Indian Women Since Independence

Since independence, women's legal, political, educational, and social status have changed dramatically. This was not surprising, given that the issue of improving women's status had been at the forefront of the social reform movement since Ram Mohan Roy began questioning social orthodoxy in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the freedom struggle, which began in the 1920s and intensified in the 1930s, drew heavily on the creative energies of Indian women. 

 

•    ‘I have brought the Indian women out of the kitchen, it is up to you (the women activists) to see that they do not go back,' Gandhiji said to Mridula Sarabhai, a valiant fighter for his causes of women and freedom, in the mid-thirties. 

•    Many doctrinal debates about the desirability of women's role in the public sphere were resolved by the national movement, which treated women as political beings capable of nationalist feelings and as, if not more, capable of struggle and sacrifice than men. If women could march in processions, defy laws, and go to jail without being accompanied by male family members, they could aspire to work, vote, and possibly inherit parental property.

 

•    From the 1920s onwards, women's political participation in massive popular struggles opened up new vistas of possibilities that a century of social reform could not. In the nineteenth century, the woman was portrayed as a victim of injustice, then as an ardent supporter of nationalist men in the early twentieth century, and finally as a comrade in the 1930s and 1940s. 

 

•    Women had taken part in every aspect of the national movement, from Gandhian to socialist to communist to revolutionary terrorist. They'd been involved in peasant uprisings and labor disputes. They also established separate women's organizations, the most important of which was the All India Women's Conference, which was founded in 1926.

 

•    When the time came to consolidate the gains of the long struggle for independence, the focus naturally shifted to securing legal and constitutional rights. Women were promised complete equality in the Constitution. It fulfilled a promise made by the national movement many years ago: women were given the right to vote alongside men, regardless of their education, property, or income. 

 

•    A right for which suffragists in many Western countries fought long and hard was won by Indian women in a single stroke! Nehru began the process of enacting the Hindu Code Bill in the early 1950s, a measure that had been demanded by women since the 1930s. 

 

•    A committee headed by B.N. Rau, the constitutional expert who drafted India's first draught constitution, had already looked into the matter and submitted a draught code in 1944. A bill was submitted by a committee chaired by B.R. Ambedkar, the law minister after independence, that raised the age of consent and marriage, upheld monogamy, gave women the right to divorce, maintenance, and inheritance, and treated dowry as stridhan, or women's property, and treated dowry as stridhan, or women's property. 

 

•    Despite strong support from a majority of Congressmen as well as women activists and social reformers, the bill was postponed due to strong opposition from conservative sections of society and hesitation on the part of some senior Congress leaders, including President Rajendra Prasad. Sections of the bill were eventually passed as four separate acts:

 

•    The Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act are all examples of Hindu legislation. Although the legal rights granted to Hindu women were insufficient, it was a significant step forward. 

 

•    The government's attempts to extend legal rights to other religious communities have met with fierce opposition. The case of Shah Bano is a good example. The Supreme Court granted Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman, a pittance as maintenance in 1985, about forty years after Hindu law was reformed. 

 

•    The conservative Muslim sects were outraged, and enough pressure was applied to the Rajiv Gandhi government for it to wilt and introduce a bill to overturn the Supreme Court decision. It is easy, and even necessary, to criticize the government for its cowardice, but it should be remembered that while the opposition mobilized thousands, Shah Bano's supporters only mobilised a few hundred. 

 

•    While critics have criticized Nehru for not pursuing a more radical civil code for Hindus and for failing to pass a uniform civil code that applied to all citizens, it should be remembered that while Nehru faced opposition, he also had considerable support because the process of social reform had progressed much further among Hindus than among Muslims, as evidenced by the Shah Bano case thirty years ago.

 

•    Some legal rights have been exercised, while others have remained on the books. Women are keen voters, acutely aware of the power of the vote, and their right to vote has been taken very seriously. This is especially true for women in rural areas. 

 

•    However, legal rights are rarely asserted in other areas, particularly when it comes to the right to inherit parental property. In most parts of the country, women, both rural and urban, continue to forego their parental property rights. This is largely due to the custom of patrilocal residence (residence in the home of the husband). This is also one of the reasons why women have refused to give up dowry because it is their only chance of inheriting a portion of their parents' wealth. In urban areas, the legal right to divorce is becoming more widely used, despite the stigma associated with divorce and the enormous challenges of starting a new life as a single woman.

 

•    Women's issues have been taken up by women's organizations as well as mainstream political parties and grassroots movements, which is a positive development. The more visible forms of gender injustice, such as dowry deaths, rape, and alcohol-related domestic violence, have gotten a lot of attention, as expected. 

 

•    Various movements on these issues have been launched since the 1970s, sometimes locally focused, sometimes with a broader spatial reach, and public awareness of these issues has risen as a result.The women's movement became too diverse after independence, as different political forces in the national movement went their separate ways. 

 

•    Many women leaders became involved in government-led and other institutional activities for women's welfare, such as the rehabilitation and recovery of women who had been lost or abandoned as a result of the mass migration and riots that accompanied Partition, as well as the establishment of working women's hostels and women's vocational centres. 

 

•    In 1954, Communist women broke away from the All India Women's Conference to form the National Federation of Indian Women, which became more of a party forum than a unified platform for women. Perhaps predictably, there was little evidence of women's "struggles" in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the perception that there was no women's movement after independence until the 1970s. 

 

•    However, such an understanding overlooks the inevitable phases of consolidation and quiet constructive work that follow periods of intense struggle as essential components of the movement. 

 

•    Following independence, the Indian women's movement went through a similar period. Women have also played a significant role in peasant, tribal, farmer, trade union, and environmental movements, allowing them to raise women's issues within these movements. 

 

•    Women organized themselves on a separate platform of the Nari Bahini during the Tebhaga peasant movement in Bengal in 1946-47, running shelters and maintaining lines of communication. Women's rights to finance and property were also mobilized by Communist women activists, and village-level Mahila Atma Raksha Samitis (women's self-defense committees) were formed to address issues such as domestic violence and wife-beating. Women's participation was also significant in another major Communist peasant struggle at the time, in the Telangana area of Hyderabad State from 1946 to 1950, and the leadership did pay attention to women's issues such as wife-beating. 

 

•    However, no evidence of women's organizations has emerged. Women were also allegedly discouraged from joining the guerilla force, and when they did, they felt they were not fully accepted. Other Communist women later complained that they were pressured to marry male comrades and pushed into working on the ‘women's front,' rather than being integrated into the leadership as full members.

 

•    There was a new political ferment in the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which gave rise to a slew of new political trends and movements, including the Naxalite movement, the JP movement, the Chipko movement, and the anti-price rise movement. 

 

•    Thousands of housewives joined in public rallies and those who couldn't leave their houses joined by beating thalis (metal plates) with lathas during the anti-price rise movement of 1973-75, which was organised by Communist and Socialist women in Maharashtra's urban areas (rolling pins). 

 

•    The movement spread to Gujarat, where it became entangled with the Nav Nirman movement, which was influenced by Jayaprakash Narayan's book "Total Revolution." Despite the fact that neither of these directly addressed so-called women's issues, the fact that so many women participated had a liberating effect, allowing women to gain the self-confidence they needed to move on to more complex issues of patriarchy and women's oppression. 

 

•    Meanwhile, in Gujarat, a significant new development was the establishment of a women's wing of the Textile Labor Association (TLA), an old Gandhian organization, called SEWA or Self-Employed Women's Association, which later became independent of the TLA. It was unique in that it organized women in the unorganized sector who worked as vendors, hawkers, and at home in the putting-out system into a union that provided training, credit, and technical assistance in addition to collective bargaining. SEWA spread to Indore, Bhopal, Delhi, and Lucknow, and is still one of India's top success stories today, thanks to Ela Bhatt's able leadership.

 

•    In 1972, a very different kind of movement arose in the Shahada tribal area of Maharashtra's Dhulia district. The movement for drought relief and land, which was led initially by Gandhian Sarvodya workers and later by Maoist activists, culminated in a militant anti-liquor campaign in which women, who saw liquor as the main cause of wife-beating, broke liquor pots in drinking dens and marched to punish men who beat their wives in public. 

 

•    A similar movement had taken place in Uttarakhand, in the hill areas of Uttar Pradesh, in the early 1960s, under the influence of Gandhians such as Vinoba Bhave, Gandhiji's followers Sarla Behn and Mira Ben, who had set up ashrams in Kumaon after independence, and local Gandhian leader Sunderlal Bahuguna, who became famous in the Chipko agitation. 

 

•    Women had gathered in large numbers to picket liquor vendors and demand that the sale of alcohol be prohibited. Anti-liquor movements have erupted from time to time in various parts of the country, the most recent of which occurred in Andhra Pradesh in the mid-1990s, when a powerful wave of anti-liquor protest by poor rural women led to a policy of prohibition and later restrictions on liquor sales. When Gandhiji made the liquor boycott an integral part of the nationalist programme and entrusted its implementation to women, it was clear that he recognised an important aspect of women's consciousness.

 

•    Women in Uttarakhand were once again very active in the Chipko movement, which got its name from women hugging trees to prevent them from being cut down by timber contractors, beginning in 1974. It became known as the first major environmental movement, and it established the notion that women had a special nurturing role toward nature, and that environmental issues were frequently women's issues because they were the ones who suffered the most from its deterioration, such as when forests vanished and they had to walk for miles to collect fuelwood, fodder, and water. 

 

•    In Chattisgarh, women were active in the Chattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh, which was founded in 1977 in the tribal belt to protest the Bhilai steel plant's mechanisation policy, which was seen as particularly harmful to women's employment; the Mahila Mukti Morcha arose as a new platform. 

 

•    In 1979, the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, a group influenced by Jayaprakash Narayan's ideas and leading a struggle of agricultural labourers against temple priests in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, in which women activists and ordinary women played a major role, demanded that land be registered in the names of women as well. In later years, this idea gained traction, and in some states, pattas, or government-issued title deeds for land, and even tree pattas, were only issued in the names of women.

 

•    The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan was at the forefront of the campaign to bring justice to the victims of the 1984 chemical gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. The Samagra Mahila Aghadi was founded in the mid-1980s as the women's wing of the Shetkari Sangathana, which had been leading the Maharashtra farmer's movement since 1980. In November 1986, over one lakh women attended its session and took a stand against political brutalization, which disproportionately affects women. It also decided to form all-women panels for panchayat and zila Parishad elections.

 

•    Another branch of the women's movement emerged in the form of so-called "autonomous" women's groups. From the mid-1970s onwards, these exploded in urban areas. Many of these were women who had been involved in or influenced by the Maoist or Naxalite movement, and the movement's demise in the early 1970s sparked a debate and rethinking in which gender relations and women's roles in political organizations were prominent. 

 

•    The Progressive Women's Organization at Osmania University in Hyderabad, founded in 1974, and the Purogami Stree Sangathana in Pune and the Stree Mukti Sangathana in Bombay, founded in 1975, were among the first. The United Nations' declaration of 1975 as International Women's Year likely contributed to a flurry of activity in Maharashtra in 1975, with party-based and autonomous organizations celebrating March 8 as International Women's Day for the first time, and a women's conference attended in October in Pune by women from all over the state belonging to Maoist, Socialist, and Republican organizations.

 

•    Following the Emergency in 1977, a new flurry of activity erupted. In Delhi, a women's group founded what would become one of the most enduring institutions of the women's movement. Manushi, a journal that has chronicled and analysed the women's movement, told its history, featured women's literature, and much more, has thrived under the able leadership of Madhu Kishwar, unquestionably one of the most original, self-reflective, and fearless voices in the women's movement. 

 

•    The Mahila Dakshata Samiti was formed by women in the Janata Party, mostly socialists, and played a major role in launching the anti-dowry campaign, in which the Delhi-based Stri Sangharsh was also very active. The issue of dowry harassment and dowry deaths was raised in a big way starting in 1979, with street rallies and plays, demonstrations outside dowry victims' homes, and demands for legal reform. 

 

•    A door-to-door campaign on the issue was conducted by the Janwadi Mahila Samiti, a wing of the CPM women's wing, the All India Democratic Women's Association, which was founded in 1981. A bill to amend the Dowry Prohibition Act (1961) was sent to the parliament's Joint Select Committee, and women's organizations and other activists testified before the committee as it toured the country in 1981 and 1982.

 

•    In 1984, the law was strengthened against perpetrators of dowry-related crimes, with a few minor amendments following later. Following this, the movement slowed, leaving the impression that the victories were insignificant, given the persistence of dowry and the difficulty in obtaining convictions for offenders. Rape, particularly police rape, was another major campaign issue that surfaced. 

 

•    The Rameeza Bee case in Hyderabad in 1978, the Mathura case in Maharashtra in 1980, and the Maya Tyagi case in western Uttar Pradesh in 1980 all brought the issue to the public's attention. Women's organizations and groups, as well as mainstream political parties, took up the issue in a big way, and a bill to amend the existing rape law was introduced in 1980. The main change it brought about was that custodial rape was treated as a more heinous crime than other forms of rape, and the burden of proof was shifted from the victim to the accused, which changed the possibility of convicting offenders dramatically. In the meantime, the campaign had died down, having exposed the deep divisions in the women's movement, which were caused as much by turf battles as by ideological and strategy differences. 

 

•    Many activists felt their agenda had been hijacked or ‘appropiated' by the government as a result of the government's quick response. The inherent flaw in a strategy that does not allow for the absorption of reformist gains was exposed.

 

•    The anti-dowry and anti-rape movements seemed to have depleted the movement's energies for a while, and while protests erupted around the Shah Bano case in 1985-86, there was little enthusiasm or unity. The issue was also clouded by the overall communal atmosphere, in which issues of Muslim identity became entangled with the more straightforward issue of women's rights, and Hindu women's enthusiasm for Muslim women's rights frequently left women's rights activists perplexed and powerless.

 

•    The agitation against what was called the sati but appeared to be the murder of Roop Kanwar, a young woman in Deorala, Rajasthan, was along the same lines, with Hindu communal groups mucking up the issues by portraying it as an attack on Indian tradition and mobilizing women to defend their right to sati. Surprisingly, some of the most effective opposition to sati came from Arya Samajists like Swami Agnivesh, who went around rural Rajasthan and Haryana mobilizing anti-sati sentiment and challenging the head priests of the Puri and Benares temples to a debate over their claim to a scriptural sanction for sati. 

 

•    In Orissa, Gandhians organized a 10,000-woman rally to gherao the Fluri temple's head priest, challenging him to prove his claim, which he couldn't. 

 

•    The anti-caste movement in Maharashtra and rural women in Rajasthan were also vocal in their opposition. By the 1980s, there was a clear shift away from mass campaigns among the ‘autonomous' women's groups, to less dramatic work such as the establishment of women's centers for legal aid, counselling, documentation, research, publication, and the like, at least partly because it was felt that the mass campaigns with their focus on legal reform had not really succeeded in solving the problems they had set out to solve, at least partly because it was felt that the mass campaigns with their focus on legal reform had not really succeeded in solving the problems.

 

•    Many women's organizations, such as Saheli in Delhi, believed it was important to focus on women's joys as well as their problems, and encouraged women to express themselves through music, dance, and art. Others distributed magazines, acted as media watchdogs, scanning advertisements and films that were derogatory to women, raised women's health issues, or campaigned against foeticide, for the rights of the girl child, or for water and housing for slum women. Many organizations that worked with communities rather than just women put a greater emphasis on women's issues in their work.

 

•    Anveshi was established in Hyderabad as a platform for theoretical studies of women's issues, and the Centre for Women's Development Studies in Delhi promoted research and documentation, including the launch of a Journal for Gender Studies in later years. In the 1990s, many more university-based centres popped up, and enough research and writing was available for Women's Studies courses to appear in university curricula. 

 

•    Clearly, the movement had entered another phase of institutionalization and consolidation, similar to that which had occurred in the early 1950s, and what some activists perceived as a watering down of the movement was more likely diffusion of its ideas into broader society, which was bound to result in some dilution of its sharp ideological content. 

 

•    It's also true that the movement suffered from a lack of unity in terms of goals, strategies, and methods, as well as sectarianism, which was most likely a left-wing contribution, and a proclivity for reacting to immediate crises rather than forming a consensus on a course of action. It has also been claimed that money received from foreign organizations influenced some feminists to take up issues that were important to the donors but not to the movement in India, and at least some of the more convoluted debates on theoretical issues that absorbed the energies of some feminists suggest that the charge is not without merit. 

 

•    The divide between urban educated women's organizations and rural or poor urban women's concerns remained, though it narrowed in some cases. As one looked at the women's movement since the 1970s, the sense of accomplishment that was so palpable in the 1930s and 1940s, when huge leaps in empowerment and consciousness were made, was missing.

 

•    This isn't to say that the effort wasn't fruitless. Government policy was influenced, and in 1988, the government released a National Perspective Plan for Women, outlining plans for women's health, education, and political participation. 

 

•    The Panchayati Raj bill was introduced in 1989 (though it was only passed in 1993), and it mandated that one-third of the seats in panchayats be reserved for women. The Scheme for the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWACRA) was established, which sponsored Mahila Mandals or Sanghams in rural areas, allowing many poor women who had no other means of organising and expressing themselves to do so, with the help of local voluntary groups and political activists.

 

•    Another innovative scheme, the Mahila Kosh, was launched to provide credit to Mahila Mandals so that their members could improve their skills and living standards. The effectiveness of these was determined by their ability to be used at the local level, which varied depending on the level of politicization and awareness of women's issues. 

 

•    However, a large number of organizations were able to use the legitimacy or safety net provided by a government program as a stepping stone to reach poor rural women who would otherwise be difficult to reach. Women's participation in local and national politics is still being pursued. Women panchayat members and village pradhans are receiving special training to perform their new roles, as one-third of the seats in panchayats are now reserved for women. 

 

•    For some time, a serious effort to reserve one-third of the seats in parliament for women has been underway, and it has received widespread support from female politicians, women's organizations, and some political parties, as well as sparked heated debate.

 

•    On the other hand, female literacy in Barmer, the poorest district in the poorest state in India (Rajasthan), is only 8%, compared to 10% in Burkina Faso, the poorest country in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ganjam, India's worst district in this regard, has an infant mortality rate of 164 per thousand live births, which is higher than Mali, the worst country in Sub-Saharan Africa, at 161. 

 

•    We can analyses the factors that facilitate and inhibit positive trends in gender justice because of the extreme diversity we've encountered. While history and tradition are important, and the south of the country has a better track record than the north, as Himachal Pradesh has demonstrated, a strong commitment to public policy can bring about rapid change. 

 

•    The diversity also demonstrates that economic prosperity or growth does not always imply greater gender justice; Punjab and, to a lesser extent, Haryana, both prosperous states, perform poorly in this regard. The factors that aid in the advancement of women's positions are also evident. Female literacy and education are unmistakable winners, with strong correlations to improvements in all other indicators. Low literacy and education levels, on the other hand, cause negative trends in other indicators.

 

•    As a result, women have been the primary victims of India's failures in basic education and literacy. When village primary schools fail, boys are sent to neighboring villages or towns, or even private schools, while girls are typically kept at home. This decision is based on social conservatism and the belief that investing money in a girl's education is equivalent to watering a plant in another man's house because the benefits will accrue to the girl's in-laws' family. 

 

•    However, in most parts of the country, if schools are available, teachers are regular, and classes are held, a large proportion of girls are sent to school. Even among the poorest sections of society, awareness of the importance of education has spread to this extent. In fact, the poor are more aware of the importance of education as a means of social mobility. However, in a situation where single-teacher schools accounted for one-third of all schools (in 1986) and where, according to recent surveys, two-thirds of teachers were found absent during inspections, where there are fifty-eight children for each teacher in the 6-10 age group, and where India ranks 82nd out of 116 countries in terms of public expenditure on education as a percentage of GNP (1990-91). 

 

•    The provision of free primary health care at the grassroots level is another important factor in improving gender justice. If health facilities are not easily accessible or are expensive, as in the case of education, women and female children suffer unequally. 

 

•    In fact, unequal access to improved facilities and living standards is the primary reason for India's sharp drop in the female-male ratio from 972 to 927 between 1901 and 1991. Women's chances of survival haven't decreased in absolute terms—quite the contrary. 

 

•    However, women have benefited less from improved access to health facilities and higher living standards than men, and as a result, their share of the population has decreased. To correct this imbalance, health facilities must be made more accessible to women. 

 

•    The results have been dramatic in places where this has been done, such as Kerala, where over 90% of women deliver their babies in medical facilities. To be realized and democratized, millions of women must be capable of understanding and exercising the legal and political rights granted to them in the Constitution, which are theirs by virtue of their own efforts as well as by all social justice norms. 

 

•    Kerala and Himachal Pradesh, at the country's two poles, have shown the way: the rest of the country must follow. In addition, the women's movement must make education and health a priority in its strategy for women's empowerment.