[Beyond DUNIA] Are There Indian Feminists Working in India, Not the United States?

By Jo Goeun (Translator, Administrative Specialist)

The discrimination women experience is never confined to a simple conflict between men and women. Women experience corporate labor exploitation and the exploitation of nature as women—and they resist as women. In Asia in particular, discrimination and exploitation occur not only within national boundaries but are compounded by an additional layer of exploitation by Western transnational capital. Asian women may resist foreign corporations alongside men from their own countries, yet at the same time, those corporations often collude with local governments or male elites to exploit women. As a result, Asian women cannot understand the discrimination they face merely as a gender issue.

What about those on the exploited side? Western imperialism has not only exploited Asian women, but has also systematically extracted the region’s nature, history, and culture. Within the structure of “ruler versus ruled,” women, nature, and indigenous traditions—those positioned as the ruled—have frequently been grouped together. While men in the Third World are often cast as symbols of modern industrial development, women are distinguished as representatives of nature or tradition. Consequently, Asian women have simultaneously sought recognition as modern, progressive subjects equal to men, while also aligning themselves with environmental struggles—where nature, like women, is exploited by Western male capital—to critique modern ideologies that treat development and growth as unquestionable absolute values.

Indian Women’s Resistance to Logging in the Himalayas

A representative example is the Chipko Movement that emerged in the Indian Himalayas during the 1970s. At the time, Himalayan forests were treated either as weeds to be rapidly cleared for the “national good” or as inexhaustible resources to be freely exploited for profit. Amid territorial disputes with China beginning in the 1960s, the Indian central government initiated large-scale logging in the Himalayan region to install military facilities such as landmines. At the same time, corporations manufacturing products like tennis rackets with foreign capital investment began aggressively felling valuable ash and walnut trees.

In response, women living in the Garhwal region—the heart of the Himalayas—rose up to protect their forests. They physically embraced the trees, preventing loggers from approaching. This movement, named Chipko (चिपको), meaning “to cling” in Hindi, ultimately succeeded in driving logging companies out of the region and establishing regulations that allowed tree cutting only within limits that permitted forest regeneration. Today, the Chipko Movement is widely recognized as a landmark case in India’s environmental movement.

At the same time, Chipko was also a feminist movement led by Indian women. Through the movement, women became political subjects who actively resisted state violence and capitalist exploitation. Women do not engage with the world solely as women. They live as human beings in relation to nature, as wage laborers, and as citizens affected by government policies—while experiencing all of these relationships through the specific condition of being women. When the women of Garhwal resisted indiscriminate logging by the government and corporations, they did so as Himalayan residents whose livelihoods depended on the forest and as Indian citizens affected by border conflicts. Simultaneously, they perceived contradictions through perspectives shaped by their marginalization within a patriarchal society, where women were confined to domestic labor, childcare, and low-income gathering and subsistence farming.

In practice, the Indian government attempted to persuade the protesting women by mobilizing village chiefs and other men. Authorities assumed that because these men shared the same living environment, their interests would align—and that women would withdraw if persuaded by their husbands. Instead, the women directly confronted those men, demanded an end to logging, and ultimately succeeded in officially banning logging in high-altitude regions.

Agro-Feminism Among Dalit Women in India

Feminist movements led by Dalit women—members of India’s “untouchable” caste (Dalit meaning “the oppressed” or “the crushed”)—have continued steadily since the 1940s, during the colonial period. Dalit women have endured multiple forms of discrimination and violence, including extreme low-wage labor justified by caste status, routine sexual violence, and social exclusion through physical segregation. Accordingly, their feminist movements have addressed a wide range of issues, including labor rights, housing rights, and sexual self-determination.

Among these movements, Agro Feminism, centered on agricultural labor—where the majority of Dalit women are employed—has sought to reconstruct the relationship between women and nature in order to critique India’s patriarchal caste society and identify pathways toward Dalit women’s liberation. Agricultural labor assigned to Dalit women represents class- and gender-based exploitation due to its extremely low wages, while also constituting environmental exploitation of Asia itself, as crops are cultivated for global markets at the cost of water pollution and ecological destruction. Agro Feminism therefore argues that Dalit women, as agricultural laborers, must own farmland and practice environmentally sustainable agriculture for themselves and their children. Only through this approach, proponents argue, can both Dalit women—whose livelihoods and safety are under immediate threat—and India’s rapidly depleted farmland be protected.

Indian Women Confronting Patriarchy Alongside Nature

Indian feminist and nuclear physicist Vandana Shiva actively participated in the Chipko Movement and articulated the framework of ecofeminism. She argued that (1) modern, human-centered developmentalism—symbolized by science and technology—views nature as something to be used as needed and, when combined with capitalism, exploits it indiscriminately for immediate profit; and that (2) modern patriarchal capitalism similarly treats women as peripheral beings, exploiting their labor and diverse forms of value without restraint. In political and economic structures, both women and nature occupy comparable positions as marginalized and exploited subjects. As Western capital increasingly exploits both Asian women and Asian nature, the distance between women and nature in Asia grows ever closer.

Similarly, Indian feminist Bina Agarwal, a leading proponent of agro-feminism, has argued that only by strengthening the relationship between nature and Dalit women—both simultaneously exploited within the sphere of agriculture through environmentally sustainable subsistence farming—can India move beyond patriarchal caste society and dependence on transnational capital toward autonomous forms of life.

Indian women’s movements vividly illustrate the complex layers of discrimination faced by Asian women, both domestically and internationally. These movements demonstrate that feminism is not about women simply acquiring the same power men currently hold, nor about Asian women merely catching up to the achievements of Western women. Instead, they propose new pathways that fundamentally critique exploitative logics by forming solidarities with diverse beings historically excluded by Western male-dominated power structures. One such pathway is Indian feminism’s effort to reconfigure the relationship between women and nature, moving beyond development-at-all-costs ideology toward a sustainable social order.

References

Choi, Hyung-mi. “The Politics of Intersectionality in the Dalit Women’s Movement in India: Focusing on the Tendral Movement.” Gender and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2022, pp. 293–327.
EBS. The Great Course, “Vandana Shiva – Lecture 4: Declaration of Food Sovereignty and Ecofeminism,” February 26, 2023.

Jo Goeun has translated numerous works on feminism and queer theory and currently works as a certified translation and administrative specialist.