A Discipline in Flux: Four Redefinitions of the Subject in the Sociology of Gender in India, 1974–2024

Mansi Sisodia

A Discipline in Flux: Four Redefinitions of the Subject in the Sociology of Gender in India, 1974–2024

Author(s)	Ms. Mansi Sisodia
Country	India
Abstract	Flux is not a recent condition of gender scholarship in India; it is the condition under which the field was founded. This paper reconstructs the emergence and growth of the sociology of gender in India and argues that its history is best read as a sequence of redefinitions of its own subject, each provoked less by theoretical fashion than by evidence the existing categories could not hold. The first redefinition was empirical. The 1974 report Towards Equality, with its finding of a declining sex ratio and worsening indicators for women, made gender a documented problem for Indian social science before it became a theoretical one, and exposed the silences of village studies, kinship theory and stratification analysis. The second was institutional: the National Policy on Education of 1986 and the university women’s studies centres that followed converted movement urgency into syllabi, journals and posts, securing the field while binding it to state funding. The third was intersectional, and it was not borrowed. Dalit feminist scholarship, drawing on a Phule–Ambedkarite lineage, contested the unmarked upper-caste subject of earlier writing, while vernacular and regional research unsettled the metropolitan bias of the archive. India’s route to intersectional analysis ran through caste, and this paper treats that route as a contribution to the concept rather than a local application of it. A fourth redefinition is under way and remains unsettled. Scholarship on masculinities, on queer and transgender lives after the judicial shifts of 2014 and 2018, on care work, digital publics and climate-related displacement has widened the field precisely as restructuring under the National Education Policy 2020 absorbs autonomous centres into larger units. Drawing on curricula, doctoral output and journal debates, the paper asks what a discipline gains, and what it forfeits, when expansion and consolidation arrive together.
Keywords	Sociology of gender · Caste and gender · Intersectionality · Institutionalisation · Indian academy
Field	Sociology
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-19

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A Discipline in Flux: Four Redefinitions of the Subject in the Sociology of Gender in India, 1974–2024

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