The present paper shall seek to delve into Dr. Vina Mazumdar’s memoir Memories of a Rolling Stone to trace the growth of a feminist consciousness in an Indian feminist activist. Dr. Vina Mazumdar (1927-2013) was a pioneer of women’s studies and a leading figure of the women’s movement in India. The paper proposes to look at her memoir as an archival record of the beginning of the women’s movement. It shall seek to trace by using close reading as method and Partha Chatterjee’s work on the idea of governance and governmentality as methodology, how women’s activism in India was nourished by networks of affiliation and interlocution within the interstices of patriarchally conditioned state power, and how feminist activists like Mazumdar at the time formulated subjectivities which occupy a grey area between cooption and resistance to patriarchal discursive systems.
Assistant Professor of English, Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata
