Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System—Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri

Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri speaking at Jamia Millia Islamia.

[This is the full transcript of the Keynote Address by Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri delivered at the symposium “Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System” on 24 September 2026.]

I am not speaking here as an expert on textual tradition, but as a sociologist interested in how knowledge is built, and it has an inextricable connection to the context which we must remember. As someone who has had a long interest in gender studies, and who looks at knowledge also from the perspective of a gendered view, it is important to share certain ideas that we have about gender-knowledge studies. Like most people located in the global south, we are deeply aware of how colonial rule and global inequalities has had a long-lasting influence in the manner we practice our disciplines institutionally and intellectually.

I have mentioned colonial rule and persistent global inequalities, because we are still inhabiting an unequal world, and the point that—where do we publish, what is the point of citation, all of it is located in an institutional context. So, in that fundamental sense, we cannot talk about knowledge, its construction, Indian knowledge systems or western knowledge systems without locating it within the institutional context or where we are located.

Now, there are four parts which I want to look into in my presentation:

1.     What do we mean by epistemologies in a particular term, and gender epistemologies in specific?

2.     The second point that we need to look at is—what happened in the very ancient past? Where is the legacy to that tradition? It is important to know what happened in the last 200 or 300 years—how our predecessors including social scientists, poets, freedom fighters, and theorists in the 19th and 20th century, negotiate with their pasts in a colonial context, in which we were situated in?

3.     The third point is that—we need a comparative perspective. India is exceptional in some ways because of its diversity, that we sometimes don't even have to go outside to have a global perspective, because there are multiple forms of knowledge within the country only. But because we live in a globally connected world (connected often in very violent and non-violent ways), we do need to have comparative global perspectives, particularly because there are other societies (just like South Asia) like Latin America, Africa, who also had a history of colonialism and a certain kind of dominance of western knowledge systems. How did they negotiate?

4.     And finally, how do we bring in all this in our everyday practices, in our classroom? That is, epistemological always sounds very heavy and profound. Classroom teaching sounds very ordinary, but there is a deep connection between the epistemological and the routine.

Understanding Epistemologies and Gender Epistemologies

Now, if we go back a little more systematically, what do we mean by epistemological? Epistemology is a theory of knowledge. There are some fundamental questions whose answers you try to seek:

-       How do we know what we know?

-       Who is the knower?

-       What are the practices of inquiry and how do we justify knowledge? 

There are various kinds of epistemologies. For people who come from a sociological point, the questions which are debated in our methodologies are—from where did we know what we got to know? In sociology, we begin with a small distinction between common sense knowledge and sociological knowledge. A commonsense knowledge is also often described by the knowledge which we have acquired just by living—from our parents, from our neighbours, from the kitchen, ordinary and everyday knowledge, etc. How is it different from modern social science knowledge or natural science knowledge? The difference is that in the question of modern social science knowledge, there is a certain compulsion to explicate how did we get that knowledge. It could be a laboratory experiment in natural sciences, but in social science, you have to tell:

-       How did you find out this was true?

-       How did you choose your field work?

-       How did you choose your sample?

-       Can you describe the context within which that knowledge emerged?

-       What is the way they expressed their knowledge? 

Let me put it in another way. I think all of you would have had that experience. Many of us come from middle class background. We have people to help us in running our domestic work. Sometimes if you are sitting and chatting with the person who helps you in your house; you try to ask them a very direct question like—where were you born or where were your parents born? They would answer the way we know how to answer—so and so date, so and so birth year, so and so place. We are used to know the precision and the specificity of the cities. Because if I say 1952—1952 means the same year in Jamia as it would be in New York or as it would be in Nigeria. You could say that this is a Christian date and it can be translated in other forms.

But when she speaks and you ask her, where was she born, first there would be ambiguity. She would be having the clarity and then she would bring in other kinds of forms of reference. For example, she says that, 'my mother told me—it was the year when there was a flood.' So, what I am trying to draw attention to is that there are different forms of knowledge and there are different forms of citation. I would give a lot of emphasis on both; and I would also say that every form of knowledge may have a different kind of epistemology and ontology and you have to enter that sphere in a certain sense to figure out what is happening. But that acceptance of morality is important. And even within that acceptance of morality, we should be trained to say: "How did I know? How did I get to know?" That I think is important.

It is important because when we celebrate our past, we also want to celebrate our future at the same time and if we have to celebrate our future, we have to know where we are standing. So, I am very glad that someone has mentioned that it begins with questioning. The moment you don't question and you are forced to accept the given as sacred, there is a problem. In most religious traditions, very interestingly, you have what is called the interrogative tradition of how do you interpret this? Are there multiple interpretations or not? This quest for knowledge in terms of interpretation and reinterpretation is central. So, when we talk about gender epistemologies, first we have to know this 'epistemological' question about theory of knowledge and its relationship to the other big word 'ontology' which is about theory of being, i.e.,

-       who are we?

-       how do we understand human nature?

-       how do we understand the relationship of humans and the animal world?

-       what is our relationship to nature, to the forests, to the water, to the rivers (that even becomes more important today in times of global warming)?

Historical Legacies: Knowledge, Colonialism, and the Past

And that also has a long history in traditional writings. Can we go back and look into it? So, epistemology is important. Fundamental to epistemology are two aspects:

1.     One is the source of knowledge. Now we talked about AI and internet and it becomes very dangerous to figure out what is valid and what is not. I was trying to figure out what is happening in the terrible wars that are taking place and I want to switch on the YouTube and I do not know which video is recorded when. I do not know who is the author of that video. I am totally confused because there could be a video which is actually after the event but it can also be before the event because you are also presenting a discourse. Now in a modern university like Jamia or any other modern university, it becomes very important whether you are in the social sciences or in gender studies or the natural sciences—to train our younger people to figure out the source. How do we know where does it come from? That training becomes very critical. Like I was trying to figure out—can I find out quickly gender epistemology on Google and I will have two forms of answers given by AI and when you see the AI, there will be a source. It could be Stanford Encyclopaedia or philosophy. So, it is better to go to the source. Do not restrict yourself with a summary. In the summary, you will make errors. I am not saying do not use it but use it in a fashion which is scholarly, which will know where you may go wrong. When you go to that, then you will get alternative critiques and you may be following the right but that has to be freed to our very students. So, conception of knowledge, practices of inquiry, justification, and legitimation are important—which knowledge is legitimate and which is not? And that becomes very important in any unequal context like the whole buzz for decoloniality; unequal because obviously even now the global north has much more power to tell us what is knowledge and what is not knowledge.

But also, in other forms of inequality like gender, whether knowledge by women (under-educated women) will tell us how to save seeds for agriculture or various kinds of medical information for health which is widely spread across the world that women have that knowledge. Since they are under-educated, they do not know when they were born. So, do we listen to that? And if we listen to that, how do we again validate? How do we cross-check? Because even that knowledge should not be accepted as given. Because criticality is central to any form of serious epistemological inquiry. I'm bringing the question of inequality because there are different forms of inequalities. Global, geopolitical, strategic, gender, class, caste, different kinds of hegemons—which community is more dominant or not—which will be different in different countries or State. The institutions also become very important as no knowledge can be done without kind of inequalities.

So, the first aspect that we have discussed is about:

-       What is epistemology?

-       Source, criticism, legitimacy & validity of knowledge and acceptance of diverse sources of knowledge.

-       To train to figure out the sources and the methods (Don't take anything as given—whether it is folk, Indian, or American).

-       Forms of inequality.

2.     The second point is that, very often when we talk about Indian knowledge system, the first reference becomes textual. In the ancient past, it could be the Upanishad, the Vedas. Now again, as a sociologist, we are very familiar that there is a debate in sociology between the text view and the book view, i.e.,

-       How do we read the text?

-       Is the book view the one corresponding to the text?

More importantly, when colonialism came to our country, this was a direct challenge which was not the case prior to that. You had multiple forms of knowledge in our country. So, what happened was that—our reformers in the 19th century had to take this challenge and therefore had to revisit their past. So, the most interrogative questions of all religious texts and religions were raised during the 19th century:

-       Was this practice always there?

-       Is it something which came later?

-       Was something which was legitimate or not?

-       Was parda something always given or did it come from somewhere else?

So, you would have debates on these questions. It became a moment in the 19th century of great scholarship and great debate. Now very often when we talk about Indian knowledge system, we go straight back 3,000 years ago and don't look what happened just 200 years ago or 150 years ago. If you do so, you'll find that there is so much—all the debates on sati, widow re-marriage, education for women, the right to go to public spaces, etc. Why don't we teach them in the curriculum, even in gender studies?

Many of us always think a little more about Nehru, a lot about Gandhi in some senses, and more recently a lot on Dr. Ambedkar but very much less on Savitribai Phule, Tarabai Shinde, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Aurobindo, Vivekananda, etc. What is common among all of them is—they all wrote on gender. And the other amazing thing about these scholars was that they were equally familiar with tradition, traditional knowledge, as well as western and other forms of knowledge. They were cosmopolitan in the real sense of the word.

I always recommend, especially when I speak on gender, that Sultana's Dream of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. On feminist utopia, she even talks about ecology. It's a beautiful story, a story with a protagonist called Sita. And when she falls asleep, there is somebody called Sister Sarah, must be a reference from history, who says, come, let's go for a walk. And they go for a walk, and everything is very beautiful. It's a dream land; it's a lady land—flowers, fruits, meat, green, everything. And she looks around, and she says, okay, but where are the men? I can only see the women. And so, Sister Sarah tells her that the men are in Parda, because they are dangerous. And she said, but how can you look something so unfair by putting them in Parda? And she gives a story and says, supposing there is somebody, an animal, which has escaped from a zoo, and has come into the village, and is attacking children and helpless people, who would you put back behind? The animal who is struggling, or would you put the entire village behind? Now this is a very dramatic, extraordinarily radical kind of statement, where she's basically saying, if you put it in 2026 and ask, why are the streets not safe? You will say, don't go out at night. Instead, she's saying—make the streets safe; don't put the borders on the women or the families; instead, make the streets safe. So, there is also a way by which we integrate the past. But the question remains, how do we bring in this kind of knowledge into the contemporary?

There's another slightly extreme point, which I want to bring in about unequal knowledge, is that I was asked to write something on feminist utopia, for a kind of volume on utopias across the world, not just feminist utopias. And I wrote on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and then I sent it to the editors. This was from Cambridge. And the editors said, are you sure she wrote in 1905? Because there was something like this in Canada, much later in 1935, similar, a little longer. And I was wondering, would I have the courage to ask this question to somebody saying, are you sure? She's asking me, are you sure? And she would be very progressive. She would want me to write for that paper. But the very idea that she couldn't even think about this was sort of extraordinary to me. So, this is the other thing that we have to go back and find.

There's a very interesting story about Sayid Ahmed Khan too. And you would know that in AMU, there was a lot of emphasis on women's education. There was an organization and there was a very interesting dialogue between him and a Western woman scholar. The latter was very open to education and asked Sayid, 'How do you envisage it for Muslim women?' And he said, 'I want an education where they can stare back into my eyes and question, just like you are staring back at me and questioning. I want that kind of autonomy and that kind of power.' The problem is that we don't read them. We don't incorporate the specific writings into our text. That would be the best kind of thing that we could do. The list is endless.

Bridging Epistemology and Everyday Classroom Practices

Now, I'll talk about another point that—what was the contribution of gendered epistemology or gendered knowledge? There's a wonderful session on experience and what kind of knowledge you get from experience. There's also a debate in the Western philosophical sphere between reason and emotion. Now, if you look at it, there is a wonderful text by Gandhi and it's a primer for children for a primary school, which was called Bal Pothi. And the story is about a mother teaching a child on household.

The mother asks her son, 'you should also help in the household.'

Son answers, 'but why should I do it? A boy studies and plays and this work belongs to a girl.'

Sister says, 'but I also want to play and study.'

Then brother says, 'I don't deny that. But dear sister, you have to do housework as well.'

And Gandhi then says, everybody has to do housework—cleaning, cooking, laundry.

Now, was Gandhi then somebody who was really intended to propagate gendered epistemology clearly? And you will see that in this work, there is a particular kind of knowledge. He also looks at the whole question, that very often when he was asking women to participate in the freedom movement, there was a certain reluctance for the men in the family to let the women go out. And he then says, 'look, if these people are saying one thing in public that women should come and not letting their own women come out, then let the list of these anti-union fossils and send them to be published in Harijan so that people know who are double-faced and say different kinds of things.' Now, I would therefore suggest that we need a very serious engagement with even these scholars, because they were engaging with the past and preparing for the present and the future and then incorporate them in the curriculum.

Comparative and Global Perspectives on Knowledge

Finally, the question of comparative. There is an entire debate which was a 'Symposia on the whole question of the category Gender' that—is the word Gender valid for us? And there was an African anthropologist and philosopher who said that many of the African societies were defined not by gender as an organizing principle, but seniority—family, kinship, and seniority; who is the oldest and hierarchy is to depend on age, not on gender. Now, if we take that point, and he said, 'why should that gender be imposed?' I personally have two problems with that:

1.     One problem, even if traditional African societies did not have gender as a hierarchical category, the long years of colonialism would have an impact. Just like, you can't go back and walk into the past. The present has already been messed up by the past. And we have to have austerity about that.

2.     The second point, in the Indian context—we have different positions, we have a very diverse and argumentative tradition. So, we have stories of multiple questions that debate each other, we have stories of Gargi, Maitreyi, etc. And I think the main thing that we had from there is the multiplicity.

We ask, where did all these educated women come from? And were there uneducated women there? What happened to their forms of knowledge? And how do we retrieve that form of knowledge? And we know about various kinds of folk practices, and then we know what global inequality is today.

So, Ayurveda has actually become a big business, from curing people in their home, like the kadha that I made before, to becoming wellness centre globally. We also have to look into those institutional structures here.

Additionally, we have to look into the kinds of writings which took place in the post-75 period, not new. There is a wonderful 2-volume book by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, 'Women Writing in India, 600 B.C. to the Present' [Volume 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century; Volume 2: The 20th Century]. It goes back to the Buddhist saints, and talks about those kinds of questions.

I'll talk a little bit on the kind of resources that we can take, not always from gender. In sociology, there was a debate on the idea of the individual. Take an example of Lucknow School, whether it is Radha Kamal Mukerjee or D P Mukerji—when questions arise like, do we have the same idea of selfhood as we have in the global West? They said that, 'ours is relational. If I am a mother, am I less of an independent woman or not? Our kingship ties become more central. Whether I have my obligations to my family, or is my obligation only to myself?' So, we have to look into these debates and those debates have to be brought back into the classroom.

There are also wonderful questions in the Bhakti and the Sufi movement. There is one 12th century Kannada Vaishnavite poet, Dasimayya. She tries to talk about gender through one of her poems. She says:

Suppose you cut a tall bamboo in two

Make the bottom piece a woman

the head piece a man

Rub them together till they kindle

Tell me now

the fire that's gone

Is it male or is it female?

Oh! Ramananda.

Likewise, the Marathi poet, Sant Janabai, throws away her clothes, says:

I am exultant, happy in all respects

I am indifferent to distinctions of sex or body

And you say that when we talk about sex and body—why do we have to talk about gender or performing gender through scholars like Judith Butler? Why can't we also look into these texts, which are questioning binaries? And this is not to say that—this is better or that is worse. As this is the most anti-knowledge perspective that we have. There are knowledges from everywhere. We just have to be trained to figure out:

-Where did it come from?

-What was the contestation?

-What are the sources?

I'm keeping on emphasizing sources and methods because sources and methods have become particularly important today with the rise of the AI and our inability to look through the details to figure out, where have they all come from?

Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, in collaboration with Sahitya Akademi, organised a One Day Symposium on the theme “Gendered Epistemologies: Unpacking the Indian Knowledge System” on 24 September 2026, featuring a Keynote Address by Prof. Maitreyee Chaudhuri.

Prof. Chaudhuri is an eminent sociologist and the former faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Presently, she is the North-South Dialogue director at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Her early work focused on nationalism, colonialism, and feminism in India. Since the early 1990s, she has been looking at the changing nature of public discourse in the context of both neoliberalism and the rise of majoritarianism.

 

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.