Neera Desai occupies a position in Indian sociology that is unusual: she is remembered as much for founding a field as for what she wrote in it. Her doctoral study, published as Woman in Modern India (1957), was among the earliest sustained sociological accounts of women's position in India written by an Indian scholar, and it appeared two decades before women's studies existed anywhere in the country as an organised area of enquiry. When that field did emerge, she built its first institutional home.
Her scholarship joins two commitments that later became difficult to hold together. She read women's subordination structurally — as a matter of property, production, family and law rather than of attitude or custom alone — and she insisted that the study of women must remain answerable to the women's movement from which it had come. The relation between academic knowledge and political practice is the recurring problem of her writing.
Life and intellectual formation
Born in 1925, Desai came of age in the last phase of the national movement, and her early political education in that milieu shaped her understanding of the woman question as inseparable from questions of colonialism, class and social reform. She trained in sociology and completed the doctoral research that became Woman in Modern India while still in her twenties.
Her professional life was spent at the SNDT Women's University in Bombay, where she taught and headed sociology. In 1974 she established there the Research Centre for Women's Studies, generally recognised as the first women's studies centre in an Indian university. The date is significant: 1974 was also the year of Towards Equality, the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, whose documentation of declining sex ratios, falling female work participation and the failure of legal reform to reach women's lives shocked the political and academic establishment. Desai's centre gave that shock an institutional form.
Woman in Modern India and the colonial woman question
Woman in Modern India traces the position of women from the classical period through the colonial encounter, and it is the colonial section that has proved most durable. Desai's account of nineteenth-century social reform identifies both its achievement and its limits.
The achievement was real: sati, widowhood, child marriage, enforced female illiteracy and the seclusion of women were brought into public argument, and reformers from Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar to Ranade, Phule and Karve secured legislation and founded institutions. But Desai emphasised the conditions under which this happened. Reform was overwhelmingly led by men, and the woman question was raised largely as an aspect of a wider argument about national self-respect — the treatment of women had become the ground on which colonial officials judged Indian civilisation, and Indian reformers answered on that ground. Its constituency was narrow, drawn from upper-caste, English-educated urban strata, so the reforms addressed the disabilities of those women and left the labouring majority untouched.
She also drew attention to the shape of the ideal that reform produced. The educated woman it envisaged was to be a better companion, a more capable mother and a more rational manager of the household, not an autonomous person with claims of her own. Even the revivalist strand of reform, which defended Indian tradition against colonial criticism, worked by locating a golden age of Vedic womanhood and treating present degradation as decline — an argument that could improve women's condition while leaving the structure of male authority intact. Desai's insistence that the emancipatory content of reform be judged against the family and property relations it left standing marks her out from the celebratory histories of her time.
Structure, work and the material basis of subordination
Women and Society in India (1987), written with Maithreyi Krishnaraj, is the fullest statement of her framework and functioned for years as the standard text in the field. Its argument is that women's position cannot be read off culture alone. The determinants it identifies are the organisation of production and women's place within it, the ownership and inheritance of property, the structure of the family and its allocation of labour and authority, and the operation of law, caste and class — all of which vary, so that there is no single condition of the Indian woman.
Two implications follow that recur throughout her work. First, class and caste differentiate women's experience so sharply that generalisation is suspect: the constraints on a landless Dalit woman agricultural labourer and on a middle-class urban housewife are not the same constraints, and may stand in a relation of exploitation to one another. Second, apparent modernisation may worsen women's position — the displacement of women from production, the devaluing of their unpaid work, and the extension of middle-class domesticity down the social scale can all reduce autonomy while raising respectability. Her attention to women's work, and to its statistical invisibility, was among the earliest in Indian scholarship.
Building women's studies as a discipline
Desai's second achievement is institutional, and she wrote about it reflexively. Women's studies in India, she argued, did not arise from within the academy as a specialisation; it arose from the women's movement of the 1970s, which generated questions the existing disciplines could not answer and demanded research that could be used. Its founding documents were activist and governmental — Towards Equality above all — rather than scholarly.
She was closely involved in the steps by which this became a field: the Research Centre at SNDT in 1974, the national conference on women's studies held in Bombay in 1981, and the formation in 1982 of the Indian Association for Women's Studies, which gave the field a professional body and a recurring national forum. From the middle of the 1980s the University Grants Commission recognised women's studies and supported centres in universities across the country. Desai's own account of this history, in A Decade of Women's Movement in India (1988) and later essays, is one of the primary sources for it.
Her position on what the field was for remained firm. Women's studies was not an additional subject area to be added to a syllabus but a critical perspective that obliged every discipline to re-examine its categories — its units of analysis, its notion of work, its idea of the household. And it was to stay connected to the movement, both because activism supplied its questions and because institutional respectability was likely to blunt them.
Criticisms
The most substantial critique of Desai's generation of women's studies came from Dalit feminist scholarship. Its charge is that the early field, staffed and led largely by upper-caste, urban, educated women, framed patriarchy as the primary axis of oppression and treated caste as a secondary differentiation, thereby writing the specific experience of Dalit women out of the category woman. Desai's own emphasis on class and on the diversity of women's situations mitigates but does not answer the objection, since caste does more analytical work in her framework as a source of variation than as a constitutive structure.
Her early work has also been read as insufficiently attentive to women's own agency in the colonial period — the reform narrative is largely a narrative of what was done for women — a gap later historiography has filled by recovering women's writing, organisations and resistance. Her broadly Marxist-feminist framework has been criticised for subsuming gender under material relations, and her later reflections on institutionalisation sometimes read as an anxiety about co-option rather than an analysis of it.
Legacy
Women's studies in India is now taught in dozens of universities, has its own association, journals and archives, and has changed what other disciplines count as data — and the institutional path by which that happened runs through Desai's centre at SNDT. Substantively, her insistence that women's subordination be analysed through work, property and family rather than through custom set the agenda for a generation of research on female work participation, invisible labour and inheritance. Her framing of the colonial woman question as male-led, nationalist in idiom and limited in class reach remains the starting point from which historians of reform, including sharper critics such as Uma Chakravarti, proceed.
For the UPSC answer
Neera Desai is the anchor for two distinct question types. In questions on colonial social reform and the woman question, use her argument that reform was male-led, nationalist in motivation, upper-caste in constituency, and aimed at the companionate wife rather than the autonomous woman — a formulation that converts a narrative answer into an analytical one. In questions on the women's movement, use her to make the point that women's studies in India emerged from the movement rather than the academy, dating the sequence through Towards Equality (1974), the Research Centre for Women's Studies at SNDT (1974) and the Indian Association for Women's Studies (1982). Add her structural emphasis on work and property when a question asks why legal equality has not delivered substantive equality, and close with the Dalit feminist critique of early women's studies to show that you can locate her position as well as state it.
References & further reading
- Desai, Neera (1957). Woman in Modern India. Bombay: Vora and Co.
- Desai, Neera and Krishnaraj, Maithreyi (1987). Women and Society in India. Delhi: Ajanta Publications.
- Desai, Neera (ed.) (1988). A Decade of Women’s Movement in India. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House.
- Desai, Neera and Thakkar, Usha (2001). Women in Indian Society. New Delhi: National Book Trust.
- Government of India (1974). Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India. New Delhi: Ministry of Education and Social Welfare.
- John, Mary E. (ed.) (2008). Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Penguin Books.