Book Review

Asia

In 1991, Madhu Kishwar, one of the founding editors of the Indian journal Manushi, wrote an essay with the self-declaratory title, "Why I am not a Feminist." The question of whether feminism has historically been indigenous to non-Western societies or has been imposed from "outside" has preoccupied scholars for several generations. Some, like Kumari Jayawardena in Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986), have embraced the term and tracked its local and transnational origins. Others have documented the women's movement in India by folding the question into larger discussions of women's activism; Radha Kumar, for example, called her account of agitation for Indian women's rights The History of Doing (1993). Azra Asghar Ali confronts this question directly and (given the troubled fate of the term) somewhat unproblematically. In her view, feminism is "the awareness of constraints placed on women because of their gender system, [an awareness] involving new roles for women and new relations between women and men" (pp. xvii–xviii). Her emphasis is on feminism as the movement of Indian Muslim women into various arenas of the public sphere in the three decades before partition. Ali aims to dispel the myth that Muslim women were secluded from public life by nationalists hostile to "the woman question" and to engage the question of why Muslim women in this period can and should be identified as feminists. Her conclusion is as straightfoward as her definition of feminism: namely, that the emergence of a feminist movement was the "direct response to" and "consequence of" Muslim women's encounters with the West (p. 253), but that it is "Indian Muslim feminism" nonetheless.

. . .