The Indian Women's Movement: within and beyond NGOisation

The Indian Women’s Movement: Within and Beyond NGOization

Srila Roy1

AbstractThe article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re) mobilization.

KeywordsFeminism, women’s movements, NGOs, NGOisation, India

From calls for death penalty to castration, from mindless calls for revenge and counter-violence (the endless proliferation of calls for kangaroo court and mob justice—the rape of the victims, the public lynching, sodomizing, hanging of them) to middle-class feminism-informed calls (for more access to public space, to wear what one wants to wear, come out at whatever time one wants to), the failure of several decades of femi-nism in this country became obvious. (Tellis 2012)

Ashley Tellis’ damning evaluation of the mass protests that erupted across India after the gang rape and murder of the 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi on 16 December 2012 might come as a surprise. Rather than signalling the failure of feminism, did not the unprecedented outpouring of affect and public demonstration, particularly by young women and men, suggest precisely the

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Journal of South Asian Development 10(1) 96–117

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1 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Corresponding author:Srila Roy, University of the Witwatersrand, Department of Sociology, Central Block, 2nd Floor, Jorrison Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa.e-mail: [email protected]

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opposite—that feminism in India was not just alive and well but had achieved a commonsensical status?1 While Tellis, a self-styled enfant terrible of India’s queer movement, is characteristically provocative in his proclamation, he is not alone in expressing such scepticism. There were a plethora of accusations and problems registered against these protests that were unprecedented in scale (stretching from the metropolis to the national and becoming simultaneously global), composition (‘common citizens’) and form (unorganized and unaffiliated to a mainstream political party). For several feminists and leftists, however, their largely middle class ‘mass base’ was said to account for the partiality of their demands (women’s protection over their freedom; see, however, Krishnan, 2013), their political naivety accompanied by a conservative impulse (the death penalty and castration as legal responses to rape), and the fractured nature of their empathy and identifi-cation (directed at supposedly middle-class urban victims of sexual violence but not its routine causalities namely rural Dalit women).2 While some ‘activists and intellectuals’ attempted—in the moment of protest—to engage with such political misgivings head-on (see Dixit, 2013), others, like Tellis, appeared horrified that the version of feminism that had erupted on the streets of Delhi was not one that they could readily recognize, let alone embrace. Even if one had a less cynical assess-ment of the Delhi protests—which certainly some stalwarts of the Indian women’s movement did have (see, e.g., Urvashi Butalia’s interview in the South African press; Davis, 2014)—it would be hard to argue that this historically unique moment of public consensus around women’s rights was not one that was exclusively informed by the political vocabularies of the Indian Women’s Movement (IWM).3

These responses to the Delhi protests by ‘proper’—as against ‘popular’ (Tellis, 2014)—feminists are not surprising, given recent evaluations of the IWM from these very same quarters as having had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. While the Delhi protests might have signaled for those like Tellis the failure of feminism to touch, let alone transform the consciousness of the ‘ordinary citizen’, the IWM has been repeatedly written off, in recent times, as being ‘coopted’ by a number of external forces. Tellis (2014) articulates a dominant version of this argument when he writes in relation to the Delhi protests:

The autonomous women’s movement that existed in the 1970s and 1980s which took up several campaigns from the rape of a tribal woman in a police station to dowry to sati and domestic violence was vitiated and almost completely destroyed from the 1990s onward with the rise of the NGO-ization and the specific categorization of ‘civil society’ organizations in India, gendered or otherwise. However flawed and limited it was, it was a crucial force in the task of social transformation.

‘NGOization’ is indeed employed in current conversations on the IWM by feminists and leftists alike as an umbrella term to capture the many changes and transformations that have taken place in terms of its form, functioning and the wider political context (‘field’ in Ray, 1999) in which it exists. What Sonia Alvarez (1998; see also Lang, 1997) called the ‘NGO boom’ in the Latin American context took place in the late 1980s and through the 1990s in India, coinciding with eco-nomic liberalization and the withdrawal of state funding from key areas where



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NGOs stepped in to deliver—and not merely demand—development (see Gupta, 2014, for this distinction). NGOs that work with women or on women’s issues or even ‘feminist NGOs’ have played a key role in organizationally transforming Indian feminism from autonomous feminist formations in the 1970s to transnation-alized and professionalized women’s organizations in the 1990s; bringing the IWM, as one commentator puts it, to ‘a critical juncture’ (Dave, 2012, p. 122).4 NGOs have come to dominate the IWM such that a precise demarcating of the boundaries of Indian feminism as a social movement from that of NGOs is not always possible.

The dominance of NGOs in the feminist field mirrors a wider restructuring of civil society in India from the period of economic liberalization towards ‘NGO-fication’, which Ray and Katzenstein (2005) view as edging out ‘more protest-oriented forms of organizing within the social movement sector’.5 As in the case more globally, NGOs constitute controversial actors within the feminist political field especially as they become, on the one hand, key players and, on the other, less representative of a specific kind of feminist politics in becoming more transnationalized and professionalized (twin signifiers of the process of ‘NGOization’; see Basu, n.d. and Alvarez, 1998). The term ‘NGOization’ is not employed in current conversations around Indian feminism as a descriptive term alone that simply refers to an increase in the number of NGOs working on women and gender (Alvarez’s ‘NGO boom’) but an (ideologically and morally) evaluative one that ‘understands this phenomenon as harmful for feminism’ (Hodzic, 2014, p. 222).6

Given, thus, the empirical and ideological centrality of NGOs to current debates around the Indian women’s movement and Indian feminism more generally, I prioritize their role and the process of NGOization in documenting some of the transformations to the IWM in the post independence period. I begin, however, by articulating the broad sources for the felt ‘cooption’ of the IWM that has, ironically, been rooted by commentators in the many successes of this social movement. I then move onto a consideration of what Sadia Hodzic (2014) calls ‘the NGOization paradigm’ or dominant (Indian) feminist criticisms of NGOs underscoring key anxieties associated with NGOs as a form of organizing or what Bernal and Grewal (2014) call the ‘NGO form’.7 Many of these anxieties such as the relegation of autonomy and agency to external (state/non-state) actors neces-sitate a rethinking of the original ideal of political autonomy developed by the IWM during the 1970s (see Tellis’ quotation above). Indeed, the notion of autonomy, as I detail below, still constitutes a normative horizon for those occu-pying the feminist field even as it has become practically elusive. A key marker of NGOization, professionalization is another major anxiety and one that is, moreover, generationally articulated with younger women perceived to be encountering feminist politics through paid employment in women’s NGOs. I conclude by sug-gesting the need to go beyond an overdetermined NGOization paradigm in evalu-ating the IWM insofar as it offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the uniqueness of the current moment (of which the protests around the Delhi rape are the most obvious but not sole signifier; see Sen, 2014), if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that such a moment offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.



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The ‘Successful’ Cooption of the IWM

The post-independence women’s movement in India—which saw its heyday in the late 1970s to early 1980s—is said to have come of age.8 Its sustained and self-identified ‘feminist’ activism has borne fruit in a number of areas of which the most recent law reform (in 2013) post the Delhi gang rape evokes earlier modes of holding the state accountable when it comes to violence against women (for a recent summary on legal activism, see Sen, 2014). Notwithstanding Tellis’ comments about the failure of the language of feminism to acquire com-mon currency, the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape presented a unique moment of public recognition and consensus around women’s rights that had so far only been the preserve of certain ‘progressive’, that is, left leaning and feminist circles. The uniqueness of the Delhi rape moment should not, however, serve to eclipse from view the manner in which ‘gender’ has gained currency in mainstream political discourse from the 1990s prompting two major Indian feminist schol-ars to remark, in a 1994 publication, that ‘suddenly “women” are everywhere’ (Tharu & Niranjana, 1994). Tharu and Niranjana mark the late 1980s and early 1990s or what they call the ‘Mandal/Mandir/Fund Bank years’ as a ‘turning point’ for Indian feminism. They note a new, if not unprecedented visibility afforded to ‘woman’ and gender in the rhetoric of the state, development experts and public discourse more generally. Nivedita Menon (2004, 2009) similarly notes the privileging of ‘gender’ in governance rhetoric and governmental (and non-governmental) practice throughout the 1990s in government-initiated women’s development programmes, women’s commissions (such as the National Commission for Women set up in 1990), and other state-run exercises in the mainstreaming of gender. This new visibility of ‘woman’—clearly a marker of the success of the women’s movement (Tharu & Niranjana, 1994)—also extends to the field of party politics where women particularly rural women have emerged as a significant electoral and political force through reservations in institutions of local governance. Urban women activists and academics, for their part, are today able to earn a living through full-time paid employment in women’s NGOs or in women’s studies research centers, significant sites of the institutionalization of the IWM.

Yet the mood amongst Indian feminists is far from congratulatory and the future of such a ‘successful’ feminist movement, it seems, has never been more uncertain (John, 2002, p. 61). The gains of the women’s movement especially in terms of the new found visibility of ‘woman’ and the category of gender in the discourses and practices of the state signal, for many, its successful cooption by forces that are inimical to feminist ends and progressive ideals more generally. These include a market-oriented neoliberal Indian state, anti-secular right-wing and de-democratizing forces, and the discourses and practices of international development (see, for instance, Chaudhuri, 2004; John, 2002, 2009; Menon, 2004, 2009; Sangari, 2007; Tharu & Niranjana, 1994). Indeed, the watershed decade of the 1990s—the decade of globalization, privatization and the opening up of the Indian economy—has fundamentally transformed the terrain upon which femi-nists wage their struggles as well as the nature and form of such struggles. While,




for some, cooption—as opposed to subversion—is the greatest challenge that the IWM seems to face today (Saheli, 1991), for others, cooption seems inadequate to the task of describing the complexities of the present in which ‘woman’ has gained unprecedented political patronage just as the IWM has become institution-alized and housed in ‘the conservatism of neoliberal policies’ (Sangari, 2007, p. 50). Much like the ‘double entanglement’ that Angela McRobbie (2009) finds characteristic of ‘postfeminism’ in the West, feminist goals of agency and empow-erment are being, it is argued, resignified—rather than rejected—as economic efficiency and empowerment in the South in ways that legitimize and reproduce global inequalities. The ‘status of women’ as an index of development and good governance has also meant an expansion of the spaces upon which feminist activ-ism can take place but associated, more and more, with practices of professionali-zation, managerialism and bureaucratization or ‘NGOization’, as I detail below. It is thus, ironically, the considerable successes of the IWM in some of the areas outlined above that has propelled an overall feeling of wariness and exhaustion amongst Indian feminists.

Amongst these, the achievement of legal reforms to combat violence against women has generated most concern within the feminist community (see on this debate, Gangoli, 2007; Kapur, 2005; Menon, 2004; Sunder Rajan, 2003). Besides the fact that very little has been achieved in the realm of law implementation, feminists argue that such reforms have inadvertently increased the power of the state, while deepening, at other times, the policing of women’s lives under the banner of ‘protection’ (interrogating the politics of patriarchal protection assumed centrality to the politics of sexual violence post the Delhi gang rape; cf. Krishnan, 2013). Even when the state has been responsive to women’s needs, its liberal impulse has served to strengthen rather than subvert conservative and patriarchal ideologies. Underlying this critique of legal reforms is a ‘broad antistatism’ (Sunder Rajan, 2003, p. 31) that has led some Indian feminists to entirely reject a liberal valuation of the state as the upholder of women’s rights (see on Indian/South Asian feminism and the state, Loomba & Lukose, 2012; Madhok, 2010; Roy, 2012).

Feminist concerns around ‘cooption’ by the state have not only borne out in the case of legal reform but also in the state’s imperative to politicize and ‘develop’ women under which all sorts of excesses (such as the use of draconian family planning measures targeting women’s bodies) have come to be legitimized. While rural women have been politicized through the introduction of women’s reserva-tions and quotas (that has led to scores of rural women now serving as elected village heads), these landmark changes have generated what Mayaram (2002, p. 405) calls a specifically ‘South Asian [feminist] backlash’. The backlash that she speaks of—the targets of which are newly empowered rural women—was most violently manifest in the context of the unique Women’s Development Programme, a collaboration between the Indian state and women’s groups launched in the northern state of Rajasthan in 1984. Not only did the programme underscore the limits of politicizing rural women under the rubric of a state that employed pro-gressive feminist language to further its own interests but it also made clear the new forms of vulnerabilities that such developmentalism can give rise to (see



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Madhok, 2013; Madhok & Rai, 2012).9 Generally speaking, it is argued that the Indian state’s commitment to the coupling of women’s development and rights has little to do with the actual furthering of the empowerment of women and all to do with the state’s drive to—in an early avatar—modernize, and more recently, in the neoliberal avatar to reconcile with the demands of the global economy.

The 1990s has also been a decade of deepening caste and religion-based cleav-ages in India especially through the rise of an aggressive Hindu nationalism as well as caste-based identity politics; factors that have irrevocably changed the face of Indian politics (Ray & Katzenstein, 2005). Sexuality has more recently emerged not only as a site for questioning the heteronormative foundations of the family and the nation-state but also for internally contesting feminism (Menon & Nigam, 2007). Internal critiques of the IWM by Dalit and lesbian feminisms in particular have made evident the hegemonic and exclusionary nature of the cate-gory of ‘woman’ by underscoring its Brahmanical, majoritarian and heterosexual underpinnings (cf. Menon, 2007; Rao, 2003). In the face of such complex identity politics, the existence of the IWM as a singular, cohesive entity is being ques-tioned (Menon-Sen, 2001) as is its claim and ability to speak on the behalf of all women. Madhok (2013, p. 21) sums up these complex challenges well when she notes: ‘at the close of the century, the women’s movement found itself at the fore-front of debates on aspects of sexualities, identities and citizenship, with sexual rights, parliamentary quotas and guaranteed citizenship entitlements becoming increasingly important’.

The NGOization Paradigm

It is striking how across the North–South divide, the 1980s and 1990s mark the embedding of feminism in institutions of the state, governance and civil society, thereby taking a more formal, stable and, some would argue, a less visible or even apolitical form. In India, the institutionalization of feminist movements in NGOs is a locus of anxieties similar to those that have been documented elsewhere (Al-Ali & Pratt, 2009; Alvarez, 1998; Jad, 2007; Lang, 1997) and include: the sacrificing of political autonomy to external and especially global funding imperatives; professionalization, bureaucratization and managerialism in organi-zational structures and functioning; a move away from mass-based political struggles and structural critique to neoliberal modes of governance; and an ensu-ing abdication of the radicality of the IWM. It is important to underscore here—as has been noted more globally (Alvarez, 1998)—that these anxieties are being articulated in the light of the current form that NGOs take and the hegemonic position they occupy in the feminist political field. In other words, while Indian NGOs have been around for over hundred years (see Kilby, 2011) and many involved in ‘women’s empowerment’ even before it became, post Beijing,10 a buzzword, it is only now that they are perceived in particularly problematic ways: as professionalized, funder-driven, ‘expert’-based and policy-oriented rather than directed towards radical transformation. More damningly, as I detail below, they are seen within some quarters of civil society to have little to do with a




transformative feminist politics and everything to do with national and transna-tional agendas of good governance within a broader neoliberal framework (Sangari, 2007). It is in this context that Alvarez uses the descriptor, the ‘NGO boom’ in Latin America to refer not to the increase in the number of NGOs work-ing on women’s issues per se, but the increased demand for a particular kind of professionalized, formal, technically skilled and transnationalized gender exper-tise that can only be afforded by certain women’s organizations or ‘experts’ func-tioning within them (at the exclusion of grassroots workers; see Gupta, 2014). The proliferation of the demand for such organizations has been directly located in a wider ‘neoliberal turn’ in development (Madhok, 2010) insofar as such pro-fessionalized and managerial structures become prerequisites for attracting and retaining funds. Consequently, feminists scale up their activities in formalizing and professionalizing their organizations in order to meet ‘the growing demand for specialized, policy-relevant, expert knowledge about women and gender’ (Alvarez, 1998).

The relationship between NGOs and processes of privatization and neoliber-alism is, of course, an older one. In the period of structurally adjusting newly emerging Third World economies, global lenders like the World Bank and the IMF held NGOs as being more accountable than nation–states (Bernal & Grewal, 2014, p. 302). ‘NGOization’ thereby contributed to the withdrawal of the state from the provision of key public services, such as education and health. In the case of ‘failed’ third world states, neoliberalism becomes, as Grewal (2005) argues, the condition for the possibility of NGO work including feminist NGO work. The neoliberal turn in development ‘which posits the market as the institution best suited to delivering overall social good and understands women’s empowerment as largely a matter of facilitating women’s participation in cash-yielding forms of production and consumer life’ (Leve, 2014, p. 57; see Karim, 2011; Rankin, 2001, 2004; Sharma, 2008) is now spearheaded by NGOs. NGOs have moved away from the provision of welfare and income-generation serv-ices to neoliberal practices of self-help that are discursively refashioned as empowerment and exemplified in the practice of microfinance. In the absence of wider structural change, the emphasis on microcredit to manage—and not reduce—poverty and that too, via the instrumentalization of poor women’s agency can only become, Spivak (2000, p. 322) argues, a form of ‘credit baiting’. In a scathing critique of the optimism surrounding microfinance operations for transforming poor women’s lives, Karim (2011) shows how NGOs have emerged as a ‘shadow state’ in rural Bangladesh, affording to themselves forms of sover-eignty only reserved for states in providing essential services and employment. Karim (2011, p. 204) is not surprisingly led to conclude that ‘real’ political change can only come from social movements ‘that sit apart from the develop-mental sector’ or from imperatives that are not driven by the compulsions of funding, as has been argued in the Indian context (Menon, 2004).

Criticisms of NGO activity by Indian feminists thus echo more widespread postcolonial and post-development critiques of NGOs in the global South as deeply embedded if not complicit in a global neoliberal project that ‘obscures the interests of powerful states, national elites and private capital’ (Kamat, 2003; see



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also Escobar, 1995). The very fact that NGOs are structurally dependent on the same international institutions that oversee, as Arundhati Roy (2004) puts it, the neoliberal project that ‘demands the slash in government spending in the first place’ has led to a questioning of their welfarist, democratizing or empowering potential. In this regard, Sabine Lang (1997, p. 113) in her now well-known cri-tique of the NGOization of the German women’s movement asks a pertinent question:

[…] if NGOs don’t want to only engage in social repair work but actually want to change structural features of a certain political agenda, how successful can they be when they are dependent on exactly the structures that need to be transformed?

For Indian feminists, this problem is articulated as one of donor dependence, that is NGOs are increasingly dependent on external donors who may not neces-sarily be pro-woman or even pro-people, and in whose hands any original radical agenda is likely to be domesticated if not depoliticized. While the structural dependency of NGOs in the South on international donor organizations (the World Bank and the IMF) has been noted, less has been said of their dependence on the state that not only spearheads the socio-economic transitions that feminists find damaging such as neoliberal economic policies but also limits the possibility of outright critique and opposition. At a more everyday level, donor dependence is said to contribute to the ‘projectization’ of NGO work in determining and chang-ing at will ‘priority areas of intervention’ (Chakravarti, n.d.). It is also said to implicate internal organizational cultures that do not simply become more formal-ized and professionalized but also hierarchal and managerial in ways that begin to resemble corporates. The full implications of the professionalization of feminist politics as a result of NGOization are detailed further below.

The dependence of NGOs on external funding and compliance with funding agency targets also raises the question of accountability; whether accountability lies with the people and communities they serve or with the funding agencies on which they rely. It is not uncommon for women’s groups especially those that continue to function in an autonomous, non-funded mode to argue that NGOs are accountable only to their funders and not to their beneficiaries thereby compro-mising on their already hard-won credibility at the grassroots (Chakravarti, n.d.). This lack of accountability is also reflected within the sector where, under the grab of ‘non-profit’, NGOs have been known to exercise the worst forms of exploitation towards their employees many of whom are working class women (Vasan, 2004). In sum, these Indian feminists like other progressive members of civil society question the ability of NGOs to bring about social change given their inherent structural dependencies and increased professionalized and corporatized working culture. These are only some of the factors that make it highly unlikely ‘that NGO activities and movements will lead to a transformative feminist politics’ (Ruwanpura, 2007, p. 97). Sangtin Writers and Nagar go further to argue that NGOs actually ‘prevent feminist oppositional politics’ (cited in Hodzic, 2014).11 For such critics, movements are described as ‘coopted’ and domesticated by NGOs. Given their tainted status in the NGOization paradigm, it is thus not unusual




for fully funded feminist NGOs to consciously not use the label of NGO prefer-ring organization or collective instead (see Roy, 2011).

The Ideal and Practice of Autonomy

Historically, the IWM has taken two organizational forms—affiliated and autono-mous women’s groups. The former refers to women’s wings of political, usually leftwing parties while the latter are meant to be structurally and ideologically auton-omous from political parties (for a recent recap, see Dave, 2012, and for an older account, see Gandhi & Shah, 1991). Indeed, ‘autonomous’ women’s groups who were the first to self-identify as feminist broke away from male-dominated com-munist parties in the 1970s to emerge at the forefront of the IWM giving it the self-adopted qualifier, the ‘autonomous women’s movement’. Autonomous groups also shifted the left-led focus on women’s ‘practical’ gender interests around material inequality (and the subsuming of gender under class) to more ‘strategic’ gender interests especially around violence against women (Ray, 1999). They came to rep-resent the most militant, visible phase of feminist activism in India, in leading cam-paigns against violence against women and claiming rights, including civil rights given their prominence in the wake of the political unrest associated with the Emergency. They have remained the most significant legacy of the IWM.

A majority of the autonomous women’s groups that were formed in the 1980s transformed into funded NGOs by the end of the 1990s given the expansion of work and need for ‘full-time’ members (Chakravarti, n.d.). Very few remain ‘autonomous’ in the sense of being non-funded by external sources, domestic or foreign, even as they might be free of political parties (Dave, 2012).12 It is, moreover, these funded NGOs with full-time professional or trained ‘staff’ and not grassroots political organizations that are said to be taking important decisions on behalf of the entire women’s movement, thereby significantly transforming its character and reach (Menon, 2004). While the first national-level autonomous women’s conferences in the country were attended by ‘non-funded, non-party, self-defined feminist groups’ (Menon, 2009), by the time of the last National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Groups held in Kolkata in 2006 it was ‘almost entirely attended by funded NGOs’ (ibid.) suggesting, for some, that ‘the women’s movement is a hugely funded affair today’ (Biswas, 2006).

Owing to the left inheritance of the IWM, Indian feminists have always been invested in maintaining a normative distinction between funded and non-funded politics. Both the organizational and the radical left in India have consistently opposed foreign funding as an imperialist ruse (Biswas, 2006), and more recently as supportive of right-wing Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) activity. At their incep-tion in the 1970s, ‘autonomous’ women’s groups were keen to establish the authenticity and legitimacy—and somewhat crudely, the ‘Indianness’—of their feminist claims and thus distanced themselves from foreign funds and other markers of Westernization including, in some instances, the label of ‘feminism’ itself (cf. Kishwar, 2004).



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Besides a general suspicion towards (especially foreign) funded socio-political activities that the IWM inherited from the Indian Left, the politics around funding draws directly from the ideal of autonomy—a long cherished ideal and goal of the IWM. Autonomy, understood ‘as a way of acting without restrictions imposed upon women by structures, institutions and ideologies’, was seen as a necessary condition of women’s agency and liberation (Chakravarti, n.d.). Uma Chakravarti, a long-standing member of the IWM, defines autonomy as a goal of women’s liberation in both a negative and a positive sense, that is, as freedom from patriar-chal control, and as freedom ‘to conceptualise women’s subordination under patriarchy/ies and to evolve strategies to counter these through campaigns’. This autonomy of theory and action, as she calls it, has as its objective the production of a self-determining subject.13

Although autonomy has most commonly been understood as an organizational principle to undergird, as Chakravarti (n.d.) says, the distinctiveness of women’s groups from political parties, it has also acted as a symbolic horizon for feminist activism in India. The emphasis on autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s imparted much needed legitimacy to women’s groups that came to be seen as independent political formations in their own right, as distinct from mainstream political par-ties and their women’s wings, especially those of the left to which many feminist activists originally belonged. Organizational autonomy also meant a conscious distancing from authoritarian and hierarchal structures of party-based and other institutionalized forms of politics, and a move, instead, to democratic and collec-tive modes of decision making. Being non-funded was part of this framework of non-institutionalized and collective forms of political mobilization, essential to the larger ideal of political and lived autonomy. As Biswas (2006) explains:

Since autonomous women’s groups are not charity organizations but rather are political (non-party but political) formations and since institutional funding is not without its motivated interests and temporal limitations, the rationale was that institutional support for everyday activities would significantly constrain freedom and autonomy by intro-ducing overt or subtle pressures to toe the funder’s line.

Autonomy, in other words, meant freedom from the dictates of an external donor, which provided political weight and legitimacy to incipient women’s groups (see Gandhi & Shah, 1991). Autonomous women’s groups relied on dona-tions from individual supporters thus making them accountable to a vast constitu-ency that shared their political vision. In this manner, the issue of raising funds was reinscribed as a political act, part of an overarching aim of democratizing civil society.

While women’s groups might remain autonomous from political parties today, what exactly does autonomy mean in the face of their growing dependence on government or international funds? NGOization is said to have changed the very meaning of autonomy (Dave, 2012). To return to the example of the Seventh National Autonomous Women’s Conference, referred to above, Menon (2009) notes that the only groups to be excluded from participation were politically affili-ated women’s groups including, ironically, those belonging to radical left camps.14




‘State sponsored feminism’ was not only not excluded but even afforded a ‘new legitimacy’ under this seeming reinterpretation of autonomy ‘as functional, rather than structural independence; that is, “funding does not determine our politics or the work we do”’ (Menon, 2009, p. 109). Pointing to a similar contradiction, Uma Chakravarti (n.d.) asks, ‘has the logic of the move away from parties, and left and democratic groups, been neutralized by the global funding imperatives of the AWGs [autonomous women’s groups]?’

Contemporary feminist critiques of funded politics are thus more nuanced than the previous knee-jerk responses around ‘selling out’ to imperialist or Western forces. Feminist concerns around funding are also more specific: how dependence on funding might make it difficult for women’s organizations to sustain their ideo-logical and organizational autonomy, to appear credible to their constituencies, especially as funders and donors can at will change priority areas of intervention, and to prevent the transference of their energy and struggles from actual mobiliza-tion to simply raising funds for the sake of organizational survival/longevity. As de Alwis (2009, p. 86) notes of the Sri Lankan women’s movement, ‘the need to sustain such institutions becomes the primary concern of feminist activists at the cost of the activism that they may have originally sustained’. Like her counter-parts in India, she worries that the ‘shift to professionalization, and to political initiatives that are driven by compulsions of funding’ (2009, p. 88) might cost the movement its radical, critical edge.

The implications of funded politics on the IWM raises, finally, pressing ques-tions for those women’s groups who continue to function in a non-funded mode. Their diminishing strength and influence, especially amongst a younger genera-tion of women, has not always propelled a critical self-examination; on the contrary, these groups are seen to be getting more defensive in face of the threat of aliena-tion and ghettoization. As Kalyani Menon-Sen (2001), herself long associated with both autonomous and funded women’s politics in India, remarks:

Those who consider themselves ‘real’ feminist groups have responded [to NGOization] by drawing their ideological boundaries more rigidly than before, taking hard lines on core issues and refusing to dilute their stands in the interests of political correctness. Unfortunately, this siege mentality, with its insistence on ideological purity and the con-sequent ‘policing of the borders’ has weakened the culture of critical thinking and internal questioning that was characteristic of feminist women’s groups in their initial phase.

The emphasis on political purity in the face of the possible contamination of the IWM by emergent feminist forms has indeed a number of consequences, as I detail at the end of this essay.

Professionalization as Depoliticization

Autonomy is also linked to the idea of volunteerism in a wider social movement framework. Volunteerism is something that the social movement sector and NGOs—generally defined as part of the voluntary sector—share. But, as Kudva



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(2005) notes, the Indian state’s move towards market-based reforms since the 1990s, which led to the rapid expansion of the NGO sector, positioned NGOs more and more within the ‘public service contractor model’ of service delivery; one that increasingly prioritizes a language of competence over commitment in social development activity. The professionalized nature of this sector complete with generous pay cheques and perks means, for many, that ‘the volunteerism of the voluntary sector is an oxymoron’ (Biswas, 2006).

The restructuring of the IWM in terms of NGOization and transnationalization has meant the professionalization of feminist activism. Unlike the urban middle-class women activists who, in the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the IWM in an entirely voluntary manner, today’s activists are found in professional and salaried roles in NGOs. In creating a new class of paid ‘full-time’ activists, the profession-alization of feminist activism has thus contributed to the middle-class status of individuals whilst consolidating the elitism of the IWM. Dave (2012) notes how this development came at the time of India’s economic liberalization which was also a time of the greater feminization of poverty. So, one of the tensions of the NGOization of the IWM was that ‘Indian women were becoming poorer and left with fewer safety nets, while women’s activists were becoming more resource rich’ (Dave, 2012, p. 123).

Indian feminists fear that NGOization and the process of professionalization that it entails will result, if it has not already, in a ‘9 to 5isation’ of the women’s movement together with the rise of a phenomenon that is disparagingly referred to as the ‘career feminist’. Chakravarti (n.d.) identifies ‘career feminists’ as ‘women activists who are specialists in one issue: health, sexuality, micro credit, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, etc. without a larger understanding of the interrelatedness of these issues and the complexity of patriarchal practices’. Menon (2004, pp. 219–220) voices the same criticisms when she argues that pro-fessionalization has enabled women with little or no political commitments to practice feminism as a profession rather than as politics. There is a strong genera-tional dimension to such critiques insofar as it is younger women who are seen as entering radical politics through the ‘non-profit’ sector that is, in some instances, highly remunerative. These kinds of critiques persist even as ‘NGOization’ itself began with an earlier generation who shifted from autonomous to funded politics. They also persist in spite of the possibility of politicization and feminist consciousness-raising for professional middle-class women working in NGO spaces, as some studies are beginning to document (see Bernal & Grewal, 2014; Roy, 2011). There has been, however, little refection on NGOs as a huge sector of employment that might professionalize feminist activism and might even create activists insofar as they ‘foster the development of new feminist perspectives among other women’ (Brenal & Grewal, 2014, p. 307).

It should be obvious that this relatively recent development—the possibility to be paid for one’s political involvement—is a far cry from the largely voluntary, sporadic, and informal mode in which feminists have traditionally mobilized and politically intervened in India (as elsewhere; see Alvarez, 1998). As already noted, the urban middle-class women who constituted the backbone of the autonomous women’s movement of the 1980s subsidized the cost and time given to political




activism through full- or part-time employment elsewhere. Chakravarti (n.d.) mentions teaching, office work, legal practice, advertising and journalism and even the possibility of financial support from the family even as this was ‘tricky’ given the movement’s understanding of the family as an institution of patriarchy. The model of coalitional political and single issue-based campaigns that involved individuals and groups made this model of voluntary political involve-ment possible. A clear separation between paid work (one’s ‘job’) and unpaid activism (one’s commitment) was reflected in the organization of activism itself, such as scheduling meetings after work hours, a practice that autonomous women’s groups continue to maintain for the benefit of their supporters. As a member of the IWM who has been politically active since the 1980s explained to me, one could not imagine being paid to attend a dharna or to go on a protest march against the state. The possibility of earning one’s livelihood out of one’s politics or activism was simply unthinkable for women of this generation. For these older activists—many of whom continue to contribute to feminist net-works and organizations in a voluntary mode—to speak of a full-time, paid feminist appears nothing short of an oxymoron.

While there was, on the one hand, a clear separation between work and activism—as reflected in the organization of meetings after work hours—there was, on the other, a blurring of boundaries between personal and activist lives. Meetings were held out of individual homes that doubled up as make shift ‘offices’ and children were taken along. The rise of funded politics in the form of profes-sionalized NGOs has meant a conflation of one’s job and one’s activism but has also, inadvertently it is believed, sharpened divisions between what is considered to be the personal, on the one hand, and the political, on the other. In speaking to feminist activists operating outside of the NGO sector, I was repeatedly told that you could only access a NGO worker during office hours, between ‘9 and 5’, which served as a measure of their political (in)authenticity.

Criticisms of professionalization are not limited to the implications of the transformation of feminist activism into ‘work’ and its ‘cooption’ by the logic of the market in ways that are seen to be inherently depoliticizing (see Roy, 2011). For both of the key critics of the ‘NGOization paradigm’, namely, Sabine Lang (1997) and Sonia Alvarez (1998), professionalization is a defining feature of this paradigm which they understand to be the move from collective social move-ments to professionalized, projectized and expert-based interventions. For Sangeeta Kamat (2003), writing on transformations in community-based organi-zations in India, professionalization has meant a move from grassroots workers to a skilled, trained ‘staff’ who, while providing ‘expert’ knowledge, ‘ten[d] to regard [their] work as apolitical and disconnected from larger social and eco-nomic processes, such as structural adjustment or international debt policies […]’. Echoing a criticism that I cited from Chakravarti earlier, both professionalized and ‘projectized’ NGO activity are seen to locate social issues outside of a broader context of social and economic process and underlying power relations. For Kamat (2003), then, ‘the professionalization of community-based NGOs and their subsequent depoliticization represent two sides of the same coin and produce a common set of effects’. Professionalization is also seen to have an impact on the



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internal structuring of some women’s and grassroots organizations that have had to sacrifice long-cherished ideals of non-hierarchy and collective decision making for the sake of efficiency and expediency. Finally, the professionalization and bureaucratization that accompanies ‘development delivery’ (Gupta, 2014, p. 140) can be seen as creating hierarchies and tensions between ‘professionals’ and grassroots workers within an organization just as it disempowers those in the political field who are not professionalized, thereby contributing to the creation of small hegemonic elites (Hodzic, 2014).

Beyond NGOization: Beyond Autonomy and Purity

A recent edited volume on gender and NGOs makes a strong case to move beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ or the dominant feminist critiques of NGOs (Bernal & Grewal, 2014). The editors and (some) contributors do so in two ways: one, by producing rich ethnographic examples that constitute compelling counter cri-tiques to criticisms of NGOs as coopting women’s movements. Instead, they show how ‘NGOs are often constitutive of women’s movements’ and better understood as ‘hybrid formations or assemblages of different movements and organizations formed by coalitions and collectives’ (Bernal & Grewal, 2014, p. 219). The hybridity and heterogeneity of NGOs is emphasized in Alvarez’s (2014) contribu-tion that revisits her path breaking study on the Latin American ‘NGO boom’ to show that ‘the NGO form is being taken over by activists to work through femi-nist projects’—or what another contributor (Helms, 2014) refers to as a process of the movementization of NGOs rather than the NGOization of social movements.

Another way to question and move beyond the NGOization paradigm than by ‘bringing ethnography to directly bear [on it]’ (Hodzic, 2014, p. 223) is to challenge its normative status in structuring ‘the feminist field of knowledge about NGOs’ (ibid.). Hodzic argues that such a field of knowledge production constrains—as much as it opens up—the space for feminist analysis and critique. One of the ways it does so is by its ‘nostalgic valorization’ of women’s movements who are, in the NGOization paradigm, pitted against NGOs. In sharp opposition to NGOs, women’s movements are romanticized as pure authentic spaces for feminist mobilization to the extent that internal contradictions, inequalities and divisions that are common to all such movements are erased from view. Going beyond the ‘tropes of purity and contamination’ as they come to be attached to women’s movements and NGOs respectively in the NGOization paradigm, Hodzic suggests the need for historicizing and contextualizing the work of NGOs.

Let me end this essay by suggesting that Indian feminists would do well to engage with these debates emanating from outside of India given their immediate resonance to a transformed political landscape where NGOs function as a new normal. This is even more pressing given the largely divisive nature of the debate around NGOization where, as briefly noted above, feminist activists and scholars readily dismiss women’s NGOs as ‘selling out’ to the state and/or colluding with national and transnational neoliberalism. Biswas (2006) notes the emotionally charged if not acrimonious nature of discussions around funding that have made




it impossible for the IWM to articulate and interrogate its own dependencies, such as the increased dependence on external funds. Instead, conversations around NGOization get caught up in pitched battles around ideological authenticity and purity where ‘real’ feminists are pitted against ‘sold out’ ones, or, to recall Tellis’ (2014) assessment of the anti-rape protests in Delhi, ‘proper’ feminists are differentiated from ‘popular’ ones.

These kinds of ‘blanket assessment[s] of feminist NGOs as handmaidens of neoliberal planetary patriarchy’ (Alvarez, 2014, p. 286) do more than preclude the possibility of developing new reflections on the nature and implications of NGOs as a feminist form and the wider challenges that confront feminist practice in neoliberal times. They actively feed into rightwing, non-progressive and antifemi-nist forces best represented by the newly elected BJP government that has recently tried to police NGOs—particularly progressive and anti-state ones—on the grounds of being foreign funded and ‘anti-national’. Feminist NGOs have been pointed targets of, often violent, state crackdowns when attempting to call the political class into account on women’s issues. Unilateral condemnations of NGOs provide unnecessary fodder for such state-led curbing of civil society.

A first attempt, then, to move beyond such an ideologically charged field when it comes to the IWM would be to reject binary representations of NGOs either as ‘do-gooders’ or as ‘sell-outs’ in order to capture, as several ethnographers of Latin American feminist politics have (Alvarez, 2014; Murdock, 2003; Thayer, 2010), their ambivalent origins, heterogeneous and hybrid ways of functioning and unpredictable effects. While critics of NGOs seem to presume a stable and singu-lar entity in India, there is great diversity and fluidity in the manner in which NGOs actually operate in relation to different publics and at different scales of intervention. As many commentators have noted, characterizations of NGOs—in both social movement and scholarly discourses—often fail to capture the specificity of those operating within the political field because of the instability of the object under study (namely, NGOs) and the manner in which the term—NGO—itself functions to produce an impression of stability and uniformity. While some women’s NGOS might privilege technical aspects of their gender expertise when speaking to global policy audiences, others or even the same organization might perform crucial ‘movement work’ through the production and dissemination of feminist knowledge and pedagogy or even through advocacy and lobbying the state (see Roy, 2011). One instance of the interplay between NGOs and ‘the movement’ is the consciously collective way in which feminist NGOs in the eastern city of Kolkata have come together under the banner of an ‘autonomous’ platform called Maitree that undertakes explicitly and invariably anti-state cam-paigns around immediate political issues which might be risky for individual organizations to engage with on their own.

Notwithstanding the inability to draw sharp boundaries between NGOs and movements, Indian feminists are very invested in maintaining these normative divides, especially between ‘NGOized’ feminisms and ‘autonomous’ or social movement-based ones. While autonomous groups and spaces on the ground have rapidly shrunk, affective attachments to autonomy, as a symbolic horizon, have only strengthened. As I have detailed elsewhere (Roy, 2009), in criticizing



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the current NGOization of the IWM, Indian feminists mourn the passing of femi-nism in what is implicitly assumed to be its most pure, radical and authentic organizational and ideological form, namely autonomous women’s groups of the 1970s and 1980s. This fetishization of autonomy has a number of effects for the way in which the current feminist field and the actors who occupy it are made sense of by those within and outside of it. There are good reasons—both empirical and conceptual—to move beyond such an autonomy fetish in evaluating the IWM. Empirically speaking, the ideal of autonomy is largely untenable given the ‘indis-tinct boundaries’ (Misra, 2006, p. 48) between the structures of the state, civil society and the market. Autonomous groups that today function as collectives or platforms are just as implicated in ‘equally problematic structures of capital, power and inequality’ (Hodzic, 2014, p. 245) as are NGOs. There are no pure spaces beyond the orbit of the market logic in which feminists can situate themselves and on which their accusations of ‘cooption’ can rely.

Conceptually, there is much to gain from moving beyond nostalgic, even mel-ancholic attachments to feminist autonomy. Such attachments serve, for instance, to mask internal differences especially with respect to class–caste within the IWM. The ideal and practice of autonomy is rooted, after all, in privilege—in the luxury of not needing full-time employment or having other (familial) sources of financial stability; factors that have no doubt served to consolidate the tradition-ally elite leadership of the IWM. Ideological and affective attachments to auton-omy as ‘the paradigm of radical, pure feminism’ (Dean, 2008) also mean that emerging feminist formations invariably fall short notwithstanding their actual functioning and impact. In the context of British feminism, Jonathan Dean (Ibid.) argues that the valorization of a specifically 1970s or second wave feminist model marked by autonomy, anti-institutionalism, and anti-statist radicality serves to relegate from view certain types of feminist practice not because of their actual everyday activity but because of their failure to live up to this mode of what feminist politics ought to be. In other words, alternative, namely institutionalized and NGOized forms are judged as necessarily ‘less radical’ per force without the need for any empirical verification since they are seen as departing from the normative standards of past political modes.

To go back to what I began with—the mass protests post the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey—while these could have been perceived as herald-ing the resurgence and rise of public feminist activism in India, they were largely viewed, by activists and intellectuals alike, as ‘not properly feminist, or not the right kind of feminism’ (Dean, 2012, p. 316). Dean shows how a master narrative of the loss of feminist radicality (from the 1970s) persists even in the face of the ascend-ency of feminist activism especially by younger women in the UK today. This seems true of India as well where proclamations about the political apathy of young people and students and/or the limited nature of their political interventions persist even as the urban landscape rapidly shifts and young people—both men and women—become politicized in unintended and unanticipated ways.15 While these forms of politicization cannot be naively celebrated, as Dean (2012) rightly notes, they cannot be dismissed as ‘coopted’ by elitism and neoliberalism in advance or adjudged to be insufficiently political because of their failure to live




upto past ‘proper’ forms of political mobilization. Instead of engaging in (invari-ably defensive) gatekeeping of the bounds of ‘the movement’ in the face of its NGOization or popularization—both associated with younger women—there is a need to widen existing conceptual frameworks when it comes to the new feminist landscape. One way to do this would be to go beyond tropes of autonomy and purity associated with the NGOization paradigm in order to acknowledge the heterogeneity, diversity, plurality and fundamentally impure character of Indian feminist practice, whether autonomous or institutionalized. This is not simply in the name of capturing the ‘newness’ of feminist politics in the neoliberal present but in order to fully appreciate the hybrid legacies of the Indian Women’s Movement.

Notes 1. The term ‘feminism’ is contested in India as it is in most postcolonial countries where

it becomes an easy signifier of Westernization and elitism (summarized in Chaudhuri, 2004; see for a recent discussion, Roy, 2012). Niranjana (2007, p. 210) remarks how in the South Asian context, activists and academics alike have been more comfortable with the use of ‘the women’s question (in historical contexts) and the women’s movement (with reference to more contemporary formations)’. Besides distancing itself from the appellation ‘feminist’, the IWM has also, as Dave (2012) notes, historically privileged issues of class—over that of sexuality—as a way of establishing its relevance and authenticity. This means the easy dismissal, even today, of what is perceived to be strictly ‘middle class’ concerns to which sexuality is often subsumed.

2. Such criticisms persisted even as Jyoti Pandey herself was not of a middle class background.

3. The largely urban-based IWM has a national profile and presence but cannot be thought of and does not claim to represent all Indian women. Its several strains, as Madhok (2010) notes, have been concerned with a range of issues including health, civil rights, the environment, violence against women (a staple from the start) and more recently, sexuality.

4. Kilby (2011) notes that while women’ s NGOs such as SEWA and Annapurna Mahila Mandal have existed since the 1970s in India, it was only from the late 1980s that women came to be prioritized as a developmental category in their own right. This period saw an explosion of developmental NGOs working on women as their ‘target group’ largely through microfinance. Such NGOs should be distinguished from feminist NGOs who, while undertaking a range of services (including microfinance), self-identify as feminist and see themselves as part of the IWM. In many of the conversations on NGOization in India today, it is not clear who the object of critique is except when some NGOs are explicitly named as in Menon (2004). It also needs to be underscored here, as Kilby does, that the ‘NGO boom’ in India is waning in certain states where state and particularly international donors are pulling funds on the assumption that developmental targets have been met.

5. On the origin of India’s voluntary sector including NGOs and the changes it has undergone especially with respect to the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 and adopting IMF-sponsored structural adjustment programs that ushered in a new era of international development, see Kudva (2005) and Kilby (2011). For a recent appraisal in this journal, see Gupta (2014).

6. Much of the academic literature and activist discourse on NGOs in India and the global south more generally have been critical of NGOs especially with regard to



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the manner in which they are seen to privatize state services and depoliticize social movements. The NGOization paradigm adopted by these critics including feminist ones can be viewed, to this extent, as a continuation of Foucauldian inflected critiques of development as modalities of power/knowledge and as ‘antipolitics’ (Hodzic, 2014). This critical perspective is in sharp opposition to the manner in which states and international financial institutions embraced NGOs in the post war period as a ‘magic bullet’ of development.

7. Hodzic rightly associates the work of two key feminist scholars, namely Sabine Lang (1997) and Sonia Alvarez (1998) as central to the initial formulation of this paradigm, both of whom mapped, in their respective empirical contexts of Europe and Latin America, the historical shift from collective social movements to professionalized organizations and the distinction between earlier anti-institutional women’s movements and contemporary NGO forms.

8. Recent historiography of the IWM maps it as occurring in three waves: the first wave as marking the origins of the IWM in the anti-colonial nationalist struggle; the second wave in which the women’s movement is said to have come into its own as the ‘autonomous’ feminist movement; and finally, the third wave which is often identified as a period of quietism and reflection post the internal critiques and trend towards NGOization in the second wave (cf. Madhok 2012; Sunder Rajan, 2003; see also for a useful history, Kumar, 1993).

9. The unique feminist-cum-state run women’s development programme in the northern state of Rajasthan mobilized poor rural women in the service of grassroots development and was abruptly disbanded after the gang rape of a local Dalit developmental worker, Bhanwari Devi who has subsequently come to be an icon of the IWM (see an interview with her in Madhok, 2013).

10. ‘Post-Beijing’ is a common mode of temporalizing the recent history of ‘global feminism’ in the South referring to the transnationalization of women’s movements in this part of the world under the auspices of a series of UN sponsored conferences that began in 1975 and ended in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

11. There have been few critiques, feminist or otherwise, of the NGO world that derive from within. Sangtin Writers Collective and Nagar (2006) stand out as a complex account of rural women’s activism in north India under the auspices of funded NGOs that maps the many contradictions and complexities of such work, and that too, from the perspective of village-level fieldworkers who occupy the lowest rung of the NGO hierarchy. Delhi-based women’s groups like Saheli, Nirantar and Jagori that emerged as in the 1970s and continue to this day, have also documented their own organizational histories particularly as they formalized and even NGOized. See the respective website of these organizations to access this archive.

12. While the Delhi-based Saheli is potentially the only autonomous women’s group of the 1970s to remain through raising funds collectively in order to self-sustain, more recent urban-based activists platforms compromising of and indeed led by queer groups but with a large contingent of feminist NGOs are autonomous in not accepting external funds.

13. That the freely active subject is the goal of feminist activism in India (Menon, 2004) is not surprising given that freedom is normative to feminism as such (Mahmood, 2005).

14. See Dave (2012) for a detailed mapping of internal discussions and conflicts in the NCWM from the fourth one (held in Calicut, Kerala, in 1990) onwards where there was first uncertainty about the rise and consequences of NGOs in the movement.




15. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to adequately represent these recent developments, it should suffice to say that young people are interpellated through new modalities, scales and sites of activism that include the metropolitan and global, online and offline, feminist and queer, and the urban elite and the working classes. Men, in fact, emerged as a major constituent of public protest after the Delhi gang rape which is prompting new thinking around men and feminism as can seen in an upcoming conference on this theme (‘Men doing feminism in India’ conference in Kolkata in December 2014).

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The Indian Women's Movement: within and beyond NGOisation

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