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Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper describes the shared ideas around feminism and social work profession. Based on the theoretical discourses, it attempts to contextualise the practice framework for feminist social work. It seeks to present few efficacious initiatives in the form of case studies from Indian grassroots and highlight various success stories based on social work practice from a feminist perspective. The central idea of the paper is to explore learning insights from the field based on successful practice based models and how these can be amalgamated to develop an indigenous framework for the practice of feminist social work in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While important foci of feminist legal jurisprudence have highlighted the patriarchal bias in the areas of legal theory, sexuality, race, and violence, an important area that has received little attention is the interface between health law, gender, and power, particularly in the context of post-colonial societies. This paper explores these concepts in contemporary India, the underlying idea being that health is as much an issue of violence as violence is an issue of health, and both carry critical implications for the gender power configurations in society. This discussion is framed in the interstices between the Indian state and the women's movement that have interfaced in fashioning law as a critical instrument of social change and women's empowerment. Several assumptions foreground this paper: Firstly, culture is the ground upon which gender and power dynamics play out in any society. Secondly, law is also taken to be one of the sites of cultural engagement and is very much embedded in and the product of prevailing values, norms, and practices; it is not outside culture. And lastly, although this paper is India-specific, it raises issues which have cross-national resonance, particularly in the South Asian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work as a profession is committed to the creation of an equal and just society and thrusts its position on having a gender sensitive practicum. The current paper entails a discussion regarding the changing paradigms of gender within social work academic discourses as well as practice in India. It begins with a discourse on the sex/gender distinction as essential to feminist scholarship, and further talks about the inclusion of men and masculinities as well as the paradigm of tranfeminism in the current feminist discourse. Locating the holistic perspective in professional social work practice, it seeks to present few reflections on the contemporary field-based scenario of gender in social work practice at the grassroots in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism and patriarchy, and created innovative educational discourses and practices. The history of education is inscribed not merely in the formal school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger career as writer and builder of women's associations. An analysis of the enmeshing of women's writing and women's networks thus yields a creative, nuanced history of women's education. This paper also connects micro-histories and macro-histories of women's education, correlating macro-level data about Indian non-governmental agency in advancing female education with the work of individual figures such as Rokeya. The paper analyses Rokeya's novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”), showing that the integrated paradigm of women's educational and welfarist work found here has many similarities with the actual educational-welfarist work done by women such as Ramabai, Sarala Ray, or Abala Bose. Through her activities and writing, often made in alliance with other educating women such as Sarala, Rokeya gave voice to ideologies and views widely at variance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British colonial officialdom. The paper also shows that women of different races and religions formed networks and alliances, in the transnational British Empire, to further women's emancipation and education, in bodies such as All India Women's Conference and Bengal Women's Education League. The paper recognises how much women such as Rokeya were able to actually be and actually do in achieving social change in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dalit or ex-untouchable women's voices and perspectives have been marginalized not only in Dalit movements but also in predominantly upper-caste Hindu-led women's movements. This paper aims at exploring the unheard voices and perspectives of Dalit women in the context of Dalit assertion in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. Scholarly writing examines the different facets of Dalit political assertion led by the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. Few scholars, however, examine the ways in which individual and organizational actors engage with women of Dalit castes through social activism in the state. This paper is an attempt to do so. Specifically, it examines, with special reference to issues of culture and identity, the engagement of a grassroots women's non-governmental organization with rural Dalit women in southern Uttar Pradesh. The paper begins with an enquiry into why engagement with issues of culture and identity is necessary for social activism with Dalit women, and how it is carried out. It then examines whether social activism and electoral politics with Dalit women cross-cut each other, and also what implications this or its lack has for the women. Finally, the paper asks how far activism and politics can go towards re-inventing Dalit (women's) identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #Metoo movement spread globally to include women in India who were employing social media platforms to discuss their experiences in sexual abuse and harassment. This paper investigates through literature review and data collection, why #MeTooIndia demonstrates a non-inclusivity towards marginalized, and gendered bodies and narratives on the Twitter platform. This exclusion is primarily the product of increased attention to issues of sexual abuse among the Indian elite including Bollywood celebrities, journalists, politicians, and well-known media personalities who employ Twitter as a space for "coming-out." Secondly, non-inclusivity is evidenced through lack of discussion on the question of sexual abuse, and harassment in the daily lives of Dalit, trans women, women of lower caste and class, and other marginalized and gendered communities that have vastly different experiences of sexual abuse than the elite, urban woman. Finally, exclusion is exposed through the sparsity of personal narratives under the same hashtags owing to masculine toxicity as well as the creation of unsafe spaces for gendered minorities to recount their experiences. This research employs theory of intersectionality to ultimately rethink how to design and organize feminist movements online in order to create safer, more inclusive, and intersectional spaces for feminist activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life skills have become the foci of many girls' education initiatives because they are assumed to empower girls to negotiate oppressive gender norms constraining their lives. Often these programmes give a singular attention to gender norms, despite other interlocking oppressive structures and norms. Although postcolonial feminist perspectives in education have often stressed on intersectional analyses, little attention has been given to caste in such scholarship in India. In this paper, we draw on data from a three-year qualitative study of a girls' life skills programme in Rajasthan, India, employing a postcolonial feminist framework. We engage with Dalitbahujan feminist perspectives in education (Paik, S. 2014. Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. London: Routledge.) to decolonize our frameworks and illustrate how the life skills programme produced contradictory outcomes to address gender oppression, such as ensuring girls' bodily integrity, while re-inscribing caste norms. This intersectional analysis of caste, gender, and modernity expands on a postcolonial feminist critique of life skills [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place between 1975 and 1977. The birth of many social movements during the 1970s, including the women's movement, has been marked by certain default notions of the political that hail from that time, especially given the nature of the repressive power of those years. This paper seeks to reopen the all-too-legible understanding of power and politics that has become prominent and does so by reviewing some of the major writing on the National Emergency. Far from being a suppressed or silenced topic, what is noteworthy, when we look at the wide array of approaches among scholars concerned with the Emergency, is the extraordinary divergence in interpretations that have been put forward but which have hardly been discussed. Some have viewed the Emergency years as having been a relatively insignificant moment in post-independence history, others see it as an illustration of the specific nature of “Caesarist” power, while others have characterized it as being a “critical event,” a “watershed” or even a time when progressive change could be initiated. Taken together, these views demand a rethinking of politics on the part of social movements that goes beyond a repressive notion of power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feminists have demonstrated that positivist law adopts a patriarchal lens that marginalizes or ignores women's lived realities. This leads to legal decision-making that does not reflect women's real and varied experiences. Therefore, in this article, I argue for the use of feminist legal methods in adjudicating women's rights by comparing two distinct judicial approaches emerging from recent decisions of the Indian Supreme Court and Delhi High Court respectively on issues that affect women's rights and lives profoundly: the right to abortion and the criminalization of marital rape. I contrast the approaches taken by the Supreme Court in X v The Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department (2022) and by the Delhi High Court in RIT Foundation v Union of India (2022) through Hari Shankar J'.s opinion, to demonstrate how the use of feminist legal methods leads to findings more in tune with the gendered needs and concerns of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-globalisation India has seen the rise of several moral panics around questions of sexuality and safety. In this paper, I ask how women who see themselves as feminist mothers in urban India reflect on a variety of concerns, including clothing, fashion, consumption, sexualisation, sexuality education and sexual choices. I reflect on the complex ways in which young women are exercising choices around sexuality and how feminist mothers reflect on these choices in relation to questions around risk and morality. This paper represents the beginning of an inquiry into the question: what does it mean to be a feminist mother raising daughters in twenty-first-century urban India? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social work as a profession is committed to the creation of an equal and just society. Social work pedagogy combines an analysis of psychosocial, economic and political contexts and methods of active intervention and administration of social welfare. Gender sensitization and awareness is an integral component of social work education and training in India. Through conscious efforts students are enabled to imbibe the concept of gender, to look at women not only as individual entities but also in relation to men, and the way relations between the two are socially constructed. This paper examines the integration of a gender perspective in social work education and practice and explores how this may play a part in enabling students to 'unlearn' their gender stereotypes imbibed during socialization. The paper draws on case study examples of some projects in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from the author's own experience as a first-time fieldworker, and from Donna Haraway's writing on feminist knowledge making, to discuss feminist research in development studies as a necessarily political endeavour. Researcher neutrality in feminist fieldwork is neither possible nor desirable. However, a politically engaged approach to observation-based research entails risks and limitations rarely addressed in research methods courses. These are explored with reference to the author's research on seasonal labour migration and debt bondage in rural central India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructions of femininity and attendant notions of feminism are being produced in different ways in different places around the world. This is a complicated global process that cannot be reduced to analyses that take place in nation states. This paper seeks to respond to and enhance Angela McRobbie's compelling argument about understandings of contemporary girlhood, primarily in the UK context, by drawing into the fold Aihwa Ong's powerful thinking around theories of transnationality. Rather than repeating arguments about constructions of femininity that are invariably articulated within national confines, the discussion demonstrates the transnational nature of these subjective constructions by referring to recent ethnographic research undertaken in two elite schools in England and India, and focusing particularly on in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with some of the young women who attend these schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the success of civic actors in achieving their aims by reference to their organizational structure. Based on a comparison of a religious nationalist movement and a women's movement in South Asia, I argue that organizational structure is closely linked to the success of a social movement. The lack of coordination and collaboration among women's groups in terms of mission and strategy has led to a perception of the overall movement as weak and marginal. The superior coordination of strategy and mission within the religious nationalist movement have allowed it to effectively use its resources to cause great changes in Indian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of social media hashtags by activists in India protesting the proposed taxation of sanitary pads of luxury products. Topics include social and medical consequences of unhygienic menstrual practices in India, the social influence of the activist campaign, and elitist aspects of political campaigning using social media.

Since the process of economic liberalization began in India in the 1990s, globalization opened channels for the circulation of Western popular literature and culture in India, which led to their localized adaptation. An illustrative example of this phenomenon is Indian chick lit, which features plots that have a lot in common with Western chick lit but are adapted to reflect urban Indian popular culture, complete with popular Indian stereotypes like the arranged marriage to make it more relatable to the target Indian audience. Through an analysis of Swati Kaushal's Piece of Cake (2004) and Advaita Kala's Almost Single (2009), this essay will illustrate how Indian chick lit represents a newer version of Rupal Oza's post-liberalization 'new liberal Indian woman' and glocalizes the influences of Western culture. I also suggest that Indian chick lit requires a broadening of the understanding of agency to include the choices that privileged subjects make even if they do not dismantle hegemonic power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gender & Development is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the significance of the trip abroad and its limits in two women-centric popular Hindi movies, English Vinglish (2012) and Queen (2014). The two movies are similar in that the female protagonist's trip is central to the plot, and as the female character leaves her middle-class Hindu family in India and experiences new environments and friendships in the West, she realizes and renegotiates both her own location and identity. In spite of these ventures, the female protagonist remains focused on gaining self-respect and loyal to the nation. As a result, the two women-centric popular Hindi movies remain limited in scope, assuming a shift in the Indian patriarchal system rather than challenging the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the performative digital practices of India's feminist campaign group Blank Noise, with a focus on their 2016 project #WalkAlone. The event sought to explore and challenge embodied notions of female safety and visibility in night-time urban public spaces, by inviting women to walk alone in a place of their choosing between 9pm and midnight. In doing so, Blank Noise called on participants to 'walk alone, together', utilising digital documentation tools and media platforms to network these dispersed embodied acts. Drawing on my participation in #WalkAlone from the remote position of the UK alongside online documentation of the project, I examine how these tools established 'digital proximities' between participants, transforming our solitary acts into collective embodied action. I argue that Blank Noise's project extends Butler's notion of 'plural performativity' (2015) into a digital public sphere, by constructing a mode of embodied assembly within media spaces. Here, digital proximities between dispersed participants forged a concerted enactment from the private and personal actions of individual women, walking on the stage of the nocturnal city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study analyses the intersection of youth movements and feminist movements that has emerged in India since the 2010s. Focusing on five movements and campaigns, the study analyses the commonalities across them in terms of their mobilisation, methods of protest, and their goals. With their sites of mobilisation spanning online and offline spaces, these movements have had significant impact on public discourse on women’s rights and bodily autonomy, and systemic inequality and discrimination against women in university spaces. The study argues that we are currently seeing the real-time development of a wave of young feminist movements in India that is distinct in its methods and spaces of mobilisation, protest strategies, and membership, and has rapidly grown from feminism ‘lite’ into one that is highly political and conceptually nuanced in the face of significant backlash from oppositional forces as well as potential supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gender & Development is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The ‘Delhi gang rape’ was not only a ‘critical event’, but also simultaneously a part of successive and incremental memories of gendered violence. The protests which erupted in Delhi and across the country against the gang rape, wove an imagined community of citizens around the iconised figure of the raped woman. The diverse strands which constituted the protests, invoked distinct and divergent ideas of the state, drawing upon the different ways in which the modern state exercises power over its citizens to elicit their obedience and consent. At the same time, the gang rape, assumed criticality, by providing the site for the revival and regrouping of collective energies which mobilised against sexual violence and presented a critique of the state and its laws. In the process, the complex relationship between Indian feminism and the state and the manner in which state and law become constitutive sites of contestation were brought out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India is one of the few countries in the world that continues to exempt husbands from being charged with rape committed against their wives. This article describes a brief period of contestation between feminists and the state in India, when this exceptional treatment of marriage was challenged and it was demanded that the husband's legal immunity be ended. Unpacking the responses of the state for retaining the immunity, this article shows how the idea of marital rape as an impossibility is constituted and contested in contemporary India. While the demand for repealing the husband's immunity did not succeed, the manner in which the state framed the issue and internal debates among Indian feminists over the politics and potentials of criminalising marital rape, complicates our understanding of the issues at stake. Consequently, the article emphasises the need for situating the marital rape question within a broader analysis of the legal regulation of marriage, rather than focusing on criminal law reform alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to explore how relative income contributes to the autonomy of women at both personal and household levels. The potential problem of endogeneity, or reverse causality, in examining the link between female autonomy and relative income is addressed using the Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation approach. The years of education of a woman and her husband are used as instruments for the woman's relative income. Along with the use of exogenous variables as instruments, the heteroskedasticity present in the data is also exploited to form instruments for the relative income of women. The results of this study suggest that relative income unambiguously improves autonomy of women in household decision making but its beneficial effect on autonomy in personal decision making was not found to hold true in all the model specifications (with alternative identification schemes) as employed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do feminists harmonise cultural rights and gender equality in the governance of the family in multicultural and legally plural societies? Faced with the dilemma that advancing gender justice in the family by advocating uniform laws across religious differences would undermine minority rights in the context of growing Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, the Indian women's movement shifted ideologies and practice and pursued an assemblage of reforms in adjudicative and legislative processes, in the state and society. Women's groups pursued piecemeal legislative reforms in religiously neutral civil and criminal laws that affected the family, and supported by judicial actors, used legal innovation to advance women's rights in adjudication of religious family laws in state courts. They creatively and resourcefully built their own societal religio-legal adjudicatory forums and selectively engaged in conflict, cooperation, alliance-building, and communication with diverse religio-cultural and state actors to transform the content of gender-unequal religio-cultural laws in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary Indian feminism is concerned with a number of social justice issues, including the circumstances under which ‘adivasis' or tribal people, live. India has a large body of work on these peoples, but much of this romanticises them and fails to treat them as the inhabitants of a modern, industrial and globalising India. In this article, I discuss two works published by Indian feminist presses that provide new and alternative ways of representing adivasis. Anita Agnihotri's Forest Interludes: A Collection of Journals and Fiction is a multi-genre collection that reflects the author's time spent as an IAS officer in adivasi regions of eastern India. Agnihotri plays the dual role of privileged outsider and informed insider, which lends her narrative a forceful authority. Bhaskaran's life story of the Keralite adivasi activist C.K. Janu, Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu, attempts to present adivasi politics as relevant to modern India, yet the formal structuring of the text and the stylistic choices made by the translator and editors undercuts this. Both Forest Interludes and Mother Forest contain formal and stylistic innovations and, though not without problems, they represent a promising departure from traditional literary representations of adivasis – a departure that situates these subaltern peoples within a more contemporary discursive field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Culture, Health & Sexuality is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The first wave of feminism in India was closely connected to electoral politics, while the second wave turned away from party politics. This resulted in a growing marginalization of feminist concerns from the public agenda. There is a strong relationship between movement success and electoral engagement. This article reviews the history of feminist interventions in electoral politics and demonstrates that early victories for women depended on their participation in party politics. I argue that the creation of the autonomous women's movement has had a diminishing effect on women's progress in recent years. A number of paths remain available to the women's movement to engage with political parties and political leaders. Staying outside the electoral arena has not served Indian feminism well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopolitical strategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and uses feminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through which geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women's bodies. Buddhists and Muslims are producing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religious marriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, any transgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or their expulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize and complicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desired body to the center of analysis with an examination of how women cope with, resist or actively participate in embodied geopolitical strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian women's movement has for the last two decades been engaged in a struggle against an aggressive Hindu nationalism. Based on the idea of Hindu supremacy and a revival of traditional Hindu culture, the Hindu nationalist movement has grown as a political force in an era of rapid modernization and globalization. Met with strong resistance from secular forces, this Hindu nationalist challenge has tried to turn civil society into a battlefield challenging feminist liberal and socialist ideas on gender relations, advocating a definition of gender roles based on a traditional Hindu culture. The theoretical starting point of the article is a form of modified civil society theory in which civil society is analysed as an arena where various social and political forces battle against the State, but also against each other. It is argued in the article that despite their significant political success the Hindu nationalist forces have largely failed to gain any ground within the Indian women's movement and remain relatively isolated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illumines the nature and content of modern Indian feminism, tracing its beginnings in the great nineteenth-century social and religious reform movements in Maharashtra, Western India. Early feminist theory is tracked in the theories of women's subordination proposed by Christian and Hindu feminists. The linguistic sophistication in feminist genealogy is revealed through women's critiques of Indian society and gender relations, especially the formation of two key feminist concepts: condition of the 'stri-jati' (womankind) and 'bhaginivarg' (sisterhood), aided by the 'women's press' in the Marathi language. Their attacks on the shastras (religious texts) is considered as an important marker in their progression towards feminism. The article closes with an examination of women's self-assertion movements through the utilisation of law courts. In doing so, it counters the current historiography by arguing that if Indian patriarchy felt under siege during the Age of Consent (1891) controversy, it can only be explained by the threat posed by women's agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 15 July 2004, a public protest was staged in the state of Manipur, in India's Northeast, to oppose the rape and custodial killing of a young Meitei woman, Thangjam Manorama, by soldiers of a counter-insurgency paramilitary battalion, the Assam Rifles, who suspected she was a militant. At this protest, several women appeared nude, holding a banner that read 'Indian army rape us'. This analysis considers how we might read the nudity and the statement 'Indian army rape us'. I argue that the language of law, human rights and women's rights as human rights, are inadequate to analyze the protest and the events surrounding it because they do not situate the protest within larger political struggles in the Northeast. Further, such universalist approaches take categories like 'Indian citizen', 'woman' and 'tribal' as a given and do not allow for an engagement with how these categories are mutually constituted, or the law's complicity in their constitution. Accordingly, concerns about contested notions of citizenship that are at the heart of the Manipur protest cannot be adequately addressed within this framework. Instead, I suggest a postcolonial feminist analytics as an alternative means to engage with the political questions raised by the protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindu nationalist movement has for the last decades tried to expand within the Indian civil society, and a part of their strategy has been to increase the support for their views on gender relations. This article focuses on this mobilization and the response to it from the autonomous women's movement. It is suggested that the Hindu Nationalist groups have a very different view on gender relations compared to the main stream of the Indian women's movement, and that the mobilization of the Hindutva forces has met with strong resistance. It is further argued that this resistance may contribute to the deepening and widening of the democratic space in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture-gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of 'regional' languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the translation of feminism into the local language in Kerala State, India, over the past twenty-five years. Drawing on Tejaswini Niranjana's claim that the feminist translator located in post-colonial societies lives constantly “in-translation”, I argue that she needs not only to straddle different linguistic registers and political languages, but also to engage in multiple “modes of translation”. I seek to view the efforts at translating feminism into the local language within two distinct modes of translation: the “faithful” mode, which aims for stability of terms created, and is typically associated with pedagogy and high intellectual activity, and the “grounded” mode, seemingly derived out of a broadly modern critical possibility, expressed in local idiom and clearly serving local political ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the intersections between architecture and agency in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, by 'situating activism in place'. It highlights the significance of place in social action by examining the architecture of everyday places - the house, the street and the square - as the sites of both individual transformations and collective consciousness. Through observations of the activities of and interviews with members of Samudayik Shakti, a women's organisation and a men's panchayat, this article highlights a number of related processes in Subhash Camp: how different women experienced different places through everyday spatial practices; how the spatial practices in these places were shaped by different social structures at different scales, from the family to the state; how the architecture of these places was significant both as sites of control and of emancipation of women's bodies; and how this dynamic contributed to the making of social action in Subhash Camp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with Vina Mazumdar, member secretary to the First Committee on the Status of Women in India. Mazumdar discusses the founding of the Committee on the Status of Women in 1971, with Phulrenu Guha appointed as the chairperson. Task forces on the Committee are discussed. The issue of reserved seats for women in the Indian Parliament is discussed.

This article examines key trends within Indian feminist analysis on prostitution, and is based on primary fieldwork around feminist organizations in India and on research conducted on prostitution in the states of Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. The article argues that there are at least three ways in which Indian feminists have addressed the issue of prostitution - as silence, as hurt and violence and as potential choice and liberation. I suggest that all these perspectives are limited in that they do not necessarily take in the wide range of experiences encountered by women in prostitution, and may well feed into mainstream patriarchal views on prostitution. The first trope looks at the ways in which 'mainstream' Indian feminists did not raise issues of sexuality, thereby relegating questions of prostitute rights to the margins. The second approach is based on radical feminist critiques of prostitution as violence and hurt, and legitimizes itself by drawing on the articulations of those sex workers and activists who draw on the experiences of hurt, anguish, violence and coercion that form a part of their lives. Finally, I look at prostitute rights organizations that seek to create an alternative to these analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northern India on historically marginalised women's political participation. In particular, it examines women party activists in Dalit politics and the possibilities for the existence of feminist politics in the spaces analysed dense with masculine powers, caste identity-driven politicians and women's obstacles in building a political career for themselves. It is argued that these women present a theoretical impasse: labelling their practices as non-feminist would negatively connote the subjectivity and agency of those women who are engaged in different political worlds, even when they replicate dominant structures or embody traditions not exclusively based on the gendered individual as an actor or beneficiary of politics. Drawing from a comparison between women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations, women activists are analysed through the lenses of their self-realisation trajectories, theirs and their political movements' relationship (or the absence of such a relationship) with gender progressive agendas, and the individual and collective consequences of their mobilisation. In doing so, this article aims to offer a portrait of women's political agency unconstrained by categories that, by themselves, might only offer partial explanations for everyday political life in a slum, a village or a state capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion of Dalit interests has posed new challenges for the women's movement in India, which has been criticised for its lack of engagement with Dalit women and their interests. Some women's activists have begun to respond to this critique. Yet this article argues that caste identity still determines the place that women activists – upper caste and Dalit – are given by villagers in their fieldwork and within women's organisations. The article also explores how Dalit women are using their caste identity, alongside their identity as village-level activists, to further their interests beyond the realm of women's activism. By doing so, they are celebrating their personal experiences as political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microenterprise success is often evaluated solely in terms of economic outcomes. These evaluations do not recognize how opportunities for success may differ across groups and contexts, and disregard the importance of power and control as factors in success. This article investigates the determinants of a two-dimensional concept of microenterprise success for women in Ahmedabad, India, by analyzing data from a 1998 study of home-based garment producers. Growing economic success for these garment producers decreased empowerment outcomes, which suggests that evaluating both economic and empowerment outcomes and their interactions is important to understanding the process of achieving success. Improving the economic outcomes of women's enterprises via better training and access to markets, credit, and capital equipment does not necessarily facilitate women's empowerment. Microenterprise scholars and practitioners must focus on improving women's status within their homes, so they may contribute to and benefit from the decisions made about how to use their resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses empirical data from the author's own South India household survey, which compares the impact of slightly diverging credit schemes upon selected indicators of allocative behavior to test the value added of an economic institutional approach for modeling intrahousehold allocation. It is argued that the income-pooling test and conventional neoclassical household models inadequately picture what happens within households as they start from the premise that behavior is built solely upon free agency. An alternative economic institutional approach is proposed and an expanded test framework is set out. Empirical research findings show that unveiling decision-making processes may indicate why individuals act as if they hold common preferences. The article suggests that changes in selected allocative outcomes occur mainly as a result of changes in underlying allocative processes and further demonstrates that membership in women's groups is one effective way of changing intrahousehold decision-making processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meera Nanda arguers first-world intellectuals who espouse anti-science, anti-enlightenment, and relativist epistemological theories are guilty of supporting reactionary religious-political movements in India (and elsewhere in the third-world). I contend Nanda's argument betrays the very enlightenment ideas it aims to defend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to recent historical debates regarding the shared connections between the colony and the metropole in British-ruled India through the examination of Stri Dharma, a widely known journal started in India in 1918 by British feminists. Neither completely British nor Indian in character, this women-run journal emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as an international feminist news medium targeted at Anglo-Indian, Indian, and British women readers. This broad-ranging audience participated in a complex political dialogue determined by both class and race tensions that created a sometimes uneven forum for the exchange of ideas. Through a close examination of this title and other primary source materials related to the context of women's suffrage and Indian nationalism, this article engages with contemporary feminist scholarship in order to trace the underlying cultural and political factors that motivated British and Indian women writers to create a periodical based on universalist principles of gender solidarity and international cooperation during the late colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussed the impact of Hinduism and Islam on women's movement on the Indian subcontinent. Information on culture, religion and secularism; Impact of Hinduism and Islam on religion-based political parties.

Focuses on the history of feminist social movements in India. Role of social movements in contemporary poverty; Public debates over women's rights in the context of social reform movements; Central emphasis on women's lack of economic rights.