ABSTRACT
The Brahmani agendas of the colonial state and of elite Brahmans regarding education and reform of women, which defined women’s social worth in familial terms, excluded the issues of Dalit streepurush (women and men). Although upper-caste, middle-class women shared social and educational exclusion with lower castes and shared gendered identity with Dalit women, they still failed to include the latter in their liberal-feminist movement. A few Brahman feminists from the late nineteenth century, like Pandita Ramabai, vehemently attacked caste structures and Brahmani patriarchy and forged a liberal feminism; yet even they significantly failed to converse and establish connections with their nonBrahman supporters, like Phule. The failure of the nationalist and feminist movements to include the concerns of lower-caste women led Dalit and non-Brahman radicals to severely critique upper-castes’ instrumental agenda of education for women as well as their promises and efforts to expand educational opportunities. During the Akhil Bhartiya Bahishkrut Parishad (All India Conference of the Excluded), held at Nagpur from 30 May to 1 June 1920, more than 10,000 Dalit streepurush resolved to fight for free and compulsory education. The Marathi language use of the term streepurush (women and men) is intriguing: unlike in the English, stree (woman) and purush (man) are joined together in a single word. Dalit radicals’ deployment of the concept streepurush underscores their emphasis on gender differentiation, unlike the upper castes who sought gender-neutral unity for the cause of nationalism. Along with other streepurush, Dalit woman activist Tulsabai Bandasode attacked the upper-caste, middle-class agenda for excluding Dalits from the benefits of education (Mooknayak, 5 June 1920). She argued that education was in fact more important for Dalit girls than for upper-caste girls. She demanded boarding-houses for Dalit girl students in every district. Most significantly, she contended that, due to Dalit women’s lack of education, uppercaste women kept them at a distinct distance. Bandasode thus signalled that Dalit women’s inclusion in the modern, middle-class liberal-feminist agenda was contingent on the former’s education. Her views were further reinforced by Rukmini Kotangale, who narrated her experiences of being ignored by uppercaste women and men as well as by the colonial British government. Why was education so important to Dalit women? If women shared a common gendered identity and oppression, why did upper-caste women
ostracise and isolate Dalit women? Of course, not all upper-caste women were isolated from Dalits; indeed, some actively supported their struggle for education and equality. But in general, if upper-caste women shared educational exclusion with low-castes, why did they then fail to build alliances with them? By explaining how the entanglements of the elite Brahman educational agenda and gendered moral and social reforms failed to include Dalit women, this chapter highlights the blind spots in the mainstream historiography of both India and the liberal-feminist movement. From the mid-nineteenth century, and especially at the turn of the twentieth century, reformers contested the appropriate agendas of education, moral reform, social change and self-disciplining for streepurush of all castes, including Dalits. Indians who participated in the formation of colonial modernity undertook these practices of self-fashioning. The development of a modern state required the surveillance of social, sexual, moral and, most importantly, educational reform. Moreover, Dalits had to deal with a double surveillance: colonial and indigenous. Thus education reform was at the heart of not only the colonial ‘civilising’ mission, as we saw in Chapter 1, but also of Indian’s modernising project because education would enable Dalits – women and men – to discipline and fashion themselves, and to prepare them for community and nation-building activities. This chapter focuses on the discursive practices that led to the formation of ‘womanhood’ in this context. Much of the scholarship on the nationalist and women’s movements has dealt with high-caste patriarchy and the position of elite women in family, marriage and kinship networks. This scholarship has engaged with caste issues through some anthropological and sociological studies on poverty and NGOisation, women and their stigmatised labour, and so on. The absence of an intertwined critique of caste and gender relations has indeed been a problem for feminists. Scholars have addressed the theoretical aspects and the compounded nature of caste and gender (Pardeshi 1998; Chakravarti 2003; A. Rao 2003, 2009; Rege 2006), yet they have rarely engaged with the reality of the historical experience of Dalit women in western India (cf. Rege 2006). We also know little about how education reinforced the oppressive nature of the two hierarchies. Only recently, the feminist historian Shefali Chandra (2012) has provided a convincing corrective by demonstrating how Brahman castes contained English education within their caste and class locations, thereby domesticating and even gendering the English language. This chapter deepens her analyses by shifting the gaze from Brahman enclaves to intimate caste practices in Dalit women’s lives in order to examine the tangled and complex interplay of different education agendas, castes, genders, feminisms and masculinities. Some upper-caste streepurush argued that education led to the disruption of family values or gender hierarchies and hence opposed women’s education. Nevertheless, at the same time, many upper-and lower-caste reformers identified failure to educate women as the primary cause of the decline of Indian society. Education was more important for colonised women, who were seen as doubly ‘ignorant’ and ‘backward’ compared to men. Streeshikshan (education of
women) would serve two tasks: first, it would enable them to discipline themselves and become modern; and second, it would train them to teach, nurture and prepare their children (read: sons) to become citizens of modern India. These tasks were relevant to women of all castes. Yet Dalit women faced a double burden because unlike non-Dalit women they also needed to develop their selfrespect and self-confidence. Most significantly, this self-formation especially through formal education was crucial for Dalit women in the advancement of their ethnic self-esteem, community development, nation-building and construction as modern citizens of the nation. As Ambedkar declared, schools are the workshops to manufacture the best citizens (Bahishkrut Bharat, 3 June 1927). In this complex field of forces, education emerged as a significant instrument to discipline the body, nurture new standards of comportment and cultivate bourgeois respectability so that Dalits could become modern citizens. Interestingly, there were interconnections as well as discordances among high-and low-caste rhetoric, agendas for education and developments. In this chapter and the next, I historicise Dalit women’s struggle for access to education in the early twentieth century. Specifically, in this chapter, I deal with the different ways in which Dalit women challenged elite Brahman agendas of education, the feminist movement and nationalist patriarchy. Chapter 4 continues this investigation by focusing on the complexities of women’s reform and education within the Dalit community itself. Unlike upper-caste elite women, Dalit women did not write or publish magazines of their own in the early decades of twentieth-century Bombay Presidency; there is some fragmentary evidence in the form of quotes included in newspapers or short essays written by women themselves. Certainly, in comparison to elite Hindu and Muslim women, Dalit women were only beginning to enter schools; they could not systematically write or publish their views, unlike their counterparts in other regions, for example, the Namashudras of Bengal. Even the colonial government was indifferent to Dalit women and maintained silence regarding their issues. Anthropologists and census officers recorded many anthropometrical details about Dalits: for example, their houses, dress and food habits (or lack thereof ), and village services. They created rich compendia of educational statistics, but failed to provide any qualitative information on Dalit women’s education. The British opened schools for all, but remained ambivalent about their interference in the social fabric of the country and did not fully support Dalits. As a result, the colonial state failed to record these lowly lives and their educational efforts, philosophies and agendas.1 Scholars have extensively discussed the educational agendas as well as the caste and class consciousness of the colonial government, which favoured high-caste, high-class women and their traditional norms over the lower classes. Moreover, except for some autobiographies, there is a lack of sources on Dalit women’s ideas about education. This chapter is organised thematically. The first section begins with an analysis of the ways upper castes forged an elitist, modern, but modest agenda of education for the ‘new woman’. The second section unravels how the elitist
agenda excluded the public, ‘unruly’, ‘low’ Dalit woman. Most importantly, the nationalist and liberal-feminist discourses on domesticity and education interpellated women as subjects of class, caste and nation, once again reconstructing class power, caste privilege and inequality. The third section addresses why feminists could not successfully present an ideology that would specifically address issues relevant to all Dalits. The conclusion brings together the tangled lives of women to reveal that, although liberal-feminist rhetoric alluded to all women as ‘depressed’, it failed to build bridges to actual Depressed Class women.
