Abstract
Neera Desai (1925–2009) established the Research Centre for Women’s Studies and the Centre for Rural Development at the SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. As she believed that women’s studies was not just a sterile discipline, but an instrument of social change, Neera Desai broke the academic isolation of higher education by democratising knowledge systems through community engagement and activism. She actively worked on issues of social and economic reform and empowerment, her participation in the nationalist movement having honed a deep social consciousness.
Neera Desai, born in Ahmedabad in 1925, came to live in Bombay as a child, where she pursued her education and settled down with her family, to then take up a career in academics. The city she came to look upon as her home was a hub of nationalist activity in the years when she was growing up and her own family was drawn to the Gandhi-led movement. During her university life, she participated in the Quit India Movement and was arrested for a brief period. During this phase, while she was influenced by the socialist thinkers, she was inspired at the same time by women such as Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and others. These influences shaped the life and activities of Neeraben (as she was addressed by colleagues and friends) in the decades to come. In her worldview, the agenda of social change was part of the nationalist upsurge and guided social movements as well as the society India sought to build after Independence. Her involvement with these issues remained integral to her explorations in the arena of Women’s Studies (WS).
From her location in the Regional Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS), Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) University, Bombay, which also hosted the first National Conference on Women’s Studies in 1981, Neera Desai had a panoramic view of the evolution of WS both as a perspective within academia and as a discipline since the 1990s. It was not without reason that reflecting on her journey and that of WS, she voiced an apprehension that the ‘explosion of knowledge created a new category of “womanologists” who were more concerned with academic exercise rather than with the “politics of change”. She added that she hoped she was and, would be proved to be, wrong’ (Sharma, 2005, p. 80).
Neeraben approached issues in the women’s movement in India from her own location, which remained strongly grounded in the experience of Western India. While this partly stemmed from her physical location in the region, it was strengthened by her research on Gujarat, in the course of which she studied socio-economic relations which in turn shaped politics in the region. This gave her insights as well as a familiarity with the dynamics of change within the society in that region. Along with A. R. Desai, well-known sociologist/historian, her husband, she engaged with academic debates on social processes, including the political challenges to these. A continuous concern that emerges from her writings, especially in her study of social change in Gujarat, was the study of processes of social transformation. This involved a study of the prevailing social structures in society. Her central concern was about the impact of colonial rule and ‘whether the changes that took place under the impact of British rule—an external force—in Gujarat exhibited characteristics which were … the seeds of a modern, secular and achieving social system …’ (Desai, 1978, p. 408).
A similar concern for understanding the structural roots of women’s oppression pervades the analysis in her first book where she writes that
… though the theoretical and juridical basis for women’s equality has been laid down, the building up of the entire structure on the foundation remains to be done .… the women’s movement shall have to strike out a new path, march along a different road. It will require a new vision, new methods of struggles, a new type of leadership. (Desai, 1977 [1957], p. 257)
Her familiarity with these issues was accompanied by an ability to engage in dialogue with others in the regional language, a fact that she valued. With this objective, she continued to write in Gujarati. In fact, when the Indian Association for Women’s Studies was set up, Neeraben, along with her friends and colleagues, made a special effort to set up a regional association, the Stri Abhyas Vyaspith, to reach out to women and scholars who would be more conversant with Marathi and other spoken languages in the western region.
The name of the RCWS at SNDT, in what is Mumbai now, the first Centre set up to focus on WS in India within the university system, remains inalienably linked with Neera Desai. As also the memory of working with her in the minds of those who comprised her team over long years. Her personality remains etched in the many facets and activities that helped in the evolution of the Centre and its activities, which enable it to move on and tackle challenges in a vastly changing world. Undoubtedly, the RCWS and the SNDT University now find themselves swamped by these changes, which are contextual with respect to the University system as well as by a shift in the concerns arising from a new location in the world of academia. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile for younger scholars trying to track the history of WS in India to dwell on the integral links that Neera Desai often harped upon: between women’s education, as envisaged by the early social reformers, the national movement and the panning out of the WS agenda in its early phase.
It is not surprising that the scholars invited to contribute to this special section represent some of the key members of the team Neera Desai developed at the RCWS, who also carried forward her spirit of commitment to bringing change in the lives of women.
For this issue, Maithreyi Krishnaraj has aptly chosen to track the history of the setting up of the RCWS within the SNDT University, initially as the Research Unit on Women’s Studies (RUWS) in the University’s Bombay campus in the mid-1970s. The motto of the RUWS was ‘Change and Challenge’. This was a time when material, data and research studies had not burgeoned. The Unit was more or less the lone player in a new unmapped territory. One could not begin doing research unless one first had an idea of what existed. There was hence a strong emphasis that data should be available on the status of women in diverse fields. The second significant point is the way collaboration with other departments and other institutions was deemed critical, but this did not happen. The third note sounded was the need for ‘scientific’ studies and the perception of women’s studies as a contribution to intellectual life.
Krishnaraj observes that questions of methodology, perspective and frameworks were going to emerge more clearly only in later years. The Unit became a Centre with UGC (University Grants Commission) support, and soon became a hub for activities focusing on women’s rights and status. She recalls that her involvement with it turned into an ‘intellectual adventure’, in which she drew inspiration from the way it was conceived, of having links with the women’s movement, rather than as a purely intellectual engagement. She observes that ‘unfortunately, today the attraction of academic prestige has lured some to receive the approbation of the academic gate keepers’. Krishnaraj recalls Neera Desai’s able leadership and her functioning, which rested on giving her colleagues the ‘freedom to initiate new projects, to organise workshops, to plan programmes’. This allowed the Centre to emerge as a space which encouraged intellectual exploration, even as it pursued research grounded in social reality and the documenting of women’s life and experiences.
Veena Poonacha examines Neera Desai’s research and writing in the context of her engagement with social theory. Drawing upon her work focusing on the feminist movements in India and how they evolved and shaped the lives of women activists in India across generations, Poonacha argues that while Neeraben’s writings reveal the progression of her ideas about women’s studies as an intellectual movement and as a catalyst for social change they also shed light on her understanding of feminist politics. Neera Desai’s search for a definition and framework to under-stand the evolution of feminist thought remains riddled with dilemmas given the diversity of Indian society, the ideological crosscurrents as well as the organisational forms that have emerged in different phases.
Vibhuti Patel, in a paper titled ‘Women’s Studies in Praxis’, focuses on Neera Desai’s involvement in developmental work for rural women in Udwada, south Gujarat. Neeraben ‘visualised action as an integral component of all programmes’, she maintains. This was undertaken with the setting up of the Centre for Rural Development (CRD) in 1981, with the purpose of spreading education and awareness, providing institutional support to women in distress and creating opportunities for employment. The Centre was developed as a field for extension activity-related work, training and exposure for SNDT students who initially came from the RCWS, subsequently drawing students from other streams. As CRD developed into a training centre, simultaneously developing learning resources which factored in local needs, it also ran into several hurdles posed by resistance from local vested interests. This in itself provided a learning opportunity for the students and faculty involved.
Finally, in a paper reflecting on Neera Desai’s Journey Straddling Women’s Studies and the Women’s Movement in India, drawing extensively upon her early work, Woman in Modern India, Indu Agnihotri, seeks to explore and understand the mind and the method of this pioneering woman scholar. Desai chose to focus on the position of women in India as early as the 1950s. This work marks an early attempt by an academic to approach the subject of the writing of a history of the women’s movement in India. At the same time, it does so by engaging with the issue from a wider perspective of change as envisaged by social movements in India. Agnihotri highlights the discussion on the issue of feminism and the politics of the women’s movement, which first emerged in the context of the freedom struggle and continues to pose a challenge to those in search of frameworks to understand the diverse span of the movement in contemporary India.
As Neera Desai herself argued,
… there is a real need to reach those who are working at the ground level. After all, one of the basic purposes of the researches on women is to transform the situation with better equipment of knowledge. We need to ask this question as to whether we are losing the transformative edge of women’s studies .… whether ‘silence’ or ‘negotiation’ is the strategy of women, does it lead to any improvement in handling the situation on the ground? Explorations in new areas, the search for deeper meanings, encompassing difference and avoidance of simplistic explanations of the problem are important but at times there is a danger of getting lost in meandering articulations and expressions. For instance, while recognizing the significance of individual resistance to violence and the vital necessity of building confidence, inner strength and courage, without the collective struggle there is hardly any solution to individual tragedy. (Desai, 2002, pp. 42–43)