ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Vasudha NagarajSubscribe to Vasudha Nagaraj

The 'List' and the Task of Rearranging Academic Relationships

The list of sexual harassers in academia and progressive politics is an event born out of the demands for equality in the increasingly diverse Indian universities. The proliferation of new media has created new pathways of becoming political for young students and enabled their battles against cultural elitism and misogyny. There is need for a fresh debate on harassment, discrimination, and consent.

The Practising Lawyer

The Practising Lawyer Vasudha Nagaraj counsel the client that such is the practice of law. He would ride his rickety scooter furiously through the traffic-congested roads of the old city of Hyderabad and appear in these various courts which were at KBalagopal took up the legal profession quite late in his life. He enrolled in the Bar Council of Andhra Pradesh in 1997. Not even a dozen years passed before his sudden demise, leaving more than a thousand clients devastated, insecure and defenceless. In the legal profession it is said that the gestation period for a lawyer is about 10 years. It takes that long to apprentice with senior lawyers, to learn to draft, plead, cross-examine, argue, and more importantly, to gain the trust of the litigants. In Balagopal

A Difficult Match

Over the last two decades, the discourse on domestic violence has steadily moved into the legal/institutional domain. Originating in the debates within the women's movements on structural inequalities in the family, where women's struggles had a certain centrality, it has become a legal/governmental category. Emblematic of most feminist initiatives about women's lives in our country, this shift is beset with its own dilemmas and impasses. While naming, categorising, enumerating and measuring violence as well as efforts to make them legally recognisable are imperative to any feminist politics, they also generate their own effects. These effects, while resulting in some well-needed institutional solutions, also bring in their wake, certain conceptual rigidities. There is a need to pay attention to these effects while rethinking the familiar demands in the arena of domestic violence: foolproof laws, sensitive institutions and better awareness among women.

Adjudicating (Un)Domestic Battles

Considering that domestic violence emerges in a context where women are refusing to conform to given roles and seeking to change them, to what extent can legal intervention empower them in their struggles? What is of concern here is that the current perspectives focusing on violence and victimhood are not able to capture these strategic battles of women. The seemingly "natural" response of looking to law for resolutions is a problematic move - one that individualises the woman into a case and leads to a depoliticisation of the discussion of women's battles in the family.

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