ABSTRACT

This chapter opens up the space-time of that seemingly most Western of concepts – namely, ‘feminism’ –from the perspective of its effective history in modern India. It investigates the ways of thinking about women and their rights that were set in motion from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and their multiple careers into the present. Arguing against the notion that a given idea or theory is most true at its point of origin, the author deploys the conceptual mobility of the concept of feminism by drawing upon the modes in which it has been put to work in its crossings with ‘culture’. This is explored particularly in the latter’s recastings in India alongside the social and the political that was set in place during the colonial period. These are juxtaposed with the nature/culture binary in the West as a way of thinking about intersecting, even if discontinuous, conceptual histories which shape our understandings of feminism across time and space.