Practitioners of women’s studies are foxed at a news item that has recently appeared, announcing that “Nita Ambani will soon be teaching women’s studies at BHU” in response to a proposal by the University requesting the illustrious lady to “join the university to improve the living standard of women from Banaras and the Poorvanchal region”. After students at BHU protested, both Reliance Industries and the varsity claimed that no formal invitation had been sent, though it seems clear that an invitation had been extended.

Students, teachers and all others who have witnessed the uncertainty haunting women’s studies centres (WSCs) in universities across India over the last several years have been confused by the offer made to Ambani. This is a direct outcome of the not-so-hidden callousness towards the centres and to women’s studies on the part of the University Grants Commission (UGC). Should this latest news raise hopes that if the Ambanis look towards women’s studies, its stars may begin to change? Or, should degree holders in women’s studies now worry that even the few jobs presently available may now be taken up by women at the top?

Speaking from a long-term perspective, much like the subject of its interrogation, women’s studies is sought to be consigned to the margins in present times. Having engendered other disciplines and opened up new contours for academic analysis, women’s studies stands at the brink of being ousted from a large number of universities and thereby from academic frameworks. This is because the very existence of most WSCs – which played a key role in heralding the entry of women and studies focusing on them into academic curricula in India – have been facing uncertainty with regard to their financial status especially over the last five years.

This scenario should be a matter of concern to all those who have an interest in advancing sensitivity towards and about women, who have historically been part of those socially oppressed, dominated and discriminated against. Ironically, it is precisely when it is becoming clear that the pathways to development in modern India are fraught with life-threatening hazards for women at every step that women’s studies, which brought their life experiences into scrutiny through an academic lens, is sought to be dislodged from its institutional location.

At a time when our educational policy should be exploring ways and means to use this formal space to address the phenomenon of a visible marginalisation of women and a deepening of gendered divides as per social indicators, the uncertainty plaguing women’s studies points to the unlikely prospect of serious discussion on these critical factors.

What prospects does this callousness in academic fora towards women as subjects, citizens hold out for women in their real lives?

Some of these issues were discussed at a virtual National Convention on Women’s Studies Centres (WSCs): Current Concerns and Challenges: Way Forward organised by the Indian Association for Women’s Studies (IAWS) on February 20, 2021. The convention was addressed by Professor Nirmala Banerjee (economist, formerly with CSSS, Kolkata), a doyen of women’s studies. Speaking at the convention, students from WSCs highlighted long-term challenges with regard to their collective future, as also the immediate crisis of unemployment.

Women’s studies: Alliances and partnerships in the early years

From our present location, the themes and issues highlighted by Towards Equality (report of the GOI’s Committee on the Status of Women in India, 1974), just prior to the dark days of the Emergency, continue to serve as a reminder of the goals that independent India set out to achieve. So too the focus on agriculture and rural women in the early years of discussions on women’s status and rights. The centrality of debates on development in the organised struggles by women were part of advancing the Indian perspective in dialogues initiated with the policy establishment to push for change in women’s status, alongside putting forth alternate viewpoints on development from Third world locations on international platforms. It was these combined pressures built by activists and pioneers in women’s studies that foregrounded new approaches to develop a gendered lens to study, struggle and strategise around the subject of women, starting with the sixth five-year plan, the first to include a chapter on women.

As the Emergency era passed, women’s studies emerged from the underground to push open the portals of the research and policy establishment to claim a legitimate space within academia. Conceived in times of crisis, it explored new avenues to find recognition in the corridors of the official educational establishment. There is much to think of with regard to the responsiveness of some of institutions in the post-Emergency years and the women’s movement which carried women’s studies on its shoulders, in the realisation that for rights to advance, the controls over access, production and dissemination of knowledge had to be broken first.

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Perhaps symptomatic of its times, the SNDT, the first Women’s University in India, gave women’s studies its first home, apart from the ICSSR, which set up the first Women’s Studies Unit and introduced women’s studies as a thrust area in its fellowship programme from the late 1970s. Despite this support, women’s studies struggled to find space within academia for more than a decade. It required Gandhians such as J.P. Naik and other stalwarts such as Vina Mazumdar, Neera Desai, Madhuri Shah and many more at the helm, to push educational institutions/bodies to create both new platforms for women’s studies as well as space within existing institutions.

The Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), established in 1980, soon established itself as a premier ICSSR-supported research institution, forging links with development studies to advance research that interrogated entrenched hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries from women’s standpoint. Not surprisingly, these efforts located women within a larger developmental context to address poverty and inequality, arguing that interventions to fight these must factor in the marginality of women.

Given the backdrop of the ‘Women’s Decade’, formal consultations to critically engage with policies from the standpoint of women were often backed by UN agencies, with the International Labour Organisation taking the lead to address concerns around women and work from both rural and urban locations. We need to remember that the development debate was perhaps the most critical intervention from diverse Third World locations in the evolving discourse on women’s studies, at a time when the search for a new world order had still not been abandoned, nor replaced by the TINA [There Is No Alternative] factor. Even as nations continued to be at war, women from South and West Asian regions tried to form alliances across borders, demanding the inclusion of their perspectives in international platforms.

Within India, the struggle for women’s studies to evolve both as a perspective and as a discipline drew on support from a vibrant women’s movement with a clear focus on issues emerging from the ground. While on the one hand the need to focus on long-term planning for women was highlighted, so was the growing violence against women in both the public and private spheres. The 1980s saw the resurgence of organised mass-based struggles. These kept up a pressure on the political establishment to address critical issues, going beyond the token ‘presence’ of women, given the recent history of the Emergency, imposed by a woman prime minister, who did not hesitate to put women leaders behind bars.

Clearly, gender was not the only axis around which this resurgent movement mobilised. The organisations at the forefront of these mass actions struggled to frame the women’s question looking beyond narrow definitions of gender to focus on struggles of the poor, keeping women at the centre. The homogeneity of the category of women emerged as a continuously contested terrain. Activists on the left pushed for recognition of women’s struggles from the location of the ‘poor,’ comprising those discriminated against as citizens, members of the oppressed/ exploited classes and on account of their gender, the category foregrounded by the autonomous groups.

The sharp debates enriched the movement, with different streams bringing a tenacity of purpose and commitment, while often if not always allowing for meeting points in action agendas, despite deep differences. This synergy kept alive a democratic discourse, cherished in the post -Emergency years, along with a commitment to focal points for interventions in the international domain, overlapping with efforts by women/people of the Third World from the platforms of the UN, the Non -Alignment Movement and the erstwhile Socialist Bloc.

WSCs: An institutional location for women’s studies

WSCs first started with support from the UGC in the mid-1980s at the university level, along with Women’s Development Cells (WDCs) in colleges. These were initially to focus on research and extension activities. However, the advent of women’s studies perspectives resulted in a flood of research which amassed data, information and conceptual/thematic research, allowing for scope to develop teaching programmes. The initiative to introduce women’s studies into the teaching curriculum was taken by the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, one of the premier ICSSR institutes in this country in 1995-96, with the UGC agreeing that this would infuse much needed energy and a gender-sensitive perspective from a specifically Indian location into the teaching curriculum. Subsequently, from 1996, refresher courses in women’s studies were conducted, including in collaboration with CWDS and universities, to initiate teachers into issues, concepts and research methods with a women’s studies approach from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Over the last three decades, the WSCs in Indian universities have multiplied, reaching a figure of nearly 160 such Centres apart from the WDCs, initially set up with support from the CSWB. Such cells today also exist in several private colleges and institutions, including those offering specialised courses in sciences and engineering across India. Since the mid-90s, the UGC allowed Centres to offer teaching programmes in women’s studies at various levels, starting with certificate and diploma courses, research degrees and masters in women’s/ gender studies.

From around 2009, the UGC adopted a policy to allow the advanced centres to become departments with regular faculty, and sanctioned budgets for other posts, as per the recommendations of the Vina Mazumdar Committee. Led by dynamic scholars, the WSCs, showed an openness of mind and a visionary approach, allowing for the women’s studies space to be infused with critical research training, while opening up possibilities for research with a community involvement, transcending formal institutional boundaries.

With scarce funding, many explored local sources of knowledge, to focus on the specificities of regional histories and social patterns; overcoming the linguistic barriers that a pan- Indian location imposes. Micro-studies on the histories of local communities, cultures and practices and of social institutions in their regional specificity based on a tapping of local sources has been a specific contribution across several centres, while also embracing areas of common concern. These include studies on: the girl child and sex ratios; violence, sites of conflict; work, employment and the persistence of patterns of gender segregation in a globalised economy; gender budgeting and financial institutions/planning; and gender, ecology and environment.

Critical engagement with linkages between and the intersection of gender, identity, culture, discrimination and cultures/practices of exclusion have added to the insights from women’s studies, underscoring the need to understand caste and the persistence of caste-based prejudices/practices and entrenched inequalities from specific societal locations to understand the shaping of the macro-reality in ways that continues to challenge the constitutional goal of equality.

Gendering institutions of higher education

Since the 1980s, women’s studies has travelled far beyond its early frontiers in the social sciences. While participants in women’s studies courses were initially mostly drawn from the disciplines of social science/humanities, over time the sciences too opened up to gender concerns within the natural sciences. Several professional bodies have engaged with issues which first emerged from women’s studies to critically engage with methodological perspectives which challenged patriarchal assumptions and their intersection with structures, institutionalised hierarchies and ideologies to uphold power.

Over these decades, women’s studies registered its disciplinary presence in the UGC conducted NET/JRF/SET, as also in the civil services examinations conducted by the UPSC. Women’s/gender studies are key components of teacher training courses conducted both by the UGC-sponsored institutions and the NCERT/SCERT, given that the need to address the gender dimensions of schooling and education at all levels is known to be the key to success in educational policy.

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Programmes on gender sensitisation and development have been initiated in the IARI Research/Extension units, the KVKs and science institutions. Over the last decade there has been a realisation that gender equality in the STEM is crucial, and in the larger interest of scientific progress and society. Recognising this, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the DST launched the Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions (GATI) as a novel pilot programme, envisioned in mission mode to promote gender equity in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine domains.

Clearly, the issues flagged during these years pertain not only to giving space, visibility and opportunities to women but also the need to focus on how existing perspectives on gender shape research agendas to carry prejudices based on social contexts and hierarchies into scientific research and institutions, determining both research agendas and fund flows.

Women’s studies: At a crossroads

While recognising these successes, it is true that a vexed relationship between women’s studies and other fields continues to mark the interactions between disciplines and the institutional responses. Despite Indian academia having embraced inter-disciplinarity as a methodological perspective for several decades now, certain hidebound boundaries remain.

This contradiction is most visible in present times when the doors of established departments seem to be shut for women’s studies scholars, even as other disciplines embrace gender as an analytical category and claim a space within women’s studies on grounds of inter-disciplinarity. Reciprocity in recognition of scholarship in women’s studies is largely missing. While entry for and from other disciplinary trainings into women’s studies is more or less seamless, the reverse is hardly possible or likely.

This raises serious questions with regard to opportunities and employability for scholars from WSCs. There is an urgent need to draw up norms for entry and lateral shifts, if women’s studies scholars are not to lose out on legitimate opportunities. For this, a more sober discussion on curriculum at different levels may be required, as also hard negotiation on behalf of women’s studies in and by the UGC’s Standing Committee on Women’s Studies.

It is true that as funds in higher education enforce a squeeze on appointments, this battle gets more bitter. The UGC and those involved in decision-making in the education establishment seem to have turned a deaf ear to the plight of both women’s studies and its practitioners. Academic programmes run by the WSCs face closure, while those holding degrees duly awarded in line with UGC Guidelines face a blank wall in the face of withdrawal/uncertainty of funding.

There is a need to review the processes that have led to this situation while exploring the linkages between women’s studies and recent changes affected by state policy with regard to institutions of higher education. This should be done with sensitivity for the concerns about the future of an entire generation of scholars who are presently in the job market, with degrees in women’s studies at various levels.

Women’s studies has much to contribute to opening up the frontiers of knowledge, but for that the discipline and its practitioners have to be accorded due recognition both in the intellectual terrain and in the envisioning of educational institutions.

Meanwhile, one is left wondering whether the slogan Hum Do Hamaare Do may redefine the contours of women’s fate in India yet again, in far different ways than encountered by the pioneers in women’s studies.

Indu Agnihotri was the director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi.

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