“from Charity to Justice”: Feminist Politics at the Intersection of Liberation Theology, Marxism and Periyarism in 1990s Tamil Nadu (India)

In 1989, in the heyday of feminist organizing across the global south, a group of feminists converged in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to form a feminist collective called the Tamilaga Penngal Oringinaippu(TPO). Translating roughly into “Tamil Women Collectivize”, this collective was the first in Tamil Nadu to identify as feminist, with members across caste, class, and religious groups. In consonance with some other feminist collectives in South Asia at that time, the TPO refused international donor funding or the non-governmental organization (NGO) form, whilst also asserting autonomy from the organized Left parties in India to conduct their social justice work, primarily in the areas of health, education, sustainability, and violence against women.

Thus, these women defined social justice and nurtured feminist imaginaries outside of international donor capital-driven NGO form. Instead, they tapped into a different global imaginary for social transformation to fuel their social justice work: liberation theology. This paper tracks the myriad ways in which Tamil Nadu’s feminists harnessed the momentum, infrastructure, the ethical and moral resource base provided by Liberation Theology towards building solidarities with feminists across Asia, Latin America and Africa in the 1990s. Second, this paper explores how Tamil feminists creatively combined Liberation Theology and Marxism with localized anti-caste philosophies like “Periyarism” in Tamil Nadu, and Ambedkarite thought, to define a new ethico-moral framework for social justice and transformation. In doing so, this paper unsettles the oft-reified distinctions between political imaginaries of the global north and global south as mutually exclusive and distinct. Lastly, the paper demonstrates how Tamil feminists drew on these resources to reconfigure intimate, embodied ethical relationships with one another across caste, class and religious differences to forge new feminist imaginaries for a more just and equal future, thus shaping new postcolonial political horizons.