by RAJNI PALRIWALA
Leela Dube’s writings trace her own anthropological and personal journeys and also capture one history of the gendering of the social sciences in India, in particular of anthropology. Dube drew strength from the growing women’s movements worldwide and the burgeoning scholarly literature to pull together her refl ections on kinship, marriage, motherhood, womanhood and gender relations.
An obituary is a celebration at a time of sadness. If one counted according to local practice, Leela Dube was 90 when she passed away on 20 May 2012. Anthropologist, sociologist, feminist, commentator and teacher, but also mother and homemaker, she lived a life in which she balanced and pulled together multiple dimensions of these roles and more.
One’s first sighting of Leelaji, as I called her over the 25-plus years through which I closely interacted with her, was deceptive. As was the honorific of what she expected in her relationships with those younger than her. Small in height, hair up and yet all over the place, beautiful saris, a gentle smile – and then she spoke and you saw her sparkling eyes, full of curiosity, and the occasional mischievous glint.
Entry into the Field
Leela Dube began her university education at a time of ferment in the country, an atmosphere permeated by nationalist, Gandhian and Marxist questionings and movements, in which women too were a part. As the social science disciplines emerged and developed, women were allowed a foothold, but little more. The idea that not just the “position of women”, but that gender relations had to be questioned was largely seen as either too weird or too dangerous. Thus, “women” were marginal in the social sciences research agenda, though not entirely absent. For her doctoral research, she was advised to do a monograph on Gond women (Dube 1956). The study of tribes was a central theme in Indian anthropology, but the study of tribal women was to fill a “data” gap not germane to critical discussions and theorisations. Yet, despite an “apprenticeship” with S?C?Dube, such intensive fieldwork in the “interiors” by a woman was very unusual for her time. In this, Leela Dube was questioning the constraints placed on women of her class, caste, and education background, a background which she was ambivalent about.
That she hesitated to continue to work on women can be related to dilemmas faced by women anthropologists, at least two of which have been fairly constant. One is combining the gendered demands of everyday life with the apparently gender-neutral concepts of the discipline, an issue that men do not or did not face. This was not limited to anthropologists, of course, but was the experience of most women scholars and professionals. Nor did this just mean that Leela Dube’s career and research were interrupted by the demands of her feminine domestic care roles. They were, though she was fortunate to have daily access to literature and intellectual discussion, being married not only to anthropology, but also to an anthropologist (S C Dube, who himself was to acquire renown).
Rather, as Smith (1974) developed in her critique of male-dominated sociological frameworks, the particular combination of the gendered division of labour in everyday life and the domination of men in the discipline meant that the grounded conditions that made the everyday possible did not enter the abstract concepts used and the analyses current in academia, leaving the relations of ruling unquestioned. Thus, the “business of everyday living” – the practical concerns of women in their familial lives – a theme that Leela Dube developed, was not a central concern in anthropology. She, too, articulated very late the extent to which her own questioning of disciplinary sureties could have been an effect of her quotidian life.
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