Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

10 SUMI KRISHNA
Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862–1894), whose autobiographical narrative
Saguna, published in 1895, was the first such work in English in India.
Her story vividly reflects the influence of a much-loved elder brother and
husband in moulding her thoughts to new learning, while reaffirming
the conservative values of a married woman in colonial society. Lokuge
(1998: 12) writes:
It is possible to speculate that these women who were so directly caught
in the cross-currents of the Indian-British encounter suffered profound
conflict and dislocation not clearly explained even to themselves, caused
by the collision of recently acquired New-Woman convictions with
established ideologies, growing nationalist concerns, and equally
significantly, traumatic fear of the unknown.
Aruna Asaf Ali has argued that the ‘real liberation’ of Indian women can
be traced to the 1930s (Masani 1987, cited via Visram in Hardiman 2004:
116). She says that earlier social reformers had not been able to do what
Mahatma Gandhi had done when he called upon women to join the freedom
struggle, saying that women were better ‘symbols of mankind’ and
better satyagrahis than men. Gandhi gave women, including the majority
of those in the freedom struggle who were not educated or westernised,
tremendous self-confidence: ‘At last women were made to feel the equal
of a man: that feeling dominated us all, educated and non-educated.’ For
their part, women applauded Gandhi for his progressive views against
child marriage and for equal sexual relationships within marriage, for
his advocacy of widow remarriage, his appeal to simple lifestyles that
would reduce women’s drudgery within the home and his opposition to
purdah. Although, some educated women like Dr Lakshmi (Swaminadhan)
Sehgal of the INA (Indian National Army) did enter the public arena on
their own terms (see Ali 2004), exceptionally exercising freedoms many
men of their time could not even think of, middle-class women generally
accepted Gandhi’s core belief that it was women’s duty to uphold the moral
values of marriage and society.
In a speech to the Gujarat Educational Conference in 1917, Gandhi said:
Primary education for the two sexes can have much in common. There
are important differences at all other levels. As Nature has made men and
women different, it is necessary to maintain a difference between the
education of the two. True, they are equals in life, but their functions differ.