Abstract 2011 Patrick Hesse

Patrick Hesse, Humboldt University, Berlin


Email: patrick.hesse@freenet.de 

Liberating women, defending tradition: Communist perspectives on gender emancipation in mid-20th century 

The Communist Party of India (CPI) had existed for three decades ere it first began formulating a policy on the issue of the condition of women in the 1950s. With the establishment of the NFIW (National Federation of Indian Women) in 1954, the demands and aspirations of the female part of the population were to have found an outlet apart from the Congress, one which would advance their cause as part of the great revolutionary struggles ahead of the Indian masses.

However being regarded as a subordinate aspect of a greater struggle from the very outset heavily influenced the stances communists would take vis-à-vis the discrimination of women. Not only did demands for women’s rights seldom figure prominently on the party’s agenda. Moreover, as was also the case with other social issues, the Communists’ approach to the unsatisfying status quo as a result of centuries of class rule and mostly unspecified “supporting ideologies” tended to obscure concrete exploitation and similar omissions on the part the ‘revolutionary masses’ except for the worst excesses.

The call of the CPI to help with organizing Muslim women in the Muslim League in the 1940s still might pass as an outgrowth of contemporary party policy, but the statements of Hajrah Begum, the party’s foremost organizer on the women front in the 1950s, testify as much to the development of a genuine party line on the subject as to that line being equally detached from the specific day-to-day problems of women as from revolutionary notions of the place women should occupy in society.

The presentation will trace this development and attempt to identify the mechanisms and imperatives that guided the communists in formulating a women’s policy between the sometimes divergent stances of anti-imperialism, emancipation, and mass revolution.

Abstract 2011 Farhat Naz

Farhat Naz, University of Bonn

Email: fnaz@uni-bonn.de

Caste system making women visible and invisible in community based water management: a case study of rural Northern Gujarat, India

Until 1990s in India there was no emphasize on community based management in the development policy of India. It was only in post-1991 that community based management and initiatives in natural resource management and development began to be revived. A significant step for participatory and decentralized forms of decision making and fund allocation was started with the comprehensive common guideline which were evolved for all programmes with the recommendation of the Hanumantha Rao Committee in 1994 (Kerr et. al 2000). The watershed guidelines of 1994 advocated the need for different institutional arrangements at various level to fulfill the task of community based watershed management and to begin State-NGOs partnership oriented approach to address environmental problem, to achieve best possible utilization of natural resources, employment generation, restoration of ecological balance and to alleviate poverty through community based watershed management (GoI, 1994).

This paper illustrates a village based case study from the state of Gujarat in India which has a very poor endowment of water resources and suffers from permanent water scarcity, as rainfall is uncertain. About 78 percent of the area in Gujarat is subjected to erratic monsoons and on average, rainfall for the state is 800 mm and two in every five years are drought years. Hence, Watershed Development Programmes (WDPs) has become a key strategy for economic development in Gujarat due to its frequent facing of droughts, dwindling groundwater resources, increasingly salinity and loss of vegetations.

This paper seek to explain the role of women in community based water management by analyzing the maintenance of the water retaining structures ‘check dams’ build by the farmers as part of the watershed activity in a village of north Gujarat.

Thus paper exemplifies the role of caste and gender as key aspect of difference and hierarchy in maintaining the water retaining structures and how caste affiliations leads to different social positions of women in maintaining the structures in the village. The objective of the paper is to explain how often gender is used as symbol to make the social distance between social group more visible and apparent (Unnithan, 1994 and Mehta, 2005) and furthermore class, caste, religion, wealth and other symbolic and structural systems which makes a culture have strong binding force on gender (Mohanty, 1991, Harding 1996 and Mehta, 2005). Thus hierarchy arises among women due to all these factors and caste being the most important is analyzed in the present study.

This paper uses the micro level village based case study; employing qualitative methods for data collection such as semi-structured interviews, participation observation, focused group discussions, and narratives  under the rubric of qualitative methodological tools. The study is based on ten months of ethnographic investigation carried out in Northern Rural Gujarat, India.