ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Indian leadership that emerged from the projects of professional development described in Chapters 2 and 3. I trace the culture of early organisation, suggesting that it was heavily determined by nursing’s colonial and Western heritage and little suited to mobilising the growing ranks of Indian nurses. The TNAI, the INC and the Christian nursing organisations remained substantially wedded to a professionalising agenda based around the identity of nursing as an international sisterhood and the lifting of standards in education. This agenda, however, found little resonance with a constituency struggling to care for patients in understaffed wards, to sleep in dangerous and dilapidated accommodation and to keep themselves physically safe in hospitals. Dissatisfaction with organisational culture was evident even in the early post-Independence years and reached critical levels by the late 1970s. Ultimately, this dissatisfaction combined with a new, more gender-sensitive social and political environment to produce more militant and creative experiments in organisation. Conditions for nurses remain woeful and organisations still struggle to exact small concessions from an obdurate state, but these new trends at least suggested a new and more locally grounded generation of nursing leadership.
