I historically retrace the women’s movements engagement with questions of menstruation, health and hygiene in India, if they have been independent objects of enquiry. Through this overview, we arrive at divergent views and imaginations, and indeed at the very unstable category of ‘woman’ in India. I engage with how women’s movements have sought to shift questions of healthcare through question of labour relations, and health itself as a social category and not simply am medical one. Questions around caste, religion, region have been important, more so since the 1990’s to challenge the centrality of the notion of woman itself, and it is with this that we proceed to understand the contemporary where menstruation is cause for national concern itself.
The neoliberal state in India, in response to this global imperative releases a National Menstrual Hygiene Policy, linking it up with the Swatch Bharat Campaign. These processes result in the creation of an ‘18 for 82’ syndrome, 18% urban women for the 82% rural women, in need of awareness, some education about their own body and sanitisation. In this process, the urban, new Indian woman is the ideal menstruating citizen who must be galvanised to spread awareness for women in need, who are yet to be brought into the fold. This distinction rests on distinctions of purity-pollution and caste ideology, that render one body dirty for the sake of another, reflecting in the policy and in the campaigns run by NGO’s. Not only that, the public private binary stays intact in this governmentalizing of menstruation, where Right to Privacy and Dignity remain firmly entrenched. Questions of health and hygiene become individualised, social difference is naturalised under (bio) governmentality when bodies are stigmatised in order to artificially create a woman emancipated through the market regime.
