Women’s Participation during the Colonial Period in India- a Critique on Women’s Emancipation during the Period.
Journal Title: International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention - Year 2019, Vol 8, Issue 1
Abstract
Women as the guardians of the inner or spiritual sphere of the nation were regarded during the period as the embodiments of an essentialized ‘Indianness’. The re-articulation of the Indian woman for the selfdefinition of the nationalist bourgeoisie provided the context for the modernizing of certain indigenous patriarchal modes of regulating women in orthodox Indian society. It is no wonder therefore that the status of women became the main focus of the reforming agenda of the modernizing Indian intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Thus female infanticide was banned, sati was abolished and widow remarriage was legalised. In all cases reforms were legitimated by referring to the shastras and no women were ever evolved in the reform movements. In the nineteenth century as the women’s question became a part of the discourses of progress and modernity, a movement for female education started. By the turn of the century a number of women in middle class households were educated, either formally or informally. Earlier women’s participation was restricted to agricultural activities. If women’s issues did not figure in the nationalist discourse of the early twentieth century, it was because all other forms of emancipation were being perceived as conditional on national liberation. The period after World War One witnessed the rise of two eminent women in Indian politics, Annie Besant and Sarojini Naidu. But it was only with the advent of Gandhi that we see a major rupture in women’s involvement in the nationalist movement. During the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 he invited women to participate in the nationalist campaign. However it was during the Civil Disobedience movement that the floodgates for women were really opened. The trend that was set in the 1930s continued into the 1940s as women’s active role in the public space became accepted in society. However, as it seems, the women’s question in colonial India hardly received the priority it deserved. Although some women became conscious and actively participated in the political struggles and also identified themselves in many ways with the emerging nation, feminism had not yet been incorporated into the prevailing ideologies of liberation.
Authors and Affiliations
Dr (Prof) Anuradha Jaiswal
Keywords
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