Legal and Scholarly Activism: Recent Women's Studies on India—A Review Article

Extract

Women's studies an interdisciplinary area of inquiry is a recent phenomenon in India. Some scholars view women's studies as a harmless fad; others see it as a threat to the intellectual integrity of disciplines, or at least to the male domination of faculties. Women's studies certainly questions the androcentric assumptions of many scholarly fields and seeks a greater piece of the academic pie for women scholars, but that is not the whole story. In the past decade or so, gender has joined class, race, and ethnicity as an element in theories about the major forces that shape society. Women's studies is not only concerned with changing intellectual inquiry but also with changing society itself. Scholars and activists sometimes inhabit different bodies, but by and large people who are concerned with inquiry into women's condition are also engaged in trying to change that condition.