The Role Of Feminism In India

FCDA scholars see gender as socially and individually constructed and it interacts with other aspects of identity – such as ethnicity, age, class, sexual identity – and with power relations, thus gender is not discursively enacted in the same way for women and men everywhere (Lazar 2005:10; Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002:15 as cited in Lehtonen, 2007). Butler’s theory of performativity which states that gender is not natural instead constructed socially is provides the ground for understanding the social function of language in constructing gender. Thus the focus on empirical studies, and the ways in which gender is actually constructed in authentic texts and situations (Lazar 2005:12-13; Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002:27, as cited in Lehtonen,

Feminisim demands towards towards eliminating the inequalites and social injustices towards a gender equal society. As Byerly & Ross (2006) state, the words feminist and feminism refere to women’s liberation movements since 1970s that have been aimed at securing women’s right to participate in their societies, including the ability to enter into publi deliberation, institution building, and other processes associated with citizenship. Feminism in India is at large still seen as a Western influence and something alien and dangerous to the culture of the country. It was not received in its real sense in the Indian context and never treated for what it was among the world masses. Maitrayee Chaudhuri (2004: xv–xvi) observes, for instance, that feminism in India has to be “located within the broader framework of an unequal international world,” but she also asks whether hesitation to use the term might exclude women “from the feminist heritage” (as cited in Byerly & Ross (2006). The Indian family system was the

The struggle for education, widow remarriage, dowry prohibition was the first wave feminism in the Indian context. She puts that the first campaigns, public debates and fierce controversies on women and their status, initiated by men (Indian, British, missionary, and so on) stretched across the 19th century in different forms at different levels. Even if there had been radical women thinkers there was no platform for them to come out with their ideas due to obstacles like lack of education and empowerment within the patriarchal social setup. But it was not the same with men folk of the nation; they had the freedom to deliberate radical ideas even beyond strong traditional contradictions. So in the Indian context, the radical voices and writings on feminism was that of men which was heard and read first. Woman taking role in public or social life was socially accepted at a larger context only in the freedom struggle of the nation. John (2014) calls the second episteme as the national episteme, which came to be constructed by a founding generation of nationalists from the 1940s into the 1960s. The third wave is the post-national and after 1990s to the