In Solidarity and Rage: Revisiting the Autonomous Women’s Movement in India through Politics of Friendship

Feminist histories have mostly been built from the margins – from scraps, scribbled notes, footnotes, erasure, struck out words, discarded crumbled rough sheets. It has been an investigative exercise of tracing out words written in invisible ink, of making out words from imprints left on the second page of a diary where the first page has been thrown away, of making meanings of little clues left in doodles, in hesitations, in codes, in citations. One of the tasks of feminist historiography thus has been to not just ‘add and stir women’ into the larger historical narrative, but to also question the narrative itself, to question the process of historicisation itself, to deal with the messiness of history. Feminist engagement with the ‘affective turn’ has in this context, has been both in resonance with the need to revisit the history of sociality, and the need to unpack the role of emotions in politicisation of subjects.

It is in these contexts that this paper will explore the idea of looking at feminist friendships as a political archive to study the history of the women's movement in India. It will engage with the dominant historiography of the movement and interrogate how this history when revisited through herstories of feminist friendships, allows us to dig into the feminist struggle with the personal and the political. It also opens up feminist herstories of care, of radical vulnerability, of intimacies that not only offers us the lens to question norms, to rage against the current organising of labour, but also allows us to peep into the dissonances, the fissures, thereby bringing to focus little moments that otherwise go unnoticed in the grand timeline of events, but played an important role in shaping, defining, molding the movement, and above all, in redefining the political.