Disrupting Development Discourses: Gender, Expertise and the Politics of Rights-Making in Postcolonial South Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the role of feminist activists from South Asia as both producers and intermediaries of expert knowledge in postcolonial development and rights-making agenda domestically and internationally. Focusing on figures such as Maniben Kara and Tahira Mazhar Ali’s engagement with labour rights and others like Hansa Mehta, Lakshmi Menon, Shaista Ikramullah and Tazeen Faridi’s agenda of women’s rights at the UN, this paper explores how their engagement with socio-economic rights and social welfare policies intersected with broader transnational debates on international rights regimes and state-led development. These women operated within a complex web of ideological, institutional, and gendered constraints, navigating both national and international spaces to assert their expertise and influence policy agendas.
Building on scholarship on decolonial expertise and the gendering of development discourse, this paper investigates how these activists formulated and disseminated knowledge through labor unions, women’s committees and international organisations, both in tandem with or in contestation with state-backed feminist initiatives. By tracing their interactions with international bodies such as the UN, the ICFTU, and socialist networks, I analyze how they challenged dominant narratives of modernization that marginalized grassroots mobilization and pushed for collective rights frameworks.
The paper contributes to the panel’s themes by interrogating the gendered hierarchies of expertise in postcolonial South Asia and demonstrating how these Indian and Pakistani women navigated these hierarchies to claim authority in policy debates. Their expertise was sometimes delegitimized or co-opted by state actors and male-dominated institutions, yet their intellectual and activist labor was instrumental in shaping discourses on labor rights, rural welfare, and economic justice. By adopting a transnational lens, the paper underscores the multidirectional flows of knowledge that connected these women’s struggles across national and ideological boundaries, complicating prevailing narratives of expertise and development in the postcolonial world.