Indian atheist criticism of religion provokes less a religio-legal discourse of blasphemy than one of ‘hurt religious sentiments’ as legitimating the violence levied in retaliation, which has come to form a hitherto unstudied aspect of what has come to be called ‘saffron terror’. While previously it was common to find atheists debating whether or not […]
Read More… from Atheism, Injury and Hindutva in Contemporary India
The Pakistani penal code provides a wide yet highly ambiguous legal net to protect citizens of all faiths from “insults intended to outrage [their] religious feelings”. Framed by the colonial state and hardened by the postcolonial state with the alleged intent of dissuading (religious) identity-based violence, the so-called blasphemy laws have in fact had an […]
Read More… from Religious injury, injustice and the legal life of rancour in Pakistan
India’s surging nationalism from the 1920s onwards relied on the participation of students. Though there is historiographical consensus on their crucial role in the making of post-colonial countries, student activism in colonial India is marginal in mainstream narratives on nationalism. The role played by schoolgirls is even more elusive, due to their subalternity to male […]
This paper looks at Indian youth climate activism, particularly the Indian branches of Fridays for Future (FFF), with a focus on gendered discourses and media practices. International media coverage foregrounds gendered images and provides a feminised public image of the global climate movement with female icons, from the iconic Greta Thunberg to other female representatives […]
Read More… from Gendered (In)Visibility in Indian Youth Climate Activism
Women’s presence in right-wing movement in India remains a site of contradiction and tension. Multiple frameworks have been applied to understand this presence as a case of complementary gendered agency to the masculinised politics of right-wing parties such as the BJP and to understand the motivations for women actors who align their interests with these […]
The surging right wing is posing a critical challenge to democracies and pluralism all over the world today. The case of contemporary India, where a majoritarian right-wing politico-ideological formation commands power, is no exception. The country has been buffeted by a rolling tide of Hindu majoritarian politics. The militant creed of Hindu nationalism has come […]
Read More… from In the Service of a ‘Just Cause’: Unpacking Women’s Violent Activisms
This paper aims at providing a general overview of the strategies used by women belonging to the adivasi/indigenous communities of contemporary Jharkhand, India, in order to advocate their rights. Tracking the heterogenous forms of discrimination faced by Santal, Munda, Oraon and Ho women (i.e. domestic violence, witch hunts, human trafficking), the paper frames the different […]
Koodankulam in south India has witnessed among the earliest, largely women-led movements against nuclear energy.The intimacies of shared community spaces, conventionally sites of communal child rearing, traditional livelihood practices of drying fish/making beedis & other collective chores, transformed into sites of intense protests when their communities were threatened by the imposition of a nuclear plant. […]
Both India and South Africa have dealt with one common factor: colonialism and oppression. In India, women’s resistance to British rule must be viewed in the context of the Reform Movement of the late 19th century and the political events that unfolded in the early twentieth century. In South Africa, women’s resistance, first against colonialism […]
Read More… from Sisterhood and Solidarities: Women’s Movements in British India and South Africa
My presentation focuses on rural reconstruction work by women for women in the first two decades of postcolonial India. By taking up the example of the Dr Krishnabai Nimbkar (1906–1997), I investigate her social activism/work that aimed to improve the health, education and livelihood conditions for rural Indian women. Nimbkar, trained as a doctor, was […]
