Women and Indian Nationalism

The political role of women as a subject for research is of recent origin in India.¹ It is significant that there are so few studies of women's role in the nationalist movement or of the implicationssocial or political-of their momentous entry into the public sphere. Important works on the national movement mostly fail to examine the significance of women's participation in the struggles.² Analysis in this area so far has received insufficient attention in histories of India both before and after 1975 when the need to study women's role in history began to be acknowledged world-wide. One searches in vain for an adequate study of women's participation in nationalist historiography.³

Studies published between 1968 and 1988 do touch upon various aspects and dimensions of women's participation in the national struggle for freedom. There are some factual accounts: most standard histories of the national movement mention women's entry into the Civil Disobedience Movement.⁴ Some historians have noted the emancipatory effects of such participation.⁵ Women in revolutionary terrorism have also been described⁶ and women have been occasionally discussed as a political nuisance.⁷ Some accounts of contemporaries who participated in the movement refer to the strength and broad base acquired by it as a whole through women's participation.⁸

It is important to note that in general, information on women in the work of modern Indian historians writing in English prior to 1975 relates to women in elite sections of society. The lives and conditions of the large majority of women, or their response to changing historical forces have consistently been unexplored and thus marginalised in history.⁹ Apart from a few autobiographies of women leaders, mostly from elite groups, we know little about the lives, the beliefs or the social background of the mass of women who entered the movement in the different regions, as virtually no work has been done in this area, except in the last few years. Most of the accounts of women's role in the national movement are descriptive not critical or analytical. They do not examine either the reasons or the implications of this spontaneous upsurge of political activity by women of all classes. The dominance of elite perspectives is best demonstrated by the efforts of most historians to link women's participation in the struggles with women's education or the social reform movement, ignoring the large number of women from the peasantry and the working class, including prostitutes, who took part in the various struggles directly, or the thousands of housewives mostly mothers and wives-who provided indirect support by shouldering family responsibilities when their men went to jail or got killed. It is surprising that the socioeconomic impact of colonialism on women's lives and beliefs, turning them into sources of radical inspiration for the youth of East Bengal recorded by a British administrator as early as 1907¹⁰ and repeatedly mentioned by Gandhi-has received so little attention from historians so far.

There are some exceptions to the general pattern; for Instance, Bipan Chandra,¹¹ who has discussed the women's movement, women's participation in peasant and trade union movements along with women's role in the freedom struggle. After Independence, state- sponsored directories of freedom fighters including women were compiled in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Gujarat, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. In general, the approach in these was laudatory and enumerative rather than analytical. Where analysis was attempted, it tended to be brief. Some references to women freedom fighters are scattered in miscellaneous sources all over India and in works on Gandhi.

Existing research on women and Indian nationalism can therefore be described as noncomprehensive, cursory in nature, and generally a "history from above". ¹² Proper reconstruction of this period of Indian history, with a special focus on women's political participation and the women's movement which was a concomitant part of and yet separate from the national movement, is now essential for a reinterpretation of these movements which were entangled with one another. More local and regional studies are required to provide indepth data, but macro-level analyses also need to be pushed forward to eliminate simplistic generalisations that continue to be prevalent. For example, better explanations are required for regional variations in the level and nature of women's participation than the single factor of female literacy.

The relevance of a study of women's role in the national movement cannot be over estimated for either the discipline of history or the study of women. But where do we start and what are our sources? There is a scarcity and unevenness of material in terms of region and time periods. Recent works on the women's movement and women's political participation have used a multiplicity of published and unpublished archival records but we cannot say that such sources have been fully utilised. Government documents form a major source of information. Including secret police and intelligence reports, not all of which have been analysed. Many private collections are still not open to scholars. Some sources of data are outside this country.

Records of some political groups were destroyed by police action or otherwise through riots or careless maintenances.¹³ Some were ad hoc in nature or not systematic.¹⁴ We maintain that adequate search for and use of even conventional sources still remains to be done systematically.¹⁵

Analysis of the records of women's organisations has already yielded valuable insights into the national movement, and the attitudes of the British Government, the bureaucracy and political elites as perceived by the leadership of the women's movement. It is to be expected that elite women's organisations would have maintained detailed records.¹⁶ Many journals in India and Britain of this period (1857-1947) also contain highly useful material, with predictably more information for some regions than others. Other rewarding sources such as the journals of women's organisations which were mouthpieces and/or forums in which debates on women's issues were conducted; women's autobiographies: collections of speeches and essays by women leaders (e.g. Besant, Naidu, Cousins); regional literature, reflecting variations in social perception and the response of specific societies and communities to the movements; proceedings of local women's associations etc. would certainly need to be analysed in this massive effort.

Oral histories and reminiscences of women in the national movement are to some extent available on tape in some archives. Much more needs to be done in this respect. Interviews with family members of women who participated in the national as well as the women's movement, and in local women's associations could form a valuable source of data. If women who participated sponatoneously in the struggles refuse to or find it painful to talk about that period now,¹⁷ what does that mean? Or when lower middle class women from small towns tell us that their mothers knew and encouraged or covered up their activities in revolutionary movements¹⁸ how should we interpret that fact?

So many questions need satisfactory answers and some answers lead to further questions:

1. How did participation affect the women's families and the women as individuals? Did it affect their position in the family? If not, why?
2. What were the changes that were brought into their lives as a result? Did social values change? How did society react then and later?
3. What were the facilitating factors-were they common to all women participants? In all regions? Why do most accounts mention male encouragement, and so few the attitude of other women, or children in the family?
4. What were the social strata of the women in each region to which the participants belonged? Who took care of their familial responsibilities (including earning) when women went to jail?
5. What was the relationship between nationalist ideology and women's issues in the minds of men and women? Did women participate only for the country's swaraj or also for women's freedom? Did political participation aid women's liberation?
6. What were the regional patterns in women's participation? For instance, in Bengal, many women expressed their nationalist feelings by joining terrorist organisations or supporting them in many ways, in addition to all the overt ways in which they were encouraged to participate.
7. What were the patterns of women's participation n other movements in different regions which fought against exploitation, and ultimately against imperialism? Why have they been ignored so long?
8. What was the role of the media-newspapers, films, local journals etc. in all this during this period?
9. What were the perceptions of the leadership about women's participation? Why, and how did gender equality get incorporated in the Fundamental Rights Resolution of 1931? What connections, if any, did it have with contemporary events within and outside India (Geneva Conference on Women's Equality, 1931, Resolution of Chinese Communist Party on the 'same line'. 1931: Lahore Conference of Asian Women for Equality, 1931 preceding Geneva), or with internal political imperatives?
10. Why did the Indian National Congress fail to take any follow-up action on the Resolution for nearly a decade?

This volume is an extremely modest attempt to begin filling some of the gaps and to begin posing such and many more questions.

In its report, Towards Equality, the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) accused the government, the educational system, social analysts, the media, political parties, trade unions as well as women's organizations - i.e. most members of the intelligentsia of a failure to understand the implications of gender equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The Committee was especially struck by the total invisibility and neglect of the economic roles played by the "overwhelming majority" of women among the peasantry, in most rural industries and services, and among the urban poor in policies for agricultural, industrial and infrastructural development. Despite the growing evidence of a decline in poor women's economic opportunities and consequent distress available from Census and a few other sources, official planners, social scientists and others continued to view women as economically inactive and dependent consumers, whose basic needs were confined to "education, health and welfare" not employment.¹⁹

Seeking an explanation for the wide gap between the reality of poor women's lives and official and academic beliefs that women were at the most "supplementary earners" for the family, whose contribution to the family's survival or improvement was "dispensable",²⁰ the Committee attributed it to the class bias of the intelligentsia, which projected middle class experience as normal for all women.

The development of women's studies in the post-1975 period, however, added other dimensions to this explanation. The theory of 'sanskritisation'-explaining a long-established pattern of social behaviour among upwardly mobile social groups-offered a handy framework for the social status of a family being linked to 'non-worker' status of women. or their 'withdrawal' from the labour force, among families or groups (caste, community, class) seeking higher status within the social hierarchy.²¹ A more outspoken point of view came from a senior demographer, who in his days as a development administrator had lost a battle to include better economic opportunities for women within the Community Development Programme that 'fuzzy' definitions and silence on the value of women's work was part of a deliberate effort to "keep women subjugated economically, socially and politically".²² Another scholar, examining the Interrelationship between the nineteenth century social reform movement, the debate on women's education, and the emergence of a new family ideology among the educated urban middle class, found that this 'dominant' social ideology bore considerable resemblance to the gender role ideology of the British middle class of the Victorian period. Interestingly, the propagators of the ideology took little cognizance of not only the reality of roles played by the majority of women, but even the 'voices from within' of women in their own homes whom they were seeking to educate and transform.²³

The CSWI had criticised the educational system for its failure to inculcate the value of equality among the youth, to counter the influence of inherited traditions and socialisation practices. The Committee's report gave substantial evidence of the persistent 'ambivalence' among educationists and policy makers regarding women's expected or desired roles in

Soefety.²⁴

The absence of any serious examination of the political significance of the acceptance of gender equality as a basic principle of the Indian political system also suggests a critical lacuna in academic assessment. Why has this "radical departure from the inherited social system"²⁵ been treated so cursorily even dismissively, by scholars? A member of the CSWI has argued that this gap in critical analysis has strengthened a dominant tendency among the intelligentsia to view gender equality as the culmination of the nineteenth century social reform movements, which threw up women's status as a major issue for debate and change.²⁶

In our opinion, this perception of a linear connection between the reform movements and gender equality ignores several critical issues and contradictions within the reform movements.²⁷ It has certainly prevented adequate analysis of the politically critical role of gender equality within Indian nationalism and the political system born out of it. Thirdly it has altogether ignored women's own views, aspirations and needs that provided many additional dimensions to the multiple struggles that contributed to the anti-imperialist movement. We feel it therefore necessary to contextualizse this collection within these new perspectives on the social reform movements.

Most of the nineteenth century social reformers were male and members of the learned elites. The majority were products of the new system of 'English' education, though some came from the indigenous traditional systems. All were scholars in their own right, who had mastered one or more of the major philosophico-cultural-religious systems that met in India, modified through centuries of acculturation in the Indian sub-continent. The amalgam of indigenous cultural pluralism-mediated by centuries of philosophical efforts to systematise or homogentse-for want of an alternative word came to be known as Hindu religion, philosophy and culture.

Reaction to the economic and political changes that were initiated or accelerated after the British emerged as the undisputed dominant power found many forms of expression. The cultural form, among the highly literate new middle class-pioneers as well as products and beneficiaries of the new social order-has overshadowed all others, because of (a) the prolific literature they produced; (b) the social debates that they stirred up: and (c) the consequent high profile which they acquired among the urban literati. There were many other mass stirrings, some of which even erupted into rebellions against British rule and its socio- economic consequences but they lacked the recording and publicising capacity of the literati. As a result, the link between these cultural movements as precursors of the growth of national consciousness and nationalism has received much greater attention from historians and contemporary commentators.²⁸

It is interesting to note that while early twentieth century historians and analysts were effusive in acknowledging the contribution of the reform movements in improving women's status, some of the contemporary analysts²⁹ of the movements keep silent on this issue, not even mentioning why the status of women acquired such a centre-stage focus in all the reform debates. Especially when the critiques are set within the context of the discourses on 'modernisation', 'nationalism' or 'revivalism' this extraordinary omission appears to be doubly curious.

Of the three cultural systems absorbed by the nineteenth century reformers, the Hindu system perhaps retained or demonstrated the maximum ambivalence between patriarchy and matriarchy. ³⁰ Unashamedly anti-women practices like child marriage, female infanticide, polygamy various forms of oppression of widows etc. existed simultaneously with wide- spread worship of female deities and well-developed literature and rituals on cults of the mother goddess, in both scriptural and popular versions.³¹ By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the extension of this mother-worship to the emerging consciousness of the nation visualized as Mother India, enslaved by alien rulers, was an easy transition for many. By the early twentieth century the symbolism of Mother India became acceptable to nationalists of non-Hindu heritage also, possibly because of its popular appeal and potential for revolutionary mobilisation.

The nineteenth century reform however, were neither unanimous nor homogeneous in their inspiration and objectives. The common element was their preoccupation with problems that primarily affected women in their own social class and milieu, and made them vulnerable to humiliation. These 'social evils' brought charges of barbarity and uncivilised behaviour from the new rulers, the new teachers and the new dispensers of rewards and recognition. This preoccupation with the West, either to emulate, to assimilate, or to reject, was an inevitable consequence of the circumstances which made the cultural contact possible. Changing socioeconomic relations, the growth of urban living, new modes of communication and education, as well as the pressure to acknowledge the scientific, technological and political dominance of Europe over the inherited cultural identities unleashed several tendencies that brought about the many contradictions within the reform movements.

Most of the reform movements combined some elements of revivalism, to assert or reinforce a desired or perceived cultural identity, as distinct from that of the rulers, along with radical or reformist challenges to some facets of the inherited cultural systems. Intellectual acceptance of the need for modernisation and progress, for national resurgence, and eventual overthrow of imperalism became increasingly marked, throwing up the need for new social ideologies, including a transformed social construction of gender.

Endnote

1. Dasgupta, Kalpana, 1976, Women on the Indian Scene, New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, p. 16.
2. Examples are: Tarachand. 1961-72. History of the Freedom Movement in India. 4 Vols., Delhi, Government of India. Publications Division: and E.M.S. Namboodiripad, 1986, History of Indian Freedom Struggle, Trivandrum. Social Scientist Press.
3. Pearson, Gail, 1981, 'Nationalism. Universalisation and the Extended Female Space in Bombay City". in Gail Minault (ed.), The Extended Family : Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, Delhi, Chanakya Publications. pp. 175. 188.
4. Manmohan Kaur, 1985, Women in India's Freedom Struggle, Delhi, Sterling Publishers, S.R. Bakshi, 1988, Mutiny to Independence, New Delhi, Deep and Deep Publications.
5. Majumdar. R.C., 1962. 1963, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 3 Vols.. Calcutta. K.L.

Mukhopadhyaya, and 1969, The Struggle for Freedom, Bombay, pp. 998-999: J.P. Suda, 1969. Indian National Movement, Meerut; Bipan Chandra, 1971, Modern India, New Delhi, pp. 184-186 and 1988, India's Struggle for Freedom 1858-1947, Delhi, Viking, p. 528, Sitaran-i Singh, 1968, Nationalism and Social Reform in India. 1885-1920, New Delhi, Rampart: Sumit Sarkar. 1983, Modem India, Delhi, Macmillan India Ltd., p. 290.

6. Majumdar. R.C., 1963, op.cit.,Vol. 111, pp. 280-281, 414, and Suda, op.cit., pp. 243-244.
7. Brown, Judith. 1972, Gandhi and the Civil Disobedience Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 146, 168.
8. Desai, Mahadev. n.d., The Story of Bardoli, among others and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1945, Discovery of India, Calcutta, p. 32.
9. Dasgupta, op.cit,p.5.
10. Le Mesurier, Unrecorded Confidential Proceedings, Morley and Minto Papers, Home Department, Government of India, India Office Library, London, and National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
11. Bipan Chandra, 1971, op. cit.
12. Alexander, Rajani, 1984, "Participation and Perceptions: Women and the Indian Independence Movement", Samya Shakti, Vol.1, No.22, pp.1-5.
13. Politically redical and mass-based organizations and terrorists kept scant records for security reasons and even if they did keep them, these were destroyed in one way or another. Refer, for example, to Geraldine Forbes, 1981, "The Indian Women's Movement: A Struggle for Women's Rights or National Liberation?" in Gail Minault (ed.), 1981, op.cit.,p.77. However, a member of the Communist Party has used reports of samitis material from files of publications preserved in party archives and other papers including the memoirs of comrades. See preface in Renu Chakravartty, 1980, Communists in the Indian Women's Movement, New Delhi, People's Publishing House.
14. Forbes, 1981, op.cit., p.50.
15. See for example, Aparna Basu, 1976/1990, 'The Role of Women in the Indian Struggle for Freedom", in B.P. Nanda (ed.). Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and Vikas/Radiant Publishers, pp. 16-40. This paper has utilised a variety of sources including transcripts of interviews which are available at NMML, New Delhi.
16. Forbes. 1981, op.cit., p.50. See also Patricia Caplan, 1985, Class and Gender in India, Women and their Organisations in a South Indian City, London and New York, Tavistock Publications-, J.M. Everett, 1979, Women and Social Change in India, New Delhi, Heritage: Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, 1990. Women's Struggle: A History of the All India Women's Conference. 1927-1990, Delhi, Manohar.
17. Desai, Neera, 1989, "Family Strategies in South Gujarat' (mimeo).
18. Some of these facts emerged during discussions which were recorded in 1983 in Calcutta by the Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS), New Delhi, Transcripts are available with CWDS.
19. The Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSM), Towards Equality, 1974, New Delhi, Government of India

Anjana Johny