Commentary: “A Piece of the Pie”: Women, India, and “the West”

We not only want a piece of the pie, we also want to choose the flavor, and to know how to make it ourselves.

—Ela Bhatt, founder, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)

We want to plant fruit trees in front of our houses. We want to start an herbal medicine shop. We will build our house ourselves. We want to cultivate banjar lands. We want to register our Sangham [collective]. We want to travel. We want to see our office in Hyderabad. We want our school to run better. Our sangham should become big. We want more women to join us. We want to hold meetings at the Mandal [i.e. regional] level. Our children need a better life than us. They should learn new things.

—Annual report, Mahila Samakhya (a national-government-run program aimed at fostering women’s collectives), rural Andhra Pradesh: the women of the collective agree on their goals for the future¹

In this way, sometimes giving in to criticism, sometimes offending people, we had to do our acting. We were young so we sometimes felt resentful but ultimately true art triumphed.

—Amita Sen, Joy In All Work (account of Rabindranath Tagore as teacher and choreographer)

Commenting on the papers in this excellent symposium is no easy task. The topics and approaches are so heterogeneous that one could spend the entire commentary on methodological issues alone. One could also narrow one’s sights and focus exclusively on one or two papers that seem to tie in particularly well with one’s own interests and expertise. If I took that approach, I would reluctantly bypass the excellent discussions of my long-time collaborator Amartya Sen’s work by R. S. Khare and Jonardon Ganeri, since Sen’s work on reason, though enormously valuable, has long been the topic of comment by me,² and I would therefore turn to Arun Mukherjee’s eye-opening essay on B. R. Ambedkar and John Dewey. Having long worked on the idea of liberal education, focusing particularly on both Rabindranath Tagore and Dewey, I have been quite frustrated by my inability to trace any connection between the two men, exact contemporaries who must surely have had some awareness of one another’s educational experiments.³ But although it is clear that Tagore influenced Maria Montessori, and although his school in Santiniketan was the model for Leonard Elmhirst’s Dartington Hall,⁴ thus influencing ideas of education in the Anglophone world, I have unearthed no evidence that Dewey knew of Santiniketan, or, indeed, that Tagore—who visited his son at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the heyday of Dewey’s Lab School—knew of that school or ever sought to visit it. Now I know that there is at least an India-Dewey connection of a different, and an extremely important, type, and I have greatly enjoyed learning from Mukherjee about Ambedkar’s experience with Dewey at Columbia, and its subsequent influence on his thinking. Because I feel in any case that the single largest flaw in The Clash Within was its failure to devote enough space to Ambedkar’s thought, I now plan to atone for my prior (relative) neglect of this great legal thinker by discussing his conception of democracy further, with Mukherjee’s essay as my guide.

Which is to say that any commentary begins in the middle of a set of thoughts, and the commentator is naturally drawn to papers that illuminate problems on which she is already engaged.

A commentary focused on a single essay, or even a small group of essays, would clearly be insufficiently respectful of the achievements of this diverse group of fine papers. A detailed engagement with each and every paper, however, would be both lacking in argumentative unity and too unwieldy for the task assigned to me. I have therefore decided to do something different. I shall address what I take to be an absence in the entire set of papers, and then draw from my engagement with these absent voices some general conclusions pertinent to some of the papers...