Posted: December 17th, 2014

Postcolonial Perspectives: Women and the State of India

Postcolonial Perspectives: Women and the State of India

Order Description

Refer to reading list attached, should you require any of these documents, please contact me: From any of the readings covered in the class from the Women and Development Module onwards, including materials distributed in class, or videos/film clips presented in class, please write a critical comment, (please note that the focus of your paper must be INDIA or diasporic immigrant India/ns related issues, if you are doing a comparative paper, then India must be one of the countries you focus on) choosing from any one or more or any combination of, the following:
An article/assigned reading; A theme; An idea expressed in one of the readings;
A theoretical insight or perspective
Please discuss critically, putting down only your best thoughts. Please note that your discussion must be analytical, not descriptive. The objective is to focus on and to analyze an issue covered in the class that you are particularly interested in, to enable you to develop skills of critical thinking and analysis.

As guidelines for the assignment, some suggestions that you may incorporate, depending on your topic and focus:
Your essay should have three parts: An Introduction – where you state your problem/issue/question to be examined, why it is interesting and what your comment sets out to do; II. Theoretical framework/perspectives/methodology: mini literature review, scholars drawn from and arguments you like and don’t like III. Critical discussion: where you evaluate and critique combining II, and I discussing your perspective/opinion/analysis and about one or two paragraphs in conclusion.

READINGS TO CHOOSE FROM AND USE FOR PAPER
Women and Development in India
14. Bipasha Baruah, “Gendered Realities: Property Ownership and Tenancy Relationships” in Women and Property in Urban India (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010) 104. (chapter 2 and 8).
15. Aditi Kapoor, “The SEWA Way; Shaping another future for informal labour”. Futures. 39. no. 5 (2007): 554-568.
16. Kalima Rose, “SEWA: Women in Movement”, in Nalini Visvanathan, et al., The Women, Gender and Development Reader (Delhi: Zubaan, 1997) 382.
Women and Legal Issues
17. Annie Bunting, “Theorizing Women’s Cultural Diversity in Feminist International Human Right’s Strategies”, 20 Journal of Law and Society 6, 1993
18. Kapur “Revisioning the role of law in women’s humans rights struggles”
19. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Duke University Press, 2003), Chapter 5, “Women Between Community and State”, 147.
20. Zoya Hassan, “Gender, Religion and Democracy in India” Third World Quarterly (2010), 31:6, 939-954.
21. C. MacKinnon, “Sex equality under the Constitution of India: Problems, prospects, and “personal laws””, International Journal of Constitutional Law 2006 4(2):181-202.

Multiculturalism and Diaspora Issues
22. Vrinda Narain, “Critical Multiculturalism”, in Feminist Constitutionalism: Global Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 377.
23. Himani Bannerji, “Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Canadian Nation” in The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc., 2000) 63.
24. Pnina Werbner, “The place which is diaspora: citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol, 28, No. 1: 119-133 January 2002.
25. Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani: Bollywood, the ‘homeland’ nation-state, and the diaspora”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, 1015.

Although we fixate on our differences, ethnic minorities are bound together by the injustices and frustrations of racism
Aditya Chakrabortty
Thursday 30 October 2014
The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/bengali-black-ethnic-minorities-racism
—-
Before I was Asian, I was black. No, I haven’t since undergone some Jacko-style operation, or doused myself in Fair & Lovely. Rather, black was one of the terms my family and I used to describe ourselves.
I grew up in 80s London, which still echoed with the Anti-Nazi League’s chant of “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”. At her primary school, my sari-wearing mother was a member of the local NUT black teachers’ caucus. As late as university in the mid-90s, I was handed a black prospectus, featuring action shots of a Punjabi pointing at a noticeboard (sadly, this was to prove an all-too-accurate guide to student entz).
Discussing that period, those terms and the politics with which they were freighted, feels like remembering the era before email: so recent, so different. True, my mother’s old union branch still runs its black teachers section for “all teachers who face racism”. But the notion that someone of my background growing up today would refer to themselves as black is, frankly, fantastical.
Now you are black, or you are Asian – a categorical wall has been put up. And on either side of that wall other divisions are hurriedly being erected: you are a Gujarati Hindu from Leicester; he is a Bangladeshi Muslim from Whitechapel; they are Nigerian Christians from Lewisham. And so endlessly on, until you end up with what a sprawl of what A Sivanadan terms “cultural enclaves and feuding nationalisms”.
Isn’t this just the inevitable flowering of minor differences in an ever more diverse society? Quite the opposite. “Black” and “Asian” identities are just as badly bolted together as anything else. Take that cosy, cliched history of black Britain that begins with the Pathe newsreel of Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury. On which decks would have been the arrivals from Nairobi or Accra? Similarly Britain’s black history month, which ends today, takes its lead from the US – where the celebration began in 1926. But despite being an “Asian”, I might have as much in common with a black Trinidadian Hindu whose ancestors came from Uttar Pradesh as with a “fellow-Asian” whose parents hail from Multan, via Luton.
When someone like my late father responded to the term “black”, it was not because he’d forgotten his Tagore, or the films of Satyajit Ray. He carried that history with greater care and affection than those who today boast of their Bengali-ness. But “black” wasn’t about pigment or some flatpack identity. It was primarily a political term, borne of a recognition among those who’d recently arrived in Britain that they faced obstacles in common and would try and beat them together. One wore “black” not instead of “Jamaican” or “Sikh” but alongside all those other labels of cultural and historical identity, as an anti-racist affiliation.
Our parents were black because when they tried to get digs, they’d all see those signs saying “No black, no Irish, no dogs”. They were black because they’d all struggle to get the jobs, the pay and the promotions they deserved. And they were black because they all faced racial abuse and violence.
Of course, one could be black and Indian; one inevitably was black and leftwing. In his new book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, Satnam Virdee charts how groups such as the Indian Workers Association, or Jayaben Desai and the heroic women strikers at the Grunwick film processing plant, were constantly building alliances with others on the left, whether in the trade unions or the Socialist Workers party.
Contrast that with what we have now: a host of ethnic identities all competing with one another for recognition and government funding for their own pet projects – not on the grounds of what they do but on who they claim to represent. This has been encouraged by Whitehall – which doled out money to the Muslim Council of Britain in the name of preventing terrorism. And it has certainly been fuelled by local councils. In his book The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani notes how throughout the 80s, Bradford city council encouraged and funded local mosques to group together and “provide an alternative voice” for Muslims in the area. The hope was “they would become allies in a process of absorbing opposition, at the expense of the younger militants”. It goes without saying that the “militants” were aggressively secular.
The effect of all this, as Manchester University’s Claire Alexander observes, has been to encourage the creation of “closed-down community identities” – and to shift power and money from an openly political, progressive anti-racist politics to older, conservative ethnic politicians – the activist gives way to the community leader.
This move has bestowed power and money on certain figures within these ethnic communities – but it has also enabled successive governments to pretend that racism is no longer the problem. Instead, if you can’t get on in today’s Britain today, it’s because of some cultural factors that you and your community really need to sort out, pronto. This is the same sleight of hand that you see in discussions of sex and class, too: covering up the systemic issues and pretending that the problems can be solved by the individual. Lovely women: lean in! Oi, proles: get off Benefits Street! And you Bangladeshis: shave off those beards! Don’t worry about whether the game is rigged, or the rules are wrong: just play up.
Where this ends up is with David Cameron, that community leader for Old Etonians, speechifying in Munich about “state multiculturalism”. “When a white person holds racist views, we rightly condemn them,” said the prime minister who put on London streets vans reading “Go Home”. “But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from some who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly, even fearful, to stand up to them.”
Except that racism hasn’t gone away. It may have got more nuanced, as you’d expect over time. But in work, it still pays to be a white man. On the streets, the police in England and Wales record over 100 racist “incidents” every day, and the Institute of Race Relations has tallied up 106 racial murders between 1993 and 2013. Meanwhile, to be black or Asian is to be far more likely to be stopped and searched – up to 29 times more likely in the West Midlands.
The obstacles remain, racism is still with us. Even after decades of fixating on our differences, ethnic minorities in this country are bound together by many of the same injustices and frustrations. My identity comes in many parts: Bengali, Londoner and the rest. But I am also black, in the same way my parents were. And if you feel the pinch of the same constraints, you’re black too.
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