I’m a big fan of Vandana Singh, and I’m pleased that she’s currently blogging at Jeff Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days. In this post, she discusses how a trek she went on in her teens was her first intimation that

a) feminism was not an exclusively Western phenomenon, and b) people, however poor and illiterate, could lift themselves out of environmental and social degradation without us. In fact it was possible for “brown folks” to fall into the same colonizing mindset as the British with regard to our own rural poor — and somehow, despite this, said rural poor could take their fate into their own hands. It was a simultaneously humbling and exhilarating realization.

Until that time I’d been a fairly typical Delhi middle-class student, educated in an English medium school, having learned English when I was about four. I had somehow internalized a lot of assumptions, growing up in the city. Like how the West somehow epitomized progress and feminism was a Western phenomenon. That as part of a ‘developing’ country we were only some way behind the Western countries on the same track to the same place. It never occurred to me until then that there could be models of development, or feminism, or environmental action, other than Western models.

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