Women in South Asia: the Raj and after. (includes bibliography) Tanika Sarkar. 

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 History Today Ltd. (UK) 

The fiftieth year of Indian independence lends itself to various kinds of stocktaking. It seems almost natural that the history of modern Indian women should be an essential part of this exercise, so when and why did the condition of women become an index to measure the nation's progress? 

All this was very new. Not only were the issues of debate unprecedented, so was the amount of talk expended on them. Prior to this gender relations were frozen in sacred laws and in custom. If they were challenged it was within the context of everyday acts of defiance by women, in their secret transgressions, protest masked as sorrowful dirges and tales indicating a sense of the unfairness of the world. Now a qualitative leap was made away from these oblique expressions to a more open interrogation -- not only by women, but also by men of liberal reformist persuasion. 

The change has been explained in terms of an exposure to a liberal Western education that taught middle-class Indians to question the subjection of women. However, recent interpretations have been more critical of the gender perspective of these liberal reformers, attributing the changes to a desire to emulate Victorian moral codes and aping a bourgeois form of companionate marriage. 

The first to question patriarchal traditions came from modern, dissident religious sects -- the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj and later, the Arya Samaj. It is argued that their dissent isolated and excluded these reformers from larger networks of kinship and neighbourhood ties. In terrible personal loneliness, they turned to their core family group for social sustenance: wives and daughters suddenly emerged as crucial figures in their lives and this, in turn, brought their problems into focus. 

Inspired by an acute sense of the deep social malaise of the country, there was little the reformers could actually hope to change. Their uppercaste, middle-class social moorings prevented a critical engagement with issues of peasant or caste exploitation and before the formation of nationalist associations in the late nineteenth century, there was an unwillingness to reflect on the colonial condition. Given these constraints, and the fact that Indian elites were excluded from administrative and entrepreneurial initiatives, there was little else that they could try to achieve. 

The very fact of political subjection, which came to be regarded as a state of humiliation, raised sensitivity to wider issues of domination and subordination. How could it be recommended for one group of people and questioned for another? The subjection of women at home was immediately thrown into the spotlight. Recommended by the highest religious authorities, what had passed as unquestionable prescription suddenly lost its force. 

Early women writers -- from Kailashbashini Debi in Bengal in the 1860s, to Tarabai Shinde and Pandite Ramabai from Maharashtra in the 1880s -- were already identifying the distribution of power in intimate human relationships in gender-political terms. The same vocabulary was often used to describe the subjection of the country as it was the subjection of women. 

Since the late eighteenth century, British rule had exempted the domain of personal laws from state intervention, unless customary or scriptural sanction could be cited as a reason for change. Three important historical developments followed from this. First, the domestic sphere, governed by the personal laws, and a site of relative autonomy, became the last bastion of a vanished freedom, as well as the possible site of an emergent nation. Secondly, law as a domain of self activism led to a widespread involvement with the processes of legal change. The spread of print culture enabled a continuous interaction among various social groups on the everyday lives of ordinary folk. In the Telegu speaking areas of Madras, reformers relied on vernacular journalism to campaign on widow remarriage, in sharp contrast to Tamil speaking areas where reformist campaigns were moderate and dependent on English. As a result of the debates, gender norms were detached from the realm of sacred prescription or commonsense, and their ideological basis was made transparent. 

Up until the late nineteenth century, there was a powerful customary belief that educated women were destined to be spinsters. Reformist endeavours strained against this. Starting with Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, they were able to make some education available for middle-class girls. This was done in the teeth of orthodox resistance. In colonial India, male claims to power depended very largely on their intellectual achievements, since most other forms of `manly' and masterful enterprise were closed to them. Educated women, therefore, posed a threat to the very basis of masculinity. Orthodox reactions often took in the form of satirical imaginings of emasculated, effeminate men and masculinised women on top. 

The content of women's education tended to be moderate and geared to home management -- a fact which has to be separated from the actual social consequences of the act of learning. The pressure for education at least, from women in reformist, elite families was, therefore, persistent. The first girl graduates from Calcutta University received their degrees decades ahead of British women. 

Reformers could not always achieve new legislation, however. Malabari's campaign for raising the age of marriage was truncated into a highly modified age of consent. Agitations against polygamy did not produce any legal deterrents. The new laws never really acquired the power and influence that religious prescriptions had enjoyed. Nor were they grounded in a strong or coherent notion of equality or individual rights. Their significance, then, was not so much the creation of a new order as questioning existing practice and rattling the bars. Once suttee, absence of education., remarriage of widows, non-consensual, indissoluble, early marriage for girls were reinterpreted as signs of great oppression, the Hindu home and the family were recast as primary sites for the practice of oppression. So the discussions extended beyond their specific objectives and made porous the divide between the private and the public spheres. 

Later, the 1856 Bill to remove all legal obstacles to the marriage of Hindu widows stated: 

In the case of the widow who is of full 

age or whose marriage has been consummated, 

her own consent shall be 

sufficient to constitute her remarriage 

lawful. 

The two statements came from two very different positions, one from the orthodox view that defended suttee, and the second from a reformist bill, legalising widow remarriage. Yet both refer to the woman's own consent, pleasure and will as the ultimate arbiter in the decisions. No doubt, the inference is purely strategic, consent meaning something far less than informed and adult assent. But, it was a sign of the new times that the words were used at all on the basis of internal imperative, rather than as a purely externalised prescription. In the case of the Age of Consent controversy of 1891, after a girl of ten died in Calcutta having been raped by her husband, the language of willed consent clashed too obviously with the Hindu revivalist imperative of justifying a state of non-interference and status quo in the Hindu patriarchal order. As a result, in the last decades of the nineteenth century revivalists moved away from the domain of personal laws altogether. Swami Vivekananda gathered around a group of male ascetics who would try to rejuvenate Hindu society through philanthropic service. 

In Punjab and in the United Provinces, the revivalist, Vedas-based Arya Samaj of Swami Dayanand marked out a different trajectory. This group introduced quite drastic changes in conventional domestic practices: widow remarriage, an end to child marriage and male polygamy and the introduction of education for women. However, whereas earlier liberal reformers had advocated remarriage by normalising the sexual desires of child widows, Dayanand advised it in the interests of a better growth rate for the community. A widow was permitted only to remarry a widower, and the marriage, had to be terminated after procreation. The women was to be educated solely for more disciplined child-rearing. Each change denied individual rights and further provoked the woman to the demographic and pedagogic purposes of an authoritarian community. 

It is true that reformers, generally, functioned within a middle-class, upper-caste orbit. Few would support the Act of 1891, curtailing working hours in factories for women and children. There was little concern for the problems that tribal women faced over the encroachments of a modern market economy. Large-scale industrial production severed the earlier links between the household and production and the woman's role therein. 

With the commercialisation of agriculture and the emergence of an upwardly mobile peasantry, peasant women were pulled out of farm labour in the interests of social respectability and confined to the household where their labour inputs were relatively invisible. in the new factories., there were practically no government regulations to ensure living wages, security of jobs and welfare facilities. In the tea plantations there was reckless economic and sexual exploitation of coolie women. These developments occasionally produced flashes of concerned, investigative journalistic exposure, but, otherwise, received little systematic attention. Education was largely confined to affluent, upper-caste urban families. 

However, the limited reforms had some influence beyond the upper social level. There had been a long -- term percolation of Brahmanical orthodoxy among upwardly-mobile low castes. Suttee, for instance, had become fairly common among several low castes in Bengal, even though the custom was meant for upper-caste widows. A prohibition against widow remarriage and the spread of infant marriage had become prevalent among castes whose custom did not prescribe such practices. Reforms that encouraged widow remarriage, womens' education and a higher age of marriage, gradually emerged as alternative ways of acquiring social respectability. It is interesting that low-caste reformers like Jotirao Phule in western India, knitted up the oppression against high-caste women with the exploitation of low castes to indicate the scope of Brahmanical disciplines. 

While such literature reflected new partiarchal needs in an embourgeoised household, it also found enormous resonance among women readers. Accessible, fictionalised Urdu satisfied a thirst for reading matter that was at once interesting as well as serious. The narrative of home-based achievements through education created a hopeful blueprint for women whose status so far had depended only on kinship connections. While the new novels did not expand the boundaries of domestic confinement, they conveyed, nonetheless, a sense of self-worth by underlining women's importance both to home and society. They were also sensitive to the problems of seclusion. 

Following upon his Mirat al ars and its sequels that appeared from the 1870s, and partly as a reaction to their relatively non-denominational and open nature, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi came up with novels within the same format but with a different set of values. His Bihishti Zewar (1905) attempted a thoroughgoing Islamicisation of women who shared a lot of female custom with Hindu women. It was also careful to shore up the domestic confines that were now troubled by demands for schools for girls. In 1906, in the face of opposition from the local Urdu press, Begum Abdullah and the Begum of Bhopal had managed to open a girls' school at Aligarh. 

While formal education for Muslim girls came late in the day, and legal reforms had to wait until the first few decades of the twentieth century, a different kind of battle over womens' rights was going on in the Anglo-Indian lawcourts throughout the nineteenth century. This laid the basis for the Shariati Act of the 1930s. The British Government was formally committed to privileging Quranic and Shariati regulation over customary norms and practices. The policy provided for larger property entitlements. Widows, for instance, could claim and win the restoration of the full amount of the mehr (the sum promised to the bride at the time of the marriage) which customarily was rarely given to her. Despite problems of deposition of evidence in court by women in Purdah, we find them tenaciously fighting out disputes in law-courts. 

The reforms had created great interest in domestic issues and women were the privileged authorities on the subject. The first generations of middle-class women graduates, doctors and teachers were seen as saviours of their sex. Their achievements were celebrated less in terms of economic independence as for proving the innate intellectual abilities of women. 

Gradually women began to organise public institutions for reform: mostlv, schools and widows' homes. Pandita Ramabai founded the Sharda Sadan at Poona for widows to educate and train them as teachers, doctors and nurses. Sister Subbalakshmi established a school for high-caste widows in Madras. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussein founded a chain of schools. She also wrote biting satire on the nature of religious sanction for patriarchal double standards. Subbalakshmi and Ramabai had converted to Christianity, although Ramabai's relations with her church were very tense; Rokeya was suspected of Christian leanings. All three were bitterly criticised by the custodians of their respective religious communities. 

From public institutions for reform and welfare, women leaders had moved into the corridors of mainstream political activism by the second decade of the twentieth century. Associations like Womens' Indian Association, the National Council of Women in India and the All India Womens' Conference campaigned for suffrage, marriage reform, participation in municipal and legislative politics. The language of reform did not directly challenge the public/private divide, nor did it unambiguously speak about equality. Public activism of a few, however, strained against the domestic confines of most. Also, at a time of worsening Hindu-Muslim relations throughout the country, these associations represented all religious communities and advanced issues that concerned women across religious divides. 

The deployment of familial images and kinship terms that described the nationalist community as a family, helped women to inhabit the political domain more easily. Bi Amman, the mother of the Ali brothers, could address mass meetings of men whom she called her sons, during the Khilafat movement, reaching a stage when she could publicly unveil herself. The forms of political activism breached the boundaries of feminine domesticity irretrievably. Ordinary housewives transgressed ritual taboo by going to prison, joining street demonstrations, and facing police violence. In this vein, nationalism also created immensely widened networks of female solidarity. The active and creative political struggles of women created some of the authentic sources for Indian democracy, and disseminated a highly informed political understanding despite widespread illiteracy and poverty. 

When independence came, the liberal premises of Indian nationalism were embodied in the secular-democratic constitution which recognised all adult Indian women as fully-fledged citizens of the country. At the same time, a very different logic of state-sponsored patriarchy unfolded when Hindu women, abducted into Pakistani territory during the riots, were collected by state agencies and returned to their families without their consent being solicited. The tension between a formal commitment to equality and deeply ingrained patriarchal traditions in the organs of the state have remained constant. In the early 1950s, a series of laws modified Hindu marriage, divorce, inheritance and maintenance rights. Though they outraged conservative Hindu opinion, radicals and women politicians felt them to be far too moderate. The state does not interfere in the laws of the religious minorities which remain the preserve of orthodox community leaders. 

A new wave in women's movements was evident from the 1970s, in the wake of radical class struggles in the late 1960s and 70s where women had participated on a wide scale, but on somewhat unequal terms. Autonomous organisations developed along with a strengthening of womens' groups within mainstream Left parties. Their radicalism has forced the state to embark upon a spate of fresh legislation, especially concerning rape and dowry. 

However. women's radicalism has produced an orthodox backlash that legislative activity failed to contain. Suttee was spectacularly celebrated at Deorala in 1987 when a teenaged widow was publicly burnt to death, with the criminal instigators released by court order this year. Bhanwari Debi, a poor low-caste woman was gang-raped at Bhateri village in Rajasthan for trying to prevent infant marriage among high-caste landlords. The police brutally humiliated her when she approached them. Law, justice and the police remain deeply implicated in the most unambiguous forms of patriarchal controls. 

The New Right divides and separates women into communities, and gender-based commonalities are sought to be undermined. This comes at a most opportune moment for the current phase in Indian capitalism when structural adjustment programmes, with their inflationary plans and their cuts into extremely meagre welfare spending, have created immense hardships for poorer women. The sectorisation of women and the constant presence of communal violence may sap women's resistance to upper-caste and ruling-class control over the labour force, trade union rights and the bodies of low-caste, peasant, tribal and working-class women. 

Indian women still live with murders related to dowry demands, suttee, rape - especially of low-caste and labouring women -- female infanticide and foeticide. Female mortality is much higher and literacy rates are considerably lower in India than they are in sub-Saharan Africa. The real measure of change lies, perhaps, more in the domain of political activism: the capacity for protest, the understanding and the world view that sustain the protests and the collectivities that enable and embody them. 

FOR FURTHER READING: 

J. Krishnamurty (ed), Women in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1989); Gail Minault, The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Chanakya Publications, Delhi, 1981); Sangari and Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, (Kali for Women, Delhi, 1989); Zoye Hasan (ed), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State (Kali for Women, Delhi, 1994); Tanika Sarkar and Vrashi Butalia (eds), Women and the Hindu Right (Zed Press, 1995). 

Tanika Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in History, St Stephen's College, University of Delhi and the author of Bengal 1928-34: The Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1987).