Manushi: A Journal About Women and Society

Manushi is an Indian journal devoted to feminism, gender studies and activism, published from New Delhi under the full title Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society. Founded in 1978 by the scholars Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, it became one of the most influential and long-running women's periodicals in South Asia — described by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen as a pioneering feminist journal. For decades it bridged academic feminist theory and grassroots activism, bringing the lived experiences of ordinary Indian women into serious intellectual and public discussion.

The name itself carries the founding idea. Kishwar coined Manushi from the Sanskrit word manushya, meaning human being — a signal that the journal's concern was not women in isolation, but women's full humanity within the society around them: family, work, law, religion and the state.

Founded in New Delhi in 1978

Manushi was founded in 1978 by Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, two scholars based in New Delhi. Kishwar, educated at Miranda House in Delhi and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Vanita, a scholar of literature, brought academic training to a project that was from the start also activist. The late 1970s were a formative moment for the modern Indian women's movement, as campaigns against dowry deaths, violence and discriminatory laws gathered force, and Manushi gave that movement a journal of record — a place where reportage, analysis and argument could accumulate issue after issue.

Kishwar and Vanita co-edited the journal from 1978 to 1991, shaping its voice through its first thirteen years. The Manushi Trust was formed in 1979 as a non-profit to sustain the work, and Kishwar continued as founder-editor and managing trustee thereafter. In 1985 her journalism was recognised with the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediaperson, one of Indian media's respected honours.

A Bimonthly of Record: 157 Issues by 2006

Manushi was published as a bimonthly, and by the end of 2006 a total of 157 issues had appeared — an extraordinary publishing record for an independent journal run without a large commercial house behind it. Each issue combined investigative articles, editorials, essays and reader correspondence, critiquing the legal and societal barriers to women's autonomy and drawing on fieldwork and primary data to challenge prevailing narratives.

Longevity gave the journal a documentary function. A reader tracing debates on inheritance rights, domestic violence, labour conditions or personal law across three decades can follow them through Manushi's pages, watching arguments develop as laws changed and movements evolved. In later years the journal transitioned from print toward an online platform, carrying its archive and mission into digital publishing.

Editorial Mission: Research, Fieldwork and Non-Partisan Inquiry

From its inception, Manushi was established as a platform for non-partisan analysis of the economic, political and social challenges facing India, emphasising culturally sensitive activism and empirical investigation over ideological prescription. Its editorship stressed truth-seeking: contributions explored inheritance rights, domestic violence and labour conditions without bowing to partisan biases in academic and media circles, and the journal distinguished itself from publications aligned with imported frameworks by grounding its feminism in Indian realities.

That stance sometimes placed Manushi in argument with other currents of feminist and political thought — Kishwar became known for criticising laws enacted ostensibly to protect women that in practice trapped people in illegality, particularly in the unorganised sector. Debate, however, was the journal's element: it was built to publish dissenting, evidence-based positions and to let readers judge.

Coverage Across South Asia and Beyond

Although rooted in India, Manushi from the beginning sought to publish articles about the full range of South Asian communities. It regularly included material on women's issues in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, with less frequent articles from around the world. The editors deliberately covered people often ignored in English-language media in South Asia, and activists were invited to contribute accounts of peasants, workers and minorities, whether religious or ethnic.

This breadth mattered. The women's movement in South Asia developed across national borders, with shared questions about family law, labour, violence and representation taking different forms in each country. Manushi's pages made those parallels visible, and gave grassroots contributors — not only academics — a place in print.

Themes: Dowry, Violence, Labour and Law

The journal's recurring subjects map the agenda of Indian gender justice. Dowry deaths and domestic violence were among its earliest and most urgent concerns, treated through reportage and legal analysis. Labour rights — the conditions of women workers in fields, factories, homes and informal trades — ran through its coverage, as did inheritance and property rights, cultural representation of women, and the working of laws meant to protect the vulnerable.

Kishwar's wider work through Manushi championed the causes of street vendors, cycle rickshaw pullers and traditional art performers, among other marginalised groups — a reminder that the journal's feminism was connected to a broader concern with how regulation and policy bear on the poor. Manushi also sponsored series of lectures and training seminars, and furnished information and support to victimised and battered women, extending the journal's role from publication into direct public service.

Manushi as a Publishing House and Sangathan

Manushi is also a publishing house. It prints works on the status of women in India and, beyond them, novels and short stories with a less direct connection to gender issues. Its best-known book grew directly from the journal: In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi, co-edited by Kishwar and Vanita, first appeared in 1984 and was reprinted and revised by Indian and British publishers through the 1980s and 1990s, carrying the journal's reporting to readers far beyond its subscriber base.

Alongside the trust and the press stands Manushi Sangathan, the non-profit organisation Kishwar founded to advocate democratic reforms and strengthen human rights, particularly for women and marginalised communities. Journal, press and organisation together form an institutional ecosystem in which an issue reported in the magazine can become a book, a campaign or a legal intervention.

The Founders' Wider Work

Kishwar went on to serve as a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi from 2001 to 2016, directing its Indic Studies Project, and later as Maulana Azad National Professor of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Her books include Off the Beaten Track: Rethinking Gender Justice for Indian Women, Deepening Democracy and Zealous Reformers, Deadly Laws. Vanita became a noted scholar and translator of Indian literature, including work on women bhakti poets co-edited with Kishwar. The journal's intellectual range reflected both founders: history, literature, law and field activism in conversation.

Academic scholarship has in turn studied the journal itself; a 2016 article in the journal Signs examined how Manushi created a locational counterpublic from Delhi, articulating human rights and questions of sexuality in its own terms.

From Print to Online

Like many independent journals, Manushi moved with its readers. After its long print run it transitioned to an online platform at manushi.in, where its essays, investigation and commentary continue to reach readers in India and the diaspora. The digital form suits an archive-rich journal: decades of issues documenting evolving debates on women's roles in Indian society remain a resource for students, researchers and activists who encounter its arguments fresh.

Legacy in Indian Feminism and Media

Manushi's legacy is threefold. It demonstrated that a serious feminist journal could survive for decades in India on the strength of its readers and its trust structure. It modelled a feminism built on fieldwork and primary evidence, accountable to the peasants, workers and minorities it wrote about. And it widened what a magazine could be — journal, publishing house, lecture platform and support network at once. Founded in New Delhi in 1978, and carried forward by Madhu Kishwar after her co-editorship with Ruth Vanita, Manushi remains a landmark of Indian independent publishing and a primary source for anyone studying women and society in modern India.