Innovation Needs a Dose of Feminism

Feminists across India have shown us new ways to approach memory, livelihood, information and technology. By nurturing plurality, their ideas can reinvigorate our democracy

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

Scientist C V Seshadri was a great intellectual with deep insights into culture and feminism. I remember him once commenting that we needed the Balasaraswatis, and not the Rukmini Arundels of dance. Rukmini adhered to the form, but Bala, a remarkable feminist, provided a sense of the life of eccentricity. Our conversations often turned to feminism and innovation. To begin, Seshadri wished there were more feminists in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Feminism, he said, added not just to innovation, but to the frameworks of thought they embedded. It added nuance and texture. Setting out to reveal the great role of feminism in innovative systems, Seshadri talked about the work of several feminists—each a radical, each an innovator.

The first case he cited was of Uzramma, a maker of Malkha or naturally dyed cotton handloom cloth. Uzramma had a tremendous sense of memory and believed that feminism was a trusteeship of memory that innovation desperately needed. She ended up being one of the most remarkable innovators of the theories of memory.

Uzramma worked on recovering natural dyes, creating a complementarity between memory and innovation, between the natural and the synthetic. She had a sense of cloth not just as an aesthetic—colour itself was an element that was used to express a philosophy of the forms of life. Her work on natural dyes was one of the remarkable projects that Seshadri felt marked a history of innovation in India—of a recovery and memory that deserves to be told at length.