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How Upper-Caste Women Continue To Dominate
The WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN INDIA
Women’s movements in India have had a contested and debated history of women’s struggles articulating their
politics from different positions in a hierarchical caste society. The political spectrum of feminist articulation in
Indian society can be seen, ranging from Durga Vahini‘s likes, the women’s front of the RSS, to the autonomous
women’s groups who felt disillusioned with the patriarchy with their communist male counters parts.
By Guest Writer
Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Nomadic
and Muslim women have also broken
away from the Women’s movement in
India, which upper caste women have
historically dominated.
Historically, women have stepped
out of organised politics to highlight the
rampant patriarchy and male dominance
within organised politics. Similarly,
Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Nomadic and
Muslim women have also broken away
from the women’s movement in India,
which upper caste women have historically
dominated. They have rarely discussed
brahmanical patriarchy’s contours
while also further subjugating the
voices of doubly andtriply oppressed
women.
Historicising Women’s Movement
in India
The history of colonial India is constrained
to the nationalist discourse, so
much so that almost all political discourse
during colonialism could be
understood and articulated by discussing
the nationalist struggle against
British colonialism. Various historical
accounts have the nationalist struggle as
the central subject of the discourse.
Nationalist historiographies have subsumed
various political struggles and
reserved their positions as a dominant
discourse on understanding the assertion
of resistance in the early nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
However, in the process of assimilation,
this discourse has refrained from
articulating the discourse of the Bahujan
masses who organised and participated
in various political struggles against
colonialism and the dominant forces of
what we now know as India. While noting
the same, Sharmila Rege writes,
“Nationalist political discourse excluded
the radical pro-democratisation and
anti-hierarchical struggles of the lower
caste masses and refrained from encapsulating
and aligning with anti-colonial
nationalism.”
Feminist historiographies made radical
breakthrough by bringing out the
hidden histories of women’s articulation
of experiences of gender and patriarchy
from under the garb of paternalistic and
patriarchal ‘social reforms’. These historiographies
have rejected the
reformist movements of the White and
its Indian ally, the Savarna man.
The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya
Samaj‘s reformist movements and their
likes, along with the legislative pronouncements
like the abolishment of
Sati by the colonial rule, were projected
as an active engagement to liberate the
‘Indian woman’. Lata Mani argues that
both groups were redefining tradition
and, therefore, “Indianness”. Women
were “neither the subjects nor the
objects” of this discourse, but merely
the “site” on which the debates were
conducted.
Rassundari Devi’s autobiography
brought out the abject conditions of the
arduous labour that engulfed the
women’s life. “I was so immersed in a
sea of housework that I was not conscious
of what I was going through day
and night. After some time, the desire to
learn how to read properly grew very
strong in me. I was angry with myself
for wanting to read books. Girls did not
read… People used to despise women
of learning… In fact, older women used
to show a great deal of displeasure if
they saw a piece of paper in a woman’s
hands. But somehow, I could not accept
this.”, writes Rassundari Devi.
Feminist historians claim that this
was one of the first autobiographies
written by women and is seen as a pioneering
text for feminist struggles in
India. However, these histories speak
about the conditions of the women of
upper-caste households and women’s
laborious lives constrained to the
domestic realms in upper-caste realities.
“While these democratising movements
are seen as heralding ‘class rights for
women’ as ‘against and over’ simply
familial or caste- related identities; the
histories of the non-brahman democratic
movements, ever so crucial to the
emancipatory discourse on caste and
gender come to be overlooked“, writes
Sharmila Rege pointing out the same.
Upper caste and upper class women
were engaged in constant domestic
labour. However, traditional patriarchalism
was not true of lower caste women
who had to engage in labouring domestic
work along with the labour they produced
outside their homes in the fields
and villages.
Gail Omvedt in the book Caste,
class, and women’s liberation in India,
writes,”Indian peasants, with little property
to pass on and little chance of
attaining any status recognition, were
not so concerned with patrilineal blood
purity or caste standards; their women
of necessity played a greater economic
role and with this attained greater independence;
and the bhakti movements
which found their basis in the lower
castes and peasantry gave women, as
well as untouchables and Shudras,
greater religious roles.”
Writings by Mukta Salve and Tarabai
Shinde of the Satyashodhak tradition
highlighted the graded patriarchies in a
caste society and discussed male violence
in the contexts of caste.
During early colonialism in the
1800s, the Satyashodhak movement led
by Jyotiba Phule and Savitrimai Phule
rarely appeared in the historical texts of
feminist struggles. Phule, an anti-caste
leader, believed that Brahmanism and
violent Hinduism enslaved women,
Bahujan and Dalits. He saw imparting
knowledge in historically excluded
communities as a radical liberatory
assertion against Brahmanism. With this
view, he went on to open a school for
women, Dalits and Bahujans who were
denied the right to get an education as
inscribed in the Hindu scriptures. He
also worked with women enforced into
widowhood.
Mukta Salve, a student of Savitribai
and Jyotiba Phule, Image Source:
Forwardpress
Women’s writings from the
Satyashodhak tradition did not enter the
history of women’s movements.
Writings by Mukta Salve and Tarabai
Shinde of the Satyashodhak tradition
highlighted the graded patriarchies in a
caste society and discussed male violence
in the contexts of caste.
The subaltern school of thought has
also written on the women’s question
and rendering her from participation in
the political realm for nationalist struggle
into the domestic realm. Partha
Chatterjee, a leading historian in later
colonial studies, has discussed the patriarchal
alignments of the later colonial
period where the women’s participation
in the political struggle were seen in
binary oppositions of the public and the
private. Chatterjee argues that the
women’s question that had gained
precedence in the 19th century lost its
momentum in the 20th century as the
Nationalist movement came to the forefront
and did not see the women’s issues
challenge to the colonial State.
Rege argues that this blanket presumption
failed to see women’s en
masse participation in the Mahad struggle
led by Ambedkar and his followers.
While discussing the resolution of the
women’s question, Chatterjee overlooked
the contributions of the struggles
led by Bahujan women during the 20th
century. “The early decades of the 20th
century saw protests by ‘muralis’
against caste-based prostitution in the
campaigns launched by Shivram Janoba
Kamble. The 1930s saw the organisation
of independent meetings and conferences
by Dalit women in the
Ambedkarite movement.” . Independent
Dalit women’s conferences and
Parishads also came to be organised
during this time.
See Page 35