How do feminists, as lawyers and activists, think about and do law in a way that it makes life more meaningful and just, in a specific context? How are law and feminism called into relation, given meaning, engaged with, used, refused, adapted, and brought to life through collaborative action? How is feminist jurisprudential knowledge collectively lived with at a place and time? A Jurisprudence of Conversations shows how life, law and feminism are lived in and through conversations. In this book, conversations, performed by a diverse set of interlocutors, become a site, and a means, for calling law and feminism into mutual relations with life. As an interlocutor myself, I work to weave a historicised account of such conversations, joining a multitude of interlocutors, locations and temporality, to demonstrate how these, in turn, generate a field of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India.

Predominantly, accounts of law as a site of power, how it causes or magnifies social marginalisation, and how it may be resisted and reformed, abound in feminist jurisprudential scholarship in the common law world.Footnote ² This book is not invested in developing a similar critique of law and jurisprudence from a feminist perspective.Footnote ³ From underneath the shadows of major feminist jurisprudential thought that reveals how law wields power over post-colonial lives, this book is interested in drawing out the traditions of mutuality and reciprocity of law–life relations. It foregrounds how we wield agency to work with law, befriend it and do things with it to organise our life and relationships with others.

The aim of this book is not to reveal how we can transcend social hierarchies through conversations. In and of themselves, conversations are not a solution to the existence of inequalities and that is not the claim I am making. Conversations are a form of art that requires practise. As much as they enable alliances, conversations are often a site of contestations, disagreements and failures that tell us where a dissociation may be necessary. This book invigorates conversation as a method to accentuate the work that feminists do, as scholars and activists, to bring law into a relationship of mutuality with life, given our differences, inequalities and deep fissures, through co-creation. I activate a less acknowledged feminist tradition in law that works to reimagine a lived and relational form of jurisprudential knowledge based on an inter-dependence between life, law and feminism.

The feminist thrust of this book lies in taking up the question of method as central to its jurisprudence. A bulk of feminist scholarship in law and other disciplines, and in many different times and places, is animated by conversations on the question of method. Such as what suffices as feminist method, or how method and the content of knowledge are related and jointly qualify to be termed ‘feminist’, or how it is method that makes a particular form of knowledge feminist or not.Footnote ⁴ In alignment with such traditions of enquiry, but explored more imaginatively, method is understood to mean not just the tools of interpretation and analysis but also a practical way of shaping law’s mutual relations with people and place.

This book comprises a series of interrelated and situated conversations amongst a wide array of people, lawyers and non-lawyers, that take place in varied contexts in post-colonial India. Through this I argue that knowledge production about law in India is not solely the domain of legal academics but has been developed in relationship with non-lawyer activists. I illustrate how crafting a mutual relationship with law, and not just being in opposition to it, has been crucial to the formations of activist and scholarly lives in contemporary post-colonial India. Rather than writing a criticism of law, the book thus illuminates the coming into of law’s mutuality with post-colonial life.

My argument is grounded in fieldwork with the help of which I draw into conversation two very diverse sets of interlocutors. These are legal academics Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur; and sex worker activist groups Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP). I read a select set of materials authored by the sex workers’ collectives and the legal academics, two groups that are engaged in varied life activities that are, however, concerned with law.

The nature and form of the materials are as diverse as their authors. These include activist documents such as a manifesto, a statement, a legal petition, posters, pamphlets, organisational brochures, announcements, annual reports and newsletters, all of which have been collectively authored by sex worker groups from 1995 to 2016. There is ‘An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India’, co-authored by Upendra Baxi and three other law professors, Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lotika Sarkar, in Reference Baxi, Dhagamwar, Kelkar and Sarkar1979. There is also a book published in 1996 called Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India, which is co-authored by feminist legal scholars Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman.

I draw on a localised practice of adda – which means a meeting place and is also a Bengali quotidian activity of mutual conversation and sociality – to rejuvenate and adapt such art of discourse into a scholarly method. I shape and perform adda as a shared activity to interpret the meanings of these literatures in conversation with the authors. As method, adda is both an oral and a textual practice. It is a way of conceiving and engaging in the discursive field of feminist jurisprudence as a relational practice of legal knowledge production. It is also a means of conducting empirical research for reading and interpreting the texts that shape its body of scholarship, in conversation with those who have produced them. Post-colonial thinkers in the humanities have previously used adda as a method for historicising and representing critical thought and texts. The book joins in that tradition to shape it as a method for representing a critical feminist jurisprudence that is emplaced in lived traditions and texts, produced in the historical context in post-colonial India.

I call into relation literatures of diverse genres, authored by people who are disparately located, both socially and in terms of the field of legal knowledge production per se. For instance, the book juxtaposes a reading of activist pamphlets, petitions, by-laws and other organisational documents of the sex workers’ collectives alongside the readings of scholarly books, letters and journal articles by well-known legal academics. The reading and interpretation of these texts is performed in conversation with the authors as a shared activity by means of which its meanings are grounded in lived experience. This makes visible how legal wisdom and meaning-making are tied to everyday speech, proximate forms of cohabitation and relational forms of living, of which the texts are a part.

I read the texts in dialogue with their authors. I simultaneously locate my reading at the specific places from where the texts emerged, namely the university and the collectives. I conduct oral conversations with authors about the experiences that informed the writing of these texts, the ideas presented in the texts and the place and time at which the texts were written. I draw out the conversations that the authors were engaged in, and those that informed the practices of collectivisation and scholarly writing in their different contexts at the time. This is how, as you will see, I work to weave a narrative by relating the sex workers’ practices of collectivisation and the academics’ practices of scholarly writing, as well as the locations where these practices took place.

Why Adda?

Adda is an everyday term and lived practice in India. It is tethered to a place and people. In Hindi, which is spoken in parts of north India, adda is a noun and denotes a place of gathering. In Bangla, adda is a verb and denotes a particular kind of action or an activity of reciprocal conversations amongst people.Footnote ⁵ Adda is thus understood to mean both a form of conversations and a meeting place. Indian post-colonial scholars located in the disciplines of history and literature have already brought adda into academic discourse.Footnote ⁶ Their understanding of the practice is not identical, but they have used it as a mode of knowing and analysing the discursive productions of critical thought as post-colonial thinkers.

My use of adda in this book is ontological. Broadly speaking, ontology is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with questions of our being and experience in the world in relation to knowledge.Footnote ⁷ This makes the question of how we engage in knowledge production, and by undertaking what particular role and responsibilities, an ontological exercise. Australian feminist legal scholar Margaret Davies argues that theoretical knowledge production about law or the theories of law, which is what jurisprudence is generally understood to mean, is a contextual and embodied activity that is not external to ourselves and/or our being.Footnote ⁸ For Davies, ‘law and knowledge exist only in everyday reality, and are a product of life and culture’.Footnote ⁹ Contrary to a more conventional understanding of jurisprudence, even in analytical terms law cannot be thought to be ‘conceptually separate from the human lives who have created it, who apply it, who criticise it, and who relate to it’.Footnote ¹⁰

I engage in adda in order to actively experience feminist jurisprudential knowledge production, which is related to my being and mode of doing this research.Footnote ¹¹ Through my method, I materialise my role and its incumbent responsibilities as a feminist researcher of law from India, in relation to jurisprudence and the people whose wisdom I draw from and build on.Footnote ¹² The practice of adda, for me, is an act and activity of reciprocal conversations for conducting lawful relations and grounding these at a place and time.Footnote ¹³ I see ‘lawful’ neither as an antonym of ‘lawless’, nor as a synonym of ‘legal’. The conduct of lawful relations is a situated ethical practice of reciprocity with my interlocutors as I take up the responsibility of relating their lives and law, through a reading and interpretation of texts authored by them. Thus, I work to bring adda into my disciplinary location of law as a practical method for doing feminist jurisprudence relationally with my interlocutors.

The work of Canadian feminist legal scholar Jennifer Nedelsky particularly talks about the importance and significance of adopting a relational approach to law and jurisprudence. Nedelsky looks at how law structures and constitutes our relations in life, and argues that such relational experiences amongst people are crucial for our understandings of law and jurisprudence.Footnote ¹⁴ She demonstrates how, to give an example from the book, the relationship between children and their parents and how they experience and understand autonomy while growing up cannot be divorced from the knowledge of autonomy as a legal concept.Footnote ¹⁵

The relational approach to law that I practise through adda is distinct from Nedelsky’s argument in her book. The focus of my method is on developing a practical mode of establishing a relationship with law, and not illuminating that/how it has already structured our relations in the world. While I agree that, as Nedelsky shows us, law has a pre-existing role in organising our collective lives, I show how relationships are formed amongst people and between their lives and law, through conversations about law.

From a performative aspect, the joining of a multitude of voices, enabled in adda, bears the potential to show how a diverse cohort of actors – with and without formal academic training in law – co-create a chorus of collective wisdom about law and how it is lived and known. In this way, the dividing lines between the bearers and recipients of legal wisdom may get shifted. Not just amongst the people engaged in adda, but also between their lives and law. Although the class, caste, gender, educational or other social hierarchies remain, the thoughts and ideas of each person that contributes to the discourse may be brought to rest on a common ground. The social and educational differences may be made to lose intensity as determinants of the status and value of our legal wisdom. Adda can become a common ground for calling into relation the legal wisdom of the ‘learned’ and the so-called uneducated. In terms of a jurisprudence, conceptualised and performed in this way, adda enables a play with the academic norms around who can speak about law with authority or whose account of law can be deemed as a source of legal knowledge.

Method is a path and a conduit of knowledge production.Footnote ¹⁶ My practice of adda is both an act and a form of activity by which I stage and experience the shaping of the feminist jurisprudential knowledge in this book.Footnote ¹⁷ The performances of adda take place in two ways. They are both oral and through texts. I draw published texts into conversation, thereby drawing different authors and their ideas posited in scholarship, into dialogue with each other. Then, by performing adda quite literally as a conversation with sex workers and legal academics, I do the research and fieldwork for this book.

That is how I use adda for calling into relation the sex workers’ practices of collectivisation and the legal academics’ practices of scholarly writing with the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. In this way I show that adda works as a method for recognising the diverse experiences, and locations, of mutual law–life relations that produce a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. Thus, the method and argument of this book share a relationship of interdependence.Footnote ¹⁸

The interdependent method and argument are especially pertinent in relation to knowledge production in the Indian context, which has historically been a fraught terrain. In India, the academic pursuit of intellectual labour per se, and the question of who has a right to engage in it, is historically embedded in the caste system.Footnote ¹⁹ People’s relationship with intellectual labour is determined and mediated by their standing in the graded social hierarchy of caste.Footnote ²⁰ The caste system also has implications for why the practices of certain people would count as knowledge, while those of certain others would not.

A number of Dalit-BahujanFootnote ²¹ and feminist scholars/activists have argued that the organising logic of caste is written into the systems of academic education and expertise-driven practices of knowledge production in India.Footnote ²² The field of intellectual labour and academic practices is a hierarchical experience for people who have no formal education, or those who speak and write in the vernacular, or those who do not engage in a certain kind of theoretical work. Consequently, the academic field of law and jurisprudential knowledge production, and my own practices of it, are not immune to such hierarchies by virtue of being located within the larger context of intellectual labour in India.Footnote ²³

The objective of my method and argument is to speak to the location of Indian feminist jurisprudence within a caste-based hierarchical field of intellectual labour. I take responsibility for working out my method and argument in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the existence of the logic of a caste-based hierarchy in Indian academic practices.Footnote ²⁴ I do not address the question of hierarchy through a socio-legal enquiry into the caste composition of the two groups of interlocutors. I also do not engage with the human rights discourse on the caste-based social discriminations faced by sex workers.Footnote ²⁵ Both these enquiries – about the human rights of sex workers and the socio-legal dimensions of caste – are significant and inform my understanding of the relationship between knowledge and caste. However, based on such understanding, my intent and scholarly engagement are distinct.

The focus of this book lies in staging a performance of how a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence is experienced and produced relationally in conversations.Footnote ²⁶ My specific intent is to demonstrate how knowledge productions within this field result from the experiences of mutual relations amongst people and between people’s lives and law, which happen at specific places and times. To this end, I undertake the practice of research in this book as a creative and an imaginative exercise to form reciprocal ties with, and amongst, my interlocutors; and between their lives and law. Simultaneously, I work against a structural disparity that exists in the field of legal knowledge production with respect to whom can be counted as knowledgeable or experienced in law, and by speaking from where.

The practices of academics and activists are engaged with in tandem because of the apparent disparity amongst them vis-à-vis legal knowledge production. The academic discipline of law, and legal imagination and practice, are commonly regarded as a realm of specialised and professional knowledge in India. Thus, in popular perception, legal academics are readily recognisable as interlocutors and contributors of a jurisprudence. Sex worker activists, however, are not.

In common perception, sex workers are rendered non-recognisable as contributors to the field of legal knowledge owing to their social and educational differences from those of us who are related with academia. The sex workers not only have no academic training in law, but a majority also possesses no formal education. Moreover, their socio-legal status in India is marked as criminals by the state. These compounding circumstances locate sex worker activists at the bottom of the hierarchy vis-à-vis those of us who have ties with the legal academy and whose practices qualify as producing jurisprudential knowledge.

The inability to recognise activists as bearers of their own legal wisdom arise from a disparity in how we evaluate the understanding of law gained at university and through experiences other than these, such as collectivisation. For feminist practices of legal knowledge production in India, by implication, such non-recognition can inadvertently carry another meaning. It can work to privilege the mind and intellectual labour of the academic/scholar/researcher when it comes to producing legal meaning. This can then reproduce caste-based hierarchy in scholarship by setting a preferential precedent regarding whose experiences of law, and gained from where, are invested with the authority to count as knowledge in scholarly feminist discussions about law.

This kind of hierarchy vis-à-vis feminist practices of jurisprudence potentially impedes our engagements with the field and its rich repertoire of knowledge comprising a diversity of the meanings and experiences of law in India, which is what the method of this book helps to work against. The book makes a specific methodological argument and contribution to Indian feminist jurisprudence that helps to recognise how the practices of people who do not appear knowledgeable, and those who do, together produce the field. The scholarship in this book is directed at inverting the hierarchical logic of the caste system that is embedded in how we perceive non-academic practices of knowledge production vis-à-vis academics’ practices of scholarly writing.

I obviously do not seek to demonstrate that academic and sex worker experiences of law are one and the same. Rather, I develop a method that can help to think from my disciplinary location in law, and at the same time speak to the specific historical context of the field of knowledge this book engages in. By using a localised practice as my method, I am able to show how sex workers’ collectivisation and the scholarship of academics, albeit different, are both equally valuable practices. Both are folded together and contribute to the productions of a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence.

Adda assists in reworking the disparate locations of my interlocutors in relation to the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. It first helps me acknowledge that people with very limited, or no, formal education, and from within and outside the legal academy, have the right to engage in intellectual labour; and then demonstrate how such diverse groups of people together shape a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. For example, the legal academics – Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur – are different from each other in terms of their scholarship. However, both are renowned scholars, and therefore, their practices carry greater authority with respect to the academic field of legal knowledge production in relation to me and the sex workers.Footnote ²⁷ By engaging with texts authored by academics and sex workers, and by practising reciprocity in the conversations with both groups, I make them speak as my interlocutors who carry equal authority in this book’s account of the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence.

Through my mode of engagement with the materials, I call the practices of sex worker activists and legal academics into relation and position the authors as my interlocutors. I accord equal value to sex workers’ conversations that inhabit their practices of collectivisation and the academics’ conversations that inhabit their practices of scholarship. In doing so, I position both groups on a par with each other and as bearers of their own insights for the productions of feminist jurisprudential knowledge. Thus, I work to demonstrate how both sets of conversations, although these are disparately located vis-à-vis Indian feminist jurisprudence, can be seen as jointly contributing to the productions of its body of knowledge. In performing adda as my method, I take up the responsibility of demonstrating how people who are disparately located experience mutual relations with law in their specific place and time through the active practices of collectivisation and scholarship.

Having provided a glimpse into what the reader can expect to unfold in the later chapters, I will further elucidate some of this book’s key aspects and situate them in relation to feminist jurisprudential scholarship in India. This chapter is meant to do two things. One, to familiarise the reader with the established convention of diversity in the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence, which I will join with and expand. Two, to explain the relevance of this book’s method and argument to the caste question.

Next, I will offer an illustration of the field by introducing the body of literature that the book is drawing from and contributing to. I will foreground that there are different voices in the field, each of which speaks from a different locus both within and outside Indian legal academia. My purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive summary of the field but relay the contents of some of the literature that makes the scholarly field of Indian feminist jurisprudence a diverse body of knowledge. I will then move on to clarifying my understanding of caste and its relationship with intellectual labour in India. I will elaborate on how such an understanding informs my decision to do adda with sex worker activists and legal academics together.

Feminism and Law in India: An Overview of the Field

In the common law world, the field of feminist jurisprudence, in general, is argued to have originated through the interventions of feminist scholars who were part of legal academia.Footnote ²⁸ In these places, feminist jurisprudence developed as a named form of legal knowledge at the end of the twentieth century as feminists engaged with the foundations and formulations of law in conventional jurisprudence/legal theory and practices of adjudication.Footnote ²⁹ Although the field in all of these places is not uniform, or restricted only to legal academia, they share one thing in common. They are all concerned with the experiential dimensions of law, or how law is lived.Footnote ³⁰

Likewise, the field of feminist jurisprudence in India is also concerned with the experiences of law, but its body of knowledge did not solely originate in conversations amongst feminists from legal academia.Footnote ³¹ In India, a place that borrows the term ‘feminist jurisprudence’ from its non-Indian counterparts, the field did not begin as an interrogation of the gendered foundations of jurisprudence/legal theory. It constituted adjudicatory practices concerning women as its entry point of enquiry.Footnote ³² It is only very recently that the relationship between feminist jurisprudence and Indian legal academia has come to be formally established.

Feminist jurisprudence found its way into legal academia as a named field of legal study when, in 2003, the National Commission for Women (NCW)Footnote ³³ began advocating for its inclusion in the law curriculum.Footnote ³⁴ Based on the efforts of the NCW, the Bar Council of India (a statutory body that regulates the conduct of the legal profession) decided that feminist jurisprudence was an important area of legal studies that needed to be included as part of jurisprudence courses in the LLB and LLM degrees. It took much longer to implement this decision and replace the precursor of feminist jurisprudence, a subject that was commonly taught at public university law schools by the name of ‘Women and Law and Law Relating to the Child’. This subject was about the special legislations, case law and constitutional provisions that applied to women and children. Although ‘women and law’ as a subject of legal study worked to set up correlations between the categories of women and law within the legal academy, it was not practised as a feminist intellectual project of/in law.

To date, there has not been a consolidated effort in the Indian legal academy to develop a systematic theory and practice of law from a feminist standpoint.Footnote ³⁵ Understandably, there is no specific body of scholarship that self-identifies its intellectual practices under the name of either ‘feminist jurisprudence’ or ‘Indian feminist jurisprudence’. For this reason, the field is not clearly bounded by a demarcated inside and an outside, and the term ‘feminist jurisprudence’ cannot be simply applied to a given body of literature. There is no explicit understanding amongst the practitioners in the field, which has been arrived at through conversations, as to what kind of engagements with law qualifies to be called ‘Indian feminist jurisprudence’ and what does not. This leaves the understanding and organisation of the field open to multiple interpretations. To provide a brief introduction to the field, I have organised my account by relying on a range of published literature that correlates law and feminism from an Indian perspective, or engages with law in the Indian context, from a stated feminist position.

The scholarly field of feminist jurisprudence in India may be loosely described as a contemporary body of knowledge consisting of a repertoire of feminist socio-legal literature spanning more than four decades.Footnote ³⁶ Feminist legal scholar Archana Parashar describes feminist jurisprudence in the Indian legal academic context as ‘contemporary debates about the relationship between law and society’.Footnote ³⁷ Methodologically, from the perspective of this wide-ranging scholarship about law that originates in feminist thought and practice, the experiences of law primarily map onto social experiences. This means that in India the field is thought and practised in terms of law’s relationships with the differing and interlocking social experiences of gender, class, caste, sexuality and religion.Footnote ³⁸ Consequently, this way of thinking about and practising law’s relations has established a close proximity between the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence and movements for social justice.Footnote ³⁹ This proximity has primarily resulted from the intimate ties between Indian feminisms and social justice movements.Footnote ⁴⁰

Speaking of Indian feminisms, in The History of Doing (1993), feminist scholar Radha Kumar has argued that Indian feminisms are not focused on demanding women’s ‘equality with men’.Footnote ⁴¹ Kumar documents the history of the feminist and women’s rights movements in India from 1800 to 1990 and clarifies that the feminisms emerging from the practices of the Indian women’s movement are not founded on an inherent opposition between men and women. Kumar argues that feminists have opposed the areas in which men exercised control over women’s lives, and the practices that accorded superiority to men over women; and in doing so, Indian feminisms have also simultaneously acknowledged a ‘complementarity between the two distinct biologically defined areas of masculine and feminine’.Footnote ⁴² For Kumar, Indian feminisms, that are founded on concerns with unequal relations of gender have not been preoccupied with questions of sameness/differences amongst men and women. Rather, the debates and discussions amongst feminists have focused equally on the differences amongst women.Footnote ⁴³

Feminist political scientist Nivedita Menon has also argued that Indian feminisms are founded on an understanding of woman as a subject who is a sum total of her gender, caste, class, and religious status and conditions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Menon argues that from the 1990s onwards, conversations in the women’s movement underwent a systematic shift in terms of its subject of enquiry. This happened when ‘woman’ as a category of study and analysis shifted to a broader understanding of gender in order to accommodate the experiences of sexually marginalised men and women, such as gay men and sex working women.Footnote ⁴⁵ Menon traces this shift in articulation to the women’s movement’s conversations with two other social justice movements in India, namely the sex workers’ and the queer rights movements (I discuss the sex workers’ movement in Chapters 3 and 4). Both the sex workers’ and queer rights movements, which began in the early 1990s, made gendered experiences of sexuality a part of the conversations of the women’s movement, leading to a shift in its focus and terminology.Footnote ⁴⁶

In a piece titled ‘Legitimately Ours: The Parallel Systems of Feminist Jurisprudence’ (2018), feminist activist Abha Bhaiya demonstrates that the relationships between feminisms and social movements themselves form a locus for engagements with law and questions of jurisprudence in the Indian context.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bhaiya provides an account of the activist Indian tradition of feminist jurisprudence. By way of illustration, she discusses the Nari Adalats, the community-based, women-led tribunals/courts. These were established in Gujarat in the 1990s to address women’s experiences of violence that did not find representation in formal law and legal institutions.Footnote ⁴⁸ She refers to these courts as informal legal institutions that acted as a link between state and non-state actors. Bhaiya uses the illustration to argue that the Indian feminist jurisprudential tradition is a field of engagement with law that is not conceived solely in relation to the state and what it authorises as ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’. Instead, Indian feminist jurisprudence is a field of feminist engagements with questions of law in relation to women’s experiences of community relations and social life.Footnote ⁴⁹

When the feminisms of the Indian women’s movement began to interact with law in the 1980s and 1990s, two things happened. First, the amalgam of law and feminism was conceived largely as a project of social justice. Second, the focus of this project came to be directed primarily at the state through the demands for law reform and new legislations. Menon argues that after the independence of India from colonial rule, feminists reposed trust in the state and its institutional mechanisms, which dissipated with the declaration of the Emergency and the accompanying political events in the 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, according to Menon, post the 1970s, in the aftermath of the declaration of Emergency (this event is discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the writing of the Open Letter),Footnote ⁵¹ there was a shift in the way feminists engaged with the state and its institutions.Footnote ⁵²

In Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (1996), feminist legal scholars Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman argue that throughout the 1980s, from the standpoint of the women’s movement, law has either been conceived as a corrective tool for undoing experiences of hierarchy and discrimination, or it has been an object of criticism for contributing to these experiences (I discuss this book in Chapter 5).Footnote ⁵³ Speaking in relation to a similar context about contemporary feminist legal scholarship in India, in Engendering Law: Essays in Honour of Lotika Sarkar (1999), Archana Parashar laments the absence of a legal project from an Indian feminist standpoint.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to her, legal thought and jurisprudence carry a positivist account of law in India that is primarily interested in law’s doctrinal conceptions.Footnote ⁵⁵ A positivist understanding of law as a command of the sovereign was the most conducive for colonial rule, and was thus followed by the British administration in India.Footnote ⁵⁶ A similar conception of law – as command of the state – dominates contemporary legal scholarship, even after colonialism ended and a change was implemented in India’s political system. For Parashar, it is such narrow academic engagements with law in general that have led to a dearth of scholarly theorisations of law from the specific context and experiences of Indian women.Footnote ⁵⁷

Nonetheless, there is indeed a discursive body of scholarly and activist feminist engagement with law that is produced from both within and outside Indian legal academia. The scholarly and activist conversations that have worked to shape the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence by forming law’s relations with social experiences, based on which I have organised my discussion, appear in the form of published texts. The conversations have taken place in writings and publications in the English language whereby scholars/activists/litigators have shaped the field by agreeing, disagreeing or drawing and building on each other’s ideas.

I see the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence as comprising a set of conversations amongst three kinds of people who are either academics or possess advanced academic qualifications. They are feminists who are academically trained and based in the discipline of law;Footnote ⁵⁸ feminists who are academically trained and based in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in the disciplines of sociology,Footnote ⁵⁹ historyFootnote ⁶⁰ and political science;Footnote ⁶¹ and feminist activists and litigators.Footnote ⁶² Conversations amongst these people who are based inside and outside the university, both within India and elsewhere, resulted in shaping a body of literature that, I think, can be organised around two overlapping thematic areas.

Substantively, the scholarly literature that shapes the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence may be divided according to the areas of women’s/gendered experiences of violence and difference.Footnote ⁶³ Feminist legal literature on the gendered experiences of violence have addressed issues such as rape, dowry deaths, domestic violence, sati or widow burning, obscenity and sexual harassment.Footnote ⁶⁴ Scholarship in the area of the gendered experiences of difference has addressed issues such as sexuality, Muslim women’s right to divorce, Hindu women’s succession rights, and the Uniform Civil Code versus personal laws debates.Footnote ⁶⁵ Amongst all of these issues, law’s pertinence in relation to women’s experiences of rape and sexual violence has remained the most prominent and recurring topic of conversation amongst feminists up until very recent times.Footnote ⁶⁶ Engagements with rape law reform have been fundamental to the activism of the Indian women’s movement.Footnote ⁶⁷ The women’s movement’s engagements in law reform and the demands for protective legislations for women have been a primary topic of the conversations that took place in the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence through scholarship in the 1980s.Footnote ⁶⁸

A document that has played an indirect role in the rape law reform of the 1980s, and is widely regarded as one of the first programmatic feminist engagements with law, is the 1974 report titled Towards Equality.Footnote ⁶⁹ The report played an important part in 1980s activism around rape law reform that took shape through the writing of the Open Letter in 1979 by Upendra Baxi and his colleagues.Footnote ⁷⁰ Lotika Sarkar, a co-author of the report, was also a co-author of the Open Letter, a crucial document that set in motion the Indian women’s movement’s engagement with rape law reform (I discuss the Open Letter in Chapter 5).Footnote ⁷¹

The publication of the Towards Equality report was the result of a government-commissioned project, which set up a committee to review the status of women in Indian society. This report, almost 500 pages long, was co-authored by the members of the committee, which included a diverse and eminent group of political activists and/or academics who were associated with social justice movements.Footnote ⁷²

The report has a dedicated chapter titled ‘Women and the Law’, which mainly looks at women’s standing in personal laws such as those relating to divorce, inheritance and adoption.Footnote ⁷³ In their prefatory note addressing the minister for education and social welfare, the authors point at the inequalities in all aspects of women’s lives thus: ‘our investigation has revealed that large masses of women in this country have remained unaffected by the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the laws enacted since independence’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The report highlighted the differing status amongst women by noting that the experiences of poor and rural women were different from those of middle-class women.Footnote ⁷⁵ In effect, it suggested that ‘woman’ was not a homogeneous group, and further that the constitutional provisions of equality touched the lives of different groups of women differently, in comparison to each other. The authors of the report thus argued that women’s standing within law, and in society, was unequal not just in relation to men, but also in relation to each other.

On the question of women’s political participation, and on what measures could address this aspect of inequality in status, there was a difference of opinion amongst the authors. Lotika Sarkar and Vina Mazumdar disagreed with the rest of the group and wrote a note of dissent at the end of the report where they stated, ‘our investigations have proved that the application of the theoretical principle of equality in the context of unequal situations only intensifies inequalities, because equality in such situations merely means privileges for those who have them already and not for those who need them’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Through their dissent, Sarkar and Mazumdar asserted that constitutional equality’s lack of uniform jurisdiction over women’s lives was caused by the inadequate translation of its theoretical assumptions into practice. According to the report, the operation of constitutional legal provisions took place in the context of social inequalities of caste, class and gender, for which reason it was unable to reach and benefit all women. The report thus established the correlations between women’s experiences of law and their experiences of a discriminatory and unequal social life.

In the aftermath of the report, since the early 1980s, women’s experiences of rape have been a dominant topic of conversations in the women’s movement as well as amongst feminist scholars. Rape has not just been understood as a form of gender-based oppression that is intimately related with sexuality, class and caste, but also as a form of state oppression.Footnote ⁷⁷ This understanding emerged from the fact that many of the incidents of rape around which the women’s movement had mobilised, concerned women from marginalised class and caste communities, and those who were raped by the police in custody.Footnote ⁷⁸ This was also a period during which the country was recovering from the police brutality unleashed during the Emergency (1975–77), and all progressive forces, including some voices within the women’s movement, were very sceptical of the state entity and its institutions.Footnote ⁷⁹

Indian feminisms’ relations with law have been thought and practised largely through engagements with the state. In the 1980s, Lotika Sarkar cautioned against the women’s movement’s demand to shift the burden of proof from the state to the accused in cases of rape.Footnote ⁸⁰ She argued that vesting more power in the state in the prosecution of rape was not wise given its capacity to stifle dissent, as witnessed during the Emergency.Footnote ⁸¹ Writing in the late 1990s, feminist sociologist Raka Ray, in a discussion on the role of the state in the activism of the women’s movement, argued that the relationship between feminists and the Indian state has been marked by ‘ambivalen[ce]’.Footnote ⁸² Ray noted that some feminists believed that the state was ‘both friend and foe’.Footnote ⁸³ However, according to Ray, feminists largely recognised that the state was biased not just in favour of men, but also people who belonged to the upper castes, upper classes and majoritarian religions.Footnote ⁸⁴ Joining in this discussion, feminist lawyer and activist Flavia Agnes criticised the possibilities of a friendship between the women’s movement and the Indian state. She argued that the women’s movement’s constant reliance on law reform as a means of gaining protection from violence had, in fact, resulted in giving more power to the institution and strengthened the scope for state-authorised violence.Footnote ⁸⁵

The scholarship of Flavia Agnes exemplifies conversations between people who are not located in academia, but have nonetheless shaped the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. Agnes, who has been active in the women’s movement, founded the feminist litigation organisation called Majlis in Mumbai, and has been practising law as a women’s rights lawyer since the late 1980s. Her conversations with the women clients she represents in court, and with the women’s movement, have informed her scholarship on law’s relationship with gender, minority rights, domestic violence and the women’s movement.Footnote ⁸⁶

To give an instance of Agnes’s conversations with her clients that shaped her scholarship on law and sexuality:Footnote ⁸⁷ in 2005, the Government of Maharashtra banned the operation of dance bars. These bars were a form of adult entertainment where women danced to popular Bollywood music to entertain customers in beer-selling bars.Footnote ⁸⁸ The control of prostitution and trafficking was stated as the reason for instituting this ban.Footnote ⁸⁹ The bar owners protested the ban and filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court.Footnote ⁹⁰ On the request of the Bar Girls Union, Agnes agreed to legally represent them and filed an intervener application in the writ petition filed by the bar owners. In her writings about her experiences of this litigation, Agnes has referenced her conversations with the bar dancers as the source of her arguments in courts.Footnote ⁹¹

Agnes has written about how, through her conversations with the women bar dancers, she understood that the feminist issue at stake in this litigation was women’s right to livelihood and their oppression by a patriarchal state.Footnote ⁹² Through her conversations with the bar dancers she had learnt that their main concern was police harassment.Footnote ⁹³ Agnes perceived her role as a means for the experiences of bar-dancing women, many of whom belonged to lower castes and had received very minimal formal education, to become a part of the legal discourse on matters relating to their lives and livelihood.Footnote ⁹⁴ For this reason, Agnes conceived of the litigation as an extension of her feminist engagements, both scholarly and otherwise, against state violence.

In scholarly literature on the role of the state and the issue of rape/sexual violence, a non-Indian scholar who has often been cited is American feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon.Footnote ⁹⁵ In this regard, a notable example of scholarly work that has been in conversation with MacKinnon is Nivedita Menon’s Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law, published in 2004.Footnote ⁹⁶ Menon, in her discussion on rape law reform, in fact disagrees with MacKinnon. For MacKinnon, making a distinction between rape and consensual sexual intercourse between men and women is inconsequential under the conditions of patriarchy.Footnote ⁹⁷ In response to this, Menon argues that if that were the case, then it would be impossible to prosecute for rape. She asks, if all sex is violence how can you single out sexual assault and call it a crime? Menon thus argues that MacKinnon’s position on women’s subordination is so totalising that it not only forecloses possibilities for women to assert their sexuality, but also for feminist critique. In her book, which is not specifically about rape law but is a much broader engagement with ‘law and the state as engaged with by feminist practices’, Menon makes an argument for an emancipatory feminist political imagination. She argues in favour of a feminist engagement that is able to look beyond both law and the woman subject as its matter of discourse. For Menon, law is a universal and normative domain composed of rules, which has dissonances with feminist emancipatory politics that must be both subjective and susceptible to shifting goals.Footnote ⁹⁸

As rape and sexual violence continue to be the central concerns in feminist conversations about law in India, I offer the following instances by way of illustrating an ongoing set of conversations amongst feminists on this subject. In Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India published in 2014, feminist sociologist Pratiksha Baxi carries out a study of rape trials to look at the ‘relationship between law and public secrecy’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the book, Baxi presents her feminist ethnographic study of a trial court, which she had carried out over a period of two years, to argue that rape trials are a performance of secrecy rather than a public articulation of women’s experiences of rape.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Baxi contends that a disqualification of women’s testimonies at various sites of state law, such as the police station, court or the forensic laboratory, renders rape trials a violent experience for victims/survivors.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Baxi argues that her ethnographic study reveals that a rape victim as a juridical subject holds multiple subjectivities in rape trials because there is no fixed legal norm that is applied to the understanding of rape. She shows how the legal norm is actually a shifting one that plays out in ways that are far from what is written as law and also work to conceal women’s lived experiences of rape from the public.Footnote ¹⁰²

In a piece published in 2018, feminist legal scholar Prabha Kotiswaran provides a detailed account of Indian feminisms’ encounters and alliances with the post-colonial state around the issue of rape law reform since the late 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰³ Kotiswaran has developed her account in a co-authored book titled Governance Feminism, in conversations with her non-Indian colleagues and feminist legal scholars, Janet Halley, Rachel Rebouche and Hila Shamir.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Kotiswaran argues that historically, Indian feminisms have had close ties with the state. This has given rise to what she terms ‘governance feminism in the postcolony’, a form of regulatory feminism that acts as a handmaiden in the Indian state’s mode of governance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This form of feminism, Kotiswaran argues, manifests through an overdependence on criminal law, an extremely gendered understanding of sexual violence and a less antagonistic approach to state power.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Kotiswaran is critical of this form of feminism that, as she argues, participates in a governing of women who are sexually marginalised, and also enables feminism to walk the corridors of power.

Nivedita Menon, in her 2019 article ‘Sexual Violence and the Law in India’, has expressly stated her disagreements with Kotiswaran’s application of a ‘governance feminism’ framework for understanding the feminist experiences of law in India. The use of this framework, Menon notes, yields arguments that are untenable in the Indian context. She argues that Kotiswaran is extrapolating a framework that has been ‘developed in the West’, and is unproblematically applying it to the Indian context. Such an application of a theoretical explanation, for Menon, is inappropriate for fully understanding the Indian experience of feminist legal engagements, which is far from wielding any kind of power alongside, or in relation to, the state.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Kotiswaran is careful to declare that her articulation is but an attempt at tracing shifts in feminist legal engagements in India that appear to bear points of both convergence and divergence with similar trends in the western context.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In a methodological sense, this articulation indicates a lack of mere extrapolation and application of a foreign theoretical tool. Moreover, for the scholarly field of Indian feminist jurisprudence an east/west positioning of methodological frameworks is untenable (I will illustrate this point in my discussion of Subversive Sites in Chapter 5).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ That is because Indian feminist jurisprudence and its body of knowledge, in fact, has developed much of its theory and practice through conversations across what Menon calls ‘different spatio-temporal locations’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

This overview of the scholarship in the field thus illustrates that, methodologically, its body of knowledge is organised around law’s relationships with the differing social experiences of gender, class, caste, sexuality and religion. The scholarly practices of a diverse group of people have collectively established and authorised these relations. In terms of substance, women’s/gendered experiences of violence and difference are two organising themes or trajectories of feminist jurisprudential scholarship in India. Both themes have also been addressed by my interlocutors, as will appear in later chapters, suggesting a convergence of their thoughts and practices with the scholarly field of Indian feminist jurisprudence.

I will now discuss the relationship between caste and academic practices of knowledge production. I will then explain how the performances of adda with the sex workers and the academics is both a continuation of the conversations in the scholarly field of Indian feminist jurisprudence as well as a counter-action to caste-based hierarchy in the field of academic intellectual labour in India.

The Caste of Knowledge

The fourfold caste system, the chaturvarna, is a practice of social classification authorised by Hindu religious scriptures.Footnote ¹¹¹ Its elementary aspect is the classification of people into four castes, or varnas, namely Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. The Dalits, or former untouchables, are outside this graded hierarchy and are excluded from the social order. Each varna is categorised based on the form of labour that was assigned to them at birth. The Brahmins ‘should cultivate knowledge … the Kshatriya should bear arms … the Vaishya should trade and … the Shudra should serve’.Footnote ¹¹² However, as B. R. Ambedkar, legal scholar and one of the pioneers of the anti-caste movement in India, has argued, the caste system is not a division of labour alone. It is also a classification of the lives of people who were ordained to perform such labour into a hierarchical value system.Footnote ¹¹³

The caste system operates through a mind–body hierarchy that attributes superiority to intellectual labour (and those who do it) and devalues various forms of bodily labour (and their doers) by considering them to be inferior. At the top of a caste-based value system is the Brahmin whose duty is to possess and practise intellectual labour. At the bottom is the Shudra who is prohibited from practising intellectual labour, and, instead, is duty-bound to be at the service of those who are higher up in the caste order. The logic of caste shapes perceptions of intellectual labour as a superior activity and of bodily labour as a relatively inferior one. Subsequently, the lives of those who engage in intellectual activity are perceived to be superior in relation to those who engage in other forms of labour. This value system informs how different experiences of labour have historically come to bear a relation to the productions of knowledge.

Political scientist Gopal Guru argues that there is a ‘lack of egalitarian conditions’ in the academic practices of the social sciences in India because intellectual superiority is attributed to those who do theoretical work, as opposed to those who do empirical research.Footnote ¹¹⁴ According to Guru, this works to devalue the experiential basis of knowledge and is representative of the hierarchy between ‘theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

As a countermeasure to such hierarchies, Guru advocates the use of ‘the egalitarian principle’ for a reorganisation of academic practices in the social sciences.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He argues that the egalitarian principle is a means by which the practitioners of social sciences can be instilled with a ‘sense of moral responsibility’ to justify their modes of knowledge production.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In other words, it places a knowledge practitioner under obligation to explain why a particular theory is accorded a privileged position within knowledge in relation to a descriptive account of the same.Footnote ¹¹⁸ What Guru seems to be primarily critical of through his foregrounding of such a theory/experience divide is how this makes academic knowledge production an exclusionary field dominated by experts and specialists who are accorded the privilege of knowing experience by theorising it. Guru argues that academia presupposes ‘an intellectual position that some fields of enquiry must be left free for the specialists’, which the egalitarian principle can work against, since it carries an obligation to consider experiential accounts as a form of knowledge.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Moreover, Guru argues, it offers a ‘promise’ to groups ‘whose entry into the intellectual field has been historically prohibited by social forces in India’.Footnote ¹²⁰

The caste-based prohibition of access to intellectual fields has come to bear a correlation with law in contemporary India due to law’s desired role in the organisation of an egalitarian post-colonial society. The common law tradition, as a legal system and a field of academic study, was instituted in India through colonialism, and is therefore a colonial inheritance.Footnote ¹²¹ In the past, law had worked as an instrument in the hands of colonial authorities for commanding native Indian subjects. It was used for subjugating and ruling a people, and for ordering and enacting unjust forms of coloniser–colonised relations.Footnote ¹²² With the advent of colonial rule, the centuries-old caste system underwent alterations, but even after independence caste remains very much a part of people’s lives, although caste-based discriminations were made illegal in India after the enactment of the Indian Constitution in 1950.Footnote ¹²³

In the framing of the Indian Constitution, a conception of social equality informed by anti-caste thinking was considered to be a marker for instituting a break with India’s colonial and Brahminical past.Footnote ¹²⁴ B. R. Ambedkar, the chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution of independent India, was one of the foremost proponents of anti-caste constitutional legal thought.Footnote ¹²⁵ He argued that a complete ‘annihilation of caste’ was necessary for constituting a post-colonial sovereign nation-state as an independent legal entity.Footnote ¹²⁶ The attempt was to create a state formation that was built on equality amongst its citizens, unlike the inequality that existed amongst the colonised for centuries based on a notion of dharma, the divinely ordained duty prescribed in ancient Hindu law, or the Dharmashastra.Footnote ¹²⁷ Dharma is thus an understanding of legal duty derived from Hindu religious scriptures that individuals carry, and must perform, based on the role assigned to them by their caste status at birth.Footnote ¹²⁸ Ambedkar argued that ‘what the Hindus call religion is really Law or at best legalized class-ethics’.Footnote ¹²⁹

The equality principle in the Indian Constitution, which is predicated on non-discrimination, counters the imposition of such an eternally fixed caste-based understanding of duty, including a duty not to engage in education, in the case of those who are Dalits or belong to lower castes. In countering such authoritative conceptions of duty, the enactment of the Constitution in 1950, among other things, opened access to locations from where some people had historically been excluded due to their caste affiliations.Footnote ¹³⁰ Public educational institutions have since been made subject to affirmative legal action – such as reservations – with the intent of a redistribution of the field of intellectual labour.Footnote ¹³¹ However, although this measure has created access, there is documentary evidence which shows how caste-based exclusion is still prevalent in academia and attains further discriminatory proportions through its interlocking with gender, sexuality, religion and class.Footnote ¹³²

In the legal discipline, a notable example of how the practice of feminist legal knowledge is made to speak to the privileges of academic location vis-à-vis that of sex workers is found in the work of Prabha Kotiswaran. Kotiswaran develops a feminist account of labour law in India based on her conversations with sex workers’ activist groups, her research participants.Footnote ¹³³ She provides an account of sex workers’ engagements with the ‘work position’ which, as she argues, has long been a concern for feminists.Footnote ¹³⁴ She shows how, for instance, by fashioning their position as self-employed actors, sex workers alter tenancy relations in the sex market and institute an alternative conception of labour relations.Footnote ¹³⁵

Kotiswaran characterises her empirical research with sex workers as socio-legal scholarship, as opposed to ‘ethnography’.Footnote ¹³⁶ In doing so, her work joins a long-standing feminist jurisprudential scholarly field that is predominantly constituted by socio-legal scholarship. Kotiswaran notes that during her research, she grappled with the fact that her position as an academic researcher carried the hierarchies of privilege into her conversations with sex workers.Footnote ¹³⁷ She addressed this hierarchy by sharing her ‘professional expertise as a lawyer’ with her participants during fieldwork, which was motivated by her commitment to feminist advocacy and praxis.Footnote ¹³⁸

Thus, my adda with sex workers is not the first instance of such a conversation in the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. But the juxtaposition of this conversation alongside a conversation with academics, and consequently my demonstration of how both groups co-create the knowledge that produces the field, are new. My project is to make visible the privilege and superiority that the notions of academic expertise work to activate by distancing legal wisdom from everyday experiences and living. My unease with that arises from the fact that such notions of expertise are tied to caste hierarchy, as well as make legal wisdom and knowledge captive within legal academia and a product of academic methods alone.

A key outcome of the logic of caste is a mind–body hierarchy. The mind–body hierarchy, simply put, results in the privileging of theoretical analysis of law over empirical data.Footnote ¹³⁹ A conventional understanding of theory is that it is the framework by which we explain and give meaning to data through interpretation. It is analysis that turns data or information into knowledge – requiring the application of the legal mind. Subsequently, the analytical or knowing mind takes precedence over the experiencing body and the researcher gains primacy over her subjects. Therefore, by virtue of this ordering, the researcher gains superiority over those whose experiences they come to know and shape as knowledge through their research. This is the logical structure of our expertise-driven research culture and practices underlined by caste.

As feminists and lawyers, questions of justice and fairness in law and in the world are things that we care about. So, we often worry about hierarchies in social relations and their legal implications. Similarly, the underlying mind–body hierarchy in research practices warrants our attention since it orders research relations hierarchically – and we become agents of it – because we carry out such relations. And this hierarchy is written into the performance of our role – it has nothing to do with being a bad researcher, it is the default condition of intellectual labour. The question is should we worry about it? Yes, we do, if we think it is worth worrying about unjust structures.

This book, therefore, aims to show how the practices of people who do not appear knowledgeable or as thinking minds, and those who do, together produce the field. So, rather than engaging in a critique of how the caste system marginalises sex workers, my engagement is directed at inverting the hierarchical value system of caste that embeds how we perceive sex worker practices of collectivisation vis-à-vis academics’ practices of scholarly writing in imaginative and performative terms.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ I show that the activist thoughts and practices of sex worker groups that inform their engagements with law through collectivisations are on a par with academic discourses of law, and collaborate in the productions of Indian feminist jurisprudence. With this, sex workers emerge as bearers of their own thoughts and practices of law and not only as subjects of discourses belonging to others, such as myself or other academic researchers.

I engage in adda with sex workers about their practices of collectivisation, and with academics about their practices of scholarship, to work out how their experiences at particular locations inform their diverse ways of thinking about and practising their relations with law. Thus, the fieldwork consists of conversations with both scholars and activists. The academics and the sex workers are disparately located. My obligation is to work out a practice of engagement with research participants so that neither the position of the researcher, nor those of sex workers and academics, can be assumed to have any more understanding and experience of law than others. This is necessary so that every participant is an interlocutor and can speak with the same degree of authority. As you will see, the performances of adda that take place in this book institute a mode of speaking and listening with the research participants, which enables a sharing of authority in the field of intellectual labour and enables our relations to be founded on a counter-hierarchical method of collaborative conversations.

A Roadmap for the Book

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘Setting the Stage’, prepares the reader for the performances of my method. It comprises Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 2 explains how I have conceived adda as a method by drawing from and combining post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought. Part II is titled ‘Performing Adda’. It comprises Chapters 3–5, which demonstrate the performances of adda with sex workers and legal academics. The adda with sex workers is presented first (Chapters 3 and 4), followed by a presentation of the adda with academics (Chapter 5). These chapters draw out the distinct forms of jurisprudence that are born out of the activist and academic practices of life and law. The performances of adda in these chapters work to present sex workers’ collectivisation and the academics’ scholarship as a conjoined set of experiences that together produce a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence.

An in-depth engagement with the sex workers’ activist literature is not yet available in a scholarly discussion of Indian feminist jurisprudence, so I discuss the entire gamut of activist publications produced by DMSC and VAMP, and dedicate two separate chapters to the reading of these materials. By doing this, I have organised the book according to a non-linear timeline. This means that although the publication of the Open Letter by Baxi and others (in Reference Baxi, Dhagamwar, Kelkar and Sarkar1979) precedes the temporality of the writing of the sex workers’ activist documents, which happened much later (1995 onwards), a discussion of the activist documents appear first. The discussions of the Open Letter and Subversive Sites have been combined in one chapter to assert how academics, although they speak from within academia, think and act differently in relation to law and their own specific times and places.

The performances of adda in Chapters 3–5 unfold in two interrelated threads. In the first, I follow the pattern of correlations between law and social experiences that have received explicit attention in the works of scholars that make up the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence.Footnote ¹⁴¹ I have, therefore, attended to how the legal academics and sex workers have correlated law and the social experiences of gender/class/caste/sexuality/religion. The second thread develops the methodological argument of this book by carving out how the sex workers and academics actively experience mutual relations between their lives and law through collectivisation and scholarship respectively.

A note on why I have chosen these particular groups of sex workers and academics, and not others, may seem necessary. Even as I say ‘academics’ and ‘sex workers’, taking them to be a collective entity, I do not mean to suggest that these are homogenous groups or that my select set of people are representatives who can speak for all members of their group. On the contrary, my choice of interlocutors has to do with foregrounding the differences between the groups.

The DMSC and VAMP are both sex worker–led collectives, but they are very different in terms of their composition, scale and approach to law. The choice of Baxi and Kapur has to do with the fact that, although they are established legal scholars, both have shared a tenuous relationship with Indian feminisms: Baxi, because he is a man and is known more for his work on constitutional and human rights law, is seldom identified as a feminist scholar; Kapur, because she has been based outside of India for several years, is recognised more as a post-colonial legal scholar than as an ‘Indian’ feminist. The differences amongst the sex worker groups, and amongst the academics, help to make visible the diversities amongst the locations and experiences of all my interlocutors and the specificities of their practices of life and law.

On Style

The book is a documentation or a record of my practice of adda and is written in the form of a report. As the author, I am reporting to the reader how, as I learnt and wrote about Indian feminist jurisprudence, I trained myself to practise a method that is, rather than an analysis, an enactment of a relational form of being and knowing.Footnote ¹⁴² The author–reader relationship that I envision through the reporting, therefore, is not didactic. As you will see, adda as in the method of this book is not a set of instructions for righteous engagement in the field of feminist and legal research.

Adda as a method of research is neither generalisable nor formulaic. In and of itself, adda is not readily available as a method for research, for it requires its doers and practitioners to bring it to life. With the change of place, and its doers, the content of adda varies. Even as adda is pragmatic, it is not programmatic, since the relations that found adda are always contextual, and therefore, dynamic. There is no perfect adda. Adda’s training lies in its doing and redoing. Thus, it requires consistent training and practise in context to work it out as a method for research.

I adopt this experimental method to tell a story about how a field of legal knowledge comes to be formed in the context of a particular place and its history. The tone set by this book is in line with the style and genre of report writing. The book is an invitation to its reader to take on the role of an attentive listener. The invitation is a request for tuning-in to a style of scholarship that is enacted through adda and is about being receptive to relational engagements as much as about conceptual grip and clarity on a field.