Resistance https://fiftytwo.in/story/resistance/
In the mid-1970s, a remarkable cohort of women found themselves in Bombay. They believed there was more to science than labs and male geniuses. Some of them would pioneer the cause of feminist science studies in India. These are the women who paved the way for themselves. Chayanika, who’s now 63, wears many hats—activist, researcher, teacher—but is perhaps best known as one of the leading lights of feminist science studies in India.
The crux of feminist politics is its multiplicity. Feminists from the 1980s existed in these multiplicities. They were drawing from science to think about how women could understand their bodies and sexualities. They were doing this while protesting state-sanctioned violence of women’s bodies, meted out through the language of science.
Thinking back to her formative years at IIT-B, Chayanika observed that “there was something about that time and space” that brought women from different locations and ideologies together. Over four decades, Chayanika and several of her batchmates have taken the feminist question in Indian science forward in their own ways.
“We came at the same time in the same institution, and we got exposed to ideas of feminism as feminism was evolving in the city,” Chayanika said about herself and her comrades. “And from there, we actually carried it with us into whatever we did later.”
Now, feminist science studies in India has found other trajectories to follow. The suicide of Rohith Vemula at the Hyderabad Central University revealed how people from marginalised caste backgrounds continue to face casteism in Indian science practice. The work of scholars like Abha Sur, Shalini Mahadev, Renny Thomas and Jayasree Subramanian has foregrounded the caste question in Indian science. Similarly, the efforts of activists like Grace Banu and scientists like Bittu Rajaraman have pushed the discipline to investigate how queer and transgender persons negotiate their relationship with science.