Women in Indian Politics (1885-1947)

Women in Indian Politics (1885–1947)

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The rise of the women’s movement was one of the most significant features of 20th-century Indian politics, bringing a range of women’s issues into the mainstream of public life. This was never a single, unified movement — it comprised several distinct streams, differing in ideology, perspective, and working style, and its leading voices did not always share the same immediate concerns. From early campaigns against child marriage, sati, the devadasi system, purdah, dowry, polyandry, polygamy, and female infanticide, the story of women’s political engagement runs through the suffrage campaigns of the early 20th century, the mass participation of women in the Gandhian movements, and the more radical, class-based mobilisations of the 1940s — right up to the traumatic gendered violence of Partition. Tracing this arc reveals both how far Indian women travelled into public and political life between 1885 and 1947, and how persistently their own claims remained subordinated to the larger causes of national liberation, class struggle, and communal honour.

The Nature of the Early Women’s Movement

• Savitribai Phule, Renuka Rai, Sucheta Kripalani, Pandita Ramabai, and Sarojini Naidu were among the pioneers under whose leadership many women participated in these early movements — women who themselves generally enjoyed certain privileges of class, caste, and religion.
• The quest for improved education for women is illustrative of this pattern.
  • Women from the upper castes and from middle- and high-class families were both the chief beneficiaries and the leaders of the movement in the 19th century, and it was this same group that led social reform campaigns in the first decades of the 20th.
  • These women reckoned that the education acquired in this early period would necessarily form the base for whatever social change was to follow as the century advanced — education gave women both articulacy and confidence.
  • Savitribai Phule, Pandita Ramabai, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Subbalakshmi, among others, founded schools for girls, while many other women launched publications dedicated to highlighting women’s issues.
• The participation of women in the freedom movement, in turn, shaped the movement for women’s rights — most importantly, it legitimised their claim to a place in the governance of India.
  • Saraladevi Chaudhurani posed the question directly: “How can we attain rights?” — and answered it herself: “By the strength of our agitation. We must force menfolk to concede to our demands and at the same time carry on propaganda among ourselves.”
  • Women won considerable respect for their political work, and social benefits followed as men learned to work alongside them as colleagues, prompting a review of the legal structure governing family law.

The Issue of Suffrage and Council Entry

• In 1917, Annie Besant, Sarojini Naidu, Margaret Cousins, and eight other women formed a delegation and approached Montagu in Delhi to demand voting rights for women; that same year, at Calcutta, women’s representatives separately asked for a formal role in the nationalist movement.
  • These associations, led largely by upper-caste women, essentially practised “petition politics” — drawing attention to needs such as voting and legal rights, while the concerns of lower-class and lower-caste women went largely unaddressed.
• Sarojini Naidu raised the issue of women’s suffrage at the special session of the INC at Bombay in August 1918, and Saraladevi Chaudhurani presented a formal resolution on women’s suffrage at the regular INC session at Delhi in December 1918.
• The Southborough Franchise Committee, appointed to examine the question of franchise ahead of the Act of 1919, visited India in 1918 to gather information; two of its members — including the Indian member C. Sankaran Nair, of the Viceroy’s Executive Council — favoured extending the franchise to Indian women.
  • The Act of 1919 ultimately did not grant women’s suffrage outright, but did add a provision allowing provincial legislative councils to enrol women on the list of registered voters.
  • Bombay and Madras were the first provinces to extend the franchise to women, in 1921, followed by the United Provinces (1923), Punjab and Bengal (1926), and Assam, the Central Provinces, Bihar, and Orissa (1930); all provinces subsequently extended women the right to stand for election as well.
  • Muthulakshmi Reddy became the first woman legislator in India, appointed to the Madras Legislative Council in 1927.
• Begum Jahanara Shah Nawaz and Radhabai Subbarayan were appointed by the British Government as the two women representatives at the First Round Table Conference (1930) and Second Round Table Conference (1931) respectively, with Sarojini Naidu also representing Indian women’s organisations at the Second RTC.
• The Lothian Committee, the second Franchise Committee appointed during the Round Table Conference process, included two women members and recommended increasing the female-to-male voter ratio from 1:20 to 1:5; the White Paper of 1933 instead recommended 1:10, before the Government of India Act of 1935 finally fixed the ratio at 1:5 and introduced special electorates for women.
• Following the 1937 provincial elections, several women took up prominent legislative and executive appointments:
  • Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit — Minister in the United Provinces
  • Anasuyabai Kale — Deputy Speaker in the Central Provinces
  • Sippi Milani — Deputy Speaker in Sind
  • Qudsia Aizaz Rasul — Deputy Speaker in the United Provinces
  • Begum Shah Nawaz — Parliamentary Secretary in Punjab
  • Hansa Mehta — Parliamentary Secretary in Bombay

Women and the Early Congress Sessions

• Owing to the efforts of Dwarkanath Ganguly, six women delegates (out of ten registered lady delegates) attended the 1889 Congress session at Bombay, including the social reformer Pandita Ramabai, Rabindranath Tagore’s sister Swarnakumari Devi, and Calcutta University’s first woman graduate, Kadambini Ganguly.
  • The two women from Bengal — Dwarkanath’s wife Kadambini and Swarnakumari Devi, wife of Janakinath Ghosal — owed their presence largely to the extent of their husbands’ involvement in Congress politics, and orthodox opinion objected even to this limited participation, ridiculing Dwarkanath for insisting on women’s right to be represented in Congress and to stand for election to the Legislative Council.
• At the 1890 Calcutta session, Kadambini Ganguly addressed the Congress — though her contribution, a motion of thanks to the Chairman, was more symbolic than substantive. From 1890 onward, women began attending nearly every INC meeting, more often as observers than as delegates.
• If women’s issues did not feature prominently in early 20th-century nationalist discourse, it was largely because all other forms of emancipation were seen as conditional on national liberation first. The Congress avoided directly addressing the “women’s question” until 1917 — much as it avoided the question of untouchability — owing to its own uncertainty and oversensitivity about the fragility of an incipient nation.

The “Motherland” Metaphor in Nationalist Iconography

• As extremism gained strength in Bengal, nationalists there appropriated the already resonant cultural concept of “motherhood” as an empowering, authentically indigenous symbol of cultural distinctiveness.
  • The nationalist imagining of the country as “motherland” — as opposed to the European concept of “fatherland” — began when the Bengali intellectual Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote the song Bande Mataram in 1875, later incorporated into his novel Anandamath (1882), which portrayed three images of the mother-goddess: “mother as she was,” “mother as she is,” and “mother as she will be.” Together, these images fired the imagination of nationalist devotees and permanently inscribed the mother-goddess metaphor into Indian nationalist discourse.
  • The song was first publicly sung by Rabindranath Tagore at the Calcutta Congress session of 1896; a few years later, during the Swadeshi movement, Aurobindo Ghosh recognised the imagery’s potential to excite patriotism and national awakening, and from then on nearly every nationalist leader — from Bepin Chandra Pal to Jawaharlal Nehru — invoked the motherhood metaphor to signify the nation.
• From the 1920s, women’s involvement in the movement for independence deepened, as male leaders consciously cultivated relationships with peasants, workers, and women’s associations to build mass support.
  • Women’s participation legitimised the Indian National Congress and validated the ideals of Indian unity and Satyagraha, whose very techniques were designed to wrest moral authority from the Raj and return it to the unarmed, non-violent subject.
  • Even the British recognised women’s special appeal to the movement: one official wrote that “there is no doubt that but for them (women) the movement would never have gained the force it has had. It is due to them that the sympathy of many not otherwise likely to have been in sympathy has been evoked.”

Regional Variations in Women’s Participation

• Clear regional differences marked the extent to which women engaged with Congress leaders and synthesised their own interests with nationalist demands.
  • Bombay women were the best organised and most independent, fielding the largest demonstrations; most of their leaders belonged to women’s organisations and articulated a clearly feminist nationalism. Through the 1930s, Bombay women picketed and demonstrated extensively — drawing considerable media attention — sold salt in the streets, propagated swadeshi, and sold khadi door to door.
  • Bengal women drew great attention for their militancy, marching alongside men in Congress processions and later joining revolutionary parties, becoming subjects of folk songs and legend. Their peaceful demonstrations were fewer but still drew great attention in a society where purdah remained widely practised; though many espoused a feminist ideology, they repeatedly set it aside in favour of the broader struggle. Girl students in Bengal were actively recruited, and their activities tended to be the more revolutionary.
  • In Madras, local leaders were reluctant to make use of women’s talents, and fewer women joined the movement as a result.
  • In North India, the Nehru and Zutshi families produced several strong women leaders who placed the nationalist agenda first.
• Early nationalist leaders were not blind to the importance of feminist issues, but their immediate concern remained the mobilisation of women for political demonstration; they did not consider it possible to raise women’s consciousness on both politics and women’s rights simultaneously.
  • The Congress founded a Sub-Committee of the National Planning Committee in 1939, composed entirely of women, chaired by Rani Rajwade, to submit proposals on women’s position and role in a planned economy.
  • In 1940, the Congress established a Women’s Department, with Sucheta Kripalani (wife of Acharya Kripalani) chosen to organise it.

The Mother-Goddess Symbolism and Its Discursive Implications

• In its early nationalist reconstruction, the image of the nurturing Bengali mother was fused with the concept of shakti, or primal power, as variously represented in Hindu cosmology by goddesses such as Durga or Kali, who destroyed demons and protected the innocent.
  • This aggressive dimension was gradually softened, as the mother came instead to be imagined as the epitome of India’s spiritual essence. Abanindranath Tagore’s painting of Bharat Mata (c. 1904–05) came to symbolise this gentler image — serene, offering protection and prosperity, described as “an image that was both human and divine,” both familiar and transcendental.
• The historian Jasodhara Bagchi has argued that this ideology of motherhood, by “creating a myth about her strength and power,” actually took away women’s real power — confining them to a purely reproductive role and thereby denying them access to education, occupation, and, ultimately, real empowerment.

Women in the Swadeshi Movement

• Whatever participation women had in the Swadeshi Movement took place within the accepted gender ideology that regarded the home as the rightful arena of women’s activity — they boycotted British goods, adopted swadeshi, broke their glass bangles, and observed non-cooking days as rituals of protest.
  • A telling detail: the most powerful imagery used to mobilise women’s support in Bengal during this period was Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, imagined as having fled her abode because of the partition and needing to be brought back, protected, and cared for.
• There were, however, notable exceptions — Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, for instance, involved herself in a physical culture movement for Bengali youth, while a handful of women went further still and joined the revolutionary movement.

Women in the Revolutionary Movement

• Most women leaders found themselves unable to move beyond their own sense of respectability when recruiting others — the women who joined the revolutionary movement itself were a clear exception to this pattern.
  • They worked closely alongside men, adopted disguises, travelled alone or in the company of strangers, and learned to shoot, drive, and manufacture bombs, describing themselves as sacrificing everything a woman is expected to want — marriage, children, a home — for the country.
  • Even so, their involvement remained largely supportive or “indirect” in nature — sheltering fugitive revolutionaries or acting as couriers for messages and weapons — a form of participation that did not abruptly breach accepted norms of feminine behaviour, and was not seen by anyone, including the revolutionary women themselves, as representative of Indian womanhood more broadly.
• Notable figures and roles included:
  • Bina Das, who fired at Governor Jackson in Bengal.
  • Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta, associated with Surya Sen’s raids.
  • Dr. Lakshmi Swaminathan, Head of the Department of Women’s Affairs under the provisional INA Government, who also took charge of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, and Janaki Davar, another important figure in this movement.
  • Under Latika Ghosh’s leadership, girls pursuing higher studies as well as several employed women carried out daring underground programmes.
  • Urmila Devi, Jyotimayi Ganguly, Santhi Das, and Pratibha Devi led the Nari Satyagraha Samiti, a militant women’s group ready to court arrest, while Kalyani, Surma Mitra, and Kamala Das Gupta were prominent leaders of the associated girl students’ organisation.
• Countless women were brutally tortured by the police during this period; by 1933, almost all the revolutionary women involved were in jail.

Two Eminent Women of the Post-War Years: Besant and Naidu

• Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society, launched the Home Rule Movement in 1916, published two journals — Commonweal and New India — and became President of the INC in 1917.
• Sarojini Naidu, an England-educated poet who had been delivering patriotic speeches at Congress sessions since 1906, played a central role in establishing the Rashtriya Stri Sangh, a political organisation dedicated to Swaraj and women’s emancipation, of which she served as president through the 1920s.
  • In 1917, she led a delegation to London to meet Secretary of State Montagu and demand female franchise; the following year, she moved a resolution at the Congress session demanding equal voting eligibility for both men and women. In 1925, she too was elected President of the Congress.
• Yet despite their status as inspirational figures, neither Besant nor Naidu succeeded in evolving a coherent ideology for women’s emancipation, nor in carving out a lasting institutional niche for women within nationalist politics.

Gandhi and the Reconceptualisation of Indian Womanhood

• The arrival of Gandhi marked a major rupture in the story of women’s involvement in the nationalist movement, and it was under his leadership through the 1920s and 1930s that women were most fully integrated into it.
  • Gandhi shifted the ideal of Indian womanhood from motherhood to sisterhood, effectively negating women’s sexuality in his conception — a realisation he had first arrived at in South Africa, where he saw the political power of women’s selfless sacrifice and resolved to harness it in service of the nation.
• His appeal to women was couched in a language dense with religious metaphor, one that did not appear openly subversive of traditional ideas about femininity.
  • His chosen role models — Sita, Damayanti, and Draupadi — though drawn from Indian mythology, were reconstituted and loaded with new meaning: represented not as slaves to their husbands, but as women of great virtue capable of supreme sacrifice for family, society, and state.
  • He evoked the legends of the Ramayana, branding the British as Ravana, the abductor of Sita, and appealed that Ram Rajya would be founded once women like Sita joined the national struggle.
  • When addressing Muslim women, however, Gandhi scrupulously avoided such Ramayana-based allegory, instead simply asking them to sacrifice for their country and for Islam — branding British rule as the “Rule of Satan” and urging them to renounce foreign cloth to save their faith.
• Gandhi accepted what he termed the “natural division of labour” between the sexes, holding that women had a duty to look after the hearth and home; he urged them to spin and to encourage their husbands to join the national struggle, and argued that from within their ordained domestic spheres, women could still serve the nation — through spinning, through picketing foreign cloth and liquor shops, and by shaming men into action.
  • For Gandhi, men and women were equal but suited to different roles — a stance that, as the scholar Sujata Patel has forcefully argued, kept him firmly within the Indian middle-class tradition of conceptualising womanhood.
  • He accepted the notion of women’s biological weakness but converted it into a source of power by glorifying their strength of soul. He did not seek to invert the doctrine of “separate spheres” for private and public life, but instead redefined political participation by creating space for politics within the home — in effect, “an extraction and reformulation of received social ideas in moral terms.”

Women’s Participation across the Gandhian Movements

• It was in South Africa in 1913 that Gandhi first involved women in public demonstrations and recognised the considerable political potential of Indian womanhood. Back in India, he again invited women to join the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, though the movement was withdrawn before this could advance significantly.
  • Under his leadership, women’s role grew steadily more conspicuous across the Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India movements.

The Non-Cooperation Movement

• When the movement began in 1921, Gandhi initially prescribed a limited role for women — boycott and swadeshi — but women soon claimed a far more active part for themselves.
  • In November 1921, a demonstration of a thousand women greeted the Prince of Wales in Bombay; in December, Basanti Devi — wife of Bengal Congress leader C.R. Das — along with his sister Urmila Devi and niece Suniti Devi, stunned the nation by openly demonstrating on the streets of Calcutta and courting arrest.
  • Though concerned for their physical safety and social standing, Gandhi endorsed the move for its tremendous demonstrative effect. Similar movements followed elsewhere, drawing in women beyond respectable middle-class families and even, if only marginally, reaching toward prostitutes and devadasis — though Gandhi himself remained reluctant to actively involve this group.
  • Sarojini Naidu, Bi Amma (mother of Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali), Saraladevi Chaudhurani, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Muthulakshmi Reddy, and Swarup Rani were among those who played prominent roles during this movement, which also established dharna at liquor shops as a signature women’s programme from this point onward.

The Civil Disobedience Movement

• It was during Civil Disobedience that participation truly opened up. Gandhi again excluded women from the original core group of volunteers on the Dandi March, but along the way addressed meetings attended by thousands of women, and once the movement took off, thousands more joined the illegal manufacture of salt, the picketing of foreign cloth and liquor shops, and nationalist processions.
  • Women’s participation was most organised in Bombay, most militant in Bengal, and comparatively limited in Madras. In North Indian cities such as Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, and Lahore, hundreds of women from respectable families openly participated in nationalist demonstrations, to the shock of their conservative menfolk.
  • Sarojini Naidu organised the famous Dharasana Satyagraha in Gujarat; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Krishnabai Rau also played significant roles, while Usha Mehta joined the Vanar Sena (Monkey Army).
  • Some women in Bengal, meanwhile, moved into outright revolutionary violence — unlike the largely supportive roles of the Swadeshi period, they were now firing pistols directly at magistrates and governors.

Rani Gaidinliu

• A follower of Gandhi, Rani Gaidinliu launched a movement against British rule at just sixteen years old in the Manipur and Naga belt, and was arrested in 1932 at that same age, receiving a sentence of life imprisonment.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru met her at Shillong Jail in 1937, promised to pursue her release, and gave her the title of “Rani.” She was finally released in 1947, following India’s independence.

Individual Satyagraha

• Aruna Asaf Ali courted arrest by offering Individual Satyagraha in 1941.
• Sucheta Kripalani took part in Individual Satyagraha in 1940, for which she was imprisoned for two years; she went on to become a member of the Constituent Assembly, and in 1947 joined Gandhi in efforts to pacify communal violence in Bengal.

The Quit India Movement

• During Quit India, women’s involvement shifted largely underground.
  • Sucheta Kripalani coordinated non-violent resistance, while Aruna Asaf Ali led underground revolutionary activity, politely declining Gandhi’s own advice to surrender.
  • Usha Mehta ran the underground Congress Radio, known as “Voice of India,” until November 1942.
  • Matangini Hazra, a 73-year-old widow, displayed remarkable courage at Tamluk; Bhogeswari Phukanani, a martyr of the movement, hailed from Assam’s Nagaon district; and Kanaklata Barua, also from Assam, was shot while hoisting the national flag.
  • Most significant of all, however, was the participation of large numbers of rural women acting on their own initiative to further the movement — an engagement further widened by the lifting of the ban on the Communist Party in 1942.
    • Many middle-class educated women had already been active in the communist movement through the 1920s and 1930s, mobilising the working classes, organising industrial action, and campaigning for the release of political prisoners.
    • By 1941, the girls’ wing of the All-India Students Federation counted roughly 50,000 members.
    • In Kerala, leaders such as A.V. Kuttimalu Amma, Akkamma Cheriyan, Mettilda Kallan, Kamalam, Annie Mascreen, Karthyayani Amma, and Kochukutty Amma spearheaded the struggle across the Travancore, Kochi, and Malabar regions.

Analysing Women’s Role in the National Movement

• The trend set in the 1930s continued into the 1940s, as women’s active role in public space gradually became socially accepted. Several factors help explain why women responded so readily to Gandhi’s appeal:
  • His framing of women’s service to the nation as a religious duty, combined with his insistence on non-violence and on preserving a respectable image for women satyagrahis, meant that women’s participation never seriously breached accepted norms of feminine behaviour — reassuring male guardians that “their” women would remain safe in Gandhi’s hands.
  • There was, in the final analysis, less resistance to women’s participation precisely because women largely participated because their male guardians wanted them to. In most cases, women who joined the struggle came from families where the men were already involved in Gandhian politics, meaning their public role was essentially an extension of their existing domestic roles as wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters — and their politicisation, correspondingly, brought little real change to domestic or family relations.
  • Participation remained predominantly a phenomenon of Hindu, middle-class, urban India; though rural women did take part in some areas, the movement’s emphasis on respectability continued to exclude lower-class and marginal women such as prostitutes.
• Many Muslim women participated in the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921; while this helped ease the strictness of purdah, its complete abolition remained out of the question, since purdah continued to function as a marker of Muslim cultural distinctiveness. Where a small number of women crossed the socially sanctioned boundaries of feminine modesty by joining violent revolutionary action, they were subjected to heavy social censure.
• The historian Tanika Sarkar has argued that these “strong traditionalist moorings” explain both why this degree of politicisation was possible in the first place, and why it ultimately failed to produce any significant social emancipation for women in India.
  • The Congress and its leaders, in her assessment, showed little genuine interest in women’s issues, allowing only symbolic representation while never truly including women in decision-making. A frustrated Sarala Devi Chaudhurani lamented that the Congress wanted women to be “law-breakers only and not law-makers.”
  • Even so, it must be acknowledged that hundreds of women from respectable families marching through India’s streets, courting arrest, enduring the indignities of jail, and returning to their families without social stigma, signified a genuinely remarkable shift in Indian social attitudes. As Sujata Patel has succinctly put it, “it is difficult to separate analytically which proceeded first: women’s participation or Gandhi’s advocacy of this.”
• Some women, without being openly defiant, quietly pushed the boundaries of their own autonomy by reworking available cultural metaphors — the idea of the “extended family,” for instance.
  • Bi Amman, the elderly mother of Shaukat and Muhammad Ali, took part in the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement after a lifetime spent behind purdah; at a mass meeting in Punjab, she lifted her veil and addressed the crowd as her own children.
    • A mother required no veil before her children — and by implication, the entire nation was thereby folded into her “extended fictive family.” Her rhetoric did not challenge the ideology of purdah directly, but her practice effectively extended its boundaries.
  • It is, in any case, highly unlikely that the thousands of women who took part in the Civil Disobedience Movement had all secured prior permission from their guardians — and even where they had, historical evidence repeatedly shows that “once mobilised, women moved on their own,” time and again disregarding the very limits Gandhi had set for their activism.
• Women’s participation nonetheless had clear limitations.
  • Those demonstrating claimed to speak for all Indian women, yet the groups actually involved — beyond upper- and middle-class Hindu women — were never large in number; a few Muslim women remained steadfast followers of Gandhi, but many more either found his overtly Hindu idiom difficult to accept, or were simply neglected by Congress organisers.
  • City demonstrations, moreover, did little to generate a genuinely feminist consciousness: women marched and picketed in sex-segregated groups, typically dressed in distinctive orange or white saris to signal their purity and sacrifice, taking their directives from Congress Committees. Rural women, unless widowed, generally protested alongside their families — male guardianship persisted throughout, even though Indian nationalism was not itself characterised by an overtly patriarchal ideology.

Did This Politicisation Promote a Feminist Consciousness?

• For the wider society, the honest answer must be no. But for the women who actually took part in the nationalist struggle, and for the more enlightened middle-class women who led them, life could perhaps never quite be the same again.
  • The burgeoning women’s literature of this period reveals an increasingly blurred private/public distinction in women’s own consciousness, along with growing resentment of gender asymmetry in Indian society. Yet despite such contestations and “transgressions of ‘desirable’ codes,” middle-class and high-caste women broadly continued to consent to the hegemonic aspirations of nationalist patriarchy.
  • Among Muslim women too, a new “feminist” Urdu literature emerged in the early 20th century, contesting traditional gender boundaries and ideologies — though it, too, avoided advocating any “dramatic change,” privileging instead the image of the Muslim community above all else.

Women’s Organisations: An “Extended Female Space”

• From the outset, women’s participation in politics unfolded largely through a variety of women-only organisations, which together constituted an “extended female space” positioned somewhere between the segregated family household and the wider public arena.
  • These ranged from local social organisations and girls’ educational institutions to explicitly political bodies such as Sarojini Naidu’s Rashtriya Stree Sangha, which functioned as an auxiliary body of the Congress. In the early 20th century, a further set of organisations emerged that operated more directly in the public arena, focused explicitly on women’s political and legal rights.
  • Latika Ghosh founded the Mahila Rashtriya Sangh in 1928, with the support of Subhas Chandra Bose — a body notably radical in both approach and programme.

Landmark Women’s Organisations and Institutions

• Bharat Mahila Parishad (1904) — the women’s wing of the Indian National Social Conference, founded by M.G. Ranade, which organised Women’s Conferences in 1909 and again in 1910 at Allahabad (secretary: Saraladevi Chaudhurani).
• Bharat Stri Mahamandal (1909) — founded by Saraladevi Chaudhurani at Allahabad.
• All India Muslim Ladies’ Conference (1914).
• Lady Hardinge Medical College (1916).
• Three further major associations emerged between 1917 and 1927: the Women’s Indian Association, the National Council of Women in India, and the All India Women’s Conference.

Women’s Indian Association (1917)

• India’s first all-India women’s organisation, founded at Madras in 1917 by a group of enlightened European and Indian women, most notably the Irish feminist Margaret Cousins and Annie Besant.
  • In Tamil Nadu, its growth was driven by Margaret Cousins, Annie Besant, Malathi Patwardhan, Ammu Swaminathan, and Ambujammal.
  • The Association published the journal Stri Dharma to voice its ideals, addressing both the political and social issues facing Indian women and the achievements of women worldwide, with a focus on religion, politics, education, and philanthropy.
  • A national chapter of the International Women’s Council also operated in India, administered by Mehribai Tata, the Dowager Begum Saheb of Bhopal, the Maharani of Baroda, Princess Sethu Parvathi Bai of Travancore, and Maniben Kara.

National Council of Women in India (1925)

• Formed as a branch of the International Council of Women, with Lady Mehribai Tata its guiding spirit during its early years.

All India Women’s Conference (Poona, 1926–27)

• Founded in 1927 as the most significant of these organisations, initially conceived as a non-political body promoting women’s education under the inspiration of Margaret Cousins.
  • It gradually moved into nationalist politics, lobbying for a wide range of women’s rights — from franchise to marriage reform (the Sarda Act), the rights of women labourers, rural reconstruction, indigenous industries, and the campaign against opium abuse.
  • A permanent office with dedicated staff was established in 1941, and the organisation published its own journal, Roshni; it remained the most important women’s organisation of the pre-1947 era.

Provincial Women’s Organisations

• Saraladevi Chaudhurani’s Bharat Stri Mahamandal, whose first meeting was held at Allahabad in 1910, went on to open branches across India promoting women’s education.
• In Bengal during the 1920s, several organisations emerged around specific causes: the Bangiya Nari Samaj campaigned for women’s voting rights, the Bengal Women’s Education League demanded compulsory elementary and secondary education for women, and the All-Bengal Women’s Union campaigned for legislation against the illicit trafficking of women.
• Rather than mobilising mass agitation, these organisations characteristically petitioned the government directly and appealed to nationalist leaders for support.

Government and Nationalist Responses to the Franchise Question

• The Government intervened only reluctantly, if at all, generally preferring compromise formulae, on the belief that most Indian women were not yet ready to exercise their rights properly.
  • The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, for instance, left the question of women’s franchise undecided, to be determined later by the provincial legislatures.
• Nationalist leaders, by contrast, grew more sympathetic to the women’s question from 1920 onward, recognising their need for women’s participation in the nation-building project — a “process of universalisation” that women themselves largely accepted by placing nationalism ahead of their own specific concerns.
  • As a result, all provincial legislatures between 1921 and 1930 extended voting rights to women, subject to the usual property and educational qualifications.
  • The Government of India Act, 1935, increased the female voter ratio to 1:5 and introduced reserved seats for women in the legislatures. The Congress and women’s organisations had preferred universal adult franchise over reservation, but accepted the arrangement once offered — enabling a number of women to launch legislative careers following the 1937 elections.

Legislative Reforms Affecting Women

• Unlike the controversial Age of Consent Bill of 1891, the Child Marriage Restraint Act, or Sarda Act (1929) — which fixed the minimum age of marriage at fourteen for females and eighteen for males — passed with overwhelming nationalist support.
  • Through the 1930s, the central and provincial legislatures also passed a range of bills addressing women’s rights to property, inheritance, and divorce, along with measures restraining dowry and controlling prostitution.
• Whether these legislative gains genuinely improved gender relations and women’s quality of life, however, remains open to question. The Sarda Act serves as a useful test case: both the Government and the nationalists soon found it impossible to enforce, and it was, for all practical purposes, a dead letter before long.
• The developments of the early 20th century — a new consciousness, new organisations, and the wider politicisation of women — nonetheless brought real change for some.
  • Enlightened, middle-class, urban women effectively carved out a niche for themselves in the public sphere; by the end of the colonial period, many had entered professions such as medicine and law, earning good salaries and social respect, even as they continued to juggle these new public roles with the enduring demands of housework and childcare, largely without audible protest.
  • For the rest of Indian womanhood, the changes were considerably less dramatic — a limitation rooted in the fact that women’s organisations and activists remained constrained by what can be called a “social feminist ideology,” which recognised a public role for women while still accepting fundamental social, biological, and psychological differences between the sexes.

The Radical Turn of the 1940s

• This limiting ideology, and the dominance of the organisations that upheld it, came under serious challenge in the 1940s, as women across class and religious lines began to claim a more active role in public life, fighting as comrades-in-arms alongside men in the final phase of the freedom struggle.

The Quit India Movement and Women’s Coordinating Role

• With nearly all front-ranking male Congress leaders imprisoned almost immediately after the movement’s launch in 1942, several prominent women leaders took on the responsibility of coordinating the struggle in the face of unprecedented police repression.
  • In 1942, leftist women leaders in Bengal organised the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti, or Women’s Self-Defence League, which mobilised rural women and organised relief work during the Bengal famine of 1943.

The Tebhaga Movement (1946)

• Women’s involvement in communist-led mobilisation reached a new level with the Tebhaga movement, launched in Bengal in 1946 by communist-led kisan sabhas demanding a two-thirds share of the produce for sharecroppers.
  • The movement saw widespread, self-directed action by “proletariat and semi-proletariat” women from dalit and tribal communities, who formed their own Nari Bahinis (women’s brigades) and resisted the colonial police with whatever weapons they could find — with a number becoming martyrs in the uneven struggle that followed.

The Telangana Movement (1946–51)

• In Andhra, where the Telangana movement ran from 1946 to 1951 against the Nizam of Hyderabad and feudal oppression, women fought alongside men for better wages, fair rents, and greater dignity, with the Communist Party making special efforts to mobilise them through gender-specific issues — recognising that the movement could not have sustained itself so long without their support.
  • In most cases, however, women joined on their own initiative, serving as couriers and arranging shelter, with only a few taking up arms as members of the revolutionary dalams. Even as it opened a genuinely new space for militant peasant women, the movement never treated them as equals — the Party leadership, much like its counterparts in Bengal, preferred to confine women to supportive and secondary roles, remained unable to imagine women outside conventional structures of family and marriage, and was reluctant to trust them with weapons on the battlefield. More troublingly still, women were often viewed as the source of problems when it came to maintaining sexual morality and discipline within the rebel ranks.

The Indian National Army and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment

• An earlier experiment by Subhas Chandra Bose to raise a women’s volunteer corps under “Colonel” Latika Ghosh — which had marched through Calcutta in full uniform back in 1928 — anticipated a far larger effort when, in 1943, Bose formed the Indian National Army (INA) in Southeast Asia and added to it a women’s regiment, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment.
  • The training camp opened in October 1943, drawing around fifteen hundred women from elite and working-class Indian families of all religions and castes across Southeast Asia, who received full military training in preparation for combat duties.
  • When initially assigned only non-combat roles, the “Ranis” protested to their leadership and were subsequently deployed in actual operations during the Imphal campaign of 1945 — a campaign that ultimately failed, forcing the INA’s retreat before the advancing British Army and bringing the entire experiment to an end.
  • Ideologically, this was perhaps not a wholly radical departure, since Bose himself continued to invoke the “spiritual power” of India’s “mothers and sisters.” Even so, it represented a significant enlargement of women’s role in nationalist politics — a shift from the passive mythic model of Sita to the active, historic model of the Rani of Jhansi, fighting as a comrade-in-arms alongside male soldiers.

Muslim Women and the Pakistan Movement

• The rise of the Pakistan movement in the 1940s opened a new space for political action for Muslim women, who had, through the 1930s, participated in a united front alongside their Hindu counterparts in campaigns for women’s rights, including suffrage.
  • This unity fractured in 1935 over the question of communal reservation of women’s seats — Muslim leaders within the All India Women’s Conference, such as Begum Shah Nawaz, refused to “accept joint electorates when their men were not prepared to do so,” illustrating how broader political alignments continued to shape women’s movements as well.
  • The Muslim League itself sought to universalise its politics, establishing a women’s sub-committee in 1938 to draw in Muslim women. As the Pakistan movement gathered momentum, growing numbers of women were drawn into it — as election candidates, as voters, and as active street demonstrators, particularly in Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province.
  • For many ordinary women, this political participation was itself a genuinely “liberating experience,” even if the moment of emancipation proved too short-lived to bring about lasting change in their daily lives. It nonetheless signified a real, if limited, acceptance of a public role for women within Muslim society.

Concluding Assessment: The Limits of Nationalist Feminism

• Across class, caste, and religious lines, Indian women in the 1940s increasingly claimed agency in anti-imperialist and democratic movements — yet they rarely used these occasions to press issues that concerned them specifically as women. Their own goals remained subordinated to those of national liberation, community honour, or class struggle.
  • The very concept of feminism generated considerable confusion at the time, viewed either as a subversive Western import at odds with the cultural essence of Indian nationhood, or as an undesirable digression from the far more urgent cause of freedom itself. Even a leading nationalist like Jawaharlal Nehru believed that the “women’s question” would resolve itself automatically once political freedom was achieved.
• Patriarchal assumptions posed a persistent dilemma for the communist leadership as well: in the Tebhaga movement, independent women’s leadership could emerge only when the Communist Party leadership itself “abstained,” and trade unions, while mobilising working-class women, generally subsumed their specific concerns within general working-class interests.
  • Wherever gender boundaries blurred amid militant action, they tended to be re-established quickly afterward. In Telangana, though women had stepped out of their homes on the promise of equality, they soon found the metaphor of “family” continually reasserted by communist leaders determined to keep them within its traditional boundary.
• On the Muslim side, the Pakistan movement did draw some women into public action — but the experience of Partition reinforced, rather than dislodged, the traditional ashraf ideal of Muslim womanhood as something to be protected within the domestic sphere; any transgression of this boundary risked being read as immorality and dishonour for the wider community.
  • Indeed, the violence of Partition proved the darkest moment for subcontinental womanhood on both sides, as women became the objects of a distinctly male construction of community honour — their sexuality treated as territory to be either conquered or destroyed, so as to deny the “enemy” community the glory of conquest.
  • Caught in what can only be called a “continuum of violence,” women faced the terrible choice between rape, mutilation, and humiliation at the hands of men from the “other” community, or suicide urged upon them by their own families and kin to preserve the honour of their own.
• The women’s issue in colonial India, in the final analysis, never received the priority it truly deserved. Though a growing number of women became politically conscious and actively engaged in the struggle, feminism itself had not yet been fully incorporated into the prevailing ideologies of liberation — the honour and interests of community and nation still, almost invariably, took precedence over the rights of women. That said, this did not mean that no woman ever dreamed of a freedom that ran contrary to the dominant patriarchal conventions upheld by their nationalist leaders, community elders, or party bosses.