Submitted to :

Submitted by : Aman Sharma

INTRODUCTION
The 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 60 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.

BACKGROUND
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). 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."

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." 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-18th 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. 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 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. 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. 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") 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. 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

1947 - 1969: Synthesizing the Past and Assessing the Present

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 postcolonial India, they were more concerned with their Indian audience and less preoccupied with convincing the world that Hindu civilization was kind to women.

1970 - 1985: Critiquing the Present and Excavating the Past

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 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

1986- 2012: Challenging Categories, Reassessing Colonialism, and Revisiting the "Third World Woman"
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, and Recasting Women (1989) edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 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. Some of these articles took issue with periodization and conventional assumptions about women's progress in modern India. Lucy Carroll and Gregory Kozlowski 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,and Madhu Kishwar, Arya Samaj schools for girls 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. 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.

Conclusion
How do I sum up the writing of women's history in India in the first 65 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 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. 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."