Abstract
Vina Mazumdar (1927—2013) saw herself as one placed between ‘tradition, counter-tradition and heresy’. After years of teaching in Bihar, she migrated to New Delhi in the 1960s, first to join University Grants Commission, and then Indian Council of Social Science Research. As Member-Secretary of Committee on the Status of Women in India, she coordinated the work of its large team of members, actively supporting researchers and staff in her inimitable style to produce Towards Equality, acknowledged as the ‘founding text’ of the women’s movement. In 1980 she established Centre for Women’s Development Studies whose focus has been on issues pertaining to women in both rural and urban India. Its work among the tribal women of Bankura (West Bengal) soon became well known as a model of grassroots women’s empowerment.
These four essays seek to bring the work and legacy of Vina Mazumdar to life. Mazumdar left her imprint in manifold if deeply institutional ways, one that would not be adequately acknowledged were we to look at her writings alone. As everyone knows, her magnum opus was an orchestrated report produced collectively under the most dramatic and extraordinary historical circumstances, namely Towards Equality. Each of the essays demonstrate not only what she did and meant to the people of her time and also ours, but also how she went about her tasks, transforming her peers in a range of organisations and governmental bodies she was associated with, which extended to projects as far afield as West Bengal.
The first essay by Devaki Jain takes readers back to the eventful decades of the 1970s and 1980s. These were the years that saw the emergence of a ‘women’s studies movement’ with pioneers like Vina Mazumdar, Lotika Sarkar, Neera Desai and Leela Dube, as well as Devaki Jain herself, becoming initiators and builders of new institutional spaces and offering new directions of thinking and action. Devaki Jain vividly recalls the more heady moments of those times. Readers will find especially informative the complex if close links that women like Vina Mazumdar and Devaki Jain had with governmental ministries and other official and unofficial agencies, and their role in bringing ‘women’ into state policy within the frameworks of third world development. Kumud Sharma’s essay takes us to the role that the founding text Towards Equality played in Vina Mazumdar’s own intellectual and political formation, the kind of unlearning and relearning that someone of her generation had to go through in order to make women’s issues the centre of her agenda. She goes on to dwell on the special relationship that Mazumdar developed through action research as a mode of intervention into the lives and futures of poor women, in districts like Bankura in West Bengal, with whom the Centre for Women’s Development Studies built an institutional connection that continues to this very day. Nirmala Banerjee’s essay offers another kind of commentary through her friendship with Vina Mazumdar that also went back to the 1970s. As an economist with many well-known publications in the fields of women, work and development to her credit, this essay is more in the nature of a dialogue between Nirmala Banerjee’s own ideas and concerns and the influence that Vina Mazumdar exerted. Moreover, it also provides a significantly critical lens on some of Vina Mazumdar’s agendas, and thereby gives us a sense of how open-minded Mazumdar could be to the views of others. The final piece by Mary E. John offers the views of a close reader of some of Vina Mazumdar’s less remembered writings. The main focus of the essay is on the edited volume Symbols of Power published in 1979, and especially the remarkable introduction by Vina Mazumdar, in order to revisit difficult questions of the women’s movement’s relationship to questions of politics and power. Taken together, these essays indicate not just how pivotal Vina Mazumdar was in her own time, but also how remarkably relevant she is for all of us today.