Social Work and Political Visibility: Activism, Education and the Disciplining of Social Service

Abstract

This article considers social service work as a vector from which elite and middle-class Indian women claimed gendered citizenship during the 1940s and 1950s. The article highlights the ways in which these women emphasised social service work as a way to create visibility for themselves, while obscuring the labour of other women whom they claimed as clients. The article also traces the professionalisation of social work through the 1950s, a move which undermined these women’s claims to representative power and political visibility based on their social work.

Keywords:

• Discipline
• Indian government
• Partition
• political activism
• reconstruction
• social service
• social work
• women

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the work of Mytheli Sreenivas, Anjali Bhardwaj Datta and Uditi Sen, who organised the conference where this work was first presented and also did the heavy lifting of editing this volume. They have significantly improved this article, and I appreciate them. I also want to acknowledge and thank the two South Asia reviewers of this essay. Their comments were instrumental in revision and made the work much more than it had been previously.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kamala V. Nimbkar, ‘Training Women Volunteers for Social Welfare Work’, paper presented at the ‘International Seminar on Long-Term Educational and Training Programmes for the Advancement of Women in Asia’, Bombay, 27 Sept.–1 Oct. 1967. The programme was hosted by the National Council of Women, India, in collaboration with the Indian National Commission of UNESCO and the Maharashtra State Women’s Council, Bombay. Nimbkar was an interesting speaker at this event as she herself was not originally from India, but rather an American-born engineer. During the 1940s, Nimbkar was involved in the Congress Party and in Gandhian politics. She was also a devoted member of the National Council of Women, India, a national women’s rights organisation with strong ties to the international suffrage movement and other Indian women’s rights organisations.

2. Ibid., p. 1.

3. Emily Rook-Koepsel, Unity and Democracy in India: Understanding the All India Phenomenon, 1940–1960 (London: Routledge, 2019). Of course, there was a real difference between both the work and the recognition afforded to elite women, who were often the leaders of organisations, heads of social service programmes and the writers of documents, and middle-class women, who were privileged enough to be workers in these programmes and who occasionally show up in the historical record. I put them together in this article for two reasons. First, I want to contrast the recognition and respect afforded to both the organisers (elite) and social service workers (middle-class) as opposed to women and children who entered into the system of both social service work and political recognition as their clients—in other words, lower-class and lower-caste women. Second, while most of the benefits of visibility accrued to elite women, middle-class women were often the beneficiaries of the increased visibility of women as social service workers. It would certainly be interesting and valuable to more fully disaggregate this category, but it is not within the scope of this paper.

4. Mary E. John, ‘Alternate Modernities? Reservations and Women’s Movement in 20th Century India’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 35, no. 43/44 (21 Oct.–3 Nov. 2000), pp. 3822–9; and Maitrayee Chaudhuri, ‘The Indian Women’s Movement’, in Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.), Feminism in India (London: Zed Books, 2004), pp. 117–33.

5. Emily Rook-Koepsel, ‘Constructing Women’s Citizenship: The Local, National, and Global Civics Lessons of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall 2015), pp. 154–75.

6. Other paths included law, education, literature and the civil service. This article is focused exclusively on social service work.

7. Annie Devenish, ‘Performing the Political Self: A Study of Identity Making and Self Representation in the Autobiographies of India’s First Generation of Parliamentary Women’, in Women’s History Review, Vol. 22, no. 2 (2013), pp. 280–94.

8. Vasudha Chhotray and Fiona McConnell, ‘Certifications of Citizenship: The History, Politics and Materiality of Identity Documents in South Asian States and Diasporas’, in Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 26, no. 2 (2018), pp. 111–26; Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, ‘Her Body, Her Being: Of Widows and Abducted Women in Post-Partition India’, in Margaret Jolly and Kalpana Ram (eds), Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 58–81; Anupama Roy, Mapping Citizenship in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Susie Tharu, ‘Citizenship and Its Discontents’, in Janaki Nair and Mary E. John (eds), A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 216–42.

9. G.G. Dadlani, Survey of Social Work Education in India as Preparation for Work in the Field (Baroda: The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1961).

10. AIWC Bombay Presidency, Directory of Women’s Institutions, Part I: Social Section, K.J. Chitala (ed.) (Bombay: Servants of India Society, 1936), p. ii.

11. Hansa Mehta, ‘Random Thoughts on the Women’s Conference’, in Sarala Jag Mohan (ed.), Indian Women (Delhi: Butala & Co., 1981), p. 177.

12. AIWC papers, file no. 266, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Delhi. The resolution of the conference committee is also discussed at length in file no. 226, which includes official correspondence between representatives of the NCWI, the AIWC and the WIA on the proposed standing committee.

13. AIWC Bombay Presidency, Directory of Women’s Institutions, Part I: Social Section, p. 11.

14. Bureau of Education, India, Report of the Social Service and Public Administration Committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education in India, 1940, together with the Decision of the Board Themselves (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1941).

15. Rook-Koepsel, ‘Constructing Women’s Citizenship’; and Annie Devenish, Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–1960 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2019).

16. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, To Women (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1945).

17. Ibid., We see similar but more scientifically-inflected suggestions in the later handbook: see M.V. Moody, Social Work: Philosophy, Methods, and Fields (Dharwar: Karnatak University, 1974).

18. Clearly, the emphasis on touch was in conversation with claims about women’s capacity to challenge caste-based restrictions. Social work has long had a complicated relationship with caste because most of the women social service workers were upper caste and Hindu, but this is not within the scope of this article.

19. It would be wrong not to recognise the deeply unequal positions in which these relationships placed different women. Members of the workshop at which this paper was initially presented pointed out that the argument for recognising social service as the precursor to political visibility meant that potentially politically-engaged women needed to negate lower castes and lower-class women’s political agency in order to ‘advance the cause’. Several scholars have pointed out that this emphasis on social service foreclosed advocacy for other, potentially more equal, forms of political agency for women, including trade/labour unions for women. Additionally, by choosing to align political agency with social service, the middle- and upper-class women’s rights organisations made other kinds of women’s agency much less visible.

20. Renuka Ray, ‘Wanted—Social Workers’, in Roshni, Vol. 2, no. 4 (Dec. 1940), pp. 29–34.

21. Purnima Banerji, ‘Reconstructing India’, in Roshni, Vol. 2, no. 3 (Oct. 1940), p. 26.

22. Mala Khullar, ‘Emergence of the Women’s Movement in India’, in Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 2, no. 3 (1997), pp. 94–129.

23. All India Women’s Conference Papers, file nos. 292, 323, 382, NMML.

24. Nandini Deo, ‘Indian Women Activists and Transnational Feminism in the Twentieth Century’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 24, no. 4 (2012), pp. 149–74; and Kumud Sharma, ‘Towards Equality: A Journey of Discovery and Engagement’, in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 24, no. 1 (2017), pp. 80–97.

25. Padmini Sengupta, Women Workers of India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1960), pp. xii–xiii.

26. Ibid., pp. xiv–xv.

27. See, for example, Kamala Devi, ‘The Implications of Leadership’, in Roshni, Vol. 1, nos. 11–12 (Nov.–Dec. 1946), pp. 6–11.

28. Sengupta, Women Workers of India, p. 10.

29. Roshni Editorial Board, ‘In the Light’ section, in Roshni, Vol. 3, no. 6 (July 1948), p. 3; and Nirmala Banerjee, ‘Whatever Happened to the Dreams of Modernity? The Nehruvian Era and Women’s Position’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 17 (25 April–1 May 1998), pp. WS2–WS7.

30. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, “The Concept of Social Service: Its Relation to World Needs and Problems”: An Address Given by Rajkumari Amrit Kaur formerly Minister of Health of India at the Tenth International Conference of Social Work, Rome 1961 (London: National Council of Social Service, 1962).

31. Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

32. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), pp. 190–201; and Debjani Sengupta, ‘From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi: Rehabilitation, Representation, and the Partition of Bengal (1947)’, in Social Semiotics, Vol. 21, no. 1 (Feb. 2011), pp. 101–23.

33. Mitra Karabi, ‘The Role of Voluntary Organisations for Women in Pre-Independence India: Combatting the Challenge’, in The Social ION, Vol. 4, no. 1/2 (2015), pp. 16–24.

34. Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Armaity Desai, ‘Disaster and Social Work Responses’, in Lena Dominelli (ed.), Revitalising Communities in a Globalising World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 297–314; and Ayesha Kidwai ‘“Are We Women Not Citizens”: Mridula Sarabhai’s Social Workers and the Recovery of Abducted Women’, in Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin (eds), The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2018), pp. 162–87.

35. Ritu Menon, ‘Birth of Social Security Commitments: What Happened in the West’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000 (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), pp. 152–81.

36. Elmina R. Lucke, Remembering at Eighty Eight: Letters I Should Have Written (Athol, MA: Athol Press, 1987), pp. 174–84.

37. P.D. Kulkarni, ‘The Indigenous Base of Social Work Profession in India’, in Indian Journal of Social Work, Vol. 54 (1993), pp. 555–66; Menon and Bhasin, ‘Her Body, Her Being’, pp. 58–81.

38. Dr. B.H. Mehta, ‘Historical Background of Social Work in India’, in Current Trends in Social Work in India, Vol. 8, no. 1 (1952), pp. 1–14.

39. Ibid., p. 4.

40. Shankar A. Yelaja, ‘Schools of Social Work in India: Historical Developments, 1936–1966’, in The Indian Journal of Social Work, Vol. XXIX, no. 4 (Jan. 1969), pp. 361–78.

41. Dadlani, Survey of Social Work Education in India as Preparation for Work in the Field.

42. Ibid., pp. xii, 4–5, 8–11.

43. Lucke, Remembering at Eighty Eight, pp. 151–4.

44. Dr. J.M. Kumarappa, ‘Education for Professional Social Work’, in Current Trends in Social Work in India (Bombay: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 1952).

45. There was concern after World War II about WAC(I) returnees, with some publications speculating that war nurses were more likely to take up prostitution—hence the state attempt to rehabilitate the returnees: Yasmin Khan, ‘Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India’, in History Workshop Journal, Vol. 73, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 241–58.

46. Kumarappa, ‘Education for Professional Social Work’.

47. Review Committee on Social Work Education, Social Work Education in Indian Universities (New Delhi: University Grants Commission, 1965), p. 3.

48. Ibid., pp. 4–8.

49. Ibid., p. 6.

50. Dadlani, Survey of Social Work Education in India as Preparation for Work in the Field.

51. Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 85.

52. G.G. Dadlani, ‘Introduction’, in G.G. Dadlani, Survey of Social Work Education in India as Preparation for Work in the Field (Baroda: The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1961), pp. x–xii.

53. Ibid., p. xii.

54. P.T. Thomas et al., Report on the Beggar Survey in Madras City (A Study under the Auspices of the Research Programmes Committee of the Planning Commission), Madras School of Social Work, Indian Planning Commission, Research Programmes Committee, Oct. 1956.

55. Ibid., p. 4.

56. Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 142; and Chitra Sinha, ‘Images of Motherhood: The Hindu Code Debates’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 42, no. 43 (Oct. 2007), pp. 49–57 [54].

57. Oral Evidence Tendered to the Hindu Law Committee, 1945 (Madras: Government Press, 1947).

58. Ibid., p. 33.

59. Ibid., p. 17.

60. Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organisations (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 13–4.