Social Change Golden Jubilee Lecture 2020
From Home to the Borders; Violence Against Women, Impunity and Resistance
By
Uma Chakravarti
Chair Prof. Muchkund Dubey, President, Council for Social Development
Uma Chakravarti, feminist scholar and noted historian, delivered the Social Change Golden Jubilee lecture, 2020 entitled, From Home to the Borders; Violence Against Women, Impunity and Resistance. The lecture examined the violence and suppression from sexual assault to domestic abuse that affected millions of women in the country. Contextualising the content with specific examples, Prof. Chakravarti said that this expression of violence can be found particularly in four arenas: in the homes; in the streets and fields; in villages and regions, and borderlands. All these arenas have exhibited features linked to the manner where impunity exists. Women, in both rural and urban India, have been victims of a continuum of violence and have suffered an ongoing application of male power, including by the police and armed forces. The impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of these assaults has been responsible for their brazenness and their frequency and it is therefore important to point to the slow pace shown by the State to address this issue.
As Chair, Prof Muchkund Dubey commented on the prevalence of violence against women and girls all over the world, and stressed the importance of engaging in debates about the intersection between gender and violence, women’s rights and human development.
The lecture marked the 50th year of publication of Social Change. The quarterly is brought out by the Council for Social Development and is published by SAGE. The annual lecture, part of the journal’s Golden Jubilee series, is supported by the Anthropological Survey of India, SAGE Publications and India International Centre.
About the Speaker
Uma Chakravarti is a historian who has worked and written on issues of caste, labour and gender and is active in the democratic rights and women’s movements. Among her early published works are, Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism. Her subsequent writings include, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai and Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens. A leading scholar of women’s and feminist history writing in the subcontinent, she has been described as one of the pioneers of the women’s movement in India.
Apart from engaging with feminist issues, she has also worked as a democratic rights activist, participating in several fact-finding committees including the International Tribunal on Justice for Gujarat. The feminist scholar has also directed two documentary films – A Quiet Little Entry and Fragments of a Past, both of which focus on women’s history in India.