Early Feminists of Colonial India by Bharati Ray

There is no doubt at all that history is among the disciplines which have been richly fertilised by the insights of feminism.

The speciﬁc reference here will be to the ﬁeld of history. This paper will discuss some of these challenges to the ways in which Indian feminism has thought out its mission within and beyond the academy. If anything, there is a sobering realisation that feminism faces a new kind of challenge both within the hard won spaces of the academy and without. 1 IntroductionPractising feminist historians in university and research institu-tions today, more than a decade after this prophetic comment, would be hard put to ﬁnd evidence of either such a successful “occupa-tion/lodging” or of declining standards that have been the singu-lar achievement of the moral/political burdens of feminism. Feminism tends to make light of those demands as being artiﬁcially constraining in the context of its larger moral and political demands” (ibid).1 Towards the end of the short comment, he also noted the changing gender composition of Indian campuses, sounding a dark warning about the threat posed by women’s studies’ exclusionary tendencies to the very institutions in which they had “lodged themselves”. That space is now increas-ingly being taken over by feminism.”? In his short comment on feminism in academia, Beteille noted the excitement that feminism had generated within the Indian academy, although it was not without dismay that he also pointed to the pernicious effects that the political mission had on the intellectual practice, for “every craft has its own conventional methods.

REVIEW OF WOMEN’S STUDIESEconomic & Political Weekly EPW oCTOBER 25, 200857The Troubled Relationship of Feminism and HistoryJanaki NairWas it an exaggeration when Andre Beteille (1995:112) had this to say about the impact of feminism in the academy: “…the space within the academic world dominated by ideas about the unity of theory and practice was occupied for some time by Marxism.

Early Feminists of Colonial India by Bharati Ray