Anuradha Ghandy was, as Arundathy Roy says, “different”. Anuradha Ghandy was born in a liberal family, and becomes a leader of the feminist struggles still while attending university; soon after she works as a teacher and becomes one of the main activists for the human rights of the country. Later she decides to lead a “different” life as an ardent communist activist, which leads her to a long time of clandestinity. At first she works among workers, notably among builders; for them she organizes many struggles. For three years she remains in the areas where the guerrilla army is acting. Until her death she was the only woman to remain in the Central Committee of the Indian Communist (Maoist) Party, which was running the people’s war in India.
Anuradha Ghandy was already suffering from multiple sclerosis, but malaria added to this. She went to hospital for observation, but, since she was clandestine, she did not give her real name. When the doctors realized that the illness was advanced and all her vital organs were progressively failing, they were not able to warn her. She died on 12th April 2008.
But despite all her sufferings this comrade did not stop a moment until her last day; from
morning to night she would go around to the areas where the people’s war was taking place, and for a long time she kept on organizing the women, managing to set up the biggest movement of adivasi women (adivasi means “native people”), slaughtered and repressed by the Indian state and government, which, besides slaughters, reserved rapes and horrible forms of sexual violence. The adivasi women’s movement organized by Anuradha Ghandy counted not less than nine thousand women in Dandakaranya.
In the foreword to this book, at a certain point Arundathy Roy says: “I never had the good fortune of meeting Anuradha Ghandy, but I attended the memorial service. I was a little puzzled at the constant references that people who knew her made to her ‘sacrifices’”, adding then “To me, however, Anuradha Ghandy comes across as someone who happily traded in tedium and banality to follow her dream. She was no saint or missionary. She lived an exhilarating life that was hard, but fulfilling”.
That is a nice dedication, to state that the only life which is worth living is neither a life of ephimeral things nor a quiet life, but a life in which you struggle, you feel yourself the protagonist. This is the life that Anuradha Ghandy hands over to us comrades.
That was Anuradha Ghandy, and that she was from beginning to end.
Anuradha Ghandy was not an intellectual in the classic sense of the word; she was above all a militant who was convinced that theory was closely related to practice; she did not use to do theory limited to knowledge or meant to diffusion; she used to do theory as a weapon, a “gun over your shoulder” against the State.
In India, one of the largest continents - where all that happens acquires a huge dimension and relevance – there is the utmost condition of oppression of women. There are three kinds of rapes and murders of women, which are among the most numerous in the world. There are murders and rapes caused by a semi-feudal reality, the outcome of the tribal patriarchalism, according to which the village headmen themselves are an integral part of the actions of male violence; add to this the “modern” violence of imperialism in the huge Indian towns, which leads to brutalization, and of which women are the main victims. India shows how the most advanced forms of imperialism match the patriarchal and most aberrant forms of oppression. So women are hit by both realities.
But there is a third point, perhaps the worst: rapes and slaughters are used as a weapon of war. When the army goes to free entire areas on behalf of the multinationals, they use rapes and sexual violence; in the prisons, women and comrades are tortured in the most appalling way. A woman had stones shoved into her vagina.
It is the reaction of the Indian State and fascist government to the people’s war going on for several years, where women are 60% of the people’s army, where women are often the majority both in mass organizations and in the Party; women are in the leadership; women are those who carry on the “revolution in the revolution” while making the people’s war.
Obviously, that is not well liked by the press and generally by the mass media. That is one reason why “little is said about India”, as many say.
Moreover, India is the country where women’s movement of struggle is fully developed, in terms of both number of strikes – this year there were strikes of millions of working women demonstrating in the streets - and multiplication of struggles, especially in the areas where rapes and ferocious murders of women and girls had happened, and where the Indian government brings a capitalist “development” with expropriation of lands, forced relocation, militarization, mass massacres carried out by the army in order to free those lands and let the multinationals (such as Mittal, Tata etc) settle. And in these lands against the so-called Green Hunt the most of the population are women, who resist, fight against this policy of devastation of the Indian State.
In an interview, Anuradha Ghandy says what people’s war and the armed struggle mean for women. The armed struggle means emancipation, passing from a situation of extreme oppression, triple oppression, to the possibility to decide, to be decisive in the women’s as well as in the whole population’s lives. Anuradha Ghandy said: “People’s War had shattered the hesitations of the women. It doubled their strength. It showed the path for the liberation of women. There is a link between the semi feudal semi colonial society and women’s oppression. It has been proven once again by this victory of the DK party that the Marxist principle that we can carry forward the fight against patriarchy only along with the fight to end this system is correct”. We too had an example of that: the women partisans who had lived an ordinary, though not exciting, life in the Resistance until the day before, being protagonists in the people’s war – as in fact the anti-fascist and anti-Nazi Resistance was – transformed overnight; they became protagonists not only of their own lives, but also of the society. That’s what the people’s war means to women.
Anuradha Ghandy said that the people’s war is the most appropriate, because women have to make a very long struggle, therefore a long people’s war is what allows them to follow a path which encompasses not only the military aspect of struggle against the government , the State, imperialism, but also the aspect of the progressive destruction of all the superstructures and oppressions.
Anuradha Ghandy’s book has an apparently strange peculiarity: it is written by an Indian comrade, but tells about the philosophical trends in western feminism. Why is that? She explains it in the introduction. She says that these trends influenced also the women’s movement in India, so it was necessary to go back to the origins, make a critical analysis of those trends starting from their oldest theories. And that is right, because when a theory, a trend spreads, it is absorbed in different realities, and it obviously changes a little bit. But the problem is to recognize the core, where it rose, how it was expressed, its concepts and so on, in order to clarify or make a clean sweep. And that is what Anuradha Ghandy does.
It is a “different” book. In this regard Arundathy Roy describes Anuradha Ghandy’s style of writing, saying that it is like she threw grenades when analyzing those trends. “Some of her assertions explode off the page like hand-grenades, makes them that much more personal. Reading through them you catch glimpses of the mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic but was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustices she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought”.
Also the way trends are examined in this text is quite different. Anuradha Ghandy examines each trend separately. First she gives a historical overview of the women’s movement in the West, from the first movements in America, England and so on. About that there is an important point. Anuradha Ghandy gives a great value to the feminist movement, even though she sees the limitations of it. However, she says that without the feminist movement there would have been no wide women’s movements or general awareness of what society is, of patriarchism, feminism etc. She says: “ The movement forced men and women to look critically at their own attitudes and thoughts, their actions and words regarding women. The movement challenged various patriarchal, anti-women attitudes that tainted even progressive and revolutionary movements and affected women's participation in them. Notwithstanding the theoretical confusions and weaknesses the feminist movement has contributed significantly to our understanding of the women's question in the present day world. The worldwide movement for democracy and socialism has been enriched by the women's movement.”
That is important. Even today that statement is not at all taken for granted in some movements, organizations, parties that are communist, revolutionary –also Marxist-leninist-maoist-, which however have a kind of caesura if compared to the women’s movement.
Actually, Anuradha Ghandy reverses the question. She, who was communist, who was in the CC of the PCI(M), says that the feminist movement is a richness.
But let’s go back to the text. Anuradha Ghandy analyses the various trends: Liberal Feminism, Radical Feminism, Anarcha-Feminism, Eco-Feminism, Socialist Feminism, Post modernism and Feminism.
Of each trend, she first analyses and explains the theoretical cores, then makes a critique to the cores and then sums up the weaknesses and negative aspects.
By doing so, she deals with complex theoretical issues, makes them simple and clear so that only the main questions are highlighted. Moreover, she can also deal not only with the main trends, but –since inside these trends other ‘undertrends’ are included- also the trends either deriving from the main ones or distinguished from them.
On the Liberal Feminism Anuradha Ghandy writes: “It focuses on the individual rights rather than collective rights”. What does that mean? It means that the theories carried on by the Liberal Feminism say that everyone has to free themselves, therefore it would be an individual process, opposed to a process of collective struggle.
Then, she continues: “It is restricted to changes in the law, educational and employment opportunities, welfare measures etc and does not question the economic and political structures of the society which give rise to patriarchal discrimination. Hence it is reformist in its orientation, both in theory and in practice”. Therefore, theories are matched to a policy of entrustment to law, of changing laws, of reforming this society, and subsequently they oppose a policy stating that it is not a change of laws that –keeping this system- can effectively make women free.
Anuradha Ghandy also deals with very current issues on Radical Feminism such as separatism. She makes a sophisticated but at the same time very clear critique. This trend is well known, being present in the feminist movement of Nowl, (Not One Woman Less), even though there are several positions inside it.
Some feminist realities in our country theorize not as much the need women have a specific organisation, a separate moment in order to find strength –that is what we say, too- but a strategic separatism, in which men are tout court the main enemy. This deviates the struggle from the fighting against the production system, which today is capitalist and imperialist. We are “separatist” in that we consider it necessary that women develop an organisation of their own to build their own weapons and be therefore stronger, in order to bring this strength inside the more general proletarian movement. It is not true that women weigh without this organisation of their own. hence, “separated” not in a strategic sense, but as a need for unity and strength of women.
Anuradha Ghandy, the woman who organized 90 thousand women, deals with this. But she says: What does Radical Feminism, this trend to theorize separatism, lead to? It leads to not see what the main contradiction, the main enemy is. It makes important the contradiction man-woman and hides therefore the main contradiction: the bourgeois, imperialist system.
This feminism may seem more than revolutionary, but the consequence is the risk to slide into reformism, because you don’t struggle to overthrow a society which inevitably perpetuate the male, sexist contradiction, but you reduce the struggle to the gender contradiction. In this way, this “separatism” works for the group, but it is not in tune with the wide reality of the women, the most oppressed and exploited by this bourgeois system.
On Radical Feminism, Anuradha Ghandy deals chiefly with an important matter: the relationship between production and reproduction and the women’s role inside them. Radical Feminism says, in synthesis, that women are oppressed because they have been meant for a reproductive role, - which, by the way, is not even recognized – and that it is manifested both in the reproduction of the labour force that the capital will use and in the care of these forces. But Anuradha Ghandy adds that giving this aspect a central importance makes the war not against the system and the reproduction and the relations of production which are at the roots of it, but it turns into “Making the contradiction between men and women as the principal contradiction thereby justifying separatism”.
Another topical example is the critique to Eco.Feminism. Anuradha Ghandy says that this trend denounces that the capitalist development is one which destroys environment. Which is absolutely true. But what is the answer? The answer is: Let us go back to the former economy, to agricultural economy, and so on. This trend becomes therefore a sort of theorization of moving backwards in relation to the production development.
Anuradha Ghandy writes: “In eco-feminism nature is the central category of analysis … it has been seen that women have been in the forefront of struggles to protect nature…”
Where does this trend lead to? It leads to say that industry in itself is negative. On the contrary, the former production seems to have been positive and therefore we need to go back to non-industrialised agriculture.
But in the countryside, and we see it very well today with migrant women, and not only with them, women were treated like slaves. So they were not such good old times. This trend, therefore, leads to a conservative, underdeveloped position.
It only sees the effects that destroy environment, not the cause, i.e. the capital and the need to eliminate industry and not the capitalistic system that exploits the productive forces, having the only objective the profit and not everyone’s well-being.
This trend, Anuradha Ghandy writes, uncritically defends traditional practices. Hence she claims that in this civilization where production was for subsistence, to satisfy the vital basic needs of people, women had a close connection with nature… In actual fact what is being glorified is the petty pre-capitalist peasant economy with its feudal structures and extreme inequalities. In this economy women toiled for long hours in backbreaking labor with no recognition of their work.” Women have no interest in going back, their interest is in struggling against those who, in order to maintain their own position as an exploiting class, make production a weapon of death which destroys both environment and people.
In another part of the text Anuradha Ghandy expresses a critique to the theory of the “sex difference”, which was popular in Italy too a few years ago. This trend started from a statement which was acceptable, but led to assert that the man-woman contraposition, the values of which women are bearers (non-violence, the caring for others etc.) were to be claimed at such extent as to make them their own identity; they were to be considered positive, valued in relation to the man. Indeed, the questions are inverted: what is negative is represented as positive; so, instead of leading to a struggle that eliminates the oppressive aspects of the woman’s role, they are given a positive value.
Anuradha Ghandy writes: “The cultural feminists have gone one step further by emphasizing the essential differences between males and females and claiming that female traits and values (not feminine) are desirable. This argument gives the biological basis of male female differences more importance than social upbringing. This is in fact a counter-productive argument because conservative forces in society have always used such arguments (called biological determinism) –to say that women are different. Which is why if you struggle even only for equality, you are denying the women’s difference, which on the contrary is to be given value because it is positive (editor’s note), to justify domination over a section of the people. The slaves were slaves because they had those traits and they needed to be ruled, they could not look after themselves. Women are women and men are men and they are basically different, so social roles for women and men are also different. This is the argument given by reactionary conservative forces which are opposed to women's liberation.”
Anuradha Ghandy analyses the various trends linking them to the society development. For example, at the beginning she analyses Liberal Feminism and links it to the beginning of the bourgeois society. Then she says: this liberal movement fails not so much because it was criticized, but because the system goes forth and the trends themselves change. Then, she passes from Liberal Feminism to Radical Feminism, from the feminism that asked the State to adopt laws and interventions in favour of the women’s rights, to the feminism that thinks that this State cannot give rights but needs at least to be transformed.
Anuradha Ghandy analyses then Socialist Feminism. She says that it is not to be considered as “one”: “There is a wide spectrum amongst them as well. At one end of the spectrum are a section called Marxist feminists. ….. At the other end of the spectrum are those who have focused on how gender identity is created through child rearing practices..” On Marxist feminists
Anuradha Ghandy says that they have taken up Marx’s analysis, according to which production and reproduction are at the base, but later they abandoned it, taking the aspect of the reproduction only, and have critisised Marxism because it had taken the question of the economic base, therefore the class struggle, and not the gender struggle. Then, focusing on the aspect of the reproduction, historically they only see the division of labour. But Anuradha Ghandy says that the division of labour in itself was not subordination. She writes that to consider only the division of labour is to remain at a primordial level: even among animals there is a sort of division of labour. During the matriarchal period the division of labour was natural, and women, just because they had a more social role –they were something like bosses of the community-, they were taken into great consideration. This division, therefore, did not put men in a position of power. This actually took place with the private property. At the moment when tools were developed, hand activities were replaced by tools; subsequently the production was higher than the needs of the family, there is a sort of accumulation of goods: hence, the production of private property, where the first division of labour is between men and women. Women lose the power they had, and this is the historical materialistic base from which women’s subordination and oppression originate.
After that, Anuradha Ghandy analyses the trend of considering the intervention in the matter of ideas and education central just in the super structural field. Hence, the importance of education in schools, in society, and so on. Of course, everything is useful. But if you set aside the relation of production, the system of the capital, it is just like you were thinking to empty the sea with a shell; you are trying to make different education and the government make laws in order to turn school into a place for propaganda of the most reactionary, fascist, sexist thought. That is why you must destroy the cause.
Elsewhere we have said that it is like you turn the question upside down, in the sense that, instead of starting from the material reasons, you start from the need of changing the ideas; therefore, all the struggle becomes a cultural one, in order to transform culture, in schools, education in schools inside the family, in the mass media.
All these positions are absolutely present in the No One Woman Less movement. It is obvious that this cultural front is present, but the central base that produces that kind of culture is not affected.
These theories are widely propagated by some social sectors more predisposed to make this kind of cultural battle, the petty bourgeoisie.
Anuradha Ghandy also clarifies the sometimes wrong concept of “patriarchalism”. In India, she writes, there is a semi-feudal system and therefore patriarchalism corresponds to system. In an imperialist country like ours, where patriarchalism cannot be based on feudalism or semi-feudalism; the capitalistic system, even in its most advanced phase, has interest in using all weapons, and so has patriarchalism; but it is necessary to struggle against this system, which is an advanced, and not backward, system.
In conclusion, this book by Anuradha Ghandy is important in that it speaks to us, it speaks of the trends we can also find in Italy, and so it gives us the tools to analyse them.
It is a sort of guide, a “handbook” that we can not only read, but use. It is not enough to say “petty bourgeois feminism”, or make a humoral, phenomenal complaint; we must study, analyse critically, see the differences as well as the contributions, avoiding to reduce the trends to only one.
Therefore let’s study this book, let’s spread it. We will take richness not only into the wide women’s movement, but also into the communist movement in our country and all around the world.
Movimento Femminista Proletario Rivoluzionario (MFPR) – Italy
mfpr.naz@gmail.com
blog: https://femminismorivoluzionario.blogspot.com/
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