`Thinking Feminist International Relations in South Asia

As I sit down to pen down reflections on the story/ or rather the stories of ‘Feminist International Relations’, I traverse in between liminal spaces, scales and sites, both within the discipline of IR, and beyond. The key questions: What is Feminist IR in South Asia? And how do we study it? The location South Asia is particularly important in scripting this genealogy of feminist international relations—wrapped in differing histories, and geo-epistemological locations. The point of emphasis is that there is no one singular story that captures either the warp and weft of South Asia or of Feminist International Relations in South Asia. It is the story of both what is/ and has been visible on the canvas of history, and what is/ and has been invisibilized by disciplinary diktats, erasures and silences. So, to start with it is a ‘messy’ story that defies neat boundaries, straitjacketed theoretical frames, or paradigms. It is a story that is deeply enmeshed in the contested history of colonialism, imperialism, and the contested terrain of nationalism.

The location (South Asia as a region) is particularly valid as it does not refer to some ‘more authentic’ point of epistemic access, but in fact, underlines the importance of a certain ‘density of arguments within a lived community’ in the process of ‘knowledge’ production (Pradeep Jeganathan 2009, as cited by Malathi De Alwis et al., 2009). South Asia as a geo-epistemic space is an interesting spatial/geographic imaginary. It is space that is marked by the contesting forces of centralism and regionalism, nationalism and communitarianism, and nation and community (Bose and Jalal 1997). More importantly this analysis is central to understanding the relationship between nation, community and its intersections with gender and class and the postcolonial state (Bose and Jalal 1997, pp. 6-7). It is in this backdrop that I underline that the ‘woman’ question in South Asia has been intertwined in differing ways within the template of colonialism, and nationalism. Further it was subsumed, appropriated and silenced too within the discourse on colonialism and nationalism.

Mrinalini Sinha (2000), in Feminism and Nationalism in Late-Colonial India, through the discursive category of ‘Mother India’, brings forth the tensions, and contradictions in the deployment of the category of ‘woman question’. She writes that ‘when Katherine Mayo wrote her polemic against Indian self-rule, she titled her book “Mother India”. The intention, and the effort was to highlight how India was still not ready for self-rule, given the deplorable condition of its women. This of course, offered the needed moral umbrage, where the white man was on a ‘civilizing mission’—out there to save the brown woman, from the brown man (Spivak 1983). Interestingly, the nationalist discourse too deployed the narrative of ‘Mother India’, but in ways that offered new subject positions to women as the signifiers of an essentialized ‘Indianness’ (Sinha 2000: 625). However, in between these contesting terrains, organized waves of feminist movements in India found space to reclaim both voice and agency. However, in the meanwhile the women’s movement was in dialogue with feminist IR in Global North, there foregrounding voices of ‘difference’ and ‘dissidence’.

For instance, early women’s movements in India found spaces within the discourse of nationalism, where the subject position of the ‘woman’ was recast through a call for equal citizenship shaping the contours of liberal feminism. While Mrinalini Sinha brings to us the stories from India, Kumari Jaywardena in her seminal work Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986), draws attention to situated histories, and how women’s lived experiences in South Asia were marked by experiences of colonization and imperialism. Kumari Jayawardena (p. 2) underlined that ‘Feminism was not imposed on the Third World by the West, but rather that historical circumstances produced important material and ideological changes that affected women, even though the impact of imperialism and Western thought was admittedly among the significant elements in these historical circumstance.’

Drawing on my earlier work (with Amena Mohsin 2024), Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia: Past and Present, I put forth three key points: First, feminist international relations in South Asia call attention to the complex relationship between feminism(s), nationalism and colonialism. An attention to this relationship is pertinent to understand why feminist IR in South Asia, while in dialogue with feminist IR in Global South, has been marked by ideas of ‘difference’ and ‘dissidence’ (Singh and Mohsin 2024). Second, it draws attention to why many feminist scholars in the region were uncomfortable with the call for ‘Global Sisterhood’and relatedly embedded universalisms that tended to subsume ‘gender’ in a monolithic template bereft of its intersections with identity constellations like caste, class, religion and region (Mohanty 1984). Relatedly, feminists in South Asia have been attentive to ‘active political struggle embodied in the notion of solidarity rather than the concept of sisterhood’ (Mohanty 2003, p. 7). Third, in many ways the trajectory of feminism(s), and relatedly feminist IR is a not simple straightjacketed template, that can be captured in/ or ‘reified’ through disciplinary traps. It has, and calls for epistemic disobedience, methodological pluralism, and conceptual innovation. Taking a clue from Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo (2011)2, I would argue that feminist politics in South Asia/Global South, in all its fluidities is/ and has been a ‘place of struggles’, traversing both coloniality and domination in its pursuit for decolonial freedom.

The call for epistemic disobedience reaffirms the need to re-think what we recognize as political itself. The question of what is political has animated feminist writings across time and space. For instance, Menon (2004) speaks of the ‘political’ in reference to potentialities ‘to subvert, to destabilize, not just dominant values and structures, but ourselves’ (p. 217). I bring back the political here, to draw attention to situated histories and differing sites as political. This is marked by a twin fold agenda, first to underline the need for an alternative genealogy of international relations as a discipline, and also feminist IR as a sub discipline. The call is mediated by attention to politics of erasures and silence, representation and representability, and agency and voice. Walker very rightly states that most scholarship on the genealogy of the discipline of IR tends to draw strict disciplinary boundaries, that ‘tends to know what politics must be because we know where politics is because we know the sites of politics, and or how politics takes place—we know the processes called “political”’ (Walker 2010).

I draw attention to Walker’s writing as the story of ‘here to there’ in terms of the genealogy of feminist politics in South Asia, transcends the linear categorization of time, and space. Feminist have pushed the canvas of situated histories, to talk about how feminist politics is deeply rooted in differing histories in the region. However in many ways this history/ or rather historie(s)—herstories have been pushed to the margins of politics. So the key question, how do you capture the silence, and erasure in the everyday, when thinking through both historical times, and the present. I draw attention to two pieces of writing to highlight the case for both epistemic disobedience, and the need for methodological pluralism. The first is the work of Urvashi Bhutalia, The Other Side of Silence (1998), which foregrounds both voice, and silences in the re-reading of Partition history through women’s bodies as site of war and violence. In the voices and stories, she moves the canon of IR away from the state, and centres the gaze on differing women’s bodies, and their contestations both within nationalism and communalism. While the focus on every day, or war and violence in not new to feminist IR, more broadly, what is surely different is how differing bodies experience violence differently amidst a call for honour/ and shame, and therefore call attention to situated histories.

Further, in the call for situated herstories, there is a need for greater attention to women’s writing through differing historical periods. So, the second piece of writing that I draw your attention to is Therigatha, a Buddhist canonical text, situated in the socio-political context of ancient India (early sixth century BC). In a discussion on strategic history, thought or practice in India, we often find a reference to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, but rarely do we see a mention of Therigatha, a collection of poems, written by Theris, or women monks. The text written in Pali is in many ways the first anthology of women’s writings, and surely offers critical insights on questions of war and violence. However, texts like Therigatha have been relegated to the margins, and often boxed in categories of either women’s writings, or women writing on religion, most importantly bereft of the ‘political’.

And the reason that is so is located in the very template of knowledge production that recognizes only particular forms of language as ‘political’. Relatedly this raises the key question: Do Western theoretical templates/ or conceptual frames provide the language to read texts like Therigatha? The limited point of emphasis is epistemic disobedience, and methodological pluralism, call for attention for conceptual innovation. I agree with Sumi Madhok (2020), who argues that the ‘problem of doing theory (and I would also say genealogy), is not so much at the level of theory production, but at the level of concepts’. She states, ‘there are not enough concepts in place to capture but also produce theorized accounts of different accounts of different historically specific and located forms of worldmaking in most of the world’ (Madhok 2020:395).

My attempt in this piece was limited in terms of scope, and agenda. The idea was to walk you through this cacophony of ideas to draw attention to the point that the story/ or rather the stories of feminist international relations in South Asia is marked by ‘messiness’ of the field, and defies any attempt to reify the field through hard bound disciplinary boundaries. It pays attention to the situated histories of South Asia, and take note of colonialism, and continuing coloniality as it weaves the field forward. In that sense, postcolonialism, and decolonial matrix has been embedded in many of the writings emanating on/ and from South Asia. Further, feminist scholarship in the region, while in dialogue with feminist IR scholars in the Global North have pushed for foregrounding intersectional identity constellations in understanding of Gender and IR in South Asia. In doing so, while recognizing the call for global sisterhood, feminist scholars and activists have resisted being subsumed under its universalistic rubric—and walked on the path of solidarity, paying attention to both difference and dissidence. That said, the push has been for analytical eclecticism, methodological pluralism, with attention to the politics of knowledge production itself. In many ways, feminist IR, pushes the agenda for a call for pluriversal/relational agenda in IR, that calls attention to the temporality of struggle, resistance and solidarity in South Asia.

References:
1. Bhutalia, Urvashi (1998), The Other Side of Silence, Duke University Press
2. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal (1997), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, Oxford University Press.
3. De Alwis, M., Deshpande, S., Jeganathan, P., John, M., Menon, N., Pandian, M., & Zaidi, S. (2009). ‘The Postnational Condition’. Economic and Political Weekly. 44(10). pp.35–35. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40278775
4. Jayawardena, K (1986), Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books
5. Jeganathan, P. (2009). ‘The Postnational, Inhabitation and the Work of Melancholia’. Economic and Political Weekly, 44(10), 54–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 40278780
6. Levander, C., & Mignolo, W. (2011). ‘Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order’. The Global South, 5(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.2979/globalsouth.5.1.1
7. Madhok, S. (2020). ‘A Critical Refexive Politics of Location, “Feminist Debt” and Thinking from the Global South’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 27(4), 394–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506820952492
8. Menon, N. (2004). Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. Delhi: Permanent Black/Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 217
9. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles. Signs, 28(2), 499–535. https://doi.org/10.1086/342914
10. Mohanty, C.T. (1984). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2(12/13), 333–358. https://doi.org/10.2307/302821
11. Sinha, Mrinalini (2000), ‘Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late-Colonial India’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, Points of Departure: India and the South Asian Diaspora (Autumn, 2000), pp. 623-644. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178643
12. Singh, Shweta (2024), ‘Can Feminist IR Hear Differing Voices? A critical reading of feminist historie(s) in South Asia, “Reification” and Boundaries’, in Singh, Shweta and Amena Mohsin edited (2024), Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia: Past and Present, Routledge
13. Singh, Shweta and Amena Mohsin edited (2024), Mapping Feminist International Relations in South Asia: Past and Present, Routledge
14. Walker, R.B.J. (2010). After the Globe, Before the World. Abingdon: Routledge

Shweta Singh is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Faculty of International Relations, South Asian University.