“Dalit feminist question is at the core of debates in the Women’s movement in India,” says DU Historian and Feminist
“The greatest divide in the women’s movement in India is the Dalit feminist question, whether it is issues of the bar dancers and their livelihood, or right to choose their occupations, or issues of leadership,” according to Prof Uma Chakravarti, historian, feminist writer and former faculty at the Miranda House, University of Delhi. She was pointing to the critical challenges of the gender question in India in her inaugural presentation at the International Conference on “Histories of Gender: Transdisciplinary Approaches” organized by the School of International Relations and Politics(SIRP), Mahatma Gandhi University in association with Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and Kerala Council of Historical Research(KCHR). Prof Chakravarti said that “the challenge today is how to adopt a Dalit feminist standpoint in our work so that we may all be able to work together to end patriarchal power and oppression, and to work towards building a more egalitarian society.” She said that “this movement would have to be part of a larger movement against caste and class based inequalities along with the movement to end gender based inequality. That is the point at which we stand today and which we must fight for together. There can be no going back on our work to build a different world from the one we inherited and women are involved in that struggle, whether it is in Kerala or in Chattisgarh, in Meghalaya as Agnes fighting the mining mafia or in Jammu and Kashmir.” Prof Chakravarti reminded that we “must learn to not hierarchise oppression or trivialise it as we may have done on occasion in the past. We owe a responsibility for shaping the future and we have a right to dream of a less oppressive world even if we are charged with being this or that by those who do not want the world to change. The women’s movement knows that we have been oppressed and exploited, along with other groups, and this has led us to challenge the world we were born into; that is not the world we should leave behind,” she added.
Prof Chakravarti said that “the Constitution gave us only formal equality: substantive equality had to be struggled for as women discovered in the 70s and 80s: The committee for the Status of Women had discovered the terrible chasm between men and women in terms of birth rates, workforce participation, and educational levels which spurred a new round of activism and mobilisation. But even before the CSW had discovered the actual conditions of women, in different parts of India early stirrings of the women’s movement that we now know as the autonomous women’s movement had begun in the pre-emergency days and before the CSW published its findings. When the Emergency ended the women’s movement, like the civil rights movement, took off as it were, and went in a number of directions and spread across the country. It was at this point that patriarchy as a term began to circulate and be conceptualised as an analytical category that explained the form of oppression and exploitation and led to women’s subordination. The violence inherent in the working of this system needed to be highlighted and resisted and so we had a simultaneous move in the direction of protests on the streets and in institutional locations as well as the demand to transform knowledge systems to include gender as an analytical category in the university system. Feminists created the backdrop for the setting up of new centres such as women’s studies centres in higher educational institutions—which are in danger of being closed down now perhaps because critical thinking is dangerous to the status quo—which of course it is. Fortunately, all our energy did not go into institutional reform—important though that is. We also wrote on gender critiquing disciplines, and produced a body of work that mainstream disciplines have been forced to acknowledge and use in the classrooms. And simultaneously there has been activist work often on the streets and then in a range of other ways that have now made violence against women a benchmark for demanding and spearheading legal change. From a time when we were on the streets to highlight custodial rape by the police we have moved to resisting rape in multiple sites—homes, workplaces, hospitals, factories in militarised parts of India to demanding the right to free mobility at any time of day or night as a governance issue, she noted.
Speaking on “Heteronormal Fascism and its Interconnections with Transphobia and Homophobia,” Vijaya Raja Mallika, Transgender Poet, pointed out that though the transgender community is extremely diverse, the people in general tend to create different types of phobia in order to keep them in isolation and perpetual marginalisation. While the visibility of transgender community is rising in the public sphere, they still face severe discrimination, stigma and systemic inequality. Some of the specific issues facing the transgender community are related to worst forms of stereotyping in society, Mallika observed. Though Kerala became the first state in India to have a transgender policy, much needed to be done to remove the fears and stereotypes in the minds of people through constant public campaigns and interventions. Insofar as the transgender community still faced considerable stigma based on a historically constituted images as mentally ill, socially deviant etc, these campaigns hold tremendous significance as they are still often met with ridicule from a society that does not understand their identity and the rights, Mallika added.
Dr. K.M. Krishnan and Dr. K. Jayachandran, Members of Syndicate, Prof. Upot Sherin, Former Dean of Literature, Rajeev Kumarankandath,Chirst University, Adv. Anila George, Anil E P. Elizabeth Abraham Ammini K Wayanad and others spoke. Dr. M.V. Bijulal Conference co-ordinator welcomed and Prof. A.M. Thomas, Director, SIRP welcomed. Ms. Sonia Ravi proposed vote of thanks.
