 I work in an interdisciplinary department and chase the elusive rainbow of interdisciplinarity. My talk weaves through that central theme with the thread of being a feminist, hoping to paint the fabric with stories that tell how my research on gender and the environment is entangled with my identity. I have written it all down just to make this wading through the trickle easier. Roughly, I follow a chronological route with only minor detours. So I will start at the very beginning. That I studied geography was a matter of chance. As a child, I used to be a visual person and expressed myself best through colors and sometimes music. I knew that when I finished school, I would go to art college. But alas, that was not to be for this man. My father, a pragmatist and economist, wanted me to study his discipline, economics. His reason was simple. If I studied art, he asked, what will you eat? My father was thrown out of his family for marrying my mother for something called love, a strange thing at that time. Mother was from another religion and born into a lower caste. Father wanted to make sure my education would let me have the wings to fly free. That was the basis of his reasoning, but it took me many years to understand. Of course, I did not give in entirely and rejected fathers not to subtle suggestions to study economics. I chose geographies solely to satisfy my wanderlust and insatiable desire to see the world, because in my head was the positivist idea that seeing is believing. My father was one of the 14 million people who were displaced by the partition of India. His family was originally from the part of Bengal, now known as Bangladesh. My mother was a city girl from Calcutta. They met through the budding communist movement in India and suffered when the Communist Party was banned after independence. When they settled down in a small university town, not far from Calcutta, my parents chose to follow no religion. So along with my brothers, I grew up being watched over by portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who scrutinized our Bengali fish and curry meals. We were exposed to the tales of beautiful Russian princess Vasilisa, who transformed the frog into Prince Ivan with a wave of her arm. Imagine someone like me being introduced to Western culture, but not through English literature, but through Bangalore translations of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov. Later, father passed on books like Spartacus by Howard First for me to read. Many years later, in 2010 in Tallinn, I was greatly pained to see the Russian art on ordinary lives of working classes. An essential part of my childhood had been relegated to the Soviet propaganda museum to gather dust. These busts are from that museum. Despite the guardianship of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, home was full of fun, debate, and music, which mother gave me. It was an open home. My father's colleagues and students would drop in day and night, anytime. Parents would discuss with their colleagues world affairs, which I devoured. My mother completed her degrees and then became the head of a girl's school. Our family was different from others. The love marriage in our atheism, in the magical intellectualism, and in a deliberate non-materialist pursuit. And I grew up to know it. This childhood taught me to understand and accept difference. The idea of difference was to become a defining feature for me. My father organized academics teaching in tertiary education institutions in remote rural areas to fight for an even and equitable pay scale. I used to travel with my father as an assistant. These travels and the discussions he had with colleagues in these institutions first opened a window in my mind. They communicated to me the value of collectivist organizing, the importance of being independent, and the need to protest against unfairness and injustice. From my parents, I also inherited an overall respect for the printed world, for education, and for freedom. The other influence in my life was the Bengal Renaissance, a series of social and religious reforms that radically changed in the late 19th century the cultural, social, and intellectual lives of Bengalis who lived in Eastern India. The Renaissance took place among urban middle classes, but its emphasis was on modern English-style education of women. One of them was my mother's grandmother, Kumudini Das, who you are seeing here. She graduated from Calcutta University in 1887, very long ago. After her graduation, this woman took up a job in the Mysore Maharaja's palace in far away South India to teach the women there. Later, she became the principal of the Bethune College for Women's Education in Calcutta. Here is a story about her. Before Kumudini, primarily British women had led Bethune College, but Kumudini would not give up. After graduation, she wrote a letter to the British head of education program, making a case for hiring qualified native women. What is the purpose of educating us, sir? If you do not offer us jobs so that we could educate other women, that was the letter she wrote. It takes plenty of courage to ask such a question, but it is the quintessential story of women in different places and in different times. A story of asking for a place at that fabled dinner table, as Virginia would describe. When this country, Australia, was still a British colony, Australian women demanded comparable privileges. In a multicultural Australia, many women like me asked for pretty much similar rights. A fortunate birth and a benign patriarchy shaped my childhood, but also led to significant disadvantages. When a young girl from an idealistic utopia accustomed to esoteric things such as class struggle jumps into a marriage at the age of 19, she's bound to encounter the extreme entrenched viciousness of patriarchy. Terrible things happened to her. All those ghastly things happened to me and more. Suddenly I faced a world that my cerebral and communist upbringing had not prepared me for. I will remove the curtain ever so slightly to tell you a story. A few years ago on a holiday with my sons, this picture is from that holiday, they asked me what the dot-like black scar on my shin was. I was not ashamed to tell them that it was from the butt of a cigarette, pressed on me as a means to scare me into submission to rape by a respectable in-law. When I was only 20 years old, my sons shed tears and hugged me in response. Then they said, ma, we did not know. Why didn't you tell us earlier? Now that my hairs are all growing white and I'm getting old, I will confess that I had also not told them that that singular incident had not stultified my interest in all men. Trust me, that scar does not bother me anymore. Although my crash into the real world at that time was sudden, rough, and traumatizing. And at a very young age, I managed to survive. I looked around, but there was no model to follow. Instead of returning to my parents' home, there was only one option left to me. Complete university education, get a job and find a place to live. It took me six long years to do all that during which my studies were interrupted by the birth of my first child. But I did. That was the first success in reinventing myself. That is the message I want you to take from this tiny glimpse into a dark corner of my life. I was soon hired by a large regional university to teach geography as a lecturer. The salary of a university academic in India those days was much lower than a bank clerk. So I lived on the border of Penury with my child. But I still had that wanderlust that drew me to geography. So how do I satisfy it? My son now becomes my co-traveller as we travel around the countryside in India. In those days, people still traveled by train. The great Indian Railway, where the remarkable people move us. One had to reserve a seat often months in advance. Mostly wooden long benches as we could not afford upper class tickets. On the day of the journey as the train chugged into the station, the joy of seeing one's name on the list is indescribable. Each of these journeys introduced diverse experiences. The train compartments were a tiny cosmos buzzing with life and presenting a panoply of Indian melu. The Haura station, you're seeing that here, that station. The gateway to Calcutta, then the largest metropolis of India was jam packed with millions of daily passengers. Pushkarts, red shirt wearing coolies who carried the luggage on their head and the ubiquitous cow. The train stops frequently at stations on the way and the platforms come to life with all sorts of vendors shouting over others to sell their wares. It was an invaluable experience for both mother and son in their collective discovery of India. You would think that struggling through the university with a child, finding a job and leaving the marriage and the in-laws home to start another life of penury was the first step in my becoming a feminist. Regrettably, that is not the case. Living by myself turned me more into a marriage counselor. For the ladies in that small university town in India, when they were unhappy in their marriage, I was the go-to person. When things were hunky-dory, I was someone to shun. This hide and seek meant that I had no friends. I had no place to publicly express myself, but once again, society made me determined to stick to my difference. Yet as I toil to survive in that patriarchal culture, the everyday struggles in life forced me to think more deeply about who I am and my place in the society as a woman. I would say that I was a closet feminist then. But it was not a quick or easy transition into feminism. There was geography, the discipline I studied to contend with. Geography, I think there is a little bit of a, this is the picture that should go here. Geography as it is practiced in India at the time would not let me become a feminist so quickly. Susan Hansen, one feminist geographer, described geography and feminism as two completely separated worlds in collision. The conventional conceptualization of space recognized geography as a spatial science that deals with abstract space, defined by locational and geometric properties such as distance, latitude, and longitude. In India, geographers did work on gender, but they described themselves as gendered geographer, not as feminists. They saw difference purely as a corrupt map, like this map, in which each spatial unit is separated from the others by different shades or colors. You can see that in this conceptualization, space is thought of as a bounded entity with no gray zones, no hybridities, or uncertainties in between. An additional dimension was the advent of the Communist Party to power in the state of West Bengal. Now, after China's disputed attack on India, the party had split into two, a pro-Soviet group and a pro-China group. The pro-China group came to power, and as you can imagine, the whole lot of pro-Soviet's, of which my father's family was, ran helter-skelter to change their camp, or to hide themselves, or just leave. Those who remained suffered. Throughout the 90s, controls were imposed on who could do what and when and where. For a woman, social control meant disapprovals over mobilities and actions, but also on thoughts and expressions. For a single mother, the results of disobeying can be dangerously explosive in a society where patriarchy has married communism. As a result, I lost my gods one more time, but this time I lost Marx, Engels, and Lenin. But the good news is that I also gained some new friends. I began to look for a different kind of politics that would intertwine my research, my teaching, and my existence. My research on dams, on rivers, led me again quite by chance to Medha Patkar, the leader of Save the Normada movement. Following her ideology, I got involved in the national alliance of people's movements that was protesting against India's obsessive passion with dam building. In this, it is this active community engagement that made me discover my place in India. It showed me that the feminine face of rural India where women live their lives, not as statistics, but as real people. Indian geography continued as a monolith. My discipline was changing elsewhere. After completing my first book in English on Anglo-Indians and McClassky-Gonja, about which I will tell you in a minute, I embarked on the ambitious project of writing about the history and philosophy of geography. Perhaps the months spent in the United States in the late 1980s had triggered the desire, I do not know. Perhaps my youthful adventurousness led me into it. You know what John Robinson says. She says that only academics at the early stages in their career and at the very end become interested in their discipline's history. The result of over five or six years of intensive reading on the philosophy of geography was this book. Its title translated into English is Development of Geographical Thought. The extensive reading made me reconsider my training. Space now presented itself with a sense of place, imbued with women and men, a realm to which people forge profound attachments and identities and endow it with value and meanings, meanings that are subjectively appreciated and perceived. I realized that it is possible to see place in this way only if one borrows the tools and methods from other disciplines. This was a point of departure from my conventional training and has remained crucial to the ways I have practiced research from then on. One of my early research interests was on the homeland that the Anglo-Indian community planned for themselves in the early 1930s. This place is called, quite uniquely, McCluskey-Gonch, a name that conveys its Indianness and its Anglo origins. The Anglo-Indians imagined the place to be their homeland, a magnificent utopian imagination at a critical time in the history of the community. This book, in search of a homeland, was published when other social scientists were far ahead in their thinking. They were debating the location of culture and showing how culture sits in places. But alas, my geography training had only quipped me poorly to deal with the hybrid and complex identities of Anglo-Indians. So I used the sociologist Robert Park's concept of marginality to explain the utopia that McCluskey-Gonch was. Indian geographers considered the deviation an unpardonable crime, although the topic was firmly within the tradition of place facts of geography. But it did not deter me. I grew up in Bengal, a land built by Riverine Silt. I lived next to one of the fiercest rivers and knew the ferocity of monsoon floods firsthand. I knew that human lives are entangled with that of rivers. But in conventional geomorphology, rivers are purely physical elements shaped only by nature and often seen by experts as lines on a topographical map sheet. A defining feature of my research, therefore, has been the urge to overcome the boundaries of my discipline. As I researched the lives of people living on the flood plains of Bengal, I also became aware that the small things matter more than the big picture. God is indeed in the small things. The result was my research on chores. Those tiny temporary islands lying amidst the rivers. These chores are the result of sediments being deposited on the riverbed. But they are also the products of a long history of messing with the river system. Sometimes directly through the construction of embankments, sometimes indirectly through the establishment of revenue systems that put more value on dry lands in the riverine environment of Bengal. Chores, by their very existence, challenge the deeply entrenched separation of land and water. They also extend our conceptualization of hybridity of the environment by going not just beyond the nature culture binary, but also the water land binary. Chores allow us to think of the fluidity inherent in environments as they are neither fully land nor fully water, as you can see, but sometimes one or the other and at times both. If chores taught me the value of scaling down instead of scaling up, they also showed that our discipline-based theories have also been too rigid. They do not accommodate flux, flow, change, and other boundary blurring phenomena within the core of place and time. Chores made me realize that theories need to be flexible to absorb new contextual information without pretending to be universal or breaking under its own weight of rigidity. Most importantly, scaling down teaches us that we do not need to arm ourselves with the powerful weapon of a theory before going to the field. This is crucial for feminist research that does not need to pretend to be certain and can happily bow down to the empirical facts of local contexts. This realization coincided with a great transition in my life, taking up a job in the ANU. Again, something that happened quite by chance. I was happy to leave the communist-infested state to restart my life at the bottom of the heap in the old research school of Pacific and Asian studies. I arrived in an ANU that was intensely white and extremely masculine. Working there was not easy, if at all, it was intimidating. The Aussie culture seemed so different to my Indian eyes and ears as I tried to get accustomed to the accent. Another story comes to my mind. Soon after joining the ANU, someone invited me for lunch. After we finished, he took out his wallet and paid only his share. I was caught on the wrong foot, or rather with a belly full. For I had not carried my purse to a lunch invitation. See, in India, these niceties swirl around in a circular fashion. I return an invitation by another. Let me tell you another story about the work wives of old aerospace. You have heard it correct, work wives. There were plenty of efficient women there, but they were mostly in administrative positions. I have heard that in the past, academics had women research assistants, nicknamed as work wife. The work wife carried out data collation, literature review, and some even did writing. Some of them co-authored papers with male academics and were no less competent than the academics themselves. If two academics shared one assistant, she was also jokingly called a half-wife. If you think this is all fabricated, then check the book, The Coombs, A House of Memories, published in 2006. It had 22 contributions from male academics and only one from a female academy. It is extremely easy to be relegated to the margin of margins in this kind of masculine environment within that academic community. If someone mentioned diversity, for example, people who generally think of the aboriginals, who were of course nowhere there, and maybe sometimes Europeans, beholding my face, many people immediately profess their love of curry. Looking back, I feel that it was possibly because I was the wild card. No one knew my politics, but the fact that I was someone without Western training or mentoring allowed me to be someone who owned her own way of thinking. As I tried to, so I became this woman, standing on my head. So as I tried to find my place in Australian academia and society and struggled to be recognized as a legitimate Australian academic, what might mean to belong to a place was brought home to me? Within the ANU, this quest coincided with a steady decline of the discipline of geography. Therefore, the first few years queried my unenviable vantage of a quintessential and archetypal outsider, a gatecrusher subaltern. Someone whom the post-colonial scholar, Gayatri Spivak, described as the native informant, located in an area studies school to inform others about people like us. In response to this novel gazing, my research to different twists and turns, not only did the research themes change, but I also had to rethink how I do my research and with whom. And that reconsideration became central to my academic existence. If the transformation from the subject of research to the position of an agent was crucial, it became equally, if not more critical for me to practice what I preach in my research. So what vicious patriarchy and venomous comrades had failed to activate could now come out in the exciting scholarly environment that ANU provided. This was when I was able to reclaim my identity as a feminist. The self-inspection also rekindled the contrarian, the argumentative Indian in me. Other people helped. He is not here today. Professor Bob Wasson, at the time he was the director of Center for Resource and Environmental Studies. Professor Bob Wasson once came to visit me in my office. I stood up in a hurry to honor him. He shook my hand and said, with a big smile on his face, in this country you do not stand up for anyone. Oh, how I loved it. This is the wing I had always wanted so badly, you know, all these years. Indeed, I took this advice as the mantra in my new Australian larricking avatar. Luckily, I was also able to find exceptional colleagues who generously offered love and support and who befriended me in spite of all the difference. They progressed from being colleagues to friends. Many of these individuals are here today, so I do not wish to embarrass them or myself by mentioning them by name. This is the enchantment of life. It deals you with things quite by chance. In life, they come with human faces who lets you make something out of each of these relationships. There is simply no way to describe the joy and delight from them, no way to deny one's indebtedness to the many people whose paths have crossed with mine. If I am standing here today talking about my life and work, it is because of people who trusted me, believed in me and respected me well enough to put me here. Soon I was conversing with a cohort of scholars located within the ANU, but also beyond it. These conversations were partly disciplinary and partly feminist. To feminists, I showed how differences of not just gender and age, but also race, ethnicity, and to go back to the theme of my childhood class, constitute important aspects in women's identities. My research explored how women's lives are lived locally and how places and gender are mutually constitutive and exist in a dynamic relationship across space and time. Since the restructuring of ANU in 2009, we have been stitched up with the Crawford School of Public Policy. Here I have had to re-script myself again as we collaborate with colleagues from Economics and Political Science. This forced me to think repeatedly about what disciplines are and if they advance our attempts to make sense of gender. The question that nags me is in bridging the gap between disciplines or in crossing borders and boundaries, what models should we use? One must not forget here the models inherent in interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. They mean different things and are useful only for certain purposes. We feel the confusion most acutely when we want to switch between applied or issue-focused research and basic inquiries. In my own work of research and teaching, interdisciplinarity is crucial as feminists we take pride in being eclectic. But in the context of resources and the environment, what one means by interdisciplinarity is connected to the problematic of finding foundational concepts for and from research while retaining the right to be critical of policy-making agencies. The difficulty is most acute in integrating gender in our research and teaching about resources and the environment because much of our understanding of the environment or resource use is based either on the hard sciences or on equally hard economic or political economic interpretations. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the compelling irrefutable and convincing evidence that makes the strongest case to mainstream gender in resources and the environment has come from research that presents women as victims, victims of poor water supplies and sanitation, victims of dams, victims of deforestation, victims of large-scale mining projects. This extremely sound body of research has been able to advance well-refined tools that count, assess, and quantify how women suffer more than men or are worse off than men as a consequence of poor developmental planning. This body of research has been extremely influential in shaping policy and continues to be so. For example, when an agency like the World Bank or DFAT invests money on gender in a hyper-masculine industry like mining, they find it easier to do so if the money is to be spent to alleviate the sufferings of women. Yet, there is a biological essentialism ingrained in this approach. It is also far removed from the recent developments in feminist theory. To get this body of research to converse with and benefit from advancements in feminist theory remains notoriously painful because development practitioners avoid feminist theories and vice versa. Similarly, labor studies scholars or the historian who works on women's labor contributions to mines keeps at an arm's length the feminist political ecologist who shows how poor extractive resource projects harm women more than men. So this compartmentalization of disciplines and mutual avoidance of theorists and practitioners have prevented productive scholarly dialogues. This is where a truly feminist and interdisciplinary approach can intervene and contribute effectively. A feminist epistemology would ask which groups of women in poorer communities are primary resource managers? Which groups of these women have a history of involvement in natural resource management and why? Which groups of women bear the greatest brunt of non-participatory natural resource projects and why in most instances most rural and poor women are still excluded from decision-making? So to cross disciplinary borders our task for all of us could be to theorize our disciplines. Disciplines are not natural cognitive constructs that map knowledge is but rather social achievements made and perpetuated through commitments of ideas and resources and a variety of socio-technical practices. We can think of disciplines in various ways as maps, models, or as standpoints. You know, the entire body of feminist theories is standpoints. If we accept that disciplines are social constructs the advantages and disadvantages of disciplined approaches to investigating complex phenomena such as the unruly and all-encompassing topic of gender resources and the environment in the context of a developing country becomes apparent. More importantly, as Australian academics we can then begin to exchange knowledges with scholars who are located within the Asia-Pacific region, the region that we study and the region within which Australia is located. Such conversations are urgent because conventionally research on these topics in isolation has reflected embedded worldviews or political views. As new ontologies emerge within the broad field ontologies that resist disciplinization interdisciplinarity increasingly emerges as being more relevant. This manner of thinking about the political aspects of our research links with that of the personal to people, visible minorities, to people like me. It allows the thinking of feminism not in its biologically essentialist interpretation but as arising from flexible theories that are able to accommodate race, class and other intersections of difference. To an imposter like me it allows a path from the personal to the political which interestingly is not only a one-way street but a track along which a continuous to and fro takes place. In other words when as feminists we cross over disciplinary boundaries we can then bring the politics into our personal domains to enrich and enhance our ordinary life's journeys. One of these domains is our relationship with students. Much of our research begins and ends in the classroom and there is hardly any clear cut demarcation between the two. Admittedly as a third world woman who's the subject of development herself teaching gender and development at the ANU has not been a bed of roses. For me negotiating this extremely complicated terrain has not been easy at all. Yet I have received tremendous affection from my students in both India and Australia. The enormous support was possible because I was able to share with them the love and respect that I received from others. I would like to believe that I motivated them as a person, a teacher and a researcher. And in this picture you're seeing one of my favorite students came to me at the age of 16 fresh out of village first generation tertiary student. And she is now a professor of geography in a university in India. And we have become a collaborator. So I'm very proud of her. So let me go back to what I was reading. While seeing remain the point of emphases I was able to show to my students that one has to believe it to see it not the other way around as we were told. One or two of my doctoral students completed their thesis and moved on to becoming collaborators. I also took on my research assistants as my co-authors. I could create a level playing field in my interactions with them showing that we are working together and that rather than being a burden the mutual process of learning can actually build a nurturing space where flows of affection are as important as flows of knowledge. So as I'm coming to the end of my talk as women our professional and personal lives are interwoven I will never forget the severe warning of dire circumstances that a colleague a highly successful woman from the public service threatened me with in my early days in ANU. She said, don't be a feminist. Are you not the mother of two sons? Think about them. With women ruling the world, what will happen to them? Unfortunately that moment has left ANU whereas I have survived and fled. In an environment of growing recognition of gender equity by both women and men, if she was here today I would have told her what my sons feel about me. Now here is another story. When they were growing up I often worried that my sons did not have a male role model. Would they know what that women and men are different but must have equal rights? Will I be able to teach them empathy well enough, love for others, zeal for life? These are thoughts that cross every single mother's mind. I received a wonderful answer to all these queries the other day. I was in a car with my son, happened to listen to the radio program about role models for boys and young men. I asked my now grown up son the delicate question cautiously half expecting to hear the bad news. His reply was ma, you are my role model. That my rag tag family life, the wonder last and intense stars chasing have failed to create a misogynist's at home is not just my victory. As a feminist our research, our teaching and our beautiful students all fuse together. For me in the long journey of an ordinary girl from bird one India to the ANU. It is this collective victory and joy that make it so extraordinary to some to some people. Parts of my story would still appear ordinary. A typical migrants story. We are all ordinary. My late husband David used to say, David received a tiny part but still a part of a Nobel Prize besides other honors for his exemplary scientific work. I have in this life done nothing that will take me even closer to that kind of recognition. Some would say it is the story of any middle class woman from any place and any time. Yet my life is defined by continual and contradicting processes of giving up and dogged determination of letting go and sticking to it of learning and relearning. My being a woman was crucial to this journey of resilience and Phoenix like rebirths. I'm greatly honored by and grateful for this invitation to speak as one of the inspirational women at the ANU. But I would rather stay grounded in my ordinariness for I know in my heart that I'm only one among many, many, many inspirational women in this great university. Some of these women I know and some whose parts have yet to cross with mine. I stand here today representing each one of them. I would say every woman is inspirational in one way or the other. Every woman has a story to tell if there is someone to listen. I dedicate this talk to all of you inspirational women and to all of you wonderful people who care enough to listen. Thank you.