As the world marks International Women’s Day on March 8, we at Women Unlimited are celebrating our marvellous authors all month. Every week, we will pick two remarkable writers and focus on their words and their work. And what’s more, we have an additional gift for you, our dear readers: an opportunity to buy your favourite titles from our extensive list at flat 50% off all through March! So, what are you waiting for?! Write to [email protected] and bring home the best of feminist scholarship, activist material and creative writing, in India and South Asia, at affordable prices.

This week, we focus on two brilliant feminists, writers and educators: Sadhna Arya and Wandana Sonalkar. Arya's newest release Gaining Ground maps that “changing contours of feminist organising in post 1990s India”, while Sonalkar presents a “layered political account [that] weaves personal and public histories” in Why I Am Not a Hindu Woman.

ABOUT GAINING GROUND : The 1990s were a turning point for the Indian Women's Movement (IWM). New forms of feminist activism emphasised both the specificities and commonalities of oppression that women in different locations experience, based on power and privilege; they called for reconceptualising family, marriage, community, caste, sexuality, labour and violence.

Gaining Ground maps these new contours by taking up five critical interventions made by movements that grew out of the IWM but established distinct identities around their concerns. Muslim women came together around community identity; Dalit women highlighted gender and caste patriarchy; sex workers challenged prevalent definitions of work; queer politics critiqued heteronormative sexuality; and women with disabilities raised searching questions about what constitutes an ideal body. In the process, feminists and the women’s movement were called upon to acknowledge the gaps, tensions and differences in their struggles thus far, to incorporate these perspectives in their theory and practice, and to forge alliances across difference.

Sadhna Arya offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the expanding horizons of feminist organising, and of the vitality of women's movements in India in the 21st century.

ABOUT SADHNA ARYA: She is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Satyawati College (E), University of Delhi. She was Senior Fellow with the Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS) in 2004-05, and the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) from 2013 to 2015. Arya is actively involved with women's rights issues and has written extensively on the subject. She is the author of the monograph, Women, Gender Equality and the State and the Occasional Paper, The National Commission for Women–Assessing Performance, published by the CWDS. She has co-edited Narivadi Rajniti–Sangharsh Evam Mudde and Poverty, Gender and Migration.

These newer voices insisted that the category of Woman embrace differences in the life experiences of women that emanate from the social distribution of power and privilege, that in turn create marginalised or privileged existence. They insisted on a role beyond nominal inclusion to leadership in the framing of agendas and of mobilisation. International influences in the form of UN resolutions and conventions on racism, human rights, rights of the marginalised, as well as debates on prostitution and sex work, were important in shaping the strategies and mobilisation by these women. With a view to foregrounding their issues, women from marginalised sections of society pushed for gaining autonomous spaces within the women's movement. Their aim was to highlight the limitations of the dialogues and engagement with their issues and concerns, thus far; they demanded that the women's movement learn from their experiences and struggles, and understand and organise on their issues, as well. They asked feminists and feminism to connect with their struggles and change existing frameworks and paradigms by relooking at caste, community, family, sex, sexuality, labour and disability, from the perspectives of the marginalised and the excluded. They challenged the feminists' insistence on similarities of oppression on the basis of gender alone, and laid bare the question of who is supported and who is not; on the privileges of heterosexual, upper caste, able-bodied feminists; and on the need for a different analysis of women's oppression at the intersections of caste, community and sexuality, ethnicity, and disability. They emphasised the need for alliances and what these ‘alliances’ mean for them. …

This book discusses the different forms of feminist organising as they emerged, post-1990s, to challenge the exclusion of the concerns of different categories of women in the representation and formulation of women's issues, and in organising strategies aimed to address them. Its focus is on the struggles of Muslim and Dalit women; women with disabilities; sex workers; and lesbian/queer women. … While the specificities and commonalities of oppression that women from different locations experience is important, recognising the intersections in their oppression requires learning anew from the experiences and strugglesof women from different social and sexual and economic locations.

The tensions generated by these different movements are instructive—e.g., the Dalit women's movement's tension with non-Dalit women's movements on issues of sexual violence and sex work; or sex work as choice vs exploitation; or sex workers' differences with trade union, and even women's movements, on the question of defining labour; on issues of community and sexuality within Muslim women's movements; inhibitions related to sexual expression; how discussions have redefined the frameworks of ‘rights’ and ‘equality’; or tensions between the queer women's movement and certain sections of the women's movement on issues of sexuality and sexual expression. In the end, I challenge the notion that there is no women's movement, or that feminism is on the decline. I believe that feminism has broadened, evolved and deepened; it is the only one that engages and reflects when questioned; and has responded to the inherent intersectionality of class, caste, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and many other axes of oppression, as no other social movement has done so far.

ABOUT WHY I AM NOT A HINDU WOMAN: In a reasoned critique of Hindutva and Hinduism, feminist scholar and activist, Wandana Sonalkar, outlines why she, born female and upper caste in Maharashtra, has repudiated her religious identity. Based on her personal experience, and on textual and empirical evidence, she offers an intimate account of caste practices, and argues that patriarchy and Brahminism are integral to Hinduism. As such, it is misogynist and casteist, and its exclusionary imperatives are essential to both its practice — and to Hindutva, which extends this imperative to Muslims. She reiterates that discrimination and inequality have been so internalised that their daily observance segues seamlessly into social interactions, thus crystallising and entrenching them deeply in society.

ABOUT WANDANA SONALKAR: She was professor of women's and gender studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is the translator of, among others, We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkar Movement by Urmila Pawar & Meenakshi Moon; and of Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More. She writes regularly on gender and caste.

My year of writing has taken me on journeys into my past, required me to examine my own beliefs, emotions and convictions and, through the negative assertion that forms the title of this book, given me positive energies to face what the coming years may bring. At the same time, the rapidly evolving sequence of events as the ruling powers press their agenda of Hindutva into practice has made this book difficult to write, because one seems always to be called upon to react to something new&. In fact, there are two distinct registers on which I am holding forth about Why I am not a Hindu Woman. The first is, of course, the change that I have referred to in the paragraphs above: the transformation of our secular Indian society into one where Hinduism takes on an increasingly aggressive avatar. This new face of Hinduism is propagated by a government that was voted to power through an electoral process that was once democratic, but has gradually been corrupted: by the manipulation of voters through fake news and demagoguery; the possible selective use of hackable electronic voting machines, a compliant media that sees its role as one of supporting the government rather than raising awkward questions; and, of course, money power, which has always been present, but has now grown to enormous proportions. This new face of Hinduism may be described as ‘political Hinduism’ (to echo a term used by Martin Kramer in relation to Islam), the unfolding story of majoritarian Hindu rule, shaped by the ideology that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar called ‘Hindutva’. The present regime, like the fascist regimes of the last century, is also supported by and devoted to serving the interests of global corporate capitalism. It is a Hindutva I am, of course, opposed to: I, a woman born into a Hindu family, but an atheist by belief; a feminist; a retired teacher, whose understanding of the world is significantly influenced by Marxism, and who has been trying for decades to understand and oppose the caste system in our society. …

But there is a second register in which I inscribe myself as not being a Hindu woman. This has to do with Hinduism as it is practised in Indian society today, and has been, ever since I can remember. I am not particularly concerned with Hinduism in the ancient past, except inasmuch as its sacred texts, its history and literature, influence the present. Hinduism, as we know it, is inherently misogynist, where most other religions are male-centred. It is based on caste divisions, and one's Hindu identity is always a caste identity. Its casteism and patriarchy are intertwined and can be unbelievably cruel. As a religion, it does not believe in universal ethics or morality, as both are mediated by a range of givens and contingencies. Finally, it places no value on equality.

This book stands apart on two counts. Firstly, it's by a woman. This is significant not least because every major world religion discriminates against women. Second, unlike the male-authored critiques, this one goes beyond intellectual arguments to also draw on lived experience.

The book is radical and unceremonious in declaring Hinduism to be the root cause of our country's problems. It is unlikely that its arguments will be universally accepted. Yet, it is the unease that the book creates that makes it a must-read for anyone who identifies as Hindu in India today.

Sonalkar attempts to answer an important question: ‘Why do women buy into the overtly masculinist and misogynistic project of Hindutva?’

‘[Sonalkar] describes our collective life in the present with a sharp political eye: tottering on the edge of Hindu majoritarian rule, guided by the exclusionary ideology of Hindutva, but also redeemed by everyday acts of resistance.’ 

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