Role of Women in Indian Freedom Struggle

The course of the Indian National Movement is marked by multifaceted and complex stages. The question of social reform remained alive in the nationalist debates in the public sphere from late 19th century till 1947.

Women’s consciousness around social and the national questions grew simultaneously. The demand for legal reforms and inclusion of Indians into the imperial legislative councils constituted the early phases of the Indian national movement.

Both Indian men and women were leading the social reform movements since the 1880s. In various women’s autobiographies and writings from all over India, particularly Maharashtra and Bengal, the slogan that ‘personal is political’ was being raised. The fact of women entering the male dominated arena of social reform was tantamount to making a break with the past.

Women Leaders of the National Movement

There is no doubt that women participated in the Indian anti-imperialist struggle in large numbers.

• Rani Lakshmibai was the great heroine of the First war of India Freedom. She showed the embodiment of patriotism, self-respect and heroism. She was the queen of a small state, but the empress of a limitless empire of glory.
• Starting with Sarojini Naidu, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Mridula Sarabhai at the national level, we may go on to provincial level leaders like Annie Mascarene and A.V. Kuttimaluamma in Kerala, Durgabai Deshmukh in Madras Presidency, Rameshwari Nehru and Bi Amman in U.P., Satyawati Devi and Subhadra Joshi in Delhi, Hansa Mehta and Usha Mehta in Bombay and several others.
• In fact, such is the nature of our nationalist movement that it is very difficult to distinguish between regional level and all-India level leaders. Many women began at the local level and went on to become players in the nationalist centre stage.
• Besides all these Indian women, there were also Irish women like Annie Besant and Margaret Cousins, who brought their own knowledge of the Irish experience of British exploitation to bear on India.

The growth of feminism in India and women’s participation in the Indian Nationalist Movement were part of the same process.

Indian Women’s Association

Women in different parts of the world were asking for the vote for women, and this became the rallying cry in India as well.

• Irish women like Margaret Cousins helped the Indian women to demand representation in the limited constitutional reforms being provided as early as 1917.
• That was the year in which the Indian Women’s Association was formed, primarily with the intention of sending a delegation to Edwin Montagu, the then Secretary of State for India.
• The delegation asked for votes for women in the new constitutional reforms which would finally take the shape of the 1919 Government of India Act, popularly known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.

The beginning of the twentieth century was a very significant period, not just because of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal with its repercussions in other parts of the country, but also because it was the time when girls’ schools and ladies’ clubs mushroomed in different parts of the country.

• In Delhi, the Indraprastha Girls’ School was set up at this time on the outskirts of the Jama Masjid, in the haveli of one of the businessmen of Chandni Chowk, Rai Balkrishan Das.
• In the UP, Sayyid Karamat Husain was busy setting up a whole network of girls’ schools from Aligarh to Allahabad.
• There is a close relationship between women’s increased access to education and their nationalist consciousness.

On the other hand there were several illiterate women who also participated in the movement. In the course of their activity, they closely interacted with educated fellow nationalists, and were able to access education in a whole variety of unconventional ways. Quite often it would be within the confines of the jail barracks. The relationship between education and empowerment was being understood by many women across the length and breadth of the country by the early twentieth century. 

Mahila Samitis (Women’s Associations)

The early twentieth century also witnessed the emergence of many city and town based women’s associations.

• Unlike the girls’ schools mentioned above, these were initiated by women themselves. It was as if there was something in the air at that time which made women want to reach out to each other, to do activities together and to broaden their mental and physical horizons.
• In the light of the Swadeshi agitation, women’s associations like the Mahila Shilpa Samiti and the Lakshmir Bhandar were set up by the nieces of Rabindranath Tagore, Hironmoyee Devi and Sarla Devi.
• The Hitashini Sabha, a women’s group, organised an exhibition of Swadeshi goods in 1907.
• Alongside with the establishment of these women’s organisations, women’s journals like the Bharat Mahila were also becoming extremely popular. Kumudini Mitra wrote in one of the issues that if the Indians rejected British goods in large quantities, then there would be a great upheaval in England and that would force the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, to revoke Partition.

Rameshwari Nehru, wife of a cousin of Jawaharlal Nehru, created an organisation in Allahabad. Known as the Prayag Mahila Samiti, it tried to draw the women of Allahabad out of their homes to discuss political issues.

Rameshwari Nehru had also set up a women’s journal at this time: the Stree Darpan, which was extremely popular with the Hindi reading public. It had an interesting mix of political coverage of national and international issues, short stories, poems and other prose pieces. By the 1930s, there were several other Hindi journals, such as Madhuri, which had also made an appearance.

During the 1920s, the issue of votes for women was debated in the Provincial Legislative Councils and ultimately, by the mid-1920s, all the Legislative Councils, from the more progressive Madras Legislative Council to the more conservative UP Legislative Council, had given their assent to the idea of women’s suffrage and women’s representation.

Mobilisation Of Women in the Gandhian Phase

While these developments facilitated the growth of the women’s movement in India and their active involvement in public life, it was the new direction and focus given to the Indian National Movement by Mahatma Gandhi that enabled them to come out of their homes.

• Vina Majumdar, the doyen of women’s studies in India, has referred to Gandhi’s “revolutionary approach to women’s role in society and their personal dignity as individuals”.
• Madhu Kishwar explains that it was in the course of the Gandhian movement that the single woman acquired a sense of dignity and came to be respected for her political work.
• Women like Mridula Sarabhai, who chose to remain unmarried, could actually make this choice in the context of the Gandhian movement, where giving up one’s personal life for the cause and opting out of marriage were seen as noble deeds. Such women were not pitied because they had not found husbands. Their actions in the political sphere were appreciated.
• Mridula Sarabhai was a trusted lieutenant of Mahatma Gandhi and was often sent out by him to various places to assess the political situation and even control communal riots.
• Another example is that of Sucheta Kripalani, who actively participated in the movement and was a true Gandhian.

Women were therefore, not mere add-ons to the Gandhian movement, but were an important part of it. In fact, when explaining his strategy of satygraha and how it worked, Mahatma Gandhi had often expressed the view that he felt women would understand the method better. Satyagraha required a great deal of patience and forbearance, as well as moral courage. Gandhiji felt that most women in India had these qualities. 

Khilafat and Non-cooperation Movement

Women’s participation in the first major Gandhian movement, the Khilafat and Non-cooperation Movement of 1920-22, was limited but there were some important developments.

• The Khilafat Movement in the U.P. was marked by the energetic efforts of Bi Amman, the mother of the Ali Brothers, Maulana Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali. Her actual name was Abadi Bano Begum. A courageous woman who did not allow patriarchy and the pardah to come in her way, she took to active politics around 1914, when her sons were in jail, because she felt that the cause must not suffer.
• Despite her age (60+) she toured the Punjab, Bombay, the U.P. and Bihar during the Khilafat Movement, addressing several meetings and collecting large sums of money for the Movement.
• She would throw aside her pardah and address the gathering, asking women to come forward and participate in the Movement in large numbers. Her presence played a major role in attracting women to the public meetings held on the Khilafat issue.
• Another important development was that women went to jail for the first time in the Non Cooperation Movement.

This was bound to happen, though Mahatma Gandhi was at first not at all in favour of women going to jail. But when the wife and sister of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das got arrested in Calcutta in 1921, Gandhiji had to revise his stand. He now began addressing women in different parts of the country, exhorting them to go to jail.

He drew them more actively into the mainstream of politics, asking them to attend the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress, held at the end of 1921, in large numbers.

Attending the Congress session, participating in the discussions and getting more deeply drawn into the spirit of non-co-operation were exhilarating experiences. When they returned after the Congress session, their lives had been transformed.

The Non-Cooperation Movement was at its peak, most of the leaders had been arrested. The women took upon themselves the responsibility of keeping the movement alive by holding meetings, often in defiance of prohibitory orders, addressing large crowds, usually for the first time in their lives, and if need be, even going to jail.

The Civil Disobedience Movement

The Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-33 was undoubtedly a major landmark in women’s participation in political activity. We begin with the historic Dandi March of Mahatma Gandhi in March 1930.

• When he set out from his Sabarmati Ashram with his group of 78 volunteers, he declared that no women would be part of the Dandi March. This was extremely disappointing for women like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. She impressed upon Gandhiji the need to involve women in direct action during the Civil Disobedience Movement.
• After listening to her, Gandhiji finally held out a slip of paper on which he had written: “All may regard this as the words from me that all are free and those who are ready are expected to start mass civil disobedience regarding the Salt Law from April 6.” 
• Kamaladevi took this as the green signal from Gandhi for women’s participation in mass direct action and this made it easier for the women’s sections of the Seva Dals (volunteer organisations of the Congress) to issue directions and organise participation of women volunteers in all the programmes of Civil Disobedience.
• Women’s meetings, processions, picketing of shops the making and selling of salt, all became generalised activities in all parts of the country.
• Quite often these activities took them to jail usually in rather unexpected ways.
• This was a time when gender equations were undergoing change – women were making their choice of husbands, they were even choosing not to marry or to move away from husbands with whom there were compatibility issues.

These unconventional marriages gave women a great deal of space and it is not surprising that Sucheta Kripalani and Aruna Asaf Ali, became prominent leaders of the Congress. Both were extremely active in the underground campaign which sustained and gave a sense of direction to the Quit India Movement of 1942.

The Quit India Movement

If women came into their own in the 1930s, the 1942 Quit India Movement was one in which women’s participation was even more significant. Interestingly, women understood the complexities of this movement very well.

• Since the major Congress leaders had been put in jail in a pre-emptive strike by the British government, they realised that what was needed now was to evade arrest and many of them successfully managed to do so until almost the end of the movement.
• Women also took the initiative in a wide variety of ways – from producing pamphlets, to circulating underground literature, to running a Congress radio.
• Usha Mehta, along with Vithalbhai Jhaveri, Babubhai Khakar and Rammanohar Lohia set up the Freedom Radio in Bombay which successfully broadcast from 3rd September 1942 until 12 November of the same year. 
• The broadcasts were usually of 20 minutes to half an hour duration and would end with the Bande Mataram. They were extremely popular and people used to wait for the broadcasts.

In the Quit India Movement, there were women’s processions even in such unlikely places as Bannu in the North West Frontier Province. Girl students were active in Meerut, parts of Assam, Sagar and Wardha in Madhya Pradesh and different parts of the Madras Presidency.

Women in Jail

Women went to jail in large numbers both during the course of the Quit India Movement and the previous Civil Disobedience Movement. These arrests often threw their domestic lives into disarray.

• However, for the women themselves, the jail came to signify a new world, the routine of which was quite different from the daily domestic grind.
• Here, they learnt to spin, sing nationalist songs, educate themselves, learn new languages and interact with women whom they would otherwise never have met in their lives.
• Many of the middle-class women had their first insights into the lives of ‘criminal women’ who had been convicted for murder and other serious offences. They learnt to empathise with them and bond with them as women.

Women in the Revolutionary and Left Movements

Until now we have concentrated on the Gandhian movement and women’s participation in it. As we know, our nationalist movement had several other ideological strains besides the Gandhian one.

• From the 1920s, under the auspices of the HRA which later renamed itself as the HSRA, a strong revolutionary tradition developed over large parts of Northern India. This revolutionary movement set itself up as a counter to the non-violent Gandhian movement, which, it felt, would not work in India.
• It believed that individual assassinations, especially of top officials of the British Government would be more effective because that would paralyse the British Government and make them leave India.
• These revolutionary groups worked underground and the harsh life that they led made it extremely difficult for women to be part of it. In fact, as women like Prakashvati, the wife of Yashpal, have explained, the men themselves discouraged women from joining their movement 
• Yet, in Bengal, there were women revolutionary groups who formed physical culture clubs and secretly read banned revolutionary literature. The Chittagong Armoury Raid of 19 April 1930 greatly excited women like Pritilata Wadedar and Kalpana Dutt who became more actively involved in revolutionary activities.

• The late 1920s and thereafter witnessed the emergence of a viable Left alternative within the Indian Nationalist Movement. Many women chose to join the Communist Party, because of its more radical programme which appealed especially to the youth and also because the newly emergent Soviet Russia was making remarkable progress through collectivisation of agriculture and the Five Year Plans.
• Hajra Begum emerged as a labour leader, organising the railway coolies on Allahabad railway station. She was also a popular speaker at many student meetings during the 1930s.
• In the course of the 1940s, the number of women who participated in the various subsidiary organisations of the Left, such as the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Indian People’s Theatre Association increased manifold.
• Rasheed Jahan, Ismat Chugtai, Rekha Jain and others made their mark in literature, theatre and music.

All these cultural forms were used to mobilise the workers and the peasantry in different parts of India. This, combined with the very active role that women played in the Quit India Movement, indicates the extent to which women were becoming the “movers of history” by the 1940s.

To sum up, women’s participation in the Indian Nationalist Movement can be traced back to the Swadeshi Movement. The early decades of the twentieth century saw women’s lives being transformed through education, formation of women’s associations and increasing participation in political activity. The story of women’s participation in India’s freedom struggle is the story of making bold choices, finding themselves on the streets, inside jails and in legislatures, all of which empowered them in a whole variety of ways.

The non-violent movement that gained India her freedom not only took women along but was dependent for its success on the active participation of women. At the same time, there were several other strands in the anti-imperialist movement, such as that of the revolutionaries, communists and other left groups. While the revolutionary movement offered little scope for women’s participation, increasingly in the 1930s and 1940s, many women were being drawn towards socialist and communist ideas.

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