Women?s Empowerment in India: From Rights to Agency

The volume brings together readings describing a range of less-traversed aspects and transferences of women’s rights and struggles in India and develops a comprehensive understanding of the interface between women’s activism and politics.

The book documents and discusses diverse ways in which Indian women have struggled for empowerment, political voice and representation, and rallied against injustice and discrimination. Against the backdrop of women’s assertion of rights and negotiations for empowerment, the chapters in this volume explore diverse facets of collective agency, and emanations of women’s politico-legal struggles against stereotypes of gender and class in post-independence India. While the donor-driven international community has been eager to celebrate the successes of its global normative agenda-setting and ‘best practices’ approach, this book - based primarily on field research by the contributors - showcases authentic local ownership and women’s own agency, taking seriously the need to understand the cultural context and pay attention to intersectionality. It presents various examples of women’s activism for change, reflecting on the quotidian struggles and dynamic assertions of voice and political power, within and outside of formal political institutions. The book is a contribution to the debate about agency and ownership as key aspects of empowerment, highlighting women who defy dominant narratives.

It will be an essential read for students and academics of political science, gender studies, sociology and social sciences, and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to readers interested in the history of women’s movements and their participation in national and local politics in India.

Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya is a professor of Political Science from Banaras Hindu University and a Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at MIT-World Peace University, Pune.

Åshild Kolås is a social anthropologist and research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). She has written extensively on governance, identity politics, gender, nationhood and representation.

Eileen Connolly was the Director of the Ireland India Institute at Dublin City University. She is a specialist in gender and politics.