This week we spoke with Abha Bhaia about feminist activism in India through her work with Jagori, and the role of rural women in constructing their own path to liberation. In this article, we briefly explore the history of Indian feminism through the lens of colonialism as an example of how the "civilizing" position of the West is often used to impose an ideal of individual rights that ends up silencing the people it purports to liberate. The case of Indian feminism is a great example to illustrate how women's and queer liberation narratives are often used to reinforce power structures that place colonial authority over the self-determination of those affected.
The modern theoretical and political framework for the feminist movement as we understand it today is usually thought
to have originated with the suffragette movement in Europe and the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The initial impetus was diverse and modeled on the anti-slavery revolts in the US, but it was quickly co-opted by elite white women who used their influence and resources to focus the movement on their own struggles at the expense of ignoring the intersections of race and class that oppressed other women. Indian feminism followed a similar path.
India was occupied by the British Empire from 1858 to 1947 -but had been colonized by European powers since the 17th century- so it was in this context that news of the feminist suffrage movement in Britain reached the country. Thus, the notion of "women's rights" came to India through a colonial lens. Not surprisingly, then, as in the West, discussions of civil rights remained confined to the metropolitan upper classes. Moreover, new laws to protect women were championed by educated men from British and upper-caste Indian elites who took it upon themselves to "correct" the "uncivilized" practices of local communities in line with a European vision of progress.
But India is not a homogenous country. There are thousands of ethnic groups with their own beliefs and traditions regarding gender roles. This makes the encoding of individual rights into universal laws an imposition that ignores the needs of local women and thus reinforces the power structures that place imperial authority over the self-determination of those affected. Yet this is precisely the approach taken by colonial authorities.
In her influential essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak summarizes this approach as:
"white men saving brown women from brown men"
This situation that is not only limited to the colonial era but continues to define Western interventionism in the global South to this day. (More on this in our next article).
This is indeed what happened, to use the same example Spivak recounts, with the abolition of sati by the British authorities in 1829. Sati is an ancient practice among certain Hinduist groups in which a recently widowed woman places herself on the funeral pyre of her sick husband and is burned alive. This was by no means a widespread practice, but it was an important ritual aspect in some communities. This is not to say that sati isn't a patriarchal practice that places a woman's life at the mercy of a man's fate, but British men placed the sole responsibility on native men and portrayed women as victims, incapable of determining their own lives.
By rendering them voiceless, colonial authorities could use women as scapegoats to force social change to the values of the West, but this would ultimately erase women's own cultural identities.
This approach began to change in the 1920s. In India, this was the time of intensified civil disobedience movements for independence, and women were a fundamental part of them. Several women-led organizations emerged, and with them demands for equal access to education, jobs, and political representation. The revolutionary sentiment of equality, freedom and justice ensured a place for discussions of women's rights in the model of the new independent India.
Some sections of the nationalist movements, however, argued that a reformulation of traditional gender relations and obligations was a colonial imposition that should be rejected. As in many newly formed nation-states, in order to salvage a precolonial past, many traditions are reinvented in modern terms to legitimize the uniqueness of a national identity. Thus, when India gained independence in 1947, many practices that may not have been so prevalent in the past, such as sati, became symbols of tradition to be defended. In the middle - or rather, nowhere to be found - were the voices of Indian women, between white men trying to save them from their own "backward" communities and brown men claiming that "women wanted to die" as sati.
As a result, Indian womanhood was constructed on the basis of what nationalist sentiment considered to be traditional: a family-centered, fragile, and, above all, silent wife.
The progressive values enshrined in law following the demands of women during the independence movement made little difference. Dowries, for example, were outlawed in 1961. But the practice continues, along with related violent crimes against brides who refuse to pay, such as kidnapping, harassment, fraud, assault and murder committed by grooms and their families in an attempt to secure a good dowry. Underage marriage, limited access to education, and a general culture of silence and victim-blaming that considers domestic violence a private matter to be resolved within the family, are problems that persist today.
In response, a new wave of feminist discourse has emerged since the 1970s to expose the hypocrisy of Indian law. This time there is a greater focus on the intersecting struggles of gender and caste, ethnicity, or sexuality. Cases of violence against women are met with massive protests, shifting the social understanding of violence against women from the private to solidarity in the public.
However, special attention is now given to the voices of women beyond their victimization by male violence, as active participants in their own development. An important trend in Indian grassroots feminism is what is now called 'ecofeminism'.
Popularized by Chipko in the 1970s and continued by organizations such as Jagori Rural, co-founded by our guest, ecofeminism in the Indian context focuses on the traditional knowledge of rural women and their connection to the land. Both have been used as objects of exploitation by men and as Abha claims in our interview: "They both have no rights to rest and regeneration." So women's ancestral role as protectors of nature provides a site of resistance to patriarchal and colonial control.
Just as the grassroots feminist movements in rural India have taught us, the history of the colonization of the land is the same history marked on the bodies of colonized women and queer people, all silenced, erased, and repurposed for the interests of others. Here is where queer and women struggles intersect.
For Indigenous feminists, the ancestral voices of the feminine and queer need to be restored so that balance with the earth can be restored, too.
Finally, as we briefly introduced in this article, our understanding of gender and sexual oppression must necessarily be carefully framed by the history of colonialism when we apply Western concepts to the Global South. Rather than projecting a Western framework that can replicate the ideology of "white men saving brown women from brown men" and further promote the "women wanted to die" response in colonized countries, we need to listen to and support the voices of the people who actually know how to bring about change in their communities. This also doesn't mean that we fall back on the apathy of "respecting cultural differences" and let the voices crying out for help go unheard. We must embrace each other's strengths and share our tools for emancipation so that we can all adapt and grow them in our own contexts.
References:
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2010) “Can the Subalten Speak?” Morris, R. C. (Ed.). Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press.
Partha Chatterjee (1990) “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. (Eds.) Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Sarbani Guha Ghosal (2005). “Major Trends of Feminism in India.” The Indian Journal of Political Science 66(4). https://doi.org/41856169
Himanshi Nagpal (2017) “The Historical Journey of Anti-Dowry Laws.” Feminism in India, Jun 21st. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/06/21/historical-journey-anti-dowry-laws/
Kanksha Raina (2018) “How did Sati get Abolished in India?” Feminism in India, Oct 29th. https://feminisminindia.com/2018/10/29/sati-history-india/
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