Mary Hays, the 18th-century English writer, remains an unfamiliar name despite the recent efforts of feminist literary theory to reclaim the lost tradition of women’s writing.
Perspectives on Work, Home, and Identity from Artisans in Telangana: Conversations Around Craft by Chandan Bose, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; pp 311, ¤93.59.
This paper uses this author’s earlier paper from 1988 on M K Gandhi’s ideas on women in order to reinterpret it in terms of contemporary feminist perspectives. It lays bare the theories and methodologies used in the earlier paper and suggests that such reflexive interventions are necessary when assessing the thoughts and practices of figures such as Gandhi, whose ideas have been given new meanings in and through contemporary commentaries. It argues that Gandhi’s perspective on women needs to be situated within his project of structuring a new modernity for the emerging and evolving Indian nation, and should be perceived through the lens of hegemonic masculinity.
With #MeToo having taken the world by storm in the last few years, reflecting on debates in the Indian context reveals some important lessons. Due process is one of them but is not the key takeaway; attention must be paid to how feminist solidarities are being forged. Further, contextualising it within the changing nature of the nation state makes #MeToo stand out in the trajectory of feminist movements in India, as being one that does not engage with the state or any institution. It thus embodies what Latin American feminists have called “politics in feminine,” in which politics of desire unseat the rights-based focus of such movements.
In the feminist context, the politicisation of the private has been popular. With the pandemic at play, the households have resurfaced in quotidian conversations. Their political identity is no more limited to the battle of ownership. This space has now garnered a novel identity by featuring in the governmental political rhetoric. The article discusses if and how households are compelled to state their traditional identities, allow encroachment on and defiling of their existence and as a result evaluate the formation of the new recognition of this emerging (pseudo) safe spaces after it sheds the fetters of politics.
