Book review: Gita Chadha and M. T. Joseph,eds. 2018. Re-Imagining Sociology in India: Feminist Perspectives

Like many volumes, this work has grown out of a seminar on the theme ‘Genders, Feminisms and Sociologies: Towards a State of Altered-ness’. Along with a discussion of the ‘skewed’ presence of women in the practice of sociology in India, the volume tries to locate certain peripheral and specific themes in sociology, intersectional and feminist studies in India. Though not directed towards tracing a founding mother or mothers of Indian sociology, this volume presents the similarities and differences of academic journeys and conceptual contributions of well-known sociologists in India and how their gender identity as women became either a crucial or secondary factor in defining their place in Indian sociology. Any compatibility sociology shares with marginalities of an economic or cultural nature forms a core concern in this book. In the Introduction, Gita Chadha and M. T. Joseph highlight certain gendered aspects of Sociology as a discipline and also as an academic practice. Thus, how women’s socialisation outside academia gets extended in the form of voluntarism and social work in sociology with an impulse towards transformation, becomes an impetus in exploring a ‘critical spirit’ of the discipline rather than a limiting factor. The epistemological differences women in post-colonial academic circles have with Western academic feminists in terms of intersectional ties with caste or class in Indian contexts is explicated through the life histories of Sharmila Rege, C. Parvathamma, etc. Thus, a feminist cartography within the discipline is attempted in this volume, through 13 chapters by 14 authors.

This is taken up with enough focus in the first part, where the intellectual and personal biographies of early women sociologists are discussed. Kamala Ganesh in her account on eight women sociologists discusses how the identity of being women and sociologists in contexts of anti-colonial fervour, post-Independence, the late 1970s, etc., got translated into their topics of research and writing. Beginning from the works of Chandrakala Hate and Irawati Karve she discusses how women were ‘empirically present’ in sociology’s content in the pre-Independence period where social reforms had something to do with women’s status. The lacunae associated with these works were primarily regarding a problematisation of categories such as gender and patriarchy. The later feminist scholarship had to respond to this, and also to an unreflexively deployed professional habitus by male sociologists during that time. Karve’s analysis of kinship systems with material consequences and Hate’s inference of society’s role in making anyone a male or female are some of those significant academic perspectives we could see. Similarly, the works of Leela Dube, Neera Desai, Hemalatha Acharya, Beela Dutt Gupta, C. Parvathamma and Manorama Savur are also discussed in Ganesh’s chapter. The intellectual legacy of Neera Desai is traced and documented by Veena Poonacha in another chapter in this part. Poonacha argues that there is a very evident connection between her feminist activism, teaching and writing. Desai’s lineage demands a shift from ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ as a disciplinary trajectory and this is visible from Neera Desai’s works that historicise social movements and a feminist critique of such movements. This activist-scholar orientation in its intertwining with other social factors can be explored from C. Parvathamma’s works as discussed by R. Indira, one of the former’s students. Deriving from some of Parvathamma’s works such as ‘Scheduled Castes at the Cross-Roads’ and ‘Reservation: A Pie in the sky’, Indira describes her as someone belonging to a Structural-Functionalist school, at the same time a critic of Parsonian interpretations of events and who asserted the element of empiricism in her works. Beginning from Parvathamma’s personal biography to her sociological endeavours, the author argues that her dalit identity was a factor that catered to a reflexivity that is again related to being objective in research. Kushal Deb in his chapter revisits the works of Ratna Naidu, who was not officially known for engaging in feminist writing or activism. Ratna Naidu, as a sociologist, has worked on religion, secularism, communalism, thus dealing with the differences of sociological terms of values, norms, etc., and placing them in the Indian scenario. Deb finds her studies on communalism significant for her works detail the conditions and reasons for it. He ends this chapter with Naidu’s denial of any tendency to distance herself from being a feminist and her claim of every woman sociologist as a feminist.

In the second part, a pedagogic trajectory of feminist studies, sociology or a meeting ground of these disciplines is discussed through the documentation of arguments and experiences by Anurekha Chari Wagh, Leena Pujari, Ashika Bhargav and Rhea D’Silva. Wagh’s chapter builds on the idea and practice of feminist mentoring through published materials and informal conversations from her experience. She has divided the chapter into four sections which are based on exploratory research. She analyses pedagogic experiences and mentoring in a classroom with reference to its possibilities of construction and destruction (especially when the mentoring process is evidently unequal). Her arguments are resonant of arguments raised by scholars from critical pedagogy. Along with exploring the influence of intersecting identities of caste, gender, sexual orientation, etc., on the mentoring process, she points out why it is necessary for a feminist mentor to be conscious of that embedded power in a mentoring situation and make efforts for self-interrogation as well as self-disclosure. This theme is taken forward in Leena Pujari’s chapter on ‘critical feminist pedagogy’. Though she takes from Paulo Freire’s insights on education as a space for dialogue and mutual growth between the pedagogue and the listener, she is very critical of the ‘missed’ aspect of gender in critical theory. Feminist pedagogy as a standpoint is a political project and must be able to foster a ‘debunking tendency’, so that the limited nature of knowledge, which is mediated by a variety of factors gets revealed to the partners of knowledge production, acquisition and dissemination. She also shares her anxiety over current ways of quality assessments followed in the higher education system in India such as CAS and CBSGS. Ashika Bhargav and Rhea D’Silva in their chapter reflect on their gendered identities and how it took them to the endeavour of feminism through the two disciplines of sociology and women’s studies. D’Silva’s narrative on her journey as a student of sociology using a feminist lens reveals the differences within the discipline of sociology when one has to do a feminist sociology rather than an ‘institutionally recognised’ way of doing this. With her critique of the sociological canon for being gender-blind in providing grand theories, the chapter moves to Bhargav’s experiences of being a student of women’s studies. She finds her tendency to ‘break boundaries’ while growing up as a beginning that followed by being a student in a women’s studies classroom and later in sociology classrooms. They argue for the need of a feminist consciousness in mainstream sociology that could be possible through an integration of the two, thereby helping us revisit and transform available sociological categories and concepts.

The third part discusses these erasures and insertions in feminist sociological research and tries to document such transformations. Rukmini Sen’s chapter with the title ‘Interrogating (Non) Consent’ thus discusses a less-discussed area of sexual consent and violence that has barely become a focus of sociological studies on marriage, family and kinship. Similarly, the ‘missed’ realm of ‘sexual marginality’ in feminist sociology and sociological studies on social movements is taken up by Pushpesh Kumar in his ethnographic writing on Kothis, a gender non-conformist group in Maharashtra based on a study conducted in the years beginning from 2009. Beginning with a note on how occasional cross-dressing makes Kothis different from Hijras and similar to groups like Dhunuris in West Bengal, the chapter responds to certain narratives we gather from related earlier works on the Kothi identity and nomenclature. The study details the processes of embodying effeminacies and aestheticising practices. The chapter begins with a critique of sociology’s negligence to vocalise sexual desires and sexual violence, and goes on to study the relationship between Kothis and Panthis (masculine men attracted to Kothis), how the HIV/AIDS discourse reduced Kothis to be feminine receptive partners of these Panthis, to desire their ‘gaze’, their treatment as women by Panthis and a concomitant discouragement to penetrate in the sexual act. Hiding of kothiness and forced heterosexual marriages are some other areas Kumar ponders upon in this chapter. Vishal Jadhav’s chapter explores the idea of ‘masculine’ or the meta-narrative of a hyper-masculine, how it was produced and reproduced. Placing it as a colonial construct, the chapter historicises how Maratha masculinity and their martial past is very much linked to new forms of political mobilisation.

The link between feminisms and the disciplinary trajectory of sociology in India is further explicated in Manisha Rao’s mapping of the sociology of the environment with respect to a gendered understanding. By giving a detailed account of women sociologists associated with environmental sociology, Rao sketches the different lenses employed by different scholars at different institutional locations in understanding environmental issues to describe social phenomena. Manorama Savur’s work on the impact of paper and pulp industries on the livelihood of tribal groups through a Marxist framework, Indra Munshi’s revisiting the history of tribal women’s contribution in the Warli Revolt to resist colonial forest regulations in Thana district, Gail Omvedt’s work on the new social movements from the 1970s and the participation of urban middle classes against an environmental degradation in cities are some of the works discussed to describe and critique the idea of ecofeminism and women’s innate closeness with nature. Bindhulakshmi Pattadath in her chapter engages with the links between psychologically ‘pathologised’ women, their everyday life and bio-medical narratives. Renny Thomas tries to explore the experiences of women scientists in India, where the aspects of gender and science find a place.

This volume places the possibilities and anxieties of a synthesis of feminist standpoints and institutionalised sociological practice when they are brought into academic research and writing. Rather than going with hierarchies of the empirical and the theoretical, the mutually fostering nature of the disciplines is to be appreciated, considering the room a feminist sociology can offer with reference to knowledge production and emancipatory potential.