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| Related Articles: Women in South Asia - The Raj and After http://www.sikhnet.com/Sikhnet/discussion.nsf/3d8d6eacce83bad8872564280070c2b3/4e1170d98a045d208725690e004cbde6!OpenDocument&Highlight=0 Book Review - Women and Human Rights http://www.sikhnet.com/Sikhnet/discussion.nsf/3d8d6eacce83bad8872564280070c2b3/0b17f7d9c32e137b872568ca005d1a04!OpenDocument&Highlight=0 Suppressed In The Four Walls http://www.sikhnet.com/Sikhnet/discussion.nsf/3d8d6eacce83bad8872564280070c2b3/3c4146e7b2e0be4e8725696f004cf250!OpenDocument&Highlight=0 ******************************************************************************* Long haul of women struggle Rumina Sethi Tribune The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women?s Rights and Feminism in India by Radha Kumar. Verso, London. Pages vi + 203. ANY research on a subject with a historical and material reality undergoing mutation in a thousand different ways is exceedingly difficult. Further, if it is a category shared by the researcher, it can only add to the difficulty of representing correctly. I am referring to women and feminism, of course, whose history Radha Kumar very methodically renders in "The History of Doing". Why it becomes difficult for a woman to talk about women has to do with the inevitability of the personal voice creeping in, raising the question how one woman facing particular circumstances can represent other women in completely different circumstances. Can bourgeois women represent proletarian women or upper caste women represent dalit women? However, we are grateful, at least, for a woman-centred discourse or else we would have an androcentric way of knowing where women have more often been the objects of knowledge than the producers of it. Radha Kumar is well aware of the difficulties the locator faces as she goes through the familiar yet unfamiliar terrain of the feminist movement in India from the late 19th century to the 1980s. Kumar does not directly contest male-centred ways of knowing even as she questions the gendered hierarchy of Indian society and culture. Alongside, she also raises the question as to who these women are. Are they women in general or only some women? Are certain women being left out of the picture? She traces women?s assigned roles and their cultural contexts over the past 180 years, highlighting all the time their little campaigns for improvement. Evidently, women?s "politics" has moved from needs to rights, from restricted rights to parity in selected areas and to the larger right of self-determination. She writes, "In India, from the early 19th century definitions of the suffering of Indian women and the need for reform, by the early 20th century, the emphasis had shifted to stressing women?s right to be treated as useful members of society. By the late 20th centuty, women were demanding that they should have the power to decide their own lives." "The History of Doing" traces the early period of social conflict what with the formation of Rammohan Roy?s Atmiya Sabha intended to initiate education of women and to put an end to sati, on the one hand, and the Dharma Sabha of orthodox Hindus, on the other, forcing the British colonial government to make a distinction between "forcible" and "voluntary" sati (as though some forms of it were legitimate). Do women and feminism together represent dalit women? Radha Kumar circumvents this difficult question.. By the late 20th century, she says, by tracing the feminist movement in India, it began by emphasising social reform. Of course, the custodians of the women were menfolk. Nevertheless, by the end of the 19th century, two firebrands? Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde ? were writing about the everyday hostility, both from the traditionalists and the modernists, which women had to put up with. For not only were women insulted and ridiculed by the orthodoxy but reform literature itself projected women as gossiping, superstitious, treacherous and insolent. The next phase was scarcely worth the effort that was being made on their behalf The intense activity witnessed the construction of mother-centred nationalism so famously associated with Bankim?s "Vande Mataram" but also, surprisingly, with Sarala Devi, Tagore?s niece, who almost became an example of Bankim?s Debi Chaudharani. This is the period when woman became shakti, both Durga symbolising Mother India, and Kali, who was used to sanction violence in the struggle for independence from colonial rule. The subtlety of these images is often lost because these goddesses are the traditional symbols of female strength. They should instead be read as representational to allocate women a role in national struggles and, more importantly, as a way of containing the threat of woman?s dangerous erotic energy these representaions mean. Later Gandhi also played with the idea of the devouring sexuality of women when he predicated women?s involvement in the freedom struggle upon chastity and in "thought, word and deed." When in 1925, the Bengal Congress Committee roped in some prostitutes under its banner, Gandhi was hysterical with rage because these women had stolen the virtue of society and hence were worse than thieves. It is a very well known story that he tried to prevent the marriage of the Kriplanis since women constituted a sexual threat and were incapable of transcending desire. Although Gandhi has been seen as a champion of women?s causes, he, in many ways, saw their greatest strength in their weaknesses because of his innate belief in the woman as a repository of spiritual and moral values. One of Kumar?s insights is her focus on the indifferent attitude adopted in describing women?s movements, in particular the histories of landless labourers and the working class. Indeed, there is a discernible inclination towards representing middle class and upper caste movements which may be perceived in a number of biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, collections of speeches and writings in the early part of the 20th century. And even before that if one looks at the women?s movement in the late 19th century which started as a process of social reform, how much of that could have affected the large section of lower caste women? Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha have examined the varioius categories of the late 19th century women?s movements in detail in their monumental "Women Writing in India" and come out with the observation that lower caste women were not the main beneficiaries of the changes brought about by illustrious figures such as Rammohun Roy or Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. Sati, for example, was a Rajput custom, later practised by the Brahmins of Bengal. The harsh rites governing a widow?s life, again, mattered to the upper castes which alone could impose severe diet restrictions. In fact, among the Jats in Punjab or the Muslims, widow remarriage was not completely uncommon. The removal of purdah and the issue of women?s education, part of social reform, could also have relevance only to the lives of upper caste women who led a cloistered life in comparison to their toiling sisters. Being a history rather than a critical documentary, Kumar?s book does not, however, comment on the value of social reform in institutionalising changes in women?s lives. Be it as it may, Radha Kumar does raise the theoretical question of the degree of inequality in real and imagined women. We see in this society not only a celebration of the feminine values of gentleness and care but also a reflection of the desire to be different from hierarchical, power-based and male-dominated organisational structures. Apart from this basic tension, we are exposed to the complexity of the circumstances which confront feminists ? a society where there are differences between women themselves which exist at the level of caste, tribe, class, religion, region and language. This is evident especially when it comes to legislations for change. This is when women are confronted with the question: "Equality for whom?" What makes the situation even more complex is the playing up of Muslim, Christian and Hindu identities by power-hungry groups as happened in the Shah Bano case. Interestingly, movements against feminism use this form of attack. Feminism is itself often branded as a westernised, upper class and urban movement which is ignorant of, and unsympathetic to, traditional "Indian" women. Feminists, ironically, often find themselves outnumbered by groups of women in a hostile situation, appropriating their slogans and using them for an antithetical cause. Anti-sati demonstrators in 1987, therefore, experienced a humiliating sense of loss when their own words were snatched and turned against them by their own kind. It is undeniable that post-modernist. Lacanian ideas of the French feminist movement are disconcerting for us since problems of poverty and illiteracy precede the framework of sexual politics in this country. where a marxist-feminist approach would be more appropriate. Further, owing to an all-male leadership, who have been wooed in terms of the tradition-modernity debate where feminism is pronounced as a selling-out to the West. In a post-colonial and post-imperial scenario, this only serves to widen the gap, drumming up of sentiments. The contemporary feminist movement in India can thus be seen as riven by the gendered hierarchy of society and culture. In Kumar?s examination of the 1970s and the 80s, the protests against the existing sexual division of labour, the campaigns against dowry and rape, and the brutal forms of violence against woment can especially be linked to the culture that rationalises and justifies such oppression. Women?s "natural" inferiority, attributed to biological difference, and the language of rights is at work here. Even women?s organisations function on the principle that women have a secondary, derived identity. Thus it is that pooling resources to reduce the burden of dowry comes before active campaigning against dowry by Rashtra Sevika Samiti. Sevikas are also always told to try persuasion but to never openly revolt against their families. Although the Rashtra Sevika Samiti represents a restricted form of women?s empowerment, the organisation accepts final commands from an all-male leadership that refuses any debate on Hindu patriarchy. The so-called feminists, activist women, are seen to be drawn in support of authoritarian regimes, playing subservient roles. It is heartening to note, however, that the symbol of the mother as a rallying or entitling device is now giving way to two self-images ? the woman as daughter and the working woman. The former places emphasis away from "role playing" and the latter focuses more on her productive rather than her reproductive potential. The inadequacy of the conventional politics and literature indicates that we are grappling today not simply with the intellectual history of women but also their very site of enunciation, their location and their audience. Although Indian feminism has witnessed all kinds of liberal, leftist and radical feminist positions, clearly several things have to be done. First, women have to be put back into the study of formal politics. It is necessary to make clear how ostensibly neutral political processes and concepts, such as nationalism, citizenship and the state are fundamentally gendered. And second, the conventional definition of "the political" should be widened so that many of the activities undertaken by women are incorporated. This will enable us to approach the complexity of women in the Third World from a perspective of the multiplicity of difference rather than "otherness". |
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