Women in the currents of revolution: participation, practices and contributions in India’s Maoist movement

This thesis is about women and the Maoist movement in India. It inquires why women joined, what roles they undertook while in the movement, and the impact of their involvement, both on their lives and on the movement’s trajectory. This thesis adopts a Marxist and a Feminist lens and is based on semi-structured interviews with women who participated in the Maoist movement, alongside an analysis of magazines, pamphlets, and position papers published by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Despite extensive literature on the emergence, practices and impact of the Maoist movement, women’s engagement with the movement gets limited attention. Existing scholarship does not examine the processes that shape Maoist women’s political consciousness and falls short in inquiring the sites of their participation. This thesis argues that women participated in the Maoist movement because they not only recognised their subjugation as part of a broader process of class, caste, and gendered exploitation under capitalist and feudal structures, but were simultaneously interested in dismantling these multiple sites of oppression. I argue that women’s participation in the Maoist movement was neither incidental nor exceptional, but an integral part of the movement’s efforts to resist systemic oppression and build a more equitable society. Concretely, they joined the Maoist movement due to the centrality of cultural organisations in Maoist politics, the exploitative material conditions of the interviewees and their communities, and experiences within their family homes. Scholarly explorations of women’s practices within the Maoist movement tend to only examine their roles in the armed struggle. Addressing this gap, I investigate women’s intentional and political work, their intellectual and cultural labour, and ideological contributions. Expanding the view of what women do in revolutionary movements, I argue that women’s roles encompassed key activities such as organising large-scale mobilisations, creating and disseminating revolutionary knowledge, challenging patriarchal norms within the Maoist movement and society, and acting as a crucial node in the emotional and physical infrastructure of the movement. The competing discourses on the Maoist movement and the Indian state regarding women’s participation offer limited insights into how revolutionary praxis transformed or failed to transform the lives of women. I argue that women’s participation was transformative, fostering self-confidence, expanding intellectual horizons, and enabling them to challenge patriarchal structures both within and beyond the movement. These transformations, however, were sometimes marked by contradictions, as the Maoist movement struggled to reconcile its revolutionary ideals with realities of gendered oppression within its organisational structures. By situating women as historical and political agents within the revolutionary movements and of their own transformation, this thesis offers a nuanced and grounded analysis of women’s engagement, their political agency, and resistance. This thesis contributes to scholarship interested in thinking about how and why movement actors from the Global South articulate their relationship to revolutionary struggles, through the ideological frames of Marxism and feminism, while maintaining the particularities of their immediate conditions of marginalisation. Moreover, in its analysis of movement-texts, the thesis also makes an attempt to contribute towards carrying out movement-relevant research. This, I argue, has implications for thinking more deeply about histories of movements from the Global South and their visions of social justice, while keeping women at the centre of the analyses.<p></p>