PROFILPELAJAR.COM

Sharmila Rege
Sharmila Rege
Born	7 October 1964; Pune, Maharashtra, India
Died	13 July 2013 (aged 48); Pune
Nationality	Indian
Occupation(s)	Sociologist, writer, feminist

Sharmila Rege (7 October 1964 – 13 July 2013)^[1] was an Indian sociologist, feminist scholar and author of Writing Caste, Writing Gender.^[2] She led the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre, (the department of Gender Studies) at University of Pune which position she occupied since 1991.^[3] She received the Malcolm Adiseshiah award for distinguished contribution to development studies from the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) in 2006.^[4]

Academic contribution

Rege was one of the leading feminist scholars in India, whose work in developing a 'Dalit Standpoint Perspective'^[5] has been crucial in opening up feminist debates in India to questions of class, caste, religion and sexuality. Rege's work within the academia, to fight for the right of the Dalit student's rights, has been a testimony of her commitment to critical educational reform in India^[6] An obituary described her as a "Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist Welder" who brought the "structural violence of caste and its linkages with sexuality and labour into the feminist discourse".^[7] Her concerns around the woman's question in India, contributed greatly to new and alternative methods of historiography, exposing the blind-spots of a Hindu Nation towards the Dalit voices and perspectives that have often been neglected in the political milieu of India's history. Her emphasis on relocating the central role of B. R. Ambedkar in the shaping of the modern nation state has ensured that the voice from the margins does not remain invisible opens up space for political contestation and dialogue in a public debate that is quickly being gentrified by the rhetoric of economic development and globalisation.^[8] One of Rege's major texts was the essay 'Interrogating the Thesis of 'Irrational Deification'', on popular Ambedkarism in the 1990s, was first published in the Economic & Political Weekly (v 43, n 7, 16 February 2008), and reprinted in the volume The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect, part of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books.

In her last published work, Against the Madness of Manu,^[9] she sought to centralise Ambedkar's role in the women's movement by invoking his ideological fight against Brahminical patriarchy, and how the caste system engenders graded violence against women. Her particular focus on alternative history writing has given new life to the local and oral traditions of knowledge and cultural practice, by bringing them into public attention through translation projects that build archives of national memory.^[10]

In 2002, she established a day care centre for children in the women’s studies department.^[11]^[12]

Personal

She died of colon cancer on 13 July 2013.^[1]

Bibliography

Caste and gender: the violence against women in India, European University Institute, 1996
Sociology of Gender: The Challenge of Feminist Sociological Thought, SAGE Publications India, 2003
Writing Caste, Writing Gender, Zubaan, 2006.
Savitribai Phule Second Memorial Lecture, NCERT, 2009
Against the Madness of Manu, Navayana, 2013.