Book Forum: Rukmini Sen on Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation

This book is a deeply emotional publication for me, as a friend and former colleague of Radhika. It is also an academically significant juncture for feminist thought and activism. 

The introduction to the book takes us through Radhika’s research journey and her positionality as a researcher and teacher. These two identities have been intrinsically connected for Radhika. I recall how she so enthusiastically organised the Research Methods Festival at Ambedkar University Delhi back in 2010, creating space for unknown sociologists like me alongside renowned social scientists. The same intense enthusiasm one sees in the way she writes about cultivating her PhD students and engaging with their ‘field’ sites, or the conviction with which she writes, ‘decolonising feminist knowledge in the classroom is not a choice for me, but a necessity’. Making the invisible visible has been an intersectional feminist project since the 1980s, when women’s studies as a perspective started in Indian academia. And as Radhika affirms, intersectionality in this project is constitutive rather than additive. 

A chapter of particular interest in this book is ‘Doing women’s and gender studies in contemporary India and the UK’. I have also written on the history of women’s activism in India, tracing the contested terrains of how movement narratives have been documented and the messiness of the project of historicising (Rukmini 2014). Co-authoring a trajectory of women’s studies as a discipline in Indian higher education in 2020, with Prof. Krishna Menon, made us document the challenges of teaching an interdisciplinary pedagogic project called women’s and gender studies. It is interesting to see questions of gender mainstreaming and women’s studies in direct conversation with, if not influencing, sociology. Nomenclature changes, anxieties around losing the radical edge and fractured sisterhoods have been comparable across north and south India, and do not necessarily occur in some linear hierarchised chronology. 

The other chapter of particular personal interest is ‘Towards a renewal of feminist politics? ‘Bad girls’, everyday sexual harassment and activist campaigns in millennial India’. I have written and engaged extensively with #LoSHA, #MeToo and the Pinjra Tod campaign and how the nature of protesting changes after the 2012 Delhi gang rape, as a researcher and a teacher in Indian classrooms during these incidents. In a piece that I wrote on #LoSHA (Sen 2014), I articulated “Is feminist praxis to dialogue or to sermonise? Is the feminist ethics not about pausing and being reflexive, about listening and learning from each other, and assessing and processing the different ways in which speech/articulation can happen?” This chapter in Radhika’s book takes us through the many recent articulations and fissures within feminist activisms post 2000, where the digital space and its intersecting autobiographical contours are at the center of grievance/hurt. This is a very significant chapter, since it takes us to questions of futures of feminist politics and vocabulary in the Indian context. 

I am happy to see Radhika returning to Richa Nagar (2006) in her conclusion. I learnt about Nagar’s book Playing with Fire from Radhika, and have used it in my teaching. While Radhika’s conclusions capture dilemmas and hesitations, I take courage from the ‘anti-colonial hope’ she offers; hope for an imagined, different feminist future. I remembered John Lennon’s: 

You may say I'm a dreamer 

But I'm not the only one 

I hope someday you'll join us 

And the world will live as one 

Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation is a book which attempts to do a lot (as is quintessentially Radhika for all of us who know her intimately). It is a teacher’s guide and a researcher’s bibliographic treasure. It is a book that quilts so many kinds of methods of doing feminist research, takes us through trajectories of feminist theories, names, contexts and agendas of feminist organisations. It foregrounds the field, in the way that ethnography uniquely understands; it deploys auto-ethnography, as feminist research propagates; and brings the history and the contemporary into conversation. 

Throughout reading the book and thinking of the many exciting and despairing conversations that I had with Radhika about/on the book, I kept thinking of Audre Lorde—a black, lesbian, mother, warrior and poet. This resonates so much with the way the book concludes, with what Radhika calls found poetry.

 A Woman Speaks 

I do not dwell 

within my birth nor my divinities 

who am ageless and half-grown 

and still seeking my sisters

witches in Dahomey 

wear me inside their coiled cloths

as our mother did 

mourning. 

I have been woman 

for a long time 

beware my smile 

I am treacherous with old magic

and the noon's new fury 

with all your wide futures 

promised 

I am 

woman 

and not white. 

References:

Nagar, R. (2006). Playing with fire: Feminist thought and activism through seven lives in India. University of Minnesota Press. 

Sen, Rukmini (2014) Resistance, Reforms and Re-creation: Mapping women’s activism in India.” In Handbook of Gender in South Asia, edited by L Fernandez, first edition, 333–346. New York: Routledge

Prof. Rukmini Sen is a Professor of Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Her research explores feminist pedagogy, law and kinship. She also served as a co-investigator for the Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives project in collaboration with GENDER.ED.