ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ‘Woman Question’ in India by exploring Hindu movements of reform and revival in relation to the roles and responsibilities of women. The analysis is set against the general attitudes and ideas characteristic of orthodox opinion contemporaneous with social, political, cultural and religious developments during the British period. Various beliefs and practices commended by orthodox Hindus but condemned by other Hindus are defined. The discussion of these ‘Social Evils’, central to the conduct of controversy in the British Raj, provides the starting point for an historical account of Hindu advocacy of change in the position of women which was a major theme of the Hindu Renaissance. Such advocacy is assessed in terms of the arguments advanced by reformers and revivalists whose different versions of the Hindu tradition were advanced when addressing the most momentous questions of the age.
