A Feminist Postcolonial Journey: Moving Between Countries, Academic Disciplines and Institutions

All memorializing practices afford new forms of synthesis. Writing now in my late sixties about myself as a feminist anthropologist foregrounds for me the importance of the habitus we acquire in our primary socialization for shaping what we consciously think of and write about as our own, or even as collective, intellectual and political projects.

I could begin, for example, with my first day enrolling at Sydney University in 1973 when I went up to staff and students on strike who were demanding that feminist philosophy be taught. My immediate response was “Of course. Where can I sign?” But even this apparently “spontaneous” enthusiasm, the readiness to be addressed by a demand for feminism, requires enquiry into what precedes and supports that “first moment.” If we are ever to understand the actual plurality of the people who constitute political movements such as feminism then we must start with being curious about their histories.

My background imbued me with a sense of optimistic confidence, as well as a positive awareness of who I was even on arrival as a fourteen-year-old in an all-white neighborhood and high school in Sydney’s lower north shore suburb of Turramurra. I found it a bit dull especially after three months in a more cosmopolitan school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but did not suffer anything worse. I had looked forward to this journey as one ready for new experiences, not to be surrounded by Indians. I was already chafing at the new restrictions imposed by Indian society on girls who have “come of age.” There was certainly a new awareness of being Indian, but this was more as a political responsibility to be exercised, not an oppressive sense of my marginality. I challenged the history teacher for his attempt at giving a “balanced” account of the British in India with the usual list of benefits they bestowed. Instead, I gravitated to more rebellious fellow-students, relishing whatever they made available, from Bob Dylan’s protest albums to novels by John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair which immersed me in the violent destructiveness of capitalism.

My age of arrival and the fact that I was in a stimulating university environment within two years was important for the way I negotiated this new terrain. But I was also one of what Salman Rushdie describes as the “midnight’s children,” his term for the generations born immediately after Nehru’s famous declaration of India’s freedom “at the stroke of the midnight hour.” We were the first generations not to have to face the racism, condescension, and brutality of colonial regimes. Our very home dramatically exemplified this shift. My large Tamil family moved into and had no trouble filling with our extended kin a spacious bungalow designed by Lutyens, expressly reserved for high-ranking white civil servants. Instead, I grew up watching my grandfather, the first Law Secretary of independent India, being driven daily by an official government car to the Secretariat and to Parliament. The vast reform agenda of the new government required skills in drafting complex legal bills for parliament, and my grandfather’s talents and training rendered him invaluable. He was to oversee bills granting universal suffrage for men and women, a uniform civil code providing women new rights in inheritance and marriage, land reform legislation for landless laborers, and quotas of reserved seats in education, and government jobs for Dalits and disadvantaged castes. Women had been mobilized in large numbers by Gandhi who provided for a range of modes of participation. My maternal grandmother and her three daughters did not take part in public protests, but they boycotted British textiles and luxuries of all kinds, instead wearing undergarments made of khadi, the homespun cotton advocated by Gandhi.

Our very arrival in Sydney was shaped by this history. We came not as “migrants” but as temporary sojourners because of my father’s government posting to develop trade relations between India and Australia. When we extended our stay, it was for our education. This too was no accident. Academic achievement was an important component of the Tamil Brahmin habitus since the late nineteenth century, when my caste community became heavily urbanized and used their cultural capital as intellectuals to negotiate western colonial regimes of knowledge such as law, science, and administrative service. This move was of course dominated by men, but the women in the community began getting educated too. My grandmother only got as far as primary school but she was determined to do better for her daughters. My mother and her sisters all went to university. There was never any question that I would too. But in my final year of high school in Sydney, I was taken aback by the number of girls signing up for teacher training. On enquiry, they told me they wanted to be home from work at the same time as their kids. The idea of a future already tailored to fit maternity was a shock to me. “And they call us backward!” I thought to myself.

By second year at university, I was enrolled in a wonderful feminist philosophy course taught by Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka. They combined lecture discussions with consciousness-raising groups. Once again, I was quite aware of the different history that set me apart from the other Australian women. I approached a group formed by older women where I might expect a greater understanding of differences in experience. One late evening meeting, women were discussing the patriarchal nature of “the family.” I could see the force of the critique, of course, but I asked them whether they realized that when I left the group and went home to my family, I would finally eat real food (I was usually in a semi-starving state as Sydney then offered little for a vegetarian) and I would finally speak in my mother tongue Tamil, instead of English. And I would feel, I said, as if I was taking off a pair of shoes that felt way too tight by the end of the day.

I studied Marxist philosophy avidly, but all discussions of socialist experiences and texts came from Europe. A course on Mao’s China offered glowing representations of Chinese communist society that felt unreal and simplistic particularly compared to the sophistication of the French Marxist approach of Louis Althusser which informed our lecturer’s courses on Marx. In Honours year I came across a reference to Roy Bhaskar, a philosopher of science. This was the first reference in all my years in philosophy to an Indian name. My interest was immediately sexualized by my male supervisor who pointedly asked me if “I was into Indian men.”

What I have held on to from my exposure to feminist philosophy and the wider ebullience of the social movements in Sydney in those vital four years is the importance of paying central attention to experience that is intrinsically affective, emotional, bodily, as well as intellectual. This was central to a politics, not of “inclusion” as it is framed today, but of a collectivism that had to constantly check its own assumptions based on listening to women’s experiences. This was in direct tension with the organizational history of Marxism, built on a hierarchy between bearers of “false consciousness” and a vanguard communist party’s grasp of a scientific Marxism. I grappled, indeed agonized in my honors thesis over this tension at a time when I described myself as a Marxist-Feminist. I could not understand how my supervisor could describe it simply as a “regional” problem within Marxism.

The minute I decided to journey back to India as my next research step, I was forced to embark on another journey, which I would describe as migration across the disciplines. It enabled a new synthesis, but this came years later, after working through the strengths and weaknesses of each discipline, quite unlike the popular idea that one can begin one’s life as a student with a “multi-disciplinary” approach. Philosophy could not accommodate the empirical turn of my research, so I joined a newly established Leftist department of Sociology at Macquarie University—only to find that the research agenda of the department was focussed on Australian class and gender relations. Professor Bob Connell was welcoming but had to refer me out of the discipline for supervision to an anthropologist named Ian Bedford. Ian and I sized up one another—my youthful political fervor checking out his politics, while he took in my first research outline, full of a French Marxist language in which people, regarded in this paradigm as mere “bearers of structures,” were largely absent—instead, our job in empirical research was to delineate the “articulation” between determinant structures such as “modes of production.” Ian was a novelist as well as an anthropologist. The proposal came back with a tart comment in his fountain pen ink: “Writing is not Algebra!!”

In contrast to the immediate sense of isolation I felt when I began working on India in Australian universities, the India I went back to in 1978 was burgeoning with political excitement. Mrs. Gandhi’s “Emergency” between 1975-1977 had suspended all civil liberties to suppress the increasingly organized and diverse social movements that were challenging the Congress party’s failure to deliver on its early promise of addressing inequalities.^[1] Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India between 1975 to 1977, citing threats to the country. After three years of authoritarian rule, she misjudged the mood and called elections, in which she was resoundingly defeated. The atmosphere was now charged, and I learned more from the activists I met than I could have found in any publications. I threw myself enthusiastically into the new women’s groups in Delhi and Mumbai that announced their “autonomy” from the Communist parties while remaining solidly Marxist in their approach. I went on campaigns and debating retreats with them and came away energized and re-connected. It was the start of relationships with feminist and Left intellectuals in India that have sustained me over a lifetime of friendships, collaborations, and publications, which have allowed me to remain involved and contribute to critical debates within the country.

Back in Sydney I published on women’s liberation in India for the feminist journal Refractory Girl. My thesis was no longer on “modes of production” but on the inability of Marxist class analysis to comprehend the complexities of working-class formation in India in which women’s work in the rural sector played a crucial role. I also reached out to women students from different parts of South Asia who wished to re-examine feminism through the lens of a different history. We called ourselves the “Immigrant and Third World Women’s Group” and we grew to include a Melbourne chapter. The title signalled a divergence from what was just achieving recognition in the women’s movement as “Australian migrant women’s experiences.” Reflecting the dominant labor movement orientation of the women’s movement in Australia, the attention was finally turning to the voices and struggles of working-class women from southern Europe. Our group wanted instead to explore our colonial histories in relation to feminist questions as well as the racism and colonial legacies within the assumptions of the women’s movement. We did have some elements in common with the critiques being made of white feminism by Aboriginal women, and we began reaching out. I recall a warm interchange with Indigenous activist and intellectual Jackie Huggins.

As a group, we attended the first Women in Asia conference in 1981 organised by feminist academics Lenore Manderson and Gail Pearson. Papers by anthropologists like Doug Miles came across as lacking any real framework, more an airing of bits of information about women. We were angry about the casual, a-theoretical approach when it came to dealing with women. But during this time, I was also forming lasting friendships and intellectual engagement with Macquarie feminist anthropologists Margaret Jolly and Kathy Robinson. Chandra Jayawardena, Professor of Anthropology, offered to read a chapter of my master’s thesis and warmly commented that my critique of the lack of “fit” between Indian class realities and Marxist categories was exactly what he had been arguing for years with Trotskyist comrades back in Sri Lanka. The sense he conveyed to me was that of a comradely understanding from another leftist South Asian intellectual, rather than as a professor of anthropology. Meanwhile, as the thesis came to completion, I realized that I had fallen for the bohemian charms of my supervisor Ian Bedford. He became the love of my life until his death over nine years ago.

It was affective ties such as these rather than any purely intellectual choice that finally made me consider anthropology as my next discipline. I was also realizing that while engaging with Indian activists had created an exciting way to return home, it did not challenge my patterns of thought enough. To generalize from activist categories of “working class women” to the nature of their lived experience was to replicate at another level, precisely what I had been critiquing western feminists for doing. I felt I had to engage with and learn directly from women from Dalit communities. I knew enough of the profound social gulf in India between urban activist intellectuals and Dalit women to know that even sociology’s most qualitative method, that of conducting interviews, would be ill suited for such purposes. I sensed a convergence between my commitment to a feminist politics of democratic and pluralist listening and learning from divergent experiences among women, and anthropology’s ethnographic method of long-term participatory research based on living in communities.

Backed by Roger Keesing who had recently adopted a Marxist perspective on anthropology, I accepted a scholarship in the Department of Anthropology at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University. But this was nothing like the Anthropology department at Macquarie University. I walked down dim corridors where Pacific art exuded a museum’s aura of colonial artefacts. The review editor of Canberra Anthropology, a fellow postgraduate named Jimmy Weiner, requested I review a volume co-edited by anthropologist Michael Allen and historian Shoumyen Mukherjee, called Women India and Nepal. The history papers traced shifts in colonial gender relations. The anthropology papers analyzed the metaphysics of rituals and ancient texts. Both were arguing that Indian women’s status was fundamentally unchanged. I objected to the stasis of this analysis, but particularly to what the anthropologists were using as evidence. The promise of integration of history and the anthropological frames remained, I wrote, unfulfilled.

I soon received an unheralded visit from Weiner, who burst into my room in a fury declaring he could not possibly publish my review because “it was not anthropology.” My response was that whether my review was or was not anthropology, this was simply not an argument against my critique. It did get published, in 1982. Years later Michael Allen told me he had been furious at my review. But by this stage he had heaped praise on my PhD thesis—a testament to his innately generous spirit—and become a warm friend who loved to tease me about our early encounter

My relations with Indian Marxist historians at ANU became more important as a result of my political distance from the version of anthropology I encountered there. Dipesh Chakrabarty, already well known to me from my master’s research period, was one of a small number of Indian Marxist postgraduate students gathered around the historian Ranajit Guha, founder of the influential Subaltern Studies. I was deeply appreciative of Guha’s writing but unable to stomach his autocratic style. After attending the Women in Asia conference, he praised one member of the Third World Women’s group and advised me to drop another from the group for lowering the intellectual tone. I was shocked at the assumption we expelled members and told him we did not practice such Stalinist methods. The stage was set for what was to come. Guha took every opportunity to make it clear in insulting ways and over many years that he considered me lacking in sufficient humility or understanding of India. I finally had to break with him when I was older.

Such differences with Left political culture followed me into fieldwork. I paid a respectful visit to the Communist Party headquarters in Kerala near the part of Tamil Nadu where I was researching. I was ushered in and blinked to find myself being steadily scrutinised by a man sitting under a large portrait of Stalin, from where he proceeded to interrogate me on what kind of Marxist I was. Participating in Communist-organized protests against rape in this far southern corner of Tamil Nadu turned out to mean marching in disciplined army fashion, with marshals patrolling our ability to maintain serried ranks. This was a far cry from the quasi-anarchist festive mood that mingled with protest at our annual Women’s Day marches in Sydney. I developed a small but vital intellectual base at Trivandrum’s Centre for Development Studies where I affiliated myself and had close friendships with the women postgraduates with whom I lived whenever I was writing up at the institute’s hostel for women students. When a senior feminist economist and staff member, Gita Sen, offered to host the second Indian Association of Women’s Studies conference in 1984, we as feminist postgraduates helped her organize the exciting event.

Fieldwork, living in a Tamil fishing village, was taxing but deeply generative in precisely the ways I had hoped for. It showed the way to a very different India, viewed from the perspective of a community that was not integrated into the agrarian caste system that had entirely dominated the “village studies” anthropology of India. The local Catholicism and Hinduism highlighted the limitations of my perspective born of an upper-caste Hindu habitus. I was able to expand beyond purely activist themes to the richer scope of women’s experiences of subaltern religion, healing, and illness.

But just as I was being re-educated by subaltern women’s experiences, deconstruction and postmodernism within academic feminism were challenging the very category of experience. Gayatri Spivak famously complicated the subaltern woman’s possibility of being heard—to such an extent it seemed futile to even try. Judging by her later commentary on her own text, she was no less unhappy than I was at her conclusions. But this predicament seemed to me more a result of her own premises than anything inevitably written into the social environment. As a fellow postcolonial woman from India, I felt I had to respond. In 1993 I published a critique in Australian Feminist Studies, a paper called “Too Traditional Once Again: Some Post-structuralists on the Aspirations of the Immigrant/Third World Female Subject.” It generated debate in the feminist conferences, with many white feminists arguing I had misinterpreted Spivak. Feminist anthropologists Maila Stivens and Martha Macintyre issued, however, an enthusiastic invitation to Melbourne and an exhilarating forum with their students followed.

I was still searching, however, for a way to incorporate elements of post-structuralist critique without having to abolish or place “experience” under such severe suspicion. By 1998 I had added philosophical phenomenology to the mix of elements I worked with. With it I was able to create a fresh synthesis that enabled me to fruitfully write in new ways. The synthesis eventually culminated in my 2013 book Fertile Disorder. It also opened an exciting era of teaching. While teaching students of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2001, I found that I knew what I wanted to say to students about what was valuable about anthropology and relate it to a wide range of thematics and political issues. I further developed this over many years of teaching at Macquarie University.

 Looking back, the lack of a “fit” between academic knowledge and my experience which created this journey through the disciplines reveals a great deal about the disciplines themselves. Colonial ways of thinking are still a part of western academia, but they do not reside within any one discipline such as anthropology as the critiques would suggest. It resides deeper than explicit content, in the division of intellectual labor between disciplines. It carves up the world into domains that allow some disciplines to remain secure in the construction of a Eurocentric “west,” outsourcing the “non-western cultures” to just one discipline whose hold on academia accordingly remains more fragile. This division distorts anthropology as much as the other disciplines, creating an artificial separation that has allowed colonial history and critiques of gender inequality to remain in tension with the exploration of those elements of non-western societies that genuinely also confound modern intellectual and political categories.

Read another piece in this series.

In addition to the work of the guest editors, this piece was edited by Tracie Canada.