Reliving the Roots of Indian Women's Emancipation
Women in the Indian National Movement: Unseen Faces and Unheard Voices, 1930-42 by Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert; New Delhi: Sage Publications; 2006; 306 pp. The work under review is somewhat pedantic but reveals in spectacular detail a facet of Indian nationalist movement -- the lives and experiences of ordinary middle-class Indian women who participated in the anti-colonial struggle and did play a significant role in shaping its character and direction. It is a subject that has received little, almost no, exposition in standard history books. Despite her rather old-fashioned recovery approach to women's history, as reflected by the book's subtitle, (Unseen Faces and Unheard Voices) Thapar-Bjorkert's research has yielded some fascinating evidence, including a more nuanced account of women's activities in a variety of regional settings than was previously available to scholars, at least in English. She thus pioneers the framing of a very important social dynamics that pervaded every domain of life and yet remained, invisible, excepting the role of a few well-known elite women, or heroines, as individuals, such as Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattapadhyay, Hansa Mehta, Sucheta Kripalini, Aruna Asaf Ali, and Vijayalakshmi Pandit, not as a class or social division. Although women's participation in the Congress-led nationalist movement and the Khilafat movement in Maharastra and Bengal beginning from the 1920s was documented by historians to some extent, the role of women of the Hindi-speaking heartland, Uttar Pradesh (UP), in the Indian national movement, Thapar-Bjorkert says, has hitherto been a relatively unexplored area. She has therefore primarily focused her research efforts on the participation of 'ordinary' and 'nameless' middle-class women of UP in the anti-colonial, nationalist movements in the 1930s and 1940s, portraying how women's lives were affected and reshaped by their involvement in the freedom struggle and also how their involvement affected and changed the socio-political status quo. She explores and details it with interviews or 'oral narratives', archival materials, events and views recorded by popular magazines, and field studies, and adeptly details the complex process of gradual politicisation of women's domestic sphere and the domestication of the public sphere of politics, paving the way for later movements for women's emancipation. 'I am myself a product of that progress,' she writes. 'The opportunities that I have had are due to my grandmother's efforts and her real, if limited, encouragement to my mother. My grandmother's small changes in consciousness may not have altered her status in society, but they did lead to a change in the status of my mother and myself.' The writer's mother, by the way, is the renowned historian Romila Thapar. Thus, by shifting the emphasis of history from individual women leaders to the women as a class and studying the small changes in women's everyday life brought about by their various involvement in a male-dominated socio-political movement, Thapar-Bjorkert creates a vast canvas that portrays the truth in its entirety, in contrast to its fragmentary images reflected in individual symbols depicted by earlier historians. The book describes the ways in which women's involvement in politics, initially inspired by Gandhi and the satyagraha he launched, eventually eroded the restrictive social practices of the time in UP, such as purdah, gender segregation and norms of respectability. It explores Gandhi's approach to the juxtaposition and demands of domestic obligation and public participation, and narrates the events, processes and dynamics of women making significant contribution to the areas including the salt march, prison experiences, songs, cotton spinning, and underground activities and corollary support of armed revolutionaries. It also informs us that women's participation in the nationalist movement in the Hindi belt was initiated by the Nehru household, who articulated a particular nationalist discourse to middle-class women, a discourse that facilitated the nationalist movement but sidelined the more pressing women's issues. The book takes readers to the time when Raj Kumari Gupta of Kanpur played a key role in the Kakori dacoity. On being arrested, she was disowned by her in-laws and thrown out of the house. Readers see Basanti Devi, wife of Congress leader CR Das, mobilising women in picketing cloth shops and selling khaddar on the streets in defiance of the government ban on political activities and demonstrations. A significant aspect of women's public participation was to court arrest and be imprisoned. Women also performed clandestine activities such as writing, smuggling literature in and out of prison, as they did within the domestic sphere. The author however does not entirely sideline the contribution of elite women but also looks how both elite and ordinary women, although operating from two different social spheres, did share the same public spaces in street demonstrations, by picketing shops dealing in foreign cloth and selling khaddar on the streets, in prison cells, and in running women's organisations such as Rastriya Stree Sabha and its wing called Desh Sebika Sangh, Mahila Rashtriya Sangha, Nari Satyagraha Samiti etc. There were also those women who broke the 'new' boundaries established by the feminised public politics and engaged in violence. Analysts have ambiguously referred to them as 'revolutionaries' or 'terrorists', but the author opines that "They differed in the means and process of achieving their political goals and challenged the effectiveness of non-violence as a strategy for political liberation." Thapar-Bjorkert also contradicts the widely accepted view that women stepped out in the public domain for the nationalist cause and stepped back into the private sphere in their roles as mothers, wives and sisters once the movement was over on two counts. First, she says, not all women went back to their homes after Independence. "Their involvement, though limited for the majority, created spaces where issues such as education, social reform and women's public engagement were encouraged. More importantly, it carved out political niches for the younger generations. Second, many middle-class women did not step out in the public domain but continued to contribute and support the nationalist movement. For these women, the domestic sphere was a site of national activity, and they created a political space within the confines of its four walls." For these women, to bring up a new generation that was more articulate, more politically aware and more conscious of their rights as women -- that was their biggest nationalist act. "During the anti-colonial movement, home was not only a site of nationalist reform but also a site of political resistance," says the author, adding, "Women used the discourse of the 'familial' to carve out a political niche inside the domestic domain.' But, although the participation of thousands of women might not have led to an autonomous women's movement in the Hindi-speaking heartland or brought immediate changes for the purdah-bound women, it did generate an enhanced sense among women of their own strength. That indeed brought about a sea change in the socio-political state of the Indian subcontinent. We thank Suruchi for presenting us this valuable account of an important track of our historical roots. Swapan Sarkar is a short story writer and occasional contributor to The Daily Star.
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