ABSTRACT
This book explored the challenges posed by Indian women to male hegemony in colonial India in the period 1850 to 1920. Its objectives were twofold: First, to provide an account of the development of feminism in Indian society and secondly, a gendered rereading of modern Indian history. By placing gender or relations between women and men at the heart of Indian society and politics, the book has endeavoured to make visible a long but hidden tradition of feminist thought and politics and has tried to reconfigure our understanding of modern Indian history. This study has argued that the nature of Indian women’s feminism was a complex and varied one. Nineteenth-century Indian feminists worked towards social and domestic reform informed by a discussion of the oppression of the stri jati [female sex]. Certain core issues bond women together irrespective of caste and class differences. Women’s perceptions on a range of issues were drawn upon to show the commonalties between them as well as the feminist distinctiveness of the women’s movement. Key to this has been an awareness of women as a specific group-stri jati and a concept of sisterhood-bhaginivarg. In the nineteenth century, Indian women possessed the defining feature of a ‘feminist’: the awareness and expression of ideas about the roots of women’s subordination and a desire to remedy it. This book has argued that a concept of sisterhood developed among women, born of an awareness of the hostility of men to the improvement of women’s lives. The constant attacks on women by male conservatives led to the coinage of the term bhaginivarg [sisterhood]. This was a crucial step in the formation of feminist consciousness whereby women began to perceive themselves as a collective. This solidarity cut across caste and religion as evinced by the way in which Hindu women rallied round Pandita Ramabai when she came under attack by male conservatives and was manifested in their bold call on the government over the child marriage controversy (1891), arguing that the state alone could help oppressed groups such as women and children. Such actions by women helped develop a stronger and more widespread sense of bhaginivarg in the late nineteenth century that encompassed Parsi, Jewish, Hindu and Christian women. The development of feminist consciousness in nineteenth-century India demonstrates that historical processes cannot always be studied as unilinear trajectories. The search for continuities from the colonial past to the present in the
case of women’s history can prove a futile one.1 The struggle for women’s rights, like many other social movements, was eventually subordinated to the needs of the greater nationalist struggle. In this process, the advances and achievements of earlier women were lost by the peculiar alignments made between feminism and nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s. There were several reasons for this. Christian feminists had made a clean break with the Indian past by rejecting Hinduism on the basis of a gendered approach to religion. They had fruitfully applied the ‘welfare’ and ‘mission’ rhetoric of Christianity to assert themselves in breaking with traditional roles and legitimating their entry into public professional roles. Their refusal to belong to any one church as well as their rejection of clerical mediation along with funding from non-Indian sources had given them autonomy to create a unique brand of Indian feminism and also provide leadership to the women’s movement. However, Christian feminist leaders were able to sustain women’s interests only as long as the active phase of the reform movement lasted. Their alignment to mission Christianity, which at this time equated Christianity with civilizing values and modernizing impulses with the West, meant that they denounced nationalism and its growth. Eventually, it had two effects. Firstly, it prevented them from effectively countering the nationalist ideologies of the early twentieth century with new strategies for enrolling women into their movement that had hitherto promised emancipation with conversion. Secondly, it paved the way for Ramabai Ranade’s leadership, who in due course marginalized Christian feminists with a take-over of the women’s movement. Although Hindu women questioned Hinduism and Hindu customs and rituals, unlike their Christian counterparts, they did not reject it. This meant working within the structures of Hindu society and its limitations. As demonstrated in chapter 3, several Hindu feminist leaders overcame the hindrances of working within Hindu society through a strategy of assimilation and accommodation. Separate female institution-building programmes by women were to prove to be the vehicle for the movement of Hindu women’s embracing of modernity and in the development of the Maharashtrian women’s movement. First, it enabled women to mobilize in pursuit of the goal of their own welfare. Secondly, it contributed immensely to the transformation of women’s public roles. This was made possible by the astute leadership of the far-sighted women who founded these organizations. Their feminism, which embodied the ability to ‘assimilate and accommodate’, kept the larger Hindu society’s criticism of their programmes to a minimal level. In the period 1870 to 1920, when men did not accept women as equals, the creation of a separate public sphere was probably the only viable
political strategy giving their leaders greater autonomy in management and policymaking, while providing their individual members the strength that only numbers and a common platform could offer. The idea of a separate but public sphere of activity was no doubt an astute solution for Hindu women desirous of effecting changes in women’s lives within the constraints of Hindu society. Ultimately, however, it was to restrict the growth of an independent women’s movement. In the early twentieth century the anxiety of women regarding the safeguarding of their interests took on an urgency due to the almost certain victory of the ‘political reform before social reform’ argument. Separate female institutions, such as the Seva Sadan, in attempting to maintain the focus on women’s interests, did not allow its members to participate in political organizations associated with nationalist activities. The very nature of these institutions meant that separate female organizations were not able to fulfil all the aspirations of their members. Further, the discussion of Hindu women’s engagement with the ‘golden age’ theory undertaken in chapter 3 showed that they were not only unwilling to break with the past, but approved vigorously of the reconstituted images of Indian womanhood. Their uncritical appraisal of the Hindu past was a contrast to their Christian sisters, and gave rise to several problems. While the representation of Indian womanhood taken from the Vedic past was indeed a glorious one (allegedly women had equal rights with men measured by criteria such as the absence of sati; that they were educated, had choice in marriage and remarriage), Hindu feminists made no efforts to distinguish the functions of their own representations of Indian womanhood from that of nationalists and religious revivalists. Thus, it can be seen how women were attracted to the redrawn images of Indian womanhood presented to them by Gandhi since they resembled so clearly their own leaders’ representations of Indian womanhood and came with the added incentive of equal participation in the forbidden arena of political movements. It is the contention of this book, however, that nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury feminism in Maharashtra under the guidance of dynamic female leaders was far more radical and visionary than the women’s movement in a Gandhiinspired nationalist movement. Hindu women’s attack on the shastras [Hindu prescriptive texts] is the most important marker in their progression towards feminism binding them into a community of women with common interests born of the peculiar disadvantages not shared by their men folk. Even within as fragmented an enquiry as a ‘letter to an editor’ it was made clear that a large number of Hindu women struggled to understand the sources of knowledge production about stri [woman] and strivarg [womanhood]. Women in the nineteenth century were ‘subjects’ striving to understand how women became the ‘object’ of men’s knowledge. Many of them realized that women’s oppression arose from men’s writing of religious books that gave legitimacy to a whole range of misogynist views and actions. Many of the gender critiques were published as articles in newspapers, furious letters of vindication or books or as petitions to the government. What is discernable is that women’s writings themselves constitute resistance so far as
both men and women. Women asserted quite clearly that if the contemporary state of morality was in ruins this was not just because of unrealistic expectations from women, but also due to the fact that men themselves were less than shining models of exemplary conduct. Unlike utopian feminist writers, Indian women did not yearn for a gender-free world. They saw two sexes, with differing bodies and roles in reproduction, and differing degrees of physical strength and hence advocated complementary roles. As long as women possessed exclusive rights to reproduction, their lives would be differently structured than those of men, who occupy a different physiological, cultural and sociopolitical space. On this basis, they argued, women were to be treated with the same respect as men. This was not a form of essentialism by these early feminists because they did not believe that biology is destiny (in fact the utopias in women’s literature have women performing all the roles of men) nor did they think that women were bound by a ‘universal character or nature’.2 Equality is not mistaken, as some American feminist thought seems to imply today, with ‘sameness’.3 Women’s demands were not for women to be ‘as men’ but for a more relational and complex set of attributes for women. To be more explicit, Indian feminists advocated a world where women gain the same respect, dignity and justice for the labours they perform, however different they may be from men. For the turn of the century Indian feminist, feminism meant empowering women to realize their full potential as women without impediments: it was not about making women the ‘same as men’. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women’s organizations like the Vanita Samaj and the Seva Sadan did not consider older values of motherhood and nurturing as incompatible with the new values of ambition and individual initiative. Moreover, female identity was not imbued with shame or inferiority but was a source of pride. They celebrated femininity as a privilege granted to women over men. Even their symbolic role-reversals in literature demonstrated that they held a world-view wherein men and women did not compete but were equals. This ‘equality in difference’ theory was what nineteenth-century Indian feminists bequeathed to their sisters who followed the paths set for them in the early twentieth century. With this in mind, it is easier to understand the standpoint of prominent Indian women of the later nationalist period of the 1930s and 1940s who ferociously differentiated Indian from Western feminism as one not marked by male-hatred. In the history of modern India, patriarchy was already well entrenched and institutionalized. It was well defended by both religious strictures and enforced by the priestly classes via the laity. However, it was forced to engage in continuous reinvention and reinforcement due to the impact of colonialism. It is within this
context we see the rise of Indian feminism where the primary claim made by the bhaginivarg was expressed as a broad, comprehensive claim for the equal rights of women. These claims spilled over specifically in demands for the end of maligning women and womanhood in print [stricharitra], for educational opportunity and for access to knowledge for its own sake; for economic self-reliance and for creative self-expression; for a revision of man-made laws that disadvantaged women in property and inheritance and restricted their mobility; towards the achievement of these goals they seized the opportunities provided by female leadership for participation in women’s organizations. This study has also analyzed the informal methods of assertion and resistance of ordinary women in colonial India. Although it is not possible to quantify or track the influences of the formal women’s movement on the informal activities of women, yet it is clear that the number of women seeking the help of the British government through petitioning or more directly the law courts in resolving inheritance and property disputes, marriage, right of physical mobility and employment reveals that their awareness of their rights and civil liberties was far greater than assumed in the historiography. If the lineament of Indian feminism was demonstrated through educated middle class women’s formal entry into women’s organizations, the informal methods of agitation and everyday forms of resistance discussed in the latter half of the book has proven the case for a more widespread effect of the women’s movement in consciousness raising as well as action on the part of Indian women. An analysis of the development of the Indian women’s movement highlights several issues. The more traditional women were awakened over their need to cope with the changes brought by urbanization and the changing needs of the emerging middle class. The more progressive among them developed a clearly feminist perspective by relating to the everyday misery of belonging to the stri jati, be it a child-wife or widow. However, the meeting point of the two was that together they constructed a critique on the ‘condition of women’ based on either their own personal experiences or the everyday existence of their bhagini [sisters]. This analysis of the condition of the stri jati bonded Hindu women together. Another remarkable feature of nineteenth-century Indian feminism was that women’s discourse on social reform was based on humanitarian ideals, rather than the arguments used by male social reformers who constantly sought the sanction of the shastras for it. The differences in the arguments proposed by male reformers from their female counterparts also highlights the inescapable conclusion that it would be an affront to call Hindu women reformers’ function a ‘mediating role’ in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Maharashtra. Far from it, their constant contestations of men’s role in holding women back as well as their separate women’s organizations reveal an independent and assertive role in which men played a minimal part. Historians of the subaltern school have focused on giving the life of a subaltern meaning, but this has hardly included the greatest and most subordinated of all
and told their history in their narrative but additionally we are now in a position to observe subaltern perceptions of the Raj. One of the richest insights into how the colonial state was viewed by subordinated groups is provided through a study of women’s assertion and resistance. Fear, submission and deference-the more readily associated reactions of Indian women towards their menfolk are missing when it comes to their attitudes to the state. Whilst claiming recognition of their rights, women appeal to the state as the supreme arbiter of justice. Women’s adulation of the Raj and their firm belief in the state’s will to do good can be read as a sign of how the state was utilized as a tool to counteract patriarchal injustices. The Raj is seen as a humanitarian resource and the final arbiter-certainly in Girijabai Kelkar and Tarabai Shinde’s conception of state, wherein the state is registered as the sovereign authority, far more so than the patriarchal head of household. The greatest impact women’s crusades in the late nineteenth century had can be discerned in their persuasion of the government in legislating in favour of women. By illustrating the insensitivity of men and the double standards embedded within men’s thinking on sexuality, the resulting outrage stimulated the movement well into the twentieth century for legal reform, for the case of women doctors and for women’s suffrage. Contemporary historians can only understand the legacy that twentieth-century Indian women inherited from their immediate predecessors by studying the nineteenth century in its own right. The connections between the Mukti Mission of Pandita Ramabai, the Anti-Temperance Society of Shevantibai Nikambe and Soonderbai Powar, are immediate and noticeable with the thought and work of Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Annie Besant. Equally, the muchacclaimed SEWA or Self Employed Women’s Association movement in Western India in the latter half of the twentieth century had its precursor in the early cooperative and cottage industry movement that the Seva Sadan of Ramabai Ranade represented. Indian feminists of the nineteenth century had reinvented and reworked the old concept of dhandharm [Philanthropy] and given it a new meaning encompassing the more pressing and new needs thrown up by migration and urbanization. Rescue work and the notion of bettering the lives of their bhaginivarg stimulated all of these campaigns, and none of them more so than the movement for the legal protection of women and children. Loopholes in the law existed and which women were quick to take advantage of, such as the Watandari Act studied in chapter 4. The participation of women in moral reform campaigns of the late nineteenth century demonstrated that they wanted a complete re-haul of Indian family relations and a transformation of the relations between the sexes within the home and outside. And the women’s press of the nineteenth century played an intimate and indispensable part in awareness raising and provided the much-needed experience for early twentieth-century editors of women’s journals. Any issue of the women’s journal Arya Bhagini of the late nineteenth century resembles an issue of the contemporary women’s magazine Manushi in its animated spirit of writing, concerns and argumentative tone. Even if the direct
influence of the nineteenth-century magazine on its sister-concern of the twentieth century cannot be tracked, yet, their feminist and humanist problems remain the same.
