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Contemporary Indian Feminism Author(s): Radha Kumar Source: Feminist Review, No. 33 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 20-29Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395212Accessed: 25-11-2015 21:55 UTC

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CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FEMINISM

Radha Kumar

The Women's Liberation movement in India today is so diverse that it cannot be properly described in a brief article, so the focus here shall be on its main currents and the course they have taken over the last ten years, with occasional digressions into their history.

In many ways the development of feminism in India is similar to that in Western Europe or the United States: like them, India too saw a feminist movement in the early twentieth century; like them, again, the movement gradually died away after the winning of certain demands, until, recently, a new feminist movement developed out of contemporary radical movements.

The sixties and early seventies saw the development of a whole spate of radical movements in India, from student uprisings, workers' agitations and peasant insurgencies to tribal, anticaste and consumer action movements. These spanned a political spectrum from Gandhian- socialist (that is, nonviolent protest, based on explicitly moral values, over specific working or living conditions) to the far left, in particular, the Maoists. The Gandhian-socialists initiated several of the first women's movements in post-Independence India (e.g. an antialcohol agitation in north India, a consumer action and anticorruption agitation in western India, and a women's trade union, also in western India). Interestingly, however, neither they, nor others, looked upon these movements as feminist, nor did they advance any theories of women's oppression. These were advanced first by two women's groups which were formed in 1975, both of which grew out of the Maoist far left. The Progressive Organization of Women in Hyderabad offered an Engelian analysis of women's subordination, and the League of Women Soldiers for Equality, in Aurangabad linked feminism and anticasteism, saying that religious texts were used to subordinate both women and the lower castes. Although the imposition of a State of Emergency on India in 1975 led to a break in most agitational activities, there was, in many ways, an intensification of theoretical discussion. In 1977, when the Emergency

Feminist Review No 33, Autumn 1989



Feminism in India 21

was lifted, several women's groups had developed out of these discussions which were able to come 'overground', and several new groups were also formed. Most of these groups were based in the major cities, such as Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Pune, Patna and Ahmedabad. Though there was no particular uniformity between them, their members were largely drawn from the urban educated middle class, and this was an important reason for their feeling that their own needs were minor, and different from the needs of the large, and poor, majority of Indian women.

These women's groups comprised women from different sections of the far left, and there was, at this time, considerable debate on the class basis of women's oppression, the road to women's liberation, and the role that they themselves could play in this. Historically, the experience of the Maoist insurgency of the late sixties and its repression and disintegration in the early seventies, had led many to believe that a revolutionary transformation of society could only come into being if different oppressed groups, such as tribals, subordinate castes and women, first organized and represented themselves, and then coalesced to fight their common enemies. The question facing the women's groups, therefore, was of how women could organize and represent themselves. The general feeling was that the primary role of middle-class groups such as their own was to generate a consciousness of women's oppression not only among women but among workers, tribals and others.

Broadly speaking, two different views were expressed right from the beginning and continue to be representative even now: one, that socialist feminists should join trade unions and revolutionary mass organizations, while continuing to be members of autonomous women's groups. The former were seen as activist forums and the latter as forums for the development of socialist-feminist theory. The second view was a sort of spontanist argument, namely that once a feminist movement began, it would naturally spread and grow in multiple ways. The two positions were neither as abstract nor as crude as they sound. By and large, those holding the first had been, or were, active in radical and far left, organizations. They felt that these organizations contained space for the raising of feminist demands. The others had not been, or were not then, involved in such organizations. They felt that negotiating within them would yield small gains compared to those won by an independent women's movement which, through its very existence, would force political organizations to take note of it.

In the event, most of the women's groups were sufficiently open to allow both views to coexist within them. They developed links with far left, working-class, tribal and anticaste organizations, campaigned around specific issues, and debated and disseminated theories of women's oppression. In the early years, however, campaigns were relatively sporadic, and minor compared to the pace of theoretical activity. Most of the groups remained fairly loose until the beginning of the eighties - so few even named themselves that at the first



22 Feminist Review

socialist-feminist conference in Bombay in 1978, their main identifica- tion was regional - as the 'Bombay group', the 'Delhi group', and so on.

By 1979-80, women's groups and campaigns had started all over India, and ranged from protesting dowry murders and police rape to unionizing women workers, domestics and slum-dwellers. The campaigns against dowry murders and police rape were in fact what 'launched' the women's movement, for it was these that caught the attention of the press and became public issues. The campaign against dowry murders started in Delhi in 1979, and was the first time that dowry deaths, hitherto regarded as suicide, were called murders. (Dowry deaths refer to the deaths of young brides who were being harassed by their in-laws for more dowry, perhaps better known as 'bride-burning'.) It was also the first time that the private sphere of the family was invaded, and held to be a major site for the oppression of women.

The public/private dichotomy was broken by groups of women demonstrating outside the houses and offices of those who were responsible for dowry deaths within their families, and demanding the intervention of both state and civil society. Interestingly, feminists were joined by local residents from their first demonstration, and within some months of the campaign groups of residents and professionals also began, independently, to make similar protests. Though this tempo- rarily boosted the morale of the spontanists, visions of a snowballing movement were first disturbed by the discovery that many of these other groups came from the right-wing Hindu chauvinist stream of the social reform movement, (who opposed dowry murder but not necessarily the institution of dowry itself, and none of whom opposed arranged marriages or advocated divorce for the unhappily married, or economic independence for women); and then shattered by the near impossibility of ensuring that dowry murders were punished. Attempts at boycotting or ostracising culprits never became powerful enough to affect them in any significant way; attempts to secure convictions largely failed. Police inefficiency combined with a certain degree of corruption, the difficulty of procuring evidence, pressure on the courts which made proceedings very slow, all conspired to this end. They continue to do so in most campaigns to improve the administration of the law in India.

In 1980 an open letter by four senior lawyers against ajudgement in a case of rape by the police (who constitute a large proportion of rapists in India), sparked off a campaign by feminist groups, which initially centred on this particular incident, but in its course took up other, similar incidents. In fact, most feminist campaigns have tended to develop this way, around a series of individual people, or events. Brief though the campaign was, lasting only the course of 1980, it marked new developments in the women's movement, which would affect it fundamentally. First of all, it raised the question of representation in a different - and, for many, more painful way: who were we to protest against this incident until we had met the woman who was raped and found out whether she wanted a protest or not? Supposing the protest




brought upon her, again, the stigma of being a 'dishonoured' woman? Shamingly, this question was asked only after the campaign had begun, though fortunately, it was found that no damage had been done.

Secondly, feminists had by this time gained considerable confidence and in the campaign against rape they attempted, for the first time, to co-ordinate activities and demands across the left and between several cities. First in Bombay, and then elsewhere, they formed issue-based joint action committees, which were coalitions of leftist women's and student groups. In most places however these represented a formal and limited kind of joint action, which was rarely maintained throughout a campaign.

Within a couple of months of the campaign the issue of police rape was taken up by the major national parties, in an attempt to cash in on what was becoming a very visible movement, and simultaneously to outdo one another. Working with the entrenched and hierarchical organizations of the orthodox left, and finding their own voices increasingly drowned by the cacophony of competing centre and right parties, Indian feminists discovered the ironic process whereby an agitation gained numerical strength by being joined by political blocs, but at the same time found itself constrained, intellectually, morally and strategically, by them.

By the early eighties, therefore, the women's movement had grown in such a way that autonomous feminist groups were only one of its several currents. Though the centre and right parties soon dropped off, the socialist and communist parties were becoming increasingly active, as were the older, hitherto quiescent, women's organizations. At the same time an interest in women began to be shown by diverse radical movements.

The socialists had actually formed a women's organization in 1977, which was affiliated to the newly formed and elected Janata Party, but between 1978 and 1980 their activities were fairly low-key and they were for that period marginalized by the feminists. The Communist Party of India had had a women's front from the late fifties, which had dwindled into inactivity. It was galvanized only in 1980-81, when the Party saw that women could again become an important constituency. The Communist Party of India-Marxist also noted the potential of the women's movement at this juncture, and formed two women's organizations in 1981, one of which was affiliated to their trade union. Some of their rank-and-file members, however, had been active in a women's anti-price-rise agitation in Bombay in the mid seventies.

The first attempt to organize women's trade unions had been made in 1972, when the Self-Employed Women's Association, a kind of Gandhian socialist union of women vendors, was formed in Ahmedabad. By the late seventies SEWA had expanded, and to the union were added several craft co-operatives in and around Ahmedabad. In the eighties they had branches all over the country. Partly because the feminist movement was dominated by the far left, which characterized SEWA as reformist, and partly because SEWA itself had reservations about the



24 Feminist Review

feminists, it was not a part of the feminist movement of the late seventies or early eighties.

Working-class women's organizations which were set up in the late seventies or early eighties tended to be different from SEWA. They were not formed of women engaged in any one particular kind of work, and grew out of campaigns for an improvement in the conditions of living, whereas SEWA started with a campaign for an improvement in working conditions. Yet they, too, maintained a distance from the feminists, partly because they felt class issues were not adequately addressed by the latter, and partly because most of their leaders were members of one or another communist current. They did not wish to expose their constituencies to the struggle for power which was being waged in the feminist movement.

Perhaps it was for these reasons that the efforts to reach out made by feminist groups in the eighties took the form of neighbourhood rather than workplace politics, with groups of women working in urban slum areas and mobilizing women in campaigns for better water facilities, drainage, and so on.

Interest in feminist ideas was meanwhile growing in the radical socialist student movement, which had spearheaded a consumer cum antistate agitation in Gujarat in the mid seventies, and had waged a campaign for land redistribution in one district of Bihar in the late seventies. Though their mentor, Jai Prakash Marayan, had discussed the need to change gender-relations in the mid seventies, it was only several years later that this question began to be raised within the movement, and that too largely in Bihar. From 1979-80, they began to organize women's shibirs (camps) in Bodhgaya district, a method of consciousness-raising which had earlier been used by the Maoists, and which grew in the eighties to be widely used by various rural women's organizations.

At around the same time as feminist issues and campaigns began to be more widely taken up in these ways, the feminists began to move away from their earlier methods of agitation, such as demonstrations, public campaigns, street theatre, etc. These had limited meaning unless they were accompanied by attempts to develop their own structures to aid and support individual women. Women's centres were formed in several cities, which provided a mixture of legal aid, health care and counselling. One or two of them also tried to provide employment but, lacking sufficient resources, these foundered. The attempts to set up new structures of support eventually degenerated into 'case-work' - due to the enormous problems women face in this country. These centres initially represented an effort to put feminist concepts of sisterhood into practice, as well as to redefine these concepts through basing them on traditionally accepted structures of friendship between women. Of the first three women's centres to be set up, for example, two used the Hindi terms for 'girlfriend' or 'playmate': Salehi and Saheli. Thus a whole new set of personal relationships developed in the feminist movement, of friendships which cut across class and cultural barriers. To some extent,




these friendships remained unequal, for the middle-class women were more dutiful, and the poor women more grateful. Even so, this signified the growth of a new sense of individuality within the movement, qualifying stereotypes of the battered wife, the rape or dowry victim, the woman worker, the student, housewife or professional woman.

The attempt to reappropriate traditionally accepted and restricted women's spaces grew in the eighties, through attempts to reinterpret myths, epics and folktales; to critique mainstream religious and cultural texts or practices and search for alternative texts or practices; and to discover historical or particular methods of women's resistance in India. At its inception the feminist movement had detailed the traditional forms of women's subordination in India, from birth to puberty, marriage, maternity and work, and had searched for traditional comments on women's suffering, placing these in an orthodox socialist- feminist framework. Now, however, the emphasis changed to traditional sources of women's strength rather than their suffering. For some this consisted of identifying images of women warriors, to be used as a battle cry for latter-day women; for others, of defining the ways in which ordinary, or unexceptional, women used the spaces that were traditionally accorded them to negotiate with their husbands, families, communities, and so on. Within this a third tendency developed, of celebrating courage, gaeity, inventiveness or strength in Indian women. The shibir or camp was, in certain areas, transformed in to the mela or festival and to discussions of rape, wife-beating or unequal wages were added sessions of singing, dancing and making merry.

The search for historical examples of women's resistance led feminists to scrutinize the distant and immediate past, to look at the role women played in general movements for social transformation, and to reclaim some of the women's movements which predated the contemporary feminist one. Two movements were of especial impor- tance in this context: the landless labourers' movement in Telengana (in Andhra Pradesh), which had undergone several phases from the late forties on; and the forest protection movement of the seventies, in the north-Indian hill areas of Garhwal, popularly known as the Chipko movement. The Telengana movement had been unusual in its time for the attention it paid to such 'women's problems' as wife-beating. It remained paternalist in its refusal to allow any but the most exceptional women to join in the underground guerrilla movement led by commu- nists in the late forties and early fifties, and by Maoists in the late sixties and early seventies. It was the Maoist women who, in the late seventies, began to study the part played by women in the Telengana movement. The relationships which developed through their forays into the oral history of the movement eventually led to the creation of organizations of women landless labourers all over Telengana. As they have developed these organizations, they have fused far-left and reformist views. They participate in struggles against landlords and the state, but they also form co-operative societies through which they get certain benefits from the state.



26 Feminist Review

The Chipko movement was initiated by a couple of Gandhian men, but it was carried forward largely by women, whose economic roles were very important in North Indian hill areas. Large numbers of men had migrated to the plains in search of wage-work, and women's household work was more dependent on the forest as a resource for domestic fuel, gathering food, etc. Despite this, there was no discussion at the time of Chipko as a women's movement. It was only in the eighties that, through the feminists, it began to be celebrated as a mass women's movement, and theories of women's special relation to their environ- ment were advanced. With the introduction of feminist ideas into the Chipko movement, an antialcohol agitation began. This followed the pattern of the Shahada movement in Western India during the early 1970s. (The Shahada movement was a tribal landless labourers' movement against the outrageous practices of local landlords, most of whom were non-tribal and treated the tribals as subhuman. Here too, the development of a 'women's consciousness' had led to an antialcohol agitation.)

By this stage then, the Indian feminist movement was a multiplicity of organizations and activities. In spreading it had undergone a process of fragmentation which is common enough to all movements but which affected the feminists in a particular way. As a credo, most of us believed that feminism was based on the need for personal solidarity. Its fragmentation as a movement thus symbolized to many the breakdown of sisterhood. This led many feminists to question the very basis of feminism. Whereas earlier a certain commonality of women's experience was stressed, as a point at which political differences could be transcended, it was now felt that differences could not be subsumed in this way, and that the quest for unity was not only futile but also counterproductive, for it allowed all sorts of evils to be glossed over.

This affected the movement in various ways. It paved the way for an open display of sectarianship, which was initiated largely by the party-political women's organizations, who took to print in order to express their differences from each other. While the left concentrated on attacking autonomous feminist groups through their papers, pamphlets and other publications, the socialists concentrated on battling the left for representation as the 'leaders' of the women's movement, through leaflets, press conferences, and the like. More subtle and more scrupulous than them, autonomous feminist groups did not attack other women's organizations in public, but most of them began to devote considerable energy to establishing separate identities from each other. Specific organizations were now held to represent different strands of feminism. Unfortunately, the outcome of this development was such that organizational needs began to be privileged over the needs of the movement, and the identity of an organization was judged as much in terms of its clout as its ideas. Both cynicism and bureaucratism entered the movement. It began to be assumed that self-interest was the order of the day, and the only difference was between those who operated on




individual self-interest and those who were concerned with organizational self-interest. An ugly divide now developed within the feminist movement, with one side feeling that the emphasis on organizational identity reflected a growth of Stalinism posing as collectivity, and the other side feeling that individualism was merely a mask for egotism. This was further compounded by a problem which is common to many developing countries, of aid for 'developmental activities' being poured into social movements, creating competition, schisms and bitterness.

The bureaucratism which generally complements the development of organizational identities was seen at its worst in joint-action forums. Struggles over analyses, demands and strategies were relinquished on the assumption that the 'others' were closed to all argument, so that attempting any would be a waste of time. Yet there were redoubled struggles over the division of spoils, such as alloting areas of cam- paigning, time and space for speeches, over which banners were to be carried, and in what order organizations would march. Even worse, a kind of division of labour now developed in these forums, in which areas of interest were distributed between organizations without any attempt to achieve, or even discuss, commonality of interests.

As a result of this, autonomous feminist groups lost much of the space which they had previously occupied on the premise that they were different from party-political women's organizations. Moreover, their shift away from agitational activities in the early eighties not only left an empty space for party-political women's organizations to move into, but also led to a significant loss of presence through the media.

At the same time, the kind of individual support work that women's centres did involved them with people's lives in a way that was more intimate, and therefore more threatening than their earlier agitations. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a considerable degree of both public and private hostility, and feminists began to face attacks from irate families, in person and through the police and the courts. Instead of leading to a wave of sympathy for the feminists, these attacks were accompanied by a public, and increasingly sophisticated, critique of feminism. These arguments against feminism were remarkably similar to those advanced against social reformers in the nineteenth century: that they were westernized, upper class and urbanized, and therefore ignorant of, and unsympathetic to, traditional 'Indian' society. A small fringe took this argument further, saying that the crass 'modern' views of the feminists were drawn from capitalist society and were thus incapable of appreciating the nobility of traditional philosophies, especially Hindu. Ironically, these views were expressed at the same time as feminists were exploring traditional contexts in search of an 'Indian' feminism; and at the same time as episodes of child sacrifice, witch-hunting and forcible widow immolation were being brought to public view.

Meanwhile, women's issues had become so widely recognized that the centre and right parties also formed women's fronts, and special attention began to be paid to women in most general movements of the eighties, though this was more noticeable in peasant movements than in



28 Feminist Review

workers' ones. Perhaps in reaction to this, counter movements against feminist or women's rights ideas began to be initiated by sections of traditionalist society, and after the mid eighties feminists have faced defeats such as they had not previously encountered.

Among the most formidable onslaughts on feminism has been that launched by Indian communalists. Communalism (that is, tension and violence between communities based on religion) has long existed in India, but most observers believe that it has considerably increased since the 1960s. In the worsening communal situation of the 1980s, women's rights have begun to be placed in the context of communal identity, as they were under British rule, and attempts to better the conditions of any one community are being treated as attempts to impose alien norms and interfere with communal autonomy. From the days of the British secularism was interpreted in India as the state's recognition and codification of different religion-based personal laws, but these had not, by and large, been used to take away rights conferred under other laws. This, however, did happen in the mid eighties, when, under pressure from Muslim religious leaders, the government passed a law which deprived divorced - and destitute - Muslim women of the right to maintenance by their husbands. The campaign against this Bill showed how much the women's movement had internalized prevalent notions of secularism, as well as how much the feminist movement has been marginalized by party-political women's organizations. It was spearheaded by the CPI-M who organized a'left and democratic' Muslim opposition to the Bill, instead of allying with the feminists, who tried rather weakly to raise the demand for a uniform civil code. The feminists themselves were uncertain of how to proceed, for the occasion was used by Hindu communalists to attack the Muslims for being backward and barbaric, and they were afraid that on the one hand they would be seen as playing the communalist game, and on the other, for the majority of them were Hindu by birth, that their few Muslim members would be singled out for recrimination. The socialist women were utterly confounded by the fact that one of the main organizers of support for the Bill was a member of their party, whom they could not muffle, let alone get expelled. This was to happen again, in the campaign against widow immolation.

A few years later, the conflict between communalism and feminism has again cropped up, but this time as a problem of the majority rather than minority community. Though incidents of widow immolation popularly known as sati, have occurred periodically since Indepen- dence, the death of a young woman in Rajasthan in 1987 sparked off a furore across the country, with raging arguments over whether sati was suicide or murder, whether it should be punished and if so who should be punished, whether it was a 'Hindu' practice and if so was it intrinsic or extrinsic, ad infinitum. That the problem was one of the majority community's had an important influence on the campaign, for feminists did not hold back for fear of being used by communalists.

In the event, feminists were successful in getting a Bill passed




against sati, but ineffectual in getting all their suggestions incorporated into the Bill, so that the first person punished under it was the woman victim, for she was held to be attempting suicide.

The campaign reflected in myriad ways the malaise which had crept over the feminist movement, for again there was a limited and formal kind of discussion, with little or no discussion of the issues involved, and thus the campaign itself had practically no effect, and the organizers of the incident were unpunished. This was strange, for there were in fact arguments being offered by women who had studied sati, and who were connected to the feminist movement. Yet their knowledge seemed at a remove from the activists, and there is in fact now, paradoxically, a situation in which there has been an enormous increase in women's studies in India, much of which is conducted by feminists, but which seems less and less to inform feminist practice. Given the kind of opposition that is now mounting against feminism, this situation urgently needs changing and one can only hope that change is coming, as it often does, in puzzling and indirect ways.

Given the kind of opposition which is now mounting against feminism, this situation seems incredibly depressing, but it may be that we are now in a moment of transition, when disintegration appears more evident than new developments. Some kind of 'women's consciousness' has clearly spread enormously over the last ten years in India, especially in rural areas. The women's liberation conference in Patna in early 1988 was attended by over a thousand women, and several thousand women from surrounding villages were at the rally which closed the conference. The attendance of these women reflected the growing strength of the Indian People's Front and the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini in Eastern India. The former is a relatively new organization, a kind of coalition of different Maoist tendencies which have come together on a broad and democratic platform, and who have shown considerable interest in women. The latter has been described above.

Moreover, the links between feminism and environmental, ecologi- cal, health, radical science, anticommunal and anticaste movements appear to be multiplying and strengthening all over the country, and perhaps in the next few years we will see new theoretical developments within the movement, as well as new forms of action.

Notes

Radha Kumar lives in New Delhi, India. This article is an extract from a book she is writing about the history of movements for women's rights and feminism in India from the early nineteenth century until today. It will be published by Kali.

A shorter version of this article has also been published in Seminar, March 1989.



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