Abstract

The politics of the us/them or West/East divide forms the backdrop to philosophizing about, for and by women in India. Starting with an awareness that “Western woman” cannot mean the same as “Indian woman,” the philosopher here is easily led to an antiessentialism and explosion of a monolithic idea of woman. With such diffusion comes also a variegation in a monochrome “feminism”; for if subjects are multiple, so also are the blueprints for their emancipation. Resting content with a plurality of feminisms might seem an obvious solution here; but then, it is also natural to wonder whether a simple grammatical pluralization can create space for genuine conceptual diversity, given the entrenched (and Western) associations of the term.