Solving world problems: the Indian women’s movement, global governance, and ‘the crisis of empire’, 1933–46 (original) (raw)
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Indian Women Activists and Transnational Feminism over the Twentieth Century
Journal of Women's History, 2012
Since 1975, the global feminist community has developed sites for networking clustered around the United Nations' calendar. These meetings and their discourses have had a major impact on women's movements around the world. The Indian women's movement has engaged in transnational dialogue for the past century. This article looks at the history of transnational engagement by Indian feminists and argues that its most recent avatar-in tandem with the UN world conferences on womenhas been the least constructive. Early engagement was primarily focused on an exchange of ideas and personnel. The current engagement is shaped by financial dependency which has skewed the priorities of the Indian women's movement. Violence against women was an issue raised in 1993 in Vienna and became the central focus of activism in India despite the desire by many activists to focus on economic policies.
Indian Women’s Movement after Independence: An overview
2019
The Indian women’s movement building on the nineteenth century social reform movement progressed through the period of nationalism and freedom struggle towards the milieu of democracy which was established in India with the achievement of independence. The achievement of the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women could not fully realize the feminist aims in India providing a new momentum to the Indian women’s movement. The new women’s movement is expressing itself in the form of new organizations and groups which are emerging, new agitations and campaigns which are taking place to fulfil the dream of women being emancipated. It is in this background that the present paper attempts to understand the various aspects of the women’s movement and track the shifts witnessed by it in the post-independent era.
The International History Review, 2021
Unlike their Western counterparts, the roles and history of non-Western think tanks have been little studied. The first Indian think tank, the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), has been mostly considered peripheral to the history of International Relations and the end of the British Empire. Yet, this organisation was neither just an addition to Dominion institutes studying international affairs, nor simply a colonial institution against which the nationalist Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) emerged. Moulded in the image of the metropole think tank, Chatham House, and its sister organisations, the IIIA was set up with the same objective of strengthening the empire through new institutional bonds and a common global outlook. Instead, it contributed to disrupting the imperial logic underlying this project through India’s internationalisation and the diverging worldview it publicised within the Commonwealth. The ICWA can be understood within this trajectory of emancipation from the global project of Empire, and within a larger struggle to define the world order. Revisiting early Indian think tanks helps us better understand the relation between IR, political power, and decolonisation, and retrieve a non-Western international engagement, one parallel but distinct from the well-known anticolonial internationalism of the interwar years.
Changing status of women in Indian politics (1917-1947): the role of civil society
The role and status of women in politics has been radically changed in the last century. The political activities of Indian women can be traced back to the second half of nineteenth century, which got a remarkable shape in the early twentieth century, more specifically during the Non Co-operation Movement in 1920’s. The various social movements throughout the nineteenth century promoted the incorporation of women in Indian politics. It may be argued that these civil societal movements took an enormous role in promoting or enhancing the mode of mass participation in politics irrespective of men and women. Since mass participation is regarded as one of the most important ingredients of any political system, the significance of civil society in promoting the women questions should be acknowledged from this point of view. The main object of this paper is to focus on the role of various civil societal associations in pre-independent India to promote women’s participation in politics. Key words: Women in politics, Indian politics, Civil Society Pre-independent India, Social movements
Review Article : Indian Feminism in an International Frame
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 1996
In the heritage of imperialism, one of the peculiar by-products is the 'emancipated' woman in the decolonized nation, not her sister in metropolitan space, whom we know much better. However unwilling she may be to ac knowledge this, part of the historical burden of that 'emancipated' postcolonial is to be in a situation of tu-toi-ing with the radical feminist in the metropolis.
Close encounters of an imperial kind: Gandhi, gender, and anti-colonialism
Gender , Sexuality & Feminism, Volume 1, Number 1 (May 2013), 2013
The colonial encounter was arguably an early instance of transnationalization that had lasting and significant effects on the organization of gender and sexuality in the subcontinent, and on the current gender dynamics of transnationalization. This paper will examine the juxtaposed dynamics of imperialism, nationalism, and the Gandhian enterprise under the colonial encounter. It will argue that this dynamic impacted severely on the practices and meanings of self-definition—individual, communal, and national—and elaborated them with an almost libidinal intensity in the fields of gender and sexuality, bringing sexual politics into policy and embodiment into theory and practice. The paper will outline the modes of masculinity that were generated, operationalized, transmitted, and embodied through this dynamic and will show how in the course of this encounter, this particular historical moment was indexed in a multiplicity of ways. To do this, I map out the distinctive gender politics that was mobilized by imperial coloniality, by Gandhi and by the politico-historical developments that are now almost emblematic of national and communitarian identity politics within the modern Indian nation-state. While doing this, the paper will trace the links that Gandhi made between sexual practices and national destiny, and elaborate the gender politics of such sexual experimentation.