Scientist C V Seshadri was a great intellectual with deep insights into culture and feminism. I remember him once commenting that we needed the Balasaraswatis, and not the Rukmini Arundels of dance. Rukmini adhered to the form, but Bala, a remarkable feminist, provided a sense of the life of eccentricity.
Our conversations often turned to feminism and innovation. To begin, Seshadri wished there were more feminists in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Feminism, he said, added not just to innovation, but to the frameworks of thought they embedded. It added nuance and texture. Setting out to reveal the great role of feminism in innovative systems, Seshadri talked about the work of several feminists—each a radical, each an innovator.
The first case he cited was of Uzramma, a maker of Malkha or naturally-dyed cotton handloom cloth. Uzramma had a tremendous sense of memory and believed that feminism was a trusteeship of memory that innovation desperately needed. She ended up being one of the most remarkable innovators of the theories of memory.
Uzramma worked on recovering natural dyes, creating a complementarity between memory and innovation, between the natural and the synthetic. She had a sense of cloth not just as an aesthetic—colour itself was an element that was used to express a philosophy of the forms of life. Her work on natural dyes was one of the remarkable projects that Seshadri felt marked a history of innovation in India—of a recovery and memory that deserves to be told at length.
Another example he gave was of Ela Bhatt, the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association or SEWA, who is often described as an activist and applied scientist. Seshadri felt she was acutely theoretical. When she wrote about her ideas of home, she was questioning the dualism between domesticity and the world.
Ela was opposed to such dual spaces; she said the basic idea of feminism was to create a home in the world. The feeling that women’s organisations created homes across the world, and forms of homecoming that questioned the nature of violence. Ela realised that one had to break the dualism between home and the world to keep the complementarity between the ideas of swadeshi and swaraj. Innovation, for her, was an attempt to link livelihood and lifestyle of organisations.
Then there is Aruna Roy, whose work on the right to information was a remarkable attempt to rethink technology. Here was a group of organisations that differentiated between knowledge, information and communication. The three concepts differentiated technology in terms of a trinity of aspects. The role of the expert was reworked; information, rather than being mere data, became life-giving by embracing everyday contexts. Seshadri added that Aruna and Nikhil Dey were true theoreticians who had created a new ethnography of technology.
Aruna’s RTI Bill helped create a deep link between material citizenship and innovation. Seshadri wished that groups like the Election Commission and National Development and Reform Commission were more sensitive to the life of information and importance of the trusteeship of data. The shift argued for processing information in a liberating way.
For Seshadri, the innovator serves to reinstate democracy. Democracy, in his formulation, was not a fetish about innovation, but tended to bring about new ideas for constructing life. In this, we would not be caught in the blandness of a communication system, but react to new and outstanding forms of activity.
In this context, another important innovator was Vandana Shiva. By imposing a feminist view of knowledge, Vandana created a life-giving science. She saved the idea of the crop seed as a core of knowledge, and showed how women collecting seeds were life-giving entities. She also showed that pluralistic agriculture was required for diversity.
Seshadri referred to the feminist approaches of S Anandalakshmy, a former principal of Lady Irwin College who was instrumental in setting up Children’s Garden School in Chennai. She helped consolidate the idea of childhood as a series of dream-works and innovation. She pointed out that feminism had to be a trustee of childhood in order to sustain itself. Anandalakshmy argued that every woman with a child was an innovator and created a world of freedom.
Another example Seshadri gave was of Medha Patkar. She showed there could be an obscenity to thinking about dams only in technical terms. Medha wanted a different kind of discourse and language to enter the debate, as she said science could not only be applied as an idea of a river section. Science, in a fundamental way, had to be plural enough to allow space for doubt, and that sectional science could become theriocidal or even genocidal. As an example, Seshadri cited that merely to learn dissection, school students in the US had eliminated over 63 million animals. They must be a more imaginative way of teaching science.
Science must insist that multiple truths may need a variety of angles to make it complete. The wholeness of truth demands a sense of diversity—it is not just a gender division of labour. It is a way of pluralising the world itself.
As a thought exercise, Seshadri proposed imagining Ela rewriting the Directive Principles of state policy in the Constitution. The kind of examples she would provide—from work, livelihood and craft—he said, would create a different sense of purpose. They would counteract the threat of obsolescence, which today seems to loom as a constant threat over technologies. Feminism, he observed, was once framed as a circus of epistemologies—a perspective even Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, agreed with.
He pointed out that three things occur whenever an innovator operates in this context. Firstly, a woman redefines the social framework in a way that adds to the life-giving essence of the system. In this sense, feminism is about nurturing, transcending being merely a question of rights.
Secondly, Seshadri expressed hope that democracy would evolve not just as a theory of citizenship, but one of innovation. He emphasised that the plurality of technology was inherently tied to the plurality of democracy.
Finally, Seshadri argued that violence was incompatible with a democratic system. Democracy requires a non-violent approach to innovation. To do so, it must embrace plurality in its processes.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)