Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 10:33:54 -0700 (MST)
From: Rinita Mazumdar <rinita-AT-nmt.edu>
Subject: Partha's letter


Partha,


Excellent letter. Personally I think we have to take some
responsibility on such issues. As I said earlier, the voices of the
``other'' in India is emerging at a time when India is evolving into a
``civil society'' which was originally designed to ensure private
property (Locke/Hobbes), Hence the entire power structure is in the
hand of the elite bourgeois (resident of the burghers as Hegel said).
The politics of the ``other'' has become a ``politics of rights''
(rights for us as opposed to them). Women's movement in India, as I saw
it this time, at least the  hegemonistic ones, are very right-oriented
(a bourgeois notion derived from enlightment). Every notion of
``right'' has inside it exclusionary practices (differance: I am being
Derridian here). Hence, no wonder the ``Marxist Feminist'' woman you
talk about in your book who excludes a muslim man from having right,
does so based on her ``right-oriented''  notion of feminism derived
from the concept of a Subject-centered politics. 

It is possible to have movements via collective agencies without espousing
any bourgeois right-oriented concept (a problem as Kristeva noted exists
both with left and right politics.) Women can join in subaltern, subalterns
can join in prisoners who are tortured without anyone losing their voices.
Western notion of subjecthood is not the only notion of humanism;
the debate between essentialism and nominalism raged during between
Buddhists and Nyayiyikas long ago, agency comes through praxis.
We need not have a `right based' women's movement in India, and then
we will not see the woman you described in your book or the right
wingers appropriating all their discourses.