Globalization And Modernity In India: A Gendered Critique

Abstract

Colonial rule projected western science as the ultimate source of knowledge and western values as supreme. Stereo-types of oppressed non-western women had their counterpart in the male rational western culture coming to their rescue both metaphorically and literally. Unfortunately these stereotypes became so entrenched in the psyche of post-colonial nation builders that they and even third-world feminist activists confuse development with westernization. The fallacy of such an assumption becomes clear when one takes a glance at the realities of everyday life where crimes against women and poverty and marginalization of the masses is exploding in the most urban metropolises with the highest exposure to modernization and globalization. Urban India is replete with rising incidences of crimes against women. Conservative supporters of westernization would attribute such malaise to tradition. But rational thought points to globalization with its emphasis on material values consumerism and trashing of traditional knowledge. Globalization has eroded the traditional resource base as well as the knowledge and power associated with it. In this paper I argue that concepts such as empowerment have to be situated away from their eurocentric interpretations. A feminist methodology is an appropriate tool for redefining the political and a fresh understanding of global racism. (authors)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.