7th October would have marked feminist and sociologist Sharmila Rege’s 53rd birthday if not for her untimely death after a battle with colon cancer on 13th July, 2013.
In her short life, Sharmila Rege made invaluable contributions to the academic and activist realms centered on Indian feminism.
Early Life
Born in Kolhapur, Rege was raised in Pune, where she would later study in Fergusson College’s Department of Sociology. In 1991, she began teaching at the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Centre which was a part of the Department of Sociology at the time. When the center became anonymous in 1998, Sharmila marked that there was a sudden dislocation akin to the feeling of “being lost to one’s discipline”.
In 2005, Rege became a professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Pune. She would go on to teach sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai for a brief period only to return as director to the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Centre in 2008.
Body of Work
In 2006, she received the prestigious Malcom Adiseshiah award for distinguished contribution to Development Studies from the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
Sharmila Rege’s work must be placed in the three domains of sociology, women’s studies, and women’s movements. In an eccentric paper titled ‘Institutional Alliance between Sociology and Gender Studies: The Story of the Monkey and the Crocodile’, she attempts to integrate sociology and gender by carefully locating the specific history of sociology in Maharashtra. There existed a problematic interaction between the feminist attempt to utilize experience as a legitimate source of knowledge and the notion of a value laden ‘common sense’ that pervaded the discipline of Sociology (rooted in its patriarchal assumptions). Rege identifies the three positions that the project of integrating sociology with gender studies must undertake:
“The position of a feminist confronting patriarchies in sociology, both at the academic and institutional levels; two, the position of a third world feminist and sociologist confronting the agendas of western feminism and sociology; three, the position of a gender sensitive sociologist located in India, interrogating the complexities of caste, class, ethnicity and gender.”
Perhaps, her most debated upon contribution to the field of Women’s Studies would be the ‘Dalit-Feminist’ Standpoint. She argued that the masculinization of Dalithood and the Savarnisation of womanhood produces the classical exclusion and erasure of Dalit Womanhood. Rege uses Ambedkar’s definition of caste as endogamous class sustained through control over the woman’s sexual and reproductive activities. She explains that one cannot conceive of an adequate sexual politics without taking note of the intrinsic linkage between caste and sexuality.
The elevation of caste status finds expression in the withdrawal of the women that hail from such a location within the productive activities of the public sphere. The impurity of the Dalit man is justified through his failure to control the sexuality of ‘his’ woman. Consequently, sexual assault over Dalit women is a common practice employed to undermine Dalit manhood. Rege further explains how Bramhanism does not universalize a single patriarchal mode, but creates multiple patriarchies.
“A Dalit Feminist standpoint is seen as emancipatory since the subject of its knowledge is embodied and visible (i e, the thought begins from the lives of Dalit women and these lives are present and visible in the results of the thought). This position argues that it is more emancipatory than other existing positions and counters pluralism and relativism by which all knowledge based and political claims are thought to be valid.”
Rege went on to argue that ‘Dalit women’ itself cannot be conceived of as a homogenous category. Rege’s paper was a response to a paper written by Gopal Guru titled ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently’. Guru asserts that the autonomous mobilization of Dalit women is a unique epistemological standpoint.
The assertion that Dalit women talk differently allows for the emergence of an authentic representation of social reality. Rege found Guru’s argument problematic to the extent that authentic knowledge claims rooted in experience can lead to the formation of what she though to be narrow, identity politics limiting the emancipatory potential of the Dalit woman’s organisations.
“Dalit feminist standpoint which emerges from the practices and struggles of Dalit woman, we recognise, may originate in the works of Dalit feminist intellectuals but it cannot flourish if isolated from the experiences and ideas of other groups who must educate themselves about the histories, the preferred social relations and utopias and the struggles of the marginalised. A transformation from ‘their cause’ to ‘our cause’ is possible for subjectivities can be transformed. By this we do not argue that non-Dalit feminists can ‘speak as’ or ‘for the’ Dalit women but they can ‘reinvent themselves as Dalit feminists’. Such a position, therefore avoids the narrow alley of direct experience based ‘authenticity’ and narrow ‘identity politics’.”
Ambedkarite Feminists’ response to Sharmila Rege
The Dalit-feminist standpoint offers a radical re-envisioning of how activism and academia ought to operate in India. Nevertheless, it is certainly problematic how hailing from an upper caste location, Sharmila Rege seems to assert a certain hegemonic influence over the anti-caste academic and activist frameworks.
Also Read: The Truth About Fiction: Looking At Caste, Gender And Dissent In Urmila Pawar’s Short Stories
On Sharmila’s first death anniversary, Lata Pratibha Madhukar, a Dalit-Bahujan feminist writes:
“Is Sharmila Rege the representative of the mainstream in feminism and are Dalit-Bahujan feminists on the side streams? If this is true, it means that the scores of non-Brahmin women who have worked in the feminist movement, wrote, spread its thoughts, and strugg