ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which ‘Women’s uplift’ was justified by appeal to Hindu beliefs and values, especially the example of India’s past in terms of the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian civilisation and female characters in Hindu sacred literature. This appeal to Hindu beliefs and values is discussed with specific reference to the speeches and writings of Annie Besant and Sarojini Naidu who came to prominence as advocates of the Women’s cause in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively. The way in which they employed the example of India’s past to legitimise their aims and objectives for modern Indian women is analysed. Accordingly, this account focuses on how, when campaigning on behalf of women in modern India, they reconstructed India’s past as a time when women had enjoyed a high status and a positive image and represented it as the pattern or prototype for their own endeavours. Their appeal to the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian civilisation and to female characters in Hindu sacred literature is thus shown to have reappraised the position of women in the model society and restated the ideals of womanhood.
