Abstract
Uma Chakravarti, Sadhana Arya and Vasanthi Raman (Eds), Stree Adhyayan: Ek Parichay (trans. Vijay Jha). Vani Prakashan, 2021, 456 pages, ₹499 (paperback), ₹795 (hardbound). ISBN 8194939801.
The collection of essays and extracts in this book puts together translations into Hindi of texts on Women’s Studies from English and other Indian languages. It is the culmination of a project which grew out of the pioneering work done in Women’s Studies in India from the late 1970s onwards, in which many of the authors in this volume played a leading role.
In their introduction, Uma Chakravarti and Sadhana Arya emphasise that Women’s Studies in India was not conceived as a new academic discipline, but rather grew out of the women’s movement and the critique of ‘mainstream’ academic disciplines in Indian universities. Academic research and scholarship have so far been dominated by a male-centred perception; feminist scholarship seeks to correct this. The introduction also reminds us that we live in a world where a neo-liberal capitalism has had at least two decades to spread its roots, and an India where right-wing politics has been able to consolidate its hold in governance.
The book has four parts: The first attempts to answer the question, Why Women’s Studies? While the second outlines the modern origins of the woman question, the third focusses on the beginnings of a women’s movement in India in the 1970s, and the roots of Women’s Studies in this movement. The fourth and final section discusses the more recent ‘institutionalisation’ of Women’s Studies, and its consequences.
Vasanthi Raman’s position statement for this reader says that the purpose of Women’s Studies is to reveal the ‘various aspects and social actualities of gender and their multi-layered interconnections, which have been made invisible in the field of knowledge and learning’ (p. 14). Writing on gender in Hindi has concentrated mainly on its literary aspects, under the terminology of stree vimarsh, whereas stree adhyayan has a different scope. We are thus reminded that discourses in an interdisciplinary field like Women’s Studies differ in different languages. Any substantial intervention in this discourse in Hindi must keep this in mind.
Many of the chapters are Hindi translations of important articles on Women’s Studies (henceforth WS), mainly written in English, between 1985 and 2010. This involved the huge task of seeking permissions, of translation and coordination. (One small grouse is that the dates of publication of the English originals are not always given.) The second section includes English translations of texts from other languages.
First section begins with an extract from the 1986 book, Women’s Studies in India: Some Perspectives by Maithreyi Krishna Raj, the first head of the first Women’s Studies Centre in India at SNDT Women’s University. She writes of the connection between Women’s Studies and the women’s movement, of the need to explore feminist theory in an Indian context, and to unpack terms like ‘the condition of women’, to ask why women are subjugated, and so on. With a sharp, critical feminist eye Dipta Bhog in her article on ₹Gender and Curriculum’ analyses language textbooks prepared for NCERT textbooks after the relatively progressive New Economic Policy of 1986 had been adopted by the Central Government. Her decision to focus on language textbooks neatly addresses the literary inclination of stree vimarsh in Hindi too.
This section also has three articles that critique ‘mainstream’ academic disciplines from a feminist standpoint: Ritu Dewan on Neoclassical Economics, U. Vindhya on psychology, and Vineeta Bal on gender discrimination in science. It is interesting that the texts selected to represent feminist critiques of traditional disciplines are not drawn from social sciences, history or literature, but from the ‘harder’ disciplines which, in popular view, stand above feminist criticism. Sadhana Arya in her article: ‘The Scope of WS and the World Beyond It’ writes about Women’s Studies in the classroom and beyond, highlighting the contributions of activist-scholars working in the field, ‘at the grassroots’. Finally, we have an extract from Theories of Women’s Studies (1983) by Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein, introducing the debate on autonomy versus integration of WS in academia
The second section ‘History of the Woman Question in India and Europe: Early Theories and Critiques’ carries an important text, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) by Olympe de Gouges, and two articles on early European Feminism, including one on Alexandra Kollontai, the Marxist feminist who took part in and critiqued the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. There are then three texts from South Asia: Tarabai Shinde’s 1884 essay, A Comparison between Women and Men and Muktabai Salve’s essay on the sufferings of Dalits, both originally in Marathi; and Rokeya Sakhawat Husain’s 1905 story, The Sultana’s Dream. Finally, we have an extract from Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari’s important book, Recasting Women (1989). This book addresses the need to understand the historical processes which reconstitute patriarchy in colonial India, asserting that feminist historiography recognises that ‘every aspect of social reality is gendered’. It opened the way for feminist historiography and feminist research in new areas in history. Thus, the section gives the Hindi reader access to some historic texts from Europe as well as South Asia.
Section 3 titled ‘The Women’s Movement Picks up Momentum: WS in the Perspective of the Movement’. The section begins with the story told by Vina Mazumdar and others, of how the Towards Equality Report of 1974 saw the light of day. This document played a crucial role in setting off and inspiring research in WS in the 1970s. We learn about important women’s struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, about the nationwide protests against the multiple rape in police custody of an Adivasi girl, Mathura, in eastern Maharashtra and the rape, again in police custody, of a married Muslim woman in Hyderabad, eventually leading to changes in the law on rape. We have an account of women protesting against the rampant felling of trees by hugging them in the Chipko Andolan in present-day Uttarakhand. We have, among others, the 1987 struggle for land rights by rural women in Gaya district in Bihar.
We also have, in this section, noteworthy enunciations of the aims and tenets of the Indian Women’s movement from journals like Manushi, organisations like the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, and from a historian like Radha Kumar. There is an extract from Ilina Sen’s book, A Space Within the Struggle (1990), which brings together accounts of attempts by women activists to further the women’s cause and make women’s voices heard within people’s struggles.
There are some significant omissions, however. There is no mention of Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill and the parliamentary debates around it, or his subsequent resignation over the Congress government’s failure to pass the Bill. Why is there no article/extract that looks at the question of the Uniform Civil Code, which admittedly raises some uncomfortable issues for Indian feminism? Why is there no text by Gail Omvedt, whose contributions to the women’s movement and prolific writings on women’s struggles and feminist theory in India span more than four decades? The failure to directly address the existing Hindi discourse in WS which is mentioned by Vasanthi Raman also points to an unquestioned dominance of those with easy access to English. Vijay Jha’s contribution in the fourth section: ‘WS in Hindi’ is welcome, but does not suffice to correct the overall neglect of the issue of language and its politics, which affects feminist discourse.
The fourth, concluding section begins with a chapter by Kumud Sharma titled ‘Institutionalisation of the Feminist Programme’, and asks whether WS has moved away from its roots in ‘the Women’s Movement’. Leela Gulati outlines some of her important areas of research: the nature of women’s work, the measurement of poverty, changing trends in the fertility rate, ageing and widowhood; the dual phenomenon of women in Kerala staying back while men migrate, and that of women themselves going abroad for work, leaving their families behind. Importantly, she concludes with a paragraph on the ethics of field work and how feminist research methodology has addressed this issue. There is the story of Anveshi, the Research Centre for Women’s Studies established by women activist-scholars in Hyderabad in 1985, which took up both research and activism on women’s issues like domestic violence and the anti-arrack struggles. There is also an account of how the magisterial two-volume collection Women’s Writing in India (1993), edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, was produced. This has been a valuable resource for feminist scholars ever since its publication. Uma Chakravarti’s account of her own journey, entitled ‘Opposing Ideas’, as a feminist scholar-activist gives us different insights again. She narrates how the women students of Miranda House, facing opposition to beauty pageants in the college, ultimately reached an awareness that young women need not dress just to please men. The years of the peasant uprisings in Naxalbari, and the Emergency, brought broader political concerns to the student body. Chakravarti is also telling us something here about a feminist approach to teaching. Her work on the roots of patriarchy in ancient India, and of the writings in Pali by Buddhist nuns is also of historical importance. We have an extract from one of the earlier books of Mary E. John who has also published a Reader in Women’s Studies in English.
This Hindi reader in WS does not give us an anthology of important contributions to a new academic area/discipline/critical approach as we might expect. Rather, it gives us a rich history of WS in India and its relation to the women’s movement from the standpoint of some of those scholar-activists who pioneered it. Perhaps a better title for the book would have been Stree Adhyayan: Itihas aur Parichay. Finally, as a reader and reviewer not very proficient in Hindi, I found the book as a whole very readable, at the same time rigorous in translating abstract concepts. Credit for this must go to Vijay Jha, who oversaw the translations.