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Like their feminist counterparts all over the world, feminists in India seek gender equality: the right to work for equal wages, the right to equal access to health and education, and equal political rights. Despite the progress made by Indian feminist movements, women living in modern India still face many issues of discrimination. India’s patriarchal culture has made the process of gaining land-ownership rights and access to education challenging. To Indian feminists, these are seen as injustices worth struggling against. This has led to the creation of caste-specific feminist organisations and movements. Women’s role in Pre-colonial social structures reveals that feminism was theorised differently in India than in the West. In India, women’s issues first began to be addressed when the state commissioned a report on the status of women to a group of feminist researchers and activists.
The report recognised the fact that in India, women were oppressed under a system of structural hierarchies and injustices. During this period, Indian feminists were influenced by the Western debates being conducted about violence against women. However, due to the difference in the historical and social culture of India, the debate in favour of Indian women had to be conducted creatively and certain Western ideas had to be rejected. Historical circumstances and values in India have caused feminists to develop a feminism that differs from Western feminism.
This has provided women with traditional “cultural spaces. Indian women negotiate survival through an array of oppressive patriarchal family structures: age, ordinal status, relationship to men through family of origin, marriage and procreation as well as patriarchal attributes. In these communities, the head of the family is the oldest woman rather than the oldest man. This is because though mothers there are in forefront of most of the social activism, the society has always been patriarchal.