Herstory of Dr.

Neera Desai Memorial Lecture

Vibhuti Patel
Research Centre for Womens Studies (RCWS) instituted of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture
in memory of its founding Director and received generous donations for corpus funds from
Neerabens friends, fellow travelers in social movements, colleagues and well-wishers in
womens studies and womens movements.
From the very beginning Department of Economics, Gujarat Research Society and Advocate
Mihir Desai have collaborated in making this lecture series a grand success by identifying guest
speakers, mobilizing friends and fellow travelers in womens studies and womens movement,
colleagues and scholars and also in terms of cost sharing. Basic philosophy of womens studies
in India as articulated by Dr. Neera Desai revolved around concepts such as Theory-asPractice, Trans-disciplinarily, Feminist critiques of objectivity, and Philosophies of powerknowledge, and plural perspectives in knowledge production.
1st Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2010 Prof. Susie Tharu, Professor Emeritus, Cultural
Studies Department, English and Foreign Language Studies, Hyderabad delivered lecture titled,
Once Again, What is literature-Notes from Dalit Literary Movements from Kerala and
Tamilnadu. Prof. Suzie Tharu highlighted the fact that there has been no methodological
inventiveness, no passion or drive, leave alone richness in mainstream sociological discourses for
long. The non-canonical writers, on the contrary come up with completely different, often
shocking, articulation of issues. It is like the elephant telling the story of the blind men.
2nd Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2011: Prof. Jayati Ghosh, senior economist of JNU,
Delhi on Womens Work in India- Has Anything Really Changed? Main thrust of her lecture
was on accentuated adverse effect of jobless growth on women. She pointed out that 2000s were
a decade of unprecedented rapid GDP growth for the Indian economy. In this decade, the number
of women aged 15 years or more increased by 86.5 million. But only 8.9 per cent of them joined
the labour force, and only 7.5 per cent of them were described as gainfully employed. This
relative lack of increase in the number of working women in a period of major economic
expansion is not just unusual; it is also hard to explain in terms of most standard economic
approaches.
3rd Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 25-9-2012: Prof. Patricia Oberoi on Androgyny-Is it
Relevant for Feminist Theory and Practice?-An Illustrated Lecture. She showed stunning
visuals from calendar art to demonstrate the intersection of sacred and secular feminine
iconography. She speculated whether the concept of androgyny, the fusion of male and female,
can serve as an emancipatory ideal for feminists.

4th Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2013: Prof. Nabneeta Deb Sen on "Ladies Sing
the Blues: Women Retelling the Rama Story. She examined Ramayana with gender lens and
said, Out of the thirty-eight basic things upon which most epic narratives of the world are based,
only nine are associated with women. The ideals of the epic world obviously do not have much
to share with women, nor do the women enjoy the heroic values. There is little they can do there
- other than get abducted or rescued, or pawned, or molested, or humiliated in some way or other.
So, what happens when women choose to retell an epic? There are many alternatives.
1) You could tell it like it is, by borrowing the traditional eyes of the male epic poet, as Molla
does in her 16th century Telugu Ramayana. Or
2) You could tell it like it is, looking at it with your own women's eyes, as Chandrabati does in
her 16th century Bengali Ramayana. Or
3) You could tell it like it is by borrowing an ideological viewpoint as Ranganayakamma does in
Ramayana Vishabriksham, rewriting the Rama tale from the Marxist point of view. Or
4) You could tell your own story through the story of Sita, as the village women of India have
been doing for hundreds of years.
5th Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2014: Archival Photographs as Memory Banks by
Prof. Malavika Karlekar, Editor, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, CWDS, Delhi. With the help
of rare collection of archival photographs accompanied by explanatory captions she depicted
womens lives during the period 1875- 1947. Her lecture also included a comprehensive, wellresearched, yet lucid introduction placing in context the photographs which have been gleaned
from private collections of families and friends, as well as from archives sections of various
institutions, originally presented in an exhibition held by the Centre for Women s Development
Studies. Her lecture generated great interest among students and scholars of gender studies,
history, sociology, culture and media studies photographers, photo-journalists, archivists, and art
historians.
6th Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 24-9-2015: Prof. Maxine Berntsen, Prof. Emerita, Center
for Education, Tata Institute of Social Science, Hyderabad on 'Sharda: A Dalit Woman
Reconstructs Her Self'. Prof. Maxine lucidly constructed the story of Sharda, a Dalit woman
caught in the confusions of change in these words: Inspired by Ambedkar her father decided to
educate his children, including his daughter Sharda. However, when she was in the third standard
he suddenly arranged her marriage. Shortly afterwards, he sent her to study in an ashram in Pune.
When she came met her husband, she fell completely in love with him. Meanwhile, she was
imbibing the ethos of the ashram, that a womans husband was her all-in-all. After leaving the
ashram she went to live with her husband and his family. For several years she stayed there, but
with frequent visits to her maternal home. Finally, however, her husband refused to take her
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back. For twenty years she struggled to get him to acknowledge her as his wife, but to no avail.
Meanwhile she learned tailoring, got a bank loan and set up a shop. The nadir of her life
occurred, when she was informed that her husband had remarried; and the same week her shop
was burned to the ground in a caste riot. The question Prof. Maxine has tried to answer is how
Sharda coped with this crisis not only immediately but from then on. Borrowing informally
from the conceptual framework of Erik Eriksen and Robert Kegan, Prof. Maxine has attempted
to trace the process of Sharada defining and redefining her identity in the dialogue with herself,
her family, and her social environment.
An appeal is made to contribute generously for fund raising drive to Dr. Neera Desai Memorial
Lecture Series so that RCWS can organize such memorable event year after year in memory of
Dr. Neera Desai, mother of womens studies in India.