POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM AND THE TEXT: LITERARY STUDIES IN INDIA
Alka Kumar

The paper aims to articulate the ways in which the situation of the woman in post-colonial India differs from that of her male counterpart, including the multi ways in which it is constructed and maintained in the context of her marginalisations, for instance on the basis of caste, class and other markers of status. In the case of those women who do not fit into these neat categories of subjugation the overwhelming structures of family, traditional morality and societal norm are enough to straitjacket and force them into subservient subject positions. Any attempts on their part towards self assertion or affirmation are largely, (and in so-called liberated and democratically designed spaces, deliberately), perceived a result of 'mis-placed' feminism. The paper argues that although in the contemporary moment India is, both for the practising academic/thinker and others a meaningful postcolonial space (and the paper would address that in some detail), there is a huge feeling that feminism is essentially a western import and thus peripheral (and damaging) to the needs of Indian men and women.

In the current climate of decolonising literary studies in India, as also the intersections that are thus produced with issues of canonization, nationalism and national identity, rethinking of the paradigms of literature, pedagogy and literary representation become crucial. The ways in which gender interlocks with these other parameters to 'produce' culture and Literary/Culture studies in India will be the focus of this paper.