Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency

Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency is an exploration of the historical sources across India's composite culture that have shaped the female self. Beginning with the Upanishads, it works with several foundational texts such as the epics and their retellings, Manusmriti, Natya Sastra and the literature of the Bhakti Movement in order to trace the histories of feminist questionings. The constant interweaving of literary and social texts and the tracing of both continuities and disruptions across time and space enables a perception of the way in which individual struggles have merged with collective resistance and allowed a questioning of relationships, institutional frameworks and traditional role models. Feminism as an ideology is invariably linked to culture as it works with both the body and the consciousness. Indigenous Roots, without allowing itself to be submerged in excessive data, examines the validity of this belief across time to trace a connectivity with cultural formations.