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I thank my younger friends in Punarnaba and the Centre for Marxian Studies for their invitation to deliver the Vina Mazumdar Memorial Lecture quite soon after we lost her earlier this year. It is both an honour and a responsibility, for Professor Vina Mazumdar was an intrepid fighter for equality and social justice, and the fountainhead of Women's Studies in India. I have to warn you that what I have to say is not a finished disquisition, but my somewhat disorganised cogitations on the subject. I may be forgiven for the rough edges in my presentation.
I have decided to call this explorative presentation 'Towards Equality', borrowing it from the monumental report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI). The report was submitted under the stewardship of Vina Mazumdar in 1974, on the eve of 1975, declared as International Women's Year by the United Nations. Unlike a sarkari (to quote Vina-di's favourite word denoting both challenge and sneer!) report, it had an evocative title: Towards Equality. For me, it captures the ongoing journey in search of equality in gender, caste, class, race, religious community and ethnicity, in a multifaceted society like ours. It is the recognition of the most arduous journey that brought gender alive in our thinking people, making them seeing people in addition to being doing people. This notion of 'forever becoming' that attaches to the search for gender equality was derived from the detailed search that the CSWI report conducted on the condition of women in India. It was this utter honesty of search that gave an enduring foundation to both Women's Studies and the women's movement in India, making good the claim that Vina-di once made, that Women's Studies is the intellectual arm of the women's movement in India.
Let us look at the guiding principles that the Committee adopted despite the bureaucratic-sounding terms of reference, which was the official mandate with which it set out to explore the status of women in India at the beginning of the seventies of the last century:
(a) Equality of women is necessary, not merely on the grounds of social justice, but as a basic condition for social, economic and political development of the nation.
(b) In order to...