Madhu Kishwar


Madhu Purnima Kishwar is an Indian academic and a conservative commentator. She is currently employed as a chair Professor in the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Kishwar along with fellow-academic Ruth Vanita have been regarded as pioneer scholars of women's studies in India; they were the founder editors of the critically acclaimed journal - Manushi.
Whilst her earlier work in the domain were quite favorably received by the academia and fellow activists, her reputation was considerably affected post the '90s, once she began to increasingly embrace the growing support for Hindutva.
She has been awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1985.

Early life and education

Kishwar graduated from Miranda House in Delhi, where she was the President of the Student's Union. She received her postgraduate degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Career

She was a professor and a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, until retiring in 2016. Post her retirement, she asserted the institution of being a chaotic fiefdom of the chosen few and alleged the higher echelons of CSDS to be ideologically biased towards left, who treated her unfairly for years due to ideological differences, and supposedly, even robbed her of a legitimate government awarded scholarship. The institute rejected the allegations, en masse.
She then joined the Indian Council of Social Science Research as the Maulana Azad Professor. In 2017, she was appointed to the Academic Council of the School of Art and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The appointment was perceived to be politically motivated with her domain-expertise being questioned and students protested in large numbers. Kishwar rejected the charges, describing them as whining of the leftist intellectuals, who were losing their clout.

Manushi and feminism

Kishwar, along with Ruth Vanita, were the founding-editors of Manushi, a highly acclaimed journal in the domain of women's studies in India. Established to bridge the gap between academic discourse and popular activism by raising awareness of gender inequalities through ground-activism, it has been one of the longest-running and most-influential women's periodicals in South Asia to the extent of being heavily instrumental in setting the agenda for women-right-movements. Manushi has been described by Amartya Sen as "a pioneering feminist journal". Her books and miscellaneous writings in the topic area have been also quite favorably received.
Notably, Kishwar does not self-identify as a feminist. Kishwar's reasons behind the disapproval of feminism aligns with that of the postcolonial feminist theory - perceiving liberal feminism as a monolithic western entity which discounts indigenous ways of life and actively incorporates a western framework.
Anita Anantharam, an associate professor of Women's Studies at University of Florida, writing over Feminist Media Studies in 2009, deems Kishwar to subscribe to a brand of aggressively nationalist feminism that takes a highly holistic view of the local society, culture and traditions. She notes that as the editorial board of Manushi thinned out over the years for varied reasons and the journal came under near-absolute stewardship of Kishwar, it chose to embrace the contemporaneous rise of the right-wing-nationalism through the realms of Hindutva. This led to the introduction of religious and communal discourses into a hitherto secular and non-polarized space which vocally urged for a return to a golden atavistic past and amplified the "hierarchies of "East" versus "West", Indian womanhood versus western feminism, and Hindu versus Muslim identity" from the lenses of religion and ethno-nationalism.
Kishwar has since criticized her fellow feminists urging for laws to prohibit the Hindu practice of Sati, instead focusing on the potential hampering of freedom to undergo death by a means of their choice and the implications of a secular state trying to regulate religious customs; she had also attacked other avenues of feminist activism from anti-dowry legislation to purported abolition of khaps and introduction of female quota bills, from within the Hindu way of life, arguing for a more nuanced and cultural approach, if at all. Her views have been challenged and rejected by numerous other feminists.
She was also one of the fiercest critics of the highly acclaimed film Fire, which focused a spotlight on the lesbian community in India. Deeming that as ramblings of a self-hating-Indian that was meant to stereotype and vilify Hindus, she mocked the queer rights movements to be a Western import that went contrary to the ethos of Hindu public life and middle class values. Gradually, in the process, she joined a newly evolving group of Hindutva scholars in asserting of biases in the western scholarship of Indic religions and weaponed Manushi as a tool during the California textbook controversy over Hindu history et al.—Anantharam notes a heavy intermingling of Hindutva and her works by the middle 2000s.
Anantharam goes on to note that almost all contemporary feminists have since disowned their roles in the magazine to avoid any association with this hyper-nationalistic cum Hindu fervor.
Of late, she has been an often-vitriolic critic of the newer waves of the western-derived maisntream feminist movements in India; using pejoratives abundantly and portraying them as fascist endeavors reeking of dominating and oppressing the male gender. She had lodged legal petitions arguing for dilution of anti-rape laws to mitigate bias against males and has been also highly skeptical of the motivations of foreign-funded NGOs, working for the causes of women. Some scholars have now come to recognize Kishwar as a former feminist who has since turned into an ally of anti-mainstream-feminist causes.

Politics and fake news

Kishwar has been noted for her adulation of Narendra Modi, to the extent of comparing him with Mahatma Gandhi. She had also written a book that absolved him, a then prime-ministerial candidate of any involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots and effusively praised him as a non-communal politician. Incidentally she used to be a vocal critic of Modi.
Kishwar has been accused of aiding in the propagation of communal material and to have propagated fake news over numerous occasions, via her Twitter handle.

Works