Department of English and Kailashbasini Centre for Women’s Studies, Dr. Meghnad Saha College in collaboration with Department of English, Gour Mahavidyalaya are going to organise a two-day International Conference on “Women Thinkers and Thoughts in Colonial and Postcolonial India: Ideas, Histories and Methodologies” from 17 March -18 march, 2025 at Dr. Meghnad Saha College, West Bengal. This International Conference intends to reorient the critical focus on the women thinkers and their intellectual contribution in colonial and postcolonial India in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

To think and to translate the thoughts into works are precursors to initiate change.  Women also thought and articulated their ideas to change the prevailing condition of subjugation.  They presented their distinct arguments which intervened into the social, cultural, economic and political issues. They have been working to improve women’s lives, to create gender parity and to ensure social justice. But women’s right to think and articulate is conventionally derecognised. Their works and words are marginalized. This structure of subordination is intersected with the politics of control based on caste, class and religious discriminations. These intersecting forces relegated women’s thought in the history of ideas in India. In spite of this structure of suppression, women thinkers consistently engaged with the social, cultural, political and religious debates since the mid-nineteenth centuries and asserted their agency as a social, cultural and political thinkers. Critical discussion on the history of ideas in India often discredited this intellectual engagements by the women. They negated women’s identity as the ‘thinking’ intellectual. This international conference is looking forward to launch a series of critical deliberations on the ideas, histories and methodologies presented by the women thinkers in colonial and postcolonial India. The critical arguments presented in this conference will rethink this categorisation of the ‘intellectual’ to understand the trajectory of the gendered intellectual tradition. In this context, the idea of the archive becomes important as we have to tap the resources of the alternative archives to trace the throughtscape of the women thinkers. The critical discussions will also map the different modes of cultural translations to reconstruct the transcultural conversations among the women thinkers across the temporal and special boundaries. When women writers translate women, they recreate a community of women readers and women writers through this mode of creative translation. This conference will also look into these varied avenues of translations and transcreations to revisit the literary legacy of the women thinkers. The focus of this conference is to recover the lost voices of these women who reshape the methodologies and ethnographies to unearth the hidden terrain of women’s thought, who challenged the male-centric canonization, who broke the gendered barrier to explore new avenues of knowledge productions and who strive to make this earth a more sustainable place.

 Abstracts of 200 (Maximum) words are invited on topics that can engage with these subthemes:

• Women’s History: Rethinking the Historiography
• Revival of Lost Voices: Alternative Archives and Women’s Thinking
• Women as Political Thinkers: Redefining the Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India
• Intellectual History of Women Thinkers
• Feminist Methodology and Women’s Thinking
• Mapping the Field in a Gendered Way: Feminist Ethnography
• Translating Women’s Voices: Feminist Translation
• Conceptualising Violence: Articulation of Resistance
• Thinking Motherhood: Narratives of Reproduction
• Scripting Partition: Women’s Memoirs
• Writing Lives: Life-writings, Memoirs and Autobiographies of Women
• Women as Environmental Thinkers: Plant-thinking and Earth Democracy
• Traversing a Different Terrain: Women in Science