Chandra Mohanty’s article about the colonizing discourse of Western feminists is an important piece that also speaks to issues of intersectionality and power differentials. Mohanty urges readers to stay away from universalizing women as a class, and reminds us to acknowledge the variety of differences that separate women and create hierarchy within this category.

Nagar’s article is a useful example that underscores the importance of Mohanty’s arguments. Nagar argues that gender, race, class, and religion all influenced migration patterns from India to Tanzania. The many differences that Nagar highlights in migration patterns serve to illustrate the difficulties of universalizing the class of “women”, and also shows why it should not be done.

There were a lot of interesting elements of Fire, so here I’m just going to discuss a connection I found between the film and Nagar’s article. Ideas about “purity” in the Indian diaspora (particularly Hindus) were a huge theme in Nagar’s article. I looked up Karva Chauth, the fast that the two women in the film undertake, and found that it was a Hindu tradition. I also noticed that there were a lot of references to the women’s purity in the film, including a story about a woman who must survive being burned to prove that she is “pure”. I wonder what exactly “pure” means in this context. Because Radha survives the fire at the end of the movie, does that signify her purity? I think here, “purity” means the absence of wrongdoing because I noticed that, after Radha and Sita kiss, Sita asks Radha if they have done anything wrong. Radha replies that they hadn’t.