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Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.), New Delhi: Kali for Women & Women Unlimited, 2004, 359 pages, Rs. 325
The rich history of the women's movement in India has been well-documented by scholars. However, theoretical writing is comparatively sparse. Although there is a large mass of feminist writing produced over the last few decades in India, most of it remains scattered in journals, books, pamphlets or official documents. Feminism in India is an edited volume of readings, essays and extracts from relevant documents that seeks to provide a broad overview of the conceptual history of the idea of feminism in India. This is the second volume in the Series entitled "Issues in contemporary Feminism," which is premised on the need for "an overview of substantial writing on a variety of issues in Indian feminism" (Series Note). This series intends to fill a lacuna so that such a body of writing may be easily accessible to research scholars, teachers in women's studies and activists.
The editor, Maitrayee Chaudhuri, begins by confronting some key definitional and conceptual issues in the Introduction, a few of which must be mentioned because they draw the reader into the specific nuances of feminism within a South Asian (more specifically Indian) context. First, Chaudhuri underlines the idea that feminism is articulated within "changing contexts" and that this volume seeks to "represent the changing and cumulative nature of the concept of feminism" in India (xvi). She believes that to view developments in the women's movement in India as `feminist' only as a phenomenon that is post-1970s, is to narrow and limiting, because "movements can never be contained within the expressed, stated model that they start out with..." (xvii). Second, she confronts the `nationalist' feminist model, which brushed aside internal differences and emphasized differences from the West and also highlights the persistence of an "ambiguous relationship with western feminism" (xxvi). Thus, "indigenous feminism" in the Indian context needs to take on a variety of variables, including caste, tradition, religious fundamentalism and contested notions of `selfhood' (xxx). Third, Chaudhuri reminds us that contemporary feminism must also take on board the impact of macro-liberal economic policies in the so-called Third World countries which shape the lives of millions of poor women. In this context, issues of democracy, human...