Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Emergence of Feminism in India 1850-1920 Ch1
Emergence of Feminism in India 1850-1920 Ch1
disciplines and international locations.2 The scope and range of the current research,
especially in the last two decades, has been in-depth and wide-ranging and distinct
thematic concerns are discernible. These include: the marginalization of women in the
economy and popular culture;3 the impact of colonial law and administrative policies
on the role and status of women;4 the reconstitution of patriarchies via the recasting of
the concept of womanhood;5 and, more recently, the historical visibility of women.6
Although these works are significant contributions to gender studies, womens agency,
explored through the twin aspects of the issue of consciousness and resistance amongst
Indian women in the colonial past, has not sufficiently engaged the attention of
scholars working in the field.7 This is despite the huge increase in publications within
2
Indian gender and womens history since the early 1970s. However, if one examines
the historiographical concerns of the early social history of India (1960s and the 1970s)
and later feminist scholarship (1970s and 1980s), the reasons for the neglect of
womens agency become apparent. The position of women in Indian society has been
looked at either as part of broader studies in the social and cultural history of India or
more directly, in the attempt to trace the changing role of women in colonial India.
Such scholars have argued that improvements in the status of women came about from
the nineteenth century onwards, not as the product of a process of conscious assertion
on the part of Indian women, but through programmes of social reform devised and
carried out by Indian men and the colonial state. In many ways the picture, which
emerges of Indian women as passive recipients in these processes, has been
predetermined by the approaches, which scholars have adopted. In the Western
impactIndian response paradigm that informs their work, there is little room for
women as conscious agents.8 Instead, Indian women are projected as a monolithic and
oppressed entity and reduced to mere beneficiaries of the awakening experienced by
their men folk because of contact with Western influences.9
These problems have been compounded by a Eurocentric bias in charting protest
and self-assertion movements in Afro-Asian womens history due to an absence of an
alternative approach to define the experiences unique to women in colonial societies.
The use of Western models to explain the situation of Indian women has resulted in
sympathetic Indianists hesitating to describe even the most radical women as
feminists.10 Meredith Borthwick, for instance, who has greatly enriched our
concentrate on what was happening at the height of the nationalist agitations of the
twentieth century. A fine illustration of peasant and working womens voices in the
Communist party-led Telengana struggle between 1946 and 1951 is Stree Shakti
Sanghatana (ed.), We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telengana
Peoples Struggle (London: Zed, 1989).
8
I have adapted the model of impactresponse to modern Indian history that was
originally outlined by Paul Cohen in his hugely influential work but, in relation to
American historiography on modern China, Discovering History in China: American
Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984).
9
One of the earliest and most influential works following this framework is Charles
Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1964). In many of the works on social reform in the 60s and 70s, Indian historians
including those writing in the broad area of womens history follow its approach. See for
example B.R. Nanda (ed.), Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, (New Delhi:
Vikas, 1976).
10
Some exceptions are Geraldine Forbes and Barbara Ramusack, who were amongst
some of the earliest pioneers of womens history of modern India alongside Neera Desai,
Pratima Asthana, Vina Mazumdar, Kumari Jayawardena amongst others. See Geraldine
Forbes, Caged Tigers: First Wave Feminists in Twentieth-Century Bengal, Womens
Studies International Forum, 5/6, (1982): 52636 and her book Women in Modern India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Barbara Ramusack and Sharon Sievers,
understanding of the changing conditions of the bhadramahila [respectable middleclass Bengali women] during the period 18501905, has utilized approaches originally
devised to study the history of women in the West. Following the Western
impact/Indianresponse paradigm, she finds that the bhadramahila was emerging as a
response to the bhadralok [middle-class Bengali men], who in turn were reacting to
British rule.11 Therefore, it is not surprising that she finds that the bhadramahila did
not display any feminist consciousness. She states:
When I began my study I was interested in locating a feminist consciousness. The
possibility still interests me, but as I understand more about the lives of women at that
time, the more misguided I feel it is to expect that kind of perception then.12
One could argue here that the expectation was misguided, not because such a feminist
perception did not exist, but because its absence was already predetermined by Western
connotations of feminism.13 Ghulam Murshids work on the response of Bengali
women to modernization labours under similar problems even though a large part of
the vernacular source material he uses are journals edited by women, some of which
even include writings by some radical women of the period.14 Malavika Karlekar in
Voices from Within, on the other hand, has offered a refreshingly different analysis. By
treating autobiographical writings as personal narratives, she showed the range of
responses made by nineteenth-century Bengali women. While tracing the formation of
womens subcultures in the antahpur [inner house], she effectively demonstrated how
literacy and education enabled at least an elite section of Bengali women to question
male constructions of Indian femininity.15
Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1999).
11
Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Condition of Women in Bengal: 18501905
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
12
Meredith Borthwick, Looking at Womens History: Nineteenth-Century Bengal, in
Meredith Borthwick et al., Problems and Methods of Enquiry in South Asian History
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1984), p. 22.
13
Recently, something of a breakthrough has occurred, and orientalist assumptions
about non-Western women, which include concepts of veil and purdah in Muslim societies
and anthropological theories on African societies, and women have been questioned. Some
exciting works are Reza Hammami and Martina Rieker, Feminist Orientalism and
Orientalist Marxism, New Left Review, 170 July/August (1988): 93106; Malek Alloula,
The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godwich and Wlad Godwich (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed,
1987). Chandra Mohanty has questioned some of the conceptual frameworks of the Zed
series on Third World women in Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses, Feminist Review, 30 Autumn (1988): 6188.
14
Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to
Modernization, 18491905 (Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, 1983).
15
Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Personal Narratives of Nineteenth-Century
Bengali Women (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Even with the growth of feminist scholarship in the 1980s, the idea of women as
subjects was far from the chief area of concern. This is best uncovered through the
words of the editors of Recasting Women, one of the major contributions to the field:
This anthology has grown out of our need as academics and activists to understand the
historical processes, which reconstitute patriarchy in colonial India. We wish to focus
primarily on the regulation and reproduction of patriarchy in the different class caste
formations within civil society.16
Clearly, the reconstitution and reproduction of patriarchy was the determining theme
of the volume. Their attempts to understand how the reconstitution of patriarchy has
affected present day Indian womens problems has, predictably, resulted in the neglect
of recovery of womens voices during the colonial period.
Indeed, the creation and re-creation of patriarchy as a major theme
dominates the historiography of gender and womens studies in India. Tracing the
historical developments by which patriarchy emerged as the overriding form of
societal order and the ways in which it institutionalized the rights of men to
control and appropriate the economic, sexual and reproductive services of women
has been a major preoccupation of scholarship in this area.17 The consequences of
this, namely, the failure to engage in recovering Womens History (borrowing a
term from Gerda Lerner18), is one of which the scholars themselves have been
aware. The editor of another enormously influential volume, Women in Colonial
India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State, based on a collection of essays
published over the years on gender history in the Indian Economic and Social
History Review, has commented, If the papers have a common weaknessand in
this they reflect the existing databaseit is that we hear the voices of women at
large only rarely...19 Many of the original contributors of this volume have now
published monographs on various aspects of the subjection of Indian women.20
Moreover, I would further argue that the dominance of the constitution and
reconstitution of patriarchy paradigm in Indian gender history has created and
helped to spread certain myths about womens participation in modern
movements in India. For instance, Sangari and Vaid have argued that during the
16
Although this conclusion currently has wide acceptance, it is one based mainly on
the study of the twentieth-century Indian womens movement which has grave
implications that are similar to Vaid and Sangaris suppositions, for the agency of
Indian women. The womens movement of the nineteenth century studied in its
own terms shows that not only women were recasting themselves rather than
being recast 24 but also that women were engaged in contesting patriarchal
discourses on womanhood and were creating roles for themselves that often
differed from male perceptions and aspirations for them. The lack of detailed
micro-studies; the application of the passivity model to Indian women derived
largely from the Bengal-centric studies;25 the tendency to treat the nineteenth
century as no more than a backdrop to twentieth-century developments combined
with the stranglehold of deconstructing patriarchal discourses has resulted in the
nonretrieval of Indian womens agency within this period.
Whilst the quest for an understanding of how patriarchy works in the subordination
of women is an indispensable project, it is an essentially incomplete one. It obscures the
21
ways in which women resist patriarchy, construct their identities, assert their rights and
contest the hierarchical arrangement of societal relationships between the sexes.
Womens agency is subsumed and sidelined in favour of the theme of the constitution
and reconstitution of patriarchy. No amount of dismantling of patriarchal discourses is
going to reveal what Indian women thought about and made of developments in the
social reform era or the nationalist period. Equally, if we do not retrieve womens
discourses we will, as Geraldine Forbes says, probably never answer the question, why
[do] women participate in patriarchal systems?26
The rise of poststructuralism in the past decade has also thrown up different kinds
of difficulties with regard to the question of agency.27 The linguistic turn in Indian
cultural history has resulted in scholarship with an understanding of colonial powerrelations in which unlimited domination is ascribed to ruling forms of powerknowledge. The application of these discursive tools forecloses any meaningful
investigation into resistance or autonomy by Indian men or women.28 Not only is
colonial domination deprived of all complexities and variations, more crucially for the
study of Womens History, Indian women are stripped of agency.29 A leading thinker
in this field, Gayatri Spivak, has firmly stated that the subaltern woman cannot
speak.30 According to this thesis, imperialism was an essentially destructive project
that entailed a violent rupture from the Indian past, with the result that the Indian
woman was unable to answer back and therefore remains a historically muted subject.
26
Moreover, discourse analysis, which has provided those scholars anxious to dismantle
the dominant ideologies of colonialism, nationalism and imperialism with an attractive
tool, has resulted in the obliteration of womens voices. If Indian women are studied in
scholarship as mere representations or sites for the play of dominant discourses,
they are in danger of being completely erased from history. It is certainly ironic that an
approach that has done so much to criticize Orientalist essentialism has also reinforced
the stereotype of the passive Indian woman.
Even those studies that appear to adopt a less deductive approach to the study of
imperialism and nationalism succumb to the poststructuralist notion that power and
discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer. We therefore have scholars arguing
that womens perspectives and participation during the colonial period did not matter
because they made no difference to the outcome of major legislation affecting womens
lives.31 The dismissal of native male voices as shadows of imperial sovereign selves
or distorted mimics goes some way in explaining the disdain towards any form of
recovery of womens voices by the adherents of poststructuralist approaches. In a recent
article, Sumit Sarkar has perceptively exposed the limitations of the application of such
frameworks in the recovery of subaltern histories. According to him, viewing the
colonial state as wholly hegemonic raises various problems. He poses the following
question: how are we to characterize subaltern womens movements that made use of
Western ideologies and colonial law, justice and administration? If reforms such as
banning sati and legalisation on widow remarriage are read as surrender to western
values, then he convincingly argues, we are really back to the crudest and most
obscurantist forms of nationalism.32 He goes on:
Most surprisingly, a fair amount of recent feminist scholarship seems to be falling into
this trap, and one hears about nineteenth-century efforts to educate women as being
somewhat retrogressive, and even the raising of the age of consent in 1891 from ten to
twelve as a Victorian curtailment of feminine sexuality.33
Moreover, by not studying women as agents of their own history and viewing them as
capable of generating only derivative histories, the colonized subject is denied any
collusion and complicity in participating and creating the exploitative structures of
Indian society and polity.34
31
This study, in contrast, places the agency of Indian women as the central focus of
concern. It tracks the trajectories of Indian feminism demonstrating that Indian
womens quest for civil, political and religious rights arose straight from the belly of
the great religious and social reform movements of the nineteenth century. While
scholars in gender and womens history have tackled the question of female agency,
these have been essentially All-India studies, which have generated a call for in-depth
region-based studies.35 There have also been studies of female agency where individual
women resist certain kinds of oppression.36 However, the need for a fuller study not
only of isolated cases of women resisting patriarchy but groups and communities of
women asserting, resisting and making sense of their lives during the colonial period is
needed.37 This book provides a necessary shift in scholarship. And, by offering the first
in-depth study of Maharashtrian women, it uncovers the history of womens agency in
modern India.
article, Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a ChildWife, Economic and Political Weekly (4 September 1993): 1869. She has now extended
the study to include womens agency in a religious framework through the first modern
autobiography of an Indian woman. See Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: Amar Jiban (New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).
35
Radha Kumar, A History of Doing (New Delhi: Kali, 1993); and Forbes, Women in
Modern India.
36
As early as 1990, Veena Talwar Oldenburg made a bold case for the courtesans of
colonial Lucknow, arguing that their very lifestyles represented both autonomy from and
resistance to Indian patriarchy, Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of
Lucknow, India, Feminist Studies, 16/2 (1990): 25987. Rosalind OHanlon has outlined a
critique of gender relations through an analysis of Tarabai Shindes treatise. See OHanlon
Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western India, in Douglas
Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social
Relations in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 62108.
37
Two engaging studies emphasizing the theme of womens subjectivity and how
structure and agency dovetail have recently been released. See Nita Kumar (ed.), Women
as Subjects: South Asian Histories (New Delhi: Stree, 1994); and Bharati Ray (ed.), From
the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (New Delhi: Oxford India, 1995). The
former emphasizes anthropological studies of North India and the latter concentrates
mainly on Bengal but neither have extensive case studies from southern/western India.
10
identity and autonomy, womens assertion and resistance, and womens power
and protest within the wider context of colonial political and social relations.
The approach of the book is informed by a conception of female agency that centres
on uncovering the intentions and experiences of Indian women as they asserted their
rights, addressed social inequalities and rejected or adapted tradition in an engagement
with the world around them in what amounted to Indian feminism. In doing so it
moves beyond the rather limited configurations of agency based on issues of consent,
or coercion38, transgression or subversion or which reduce autonomy to mere
resistance 39 essentially reactive to the interventions of the colonial state or Indian men.
This broader conception of womens agency allows for a more composite and dynamic
concept that goes beyond celebratory, compensatory or her-story histories.40 By
considering womens interaction with the colonial state and indigenous men it is hoped
that this study will demonstrate that female agency originates where other forms of
agency are present, coexisting and competing with them.41 It is an approach in keeping
with Joan Scotts attempt to see gender as relational, signifying the power relationship
between the sexes.42 For gender to be a useful analytic concept, she argues, it must
include a notion of politics and hence all social institutions and organizations.43
Keeping in mind her formulation of gender, this work has attempted to construct and
interpret the complex shape of womens subjectivities in the areas of religion;
education; marriage and crime; and their entry into the public domain via feminist
organizations.
The terms feminist and feminism have evoked and continue to evoke strong
responses in a variety of settings and incorporate imagery which vary dramatically
from the aggressive man-haters to more benign and sober assessments which include
individuals and movements that support the goal of womens emancipation.
Stereotypes therefore abound and the term has no self-explanatory quality. A major
debate has emerged over the question of applying the term feminism in different
38
The historiography on the subject of sati [widow burning] provides a good example
of the process by which female agency has been reduced to simplistic conceptions of
volition. For a trenchant critique on the literature, see Ania Loomba, Dead Women Tell
No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and
Post-Colonial Writings on Widow-Immolation in India, History Workshop Journal, 36
(1993): 20927.
39
For a conception of agency as resistance see the introductory statement by Douglas
Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power.
40
Celebratory histories are defined as triumphalist accounts of womens successes;
compensatory histories are those which add women in a mechanical fashion to male
histories and her-story histories simply record the presence of women in history.
41
An insightful account of how and why feminist scholarship should avoid reductive
conceptions of female agency is in Janaki Nair, On the Question of Agency in Indian
Feminist Historiography, Gender and History, 6/1 (1994): 82100.
42
Joan Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, Gender and the
Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 2852.
43
Ibid., p. 43.
11
For an exhaustive analysis of the controversy amongst the Western tradition see
Karen Offen, Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach, Signs, 14/1
(1988): 11957. For an extension and application of the term to European women of the
medieval and early modern periods, see Joan Kelly, Early Feminist Theory and the
Querelle des Femmes in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1984), pp. 65109; and Moira Ferguson (ed.), First Feminists: British Women Writers,
15781799 (New York: Feminist Press, 1985). Middle-class British womens feminism in
the Age of Empire has been termed Imperial feminism by the British diaspora; see
Prathiba Parmar and Valerie Amos, Challenging Imperial Feminism, Feminist Review, 17
(1984): 319.
45
Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 17001950: A Political History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 20.
46
For a discussion of the plural and diverse feminisms see Barbara Caine, English
Feminism, 17801980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
47
The term feminism has now been broadened and applied in various countries and
contexts: for Africa see Filomina Chioma Steady (ed.), Introduction The Black Woman
Cross Culturally (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); for Egypt see Margot
Badran, Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s1925, Feminist
Issues (Spring 1988): 1534; for Japan see Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The
Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1983); for African-American women see Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin
to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
48
A classic formulation is in Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the
Third World (London: Zed, 1986). In the 1980s Gail Minault, Geraldine Forbes, Vijay
Agnew, Neera Desai amongst others also studied the connections between feminism and
nationalism.
12
feminism49, eco-feminism50 and the emergence of the unsavoury new woman viewed
through the rise of the saffron sari syndrome of the Hindu Right.51 Curiously, and
despite this phenomenal rise in feminist movements of various hues and shades in the
twentieth century, not much attention has been paid to the origins of Indian feminism.
This state of affairs exists despite the growing consensus in the field of Indian gender
and womens history that feminist thought in India has developed over a much longer
period than this modern picture indicates. Equally, the beginnings of the saffron-sari
clad new woman can be traced to the cow protection movements of the nineteenth
century.52 In some ways, the legacy of the early twentieth-century womens movement
has coloured and confused the perceptions of scholars in the field; indeed, it has forced
historians of women to adopt various defensive positions.53 From the 1920s onwards
Indian women active in the nationalist movement vehemently opposed the use of the
term feminist as understood in Europe and America on the grounds that it
propounded and projected an anti-male ideology.54 This helps explain the hesitancy
and ambivalence of scholars working in the field of feminist/womens studies in
pursuing the subject. The often quoted example of Madhu Kishwar, contemporary
Indias pioneering womens activist, is a brilliant illustration of this caution who has
rejected the term feminist both for herself and her ground-breaking journal called
Manushi on the grounds that it has an overclose association with the Western
womens movement.55 Contemporary feminist scholarship emanating from the socalled Third World has been burdened by sanctioned ignorancesskewed
knowledges that have percolated down from the early twentieth century about what
49
Devaki Jain, Gandhian Contributions Toward a Feminist Ethic, in Diane Eck and
Devaki Jain (eds), Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change
(Delhi: Kali, 1986), pp. 25570.
50
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed, 1993).
51
Tanika Sarkar, The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram
Janmabhoomi Movement, Economic and Political Weekly (31 August 1991): 205762.
52
Padma Anagol, Lakshmibai Dravid: The Political Economy of Nationalism and the
Birth of the Hindu Right, (forthcoming).
53
Veena Oldenburg, for example, defends the use of the term feminist by saying that
social scientists and historians use other theoretical models from the West such as
Marxism and post-structuralism, and hence one ought to be able to use the useful phrase
feminism. See Veena Oldenburg, The Roop Kanwar Case: Feminist Responses, in John
S. Hawley (ed.), Sati: The Blessing and the Curse (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), pp. 1023.
54
The stance taken by influential female leaders such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhayaya
on the label of feminism has been commented on and negotiated with from the 1970s
onwards. See Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in Asia; see also Geraldine Forbes,
The Indian Womens Movement: A Struggle for Womens Rights or National Liberation?
and Barbara Ramusack, Catalysts or Helpers? British Feminists, Indian Womens Rights
and Indian Independence, in Gail Minault (ed.), The Extended Family: Women and
Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Delhi: Chanakya, 1981).
55
See her statement in Why I am not a Feminist, Manushi: A Journal of Women and
Society, 61 (Nov/Dec. 1990): 3.
13
constitutes Western feminism. Mary John argues persuasively that not being like
Western feminists and equating the militant suffragette to a male-hater and not
wanting to be like the memsahib is simply reverting the orientalist gaze and freezing
Western women into cardboard stereotypes of sensuality.56 Hence, it is all the more
crucial that we study womens ideology and work in the early nationalist era prior to
the Gandhian-led movements. In order to understand the connections between past and
present forms of feminism, an important task has to be an assessment of the earlier
feminist traditions, especially its origins and significance, which includes the
reclamation of the terms feminist and feminism and a delineation of the conundrum
of the anti feminist.
One of the aims of this book is to uncover these early developments by tracing the
development of feminist consciousness before the rise of Gandhi and mass nationalism.
Tracking feminist resistance and assertion in the nineteenth century through word and
deed, and identifying its crucial connections to the mutations that take place in the
early twentieth century which witnessed and facilitated the rise of feminist nationalists,
forms the core of this work. In order to fully comprehend the historical range and
possibilities of feminism, however, the origins and growth of its gendered critique must
be located within the regions cultural and ideological traditions. Equally Indian
womens subjectivities were forged within the context of colonialism; and they had a
choice now, of selecting from a wide array of discourses on tradition and modernity.
The rise of feminism in India was made possible through a combination of factors: the
presence of a colonial economy, the new web of modernizing impulses which
interacted with the contending circumstances and criteria of sex, race, status and class,
caste and religion.
This study suggests three important criteria for identifying a feminist. First, it
includes women and men who have exhibited consciousness of injustice towards
women as a group either by men and/or other women, religion, or by customs.
Secondly, it includes those who have articulated their dissent through word and/or deed
either individually or collectively and finally, it is presumed that such women and men
engage themselves in confrontational and nonconfrontational strategies either
individually or collectively to improve the disadvantaged status of the female sex. This
study also emphasizes individual consciousness because feminist consciousness has
developed in stages that have no clear continuities and which often take the form of
isolated insights. Although these insights, such as Tarabai Shindes, were worked out
in isolation, they had origins in a common set of social and political problems that
faced women at that time. I define Indian feminism, then, as a theory and practice
based on presenting a challenge to the subordination of women in society and
attempting to redress the balance of power between the sexes.57 By the same logic, the
56
14
whilst the latter is a highly subjective and psychological response. See Karen Offen,
European Feminisms, p. 22.
58
See chapter 4 for details.
59
Chris Weedon, Subjects, in Mary Eagleton (ed.), A Concise Companion to Feminist
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 112.
60
This follows the phenomenological feminist perspective encapsulated in Sandra
Bartkys work. Phenomenology focuses on the centrality of human subjectivity arguing
from the position that our reason and theories emanate from lived human experience.
Bartky takes this further through a marriage of feminist philosophy with phenomenology.
She argues that there are distinctive ways of perceiving feminist consciousness. When a
woman begins to perceive the various oppressions that she and or /other women face this
awareness may lead to anger or despair. Even such an awareness, she argues, is an advance
over false consciousness because it marks the beginning of an understanding of the
origins of womens subordination and even beginning to understand this, makes it
possible for change. See her classic essay Towards a Phenomenology of Feminist
Consciousness, in Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong (eds), Feminism and Philosophy:
Essential Readings in Theory, Re-interpretation and Application (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995), pp. 396406.
61
See chapters 3 and 4 for more details.
62
Almost all the chapters in this book describe how women use these terms within
particular historical contexts; wherever possible it is also demonstrated how they differ
from mens use of the same terms.
15
colloquial and formal texts written by Maharashtrian women and the most significant
of the magazines within the broader womens press of the time, Arya Bhagini, literally
uses the concept of Bhagini [Sister] in its titlea telling sign of the times.
Swadeshbhagini [Indian Sister] is yet another womens periodical which had a long
run at the turn of the century. The vernacular use of the terms is retained as far as
possible in the book so that readers may appreciate the varied richness of the early
feminist thought in colonial Maharashtra.
63
16
17
Marriage and Marital Rights. Womens attempts to remain agents of their lives
through recourse to the law courts for restitution of conjugal rights, divorce,
separation and maintenance and remarriage form the main focus of study in this
chapter. Legislation in social matters did not arise from the interventionist
ambitions of the colonial state. A veritable rebellion of Indian wives prompted
Indian male reformers such as Ranade and Malabari to seek legislation. The
reaction of Indian male elites represented a backlash to the vigorous attempts
made by Indian women in asserting their rights through the courts in an attempt
to shore up patriarchy and meet the threat posed to their masculinity by the
actions of their womenfolk.
Since this book makes a claim for seeing the rise of Indian feminism in the
nineteenth century as opposed to the current view that it begins with the
Gandhian-led nationalist movement I have had to harness new and more
imaginative means of recovering Indian womens voice-consciousness. Womens
self-authorization programmes and the construction of identities in non-Western
contexts can be traced in Indian language collections. For the perceptions of women, I
have concentrated on Marathi sources as many women spoke and engaged in dialogues
with each other in their mother tongue and conducted their public work in local
languages. Thus, I have used wide-ranging materials as diverse as book reviews written
by women to the maps created by the earliest attempts of Indian women cartographers
as evidence of their agency. The range of empirical material harnessed here includes
autobiographies, biographies, periodicals meant for women only, womens petitions
and memorials to the government, folk writings in the form of collections of womens
songbooks, cookbooks, embroidery and sewing manuals written by women, literature
(novels, short stories, plays and tracts) and treatises on philosophical, religious or social
questions. Womens journals edited by women and indisputably meant for women
readers have been used to gauge the opinions of ordinary women. Letters by women to
the editors of womens magazines or for important national and regional newspapers
have also proved useful as an index of their awareness and dissent. Advertisements of
new books and book reviews of women writers by their peers have yielded valuable
biographical material that would not have been made available otherwise.
Organizational papers have been a rich mine of information for the work done by
feminists of the time, and some of these early womens institutions are indeed an
enduring legacy of the nineteenth century which continue today.
No work emerges in a vacuum. This study owes an intellectual debt to many. As
indicated earlier, my own interest and curiosity in the subject was triggered by family
members, among whom knowledge about influential feminists such as Pandita
Ramabai and Ramabai Ranade was commonplace. Whilst working on my doctoral
thesis, I encountered Gail Pearsons extremely detailed account of Bombay feminists
work during the civil disobedience movement which convinced me that the fiery
feminist nationalists she was describing must have inherited or at least benefited from
a much earlier tradition of dissent in Maharashtra, and it doubled my enthusiasm to
pursue the project. Methodologically, I have tried to surmount the paralyzing effects of
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