“After more than a millennium for men, we got a decade for women.”(1) This sentiment expressed at the 1991 Women’s Studies Conference in London, reminds us that the women’s movement had to struggle even for political visibility and recognition in its early days. From there the movement has traversed the terrain of defending basic human rights and redefining development issues. The women’s movement has emerged as a potent political force in the struggle for social transformation today. Be it in terms of ideology, activism, organisation, research or alliances, it presents a significant voice. While initially the endeavour was to storm male bastions, today we see the emergence of a gender-inspired development paradigm.

Contemporary India though, presents a particular challenge for any attempt to understand the question of gender. The impact of many struggles, especially those of the last two decades, has meant that many giant leaps have been made, but gender issues are being shaped by many other developments and are being continually recast in complex ways. This multilayered, vivid rubric that makes up the women’s movement therefore is almost impossible to capture in any one way.

And yet an attempt is being made...

Defining through Struggle

It was the International Women’s Decade that forced a minimum visibility and acceptance of the women’s movement. In India, the seventies saw the beginnings of a specifically articulated and more organised women’s movement in India as it struggled with issues of  violence against women – particularly rape, including police custodial rape, dowry and wife beating.

Women have always been involved actively in many struggles. The Naxalite Movement, the student movements and the general struggles of the rural poor and industrial workers saw many women participate. They were also part of important tribal movements (including the Telegana stir)(2), the Shahada land movement in the Dhulia district of Maharashtra where tribal women mobilised against wife-beating and alcoholism and in the Chipko ‘tree-hugging’ anti-deforestation struggle(3). The Sarvodaya leader Jayaprakash Narayan’s “Total Revolution” also inspired many women.

Women have brought in their creative energies and helped to sustain a wide range of agitations– be it against the Sardar Sarovar Dam (Narmada Bachao Andolan)(4), the Uttarakhand bid for Statehood, the Jharkhand movement (Jharkhandi Nari Mukti Samiti)(5), or the fight for justice for the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy (Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sangathan).

Women have also successfully devised novel methods of resistance. In Baliapal, for example, women who rose against the proposed setting up of a test range blew conches to alert villagers of the arrival of outsiders(6). Other examples include the numerous cases of women surrounding a man who was battering his wife or Dalit women refusing to clean the village until they were also allowed access to the community well.

There are a number of protests and resistances in the country today – all authored by people whose rights are seriously compromised by the existing structures. The Dalit movements built on the legacy of Phule and Ambedkar (although they are now fragmented and factionalised)(7); the Adivasi movements to self-determination (that is often quashed by state aggression); peasant movements to retain control over their resources(8) (in the face of bio-patenting, and lopsided international agreements); the struggle of fisherfolk (who are involved in protecting marine resources and their livelihood, while countering the forces of globalisation)(9); and the efforts of a wide variety of citizens to keep the plurality of the country alive (in the teeth of fundamentalistic aggression) are but a few examples.

The women’s movement has been shaped and influenced by all of these streams of struggle even as it has also played a role in shaping and influencing these movements. For example, women have often effectively used Gandhian methods of non-violent resistance while at the same time the women’s movement has forced many of the Gandhians to look at sexism within their organisation.
The movement has subsequently gone on to take up issues of Dalit women, of alcoholism, reservations for women in institutions, sexual harrassment, legal reforms, the increasing feminisation of poverty under the new regime of liberalisation and globalisation. Every issue re-articulated a critique of society and defined the movement, its values and its ideology in its own way. Thus the movement that faced tremendous resistance is now at the centre of resistance to the current destructive development regime.

References
As quoted in Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1995[B.A30.K60](1)
Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle. Kali For Women, New Delhi, 1989. [B.A71c.S2](2)
Ilina Sen, A Space Within the Struggle: Women’s Participation in People’s Movements. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1990. [B.A71c.S60](3)
Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1995. [B.E21b.B1](4)
Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan, Gender and Tribe: Women, Land and Forests in Jharkhand. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1991. [B.A31.K60] (5)
People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Bheeta Maati:Our Soil, Our Earth, Our Home - A Report on Baliapal Missile Base and People’s Struggle. New Delhi, Aug.1988. [R.K02a.20](6)
Sandeep Pendse, Dalit Movement Today: At Cross Roads. Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, Bombay, Aug.1994. [B.L11.P60](7)
Vandana Shiva, Captive Minds, Captive Lives:Ethics, Ecology and Patents on Life. Research Foundation for Science and Technology Policy, Dehra Dun, 1995.[B.U10e.S2](8)
Update Collective Chilika Bachao. New Delhi 1993 [R.E21.603] (9)

Other References
Simantini Dhuru and Anand Patwardhan, A Narmada Dairy: The Story of a River, a Dam and a People Who Will Not Be Moved. Bombay, 1995. [V.E21b.212] (Video Documentary)
Ali Kazimi, Narmada: A Valley Rises (2 cassettes). 1994. [V.E21b.145] (Video Documentary)
Navdanya, Save Our Seeds: Farmer’s Rights. New Delhi 1993 [R.K34b.605]
Ajantha Subramaniam and M.H. Kalavathy, Between the Devil and the Deep Sea. Ecologist Asia, Vol.3 No.5, Bombay [J.H54.010995ECA]

Facing Resistance and Denial

Despite the large presence of women in all social movements in India, the women’s movement has had to continually assert its existence, legitimacy and relevance. There is a basic “ideological defence mechanism wherein the raison d’être of the struggle for women’s equality continues to be denied in the contemporary Indian mindset.”(10) Claims that, traditionally, women are accorded a high status in India or that Indian culture worships women as goddesses and mothers, are used to condemn “feminists” as immature, west-aping, rabid women. Much is made out of symbols like the grandmother handing over the “keys of the safe” to the new “bahu”, in order to question the very relevance of the women’s movement in India. Any discussion on the actual or effective position of women in Indian society, within different religions, family structures or the workplace is branded as being anti-family, anti-religious or anti-culture.

Another defensive reaction is the very paternalistic and parochial sympathiser with the “plight of women”, who refuses to relinquish the power and privileges that a patriarchal form of society gives him.

Like Virginia Woolf said, “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps, than the story of that emancipation.”(11)

References
Indu Agnihotri, The Women’s Movement in India, a Historical Perspective.  The Eye, Vol.4 No3 New Delhi, March 1997. [R.A71.625](10)
Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own  and Three Guineas. Chatto & Windus (Hogarth Press), London, 1984 [B.A70.W1](11)
Other Readings
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. Vintage,   London, 1992. [B.A10.F1]
John Stoltenberg, Male Virgins, Blood Covenants and Family Values: Inside America’s Fastest Growing Men’s Movement. On the Issues Vol.4 No.2 [J.A71d.010395OIS25]Promise Keepers is a new cult of masculinity. It reveals in microcosm as if under laboratory conditions - exactly how patriarchy operates through male bonding which simultaneously propels men’s public policies and impacts on men’s private relations with women. Mary E John ‘Indisciplined Outpourings’: Myths and Bathos of Male Exclusion. Economic and Political Weekly Vol.30 No.22 Mumbai [J.A71d.95EPW1333]

Reclaiming History

“Women have a history; women are in history,” proclaimed Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the field of women’s history.

“As long as androcentric (male centred) assumptions dominated our interpretations, we read sex-gender arrangements prevailing in the present, backward into the past. We assumed the existence of male dominance as a given and considered any evidence to the contrary merely as an exception to the rule or a failed alternative.” (12)

To right this, feminist historians have set about including the conspicuous omissions from the accounts of major events – particularly the participation of women in social change and development. They have raised questions on the manner in which research is done. They have also scrutinised power relationships, the language used, the observer’s biases etc. The predominance of positivist notions, which recognise only observable phenomena, were also seriously challenged. Oral traditions started getting acknowledged as valuable sources in the recasting of history. This new scholarship, predominantly feminist, contributed significantly to the recording of women’s history and the history of the movement itself. Uma Chakravati(13), Radha Kumar(14), and Shahida Lateef(15) are some of the Indian Feminist historians.

This process of (re)writing history has made it possible to peel off layers of the dominant, hegemonic consciousness encoded in that history. It also unfolds the experience and ideas of non-hegemonic groups, particularly women making way for a more ‘gendered’ and a more situated history.

References
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford University Press, New York 1986 page-15, pp 318. [B.A00.L1] (12)
Lerner in Creation of Patriarchy, traces, by means of historical evidence (particularly from Mesopotamian society), the development of the leading ideas, symbols and metaphors by which patriarchal gender relations were incorporated into Western civilisation.

Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1993. [B.A71.K1](13)

Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History, The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai. Kali For Women, New Delhi, 1998. Price: Rs. 250 (Available at CED)[B.A80.C60](14)
Part One provides an overview of the structure of society in 18th and 19th century Maharashtra: Chapter 1: Caste, Gender and the State in Eighteenth Century Maharashtra; Chapter 2: Caste Contestation, Class formation, Nationalism & Gender
Part Two deals with issues of gender:  Chapter 3: Law, Colonial State and Gender; Chapter 4: Men, Women and the Embattled Family; Chapter 5: On Widowhood: The Critique of Cultural Practices in Women’s Writing
Part Three deals with the relationship between structure and agency in the specific context of gender as played out in the life and work of Pandita Ramabai.

Shahida Lateef, Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities 1890s–1980s. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1990.[B.A10a.L61](15)

Other Readings
Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. Pathfinder Press, New York, 1981.[B.A00.R1]
Eleni Varikas, Gender, Experience and Subjectivity: The Tilly-Scott Disagreement. New Left Review, No.211 London [J.A00.010595NLR88]

New
samyukta : A Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Initiatives, Tiruvananthapuram, Vol 1 No. 1 January 2001
The focus of this issue is on Women and Autobiography