ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the various forms of individual and collective assertion and resistance by women in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century colonial India. These initiatives, it is argued here, arose when women were caught up in negotiating with various kinds of power relations in an everyday context. Women’s resistance in India remains a little explored area. Hence, it seems appropriate to begin with conceptual clarifications. The term ‘resistance’ is a wideranging term, encompassing many acts extending its sweep from the private sphere of the home to the public/political arena. By ‘resistance’ we mean the ability to limit, nullify or overturn structures of power. As such, resistance is an inherently conscious act and is characterized by intention. From within the broader concept of resistance emerges ‘assertion’. Assertion is a mode of resistance in which women try to safeguard their interests and rights through an arbitration process such as seeking the law-courts and petitioning the state.1 Assertion by its very definition is a more positive form of resistance that allows the woman appealing to state authorities to do so, within recognized and legitimized forms of agitation. The first section is an exploration of women’s role as agents in bettering their lives through their use of a variety of state apparatuses, specifically petitioning. This mode of resistance as ‘assertion’ contested the kinds of power relations that worked to restrict their economic independence, limited their ownership of property and productive resources, controlled their sexuality and restricted their mobility. In their use of petitioning, they at once actively responded to, and resisted, situations that threatened to restrict their agency. Moreover, when appeals and memorials failed to satisfy their demands, certain classes of women adopted more aggressive forms of resistance. Such instances usually occurred when forms of assertion, in which women attempted to safeguard their interests and rights through negotiation, failed, and covered acts as diverse as defying authority, refusing to comply with rules and regulations and finding loopholes in the legal structures and working them to their advantage. In addition to these, women were also increasingly turning to the written word to combat the misrepresentations of femininity and to curb the trend of apportioning blame for
contemporary social maladies on womanhood in misogynistic literature. The strategies and sites of resistance that the women employed were extremely diverse and varied in accordance with the caste/class locations of women. For example, upper-caste and upper-class women were more likely to have the self-confidence and self-assurance to use ‘appeals’ as a way of registering their complaints. These forms of resistance tended to be based on more favourable allocation of power or resources. On the other hand, a prostitute’s or middle-class woman’s cause of complaint and mode of protest may have differed vastly from those of her upper-class counterparts, as they not only had different concerns but also lacked the access to the grievance procedures that were perhaps more open to wealthier women. Bearing these facts in mind, it has proved useful in this chapter to distinguish ‘assertion’ from other forms of ‘resistance’ in Indian women’s strategies of opposition and confrontation.2 The second section examines a specific form of symbolic resistance adopted by women in their use of a particular genre of literary writing. Women’s folk songs, novels and plays written during this period recreated a world that turned social reality upside-down. In them, we find a world ruled by women administrators who are intelligent and able, and a just female police upholds law. In short, this is an equitable world where, they believed, the deceit and cunning practised by men in public and private affairs would be entirely absent.3 It is shown here that resistance was, and
indeed has remained, an important aspect of everyday relations of ordinary women and was a general phenomenon. The process by which symbolic resistance as exhibited through a text is transformed into actual resistance is demonstrated. The ways in which ‘symbolic’ acts, such as the literary genre of role inversions in ‘plays’ precedes and informs consciousness, is revealed here. The patterns of women’s assertion and resistance uncover distinctive behaviours that are purposeful with specific goals. Thus, in contrast to some current theoretical formulations on resistance, this book reveals that women as resistors were almost always conscious agents of resistanceintention and deliberation is invariably present-either to subvert immediate authority or in the promotion of larger agendas such as feminist consciousness raising.4 Seeing women as conscious resistors and their acts of resistance as purposeful also sheds light on their ambiguous attitudes towards the colonial state, which was sometimes seen as a benevolent force whilst, at other times, viewed with disapprobation. Collectively, perhaps recovered from the repositories of Indian history for the first time here, these writings therefore provide a valuable perspective from a subordinated group on colonial rule.
