Abstract

This Introduction frames a collection of papers that explore the roles played by women—as volunteers, organisers, bureaucrats, politicians and citizens—in shaping the emerging ideologies and structures of independent India. Although women’s participation is both understudied and inadequately theorised in existing scholarship, the papers in this collection demonstrate that the decades following India’s Independence witnessed the participation of women in every sphere of politics and nation-building. The introductory essay tracks the limits and possibilities of women’s agency and gendered citizenship in these spheres to historicise the women’s movement during the post-Independence decades, and to examine its fraught relationship with feminism, patriarchal society and state politics.

摘要

本导言收集了一系列论文，探讨女性在塑造独立印度新兴意识形态和结构中扮演的角色——作为志愿者、组织者、官僚、政治家和公民。尽管在现有的学术研究中，女性的参与既没有得到充分的研究，也没有充分的理论化，但本集中的论文表明，印度独立后的几十年见证了女性参与政治和国家建设的各个领域。这篇介绍性文章追踪了这些领域中女性能动性和性别公民的局限性和可能性，以将独立后几十年的女性运动历史化，并研究其与女权主义、父权社会和国家政治的紧张关系。