WOMEN’S QUESTION

The women’s question, like the untouchability question or the communal question, emerged
during the national movement as a political question that had to be solved to give shape to the
vision of a free Indian nation. From the 19th century, the women’s question has formed one of
the major issues in social debate - first among social reformers, then among the nationalists and
finally, in the contemporary period, among all those who are concerned with problems of
development, of growing inequality, poverty and unemployment.

In the first phase, the women’s question emerged essentially in the context of the identity crisis
of the new educated middle class - the first products of the colonial system of education. Many
of them, trying to imitate the lifestyles of the colonial rulers, found the condition of their own
women to be a stumbling block. The criticism of many of our traditional customs like the
treatment meted out to widows, child marriage, and the denial of education to women were felt
to be blots on our society which earned, very rightly, the criticism of western commentators. The
first generation of reformers were anxious to remove those blots and a few of them began to
address some of the instruments that were used to subjugate and oppress women.

However,19th century reformers, being primarily concerned with the problems of the newly
emerging urban middle class, had concentrated all their concerns on the problems experienced by
women of this class. The image of the suppressed, subjugated and secluded Indian woman -
Hindu or Muslim - that preoccupied the Indian literati and their counterparts in the west took no
note of the millions of Indian women who formed the backbone of the Indian economy, and who
were far greater victims of the colonial transformation of the economy than even the men in their
family. Just in the province of Bengal, 30 lakhs of women, who formed 1/5th of the women
population of the province, earned their livelihood from hand spinning of cotton yarn in the late
18th century. By the end of the 19th century, their numbers had dwindled.

In the second phase, namely in the last quarter of the 19th century, the women’s question got
increasingly coloured by the rise of cultural nationalism and revivalism as a counterattack to the
spread of western influences and values in our society. The revivalists, interested in conserving
indigenous cultural traditions, began to support women’s education against the attack by
orthodoxy, on the grounds that women’s education would help to strengthen the hold of
indigenous culture through the institution of the family. The growing communication gap caused
by only men receiving modern education, in their opinion, was eroding the ability of women to
influence the men in their families. Educating them would improve their status within the family
and introduce a break on the increasing influence of western values and culture over the minds of
young men. The cultural nationalists thus introduced a new concept into the women’s question -
women as the custodians of traditional cultural values.
The voice of dissent was present also during the second phase. Writing around the 1890s Jyotiba
Phule, whose primary concern was to break the hegemony of the high castes, referred to `the
subjugation of women as an instrument for maintaining Brahaminical dominance in Indian
society. During the same period, B.M. Malabari demonstrated for the first time the role that the
Press could play in mounting a social campaign - in the agitation that he promoted for the Age of
consent Bill. For the first time, readers of the Times of India read real-life stories of women who
had experienced torture and oppression at the hands of their husbands.

In the third phase, the women’s question began to get increasingly intertwined with the trends
within the nationalist movement. A handful of women got involved in revolutionary activities
and challenged their leaders’ refusal to allow them to participate fully in the freedom movement.
As the movement increasingly took a turn towards mass mobilization, women’s participation in
increasing numbers became visible.

During the earlier phase of the women’s question, research and writing on women’s problems
were primarily taken up by historians and Indologists. They emphasized women’s familial roles
and reflected the particular concerns of the social reform movement by attempting to reinterpret
scriptural texts. The rise of cultural nationalism strengthened this perspective and nationalist
historians competed with each other to prove how high was the status of women in earlier
periods. However, little attention was paid to writings by women which could have indicated
women’s own perception of their realities. The debate on the women’s question was dominated
by men. Even the creative writers, poets, journalists, and playwrights of the 19th and early 20th
centuries, though concerned and sensitive about women’s problems, tended to emphasize the
familial, confined and dependent lives of middle-class women - whether they were writing about
urban or rural society.

The first three phases of the women’s question had focused entirely on the issues of women’s
familial status, their access to education and better legal rights as the instruments of reform. In
the fourth phase, after independence, the question was deemed to have been solved, with the
adoption of the principle of equality in the Constitution, and throwing open to women the rights
to education, the vote and entry into professions, public services and political offices. This phase,
benefitted a large number of women from the middle class, fostering in them a complacency and
support for the status quo. Women’s organisations which had fought militantly for women’s
rights during the 30s and 40s settled down to perform welfare services for the people with grants
provided by the Government. For all practical purposes, the women’s question disappeared from
the public arena for a period of over 20 years. This was reflected in the decline of both research
and writings about women during this period.

The fifth and the last phase is really set in the context of the growing crisis in our society, with
increasing inequality, poverty and threats to people’s rights. New compulsions that began to
generate renewed interest in women’s situation were (a) the concern with the population crisis
from the 60s, and (b) the growing crisis of unemployment and poverty from the late 60s. The
population area attracted substantial research investment from both government and international
donor agencies and a spate of research on family planning emerged.

All investigations into women’s status and the findings of eminent social scientists like Srinivas,
Altekar and others point to a consistent alliance between patriarchy and hierarchy in maintaining
the existing structure of inequalities in our society. The power relations that help to perpetuate
monopolistic control of political power, economic power, and knowledge power by a small
minority of our population also help to perpetuate certain role models, myths and mystification
about women’s social, economic and political roles by keeping them but of the arena of
legitimate scientific enquiry. This promotion of invisibility of women’s actual roles, struggles,
views and aspirations has provided a major obstacle to the realisation of the vision of equality
that took shape during the freedom struggle.