New Delhi, and

The question of multiculturalism as it is currently understood is the result of the major migrations of populations, as well as of the emergence of civil rights movements, liberation struggles, and feminist movements in Western nations and worldwide. Therefore as the two leading terms on minority rights, feminism and multiculturalism should be comrades in arms. However, as Shigehisa Kuriyama writes, the term multiculturalism is notoriously vague as ‘it sweeps under its blanket generality a tangle of confusion and uncertainties about how cultures can or should relate to each other, and how their worldviews relate to the world ’ (Kuriyama, 1994: 337). Conversely feminism is marked by the unstable equilibrium between the universalizing common ground and the recognition of difference between women. Given the internal tensions within the two discourses it is only too obvious that questions of multiculturalism have been connected to feminist issues in many contradictory ways, though the relation between the two begins to have a genealogy of its own