Archiving Women’s Resistance in South Asia

The representation of women in the Left has been of great concern especially in the South Asian region, as seen in very few having prominent organizational roles or the general inability of organised Left to rally women either at sites of production or in the sphere of reproduction. However, to interpret this ‘status-quo’ as a general absence of woman’s movement is to obliterate and subalternize the undocumented success stories of their role in resistance struggles aiming at larger socio-political transformations. The real tragedy of woman’s resistance in South Asia has been the lack of, or half-hearted attempts to unearth and document their histories especially from a Marxist lens.

In this context, the working paper series, from our partner South Asian University (SAU), is an output of a 10-month research on ‘Archiving Woman’s Resistance’ conducted by four researchers in four different locations i.e. Nagaland (India), Uttarakhand (India), Bihar (India) and Sri Lanka. The series aim to understand women’s questions in left politics by carving and linking the role played by them in local resistances, and their interaction and contribution to larger movements geared towards socio-political transformations. It tries to amplify their voices, often pushed under the carpet, by providing a valuable point of convergence, to push boundaries of feminist approaches to capitalist development in South Asia. It attempts at bridging the gap between different forms of political movements and Marxist struggles in South Asia while focusing on the role played by women. It thereby contributes to existing scholarship of entwined and often conflicted histories of Feminism and Marxism.