Who is the Gloria Steinem of India?

For more than five decades, Indian women have built a feminist movement without a single figurehead — a sprawling collective that continues to reinvent itself, and whose very decentralisation may be its greatest strength

Updated - September 11, 2026 07:07 am IST

In India, questions of land, labour, caste, health, the environment and violence have long been central to women’s activism. | Photo Credit: The Hindu and Getty Images

It has been a little over a week since Gloria Steinem, the iconic American feminist, died. The media has been full of stories about this extraordinary woman whose achievements were considerable, as were the controversies she was caught in.

Will the history of feminism give us another such hero? It’s hard to say. Steinem was an influential woman and her fame traversed many borders. She was also somebody who did not fear the limelight, although she did not necessarily actively seek it out. In the history of feminism, there aren’t too many icons like her. Perhaps, this is why many are asking the question: is feminism no longer the force it was, has it had its day or has it morphed into something else?

But, feminism isn’t the same the world over. Nor is it that easy to kill. Once the battle against injustice and discrimination begins, the route it takes may not be straightforward or linear but it continues to be resilient. Further, in each location, in each context, feminist histories are localised and shaped by particular ground realities.

In many parts of the world then, feminism is alive and well. Take India, for example. Here, questions of land, labour, caste, health, the environment and violence have long been central to women’s activism. Indeed, one of the early slogans of the feminist movement defiantly claimed women’s right to ‘jal, jangal, zameen’ (water, forest and earth).

Village women hug trees as part of the Chipko Movement in the 1970s. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Perhaps, then, the search for another Steinem is itself the wrong question. In India, feminist activism has often found its power not in a single figure, but in collective mobilisation around concrete struggles. Maharashtra offers a particularly revealing example.

Last December, women’s groups all over the State came together under the collective banner of the Maharashtra Stree Mukti Parishad to mark 50 years of feminist activism in the State. Days of commemoration showed the richness and range of issues taken up by women activists. “Women came together from all over Maharashtra, rural, urban, everywhere. They looked at old and new issues. The conference was a wonderful example of how much work has happened in 50 years,” says Nandita Gandhi, co-director of Akshara, an organisation born of the early days of the movement.

Three years earlier, in a major 65-day march called the Dignity March, survivors of sexual violence from across 24 States in India walked over 10,000 kilometres to draw attention to sexual violence. And during the many months of the farmers’ protest outside Delhi, hundreds of women farmers came together to demand their rights. Multiply these instances many times over and you will still only have a snapshot of the Indian women’s movement.

Among those who undertook the Dignity March were women from different villages in Madhya Pradesh. With the support of Maraa, a Bengaluru-based group, they were inspired to form a theatre group called Freeda. Today, they take the message of the importance of battling sexual violence across India through theatre. “This is our life now. Theatre allows us to give voice to issues we cannot talk about easily at home,” says a member of the group.

Village women in Palghar, Maharashtra, on a cleanliness awareness campaign. (File photo) | Photo Credit: Getty Images

This kind of activism is not something new. When Steinem first came to India in the 1950s, she spent some years travelling around the country. Among the Gandhian activists who were her travel companions, there must have been considerable numbers of women because in those years, and the ones that followed, women across India were centrally involved in many different movements.

American feminist activist Gloria Steinem (centre) with Indian writers and activists such as Ruth Manorama (left), Devaki Jain (right), Shashi Deshpande (back row) and others, at an events in Bengaluru, February 2007. | Photo Credit: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

For activists of my generation, the 70s were the turbulent and exciting years in which we came into our feminisms. The Supreme Court’s shocking acquittal in 1979 of two policemen accused of raping a minor Adivasi girl called Mathura acted as a catalyst for a countrywide movement against violence. Small and large collectives, and organised groups sprung up to deal with domestic violence, health, coercive contraception, caste discrimination, communalism, unfair laws; they brought out magazines such as Baiza (Marathi), Manasi (Kannada), Stree Sangharsh (Hindi) and many more.