People's Democracy

 Renaming The Women’s Studies Centres

 Nalini Taneja

SOONER or later the Sangh Parivar was bound to take note that some educational grants also find their way into Women’s Studies, and that much of the research that goes on in them is at variance with the prerogatives of the Hindutva agenda. This has now happened, and the Parivar has moved in to stake claim on these institutions and departments. This has been done through a game of renaming and making the usual committees, which could influence what grants get used for.

The UGC has taken a decision to reorganise and rename the twenty odd women’s studies centres across India as “Women and Family Studies Centres” (report in Times Of India, August 24, 2003), and instructions to this effect have been sent to the Universities concerned. As women academics have pointed out, this is a way of equating women with family, while one purpose of setting up these centres was precisely to look at the role and contributions made by women in fields like politics, economy, agriculture, industry and so on. The new focus and nomenclature obviously denies and works against an appreciation of this varied and equal role of women in the development of economy and society.

ROLE OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

It must be remembered that women’s studies emerged as an important and necessary component of social science studies/ research as part of women’s struggle for equality the world over, and the concern in social science for the search and enumeration of the role and contribution to history and society by those who have been marginalised. Among the ‘people without history’, if one were to go by traditional history writing and sociology, and the textbooks that abound in the school curricula the world over, are whole sections of people --- the blacks, the American Indians, the working people, and in our country the tribals and dalits --- including women, who constitute fifty per cent of the world’s population, but have not had the privilege of being the object of enquiry in social sciences. As scholars’ women have constituted an even smaller percentage as in most societies they do not have equal access to higher education, or at least have not overcome gender bias, in the field of education as much as in other fields.

Women’s knowledge and knowledge about women has been hard to come by in as much as knowledge about other oppressed and marginalised groups has been. Impetus for women’ studies came from two related developments: one within the social sciences, and the other from the radicalising potential of the women’s movements. Women’s studies became a valid and viable field of enquiry and women’s studies departments were established not as a gift from the existing systems of governance but as a by product of the women’s assertion of identity all over the world as equal citizens with claims to equal rights, including political rights, more specifically the vote. Their role in the formation of nations and in the freedom struggles in the Third World, and their assertion of equality within these struggles were clearly bound up with their citizenship rights, their roles as political activists, teachers, students, peasants and workers --- the entire gamut of identities that men claimed for themselves. The expansion of women’s movements to include workers and peasants, and to encompass their demands as legitimate demands of the women’s movements constituted the historical legacy of women’s studies. To be a woman no longer implied asking for better status in families, although that was part of the struggles as well.

RADICAL AGENDA

The women’s studies departments, therefore, began with the radical agenda of providing the intellectual armoury for women’s political activism, but in the process also became linked with all progressive political movements, including the left movements whose agenda incorporated women’s equality. This live link with the left oriented mass movements, in particular the left oriented women’s movements, gave to this intellectual endeavour a radical stance. A vast body of research aimed at exposing gender discrimination and in linking up with the concerns of the women’s movement. As such their heritage is revolutionary as well as truly international.

Developments within social sciences, particularly the assertions for a people’s history of nations, responded to this need to include all sections of society until then left outside history, and women’s studies found a place in almost all universities and academic institutions, except where there was general academic backwardness.

In India the struggles against dowry and for laws sensitive to women provided the backdrop for the emergence of women’s studies, whose agenda included gender discrimination. In 1975 a report (Towards Equality), published eventually by the government of India, enumerated the various aspects of a woman's everyday existence, and the low status this implied, following which a number of research units were established all over India from the 1970s onwards.

CO-OPTION BY THE RIGHT WING

But even as women’s studies became recognised as valid and necessary, they also became mainstream like all endeavours funded by the government, and have largely, although not wholly, lost their earlier live link with the women’s movements. For many middle class women women’s studies has become a substitute for political activism, and activism has become synonymous with studies and an exaggerated importance of its role in relation to the expressions of women from the unprivileged strata of society. It is no longer an accepted reality that there is an affinity between women’s concerns and a left political perspective. A political autonomy is being consciously sought, which as much as the government’s moves, is likely to make these centres vulnerable to co-option by the right wing.

It is being felt by many in these centres that women’s studies are somehow autonomous from the political process and that it is possible to continue with a radical agenda in women’s studies even as middle class women withdraw from the domain of politics to a third round of feminism where all expressions of women’s power assume an automatic radical identity ---whether it is the figure of Kali or Maitreyi, or Gargi. In response to the current political situation a need is felt to ‘discover’ the radical potential of traditional figures, and to rescue them from the communalists rather than arm themselves against the right wing resurgence. It suits agenda of liberalisation as well as the religious fundamentalists to eliminate women from the terrain of work into the family, and to promote a version of women’s identity that is embedded in the family, even as her agency is reduced within it as a result of being confined to it.

Family has been a subject of primary research in women’s studies, but as an agency that women have to contend with, changes within which impinge on women’s condition even as women work to transform it in keeping with their own aspirations as human beings. It is an agency whose mediating role has been recognised by women. All women specific forms of oppression ---from dowry and female infanticide to rape and inheritance rights and unequal laws --- are perpetrated within families and through the changing forms of the family in an even otherwise inequality ridden society. Yet to equate their aspirations and condition as synonymous with family, as the government is doing, is a step backwards and a reversal of the gains made by women through a century of struggles. It is also a clear regression in the field of women’s research, which has continued to expand in terms of the subject matter covered and, in the past, also in terms of the objectives that underline the research.

THE GOVT INTERVENTION

The UGC proposals also emphasise that each women’s studies centre is to be headed by an advisory committee, which must include representatives from the Department of Women and Child Development and Social Welfare Boards. This move is indicative of the government’s attitudes towards women, and the patronising and social work approach to issues of women’s equality and political participation, which characterise the government’s approach. Such approaches exclude a genuine appraisal of gender discrimination or a real appreciation of issues concerned with women’s emancipation. But in this recent move we may well see a definite direction that fits in with the Hindutva agenda as well. The presence of representatives from the Departments of Women and Child Development and Social Welfare Boards will certainly create pressure for a conservative curriculum in these centres and narrow the scope of the projects for which grants would be available. The proposals also impinge on the autonomy of the Universities and the rights of the statuary bodies in these Universities, and facilitate their takeover by the Hindutva forces.

Women’s studies may well remain a valid subject in higher education under the BJP government’s onslaught on education, but its content would have changed. There are already many feminists willing to fall in line with the view that women enjoyed a great position in the Vedic society, losing out only with the coming of foreigners --- of the Muslim and Christian-British variety.

Women’s studies centres can save themselves from being co-opted by this right wing, communal resurgence only by asserting their identity of interests with the ongoing women’s movement in this country.