The early 1990s was a socially turbulent time in India. The liberalisation of the economy, explosive Hindu-Muslim relations, and the introduction of caste-based affirmative action policies are issues that broke into public discourse at this time, and continue to resonate today. The challenges posed by these issues to feminist theory and practice have been enormous, and the 1990s saw a momentous shift in the assumptions underlying feminist debate. Caste is the pivotal issue that I shall take up in this talk, particularly the intersections between caste and feminism. Caste is a centuries-old practice, yet it was only in the 1990s that a ‘mainstream’ feminist critique of caste began to emerge. What happens when feminism, an ideology or a movement that resists patriarchy, meets caste, a social institution which is inherently patriarchal? The feminist and the anti-caste movements, though both concerned with social justice, have not always been natural allies, with feminism being accused of an upper-caste, middle-class bias, and anti-caste movements often being patriarchal and silencing of women. Who controls the production of knowledge has been an important issue to feminist movements around the world, leading to the development of women’s studies as a discipline and the emergence of feminist publishing houses. The general patriarchal bias of knowledge production is further complicated for lower caste or dalit-bahujan women by the fact that knowledge was traditionally created by men of the upper castes. How, then, does the dalit-bahujan woman articulate her grievances? And where can she express these? In this paper I will explore these questions by looking specifically at the work of Indian feminist presses, who provide a valuable platform for a variety of women’s voices.

Elen Turner is a third-year PhD student at the RSHA. She has a BA (Hons) in English and History from the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her honours research looked at women’s experiences of the partition of India, using novels as the historical source material. This interdisciplinary methodology has carried through to her PhD work, in which she is researching the contemporary feminist publishing industry in India. Her thesis will encompass a number of themes of importance to feminism and broader society in India today. This work in progress presentation takes up one of these themes, caste.