Volume II, No. 1, Spring 2003

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

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Reading and Writing Indian Women:

The 50 Years Since Independence, 1947-97

by Geraldine Forbes

My title is intended to underscore the dynamic element in the scholarship about Indian women and gender produced in the half century after independence. The dynamism resides in the fact that so much contemporary work on women and gender involves living women as subjects. I also want to highlight the fact that during this time, scholarship has advanced in tandem with equally energetic efforts to unearth and preserve material by women and to reread sources useful for an understanding of gender. Meanwhile, the process of rethinking the essential questions continues.

In the 50 years since 1947 the concept of gender replaced that of biological sex in intellectual discourse at the same time interdisciplinary approaches supplanted conventional modes of inquiry. In the process, traditional disciplines have been shaken to the core and honored assumptions subjected to scrutiny. This shift makes it valuable to look beyond the subject matter of scholarship on women and gender to how those writing have viewed "women," their view of appropriate sources, their relationship to traditional disciplines, and what they have judged relevant questions and approaches.

To give structure to this inquiry, I have divided 1947-1997 into three periods. The first period, 1947 - 1969, was a time of synthesizing the past and assessing the then present. The second, 1970 -1985, focused on a critique of the present and efforts to excavate the past, and the third, 1986 -1997, was a time for challenging categories, reassessing colonialism, and revisiting the "Third World Woman." I have selected a few works representative of each period and analyzed how the authors defined women, their adherence to traditional disciplines, and the questions they deemed most relevant. Finally, I have attempted to position this scholarship within the context that framed it and comment on its relationship to more general interpretations of South Asian history.

In the period prior to independence only one comprehensive history of Indian women, from antiquity to the twentieth century, was published: A. S. Altekar's The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization (1st edition, 1938).[1] I will briefly summarize this book to provide a baseline for considering the changes that followed.

Altekar, although he does not mention James Mill by name, responded to Mill's influential History of British India (first published in 1826) that argued women's position was the indicator of society's advancement. Mill's formula was simple: "Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted." Having studied Hindu society, Mill concluded: "nothing can exceed the habitual contempt which the Hindus entertain for their women. . . . [they] are held, accordingly, in extreme degradation."[2] Altekar wanted to correct the record by giving readers an appreciation of Hindu culture's treatment of women. His intention was not to ignore problem areas, he wrote, but to put them in "proper perspective" and derive solutions from Indian history. Aloka Parasher has discussed Altekar as a nationalist historian, joining the project for the "compulsive glorification of the ancient and medieval past of India."[3]

Seen through Altekar's eyes, the story of Indian women moves from the "Golden Age," a time of near equality with men, to slow decline beginning as early as 1000 BC (precipitated by the acceptance of non-Aryan women into Aryan households) and lasting a millennium followed by 2000 years of deterioration. By the mid-18^th century women's status had hit rock bottom and begun its slow recovery. Improvements in education, age of marriage, widow-remarriage, laws and customs, and recognition of women's economic potential all played a role in restoring Indian women to their long-lost status.

Altekar's ideas seem archaic when read in the late twentieth century. There was no doubt in his mind that women, the "fair sex" as he often called them, were naturally subordinate to men. His imagined prehistoric people were patriarchal warriors and in this setting, men's dominance over and protection of women was natural. However, the mark of man's civilization was the extent to which he controlled and curbed his power and gave women their rights.

In his discussion of education, Altekar blamed the decline of women's status on limited education resulting from early marriage. However, he firmly believed that biology was destiny and worried about the strain of intense study on women's health that could bring harm to the race. Throughout Altekar's history we are informed that though people historically practiced child marriage, preferred males, and prohibited intercaste marriage, society was harmonious. Fathers who preferred sons really loved their daughters, young brides were well treated in their husbands' homes (their youth made adjustment easier), and most wives lived up to the ideal of pativrata [the perfect wife]. Perhaps most important, the majority of men were good husbands. Altekar summed up the treatment of Hindu women in positive terms and concluded that even though women were subordinate to men, they were protected and respected.

Using the three criteria mentioned above to analyze works on Indian women, what do we make of Altekar? First, woman as a category did not need further explanation. There were women and there were men and each group could be further subdivided into the broad categories of lower and cultured classes. As an historian, he stayed faithful to a conventional reading of material deposited in libraries: religious texts, law books, literature, official documents, government records, and census data. The sources were accepted without criticism of their androcentric nature and no attempt was made to locate women's documents or voices. Finally, the narrative concentrated on two questions: what was the true nature of women's condition in India from antiquity to the present? and what lessons did history hold for improving the status of women in contemporary India?

In the years immediately following independence there were many books published on Gandhi and prominent nationalist women. But this was also a period of synthesizing works and saw the publication of Neera Desai's Woman in Modern India (1957) and P. Thomas's Indian Women Through the Ages (1964), as well as Manmohan Kaur's Role of Women in the Freedom Movement 1857-1947 (1968) summing up women's political role in the struggle for freedom. There was also sufficient demand to warrant the publication of a revised edition of A. S. Altekar's The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization (1959). Post independence Indians discussed the Hindu code bill, witnessed women who had worked with Gandhi and Congress appointed to prestigious positions, and listened to the prominent women's organizations. This seemed an appropriate time to reflect on the past from the perspective of the emergent Indian state. The relative abundance of synthetic works is significant in light of the fact that this phenomenon was not repeated for another 30 years.

Desai and Thomas wrote books strikingly different from Altekar's. Living in post-colonial India, they were more concerned with their Indian audience and less preoccupied with convincing the world that Hindu civilization was kind to women.

Desai followed a conventional framework, placing modern history in a context that began with Vedic society and moving through the Buddhist period, Puranic Hindu society, and Muslim rule ("one of the darkest periods")[4] to the British Raj. In her view there was no "golden age" for women, antiquity was patriarchal, and even "great women" were under male domination. The puranas were written to establish brahmins as the highest class and this process further excluded women and limited their influence. Under Muslim rule, women suffered further restrictions on rights and freedom as the dual customs of purdah and polygyny took hold. A bright spot (but not a golden age) for women was the bhakti movement with its democratic tendencies, promotion of vernacular languages, and acceptance of women as spiritual equals. The British brought new ideas and technology to India that had both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, some Indian men imbibed these ideas and sought to change their society, and women benefited from the changes set in motion. At the same time, Western ideas and technology justified and facilitated the political and economic exploitation of the country.

Desai traced women's entry into political and social organizations in the twentieth century, hailing their achievements while deploring their elitist nature. In her conclusion she recognized the importance of the Constitution for proclaiming gender equality, but focused attention on its impact on women's lives. In her view, "the old fossilized, oppressive institutional and ideological legacy" worked to prevent women from enjoying rights granted under India's constitution.[5]

Desai was critical of "reactionary" doctrines and "pseudo-scientific" theories that defined sex-differences as fundamental. Throughout the book she recognized differences between women because of class, caste and religion, but assumed all women were economically vulnerable, dominated by patriarchy, politically and educationally disenfranchised, and socialized to want to become ideal wives. The author used the term "Indian womanhood" even though she did not want to essentialize women. A sociologist by training, Desai used the methodology, sources, and framework of history for this study. The documents informing this work were conventional but she read them for information on gender. And her question why haven't most women benefited from the promises of new India? was new, even radical, for the times.

Thomas, a member of the Indian Christian community, wrote books on India's epics, legends and myths, the Hindu Religion, Christianity in India, and India's cultural empire before he tackled Indian Women through The Ages.[6] Following accepted periodization, Thomas moved chronologically from the Indus Valley civilization to post independence India. Like Desai, he did not find a golden age in ancient India, but rather increased subjugation of women under Brahminism. Thomas contended that by the Middle Ages, Brahminism had deprived women of their individuality and they remained in subjugation until the nineteenth century. Women's emancipation began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the legal and constitutional rights Thomas witnessed.

Improvement in women's status was a function of three forces: British rule, a general awakening in twentieth century Asia, and the Indian freedom movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century Indian women, styled "feminist" by Thomas, took control of the movement for women's rights and began to control their own destiny. The changes made after independence were indeed positive, but the author noted that 15 years later only the upper classes had benefited.

Thomas was not critical of the term woman and seemed largely unconscious of the way gender was constructed in the literature and his own narrative. Men and women were fixed categories men dominated, women were subordinate. At the same time, Thomas was very sophisticated in his analysis of race, caste, and community, differentiating between Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees, and Christians, commenting on the differences between clean castes and those designated untouchable, and including in his work a discussion of the indigenous or pre-Aryan peoples. He used conventional sources, but read them for details about women and gender ideology. Thomas' central concern was finding the cause of women's subjugation to give guidance for changing society. He discovered the culprit in Brahminism, that is, in the institutionalization of a priesthood that suppressed both women and other Indian communities preventing sex equality, true democracy, and Indian pluralism.

Although old-fashioned in many ways, Desai and Thomas wrote women-centered texts, espoused feminism, and championed democracy and pluralism. Written only two decades after Altekar's Position of Women, these books mark the beginning of scholarship on women that placed women and gender questions at the center of the analysis and interrogated records in new ways.

This period was dominated by Toward Equality: the Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974), produced by a committee appointed in 1971 by the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare. The Ministry was acting on a United Nations request for a status of women report for International Women's Year in 1975. The committee had two tasks: to examine "the Constitutional, legal and administrative provisions that have a bearing on the social status of women, their education and employment," and to assess the impact of these provisions.[7] The published report had the effect of dramatically altering the study of women and gender in India.

In preparing this report, the committee commissioned a number of studies and interviewed approximately 500 women from each state. These studies were the first systematic effort to question what constitutional guarantees of equality and justice actually meant to women. Reviewing history, the authors found no golden age and instead highlighted the negative representation of women in ancient texts and the authoritarian nature of Hindu prescriptions for good behavior. Although they commended nineteenth century Indian reformers for their efforts on behalf of women, the authors also criticized them for limiting change to the domestic sphere. They concluded that it was "left to Mahatma Gandhi and, the Freedom Movement to place the movement for women's emancipation in its proper perspective as a part of the larger movement for social transformation."[8] Looking at women's position in the mid 1970s the authors of Toward Equality concluded women's status had not improved in the twenty-five years since independence. They were especially disturbed by the "total invisibility and neglect" of women's economic roles at a time when women workers faced a shrinking market for their services.[9]

Toward Equality's impact on programs and policies for women, the direction of research on women and gender, and our reading of the history of women in India has been momentous. Following publication of the report, the Indian Council of Social Science Research established an advisory committee on women's studies headed by Dr. Vina Mazumdar to support further research on women's lives and work in contemporary India. In the following years ICSSR and other institutes sponsored a number of studies on working women and the conditions of their lives.

In defining the scope of the Toward Equality project the committee had to grapple with the problem of conceptualizing women's multiples roles and status positions. Realizing that inequality influences every aspect of people's lives including their perception of rights, the Committee did not want to make broad generalizations about women. When they found it necessary to categorize women, they chose economic divisions with political and social and implications: women below subsistence level, women who live on the edge of subsistence, and women with economic security.[10] Their analysis was necessarily interdisciplinary and multi-valent. Consistent with their charge, the Committee included detailed recommendations.

The decade following the publication of this report witnessed a flowering of interdisciplinary anthologies on Indian women. Alfred deSouza, Devika Jain, and B. R. Nanda[11] all edited books with articles challenging conventional assumptions about women and their history, and raised new questions about women's political success, the representation of women in nationalist propaganda, and the nature of women's lives. Although many of the historical articles praised both nineteenth century reformers and nationalist leaders for their work on behalf of women, new directions were much in evidence. Romila Thapar deplored the essentialism of historical documents,[12] Imtiaz Ahmed related women's political success to their family connections,[13] and Ashis Nandy suggested the importance of rethinking psychosocial phenomenon in relation to woman and womanliness.[14]

Concurrently a number of historians were discovering and recovering women's documents. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library's oral history project systematically contacted women freedom fighters for interviews and offered to house their private collections. Historians working in the field located manuscripts, private papers, collections of journals, and records of organizations in trunks, godowns, and sometimes trash barrels. I had met Shudha Mazumdar in 1970 and received a copy of her manuscript, but it took years to convince people that an unknown woman's life was worthy of attention.[15] In Madras, C. S. Lakshmi carried out wide-ranging interviews with Tamil women from all walks of life, then focused specifically on women writers, singers, dancers, and musicians, and hunted for obscure periodicals by women in archives and private collections. In north India, Gail Minault began her discovery of the records that led to Secluded Scholars[16] while Gail Pearson searched police records in Bombay for details of women's participation in Congress-sponsored marches and demonstrations.[17] Other feminist scholars, such as Rama Mehta, Bharati Ray, Aparna Basu, and Vina Mazumdar, among others, turned to their mothers and grandmothers, and women in their communities to learn about the past.

What stands out about this period is the passion for social justice shared by researchers and the connection between activism and the intellectual enterprise. This was when Women's Studies began in India. The Research Center for Women's Studies at SNDT Women's University in Bombay began its work in 1974 with Neera Desai as director and in 1980 the Center for Women's Development Studies opened in Delhi with Vina Mazumdar at the helm. The early 1980s witnessed the first national Women's Studies conferences and a host of local, regional, and national meetings focused on specific themes. Manushi, India's leading feminist publication, was begun in Delhi by Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita and other members of a collective in 1978 to bring together scholarship on women with accounts of activism and personal testimony. A few years later, in 1984, Ritu Menon and Urvashi Bhutalia founded the feminist publishing firm, Kali for Women, as an independent non-profit trust. In 1986, Economic and Political Weekly began its biannual Review of Women's Studies, and provided a valuable forum for the publication of new scholarship on women and gender.

The key area of inquiry during this period was women's social and economic condition. Micro-studies exploring single industries, tracing regional data, and studying neglected populations created a body of literature that provided material for later synthetic works. By-and-large, woman remained intact as a subject, but studies from this period attended to caste, class, religion, and regional differences. Researchers used old records to ask new questions, interviewed women who had lived through the struggle for independence, tried to preserve women's documents, and crossed disciplinary boundaries in search of answers to complex questions. Gone was the notion of a golden age and nineteenth century reformers now received mild criticism for their limited vision. Nevertheless, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress remained the acknowledged champions of women while the period from 1947 until the mid-1970s received the most attention.

This search for answers was carried out during a difficult political time in India's modern history. Indira Gandhi's declaration of a state of emergency coincided with the inauguration of International Women's Year. The newly released Toward Equality practically disappeared and conferences on women's status turned into celebrations of India's "Woman Power."[18] Many women who belonged to organizations critical of Mrs. Gandhi went to prison while others published underground papers, went into hiding, or remained silent and waited for new opportunities.

When the Emergency was lifted in 1977 India witnessed a renewal of feminist activity. The publication of books such as We Will Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle by Gail Omvedt (1980), The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India (1981) by Barbara D. Miller, and In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi (1984) edited by Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, were rallying cries that focused world attention on the deadly nature of son-preference and systematic and pervasive violence against women. At the same time these books made it clear that Indian women were organizing to protest injustice and fight for their rights.

This last period represents a significant shift in terms of redefining Indian history within a post-colonial framework, weaving gender into the meta-narrative, and developing theoretical perspectives. Since 1986 we have seen a significant increase in the number of books, journals, and journal articles focused on women and gender in South Asia, and growing international interest in the topics addressed in these publications. Significantly, synthetic works reappeared during this period.

Of all the disciplines, history has been especially productive. The publication of two volumes: Women in Colonial India (1989), edited by J. Krishnamurthy,[19] and Recasting Women (1989) edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid,[20] signaled a new direction in the study of women and gender in India. Both volumes included previously published work, but their appearance as collections set the tone for future scholarship.

Krishnamurthy stressed the importance of studying women as participants in their own right and, at the same time, in relation to men. The editor's concern with subject position focused attention on a major issue for historians striving to represent women's lives in ways that are faithful both to how women see themselves and how they are viewed from the outside. The editor also raised the question of sources, lamented the dearth of material in official records about economic issues, and explained how "the ideology of the women's movement" suggested new ways of reading from the margins and interpreting silences.[21] Some of these articles took issue with periodization and conventional assumptions about women's progress in modern India. Lucy Carroll[22] and Gregory Kozlowski[23] discussed how reformist colonial law affected women and challenge Altekar simplistic assumption that women's emancipation began with British rule. Tanika Sarkar, writing about the Gandhian movement,[24] and Madhu Kishwar, Arya Samaj schools for girls,[25] highlighted the persistence of traditional elements in the reform movement. Together these authors challenged accounts applauding the work of Indian social and political reformers.

In their introduction to Recasting Women, Sangari and Vaid linked academics to activism and stressed the important of understanding how the British reconstituted Indian Patriarchy. They expressed special concern with the resurgence of patriarchy in post-independence India manifested in atrocities against women, such as dowry murder and widow immolation, communal violence, and the marginalization of women in production. The articles in this volume, mostly about middle-class Hindus in northern India and linked by the theme of reconstituted patriarchy, created a powerful challenge to previously held assumptions about public and private spheres, the relationship of materiality to social issues, and the nationalist reform agenda for women. Moving away from women's history and embracing feminist historiography, the editors defined the latter as a rethinking of history and historiography that could be done by any historian about any topic. The goal was to "recast" women, then gender, and finally history. The probing questions asked by various authors tried the limits of conventional history, making necessary the use of other disciplines that in turn had their boundaries assailed. The immediate concern was to understand how patriarchal institutions and discourse, reconstructed during the colonial period, continued to be effective in keeping women in their place.

The search for women's voices was of major importance in this period. Women Writing in India, edited by Susie Taru and K. Lalita, is one of the most ambitious and valuable collections published to date. Volume I (1991) included translations of women's writing from the 6th century BCE to the early twentieth century and Volume II (1993): twentieth century women writers representing eleven regional languages. There have also been a number of single memoirs of prominent women, e.g., Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal, An Indian Freedom Fighter Recalls Her Life (1994), edited by Geraldine Forbes, and Lakshmi Sahgal's A Revolutionary Life: Memoirs of a Political Activist (1997), as well as collective memoirs such as Sumitra Bhave's Pan on Fire (1988) which gave voice to dalit women and Stree Shakti Sanghatana's 'We were making history . . .' Life stories of women in the Telangana People's Struggle (1989). These projects to retrieve women's writings and voices have stimulated reflection on a wide range of issues from agency and victimhood to women's cultural differences.

While these efforts to recast and reclaim the past have had a significant impact on the way we look at Indian women's history it is interesting to note that Subaltern Studies, the challenge to elitist colonialist, nationalist, and Marxist historiography mounted by Ranajit Guha more than 15 years ago, has, until recently, neglected women and gender issues.[26] The fifth volume (1987) was the first to include women in the form of Gayatri Spivak's presentation of translations of Mahasweta Devi's literary subaltern women and Ranajit Guha's "Chandra's Death." Spivak discussed various readings of Mahasweta Devi's work within the larger framework of the "narrativizations of history" and the "subalternization of so-called 'third world' literature," and included translations of two of Mahasweta Devi's stories. Ranajit Guha, using archival sources rather than literature, defied conventional historiography in his rescue of a fragment: depositions by people implicated in Chandra's death following an abortion. In his close reading of these few documents from the mid-nineteenth century, Guha highlights women's initiative in obtaining and administering the drug and elaborates on how patriarchy met the challenges posed by the pregnancy, abortion, and death of the unfortunate Chandra.

In her essay of introduction to Selected Subaltern Studies (1988), Gayatri Spivak commented on the absence of women in subaltern writing and observed that even when they were present, female figures were "drained of proper identity."[28] In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak addressed the problem of writing the history of colonial women. She found that in both colonialist and subaltern historiography, "the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant." And when women were written about there was a danger of valorizing "the concrete experience of the oppressed" without due recognition of the dual oppression of colonialism and patriarchy, and the further oppression of western scholarship.[29]

It was not until the ninth volume (1996), that the majority of the Subaltern Studies essays included women or gender in the analysis.[30] This volume included the first serious attempt to grapple with the problem of "constituting gendered subjects as subalterns" in Kamala Visweswaran's article "Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Historiography."[31] Visweswaran drew attention to Subaltern complicity with and failure to break from the nationalist pattern of resolving the woman question with the ideology of the home and, thereby containing women's agency. Using examples from her work in the Tamil Nadu Archives on women in the nationalist movement, Visweswaran alternated between examples of women's involvement and speaking and the "dual strategies of containment of women's agency . . . and repression."[32] In the conclusion, she suggested it may be possible to rescue the female subaltern for history by looking at "the point of erasure."[33]

This last period has also seen the publication of a number of synthesizing works that sum up the existing scholarship and portray women as agents constrained by patriarchal attitudes and institutions. The first of these published, Radha Kumar's A History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990 (1993), is a wonderfully illustrated look at women's movements and activism. My own Women in Modern India (1996) focused attention on how women perceived their world and acted in it. Drawing on women's writings, organizational records, magazines and journals, oral histories, and private papers and letters, I presented socially and politically active upper and middle-class women as thoughtful participants in the events of their time. In 1994 two important books for understanding women in society were published: Bina Agarwal's A Field of One's Own and Susan S. Wadley's Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984. Agarwal has written an encyclopedic account of gender and land rights while Wadley's longitudinal study of this north Indian village lets the villagers tell their own story.

How do I sum up the writing of women's history in India in the first 50 years after independence? It is clear the category woman has been successfully deconstructed and interdisciplinary approaches have become the norm. Additionally there has been a major shift in the questions asked. Scholars no longer investigate "women's problems" but rather ask why are women and their issues seen as problematic.

It would be erroneous to suggest everyone working on topics related to women and gender have moved together from one stage to the other. Life is not that simple and the writing of women's history has been influenced by trends in history as well as newly uncovered sources and the changing political climate.

Historical analyses that focus on representation without concern for material existence have sparked a great deal of controversy. For example, articles that defend sati or extol the charms of purdah seem detached from the real world and an understanding of the extent to which these customs oppress women. Scholars who came of age in what I have called the second period, from 1970 to 1985, often find themselves at odds with younger colleagues enamoured with theory.

The writing of history has been dramatically affected by the efforts of scholars to search out and preserve women's records. Great strides have been made in the past two decades but there is still a great deal to be done. Organizations such as SPARROW [Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women], begun in Bombay/Mumbai in 1987, faces formidable obstacles in its attempt to preserve women's photographs, recordings, and oral histories. The good new is that SPARROW is not alone and many women's organizations as well as libraries and archives are actively engaged in collecting and preserving material by and about women.

For those of my colleagues who live and write in India, writing women's history is a political act. Just as Mill justified British rule by referring to women's status, modern politicians seek to use history, and especially the history of women, for their own ends. Serious efforts to question the "Golden Age" and the basis of "Women Power," have been unpopular with political regimes that would like to lay claim to a mythical past and a problem-free present.

Rich as the scholarship on women and gender issues is, has it changed the field of Indian history? Rosalind O'Hanlon delineated three advances historians have made in addressing questions of social change in colonial Indian society: the break with colonial rhetoric about tradition and Indian women, a new understanding of the modernizing Indian woman in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and new insights into gender and the construction of colonial hegemony.[34] But, as Barbara Ramusack has noted, the work of scholars on South Asian women has had "limited influence" on the writing of Indian history. Unfortunately, "there have been no major shifts in periodization or in categories of South Asian historiography resulting from this research on gender."[35]

What impact has the writing of women's history between 1947 and 1997 had on Women's Studies? Over a decade ago Hanna Papanek, an American sociologist, commented on the problem of integrating gender into Asian studies and at the same time drew attention to an equally difficult problem: integrating an international orientation into feminist scholarship and teaching.[36] The most widely circulated books in the USA on Indian women continue to be those which feature manstrocities: books by Elisabeth Bumiller[37] and Mary Daly[38] that I read as updates of Katherine Mayo's Mother India.[39] In terms of Women's Studies in the United States, the challenge is to move the discipline beyond an Orientalist construction of the downtrodden Indian woman to look seriously at the exciting scholarship that spans half a decade and continues to be vibrant. Fortunately, India is a different story. Women's history has had an immense impact on Women's Studies and the work of historians is considered vital to the enterprise.

Notes

[1] A. S. Altekar, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization, 1st edition, 1938; 2nd edition, 1959; reprint (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978).

[2] James Mill, The History of British India, v. I & II, (New York: Chelsea House, 1968), 309-310.

[3] Aloka Parasher, "Women in Nationalist Historiography: the Case of Altekar," Women and Indian Nationalism, ed. Leela Katuri and Vina Mazumdar (New Delhi: Vikas, 1994), 17.

[4] Neera Desai, Woman in Modern India (Bombay: Vora, 1977), lst ed. 1957, 23.

[5] Ibid., xi.

[6] P. Thomas, Indian Women through The Ages: A Historical Survey of the Position of women and the Institutions of Marriage and Family in India from Remote Antiquity to the Present Day (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1964).

[7] Toward Equality, Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, (New Delhi: GOI Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, 1974), xii.

[8] Toward Equality, 54.

[9]  "Introduction." Women and Indian Nationalism, ed. Leela Katuri and Vina Mazumdar (New Delhi: Vikas, 1994), xxx.

[10] Ibid., 8.

[11] Alfred deSouza, ed., Women in Contemporary India: Traditional Images and Changing Roles. (Delhi: Manohar, 1975), B.R. Nanda, ed., Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976),  Devika Jain, ed., Indian Women, (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1975).

[12] Jain, 10-12.

[13] Jain, 301-312.

[14] Nanda, 146-160.

[15] The memoir was first published as A Pattern of Life (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978) and later as The Memoirs of an Indian Woman (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989).

[16] Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[17] Gail O. Pearson, Women in Public Life in Bombay City with Special Reference to the Civil Disobedience Movement, Ph.D. Thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, (1979).

[18] This is the title of a book by Tara Ali Baig (India's Woman Power, New Delhi: S. Chand, 1976) that focuses on the "ancient matriarchal base" that supports modern Indian women in their search for a more egalitarian society. Baig sees the ideal as a society that recognizes gender difference (and strength) and ends gender abuses. During the emergency women like Tara Ali Baig were prominent spokespersons for the Congress party and pointed to Indira Gandhi as a model of Indian womanhood. Indian legends and myths were once again lauded for their strong role models.

[19] J. Krishnamurthy, ed. Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[20] Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ed., Recasting Women, Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).

[21] Krishnamurthy, viii.

[22] Lucy Carroll, "Law, custom and statutory social reform: the Hindu Widow's Remarriage Act of 1856," Women in Colonial India.

[23] Gregory Kozlowski, "Muslim women and the control of property in North India," Women in Colonial India.

[24] Tanika Sarkar, "Politics and women in Bengal the conditions and meaning of participation,," Women in Colonial India.

[25] Madhu Kishwar, "The daughters of Aryavarta," Women in Colonial India.

[26] For a sophisticated and detailed discussion of this topic, see Himani Banerji, "Projects of hegemony: Subaltern Studies' resolution of the women's Question," Economic and Political Weekly, v. 35, No. 11, March 11-17, 2000, 902-920.

[27] Ranajit Guha, " Chandra's Death," Subaltern Studies V (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165.

[28] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31.

[29] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313, quotes from 287, 275, 295.

[30] Some other articles discussed gender, but it was not the central topic. For example, see, Sumit Sarkar, "The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early Twentieth Century Bengal," Subaltern Studies VI, 1-53, Partha Chatterjee, "A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class, Subaltern Studies VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

[31] Kamala Visweswaran, "Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Historiography, " Subaltern Studies IX, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakraborty, (Delhi: OUP, 1996), 84.

[32] Ibid., 124.

[33] Ibid., 124.

[34] Rosalind O'Hanlon, A Comparison Between Women and men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India, (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3.

[35] Barbara Ramusack, "Women in South Asia, " in Barbara N. Ramusack and Sharon Sievers, Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History, (Indiana University Press, 1999), 16.

[36] Hanna Papanek, "False Specialization and the Purdah of Scholarship -- A Review Article," The Journal of Asian Studies, v. XLIV, No.1 (November, 1984), 129.

[37]Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of A Hundred Sons (NY: Random House, 1990).

[38]Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

[39]Mayo Katherine, Mother India (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1927).

Geraldine Forbes is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the State University of New York at Oswego.  Her publications include The Memoirs of Dr. Haimabati Sen: From Child Widow to Lady Doctor, (translated by Tapan Raychaudhuri, edited by Geraldine Forbes and Tapan Raychaudhuri, introduced by Geraldine Forbes) (2000), Women in Modern India (1996), and Positivism in Bengal (1975).  She is Series Editor of FOREMOTHER LEGACIES: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, a series that now includes six books. In this series she has edited and introduced An Indian Freedom Fighter Recalls her Life by Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal and Memoirs of an Indian Woman by Shudha Mazumdar, and edited and written the Afterword for Nadia, Captive of Hope: Memoir of an Arab Woman by Fay Afaf Kanafani. At present she is working on three projects, on gender and colonial medicine, family photography in 20th century India, and the Tarakeswar Murder Case of 1873. Geraldine Forbes teaches courses in world history, women's history, and India and the Middle East. She is also a member of the board of editors of Project South Asia, a digital library of teaching resources for colleges and universities.

Copyright  2003 Teaching South Asia (ISSN 1529-8558) and Geraldine Forbes.  All rights reserved.  No part of this article may be reprinted in any form without written permission from Teaching South Asia or Geraldine Forbes.