Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 9
inconsistency of Congress support forced upon them difficult choices
between nationalistic and feminist goals. The ‘feminist nationalism’ that
was projected by women and supported by men subordinated gender
equality to national politics. Forbes (ibid.: 120) argues that in choosing to
subordinate their claims to the national goals, women were not being
‘puppets’ as some have maintained, but were conscious of the difficulty
of the struggle and compromised to get some degree of justice.
The complexity and ambiguity of the women’s struggle is evident
in the arena of education. Education and law were seen as key factors in
the social reform campaigns against child marriage, and those in support
of widow remarriage and the abolition of sati. Everyone seemed to agree
that education was at the centre of women’s emancipation, but this education
was envisioned in Brahminical and elitist terms to enhance women’s
ability to serve the family and the nation more effectively. Many reformist
men who played a key role in widening the lives of Indian women through
education also fostered ambiguous attitudes among women towards their
own emancipation, the freedom of their minds.
Prominent among those who championed women’s education in the
later nineteenth century was Pandita Ramabai Ranadive (see Chakravarti
1998). As Omvedt (2006: 26) points out, although Pandita Ramabai converted
to Christianity, she ‘accepted much of the framework of the Brahman
intellectuals of the time’, the identification of ‘India’ with ‘Hindu’, and the
Aryan justification for caste hierarchy as ‘economic division of labour’.
Despite this, says Omvedt, Ramabai was the first to identify ‘the Sanskritic
core of Hinduism as irrevocably and essentially anti-woman’.
The hegemonic substratum of a Brahminical patriarchy is reflected
even more clearly in the lives and work of some of the prominent ‘new
women’ of the late nineteenth century. Tarabai Shinde (ca. 1850–ca. 1910)
wrote the defiantly path-breaking treatise Stri Purush Tulana on the
problems faced by widows and by women in traditional marriages, but
accepted that a woman’s fulfilment in life lay in her role as wife and mother
(see O’Hanlon 1994). Anandibai Joshi (1865–87), the first Indian woman
who qualified as an allopathic doctor, was able to do so because she had
been married as a child to a fanatic believer in women’s education, but
she also suffered greatly from his patriarchal convictions, which she upheld
to the extent of publicly defending child marriage (see Chitnis 1992: xi).
Such defiance of tradition and submission to it also marked the life of