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Subject: Political Cultural History

This paper looks at ‘Nationalism and Women’, their relationship and change. The 19 th

and 20th century saw the rise of Indian nationalism. Around the same time English educated

Indian men brought the women’s question regarding their rights and reforms to discussion.

Women participation in nationalism movements were markers of the changing women’s

situation.

The idea of femininity and women’s reform go hand in hand. The 19 th century India

was labelled effeminate by the British as compared to the masculine colonizers. India thus

was understood as showing feminine characteristics which are often linked to the idea of

weakness. This feminine idea of India later became the justification for the colonialization by

the stronger, masculine British. It is in this backdrop that the paper will explore the

reformation of the women’s question. 19 th century India increasingly saw English educated

Indians reflecting interest in modern reforms and thoughts. One among that was the

reformation of the women’s question. Raja Rammohun Roy and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar

were important figures in the women’s discourse as they brought widow remarriage to light

and were vocal about the need for female education. In this pattern of demanding reforms,

reformers like them questioned the Age of Consent Bill (1891) which marked an important

pivot, as the ideas of reforming the Age of Consent was seen as impeding into native

masculinity. In the backdrop of India being labelled effeminate, native masculinity was very
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crucial and thus impedance into that had consequences. The conservatists and traditionalists

stopped the women’s reforms and instead began to evoke a Hindu revivalism which pushed

women back into subordination. Nationalism at this point of time rose with conservatist

ideologies and adopted the women’s question through these lenses.

The 19th century nationalism also saw the splitting of livelihoods into private and

public spheres. The public represented the involvement of men with the colonials. Colonials

represented the materialism where India was a subject nation. The private sphere represented

the spiritual part of India, which was prided as something the West did not have and thus

made the Indians superior. The division of labour according to the sexes was that of

public/private, material/spiritual and male/female. As the division indicates, women were

pushed into seclusion and were given control of only the domestic setup. Association of

women with the spiritual section led to the idea that the purity of women equated to the caste

status. The purity increased with higher seclusion. Aparna Basu 1 in her paper on ‘Feminism

and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947’, calls women the ‘popular barometer’ as a scale to

describe this situation. The equation of seclusion and caste status soon became reasons for

lower caste people to seclude their women even further in hopes of moving upward in caste

status. It is important to note that seclusion was a concept of the 19 th century (Sekhar

Bandyopadhyay2 Plassey to Partition and After). While nationalist ideas were centred around

religion and conservatism, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay3 goes on to tell that the domesticity and

seclusion of women were the only areas of consensus for the colonial rulers and Indian men.

Nationalism rose alongside a period of modernism and rational thinking. This change

was brought by the colonials into Indian society to create English educated Indian men.

1
Aparna Basu, “Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917- 1947,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no.4 (1995):
95, doi:10.1353/j owh.2010.0459.
2
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India, 2nd ed. (Hyderabad,
Telangana: Orient Blackswan, 2015),383.
3
Bandyopadhyay, “Plassey to Partition”, 385.
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Meanwhile the need for women’s education also increased and eventually led to the

education of women. A common misconception is that this female education was for

emancipatory purposes of women. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay 4 states how this education was

actually for the men to come home to educated wives and hence to maintain a psychological

balance in the family. The ‘New Women’ of Nationalist ideologies thus was superior to the

Western women by her involvement with spirituality and upholding of culture. Partha

Chatterjee5 in his essay on ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, explains

how the increasing Nationalist movements brought women into the public sphere for

education. The idea of the new women extended women’s mobility into the public sphere as

long as her education and awareness of her culture, tradition and femininity would be

retained. A simple way of stating this would be that the woman extends her domesticity to the

public sphere. In this crossroads one can question why women did not take this opportunity to

create reforms for themselves. It is often unnoticed that the entire idea of public and private

spheres and that of the domesticity of women were the result of the nationalist patriarchy that

stemmed from the Age of Consent issue. All the changes given to women, education and

mobility for instance, were strictly for the benefit of men, and sanctioned by men. When the

idea of extended domesticity is controlled by men, women protesting for reforms would

reverse these changes and bring them back into seclusion. Regardless, the movement of

women into the public sphere retaining their femininity was a marked change for the

women’s question. This mobility became instrumental in changemaking in later parts of the

19th century

Though mobility was possible, women did not utilise it much until the 1920s and

1930s. The arrival of Gandhi with experience of rallying African women was instrumental in
4
Bandyopadhyay, “Plassey to Partition”, 384.

5
Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in
Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1990),245.
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increasing the participation of Indian women in the nationalist movement. Aparna Basu 6

remarks upon how Gandhi’s simple language, attire and respect spoke not only to the

educated women, but to the rural and unsophisticated ones too. Gandhi gave them roles that

they were able to do while in their domestic boundaries, which increased women’s

participation in the nationalist movements. When he spoke for the women supporting their

men for nationalism, he also spoke about how he believed women had the highest inherent

capacity for nonviolence. As nonviolence was one of the pillars of Gandhian thought, he

advocated for women in picketing for liquor, foreign clothes and spinning Khadi. This

became their passive participation in the Indian National Movements observed in the years

following 1920. He forged the idea of sisterhood and motherhood in way of evoking

consciousness and unity in women. Partha Chatterjee 7 upon the topic of women as mothers,

remarks how this shifted perspective ‘erases their sexuality’ and thus allowed for their

heightened participation. Gandhi also asked women to tie their women’s struggle with the

national struggle. Nehru and others imminent leaders had the idea that independence of the

nation would emancipate women from their problems too. However, modern India does not

show such improvement in the women’s question. Sumit Sarkar on a concluding note 8 in his

essay on women in Bengal, emphasises how ‘genuine women’s liberation cannot come as an

automatic fall-out from other types of change, but requires sustained, self-conscious and

independent struggle’. While entertaining this thought, Aparna Basu 9 states an important

point, that ‘the merging of the women’s movement with the Indian National Movement is

argued to have helped the cause of women and prevented development of hostility between

the genders, which is characteristic of Western feminist movements. Gandhian ideology

created a consciousness among women. Some of them wanted to actively participate beyond

6
Basu, “Feminism and Nationalism,” 103.
7
Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution,”249.
8
Sumit Sarkar, “The Women’s Question in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” Women and Culture 1, (1994):109.
9
Basu, “Feminism and Nationalism,” 103.
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what Gandhi had asked for, and thus women participation in nationalist movements evolved

accordingly.

Quit India Movement was the culmination of women’s ideologies and participation.

Namrata Singh’s paper10 on the women’s question, explains how the Quit India Movement

saw most of its leaders jailed very soon and, in their place, women began to lead. While the

Gandhian ideologies still prevailed, there was a distinction between non-violent Satyagraha

and equally violent outbreaks women were involved in. One such example would be women

involvement in the Indian National Army, led by Subash Chandra Bose. As the events began

to close towards the partition, women of both Hindu and Muslim religions were seen

participating. While women fought among men almost as though they were equal, the

public/private and material/spiritual divide was still there. India-Pakistan partition highlighted

these divides. Women were still areas of purity untouched by the West. Women’s bodies

were still the ‘barometers’ of the society, as Aparna Basu 11stated. At this point of nationalist

struggle women were still controlled by the patriarchy of their community. However, as

women held the chastity of a community, other communities wanting to violate that, often

showed the violence to the women themselves. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s essay states the

staggering statistics that in the few months surrounding the partition 75000 to 100 000

women were abducted or raped12.

When the nationalist ideologies adopted the women’s question in the 19 th century, the

women’s question faced dramatic changes. As Sumit Sarkar stated, the women’s question is a

struggle of its own. However, women’s reformation was overshadowed by the nationalist

agenda. Though men, women and leaders of that era believed that independence would result

in their emancipation too, current day India proves otherwise. Regardless, beyond the
10
Namrata Singh, “The Women’s Question: Participation in the Indian National Movement and its impact,”
IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 20, no.4 (2015) :25, doi:10.9790/0837-20412326.
11
Basu, “Feminism and Nationalism,” 95.
12
Bandyopadhyay, “Plassey to Partition”, 398.
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overshadowing, women brought other important reforms such as voting rights for themselves

in the same period. Namrata Singh’s 13 paper shows how in 1920 Bengal, The Bangiya Nari

Samaj campaigned for women’s voting rights. They were granted suffrage and female voters’

ratio of 1:5 through the Government of India Act 1935. Historians have argued that the

Nationalist sympathy was shown to the women for their participation in nation building.

Regardless, the 19th century saw the shift of women’s participation from passive to active.

The women’s question and their movement are still present today. The 19 th century saw

awakened consciousness in many women that still stays awakened in the modern discourse.

To quote Sekhar Bandyopadhyay14, ‘the women’s question in colonial India hardly received

the priority it deserves’. However, the nationalist movement did change the reception of the

women’s question in the discourse of modern India.

Bibliography

13
Singh, “The Women’s Question”, 25-26.
14
Bandyopadhyay, “Plassey to Partition”, 398.
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Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India. 2nd ed.

Hyderabad, Telangana: Orient Blackswan, 2015.

Basu, Aparna. "Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947." Journal of Women's History

7, no. 4 (1995): 95-107. doi:10.1353/jowh.2010.0459.

Chatterjee, Partha, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting

Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh

Vaid, 234-253. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Sarkar, Sumit, “The Women’s Question in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” Women and Culture

1, (1994): 103 – 112.

Singh, Namrata. “The Women’s Question: Participation in the Indian National Movement

and its impact.” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 20, no.4 (2015): 23-

26. doi:10.9790/0837-20412326.

Words without footnotes and Bibliography: 1586.