shuvatri Dasgupta

This conversation is excerpted from the exchanges that took place between Shuvatri Dasgupta and Samita Sen, spanning across several months (between September 2020 and April 2021)—in Cambridge and Kolkata—over Zoom, over email, and by the Cam. It is inspired by the present context, where the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the atrocities of global capital. Neoliberal modes of production have always prioritised thing-making over life-making, and the pandemic has only highlighted these ongoing processes of exploitation, resulting from the ruthless logic of capital accumulation and commodification. It has caused what scholars are identifying as a universal crisis of social reproduction, causing shecession, ecological damage, and severe austerity. In an attempt to analyse this, our conversation attempts a liminal fluidity by traversing the last three decades of both academic scholarship and personal experience. Through that, we reflect on the ways in which history, theory, and politics, can be interwoven for addressing the exploitations of capital, patriarchy, and colonialism. Conclusively, within this discursive space, we explore ways in which these intersectional and interdisciplinary insights can be used to imagine radically egalitarian futures. 

Shuvatri Dasgupta: What were the formative influences for you in shaping your research interests in histories of labor and gender? Can you retrace any intellectual starting point perhaps for your rather unusual research trajectory on the histories of labor and gender in South Asia?  

Samita Sen: I can trace it back to two academic events from the mid-1980s when I was a student pursuing my master’s degree in history at Calcutta University. The first event was a seminar I attended where Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Dasgupta proposed two alternative views on Marxist historiography. Whilst Dasgupta advocated the importance of ‘class’ in colonial histories of labor, Chakrabarty insisted on using the lens of ‘community’—an argument which he later elaborated in his monograph ‘Rethinking Working-Class History’ (1989). For a long time, Subaltern Studies debated the whole question of community—what it meant for communalism (Gyan Pandey), was it precapitalist and premodern (Partha Chatterjee), or pre-colonial (Ranajit Guha)—we were getting a more complex understanding of ‘community’ and its potential to challenge the category of class in understanding social history. In a sense, Sumit Sarkar opened the door, when he argued that ‘bhadralok’ rather than ‘middle class’ was a more appropriate description for the new elite of colonial Bengal.  The other formative event was the Subaltern Studies conference which took place in Calcutta in 1984.  We were first-year masters’ students.  We also saw the power of gender unfold before us, in more ways than one, when Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak made her decisive intervention.  It was an electric moment for us, especially for those of us already attracted to the ‘second wave’ feminist movement.  We were just beginning a new range of discussions on women’s issues in Kolkata.  

At that time, neither gender history nor Subaltern Studies were a part of our university curriculum. These were interests that had to be pursued outside the classroom.  It was my involvement in feminist groups in Calcutta rather than my day-to-day coursework at Calcutta University that was central in shaping my research interests. In this period, I was hired as an assistant by Professor Nirmala Banerjee to help her with her book, ‘Tyranny of the Household’ (1985) and she shared with me an occasional paper, which was later published as ‘Modernisation and Marginalisation’. That paper sparked my interest.  I thought back to debates about class and community and wondered why gender did not figure in any of these debates and how it might.  I wanted to understand the relationship between gender and class.  It was not that the jute industry itself fascinated me; I chose the jute industry because it was the most important industry in Bengal.  It was quite inconvenient that I had chosen an industry where the majority of workers were men rather than women, and the number of women had further declined over time.  I had to work hard to justify my choice.  It was a time when ‘absence’ or ‘lack’ was emerging as a lens of examination and I thought that could work for me.  My real curiosity was about how to understand the intersections of class, community, and gender. At that time, few questions had been asked about gender and class in Indian historiography.

SD: How did you get involved with the gender politics of 80s Calcutta? In what ways has that involvement shaped your trajectory as a scholar? 

SS: Politically speaking, the early 1980s was a dull time to be young.  The Naxal movement of the previous decade had reached a bloody end.  The Left Front government was already established in West Bengal when we joined Presidency college in 1980.  

The first student elections in a decade took place soon after we joined.  SFI (Student Federation of India), which was the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the largest party of the Left Front which was then in government, won a thumping victory.  We were not interested in joining a party that was in the government!  There was very little political space at that time, however, to critique the ruling establishment.  Left politics was in process of building something like a hegemony.  I came into conflict with the SFI on many counts.  SFI was attempting the social policing of women.  In college and later in the university, SFI union leaders tried to stop women from smoking, dictate what clothes they could or could not wear.  These were petty things perhaps, but they mattered a great deal then.  We felt that our independence was being attacked.  We grew very disillusioned with the established left politics.  These experiences forced me to ask what it meant to be a woman in our social milieu.  Who were my role models? It was not just an intellectual question.  It was closely tied to everyday experiences and how we wished to shape our lives. 

This attracted me to a group of women, which included many academics, who were coming together in Calcutta in the early 1980s.  They were posing new questions about women’s ‘consciousness’.  The group included Nirmala Banerjee, but there were many others, such as Jasodhara Bagchi, Ratnabali Chatterjee, Sukumari Bhattacharya.  These women, mid-career at that time, had begun to feel that the academy in Calcutta had failed to provide them with a space in which to pursue the issues of women. Thus, Sachetana, an autonomous women’s organization, was formed in 1982, around the time when I was finishing my undergraduate studies from the Department of History in Presidency College. It was at Jasodhara Bagchi’s encouragement that my mother and I became members of this organization.  To be a mother-daughter duo in a women’s organization has been a truly remarkable experience.  Perhaps because there were so many academics, members of Sachetana started a reading group. Today we are celebrating Friedrich Engels bicentennial (28 November 2020): The first text we read in this group was Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.  A few months after this, I read Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics for a presentation to the group.  It left a very deep impression on me.  From those early years, the group graduated to organizing seminars, lectures, and conferences regularly. 

SD: I have personally gone back to your first monograph on women laborers in the jute industry in late colonial India several times, for how it makes a theoretical intervention in the corpus of Marxist-feminist theory by reading archives against the grain.  Even your subsequent publications on domestic work as an informal sector of the industry, affective labor, care work, marriage, and slavery in India, have made a very important historiographic intervention in incorporating actors from the margins of the archives as agents of historical change. I have also noted with interest, the absence of any engagement with the concept of ‘subaltern’, and I can’t help but wonder if that is a rather telling silence? 

SS: Ah yes. That is a silence indicative of my theoretical and methodological differences with gender-related arguments of the Subaltern Studies collective.  I have written about this here and there but not in any systematic way.  In the 1980s, the focus of women’s history was on nationalism (women’s role and/or participation in anti-colonial struggles) and women’s writing (to recover their agency and subjectivity).  I have always found it somewhat paradoxical and ironical that Subaltern Studies, which gave us such a trenchant critique of elitism in nationalist histories, ended up justifying, even shoring up elitism in other ways. By designating women as subalterns and the recovery of their voice as the primary agenda, we limited the scope of women’s history to middle-class and upper-caste women. The bhadramahila became the focus of women’s history. We told and re-told stories of social reform. I was not convinced by this argument. We had to bring women other than the elite into our history writing.  What would I call them? The subaltern of the subaltern? Subaltern Studies did not quite provide me a framework with which to think about differences among women. I found it more helpful to think with categories of class, community, and gender.  

I don’t think that either nationalism (race) or patriarchy (gender) can be said to override inequalities of class and caste.  There remains a need to write histories of non-elite women.  We ignore this at our peril.  From the vantage of my feminist politics, I felt strongly that subaltern studies had failed this cause, which had to be pursued outside its ambit.  

SD: How has your affective and academic engagement with these questions of labor and gender evolved since those formative years in Calcutta, over the last three decades?

SS: Coming to the UK for my Ph.D. was a big watershed.  I arrived in Oxford in 1987 as a graduate student to work with Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri. He was a versatile scholar who had a wide range of interests. He had also supervised many students, who had by then become distinguished scholars of Indian history, such as Shahid Amin, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, and Omkar Goswami.  They had worked on a wide variety of subjects.  Professor Raychaudhuri, however, drew the line at my feminist approach.  Maybe he just didn’t find it interesting.  My teacher in Presidency college, who had played a significant role in our training in history, Professor Rajat Ray, told me frankly that he thought I had run mad.  I was attempting the undoable. Maybe, Professor Raychaudhuri also found it ‘boring’ but was too kind to say so.  At that time, when we were both suffering varying degrees of unhappiness, my friend Nandini Gooptu was very happy working with Raj Chandavarkar in Cambridge.  She set up a meeting with him for me.  I came to Trinity and met Raj.  It worked instantly.  He liked my proposal.  They (Dr. Chandavarkar and Prof. Raychaudhuri) facilitated my transfer from Oxford to Cambridge. 

I learned labor history from Raj.  We had a great group of graduate students in Cambridge, now notable scholars in their fields, such as Nandini Gooptu, Dwaipayan Bhattacharjee, Shubho Basu, Ajay Skaria, and many others.  We debated and quarreled and learned from each other.  We fought endlessly on all kinds of ideological battles, especially between Marxism and Feminism.  There were two of us working on the jute industry and we soon teamed up with Arjan de Haan in Amsterdam.  Our ‘jute team’ was later augmented by Parimal Ghosh and Tony Cox.  Our informal ‘addas’ [informal conversations], which flowed from evening tea to dinners to the crack of dawn, were critical in shaping our work and our worldview. 

SD: What was your earliest exposure to Marx’s writing?  

SS: We did not read Marx at the undergraduate level, but in the master’s program we were encouraged to read Marx directly, as part of a paper on the History of Political Thought. I read the first volume of Capital first (not including Communist Manifesto, which we all read in school), and then a few of his other works. But it would be wrong to say that this first encounter with Marx’s writings left a very deep impression.  It took me time to appreciate the power of Marx’s writings.  I read Engels’ Origins of the Family around the same time and on first reading found it much more exciting, because I was thinking about the women’s question at that time.  When I started my research, I had to grapple with Marxist-Feminist debates and it was then that I realized that I had to go back to Marx, time and again. Over the years, Marx has been a formative influence. 

SD: Do you think one can argue that in the last 200 years, Marx while remaining one of the most relevant, powerful, and productive philosophers to think with and think through, his presence as an author has been subsumed under the ways in which his ideas were practiced? Would you say that it is a double-edged sword of powerful ideas: that his ideas were so relevant and powerful in every context of our world, that the relevance of the context of nineteenth-century Britain, which produced Marx and his ideas has dwindled? Also, is there something to gain from reading Marx solely in his context, in the way Gareth Jones does for example?

SS: I would say, both are valid.  As a historian, I think Stedman Jones’ historical reading of Marx has yielded some fascinating insights, and it’s a very valuable exercise to undertake.  At the same time, that is not the only way to read Marx, and the power of his ideas have acquired a life of their own. His reception in non-European, non-Western contexts, is not something one can overlook.  That is the issue we have tried to address in our recent book, Capital in the East.  One simple question to ask is what Marx has meant in different contexts. To what extent was he translated into other languages and how.  This is a fascinating problem of ‘global intellectual history’.  How did non-western intellectuals make Marx their own?  

SD: In your essay in ‘Capital in the East’, you trace a very interesting genealogy of the languages of women’s politics, globally: from emancipation to autonomy, to empowerment. How can we contextually understand this transition within the intellectual trajectory of the women’s movement? 

SS: This is a very big question, and it can be answered at several levels.  Early in the second wave, feminists spoke of emancipation or ‘liberation, the latter term catching popular attention.  Thus, terms such as ‘women’s lib’ or ‘libbers’ gained currency.  The focus was on liberation from patriarchy but this also initiated a debate between Marxists and Feminists.  This was an influential debate in India, where Feminists were engaged with a variety of left politics.  While ‘liberal feminists’ believed that there was a possible route to emancipation through the struggle for ‘rights’, Marxist Feminists emphasized that the problem of gender could be solved only alongside a socialist revolution.  These debates did not (as they often do not) lead to any definitive conclusions.  However, it became quite clear, as we began to understand better the condition of women in socialist/communist countries that emancipation or liberation was difficult to define and difficult to sustain politically.  There was a double play in the term autonomy.  First, the women’s movement in India in the 1980s began to call itself ‘autonomous’ to signal that it was not attached to political parties.  In another register, however, autonomy was a concept increasingly used to negotiate the fields of patriarchy and capitalism, family and work.  Clearly, integration into the labor market was not emancipatory, yet it yielded benefits for individual women.  We used the term autonomy to indicate a measure of freedom, which did not make such a big claim as liberation.  

The notion of empowerment came with the post-structuralist turn.  It was clearly Foucauldian in its origins, though Anthony Giddens contributed greatly to its development.  The term blasted a trail in India through policy documents in development circles.  It scaled down our goals still further and it was, at that point, a very pragmatic move.  Once we accepted the notion that power works along interstices of networks rather than in a binary of powerful and powerless, the possibility of gradual and relative accretions of power became possible. The term is now so overused that its precise contours are blurred.  Scholars speak of women’s empowerment in particular as a process that enhances the ability of disadvantaged individuals and groups to challenge and change (in their favor) existing power relationships that place them in subordinate economic, social, and political positions.  

I would say that the embrace of the term empowerment is also a response to feminism’s ambivalent relationship with the concept of power, as well as post-feminist (and feminist) critiques of an earlier focus on victimization. But the indiscriminate application of the term is likely to trivialize it and defuse its potential. Devaki Jain famously argued that inputs of education, better health facilities, or toilets are not empowering.  Such representations were, according to her, a misuse of the word and would mislead policy. I say this because of our current preoccupation with toilets.  Of course, toilets are important and a policy that focuses on building them for rural India a step in the right direction, but it is equally important to note that toilets by themselves are not empowering. The exercise of power by certain groups may lead to a situation where most people are denied basic facilities, such as toilets, and the goal should be to empower underprivileged groups so that they can claim such facilities. 

I find it interesting that we speak very often about ‘economic empowerment’.  In fact, given its close association with development, it is in economic terms that we most often speak of empowerment.  I often wonder if this has proved useful.  Empowerment is about power— and politics is the field where power is negotiated.  Should we connect empowerment with women’s political representation?  Can there be empowerment unless the women’s movement operates in the field of politics, not only in the manner in which it redefines the field (the personal is the political) but also in the arena where power is brokered— the public world of formal, institutionalized politics?  

SD: What are your thoughts on the neoliberal redefinition of the concept of ‘empowerment’, from this Foucauldian genealogy which you traced?

SS: It is undeniable that the concept of empowerment at present has a neoliberal genealogy, of course, which focuses on the individual making free choices in a free market economy, and thereby becoming ‘empowered’. When one attempts to rewrite the language of gender politics by implementing useful categories such as empowerment, the main difficulty lies in ensuring that ‘empowerment’ does not become entangled in the debate on ‘free choice’ between Marxists and Liberals. In the context of gender politics, often, free choice is not the crux of the problem. The real problem lies in (re)constructing the languages of gender politics beyond the individual, while negotiating a neoliberal market economy, in a postmodern world. One cannot invoke ‘false consciousness’ as a conceptual tool to critique liberal feminism anymore, because the hegemony of capital has blurred the lines between ‘true’ and ‘false’ consciousness. The dominance of the neoliberal market has deconstructed the very falseness of the Marxian ‘false consciousness’.  

So, in order to rewrite the languages of intersectional identity politics whilst protecting it from the dangers of neoliberalism, perhaps one needs to take into account all forms of oppressive hierarchy equally: whether it be gender, class, race, ethnicity, or caste. The problem with the neoliberal understanding of intersectionality is that a hierarchy, determined by the free market, is immediately formed by the number of intersections in one’s identity, as opposed to the precedence of class in the Marxist understanding of identity politics. However, if only we can agree that all these intersecting strands of identity politics run parallel and in tandem with one another, rather than hierarchically, then radical solidarities can be forged, and new modes of emancipatory politics can be imagined. This alternative is still in the making, and we do not yet know what shape it may take, but one need not abandon hope for a more equitable politics.  

SD: That was absolutely fascinating! It made me think of two recent works—‘Feminism for the 99 percent: A Manifesto’, and ‘Feminist International: How to Change Everything’—which attempt to do precisely what you indicated. These works move beyond the opposition between class and identity politics and chart out the ways in which we can understand the violence of capital and patriarchy, in intersection with one another. It makes me wonder about a third category on whose edge we have been hovering on so far—that is ‘Empire’. How can the politics of decolonization speak to anti-capitalist politics? This is something we touched upon in March 2021, in the roundtable on Political Economy and Intellectual History—and also, if I have understood correctly—was the intellectual impetus for thinking about ‘Capital’ in the ‘East’? 

Indeed, yes.  I discuss in my article in that volume the connections drawn by Marxist Feminists in the 1980s between women and the colony.  A great deal of that work drew on Rosa Luxemburg’s theories of reproduction.  The question of the ‘outside’ (the colony) in relation to reconceptualizations of primitive accumulation is very much on our agenda again in trying to understand the new phase of (neo-liberal) capitalism.  As you rightly flagged earlier, the pandemic has exacerbated as well given hypervisibility to some of these pre-existing conditions.  Take the case of paid domestic workers.  No amount of political organization could have achieved the withdrawal of paid domestic work on the scale that lockdown inflicted on urban India.  What have we learned from that?  About the political economy of domestic work?  About gender and class?  

I will connect this to questions of the global care chain, which has underlined global inequality on a new register.  We cannot understand these issues without the context, say, of imperial domesticity.  In global terms, it is not for nothing that the trinity of race, gender, and class has had such enduring significance.

These are ongoing concerns.  We need a high level of intellectual alertness to capture change as it is underfoot, so to say.  As I see it, these should be (like the related question of migrant workers) at the top of our research priorities.

SD: What are your thoughts on the politics of canonization which is usually associated with the canon of gender theory? 

SS: Firstly, I am not so sold on Theory and how the idea of a singular canon of ‘Theory’ has been fetishized. Inclusion in the canon of gender theory has largely depended on the autonomy of the authorial voice. Since a great deal of modern South Asian women’s writing on gender has been inflected by colonialism (and post-colonialism), and are perceived as ‘local’ or ‘situated’, their autonomy, as well as their capacity for powerful abstraction, is not adequately recognized.  There have been scores of women’s writings from all kinds of class-caste and race backgrounds, in various non-Anglocentric registers, which are not included in the canon. The central question is whose voice matters? I am very uncomfortable with the politics of exclusion inevitable in consolidating a canon since it reinforces already powerful racial and sexual identities (white, male). This is not to say that we must disregard the power of canonical ideas: but rather to say that the power of ideas and abstractions is not (or should not be) determined by their inclusion within any canon.  

SD: In what ways do you think historical archives can generate theoretical insights? How can we use those theoretical insights to move beyond a deeply fragmented political, and reimagine fraternities and alliances which will facilitate a powerful global politics of empathy, solidarity, and compassion? How can that framework incorporate actors on the margins of capital as agents of historical change?

SS: At the time I began my research, historians, particularly gender historians, were abandoning the archive, representing as it did the voice of the colonial state, in favor of ‘vernacular’ sources, in which we found the voices of the colonized.  The women, who were the subject of my study, had voices in neither kind of sources.  It did not seem to me as though one could argue that elite women had any extraordinary claim to representing working-class women.  In a sense, this was liberating.  I could use all kinds of sources and I did.  I used the archives as well as vernacular sources.  I had to tell a story from scraps of evidence, and I scrounged for scraps wherever I could find them.  

Just one more word on this-- if we reject the archives, we foreclose the option of researching the history of poor women.  It is difficult to write such histories only from vernacular sources and even less from elite women’s writing.  In my first book, I attempted to bring all these different kinds of sources together.  Furthermore, I strongly believe that the archives, if read against the grain, can be made to yield a lot of information about the pasts of marginal women.  

As a historian of marginalized women, I find it unrewarding to attach myself to a singular theoretical corpus.  I began my research attempting to negotiate Marxism and Feminism.  I suppose I have found it most useful to draw on different bodies of theory as and when it helps my argument, rather than to allow the logic of a particular theory to drive my argument.  As a discipline, history allows that freedom.  Can one past be made to fit the theory of another?  I know I will be told that there is no such thing as a past independent of the telling.  The question is whether the relationship has to be made to conform to a logic delineated in a Theory?  The historian has to be intellectually agile to move in and out of boxes and it may be easier if we think of what s/he produces as theory if not Theory.  As we begin to value intersectionality more, we may want to give more credence to theories, which seek to navigate among Theories.  The less we say, my politics alone is significant, the less we will be able to rely on the certitudes of Theory.  I would suggest that all politics of people of the oppressed/subordinated is urgent and immediate; none can be (or should be) subsumed within other(s).  If we really believe that our politics needs to shape our theoretical production, we must agree that it must shape our understanding of Theory itself. 

SD: We have reached the concluding section of our adda today. Let us end with a final word of reflection from you on the diverse terrain you have very comfortably traversed over the course of these years: from being a women’s rights activist, a historian, a public intellectual, and an academic—how do you see all of this as fitting in with one another? 

SS: My research and activism are so interconnected that I am unable to separate them now.  There are sometimes contradictions, but they are not separate worlds.  I began the research on paid domestic workers in 2006, I got drawn into their organizational efforts.  By 2012, I was working with the collectives that were trying for trade union registration.  I did not document how it happened, perhaps I should have.  It is true that I cannot do both equally; as I became more involved with university administration, I found it difficult to find the time you need for activism.  Nevertheless, wherever possible I tried to make as many connections as possible.  In the domestic workers’ research project, for instance, we involved our students in the actual fieldwork.  The project was designed with the hope that students would learn politically as well as academically from this work.  I worked for more than a decade in women’s studies, which gave me the opportunity to respond to my immediate environment with research questions.  After a dozen research projects, which required me to learn sociology, quantitative methods, a bit of anthropology, I no longer think of myself solely as a historian.  I have returned to a Faculty of History, which is extremely hospitable to interdisciplinarity.  I have found this journey of traversing several disciplinary terrains very rewarding and hope to continue in this way. 

Shuvatri Dasgupta is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and a contributing editor for the blog of Journal of History of Ideas. She completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from Presidency University, Kolkata, in India in 2017. She was also an exchange student and Charpak Fellow in Sciences Po Paris (Reims campus) where she completed a certificate program in European Affairs, and B1 French. For her Master’s degree, she wrote a dissertation titled “Beyond local and global narratives: Concept Histories of the Baidya Community in Colonial Bengal, c.1870-1930”. Her Ph.D. project is titled “A History of Conjugality: On Patriarchy, Caste, and Capital, in the British Empire c.1872-1947” and is funded by the Cambridge Trust and Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. 

Professor Samita Sen is Vere Harmsworth Professor in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.  She was the first Vice-Chancellor of Diamond Harbour Women’s University in West Bengal India. Previously, she has taught at the Department of History, Calcutta University, and was Director of the School of Women’s Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, at Jadavpur University. She has been a member of Sachetana, a voluntary women’s organization, since 1982, and has participated in the United Nations World Conferences on Women, held in Beijing in 1995.  Her most recent publication is Love, Labour and Law: Early and Child Marriage in India, co-edited with Anindita Ghosh, published by Sage India (2021).

*With Editorial Assistance from Khadija Hussain