At the outset, what is most striking about Sadhna Arya and Lata Singh’s edited volume Feminist Movements in India: Issues, Debates, Struggles (published by Aakar Books in 2024) is its title. While the chapters of the book frequently revisit landmark moments in what is popularly known as the autonomous women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s, they distil their implications for feminist politics, aptly renaming them—along with struggles before and after—as feminist movements. As the editors’ introduction states, the book is designed as a resource for students and teachers in the critical social sciences, and it is indeed among the most comprehensive texts on feminist movements in recent years. It is also a text on the unfinished engagement of feminist movements with intersectionality as it compels the reader to account for axes of identity beyond gender analytically rather than descriptively—serving as a companion to theoretical discussions on intersectionality in the Indian context.

The book starts with a conceptual explanation of patriarchy, drawing on the waves metaphor and summarizing predominant feminist traditions like the liberal and radical traditions, along with subaltern traditions like Black feminism and Dalit feminism. The discussions in this chapter (and the next on gender, kin, caste and class) also summarize arguments from several texts and thinkers, which is valuable background reading for students of gender studies working across themes. But while these conceptual discussions help establish the tensions within feminist movements, it is in the second chapter onwards that the book moves to a more contextual understanding of patriarchy, with debates on caste, sexuality and labour, histories of women’s advocacy and legal reform, and exclusions in these debates and histories. The chapters of the book are not necessarily chronological (except the concluding chapter on feminism in the post-1990s era), but they build the debates through significant events—the custodial rape of Mathura, the Shah Bano case on maintenance, the rape of Bhanwari Devi while at work, the dance bar ban in Mumbai. Although several chapters analyse the same events, rather than being repetitive, they demonstrate that these violations were not single-issue events, and need to be analysed from the intersecting perspectives of gender, caste, sexuality, and labour, exposing the structures within which patriarchy is sustained.

A particular strength of the book lies in its explorations of women’s labour in the household, in the organised and unorganised sectors, and in subsistence economics, connecting these sites, and looking into issues of wages, identity, care and resistance. The discussions on the moral, agentic, and caste-based associations of women’s sex work in the chapters by Anagha Tambe and Meena Gopal are especially useful in understanding and asking who the women in feminist movements are, and in fact, what qualifies as a feminist movement. These discussions connect seamlessly with discussions on kinship, caste and household, Dalit feminism, and women in media and performance. The chapters on sex work and other forms of devalued labour also foreground the role of the material body in labour, which is not as prominent in wider discussions on labour.

Another significant contribution of the book is its vastly comprehensive chapter on Muslim women’s rights, co-authored by Ghazala Jamil and Khawla Zainab. The chapter presents a historical picture of Muslim women’s political organisation, and contemporary entanglements with development discourses and legal reforms, and significantly, women’s navigation of “community and feminist allegiance” (p. 212) in the context of anti-Muslim politics. Jamil & Zainab’s chapter, along with Ranjana Padhi’s chapter on land rights movements in Odisha, are noteworthy examples of feminist struggles in relation to and within political and social movements, which, as the conclusion notes, is a continuing gap in feminist movements.

The book brings together a vast range of debates but leaves wanting other contemporary issues, perhaps beyond the scope of a single edited volume: digital media and movements like #MeToo, gender rights in the post-377 era decriminalising homosexuality, the NALSA judgment recognising a ‘third gender’, the passing of the controversial Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, and also women’s resistance to authoritarian and carceral regimes in the state and the market. The book builds a largely historical narrative of feminist movements, much as they find reverberations in the current period, but one wishes to see more engagement with feminist politics in the last two decades.

To quote from Anagha Tambe’s chapter on sex work,“…the dominant subject of feminist politics, till recently has been the middle-class women within the framework of monogamous marriage” (p. 91). The book makes a remarkable shift in building subjective positions of women in their various political contexts, and significantly, explores how agency within feminist movements is built and challenged.

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Alankrita Anand is a Research Associate at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi.