ABSTRACT
What might the concerns of the present volume on the circulation of knowledges in the social sciences look like from the perspectives of feminism? I hope to address this problematic from the location of India and its history of the women’s question. The terrain of my discussions will be pre-academic and extra-academic, by which I mean to include concepts and knowledges that pre-dated the establishment of the university and its modes of structuring higher education and/or came to be created outside such institutional contexts, including those associated with political and social movements. Certainly in the case of feminism, and there are surely many other examples as well, we are dealing not just with ideas or beliefs but with forms of conceptual knowledge that played a constitutive role in shaping the more recognizable fields and disciplinary orientations of the social sciences.
