ABSTRACT
The status of Indian women is best contexualized in terms of India’s ancient history and mythology going back about 4,000 years and, in modern times, its subjugation as a colony and regeneration since 1947 as a free, democratic, secular country experiencing the paradox of an egalitarian constitution with an inegalitarian society. Different perspectives have emerged in the literature assessing Indian women’s status. The anti traditionalist perspective traces Indian women’s subjugation to patriarchal and feudal forces inherent in the Indian culture that denigrate the female’s status from infancy through adulthood, leading to such abhorrent customs as female infanticide, child marriage, enforced widowhood, and sati (self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s pyre). The traditionalist perspective eulogizes ancient Indian canonic tradition and scriptures and seeks to prevent Indian women and society from the debilitating consequences of modernism in the limiting sense of Westernism. The anticolonialist sees Westernism as an arbitrarily imposed choice on the colonized by the colonizer. Tracing the deterioration in women’s position—particularly economic power—to colonial economic, civil, political, land revenue, and annexation policies, it contends that Western male-centered capitalism reinforced patriarchy; increased women’s dependency on fathers, husbands, and sons; and relegated women’s traditional roles to social and domestic spheres.
