social reform movements was to root out certain 'social evils' (undesirable cultural practices), such as, widow immolation ('sati'), discrimination against widows and child marriage. As Sumit Sarkar and Tanikar Sarkar tell us there were multiple factors, which provided the impetus for these reforms: 'a new colonial education, purveyed through the state and Christian missionaries, that altered and modernised traditional social perceptions; new religious movements that revived and consolidated older humanitarian impulses; and of course, the sudden availability of a pool of human greatness, eager to save the weak and the helpless.'[63] However, it is important to note that the leaders/reformers were invariably Hindu, upper caste, educated men from metropolitan cities, and therefore, expectedly, the reforms generally centred on social evils afflicting the upper caste women. Little, however, was done for lower castes. The beginning of social reforms for progressive gender relations is sometimes linked to the onset of modernisation in Indian society, In the words of Sarkar and Sarkar the 'legislative prohibition of sati has come to be seen as a founding moment in the history of women in modern India.'[64]
     
  36. However, this becomes problematic from the point of view of the relationship between colonisation and the resistance to it. Paradoxically, these gender reforms fed into the political de-construction of India as a nation, and reinforced the binary of the colonised as the 'other,' buttressing in the process the colonial claim about India and other colonised countries being primitive and uncivilised, which in turn justified the political intervention in the form of colonial rule. No doubt the banning of sati was guided by the 'Father of Modern India' Raja Rammohan Roy, but simultaneously it was also seen as the outcome of the sustained official campaign against sati by Governor-General Lord Bentinck through whose official instrumentality the legislation against the practice was passed.[65] However, several home-grown organisations and prominent citizens/intellectuals of the time led women's reforms, such as Brahmo Samaj[66] and the Arya Samaj,[67] while individuals such as Jyotiba Phule, Raja Rammohan Roy, Veeresalingam and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar initiated similar campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in different parts of India.
     
  37. As a result of increased educational facilities for women, and the reform movements, some women from reformist families started to challenge their subordinate position. As Mala Khullar suggested,

      Swarnakumari Devi, Rabindranath Tagore's sister, organised the Sakhi Samaj in Bengal in 1882; in Poona the Arya Mahila Samaj was founded by Pandita Ramabai Saraswati in the same year, followed by the establishment of the Sharda Sadan to provide education and employment to young widows. The Bharat Stri Mahamandal (1901), the first all-India women's organisation, was started by Sarladevi Chaudhurani, daughter of Warnakumari Devi. In 1917 the Women's India Association (WIA) in Madras was founded by Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa.[68]

    Education was seen as a major instrument of reform and in January 1927 the first all-India conference on educational reform was organised in Poona, bringing together women from different parts of the country. Subsequently, this conference was held every year and laid the foundation of the major women's organisation, the All-India Women's Conference (AIWC). These organisations heralded the emergence of what Basu and Ray called a rudimentary women's movement in India.[69]
     
  38. But the social situation in India, after independence reveals a disturbing trend: slow erosion of engagement with women's issues. In the years before national independence was achieved in 1947, there was an outstanding record of women's participation in the political struggle and through it of articulating their rights. Until the early seventies there has been nearly a complete absence of concerted action towards achieving gender equality, even though the post-independence period generated a great deal of hope and optimism among the people, including women, for an equitable and just future. Free India adopted a constitution, which recognised equality of both the sexes. Several factors were responsible for this phase of acquiescence, such as, emergence of new India as a welfare state and the establishment of the Central Social Welfare Board, which co-opted several prominent women social workers both at the state and central levels. Women's development was to be confined to education, social welfare, and health by the Planning Commission. As Neera Desai explains, 'The main thrust was on the expansion of girls' education, rural welfare services, and condensed courses for adult women.'[70] Here again, as was the case with the social reforms phase in the colonial period, the upper middle classes were beneficiaries both of higher education and new employment opportunities. The academic and medical professions absorbed a large number of qualified women, and this, too, helped to strengthen the illusion of a rapid improvement in women's conditions and the achievement of equality by them. This lack of concern with women's issues lasted till the seventies.
     
  39. It was the stagnation of the economy after the sixties, the growing agrarian unrest in states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and the rapid rise in the prices of essential commodities that acted as catalysts in generating interest among some of the left parties to take up issues affecting women directly. Women's Organisations such as Shramik Mahila Sangathana (The Working Women's Organistion) protested actively against the rising prices of essential goods, adulteration and empty hearths. The Anti-Price Rise Movement in 1973 was an umbrella organisation of women belonging to different political parties, such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)), the Socialist Party, Congress, and even non-political middle class housewives.
     
  40. An additional factor for the renewed concern for the status of women was the U.N. mandate to governments of all member countries to critically assess the status of their women. This resulted in a major exercise in action research, carried out by the specially appointed Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) whose members included activists, academics and members of parliament. The Committee's report (CSWI 1974) was titled Towards Equality, and has been considered by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita as a founding text for the women's movement in India.[71] As Mala Khullar points out: this report 'remains something of a milestone, marking the beginning not only of women's studies in India, but also the introduction of a radically altered perspective on the women's question for activists, the State, and researchers alike…this report was a major eye-opener and galvanized many groups into action.'[72] For example, it presented chilling statistics to highlight the stark inequalities of gender:

      imbalanced sex ratios, indicating major differentials in male and female mortality; constraints experienced by women as a result of socio-cultural institutions such as dowry, polygamy and child marriage. It also identified discriminatory legal frameworks and practices; economic practices that did not recognize the contribution of women; an educational system that was not equally accessible to girls and women, ghettoizing them in certain fields of and transmitting values inimical to gender equality; and a political system that did not promote women's participation adequately.[73]

  41. The women's movement during the last three decades, that is eighties, nineties and post-2000 focussed on violence against women within the State, community, family and society and the activists mounted several campaigns against rape, dowry, amniocentesis and sex selection, population control policies, political violence etc. Consequently, some small gains have been achieved, as for example, the law on rape was substantially changed after sustained protests against it during the seventies and eighties. Though the movement is often accused of being urban-centric, issues pertaining to rural women were centre-staged, bringing about greater understanding about their problems. Women's organisations in different parts of the country spearheaded campaigns in rural areas on issues of livelihood, literacy, alcoholism, the environment, reservation for women in local government and so on.[74] The 33 percent reservation for women in the Panchayats, a unit of local self government, has empowered rural women in addressing their day-to-day and long term problems and providing solutions which are enabling for them.
     
  42. A favourable State response to the women's movement was The Sixth Plan Document (1980–85), which included for the first time in the history of planning in India a chapter on 'Women and Development,' which stressed economic independence for women, access to health care and family planning. Another important landmark was the setting up of the Department of Women and Child Development in 1985 as a national coordinating body for women's programmes, and women's cells were created in several ministries. The role of women's organisations, engaged in advocacy work, came to be recognised as important in promoting women's interests and functioning as a support system in times of distress. The crimes against women groups have also played the role of vigilantes and counsellors, for instance, along with the Crime against Women Cell of the Delhi Police.[75]
     
  43. But patriarchal politics keeps hindering women's participation in the political processes of the country and blocking their full development Male domination keeps asserting itself from time to time. For example, the Bill providing for 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament has been repeatedly thwarted by different political parties on one pretext or the other. The present government has unanimity on the Bill and plans to introduce it again. Conservative attitudes towards sex and gender variant peoples have resisted the reading down of Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which provides for the stringent punishment with imprisonment, ranging from ten years to life and fines for what it calls carnal intercourse against the 'order of nature' with any man, woman or animal, which includes homosexuality. The Delhi High Court in a recent judgment, on 2 July 2009 decriminalised sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex, but appeals against the judgment have been filed by groups, which belong to most of the religions and also by the Child Rights activists. The latter argue that decriminalising homosexuality would result in the increased abuse of children, a helpless and unprotected category. The case is pending with the Supreme Court.
     
  44. Much still remains to be done to empower women and provide them with self-autonomy and infuse in them the feeling of self-esteem. The media, educational institutions and the courts need to be further sensitised towards the excesses generally committed on women. Ironically, quite often it is women themselves who are the source of domestic violence on women. The mothers-in-law, who are the agents of this violence on their daughters-in-law, too, have to be educated.


    III

    Face(t)s of woman: gender in the Indian cultural context
     
  45. Malashri Lal's essay, 'Women's Issues in India,' underscores the differences between the approach to Women's Studies in western and Indian institutions of higher education, and in some degree this reflects attitudes towards 'feminism.' Indian universities combine both academics and activism for social justice, unlike western institutions where women's studies is an academic discipline tending more towards theorisation than practice. The Guidelines for the XI Plan (2007–2012) declare that the University Grants Commission of the Government of India has 'taken a broader view of the women's studies constituency by supporting University Women's Studies Centres and facilitating them to become teaching and research projects for Departments in the University system. Further, the thrust is to develop field action, research, evaluation and enhancement of knowledge and partnership across boundaries of caste/class/religion, community and occupations.'[76]
     
  46. What is the relationship between the social and the literary texts? Can the boundaries between the two be erased? Vibha S. Chauhan believes they can and proceeds to investigate the complex psychosexual universe of characters peopling both the real and the fictional world. The tension between the individual and the collective has many variations depending on region, history, occupation, caste, and class existing within the community that frames the characters. She focuses on the complex and multilayered connections between social codes and sexuality in the Indian cultural context through a detailed reading of historical documents as well as novels in Bangla like Nagini Kanyar Kahini and Hansuli Banker Upokatha and Hindi novels like Kahi Isuri Phaag. Chauhan also examines the location of sexual preference within some non-urban communities and the presence of marital and chastity norms that challenge the orthodox version of monogamous marriages in dominant Hindu society.
     
  47. Subhash Chandra's interview of Agniva Lahiri, a transgender activist, who is the founder and Executive Director of PLUS-KOLKATA (People Like Us–Kolkata), an NGO working for the protection and promotion of the rights of transgenders in India, reveals the difficult life a transgender leads, from childhood through adulthood and later, on a continuing basis, in a transphobic society, which stigmatises all non-normative gender variations and sexualities. The constructive work being done by Agniva, through the transit shelter, PROTHOMA, she is running for transgenders, who are victims of violence, providing them with psychological and financial support is also highlighted. PLUS-KOLKATA, as an organisation is doing commendable work in the areas of HIV/AIDs awareness and control among transgenders and visibilising this 'closeted' community.
     
  48. Through a comparative study, Saumitra Chakravarty, argues that whereas the classical Devi Mahatmya projects the goddess, Chandi in her demon-destroyer image as arising out of a situational need of powerful Hindu male gods, the folk version in the Chandi Mangal amalgamates Puranic, Tantric and folk images to project the resurgence of goddess worship in a patriarchal society. Gender, class and caste issues are skilfully synthesised in the two stories of the latter text to propagate the goddess as a rural wife and mother exposed to the travails of poverty and patriarchal duress, soliciting the establishment of her cultic status on earth and culminating in an androgynous image of Shiva and Parvati.
     
  49. An interesting insight is provided into the positioning of woman in the Indian folklore in Naresh K. Jain's essay 'Folk Imagination: Women in Indian Love Legends.' Imagination running freer, the norms of realism not constraining the representation of women, and the shades of characters, considered the hallmark of rich literature, not obstructing the construction of unambiguously empowered women, enables folk literature to portray women in a manner that is different from the stereotypical image. So, we have women, in the legends Jain analyses in his essay, who are assertive, dynamic and even as powerful as the male who tries to subjugate them.
     
  50. Together with Vijay Tendulkar and Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad is regarded as one of the three great writers of contemporary Indian drama. While Sircar and Tendulkar deal with the problems of the middle-class, Karnad takes refuge in Indian myths and legends and makes them the vehicle of a new vision. Karnad's use of myth allows him to explore the masculinist underbelly of mythic stories, and his retelling of well-known local tales gives him the space to articulate woman-centric realities. Anupama Mohan's article, 'Girish Karnad's Naga-mandala: Problematising Feminism,' examines Karnad's well-known feminist play, Naga-mandala (Play with a Cobra), where he crafts a head-on collision, as it were, between the local/material realities of women's lives in Hindu India and the universal/mythical discursive idealisation of woman that (super)structures women's existence. Anupama argues that by foregrounding the limits of its own dissidence, the play presents a searching critique of the strictures that circumscribe women's agency in the 'real' world.
     
  51. Kamalakar Bhat is of the view that within the narrative universe of Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence, the construction of the gendered subjects in their class environs represents a collective identity whose voice is discursively silenced by the metanarratives of progress of the nation. This is one plane on which the novel problematises an undifferentiated notion of nation as a collective identity. Yet the novel does not attend to the cultural politics of the gendered subjects which results in the attenuation of others. The novel insistently operates at the level of a class-determined binary of male and female social categories rarefying the cultural marks of the gendered subjects. Resultantly, in the novel, the protagonist's narrative appropriates the underclass and the lower class.
     
  52. "'Now I'm Chapal Rani": Chapal Bhaduri's Hyperformative Female Impersonation' by Niladri R. Chatterjee germinates from the idea that gender is performative, not only in the involuntary way which Judith Butler theorises, but also in a voluntary, theatrical way. The fact that the female/feminine is a 'spectacular' gender is something that is dramatically obvious in the voluntarist act of theatrical female impersonation. Niladri uses the case of the Bengali female impersonator Chapal Bhaduri to engage with the socio-cultural problematics of such a profession. His discussion of Bhaduri's life takes into account the marginality that has been his lot —till the onset of queer-valorising 1990s—due to his off-screen effeminacy. The essay cites the cases of other female impersonators such as Julian Eltinge and Balgandharva who scrupulously maintained their off-stage masculinity. It is argued that when the performance of gender is not in alignment with heteronormative hygiene (men will perform men, women will perform women) there seems to accrue to that performance a sense of exaggeration and that this heightened register of cross-gender performance requires a new term, 'hyperformativity.'
     
  53. 'Women in Post-Independence Bengal: Mahanagar by Narendranath Mitra and Satyajit Ray' by Suddhaseel Sen takes a comparative look at Satyajit Ray's 1963 film Mahanagar (The Big City) and Bengali writer Narendranath Mitra's short story Abataranika (first published in 1949) on which the film was based. The short story dealt with the issue of women's entry into the (male) public workplace and sought to capture Calcutta in the throes of social changes that came with India's Nehruvian agenda of post-independence 'modernisation.' After Ray's film was made, Mitra expanded and reworked his short story into a novella (published in 1965) bearing the same name as Ray's film. In this article, a dialogical model is used to engage the three works under consideration —the short story, the film, and the novella —and to examine how the writer and the filmmaker responded to each other's work, providing two different but crucial perspectives on the changing roles of women at a key transitional moment in the history of independent India. In the process, the essay also seeks to understand the rich, complex ways in which a palimpsestuous textuality becomes representative of the many discursive imbrications of gender, class, and the distinctive formations of women's ethical subjectivities in film and literature.
     
  54. 'Outside the Frame: The Representation of the Hijra in Bollywood Cinema' by Sonali Pattnaik posits two very different representations of the hijra (transsexual and/or transvestite) in two films belonging to Indian popular culture, made, interestingly enough, by the same director. The raison d'être for the inclusion of an essay on the transsexual identity in a collection that focuses primarily on the 'face(t)s of women' is to revisit the definition and boundaries of the identity of 'woman' itself. The underlying contention in the essay is with the branch of feminist theory and politics that believes in the delimitation of 'woman,' excluding those that do not meet the parameters set by a hetero-patriarchal ideology. A Butlerian position of identity as being performative is explored through the lens of cinematic representation of the 'other' woman, the hijra. While the first film in discussion (Sadak) villanises the transsexual, deploying h/er as the very limits of heterosexual love, both literally and politically, the second (Tammana) allows for a more empathetic reading of the hijra's need for love and companionship which are erased by a homo-phobic society and nurtured by the marginalised. Pattnaik aims to demonstrate the possibility of re-viewing the body of the hijra (as cinematic construction especially) and the urgent need for a more inclusive identity politics that does not erase or reduce difference.
     
  55. Chaity Das in her essay, 'Is vengeance mine? A Semiotic and Cultural Analysis of the Urban Woman Avenger in Popular Hindi Cinema,' uses as its point of departure and argument the semiotics of the representation of the urban woman avenger in Hindi popular cinema in the past couple of decades. Training her focus on films such as Khoon Bhari Maang, Anjaam, Mehendi and Ek Hasina Thi, Das suggests that the nature of revenge itself is gendered. The essay explores how gender influences the mode of retribution, the imagination of the filmmaker, the gestures and language used by the avenger and not to mention the cultural backdrop against which such an act of violence is permitted. It also seeks to examine how space ('urban') influences the modus operandi and in a partly comparative analysis of Ek Hasina Thi juxtaposed with the other films, the article (by implication) suggests that the mode of being of the woman in the city not only makes her a victim but also determines the grammar of her response/act. Or for that matter the way she justifies her act, whether she buys the audience's complicity or challenges their interpretive tools.
     
  56. 'Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: The Vishakha Guidelines, Implementation and After' by Joya John discusses the Vishakha guidelines, issued by the Supreme Court in 1997, which were hailed as a milestone in gender justice in India. The guidelines laid down a series of mechanisms to address sexual harassment in the workplace. Central to this was the imperative of setting up in-house complaints committees in public and private sector institutions. According to her, ten years on the implementation of these guidelines has been negligible and when operative they have failed to provide justice to victims. She analyses the reasons for this failure with a view to showing that the problem lies in the very mechanisms and structures that the Vishaka judgment laid down rather than its poor implementation. Various features like the shift from criminal to civil law, the use of third party ombudsmen and the composition of these committees are also analysed for their implications for dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace. She shows how the spectre of law has haunted the very strategies of resistance/redress used in daily interventions by women's rights activists. Moreover the rhetoric of privacy, autonomy and neutrality has resulted in the terrain of collective struggle being surrendered to state arbitration. Paradoxically the logic of law works through a process of individuation that restricts individual experience to an 'event' and alienates it from a collective experience.
     
  57. 'Female Genocide in India and the 50 Million Missing Campaign' by Rita Banerji points to the horrible situation regarding female genocide, which has eliminated more girls than the people killed in the holocaust in Europe. This however is not the outcome of illiteracy, poverty or social unawareness. Rather it is the fallout of a misogyny that is deeply engrained in India's history, religion and culture. This is apparent in the wide acceptance of long standing traditions that are in effect forms of female homicide, practices like sati, doodh peeti, and jowhar, and in the social sustenance of terms like dowry deaths and bride burning that are culture-specific to India. What this points to is an acculturation of female homicide, where various forms of killing females is normalised in the psyche of society at large. The only solution to female genocide in India, is to socially redefine the traditions and practices that sustain it, in the language of modern law and justice as criminal acts. These terms and traditions must be banned and their termination legally enforced. A concerted effort has to be made to shake society's apathetic acceptance of female genocide into a recognition of these practices as deviant, intolerable and criminal.
     
  58. Tanya Caulfield's article, 'Life Without Marriage: Actualities of Unmarried Women in Delhi,' examines how single Indian women negotiate their social modes of being along non-traditional lines of conduct as socioeconomically independent women, and reject patriarchal values and dominant ideologies that regulate women's intellectual freedom and expression. Based on interviews conducted with middle-class, unmarried women living in Delhi, Caulfield's article shows that women's experiences and circumstances are multiple and varied, thereby shaping and framing their lives in diverse ways. However, while single women exercise different forms of agency in order to achieve specific modes of being, their behaviour as active human agents is limited by powerful normative ideologies of Indian womanhood. The article highlights the potential for, and actuality of, women living self-determined and fulfilling lifestyles and describes the actual situation of different female lived experiences and identities that exist within a range of socio-economic contexts.
     
  59. Chandhrika G in her essay, 'Of Men Women and Morals: Gender, Politics and Social Reform in Colonial South India,' explores the ways in which the woman in India has relocated her identity to create a space for herself within and beyond the patriarchal structures of state and society. The paper focuses on the critiquing, deconstruction and representation of gender relations in one of the diverse cultural traditions of India in the 1930s. Through an engagement with Dasigal Mosavalai, a feminist text in Tamil, written and published in 1936, the paper seeks to examine intersections of religion, social reform, politics and gender, to highlight women's lives in the public and the private spheres and to foreground women's roles that have been silenced and marginalised.
     
  60. 'Amazing Tharu Women: Empowered and in Control' by Subhash Chandra Verma brings out an interesting facet of women's positioning: while in urban spaces, the feminist movement, together with several women's forums and NGOs, is trying to achieve women's empowerment, in the tribal community of Tharus, women occupy a dominant position, by not only controlling the economy in the household, but also the work outside home. Certain rituals and customs practiced by the Tharu community work as semiotics of the superiority of women. The essay draws an interesting conclusion: modernisation is working against the interests of women among Tharus, who are in the process of losing some of the rights they have enjoyed from the beginning.
     
  61. The personal narratives of two female students, doing their Masters in English at Delhi University, 'Being Queer in Delhi University: A Personal Narrative' and 'Where Does Friendship End and Where Does Love Begin?' both interlocuted by Akhil Katyal, himself an 'out' gay, point significantly to the submerged same-sex desire among women, which remains under wraps, primarily for fear of social ostracisation and discrimination by the dominant heterosexual society. That both the girls narrated their intimate feelings/desire under pseudonyms, speaks volumes about the forced 'clostedness' of what is called 'deviant' love.


    Endnotes

    [1] Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It, New York: Random House, 1993.

    [2] Toril Moi, What is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 114.

    [3] Some of the prominent names included Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Kate Millet, and others.

    [4] Judith Butler used Jacques Derrida's concepts of citationality, Michel Foucault's theory of social constructionism, Jacques Lacan's formation of identity through the Symbolic Order and J.L. Austen's theory of language being action to formulate her theory of the performativity of gender. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990.

    [5] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 'Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses,' in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, Lourdes Torres, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 51–80 p. 51.

    [6] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin Books, 1978.

    [7] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, pp. 69–70.

    [8] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Allen Lane, 1979. Originally published as Histoire de la Sexualite Vol. 1: La Volonte de Savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

    [9] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 5. Butler's insights were appropriated by Queer critics to legitimate the non-heteronormative identities of lesbians, gays, transgenders, transsexual and hijras.

    [10] Moi, What is a Woman?, p. 114.

    [11] Adrienne Rich's concept of a 'lesbian continuum' was criticised by lesbians for diffusing the lesbian identity, but Rich wanted to stress commonalities among all women and build bridges with feminists from whom lesbians had separated in 1970, as she understood the power of collectivity.

    [12] In the current Indian context, women Members of Parliament, fighting for passing of the bill for reservation of seats for women in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) united across party affiliations (which are quite strong and well defined otherwise) and launched a united movement to achieve their goal.

    [13] Susan Bordo, 'Feminism, postmodernism, and gender-scepticism,' in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, New York: Routledge, pp. 133–56.

    [14] Nancy Hartsock, 'Foucault on power: a theory for women?' in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, New York: Routledge, pp. 157–75.

    [15] Judith Butler, 'Imitation and gender insubordination,' in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, New York: Routledge. 1991. pp. 13–31.

    [16] Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993.

    [17] Martha Naussbaum, 'The professor of parody,' in The New Republic Online, 28 November 2000, p. 1, online: http://akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf, accessed 11 Sept. 2009.

    [18] Naussbaum, 'The professor of parody,' p. 2.

    [19] Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, New York: Crown, 1991.

    [20] Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man, London: Vintage. 1999.

    [21] Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millenium? London: Harper and Collins. 1999.

    [22] Sarah Gamble, 'Postmodernism,' in The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, London and New York, 1998, rpt. 2001, pp. 43–54, p. 45.

    [23] Naussbaum, 'The professor of parody,' p. 2.

    [24] Malashri Lal, Manjeet Bhata, Bidisha Chaudhury, Final Report: Project Developing Indian Perspectives on Feminist Theory and Methodology, Project sponsored by Women and Child Development, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, April 2004–October 2005, Project reference no. F. No. 1-50/2002-Research p. 2, online: http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:YVNwMH6sJhYJ:ncw.nic.in/pdfreports/developing%2520indian%2520perspective%2520on%2520feminist%2520theory.pdf, accessed 11 Sept 2009.

    [25] Naussbaum, 'The professor of parody,' p. 1.

    [26] Susie Tharu and K Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, vols. I and II, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993 (paperback).

    Volume I: Begins at 600 B.C. and goes to the early twentieth century and contains such diverse texts as songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Also included are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman and an account by the first feminist historian.

    Volume II: The Twentieth Century features poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography by 73 writers born after 1905, some widely appreciated in their own time, others neglected or ignored. These works bring into the scope of literary discussion a whole new range of women's experiences in and responses to society, politics, desire, marriage, procreation, aging, and death.

    [27] Anita Desai, cited in 'Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, V: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century Book Description,' in infibeam.com (n.d.), online: http://www.infibeam.com/Books/info/Susie-J-Tharu/Women-Writing-in-India-600-B-C/1558610278.html#, accessed 10 October 2009.

    [28] Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Woman: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989.

    [29] Mrinalini Sinha, 'Gender in the critiques of colonialism and nationalism: locating the 'Indian Woman,' in Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader ed. Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 452–72, p.452.

    [30] Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1993.

    [31] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York; Oxford University Press, 1985.

    [32] 'Sati' is a cultural practice in India (now illegal and on the decline) in which the widow burns herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Roop Kanwar case: On 4 September 1987, 17-year-old Roop Kanwar consigned herself to flames or was burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband Maal Singh Shekhawat at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. This infamous incident came to be referred to as the 'sati' case. Sixteen years later, on January 31, 2004, a Special Court acquitted,all the accused who abetted/participated in this illegal event, for lack of evidence. See T.K. Rajalakshmi, '"Sati" and the verdict,' in Frontline, vol. 21, no. 5 (28 February–12 March 2004), online: http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl2105/stories/20040312002504600.htm, accessed 11 September 2009.

    [33] Jacqueline Rose, The Institution of Feminism, cited in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 117.

    [34] Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, p. 117.

    [35] For details, see Malashri Lal's essay, 'Women's issues in India: an overview,' in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, issue 22, (October 2009), online: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue22/lal.htm, accessed 19 October 2009.

    [36] Mary E. John, 'Introduction,' in Women's Studies in India: A Reader, ed. Mary E. John, India: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 1–19. p. 8.

    [37] John, 'Introduction', p. 9.

    [38] Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve, Bombay: Jaico, 1978.

    [39] Rama Mehta, Inside the Haveli, New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977.

    [40] Shashi Deshpande, That Long Silence, New Delhi: Penguin. 1989.

    [41] Shashi Deshpande, The Binding Vine, New Delhi: Penguin, 1993.

    [42] Rama Mehta is a sociologist and novelist, who has conducted in depth study into the social-cultural determinants in woman's life in India. See The Western Educated Hindu Woman, Bombay: Asia, 1977.

    [43] 'Anuradha Ramanan: Artist who became a writer,' in Sify.com, 21 August 2009, online: http://sify.com/news_info/cities/chennai/features/fullstory.php?id=13518289, accessed 19 October 2009.

    [44] Arundhiti Roy, The God of Small Things, New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997.

    [45] Shobha De, Strange Obsession, New Delhi: Penguin, 1992.

    [46] Shobha De, Starry Nights, New Delhi: Penguin, 1991.

    [47] Shoba De, Snapshots, New Delhi: Penguin, 1995.

    [48] Fire, dir. Deepa Mehta, Cast: Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Kushal Rekhi, Ranjit Chowdry, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Javeded Jaffrey, 1996.

    [49] Girlfriend, dir. Karan Razdan, Cast: Ashish Chaudhary,Amrita Arora,Isha Koppikar, 2004.

    [50] Sadak, dir. Mahesh Bhatt, cast: Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Pooja Bhatt, Sanjay Dutt, 1991.

    [51] Tamanna, dir. Mahesh Bhatt, story and screenplay: Mahesh Bhatt and Tanuja Chandra, cast: Paresh Rawal, Pooja Bhatt, Manoj Bajpai, Sharad Kapoor, 1997.

    [52] There are several versions of the folk story including Valmikia Ramayana and Kamban Ramayana.

    [53] See Naresh K. Jain's essay, 'Folk imagination: women in Indian love legends, in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, issue 22 (October 2009), online: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue22/jain.htm, accessed 19 October 2009.

    [54] Bimal Roy, Sujata (heroine's name, meaning high caste born girl), dir. Bimal Roy, Cast: Nutan, Sunil Dutt, Shashikala, Sulochana Latkar, Tarun Bose, Lalita Pawar, 1959.

    [55] Ankur, dir. Shyam Benegal, Enterprises, Cast: Shabana Azmi, Anant Nag, Sadhu Meher, Priya Tendulkar, Kader Ali Beg, Dalip Tahil,1974.

    [56] Bollywood's well known films of the sixties: Bandini, 1962; Araadhana, 1969; of the seventies, Zanjeer, 1971, Deewar, 1975; of the eighties: Sharaabi, 1984, Arjun, 1985.

    [57] Bollywood films of the nineties: Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who am I to You), dir. Sooraj R. Barjatya, Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Salman Khan, Mohnish Bahl, Renuka Shahne, Anupam Kher, Reema Lagoo, Alok Nath, Bindu, Satish Shah etc., 1994; Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (The Braveheart Shall Win the Bride), dir. Aditya Chopra, Cast: Shahrukh Khan, Kajol, Anupam Kher, Farida Jalal and Amrish Puri, 1995.

    [58] Rakesh Roshan, Khoon Bhari Maang, Mumbai, India, 1988.

    [59] Pratighaat (Counter Attack) dir., N. Chandra, Cast: Sujata Mehta, Nana Patekar, Rohini Hattangady, 1987.

    [60] Bazaar (Market), dir. Sagar Sarhadi, Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Farooq Shaikh, Smita Patil and Supriya Pathak, 1982.

    [61] Arth (Meaning), dir. Mahesh Bhatt, Cast: Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, 1982.

    [62] Nandita Gandhi and Nandita Shah, The Issues at Stake, New Delhi, Kali for Women, 1992.

    [63] Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds), Women and Social Reforms in Modern India: A Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 1.

    [64] Anand A. Yang, 'Whose Sati?: Widow Burning in Early-Nineteenth-Century India,' in Women and Social Reforms in Modern India: A Reader ed. Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 15–37, p. 15.

    [65] Regulation XVII passed in 1829 declaring the practice of sati or of burning or burying alive the widows of Hindus, illegal and punishable by the criminal courts. See Yang, 'Whose Sati?' p. 33.

    [66] Brahmo Samaj was founded in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy in Calcutta, and is a religious movement. At its centre is the belief that there is one God, who is omni-present and omniscient. It initially evolved in India where it differed from existing practice as it did not believe in idol-worship or the caste system. The Brahmo religion is now practised in many parts of the world. The Brahmo Samaj has played a significant role in the renaissance of India, and the roots of much of the modern thinking in India can be traced back to the Brahmo movement. Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate, was one of the luminaries of the Brahmo Samaj. For more information see: 'Brahmo Samaj' in Sumit Chanda's Home Page, 2008, online: http://www.chanda.freeserve.co.uk/brahmoframe.htm, accessed 12 October 2009.

    [67] Arya Samaj, Society or Society of Nobles is a Hindu reform movement that was founded by Swami Dayananda in 1875. He was a sannyasin (renouncer) who believed in the infallible authority of the 'Vedas.' Dayananda advocated the doctrine of karma and reincarnation, and emphasised the ideals of brahmacharya (chastity) and sanyasa (renunciation). Swami Dayanand and the Arya Samaj movement attracted a large number of followers in Haryana, including Lala Lajpat Rai, Sir Chhotu Ram, Seth Chhaju Ram. See Arya Samaj, in Haryana Online, no date, online: in http://www.haryana-online.com/People/arya_samaj.htm, accessed 12 October 2009.

    [68] Mala Khullar, 'Introduction,' in Writing the Women's Movement: A Reader, ed. Mala Khullar, New Delhi: Zubaan, An Imprint of Kali for Women, 2005, p. 4.

    [69] Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women's Struggle: A History of the All India Women's Conference 1927–1990, New Delhi: Manohar, 1990; and Alka Kumar and Manjeet Bhatia, 'Refresher course in Women's Studies' (Jan-Feb 2002), unpublished list of topics, 2002.

    [70] Neera Desai, 'From accommodation to articulation: Women's movement in India,' in Women's Studies in India: A Reader, ed. Mary E. John, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 23–27, p. 24.

    [71] Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, cited in Khullar, 'Introduction,' p. 11.

    [72] Khullar, 'Introduction,' p. 11

    [73] Khullar, 'Introduction,' p. 11

    [74] Sudha Sundaram, 'Literacy campaigns: lessons for the women's movement,' in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 31, no. 20 (1996):1193–97.

    [75] Khullar, 'Introduction,' p. 16.

    [76] The Guidelines for the XI Plan (2007–2012), University Grants Commission 2007, p. 4.
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