Bridging Western and Eastern Perspectives: The Necessity of an Indian Feminist Philosophy

When we talk about feminism in a global classroom or an academic text, the conversation almost always begins in the West – with Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, or Judith Butler. These are important thinkers, no doubt. But for the millions of women living in India – navigating caste hierarchies, religious patriarchies, colonial legacies, and layered socio-economic inequalities – Western feminist theories often arrive as ill-fitting frameworks. This is precisely why the call for a distinct Indian feminist philosophy is not just intellectually justified, but urgently necessary.

Why Western feminism cannot be a universal template 🔗

Western feminist thought emerged from specific historical conditions: Enlightenment liberalism, the suffragette movement, and later, the civil rights and sexual revolution contexts of the 20th century. Its primary framework centers on patriarchy as the root of women’s oppression – male dominance over women – and advocates for individual rights, legal equality, and bodily autonomy as the main pathways to liberation.

These are valid concerns. But they don’t tell the full story of a woman in rural Rajasthan, a Dalit woman in Tamil Nadu, or a Muslim woman in Kashmir. Postcolonial feminism, which emerged in the 1980s, challenged the universalizing tendencies of mainstream feminist ideas, arguing that women living in non-Western countries are frequently misrepresented – or simply not represented at all – in dominant feminist narratives. By using the term “woman” as a universal category, women become defined only by their gender, not by nationality, social class, caste, occupation, age, religion, language, or sexual preference.

One of the most influential critiques of this problem came from Chandra Talpade Mohanty, whose landmark 1984 essay “Under Western Eyes” challenged Western feminism’s construction of the “Third World woman” as a singular, homogenized category – powerless, oppressed, and defined primarily by what she lacks compared to her Western counterpart. Mohanty argued that this construction tells us more about Western feminist assumptions than it does about the diverse lives of women in the Global South. She later proposed a model of transnational feminist solidarity built not on assumed sameness, but on shared political struggle across difference – solidarity earned through engagement with specific contexts, not abstract appeals to universal sisterhood.

This critique is not merely theoretical. Postcolonial feminist critiques take issue with the tendency of Western feminism to view its own trajectory as more inherently feminist, and to therefore believe that Global South countries have to adopt similar strategies in order to “catch up” to progress already made in the West. This assumption is not only intellectually flawed – it is also a continuation of colonial logic in a new form.

India’s unique socio-cultural context demands its own feminist lens 🔗

India is not a monolith. It is a country of extraordinary diversity – in language, religion, caste, class, region, and colonial experience. Any feminist philosophy that hopes to address Indian women’s realities must grapple with this complexity rather than flatten it.

A complex interaction of variables, including colonial history, cultural variety, religious traditions, and socio-economic inequality, has shaped Indian feminism. Unlike Western feminism, which often emphasizes individual rights, Indian feminism is closely connected to the country’s colonial history and the wider fight for independence. The women’s movement in India did not emerge in a vacuum – it grew alongside nationalist struggles, anti-caste movements, and social reform campaigns that had no direct equivalents in the Western feminist tradition.

Consider the issue of caste alone. Dalit feminism finds its place at the intersection of caste, gender, and class oppression, centering the perspectives of Dalit women while challenging both the patriarchal structures prevalent in society and the deeply ingrained caste system. Mainstream feminism – both Western and upper-caste Indian – has historically failed to account for this. Feminist scholars and women activists made gender-based oppression normative, thereby excluding Dalit communities altogether and constructing a homogeneous “Indian woman” that masked the ways class, gender, and sexuality intersected with caste oppression.

This matters philosophically. A feminist theory that ignores caste cannot claim to speak for all Indian women. It only amplifies the voices of those already privileged within the system, while pushing the most marginalized further to the margins.

The layered reality of Indian women’s oppression 🔗

India’s feminist challenges operate on multiple registers simultaneously. Dowry violence, female infanticide, caste-based sexual violence, restrictions on mobility and dress, child marriage, denial of property rights, religious personal laws – these are not problems that a framework built around, say, the gender pay gap in corporate America was designed to address. Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s anthology Feminism in India deepens our understanding of why, despite the existence of legal and constitutional rights to prevent discrimination, women are subject to oppressive practices like dowry – showing that legal reform alone, a cornerstone of liberal Western feminism, is insufficient without cultural and philosophical transformation.

Furthermore, a rich and complex body of feminist writings has emerged over the last forty years in India, which in many ways has become institutionalized within academia as well as within policymaking – yet its presence in global feminist discourse remains disproportionately small. Western feminist readers, even those claiming multicultural or global perspectives, are still dominated by Western debates and taxonomies, with feminist perspectives from the Global South, if included at all, usually relegated to a single chapter.

Maitrayee Chaudhuri: reclaiming the Indian feminist tradition 🔗

Maitrayee Chaudhuri teaches sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is one of the most important voices in articulating the need for an Indian feminist philosophy on its own terms. Her edited anthology Feminism in India (2004) is a landmark work that traces the history of feminist thought in India from colonial times to the contemporary period.

Chaudhuri’s central argument is direct: she rejects claims that feminism in India has been a Western import, arguing instead that ideas about women’s rights and gender construction have always been part of Indian intellectual and political life. Her anthology challenges the reduction of local feminisms into one interchangeable “third world feminism,” insisting on the importance of recovering the infinite variety of Indian feminist thought and its distinct theoretical trajectories.

Chaudhuri is also acutely aware of the structural inequalities within global academic knowledge production. She points out that Western writers may choose to engage with non-Western thought – but that no such choice exists for scholars at the intellectual periphery, who must always engage with dominant Western frameworks simply to participate in global academic conversations. This is not a neutral or equal exchange. It is a reflection of ongoing epistemic hierarchies that an Indian feminist philosophy must actively resist.

Her collection bridges academic and activist divides, personal and political concerns, and local and global tensions, showing how Indian feminism is part of a larger project of consolidating the liberal values of secularism and democracy – but within a specifically Indian democratic and pluralist context, not as a derivative of a Western model.

Sarojini Sahoo: language, sexuality, and the feminist body 🔗

If Chaudhuri works primarily in the register of sociology and intellectual history, Sarojini Sahoo – an Odia feminist writer, columnist in The New Indian Express, and Odisha Sahitya Academy Award winner – challenges patriarchal structures through literature. Her novels engage directly with female sexuality, emotional interiority, and the politics of the body in ways that are rare, and often considered transgressive, in Indian public discourse.

Sahoo’s feminist philosophy diverges sharply from both Western second-wave feminism and conventional Indian feminist positions. Her debatable concept of feminism and her denial of Simone de Beauvoir’s “the other” theory make her a prominent feminist personality in South Asia. For Sahoo, feminism is not a “gender problem” or a confrontational attack on male hegemony. She accepts feminism as an integral part of femaleness – something rooted in women’s own experience of their bodies and lives – rather than as an opposition to the masculine world. This is a fundamentally different philosophical starting point from the adversarial framework common in Western feminist thought.

Many of Sahoo’s writings deal candidly with female sexuality, the emotional lives of women, and the intricate fabric of human relationships, depicting extensively the interior experiences of women and how their burgeoning sexuality is seen as a threat to traditional patriarchal societies. Her novel Upanibesh was the first attempt in Odia literature to focus on sexuality as an act of social revolt by a woman. Pratibandi and Gambhiri Ghara continue this exploration, covering territory – from sexuality to philosophy, from the politics of the home to the politics of the world – that had rarely been addressed in Indian literature from a woman’s point of view.

Sahoo also raises a crucial point about language. She thinks people should emphasize their femininity rather than impose the so-called stereotyped feministic attitude of the second wave. By writing in Odia rather than English, and by centering specifically Indian women’s experiences of desire, family, and social constraint, Sahoo asserts that feminist expression must be rooted in the linguistic and cultural realities of the women it speaks for. This is itself a political act – a refusal to translate Indian women’s lives into Western feminist categories.

The diversity within Indian feminism: beyond a single voice 🔗

One of the most important contributions of Indian feminist philosophy is its insistence that there is no single Indian feminist voice. Indian feminism encompasses many branches such as postcolonial feminism, Dalit feminism, and ecofeminism, each concentrating on different aspects of identity and power that are especially significant in the Indian setting.

Dalit feminism, in particular, exposes a critical blind spot not just in Western feminism but in mainstream Indian feminism as well. Dalit feminist politics in India have always been entangled in the politics of caste, religious community identity, and sexuality, and the varying lived experiences of women of different castes and religious communities undermine the supposed uniformity of the identity of the “woman.” Scholar Nivedita Menon has noted that intersectionality, even in its American conceptualization, cannot simply be imported as a universal framework – Dalit feminist theory must instead be understood as situated in the temporal, spatial, and lived contexts of Indian women specifically.

This internal diversity is a strength, not a weakness. An Indian feminist philosophy that honestly grapples with caste, class, region, religion, and language is a richer and more truthful philosophy than one that papers over these differences in the name of solidarity. Dalit women face triple oppression – from non-Dalit women, non-Dalit men, and Dalit men – and are offered little to no political representation, because most political parties are based on Brahminical ideologies that marginalize Dalit concerns. A feminist philosophy that does not see this cannot claim to be Indian.

What an Indian feminist philosophy must do 🔗

Developing a distinct Indian feminist philosophy is not about rejecting all Western feminist insights – many are valuable and applicable. It is about refusing to treat them as the default or the gold standard. It means building feminist theory from the ground up, from the lived experiences of Indian women in their full diversity, rather than importing frameworks and then struggling to make Indian realities fit.

This means taking caste as seriously as gender. It means engaging with religious traditions critically and from within, rather than dismissing them wholesale as patriarchal relics. It means recognizing that for many Indian women, family and community are not simply sites of oppression but also sources of identity, belonging, and strength – and that feminist philosophy must engage with this honestly rather than prescribing Western ideals of individual autonomy as the only path to liberation.

It also means making space for regional and linguistic diversity in feminist knowledge production. Sahoo writing in Odia, activists working in Tamil, scholars publishing in Hindi – these are not marginal contributions to a mainstream English-language feminist conversation. They are the mainstream of Indian feminist thought, and deserve to be recognized as such.

As feminist discourse in India continues to evolve at the intersections of social movements, state policy, international institutions, and knowledge construction, the need for a philosophy rooted in India’s own intellectual traditions and political realities becomes only more pressing. Thinkers like Chaudhuri and Sahoo have done foundational work. The task now is to build on it – rigorously, honestly, and with attention to the voices most often left out.

What do you think? If feminism must always be grounded in the specific historical and cultural contexts of the women it speaks for, does importing any external feminist framework – Western or otherwise – risk silencing the very voices it aims to liberate? And within India itself, whose feminist vision gets heard most – and whose remains at the margins?

References

1. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/postcolonial-feminism-gender-cultural-imperialism/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_feminism
3. https://theglobalobservatory.org/2023/10/what-can-feminist-foreign-policy-learn-from-postcolonial-feminism/
4. https://www.ijfmr.com/papers/2024/4/25532.pdf
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8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332446532_Feminism_in_India_The_Tale_and_its_Telling
9. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390333003d9Ghosh.pdf
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.Sarojini_Sahoo
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13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343480466_Intro_to_Feminism_in_India_2005