ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, feminist academics and activists from the ‘West’ have been attracted to the cultural specificity of discrimination against females in India. They refer to documented cases of rape, the abortion of female foetuses, the killing of girls, dowry crimes, the marriage of young girls, and the burning of widows. More recent publications by gender experts and Indologists that adopt a postcolonial approach sometimes criticise the findings of ‘Western’ feminists, arguing that such feminists lose sight of the commensurability of sexually motivated acts of violence in India, and define the ‘Indian woman’ as ‘gendered subaltern’ (Spivak), without giving her the chance to speak for herself. This chapter outlines the conflicting issues, concepts, and goals surrounding academic research on gender-based violence in India today. It furthermore questions to what extent the different forms of social discrimination against the female gender in India are due to traditional narratives, social ascriptions, and political practices that can be seen as an ‘Indian’ phenomenon, or to one that is cross-cultural.
