Women's Movements (India)

Indian women's movements have a long, albeit complicated, history. Avoiding the wave metaphor that often highlights one strand of women's movements and marginalizes others, this entry analyzes the complex terrain of movements over time. Beginning in the early twentieth century, women from all castes and classes worked around the freedom struggle. Yet, upper-caste women primarily worked with the Gandhian movement around suffrage, education, and reform of Hindu personal law, while dalit women worked with Ambedkar to end caste and gender injustice, and women across caste and class also worked in the emerging communist women's movement. Such divisions continue today as dalit feminists organized to challenge the autonomous feminists who, starting in the 1980s, began to challenge violence against women, for ignoring how caste was constitutive of that violence. And LGBTKQHI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Kothi, Queer, Hijra, Intersex) activists highlight how gender and sexual identities should also be central to the understanding of violence and gender justice.