What are the main features of the second wave of Women’s movement in the Indian context? (2014)
The wave metaphor is borrowed from Western feminism, and Indian scholars such as Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishnaraj periodise the movement by its own history. Applied to India, the first wave covers nineteenth-century social reform and the nationalist mobilisation; the second wave is the autonomous women’s movement of the mid-1970s and 1980s, whose distinguishing mark is that women ceased to be the object of reform and became its subject.
Autonomy from party, state and male leadership
Groups formed outside the control of political parties and of the state: the Progressive Organisation of Women in Hyderabad, Stree Mukti Sanghatana in Bombay, the Forum Against Oppression of Women, and Saheli in Delhi. They were small, city-based, deliberately non-hierarchical collectives rather than mass-membership federations of the nationalist type.
Patriarchy as the analytical centre
- The organising concept shifted from women’s welfare to patriarchy — what Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) later formalised as a system of interacting structures. The slogan that the personal is political opened the family, marriage and sexuality to scrutiny for the first time.
- Towards Equality (1974), the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, with Vina Mazumdar as member-secretary, supplied the evidence: a declining sex ratio and falling work participation despite constitutional equality.
Violence and the body as the defining issues
- The Mathura custodial rape judgment (1979) and the open letter by Upendra Baxi, Lotika Sarkar and Vasudha Dhagamwar triggered the anti-rape campaign and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983, which created the offence of custodial rape and inserted s.114A of the Evidence Act presuming absence of consent.
- Campaigns followed against dowry death, wife-beating, sati after the Deorala incident of 1987, and sex-selective abortion, leading in time to the pre-natal diagnostic techniques legislation of 1994.
Law-centred strategy and new knowledge
- The characteristic method was campaign plus litigation plus legislative demand, rather than mass agitation.
- The wave created its own institutions of knowledge: Manushi (1978), the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (1980), the publishing house Kali for Women (1984) and women’s studies departments. Radha Kumar‘s The History of Doing (1993) is itself a product of this turn.
Links with livelihood and ecology
The Self Employed Women’s Association (1972) organised informal workers; Chipko, anti-price-rise fronts and anti-liquor agitations connected gender to subsistence — the empirical basis of Bina Agarwal‘s argument in A Field of One’s Own (1994) that resource rights, not welfare, determine women’s bargaining power.
Internal critique, and the wave’s exhaustion
- The applicability of Western feminism was contested; Madhu Kishwar urged drawing on indigenous cultural resources instead.
- The Shah Bano controversy (1985) and the Mandal moment exposed the movement’s assumption of a single “woman”. Uma Chakravarti‘s brahmanical patriarchy (1993) and Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint mark the passage to a third, intersectional phase.
Conclusion
The second wave’s lasting contribution is conceptual: it made patriarchy, consent and the body sayable in Indian public life, and converted that vocabulary into statute. Its limitation — a largely urban, educated, savarna base, and a faith in law that outran the state’s willingness to enforce it — set the agenda for everything that followed.