Introduction: A Country of Her Making

Abstract

This Introduction frames a collection of papers that explore the roles played by women—as volunteers, organisers, bureaucrats, politicians and citizens—in shaping the emerging ideologies and structures of independent India. Although women’s participation is both understudied and inadequately theorised in existing scholarship, the papers in this collection demonstrate that the decades following India’s Independence witnessed the participation of women in every sphere of politics and nation-building. The introductory essay tracks the limits and possibilities of women’s agency and gendered citizenship in these spheres to historicise the women’s movement during the post-Independence decades, and to examine its fraught relationship with feminism, patriarchal society and state politics.

Keywords:

• Activism
• development
• feminism
• independent India
• Indian women
• nation
• social service
• women’s agency
• women’s labour

Historians of the women’s movement in India are faced with a curious paradox. Although the late colonial period witnessed women’s participation in different spheres of politics and social reform, an apparent retreat seemed to characterise the years immediately after Independence. Consequently, the 1950s, and to some extent the 1960s, are seen as ‘dead decades’ for Indian feminism, which would only re-emerge in the 1970s with the rise of autonomous women’s movements. Working within this framework of a post-Independence lull in Indian feminism, scholars tend to assume that women played less prominent roles within the post-colonial polity, and that the era was marked by an absence of activism for women’s rights.¹ This leads to the paradox. How then do we explain the individual trajectories of Indian women who took leading roles in the women’s movement and the nationalist movement? Did prominent women activists simply abdicate the fight for women’s rights to the nation-state?² Or, did women active in the nationalist movement fail to see a public role for themselves within an emerging national polity? Moreover, how might we understand the struggles of women at all levels who did not form autonomous women’s movements, but who worked within other formal and informal institutions?

This collection of ten essays critically engages with the so-called ‘dead decades’ of Indian feminism. It suggests that this period of apparent inactivity might be less a reflection of the ground realities and more an effect of historiographical orientations that tend to validate specific patterns and actions over others. The legacy of the nationalist movement and the contexts of anti-imperial struggle foregrounded certain kinds of events and narratives as the mainstays of women’s history in modern India. The scholarship centres Indian women as the subjects of reform in the nineteenth century, and documents the rise of autonomous women’s organisations in the early decades of the twentieth century.³ This was an uneven and fractured process, with some historians tracing the beginnings of a feminist consciousness to the Bombay Presidency in the nineteenth century, while others locate it in the ‘second wave’ of the Indian women’s movement during the inter-war period, when national associations claiming to represent the interests of all Indian women were formed.⁴ Thus, the ability to form women’s associations emerges as one key element of an active period in the history of women in India. A second key element conventionally used to mark an active period in women’s history is Gandhian nationalism. More specifically, women’s roles in the Gandhian anti-colonial struggle marks their entry into formal politics, and accounts for women’s political mobilisation on a mass scale.⁵

This orientation of historiography, which privileges women’s autonomous organising and anti-colonial struggle, helps to explain why the 1950s came to be characterised as a period of inactivity. In the immediate aftermath of Independence, the focus of political activity moved away from confrontational models on the national scale.⁶ With the nationalist leadership coming into full possession of the apparatus of the state, a politics of mobilising support for petitions or protests gave way to a more collaborationist orientation towards the state. Widespread support for the Nehruvian vision of national development ushered in a period of lull in popular movements in the regions where the Congress Party enjoyed legitimacy. Even the Communist Party of India moved away from Ranadive’s confrontational model into a parliamentary model of opposition. The ‘lull’ in the sphere of confrontational politics thus characterised the 1950s as a whole and cannot be seen as unique to the women’s movement.

While broad themes of social reform and nationalism have often framed historical scholarship on women’s activity during the colonial period, the hegemonic framework of national planned development has come to dominate policy orientations and scholarship on the post-colonial period. Despite their centrality to the construction of a national identity, women remained marginalised in the discourse of development.⁷ Thus, as Nirmala Banerjee notes, India’s first three Five-Year Plans ignored the role of women as workers and contributors to the national economy. This was partly born of the entrenched patriarchal discourses that privileged the domestic and reproductive roles of women, and partly born of the refusal to engage with the unorganised sector of the economy where the vast majority of Indian women worked.⁸ The aim instead was to achieve a ‘modern’ nation-state and this rationale of modernity centred the male breadwinner who was also universalised as a political citizen.⁹ Women’s labour was configured and co-opted in this discourse, but their participation was once again justified as service to the nation This deeply gendered archive in turn informed malestream scholarship on Nehruvian India and the early decades of India’s experience of planned economic development, where women either disappeared as a distinct category of analysis, or were seen to have little or no role in the project of national development.¹⁰

The essays in this volume expand their investigations into the lives and activities of Indian women beyond the themes of reform and political resistance, and revisit the theme of national development, by focusing on projects and processes in which women took an active part. They evaluate women’s diverse roles in the 1950s in light of the dominant historical developments that characterised the decade: namely, national development, democratic elections and political mobilisations, welfare projects, and the myriad legacies of Partition including rehabilitation of refugees and transformation of urban landscapes. Taken together, they suggest that far from a period of inactivity, the decades following Independence witnessed the active participation of women in every sphere of politics and nation-building. The contributions map the participation of women both as individuals and as a collective group who worked through different women’s organisations and left their mark on various institutions of the state. Each of these perspectives provides important insights into the limits and possibilities of the agency of women and patterns of gendered citizenship in post-colonial India.

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The essays can be organised into three broad thematic groups, each privileging a distinct location for women’s agency in the post-Independence period, that is, within the formal institutions of the state, within movements and spaces distant from the state, and last but not least, within a gendered space of service that enjoyed proximity to the state and yet existed outside its formal structures. Several articles track women’s agency within state institutions through attention to elections and legislative bodies. Ornit Shani analyses the diverse roles played by women in the first elections held in independent India as members of the electorate, as aspiring candidates, and as members of women’s organisations that supported women voters and candidates.¹¹ Women’s participation was seen as crucial in proving the democratic credentials of the election process, and the Congress Party leadership expressed a formal commitment to increasing women’s candidature and mobilising voters. However, in practice, women’s participation was limited by the regulatory frameworks of voter registration and by negotiations over party tickets at the provincial level that treated women as one of several minority identities whose claims had to be balanced against each other. This contradiction between a stated commitment to women’s inclusion and practices of exclusion continued, albeit differently, even after women won elections. Wendy Singer examines how women legislators in the Bihar and Madras legislative assemblies, and in parliament, negotiated their gendered positions within male-centred institutions.¹² As she argues, women’s focus—like that of their male colleagues—centred on everyday governance. But in the process of tackling the diverse array of issues that confronted their constituents in the 1950s and early 1960s, women legislators both helped to create new modes of Indian parliamentary democracy and challenged their marginalisation within legislative processes. Humaira Chowdhury takes a more intimate view of women vis-à-vis formal state politics by examining the nearly forgotten history of Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul.¹³ The only Muslim woman in the Constituent Assembly, Rasul served in the Rajya Sabha and was elected to the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) Legislative Assembly. Bringing together Rasul’s public utterances alongside her published autobiography and private papers, Chowdhury’s essay traces the articulation of self by a Muslim woman who, despite her elite status, was doubly marginalised by her gender and religious background.

Several contributors map women’s roles in a sphere of nation-building activity that was proximate to the state but was, strictly speaking, not located within formal state structures. Their articles collectively expand our understanding of women’s politics in the first decades of Independence by illuminating an intermediary gendered political space for advocacy, activism and institution-building that was located in between state structures and patriarchal society. Abigail McGowan identifies the institutionalisation of crafts as a key site of women’s leadership in these intermediary spaces.¹⁴ Focusing on the efforts of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar, she demonstrates that these prominent women both helped to create the idea of India as a crafts nation and enabled new roles for women in the field. Yet their initiatives also faced structural and ideological challenges, illustrating how patriarchal constraints limited even well-connected women during the first post-colonial decade. Another important institution in this intermediary political space was the Central Social Welfare Board (CSWB), a state-funded body that existed outside state ministries and relied heavily on voluntary labour. Taylor Sherman investigates the CSWB’s Welfare Extension Projects (WEPs) as an example of the directions Indian socialism and Indian state feminism took during the 1950s.¹⁵ The WEPs suggest a curious dynamic that may be characteristic of these avowed socialist and feminist frameworks, whereby in order to be ‘responsive’ to the needs of poorer women, middle-class volunteers first set out to convince them of what their needs were. Mytheli Sreenivas uncovers a similar dynamic between middle-class women volunteers and the targets of their service in the field of family planning.¹⁶ Her essay documents the efforts of the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI) to make family planning a component of national development. While they claimed to meet poor women’s needs, family planners’ own records suggest that women were often sceptical of their claims. More than serving poor women, the AIWC and FPAI were perhaps most successful in carving out a space for the gendered citizenship of the middle-class family planner herself, who claimed to mediate between the masses of ordinary women and the development goals of the post-colonial state.

The question of mediation is equally important for Emily Rook-Koepsel’s investigation of women’s social service work.¹⁷ Middle-class women’s commitments to social service, she argues, offered a path for them to claim gendered citizenship because they served poor women. But at the same time, their citizenship claims obscured the labour of women they identified as their clients. However, after the 1950s, even this limited avenue for middle-class women’s citizenship narrowed as social work became professionalised. The potential contradictions and limitations of women’s social service work is similarly apparent in Uditi Sen’s analysis of refugee rehabilitation in West Bengal.¹⁸ As she argues, the impetus for providing vocational training to refugee women was an autonomous innovation by women activists across the political spectrum. Yet Sen also makes clear the limitations of such efforts, which failed to challenge the patriarchal characterisation of all single and widowed refugee women as permanent liabilities of the state. These limitations were the result both of leaders’ own negotiations with patriarchal state structures, and their inability to imagine solidarities with—rather than only service to—the refugee women they encountered.

Together, the articles by McGowan, Sherman, Sreenivas, Rook-Koepsel and Uditi Sen all suggest that middle-class women, both individually and collectively, aimed to contribute to national development through service. They were not merely collaborators or unpaid volunteers who executed state policies, but were innovators, policymakers and institution-builders who connected service to nation-building projects. In the process, they created new spaces of gendered public activity and articulated new claims of citizenship for themselves in the nation-state. However, their service was not always successful in promoting the specific needs of women. Despite some evidence of attempts to respond with genuine empathy and flexibility, middle-class women activists did not develop a critique of state policies that we might today recognise as a progressive feminist politics. Moreover, they stopped short of forging solidarities with the women they served, which left them reliant on the patronage and goodwill of the post-colonial state, even while they functioned outside its formal institutions.

Contributions by Samita Sen and Anjali Bhardwaj Datta examine women’s activities within institutions and communities that were more distant from the state. Samita Sen analyses women’s activism in unions to challenge existing historical accounts that have either lamented women’s marginality in labour politics or celebrated their participation and leadership.¹⁹ By situating middle-class and working-class women’s labour activism in the context of their negotiation of familial relations and social norms, Samita Sen offers a more complex narrative. As she suggests, multiple contingencies—and no one single historical shift—shaped women’s responses to the political mainstreaming of trade unions in the decades after Independence. Bhardwaj Datta’s article considers women’s complex engagements with families and communities by focusing on the negotiations of Delhi’s Muslim women in the aftermath of Partition.²⁰ Locating women’s agency in their everyday lived experiences and in their strategies of survival, she shows how their efforts were critical to claiming space and belonging, generating family income, and developing small capitalism in Delhi’s Old City. Together, both essays extend the spheres of women’s political and economic agency well beyond the state and its proximate institutions to make visible the scope and variety of women’s activity within families, communities, workplaces and neighbourhoods.

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How do these contributions intervene in a historiography that has privileged social reform and nationalism in the colonial period, documented women’s marginalisation from development after Independence, and assumed a ‘lull’ in women’s political activity during the 1950s and early 1960s? Broadly speaking, across various areas of focus, feminist historians of South Asia have investigated the reconstitution of patriarchy in different modern contexts. For instance, in their influential collection, Recasting Women, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid locate this reconstitution within the spaces of civil society, arguing that the collusion of colonial and nationalist patriarchies before Independence has had an enduring impact on the gendering of society, economy and politics in post-colonial India. During the colonial period, as Sangari and Vaid suggest, the reform of gender realigned patriarchal relations with emergent forms of social stratification, especially class. Gendered social reform in India was therefore less a democratising movement to challenge oppression, and more a modernising movement that consolidated and homogenised the power of the middle classes.²¹ This formulation helps to explain the constraints imposed upon women and their modes of participation in politics, and in civil society more broadly. In Partha Chatterjee’s terms, the nationalist resolution of the ‘women’s question’ pushed women back into the domestic and private realm while enabling the construction of a political identity for the male Indian nationalist.²² While Gandhian mobilisation of women allowed them to enter the public sphere of politics, it did so by extending the domestic space of spiritualism into the public political sphere and allowing women to perform selected roles which did not challenge the overall status quo of gender relations.²³

However, despite these discursive and material constraints, women were actively engaged in and responded to the dynamics of colonialism and nationalism.²⁴ Research on the struggles of lower-caste and working-class women documents their transgression of the binaries—of public and private, of political and domestic—that marked the discursive terrains of a modernising patriarchy aligned with the emerging power of India’s middle classes.²⁵ For middle-class and upper-caste women, the refashioning of the ‘new Indian woman’ created opportunities in the public sphere, which also involved a renegotiation of the family and the household.²⁶ Women’s activism, in turn, transformed the spaces of both civil society and formal politics. For instance, as Mrinalini Sinha has argued, an emergent national women’s movement during the inter-war decades enabled Indian nationalism to seize from the colonial state the mantle of social reform, and to claim that it represented both the social and political aspirations of a modernising India. In Sinha’s terms, organised Indian feminism thus prompted the rearticulation of the social and political spheres and, for a brief period, figured women as ‘paradigmatic citizen-subjects of a nation-state-in-the-making’ whose relationship to the state was not mediated by religious communities.²⁷

Partition and the transfer of state power in 1947 accelerated and transformed this alignment of the social and political, as the ideological imaginings of the nation began to merge with the policies and powers of the post-colonial state. The essays in this volume suggest that during the 1950s, when this new relationship between nation and state was being worked out, women’s activities were important to forging these new alignments. The post-colonial era opened up new opportunities for women, especially with different models of and experiments in development and access to state resources. In electoral politics, women competed with men to participate in elections, both as candidates and as voters. Women also created new institutions, such as those to advance crafts, and generated new discourses of governance, such as elevating family planning to the development agenda. They worked towards the radical possibility of the economic self-sufficiency of single refugee women, and transgressed class, caste and gender roles in organising labour movements. Even while negotiating the myriad prefigured roles imposed upon them by malestream politics and modernising patriarchies, they radically expanded the spaces of politics and articulated multiple possibilities for national citizenship. At the same time, individually and collectively, women’s work to build new institutions and to chart new terrains of public activity helped the post-colonial nation-state to claim the modernising aspirations of nationalism, as the driver of both social and political change in the aftermath of colonialism.

Consequently, the work that women did—as elected officials, as institution-builders, as social service workers, as voters, as economic actors—was not at the margins of the post-colonial polity but was arguably central to nation-building projects in the first decades after Independence. How do we understand this space of gendered politics, characterised by service, institution-building and ambitions for broader outreach? Its relationship to feminism is fraught and can be interpreted in diverse ways. For instance, Sherman argues that though imposed from the top-down, the CSWB’s Welfare Extension Projects ultimately strove to improve the lives and livelihoods of the women they sought to train and liberate in a flexible, incremental and decentralised manner that can be understood as ‘first step feminism’. The same cannot be said of the projects of family planning undertaken by the women of the AIWC and FPAI, who retained a rigid and top-down vision of family planning that imposed the state’s developmental agenda of population control upon poor women, while ignoring their alternative ideas around family and reproductive rights. Though the women spearheading these efforts were aligned with the Indian women’s movement, their activities shared disturbing structural similarities with imperial feminism, as the language of women’s rights was ultimately employed to further the agenda of the developmental nation-state, over and above the actual needs of women.²⁸

Furthermore, the intermediary spaces of public activity that women activists created were largely accessible only to middle-class and elite women, suggesting that the emergent modes of women’s citizenship represented realignments of class, alongside gender. Indeed, as many of our essays demonstrate, these spaces were often developed at the cost of the autonomous voices of working-class, depressed-caste and poor women, whom more privileged women claimed to represent. Even while the expansion of the sphere of gendered politics and citizenship may have provided a pathway to participation for some ordinary women as voters, volunteers or paid employees of women-led organisations and institutions, many others, such as the Muslim women of Delhi’s Old City considered in Bhardwaj Datta’s article, were left outside its purview, and crafted their own means of survival and negotiation of the post-colonial transition. Further complicating this picture is the finding—highlighted in several of the articles here—that even while women-led projects of refugee rehabilitation or national development marginalised poorer women, they nevertheless made visible the dissonance between elite agendas and subaltern needs. Often, the very women who imposed their own agendas upon poorer women faithfully recorded the push-back they received. Thus, paradoxically, elite women’s attempts to serve and/or save their less fortunate sisters created ruptures in the supposed alignment between the post-colonial nation-state and women’s activism—and between political policy and social transformation—through which the alternative priorities, consciousness and orientations of working-class and rural women became visible. This was, perhaps, an unintended consequence of the intermediary space of women’s public activity, and its realignment of the political and social in the space of the nation-state.

The essays in this collection are by no means representative of the entire sphere of women’s activism and politics during the first two decades of Indian Independence. The contributions lean towards mapping out the agency of middle-class or elite women, and without exception privilege the urban sphere of activism and organisation. While the exploration of the career of Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul and the collective negotiations of Partition’s fallouts in Old Delhi by Muslim women do provide a departure from the overwhelming focus on Hindu actors, much more research is necessary in order to fully understand how, and to what extent, religious difference shaped the specificity of women’s experience and agency during these decades. Dalit women, and the specificities of gendered Dalit politics, are also not represented. The unmistakable bias towards Hindu, middle-class and urban women emerges partly from limitations of the archive, where rural women and the poor are grossly under-represented. This bias likely also derives from the specificities of the post-Independence decades when the leaders of the women’s movement and the women leaders of the labour movement, as well as the unpaid women who volunteered in various welfarist schemes, were drawn from an urban, educated, upper-caste and middle-class milieu. Within existing scholarship, it is these women who are held responsible for the assumed quietism of the post-Independence decades. While this quietism has been variously explained as complacency, accommodation, or a naïve belief in, and over-reliance on, the post-colonial state as a vector for social change, none of these explanations have been grounded in historical research into specific actors and contexts. The essays in this collection, partly because of their collective bias towards middle-class actors, begin to historicise the women’s movement during the post-Independence decades.

The pattern that emerges is neither one of complacency, nor one that merits an uncritical celebration of women’s agency. In the immediate aftermath of Independence, the Indian women’s movement had neither the capacity nor the will to resist being subsumed within the overarching narrative of nation-building and planned economic development. During these decades, we do not see any unified women’s front, or even a nationwide movement that sought to reimagine women’s role within an independent nation. Instead, women aimed to carve out spaces of active participation within the institutions of the state, and within projects of nation-building.

This was no easy task because, despite the formal promise of equality to women enshrined in universal adult suffrage, the Indian state’s leadership and policies remained firmly moored in patriarchal assumptions that focused on women’s domestic and reproductive roles. Women had to work to create spaces and patterns of gendered citizenship, and they did so in diverse ways that were diffused into various arenas of public and political life. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal everyday negotiations of entrenched patriarchy within state and society that constitute an important period of learning and experimentation for individual women as well as for various women’s organisations. The contributions here do not attempt to trace the continuities or ruptures between this period and the later emergence of the autonomous women’s movement. More research would be necessary to understand whether and in what manner the lessons learned regarding the limits and possibilities of working with the state during this period informed the trajectory of the Indian women’s movement in subsequent decades. However, there is little doubt that instead of a ‘lull’ or retreat from public and political life, Indian women during the post-Independence era got busy authoring and inhabiting multiple gendered patterns of participatory citizenship.

Acknowledgements

The papers in this collection were first presented at a workshop titled ‘Women, Nation-Building and Feminism in India’ held at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, in September 2018 with support from Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. The feedback and comments we received from all our discussants and participants were invaluable in shaping this collection. We would particularly like to acknowledge the contributions of Padma Anagol, Joya Chatterji, Shailaja Fennel, Eleanor Newbigin, Tanika Sarkar and Partha Pratim Shil. We also thank our authors for sharing their work and insights with us, and for their commitment to our collective project. Kama Maclean and Vivien Seyler have supported our work on this collection from start to finish, and we are very thankful. Finally, we thank each other for sustained and supportive collaboration across three very eventful years.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See, for example, Rajeswari Sundar Rajan’s periodisation of the Indian women’s movement, where she characterises the post-Independence period as one of little or no organised activity: Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). In her exhaustive survey of women’s movements, Radha Kumar describes these decades as a period of ‘lull’: Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993).

2. This is the main hypothesis offered by current scholarship regarding the perceived quietism of the post-Independence decades. For Neera Desai, these decades were a period of passivity and accommodation, which she explains in terms of the complacency of middle-class and upper-class women who reaped the benefits of Independence and were also in positions of leadership within the women’s movement: Neera Desai, ‘From Accommodation to Articulation: Women’s Movement in India’, in Mary John (ed.), Women’s Studies in India: A Reader (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008). While Mary John strikes a note of caution regarding the assumption of quietism in post-Independence women’s movements, she nevertheless echoes Desai’s reading by arguing that there was an abdication and relegation of responsibility to the state by pre-Independence women’s organisations: Mary John, ‘Gender, Development and the Women’s Movement: Problems for a History of the Present’, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed.), Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India (New Delhi: Kali for Women/Zubaan Books, 2000).

3. A wealth of scholarship addresses women and social reform, with key works brought together in Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds), Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). For an overview of the autonomous women’s movement, see Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chaps. 3–5.

4. Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005); and Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

5. See Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 20, no. 41 (1985), pp. 1753–8; Sujata Patel, ‘Construction and Reconstruction of Women in Gandhi’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 23, no. 8 (1988), pp. 377–87; and Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National Movement (London: Sage, 2006).

6. Although confrontational politics was not nationalised in this period, there were numerous instances of more localised, often militant, struggles in which women played important roles: see, for example, Stree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We Were Making History’: Women and the Telangana Uprising (London: Zed Books, 1989).

7. See Leela Kasturi, ‘Development, Patriarchy and Politics: Indian Women in the Political Process, 1947–1992’, in Valentine M. Moghadam (ed.), Patriarchy and Economic Development: Women’s Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Clarendon Press, 1996); Samita Sen, ‘Towards a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical Perspective’, Policy Research Report on Gender and Development, Working Paper 9, The World Bank Development Research Group, 2000, pp. 1–72; and Nirmala Banerjee, ‘Whatever Happened to the Dreams of Modernity? The Nehruvian Era and Woman’s Position’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 7 (1998), pp. WS2–WS7.

8. Banerjee, ‘Whatever Happened to the Dreams of Modernity?’.

9. See Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap. 5.

10. For example, see Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Development Planning: The Indian Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Terence J. Byres (ed.), The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

11. Ornit Shani, ‘Women and the Vote: Registration, Representation and Participation in the Run-Up to India’s First Elections, 1951–52’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1882746.

12. Wendy Singer, ‘Women in the State: Elected Women and the Challenge of Indian Politics (1957–62)’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1890257.

13. Humaira Chowdhury, ‘The Life and Times of Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul: An Exploration of Muslim Women’s Self-Fashioning in Post-Colonial India’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1878418.

14. Abigail McGowan, ‘Mothers and Godmothers of Crafts: Female Leadership and the Imagination of India as a Crafts Nation, 1947–67’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1876589.

15. Taylor Sherman, ‘Not Part of the Plan? Women, State Feminism and Indian Socialism in the Nehru Years’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1884790.

16. Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Feminism, Family Planning and National Planning’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1886731.

17. Emily Rook-Koepsel, ‘Social Work and Political Visibility: Activism, Education and the Disciplining of Social Service’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1883269.

18. Uditi Sen, ‘Social Work, Refugees and National Belonging: Evaluating the “Lady Social Workers” of West Bengal’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1882095.

19. Samita Sen, ‘Gender and the Politics of Class: Women in Trade Unions in Bengal’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1888190.

20. Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, ‘Nation and Its “Other” Women: Muslim Subjectivity and Gendered Agency in Delhi’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1887994.

21. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Recasting Women: An Introduction’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

22. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

23. For gendered patterns of participation for women, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Politics and Women in Bengal—the Conditions and Meaning of Participation’, in The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Vol. 21, no. 1 (1984), pp. 91–101.

24. See, for example, Forbes, Women in Modern India; Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).

25. See, for instance, Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Shailaja Paik, ‘Forging a New Dalit Womanhood in Colonial Western India’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 28, no. 4 (2016), pp. 14–40; Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon, We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2008); and Amrita Basu, ‘Indigenous Feminism, Tribal Radicalism and Grassroots Mobilisation in India’, in Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 15, no. 2 (1990), pp. 193–209.

26. See for example, G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala Malabar c. 1850–1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003); Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India; and Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

27. Sinha, Specters of Mother India, p. 10. This universalisation of a female subject whose relationship to the state was not mediated by the community, Sinha argues, was short-lived because 1930s debates about the franchise pitted women’s political representation against the collective rights of communities (pp. 10–11). For further discussion of the universalisation of rights vis-à-vis the female subject and the religious community, see Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

28. Antoinette M. Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865–1915’, in Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 13, no. 4 (1990), pp. 295–308.