(Un) becoming women: Indian factory women's counternarratives of gender (original) (raw)

WOMEN AND GENDER IN A CHANGING INDIA

The pace of socio-economic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. In this volume we are concerned with examining how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. The 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India conceive of these ongoing everyday transformatory churnings as undercurrents that play out well below the radar screen of the national and international media, and beyond the realm of the spectacular. To analyse these everyday transformatory churnings our authors look closely and ethnographically at a diversity of everyday 'sites of change in which macro-structural processes of social transformation interface with everyday life-worlds to generate new contestations and contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and on the relations between genders. In doing so, they combine to identify the ambiguous, contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of social transformation. They also provide us with some cause for cautious optimism. Thus, while much of the current debate on women and social change in India is, for very good reasons, dominated by the pessimism triggered by the apparent increase in brutal sexualised violence against women, and the very low child sex ratio that makes India 'a terrible place for girls cf. also Jha et al. 2006;, the chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India paint a more composite and contradictory picture. The past 10 to 20 years have seen an increasing number of women moving out of the domestic domain and into the 'public' domains of education, work and politics (Reddy 2012); female literacy has gone up; more women pursue higher education and are an increasingly common sight on buses, in cafes, markets and other public spaces in the big cities; new and affordable communication technologies blur the gendered boundaries between the private and the public; there is greater participation of women in economic activity in the cities; the large number of women elected to village and municipal councils across the country give women a permanent political voice; there is a strong women's movement; and in some states women now 'out-vote' the men. These changes, we argue in this book, are deeply implicated in everyday lives and have had a considerable, if contradictory, impact on how Indian women and men live, work and dream. We have organised the 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India under three topical headings: (1) Work, technology, aspirations; (2) democracy and the developmental state; and (3) assertions and activism. The key questions that we address include: How does women's ability to participate in an increasingly globalised and volatile Indian labour market alter the terrain upon which gender relations are negotiated and organised? How does the entry of new technologies into everyday life domains alter the relationship between men and women, and between the private and the public? How do global cultural flows impinge on local imaginaries and desires to reconfigure subjectivities? Does the growing policy focus on maternal health change local views of women and motherhood? How is contemporary Indian feminism articulated and contested? And how does women's grassroots political activism reconfigure gender relations and practices?

A Feminist Counter-Reading of 'Indian Women'

2013

Critical linguists, including feminists, argue that language is not a value-free medium reflecting the world but a medium of constructing it. In every use of language, writers have at their disposal a wide repertoire of options, albeit within a restricted set of parameters. The selections they make are calculated and signpost ideological positioning. Stylistics offers a systematic approach to the analysis of language use and the description of ideological positions and three of its ambitions have been identified: to support existing interpretations of texts, to suggest new interpretations, and to establish general points about how meaning is made (Barry, 2002). In this paper, I propose to demonstrate how stylistic analysis can be used to investigate women representation in texts and offer a feminist counter-reading of an existing interpretive claim. The analysis in question is Prabhat K. Singh’s interpretation of Indian Women by Shiv K Kumar, which he saw as a glorification of Indian women’s integrity, richness and faith. Singh also argues the women in the poem serve as a “metaphor for feminine beauty, chastity, patience, love and trust” (Singh, 2001, p. 107). However, detailed linguistic evidence reveals the tensions and inconsistencies in Singh’s reading, and demonstrates how his positive construction of Indian women is based a few selected details that, in a sense, do not allow a more thorough and coherent view of the poem. Stylistic analysis is used to demonstrate how a particular interpretation has been privileged and other interpretive possibilities downplayed, and provide an alternative reading sustained by a consideration of all aspects of the linguistic make-up of the text. The image resulting from the analysis is much less favorable than the one provided by Singh’s interpretation. Kumar has indeed constructed Indian women as powerless, inactive and silenced, thereby reinforcing traditional gender roles in patriarchal cultures.

The New Woman in India

Muse India-Issue 65, 2016

Abstract: Women’s history in India is tainted with extreme illogicality. While some historians make fleeting references to the lives of women during their discussions on society and economy of different periods, some draw attention to the drastic changes that occurred in their lives over centuries, while a few suggest the shortcomings of such changes which were incapable of transforming the formidable traditions of the land which even theoretically do not acknowledge that women share the same space and status as men in society. Women-centred fiction was by no means a new phenomenon in India when Kannada writer Vaidehi and Assamese writer Dr. Bhabendranath Saikia began to write in early and late twentieth century respectively. Indeed several novels and short stories had appeared as precursors to their writing, which had the lives of individual women at the centre of the narratives. Where a female protagonist occupies the central consciousness through whom the world is witnessed, the writing is invariably preoccupied with questions of sexual morality, spinsterhood and marriage. This paper is going to show how through Saugandhi’s self-introspection and Sumitra’s epiphanies the readers can feel the anguish and hidden desires of these two spinsters. (Key words: traditions, space, morality, spinsterhood, self-introspection, epiphanies)

The rise ofnewDalit women in Indian historiography

History Compass, 2018

Especially since the political turmoil of the 1990s, scholars have focused on the marginalized histories of Dalit ("Untouchable") communities in India. Yet these investigations also concentrated exclusively on the male Dalit community. Only recently, however, scholars have focused their attention on Dalit women as "subjects" of study. Dalits are dominated and dominating at the same time. My article examines Dalit women's lifeworlds under double patriarchy in colonial and post-colonial India to highlight the contributions of scholars in understanding how different Dalit women are negotiating, challenging, politicizing, and transforming conditions of their discriminated Dalit status: as sexed women and caste Dalit. I theorize and focus on ways "new" Dalit women engaged with the incremental intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and community to carve out their subjectivity, agency, respectability, and honor in modern India. To this end, I dwell on a variety of themes-generative gender and "new" Dalit women, upper-caste prejudice, community, patriarchy, honor, and formal education to illuminate the changing sociality and complexities of Dalit women's worlds. My review article demonstrates that Dalit women's universal perspectives and historical and political practices are deeply democratic and as such have the potential of engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building solidarities, and actually reshaping the larger fields of South Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender Studies.

Women on the Margins in Indian Society

Haryana More than half of the population of the world is made of woman but she is not treated at par with man despite innumerable evolutions and revolutions. She has the same mental and moral power, yet she is not recognized as his equal. In such conditions the question of searching her identity is justified. Actually in this male dominated society, she is wife, mother, sister and homemaker. She is expected to serve, sacrifice, submit and tolerate each ill against her peacefully. Her individual self has very little recognition in the patriarchal society and so complete selflessness is her normal way of life. Inspite of all brouhaha and sloganeering about woman lib, the blink ring view that woman's place in India is within the four walls of a home that pervades the entire system. The crime statistics against woman and the cases reported and unreported of female feticides, rapes, sati, devdasi, prostitution, use and throw like divorce practices rampant in society even after sixty years of independence, all are indicative of the fact that what we talk about woman, we aspire not. The ideas, thoughts, traditions, and practices reflect anti woman attitude and the values fixed by patriarchal hegemony have made the life of the woman much more pitiable. Various feminist movements right from mid 19 th century till the recent decade establish the fact that women have been neglected throughout the world on one pretext or the other. They are oppressed under a system of structural hierarchies and injustices. Besides, certain relational hierarchies direct women against one another in a family setup. The patriarchal male dissuades them their rights by supporting the one who is inadvertently provided a higher position in the hierarchy. Women are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and outmoded institutional structures. And a nation is an era of global competition cannot afford such under use of precious human capital. The intense culture bias relegated woman to playing second fiddle. Woman central issues are always tainted with male bias. Woman has always been restricted, forced, pressurized, and persuaded to be a homemaker, supportive spouse, esteemed mom, and professional success for man. And she gradually melded all these personas, letting the male all the glory, just for peace of mind.

'The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-Naked One': Or the Indian Nation's Contradictions Personified

Modern Asian Studies, 2010

This paper explores the interplay between development, identity politics and middle-class aspirations amongst low-caste Chamar women in rural north India. It argues that this interplay has reinvigorated notions of women’s domesticity, education and modern conjugality as they emerged in the reforms and ‘modernising’ efforts of sections of Indian society, since the nineteenth century, in their encounter with the colonial ‘civilising mission’. It will show how the long term effects of this ‘legacy’, through its reconfiguration and appropriation by members from a low caste, have affected a historically marginalised community in their pursuit of middle-class aspirations. In addition to the criticality of Indian women and their gender roles as ‘sites’ where nation and community transformations are symbolically and practically negotiated, scholars of South Asia have also highlighted the separation between historical and anthropological discourses on women. This paper brings these discourses together and addresses this separation by showing that Chamar appropriation of the ‘modernising’ agenda has initiated a dual process. On the one hand, a minority of women have embarked on an embourgeoisement trajectory predicated on education, ‘modern motherhood’ and aspirations to white collar employment, and on the other hand, underprivileged women (with their ‘unfit’ personas) have become increasingly vulnerable to stigmatisation as a result of being in ‘menial labour’. It is further argued that dialectic study of the ‘two [groups of] Chamar women’ will provide an insightful lens through which inner conflicts within low-caste communities in contemporary India may be understood, and suggests that there are contradictory trends concerning women, their development prospects, and their membership within the nation.