This blog is a summary of a forthcoming encyclopedia entry titled ‘Postcolonial Feminism and Welfare Reform.’ It explores how postcolonial feminist scholarship has shaped, responded to, and interrogated reforms aimed at addressing welfare-related inequities by taking the specific case of post-independent India.

In this blog, I will discuss some key ideas or arguments that postcolonial feminist scholarship has put forth that are crucial for understanding processes of welfare reform in India since it gained its independence from British rule.

The first key idea that postcolonial feminist scholarship has forged vis à vis the question of welfare reform in India is that supranational welfare-related measures based on safeguarding human rights, initiated primarily by global and cosmopolitan civil society organisations, must attend to the fact that ‘third world women’ are not homogenized victims who have been denied welfare by their respective governments. The idea is drawn primarily from feminist sociologist and cultural critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984). It challenges both the notion of victimhood attributed to third world women as well as the Euro-Atlantic perception that ‘third world women’, as a demographic and a political category, is homogeneous and uniform. Further, the feminist historian Taylor Sherman’s (2021) scholarly interventions can play a key role in addressing this first idea, notably how there is crucial evidence of the fact that welfare reform in India in the 1950s had, in fact, treated the subjects of such reform not as mere victims but as agents and makers of history.

The second argument, drawn from the feminist literary critic and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2014), is that it is crucial for welfare reform initiatives in India to remember that to be equal is not to be the same. This implies that for Indian women to be considered equal to men and to women of other ‘developed’ nations vis-à-vis welfare policies, they should not need to prove that they are identical to men and to women of these other nations. It is important to instantiate the career of this second idea in Indian political debates. This discussion includes how postcolonial feminist activist-scholars have argued that because (gender) equality is erroneously pegged to sameness, welfare reform initiatives in India have been unable to recognise women’s role as labourers and thereby undervalued women’s work. In fact, as the late Dalit feminist writer Sharmila Rege (2019) had pointed out, in the planned development and welfare programmes launched in the first thirty years after India’s formal independence from colonial rule, women were predominantly identified as ‘non-working’ mothers. This was because women, during this time, provided more than fifty percent of agricultural labour. And since the products of agricultural labour was mostly geared towards subsistence-related use and not towards exchange in the market, and because productive labour was considered as something that produced goods and services which could be sold in the market for a price and therefore had ‘value’, agricultural labour performed by women was not identified as productive labour.

Further, a key argument made by Indian social and political activists in relation to challenging the reduction of equality to sameness is that several welfare reforms that were and continue to be instituted in India are indifferent and resistant to local customs, mores and cultural practices. For example, a key point of contention for feminist activists has been the contemporary Indian State’s efforts at bringing about reform in the school education of girl children. One of the main ways in which the State aims to introduce welfare-related measures for girls within schools is by removing traces of religion from school uniforms. In the year 2022, for example, the State and its attendant legal apparatus (in this case, the Karnataka High Court) argued that the hijab or the headscarf is not an ‘essential religious symbol’ for the Muslims and therefore it is perfectly legitimate to ban Muslim female students from wearing the headscarf in school. The High Court, in fact, argued that this ban does not tamper with Article 25 of the Indian Constitution that safeguards the right of all communities to practice their religion without the fear of persecution, and therefore the prohibitive measure is legitimate. However, Muslim girls in these educational institutions and their families have vociferously resisted the ban and asserted that this purported claim to welfare by the state apparatus is actually detrimental for the wellbeing of the girls and their education. They have also argued that the ban is a violation of their Right to Education (as enshrined by Article 21-A in the Constitution of India) without discrimination. They have further pointed out that this mode of ‘interventionist secularisation’ (Madra 2015) steers our attention away from the real objective of welfare reform, that is creating a safe and a protected educational atmosphere where girl children, in order to thrive intellectually, academically and professionally, do not have to cede their ways of life grounded upon religious practices.

Consequently, a key argument made by postcolonial feminist scholars [and here I have Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) in mind] vis-à-vis welfare reform is that all forms of violence, including violence unleashed by men, need to be theorised and situated historically. Such forms of violence cannot be universalised, any more than atrocities against women can be universalised. The second attendant argument put forward by Mohanty is that if one does not situate cultural practices of the postcolony historically, then one ends up equating cultural practices and institutions like that of purdah, for example, with forced prostitution, domestic violence or rape. In a complete absence of efforts to historically understand the practice of purdah, she shows how sexual control is identified as its primary function. Consequently, given that there is no way one can differentiate between the subversive and political aspects of culture on one hand and its oppressive and exploitative aspects on the other hand, owing to what Mohanty calls ‘methodological universalism’, several welfare reforms geared towards addressing violence against women in India become misdirected, lack focus and mislead inquiries. Finally, a key intervention of postcolonial feminist scholarship has been to arguethat patriarchal oppression, that does not let women achieve their mental and physical wellbeing, cannot be defined exclusively in terms of male domination. One must understand and interpret the class, caste, regional, linguistic and religious registers via which patriarchy manifests itself. And welfare initiatives should be oriented towards addressing this hydra-headed, intricate nature of patriarchy, rather than reducing it exclusively to the question of domination of women as a homogenised, internally undifferentiated group by men as a non-diverse, homogenised group.

References

Chakravorty, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2014. ‘We cannot improve the world from the top down.’ World Economic Forum.https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/08/new-social-covenant-top-down-leadership/

Madra, Aysel, 2015. ‘Interventionist secularism: A comparative analysis of the Turkish grand national assembly (1923–1928) and the Indian constituent assembly (1946–1949) Debates.’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54(2), pp. 222-241.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1984. ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.’ Boundary 2, pp. 333-358.

Rege, Sharmila, 2019. ‘Brahmanical nature of violence against women.’ In Dalit Feminist Theory, Routledge: India, pp. 103-116.

Sherman, Taylor, 2021. ‘Not part of the plan? Women, state feminism and Indian socialism in the Nehru years.’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 44(2), pp. 298-312.