#MeToo and India: The Movement in Its Moment

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the pursuit of justice by the police is generally commendable, the extrajudicial killing by police of four alleged perpetrators of rape and murder in greater Hyderabad complicates the public outcries for immediate justice. For more details on the case of Disha, see Mutha (2023).

2 See Sonora Jha’s essay “#MeToo, Masculinity, and Sexual Agency: Emerging Conversations and Representations” in this forum, where she notes how the Indian media referred to the #MeToo moment, rather than the #MeToo movement.

3 Pallavi Guha writes a concise history of the anti-rape and sexual assault movement in India that began in the 1970s in the introduction to Hear #MeToo in India. Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian (Jha and Kurian 2018) describe the development of women’s movements in the eight South Asian nations in their introduction to New Feminisms in South Asia: Disrupting the Discourse through Social Media, Film, and Literature. In #MeToo and Beyond: Perspectives on a Global Movement, edited by M. Cristina Alcalde and Paula-Irene Villa, essays examine diverse countries (from Australia and South Africa to Palestine and the UK), gender identities and sexual orientations, and activism strategies of the transnational #MeToo movement. The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement, edited by Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdottir offers short essays on the theories, contexts, and global perspectives of the #MeToo movement.

4 Pan explains savarna as: “The Savarna perspective refers to a homogenised, upper-caste/Brahmanical perspective. In Indian feminism, the savarna aspect becomes visible when feminist thought and practice tend to promote the concerns of only upper caste women while categorically erasing the factor of caste. Savarna feminism has been criticised for white-washing Dalit women’s concerns, and its inability to identify intersecting structures of caste and gender” (Pan 2023, 3).

5 Bidisha Bidwas notes that “nearly 80% of Indians now have a mobile phone, but only 11% have Internet access, and fewer than 5% use social media…. Male smartphone or feature phone users in India are three times more likely as women users to have used Facebook” (2018, 48).

6 Srimati Basu (2022) describes the nexus of law, power, and sex as embodied by the #MeToo movement in her essay, “In Singular and Plural Voice: #MeToo, Law, and Solidarity.”

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Notes on contributors

Robin E. Field

Robin E. Field, Ph.D., is a professor of English at King’s College in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction (2020) and editor of #MeToo and Modernism (2023, with Jerrica Jordan) and two other essay collections. She has given lectures on #MeToo and literature in the United States, Northern Ireland, and India. She is Managing Editor of South Asian Review and Associate Editor of Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts.