94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST [n the 70's and 80's, an important task for feminist theory was to establish 'gender* as a category that had been rendered invisible in universalisms of various kinds. In Hyderabad, for example, the campaign against 'eve-teasing* taken up by women students in the early seventies brought into the open the hostile and sexually threatening conditions all women had to deal with everyday, not only in the university, but also on the streets and in every kind of workplace. Through public interest litigation, as in the cases of injectible contraceptives (Net-Oen) and police rape, as well as appeals against a variety of judgements—on custodial rape, family violence, restitution of conjugal rights—we tried to demonstrate the asymmetries and inequalities in gender relations that underwrote the notion of rights and the legal process. We demanded changes that would make the law more sensitive to the cultural and economic contexts of women's lives. Women's groups who investigated 'dowry deaths' demonstrated how the designation of the family as private domain restricted women's access to protection against domestic violence. They exposed the collusion of the law, police, medical system and the family in classifying these deaths as suicides. Feminist scholars worked to salvage gender and women's issues from being subsumed by class analysis, and sought to extend the Marxist understanding of labour to include domestic production, and highlighted the marginality and vulnerability of women in the workforce; disciplinary formations such as history or literature were critiqued and alternative narratives produced that foregrounded women. We demonstrated gross inequalities in women's access to health care systems or to 'development,' and examined patriarchal ideologies as they operated in a wide range of institutions. These initiatives extended our understanding of the micro-politics of civil society, showing how pervasively mechanisms of subjugation operated, and how processes of othering worked in relation to women. In the late 80's and the early 90's—the Mandal/mandir/fund-bank years—however, we face a different set of political questions. Entering into new alliances, we have begun to elaborate new forms of politics. These have demanded engagement with issues of caste and religious affiliation/community as well as with new problems emerging from the 'liberalisation' of the economy, creating contexts in which the contradictions implicit in earlier initiatives have become increasingly apparent. For example, feminists calling for a uniform civil code in the context of the Shah Bano case soon realized the difficulty of distinguishing their position from that of an aggressively anti-Muslim lobby, and began to back-track on the demand as 'Shah Bano' became the rallying cry for Hindutva. Similarly, in Chunduru, sexual harassment was cited as justification for the punishment moled out to dalits by upper-caste men. More recently, leftist women's organisations in Hyderabad were placed in a dilemma about joining in a protest