May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (4 page)

Fifteen months after I left India, Rajiv Gandhi was defeated for reelection by a coalition led by his former finance minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who had broken with Gandhi over the issue of government corruption. Singh’s party, the Janata Dal, or People’s Front, drew its base of support from the conservative “Hindi heartland” of the north, where women have had a more difficult time entering politics than in other regions of India. In the weeks after the election, Singh appointed no women to his senior cabinet; the highest-ranking woman in government was Maneka Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi’s estranged sister-in-law, who became a minister of state for environment. Her biggest issue was not women’s rights but animal rights. In Parliament, the number of women was greatly reduced from the previous record level of 10 percent of the membership. The situation was hardly encouraging. And yet my feeling—and the feeling among people I spoke to in India—was that even if programs and policy for women did not make further progress under V. P. Singh, at least there would be no retrenchment. The gains in the past decade had made it difficult to turn back.

Certainly the history of India’s women is not one of unrelieved misery. It is believed that the status of women deteriorated only in relatively recent times, the past two thousand years or so. Before this, some historians have theorized, there was an ancient “golden age,” sometime around 1000
B.C
., in which Indian women were considered the equals of men, or at least had a higher status than they did in the later millennia. Scholars have based this belief on evidence left by the
Aryans, the seminomadic tribes who wandered into India from Central Europe around 1500
B.C
., establishing the beginnings of Indian culture as it is known today. (Although the Aryans are thought to have been somewhat lighter-skinned than the indigenous tribes already living in India, “Aryan” is a linguistic rather than an ethnic term. The Aryan tribes spoke a language that was the ancestor of, among others, Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, English, German and Italian—all members of what scholars call the Indo-European or Aryan family of languages. The Aryans were determined to keep themselves separate from India’s indigenous tribes, and scholars believe this eventually led to the Hindu caste system, which segregated all Hindus into rigid hereditary social classes.)

It was the Aryans who left the first written record about life in the subcontinent, the
Rig Veda
, a collection of 1,017 Sanskrit poems that with later literature forms the basis of historical reconstruction of the era. The works describe a society in which women married relatively late, at sixteen or seventeen, and did not live in purdah. They took part in gatherings of the clan and had prominent positions at religious rites. Most important, they were in charge of cattle-raising, the chief occupation of the Aryans, and made bows, arrows and other weapons for the men when they went to battle.

No one is quite sure why, but over the next two thousand years, the position of women gradually eroded. Girls were married off at a younger age and were barred from religious rituals. Widows were not permitted to remarry. Sometime between the years 200
B.C
. and
A.D
. 200, the upper-caste law codifier known as Manu produced the first compilation of Hindu law, which assigned to women the status of chattel. “Woman is as foul as falsehood itself,” Manu wrote. “When creating them, the lord of creatures allotted to women a love of their beds, of their seat and ornaments; impure thoughts, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct.” A woman had no hope of an autonomous life. As Manu stated: “From the cradle to the grave a woman is dependent on a male: in childhood on her father, in youth on her husband, in old age on her son.”

Manu is seen by some feminists today as the chief culprit in the history of the subordination of Indian women, but Manu’s compilation of the law does not explain the steady decline in the status of women that had occurred before his time. Many historians have come to believe that what happened to women in India was what happens to all women as a society evolves from wandering, pastoral clans into
sedentary groups that make their living by agriculture. In a tribal society, women are more involved in the means of production. In a settled society, where there is relatively more leisure and less fear of enemies, the roles of men and women become increasingly demarcated. Men tend to assume a superior position and women a secondary one. The “golden age” for women, a notion many historians believe was promoted by nineteenth-century Indian nationalists eager to find a utopian past, may have been nothing more than a stage in the development of Indian society. Manu may well have been a misogynist, but the society in general was probably motivated by other stresses. As the Aryans spread geographically, they came into contact with other cultures, particularly the darker-skinned Dravidian tribes of the south. In the opinion of Romila Thapar, a highly respected historian and a supporter of women’s causes in India, the oppression of women developed hand in hand with the idea of preserving caste distinctions. Manu’s code of law, which first set down the rules of caste in India, is in her view an illustration “of the need to rigidly define caste society,” to create rules that keep the outsiders, the people viewed as “pollutants,” in their place. Consequently, there are elaborate rules in Manu’s code governing precisely who may marry whom. “To avoid pollution, you must control birth,” Romila Thapar explains. “But you lose control over birth if you lose control over women.”

The next historical decline in the status of women is popularly believed to have come at the time of the sixteenth-century Moghul invasions. Although there had been earlier Muslim invasions, the Moghuls brought Islam to India on a large scale, and with it, at least in the view of many Hindus, the regressive attitudes toward women that spread the practices of purdah and sati. Others are less sure of the Muslim role in the decline of women. Romila Thapar says there is evidence of the seclusion of upper-caste women and of sati before the Muslim invasions. Whatever the case, it was not until the nineteenth century, at a time when sati and purdah showed no signs of abating, that the first impetus for reform began among the middle class in Calcutta, at that time the capital of British India. The reformers were opposed to sati, purdah and child marriage. They promoted education for women, a wife’s limited right to property and the right of widows to remarry. This movement, which later spread to the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, was inspired by far-thinking male reformers like Rammohan Roy, who founded the Brahmo Samaj, a reform sect of Hinduism, and other men genuinely troubled by the condition
of women. Recent historians, however, have concluded that another major impetus for what is considered the first phase of the Indian women’s movement came from the desire of middle-class men to make themselves more socially acceptable to the British imperialists, who employed the men as junior administrators in the bureaucracy and as brokers in the East India Company. The woman in the Bengali middle-class household—unseen, uneducated, isolated—clearly did not conform to the English model of what, for the time, was considered a proper wife. She was not, for example, educated even to the extent of the colonial wives, who knew how to run competent households and assist at social functions in the furtherance of their husbands’ careers.

Yet the reform movement, at least in the early part of the century, was a theoretical reform falling far short of revolutionary change, “a safe issue,” as the scholar Meredith Borthwick has written, “that did not present a vision of imminent social chaos.” The women were to be educated only to enhance their roles as wives and mothers. While the men argued the issues of reform, the women stayed home, most of them unaware that they were the subjects of so much debate. It was not until the second half of the century that some of the reforms were made law—widows were allowed to remarry in 1856; sati was banned in 1859—and even then, the laws had limited impact. What did change was the standards by which Bengali middle-class women were judged. By the dawn of the twentieth century, a new woman had emerged, one who, in Borthwick’s words, “appeared in mixed social gatherings, and was a member of various philanthropic and social women’s organizations.” This woman “had received a basic education and read improving literature—domestic instruction manuals and ‘refined’ fiction.” The new woman represented the values of “cleanliness, orderliness, thrift, responsibility, intelligence,” and had “a moderate interest in and knowledge of the public world of men. These were added to, rather than substituted for, the traditional virtues of self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion to the husband, respect for elders, and household competence.”

It was this new middle-class woman who responded to the upheavals that began in Indian life with the birth of the nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Women’s emancipation was one of the goals of the nationalists, and by 1905 the men were encouraging women to participate in the Swadeshi movement to boycott foreign goods. Within the next twenty-five years, three major women’s organizations
were founded, the first of them with links to the British movement for women’s suffrage. The most influential of the organizations, the All India Women’s Conference, began in 1927 as a forum that met to discuss women’s education but soon expanded into a group that worked to stop purdah, child marriage and the other problems first tackled by the nineteenth-century reformers. This time, however, it was women who discussed women’s issues, and it was women who determined that these issues should not be separated from the larger concern of India’s subordination to England.

The women had their first chance to prove themselves on a massive scale in 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi launched the first of his civil disobedience campaigns. The British responded by arresting most of the nationalist leaders and throwing them into jail. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding prime minister and a leader in the civil disobedience campaign, recounted what the women did to keep the movement alive in
The Discovery of India
, a book he wrote largely in jail: “Most of us menfolk were in prison,” Nehru explained. “And then a remarkable thing happened. Our women came to the front and took charge of the struggle. Women had always been there, of course, but now there was an avalanche of them, which took not only the British government but their own menfolk by surprise. Here were these women, women of the upper or middle classes, leading sheltered lives in their homes—peasant women, working-class women, rich women—pouring out in their tens of thousands in defiance of government order.… It was not only that display of courage and daring, but what was even more surprising was the organizational power they showed.”

The women had been in large part inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, who saw women as autonomous, independent people, and also as an important social base for the movement. No man before or since has done so much for women’s rights in India. In summoning the masses of women into the freedom struggle, Gandhi told them they must no longer be “dolls and objects of indulgence” but rather “comrades in common service” with their husbands. “Man has regarded woman as his tool,” Gandhi wrote. “She has learnt to be this tool and in the end found it easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall the descent is easy.” In 1925, Gandhi had chosen Sarojini Naidu, one of the leading women freedom fighters, as president of the nationalist Congress party. In 1931, largely as a response to women’s participation in the civil disobedience campaign, the Congress party passed a resolution endorsing political equality for all
women, regardless of qualifications. This was at a time when women in some European countries had not yet won the right to vote.

Gandhi did have his limitations as an emancipator. The role of women in the freedom struggle was for the most part supportive and auxiliary, limited to spinning, picketing, distributing literature and attending meetings. Gandhi himself saw women as long-suffering vessels of self-sacrifice, who should neither earn the principal wages in a family nor disrupt the balance at home. But he nonetheless moved a large step forward from the nineteenth-century reformers by seeing women as active participants in their own progress and not, in the words of the feminist Madhu Kishwar, “as helpless creatures deserving charitable concern.” Certainly Indian women responded to Gandhi in a way they never had to any other male leader, a phenomenon that has always interested Romila Thapar, who believes the psychological connection between Gandhi and the masses of women has not been adequately explored. “There’s something about him,” she told me, “that makes him very much like us.” Erik Erikson, in
Gandhi’s Truth
, the Pulitzer Prize–winning psychoanalytic study of the Indian leader, suggests what that might be. Gandhi, Erikson argues, believed in the “natural superiority” of the self-sacrificing woman but could not tolerate this notion “without a competitive attempt at becoming more maternal than the most motherly of mothers.” Gandhi thus saw himself as a “mother” to his mother, his father and India “herself.” (Erikson, in one of his most seductive meditations, also explains his belief that India is essentially feminine, or, more precisely, that “Father Time in India is a Mother.” Indians, Erikson says, live in “a feminine space time,” a world in which they feel enveloped and carried along as participants in a larger continuum.)

The next major development in the history of Indian women did not come until the mid-1970s, after the government released “Towards Equality,” an explosive, far-reaching report on the status of India’s women that revealed that conditions for many of them had actually regressed in significant ways since independence. It is this report which serves as a basis for the current women’s movement in India, although feminists prefer to categorize the present movement as the natural “third stage,” after the nineteenth-century reform in Calcutta and women’s participation in the freedom struggle. Historically this view is correct, but it is also a way for Indian feminists to distinguish themselves from the Western women’s movement and to emphasize their often-repeated point that feminism has a different context and set of goals in India.