Reconstituting Anthropology: Indian Women’s Writing as Decolonial Anthropological Thought

Abstract (English)

Women in India, have long theorized their worlds, societies, and cultures, and engaging with their intellectual traditions is critical to efforts to decolonize and decanonize the history of anthropology. Feminist scholarship (Hooks, 1984) has critically reflected on the institutionalisation of feminist scholarship, with particular focus on what constitutes theory, and who determines these questions. In this context, Indian women’s intellectual contributions embedded in writing poetry, autobiography, and other genres can be read as anthropological critique in their own right, serving as powerful decolonial tools to generate alternative epistemologies. This paper engages with precolonial and colonial-era Indian women’s writing as anthropological critique, with particular focus on the 19th-century feminist texts Tarabai Shinde’s Stri Purush Tulana (1882) and Pandita Ramabai’s The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887). The paper proposes that we read these alongside the Bhakti devotional traditions, in which women used devotional poetics to challenge patriarchal and brahminical religious hierarchy, tracing Indian women’s intellectual genealogies in writing, storytelling, literature, and poetry, rather than being seen “sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own” (Rich, 1972). These writings complicate the historical understanding of anthropological thought by demonstrating modes of theorisation emerging from outside the discipline’s institutionalised and colonial frameworks. This paper argues for the recognition of Indian women’s intellectual contributions as foundational to decolonising the discipline’s history and to rethink what constitutes anthropological knowledge, method and epistemology itself.