Review of Sindhu Rajasekaran’s ‘Forgotten Feminisms'

Living amidst a harrowing reality of gendered violence and inequality, often the mere hope of resistance grows dim in the face of seemingly insurmountable structural odds. This is where history, rather, herstory, as Sindhu Rajasekaran writes, becomes important. Our foremothers' courage and resilience are what she believes can help us navigate the bleak present.

In her highly ambitious book, Forgotten Feminisms (Aleph), Rajasekaran aims to unearth forgotten narratives of womxn's active resistance from the Stone Age to the 21st century and declares without wincing: "India's feminist history is as old as time." She criticises not only misogynistic “History” but also mainstream feminist historiography for its disavowal of unspectacular, everyday acts of resistance and contempt for the "sexually agentive" subject. In her effort to rubbish the idea of Indian womxn as perpetual victims, she makes creative use of what she terms "jugaad" methodology to bring together evidence ranging from history and anthropology to folklore and drama. She also often points to her own complex positionality as a point of reflection on the myriad, interconnecting lines of power within which womxn's lives are embedded.

The author’s voice is clear, raw and full of rage. Her writing makes generous use of popular-culture terms (even abuses!) alongside fairly academic phrases like "deconstructionist", "heteropatriarchy" and many more, which make the book a somewhat atypical piece of writing. Whether this engages the audience or confounds them remains to be seen. The book is divided into two sections, the first exploring womxn's experiences in the ancient and the medieval Indian past, and the second engaging primarily with the colonial moment and extending into the present.

The book starts its explorations of the ancient past with a bold alternative framing from traditional feminist critical perspectives that the world order may have been matriarchal and matristic before turning patriarchal. The author starts from the cave paintings of Bhimbetka with the purpose of demystifying the notion of the female gatherer and the male hunter and moves through Vedic, Puranic literature and various figures like Gargi, Ulupi and Kali, and makes her claim that Brahminism was a key tool in the subversion of matriarchy.

Through a recounting of stories of saints, subversive poets, queer presence and fearless fighters, Rajasekaran shows that the Middle Ages, generally considered "dark" across the world, were in fact, a space of opportunity for the Indian milieu. The chaos presented an opening to somewhat re-order established hierarchies. She speaks of female sovereigns who wielded considerable power and describes their quick wit and sharp strategic visions. There is an interesting portrayal of violence and mercy through stories like that of the Nak Kati Rani and Salima Sultana Begum which deter us from fitting womxn within the silo of either.

The author repeatedly points us to two main lenses of sexuality and labour, both of which take varied forms in the narrative, marked by lines of caste, class, region, gender and race. Her focus on the colonial moment highlights the sexual policing most sharply and moves away from her earlier style of introduction and instances, which sometimes read like an isolated charter of evidence stacking, as compared to more integrated analysis.

In what she calls “modernity proper”, Rajasekaran adeptly shows the contradictions within the colonialist agenda and the collusion with indigenous patriarchy which led to severe subjugation of womxn's lived freedoms. Her heroines, however, rebel against these in many forms—be it as Bahujan queens like Rani Rashmoni outwitting the British or as the fierce Jhalkaribai aiding the Rani of Jhansi or as bold courtesans refusing the “criminal” tag and thwarting reform attempts.

The author, to her credit, covers a wide range of regional and temporal variations as well as caste, class and gendered identities. But whether all acts of resistance by womxn, and no acts by mxn, situated in such vastly differential contexts can be termed "protofeminism" or not remains a question to be pondered upon.

Rajasekaran's stinging, critical prose offers a welcome jolt to oft-accepted ideas about womxn's realities but some of the absolute claims she makes like "grown cishet men being lost causes" or non-violent ones having "psychotic issues" stretch well beyond what the evidentiary base can support, no matter how creative.  Her treatment of “history” being obviously biased while treating “herstory” as an alternative, also raises critical questions around how one may be epistemologically less biased than the other, especially when we are to move towards, as she advocates, “androgynous futures”.

Despite the few stumbles, the book remains a daring attempt at subverting established tropes around womxn's pasts and would be a read for people interested in undoing assumptions and rethinking current structures through a lens of alternate narratives. While perhaps not yet a handbook on womxn's lost lives, Rajasekaran definitely presents an audacious entry into what she terms the “feminist storytelling blockchain”.

(Shrestha Bandopadhyay is a research scholar at the Centre for Women’s Studies, JNU, working at the intersection of gender, ageing and care labour.)