Date: 27 March 2023

Time: 4 pm

Venue: HSS Dept Seminar Hall

Abstract

In the decade-long (1996-2006) Maoist People’s War (MPW) of Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), that led the war, opened all its units – the Party, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and the mass front for women. At the war’s peak, almost 50 per cent of its cadres were claimed to have been women. Although women’s participation in wars isn’t a new phenomenon, in the MPW, uniquely, women participated as armed guerrillas from the very first day i.e. in the attacks of 13th February, 1996, in police stations and government offices through which initiation of the war was marked. Further, women guerrillas didn’t have to wait for the war to come to an end, or for monarchy to be uprooted, or for democracy to be established, or for the party to come to power to raise, discuss, and address issues that concerned them, within and outside the war. War, nonetheless, has been a gendered experience resulting in the gendering of memories and an imposed or strategic forgetting of wartime past. This presentation keeping its focus on these gendered experiences and memories identifies their implications on women guerrillas’ perceptions and representations of the self. Based on ethnographic field accounts it shall identify memories’ mobilization in the retention of wartime identities and in forging postwar subjectivities.

 

Bio

Amrita Pritam Gogoi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dibrugarh University, Assam. She has an M Phil from the Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, JNU. She received her Ph D in 2019 from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati Campus for her work Ideologies, Institutions and Women Combatants in the People's War of Nepal. Her teaching and research focuses on war and conflict studies; women militants and combatants; feminist theory and politics.