Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India

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"The women’s movement in India has a long and rich history in which millions of women live, work and struggle to survive in order to remake their family, home and social lives. Whether fighting for safe contraception, literacy, water and electricity of resisting sexual harassment, they are participating in vibrant and active women’s movements that are thriving in many parts of India today. "Fields of Protest explores the political and cultural circumstances under which groups of women organise to fight for their rights and self-worth. Starting with Bombay and Calcutta, Raka Ray discusses the creation of "political fields"–structured, unequal and socially constructed political environments within which organisations exist, flourish or fail. Women’s organisations are not anonymous or free agents; rather, they inherit a "field" and its accompanying social relations, and when they act, they act in response to it and within it. Drawing on the literature of both social movements and feminism, Ray analyses the striking differences between the movements in these two cities."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Raka Ray

Raka Ray is associate professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies and chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, social movements, and relations between dominant and subaltern groups in India. Publications include Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (University of Minnesota, 1999; Kali for Women, 2000), "Masculinity, Femininity And Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century" in Feminist Studied (26.3), and (with Seemin Qayum) "Grappling with Modernity: Calcutta's Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude" in Ethnography (4.4, 2003).