Description
Diplomatic literature so far points us towards the recruitment and career progression of women diplomats in home foreign offices. There has been little work undertaken to qualitatively better understand their postings abroad. In recent times scholars of gender in diplomacy have produced valuable datasets expanding our understanding of gendered diplomatic postings. This paper intends to tie this data with feminist historiography to relate women diplomats to a relatively new site, the host country and culture. The location studied here is the Indian capital of New Delhi and the culture of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. ‘Gendering Indian diplomacy’, the larger project this paper is a part of, locates women in Indian diplomacy to investigate the gendered nature of Indian foreign office, policy and practice, to begin with. The study takes into account approaches towards gendering any institution, looking inwards and outwards. While significant attention has been paid to the internal operationalisation of gendered power relations thus far, this paper takes the leap towards the external operationalisation of gender in the workings of MEA. Methodologically, the paper connects the gendered postings with feminist historiography to understand India as the receiver of women diplomats and how it adds to our understanding of New Delhi as a ‘suitable’ posting of women in diplomacy. At the same time it interrogates how Indian diplomacy received women foreign representatives in its formative years as its own women diplomats struggled to gain equal status in the foreign service. Thus turning the prior investigations on its head.
