Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Image credit- Wikipedia.org

NOTES ON INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM OR, READING KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAY

Intersectionality, as the name implies, is thinking oriented towards analyzing points of concurrence. Understood from a feminist perspective, it does not recognize patriarchy and sexual inequality as monolithic systems that dominate women the world over in a uniform and systematic manner but as particular, contingent, and discursively produced systems of domination and control that participate in intersecting networks of power, desire, and ideological interest. The obvious influence of Michel Foucault’s theorizing on power and knowledge on such understanding notwithstanding, credit must be given to Kimberle Crenshaw who was one of the earliest to recognize that intersectionality did not just provide critics and activists with conceptualization to analyze social situations but that it could also be used to resist and defy the very discursive universe that provided the conditions for its perpetuation.

Crenshaw, seeking to theorise Black feminist resistance, realized that intersectionality provided the means to combine the struggles against oppression carried along the different axes of race, class, and gender. She suggests that sexual discrimination does not exist in isolation from racial violence (and vice-versa) and, therefore, any attempts to engage with the experiences of a Black woman must seek to analyse them through the categories of race and gender simultaneously. In other words, she demands that cross-category alliances, understandings, and networks need to be developed that will lead to the recognition that Black women’s experiences are neither discrete nor distinct or separate. Rather, she argues, that any attempt towards checking women’s disadvantage and subordination must move through the realization of the fundamental intersection of the various aspects of their condition. (Crenshaw, 139-140)

Third World/Postcolonial feminism in the academia as well as outside, as advanced by the likes of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, further nuances the point that Crenshaw makes as it provides intersectional feminism with a definite and strong anti-colonial inflection. In other words, most postcolonial feminist theorists have come to realise that their work must engage with the manner in which the (post)colonial intervenes and mediates in a situation of concurrence between race/colour and gender/sex without seeking to determine or control either of them. One could argue, therefore, that postcolonial feminism is perhaps the most crystallised form of intersectional feminist thinking as it is not only concerned with the problems that inevitably arise at the moments of its intersections with other identity markers of female identity such as race and class but also because it also demands a promise of responsibility from the postcolonial, feminist theorist that she/he would engage with those within the (post)colony in ethical terms.

It is in the above detailed context of recognizing postcolonial feminism in/as intersectional feminism that the paper seeks to read three specific incidents from the life of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Such a reading is not to suggest an easy and presentist conflation between these incidents and principles that have come to be recognized as those characterizing intersectional feminism but rather an attempt at throwing some critical light on issues that continue to persist in debates about feminism in (post)colonial India. In other words, the present essay is not interested in an uncritical, biographical portrayal of Chattopadhyay (even) as it recognizes her thought and her writings as raising some crucial questions that have a bearing on our present.[i]

In 1920-21, Chattopadhyay went to London to pursue her studies. Her husband Harindranath Chattopadhyay was accompanying her. She decided to pursue Diploma in Sociology which required to her pursue simultaneous and compulsory fieldwork under Bedford College. The Principal of Bedford College, Miss Luke, however denied her admission on account of her dress. The Principal argued, “You realise you will have to work in the East End of London and you simply cannot go there in that weird garb of yours. The alleys are haunted by wild urchins who would soon chase you out. I don’t suppose you propose to change your costume, do you?” To this Chattopadhyay responded by saying, “No, I don’t. But please remember if I take on this course, those urchins would be seeing me every single day for weeks, months, years. They are bound to soon become bored staring at my dress or chasing me. They will look for some other novelty for excitement. Let us try it out. If I am prepared for a trial, why don’t you let me.” (Cited in Dhamija, 16) The Principal had no answer to her argument and she was granted admission to the course. From our perspective, it is instructive to analyse the above detailed anecdote in at least two ways. One, that it provides us the opportunity to counter the naively nativist branch of thinking which believes that ‘insiders’ are the most suited to study a given socio-cultural situation. Secondly, it also makes us wonder as to how certain sections within modern disciplines such as sociology and economics have moved away from lived, material realities towards theoretical abstractions that average readers struggle to understand and relate to.

In March 1930 when Mahatma Gandhi decided to launch the Salt Satyagraha as the precursor to the larger Civil Disobedience Movement, he felt that women would find it difficult to undertake the journey from Sabarmati, Ahmedabad to the sea-side town of Dandi and thus barred them from participating. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay insisted that she along with the other women must accompany him in the March. Thus, on 6^th of April when the Mahatma picked up a few grains of salt dried by the sun at Dandi, Chattopadhyay and hundreds of other women followed suit. Chattopadhyay continued to sell salt ‘illegally’ at the Bombay Stock Exchange as well as the High Court. Consequently, she was arrested and awarded one-year imprisonment at Yerwada Women’s Prison.

As Ramachandra Guha argues, the fact that Chattopadhyay and hundreds of other women accompanied the Mahatma during the Salt March was primarily a consequence of her insistence that the Indian National Congress as well as the national leadership of the time must be “sensitive to the rights of women as well as to the economic bases of social strife.” (Guha, 263) Moreover, it could also be argued that the incident reveals Chattopadhyay’s courage to stand up even against those who she herself considered her mentors and spiritual guardians. As today’s India moves towards times where most of us follow politicians and celebrities uncritically, it would not be unwise to remember that Chattopadhyay, during her lifetime, repeatedly displayed the will to stand up against the leading lights including, among others, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Jaiprakash Narayan, and Indira Gandhi.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay joined the Congress Socialist Party founded in 1934 and she had Jaiprakash Narayan, Minoo Masani, Acharya Narendra Dev and others for company. The old-guard in the Indian National Congress, with the exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, was deeply discomfited with this development as they understood that engaging with socialism meant accepting that (only) class struggle could be the basis for envisioning and arriving at social change. Chattopadhyay strongly rejected such an opinion and she argued that there was no contradiction between the work that the Congress conducted and the Marxist anti-imperialism that characterized socialist activism. In fact, she urged that the Congress leaders recognize that “[their opinion] betrays a lack of historical knowledge and a lack of understanding of the nature of imperialism whose allies are princes, capitalists, middle men, and money lenders.” (Cited in Dhamija, 45)

The manner in which Chattopadhyay reacted to the criticism from a section of the Congress reveals the fact that she saw no contradiction between Marxism’s opposition to imperialism and the Congress anti-colonial politics. In other words, she appreciated the manner in which imperialism formed the firm economic foundation on which the colonial enterprise flourished. Such an understanding is instructive for intellectual thinking in today’s time that has come to be increasingly specialized and it also demonstrates the urgent need to wonder about connections and intersections between disciplines and schools of thought that are conventionally seen as opposed to each other.

The present paper has thus made an attempt to understand the above detailed three events from Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s lifetime as being instructive for the present. Moreover, it has also implied that Chattopadhyay’s engagement with issues and concerns fundamental to women in colonial and postcolonial India intersected with and was supplemented by her involvement in the lives and works of artisans, workers, and craftsmen which led to considerable chagrin even within the Indian National Congress. Therefore, it has attempted an evaluation of her life and work and tried to explain as to the lessons that the contemporary feminist movement could draw from it.

Here, it would not be inappropriate then to end the essay by citing Kamaladevi Chattopadhayay’s response to criticism that the work that she and her contemporaries undertook for improving the lives and conditions of Indian women was “reformist” and neither “radical” nor “revolutionary”. Chattopadhyay writes:

In their [young women’s] estimation they [she and her colleagues] were not radical, not revolutionary. They are defined sneeringly as “Reformist”, that they only bothered about middle class problems of marriage laws, widow’s inheritance…While it is conceded that much of the initiative and leadership came from men it has also to be realized that the women were the main workers, for they were the crucial elements in the social crucible. Even where a bourgeois leads a worker’s union, it is the workers that constitute the union and make it act. The main weakness of the male leaders of the time was their tendency to treat social evils as different malfunctioning constituents of society. Even as they failed to see a human personality as an integrated whole, they failed equally to realise that human life too is an integrated single unit. In such a setting the technique of change had to be “reformist”, piecemeal. (Chattopadhay, Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom, p. 2)

            
References:

Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi. Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1983.

____________. Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs. New Delhi: Navrang, 1986.

Crehnshaw, Kimberle. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, Issue 1, Article 8, pp. 139-167.

Dhamija, Jasleen. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007.

Dubois, Ellen Carol and Vinay Lal eds. A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2017.

Guha, Ramachandra. ‘The Socialist Feminist: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’ in Makers of Modern India, New Delhi: Viking/Penguin Books, 2010, pp. 263-265.

Nanda, Reena. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.