Remembering the Feminist Scholar, Leela Dube

Leela Dube was a renowned anthropologist and feminist scholar. Let us remember her on the occasion of her birthday.

Leela Dube was born on 27 March 1932 and was a renowned anthropologist and feminist scholar, fondly called Leeladee by many. She was the widow of anthropologist and sociologist Shyama Charan Dube and a younger sister of the late classical singer Sumati Mutatkar.

Although she had taught earlier at Osmania, Dube’s academic career began in 1960 at Sagar University, Madhya Pradesh. She moved to Delhi in 1975. She played a crucial role in shaping the “Towards Equality” report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974), Government of India, discussion of which in the Parliament of India brought women’s studies to center stage in Indian academia via the UGC and the ICSSR.

She was a key person in the Indian Sociological Society in the 1970s and was responsible for introducing women’s studies concerns into mainstream sociology. She was one of the pioneering and senior faculty in the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, when it started functioning in 1980.

She has given many speeches on the empowerment of women and co-edited works like Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development, Structures and Strategies: Women, Work, and Family. Her celebrated book, Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields, published in 2001, is an important contribution to feminist anthropology in India.

In 2009 she was given the UGC’s Swami Pranavananda Saraswati Award for 2005. In 2007 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Sociological Society. She passed away on 20 May 2012.

–Staff Reporter