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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.
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.