Articles by Sharmila Rege

"New times" in the university are marked by narratives that bemoan a "decline in plurality and standards" especially in places where a new generation of scholars and students from historically disadvantaged sections in Indian society is posing challenges to the social homogeneity of the classroom, boards of studies and other academic bodies, leading to obvious frictions on issues related to standards and merit. A new generation of dalit scholarship has raised questions both about the accessibility of higher education and the limitations in making it enabling for those who struggle to gain entry into it. This has enabled an open debate on the absence of transparency in higher education and the nexus of networks of exclusion that operate formally and informally on campuses to reproduce caste inequalities in the metropolitan university.

This paper maps three discrete and overlapping feminist perspectives on globalisation, locating their theoretical genealogies and legacies in development studies, third world/transnational studies and post-communism transitology studies. It underlines the prominent discourses of globalisation which in outlining the econo-techno and institutional processes as having a pervasive if uneven impact, treat them as gender neutral. The paper argues that a mode of relational analysis, which makes feminist contributions distinctive, helps to make connections and trace the naturalised assumptions in the debate on globalisation. It suggests that engendering the discourse of globalisation entails more than simply tacking women on to macrostructural models of globalisation.

The sphere of cultural studies, as it has developed in India, has viewed the 'popular' in terms of mass-mediated forms - cinema and art. Its relative silence on caste-based cultural forms or forms that contested caste is surprising, since several of these forms had contested the claims of national culture and national identity. While these caste-based cultural practices with their roots in the social and material conditions of the dalits and bahujans have long been marginalised by bourgeois forms of art and entertainment, the category of the popular lives on and continues to relate to everyday lives, struggles and labour of different classes, castes and gender. This paper looks at caste-based forms of cultural labour such as the lavani and the powada as grounds on which cultural and political struggles are worked out and argue that struggles over cultural meanings are inseparable from struggles of survival.

Cultural Hierarchies Sharmila Rege Dalit Cultural Movement and Dialectics of Dalit Politics in Maharashtra by Gopal Guru; Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, Mumbai, 1997, THE book under review, a documentation of the dalit women's cultural assertion and an analysis of the post-1980s decline of the dalit cultural movement in Maharashtra, is welcome, particularly at this political juncture. On the one hand hindutva forces project a homogenised brahmanical Hindu identity in a bid to woo the dalit and bahujan votes, and some of the most radical of the 'panthers' seem to have surrendered to the calls of the 'tiger territory'. On the other, the forces of globalisation project a homogenised, seemingly secure, globalised consumer identity. Yet the caste question, like never before, seems to have come to the centre of political processes as an issue of redistribution of power and justice. The separate political assertion of dalit women's organisations has been significant in drawing attention to the inseparable nature of the caste and gender question in India. That dalit political parties, organisations and feminists came together in giving a call for the celebration of December 25, the day on which Babasaheb Ambcdkar burnt the Manusmriti, as Indian Women's day, is a case in point. For all those who still continue to conceive the caste question as 'identity politics' and a politics of recognition, and thereby political economy and culture as a mechanical dichotomy. Guru's analysis underlines the inseparability of the structures of the political economy and meaning of cultural reproduction.