The changes wrought by social reform in India – and resisted staunchly by the orthodox – emanated not only from women’s sufferings and the desires which a few women began to articulate passionately from the late 19th century. They arose also out of a few men’s weariness with their own past traditions of masculinity, conjugality, and domesticity, and their hopes for a very different life.
Being reformers rather than revolutionaries, these men and women did not attack all aspects of patriarchal gender, root and branch. They sought instead to initiate sectoral changes in specific areas: companionate marriage with educated wives being one, alongside love marriage, and security for the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable widows. Feminists have tended to criticise the modest scale of these aspirations. Some regard the limited changes as a ploy for new forms of male self-gratification rather than any genuine search for equality, and the reforms as a pale imitation of the Victorian model of domesticity.
Two arguments need to be clearly outlined in order to counter this blanket dismissal. First, in the context of their times, it is necessary to appreciate the overwhelming strength of the opposition that reformers faced. Even their limited ideas for social change were seen as outrageous and wholly unacceptable by society, family, and friends. Those who embraced even these small changes were disinherited, outcasted, isolated, and painfully confined within a tiny coterie of like-minded friends. Any evaluation of their projects therefore needs to be relative and context-specific, sensitive to the enormous social and religious power of the orthodoxy. We require a larger awareness of the ideological context these handfuls of reformers were embedded in and out of which they sought an exit – an exit which had to be incomplete and tentative given the sheer size and strength of the overarching ideological ecosystem.
Second, in a different reading, the reformist efforts may be called remarkably ambitious: reformers dreamt of fashioning not only a generation of “New Women” but also “New Men” – even if restricted as yet to their own class and caste. But, once begun, the process rolled on beyond their dreams and constituted the contradictory but real beginnings of future Indian feminism. Unless we acknowledge the historical importance of the seemingly small fractures and dents, we cannot account for feminism’s emergence. So, while I have bent over backwards to show up the many limitations and failures of these early reform efforts, I have also tried to balance matters by arguing for their potential.
Regarding tribal cultures in India: Early colonial ethnographers had assumed that tribes by definition existed in a timeless and self-contained world. Slowly, however, they began to register the processes of social transformation among these communities. Their drift towards Christianity as well as towards Hinduisation or “sanskritisation” – the emulation of “pure” caste habits – meant significant changes in their gender relations as they introduced early marriage for their daughters and prohibited widow remarriage. The Bhil women of Central India, for example, lost their freedom to choose their husbands. Their relative freedom in premarital sexual relations was also curtailed. From the mid and late nineteenth century conversions to Christianity acted as catalysts for sweeping changes in the north-eastern regions.
In some ways, conversions equalised the modes of church worship for women since some Protestant denominations appointed women as deacons, preachers, and trustees. They also became prominent in community work. Mission schools taught their students through the vernacular, which eased their reading and writing habits, and missionaries developed a vernacular script for the Nagas. In what is now the state of Mizoram, government-run schools had used Bengali – a foreign language for the Mizos – as the medium of instruction. Large numbers of students, including girls, therefore preferred the vernacular-medium mission schools. From the early 20th century, missionaries began to send Mizo girls for their higher or vocational education to Shillong or Calcutta, and many of these young women trained for nursing courses.
But conversion also spelt major breaks with earlier cultural worlds, along with the loss of some former freedoms, rituals, and festivals. Missionaries frowned on divorce, for instance, and on premarital intimacy. They also dictated that male and female bodies be firmly gendered by sex-differentiated dress codes. Both sexes were advised to cover themselves fully and stop wearing their hair long. In an interesting contrast, while men took to European dress, women became the chosen bearers of a sanitised ethnic costume which supposedly preserved some elements of the traditional Mizo colours and patterns (puncheri). Photographic evidence from the 1890s reveals that Mizo girls took to wearing the sari if they were educated outside Mizoram.
Between 1876 and 1955 about 60 American Baptist missionaries, including a few women, and hundreds of local evangelists set up churches in what is now the state of Nagaland. They harvested large-scale conversions. These missionaries entertained a certain degree of approval for the “manliness” of warlike Naga men, combined, though, with stern stigmatisation of Naga head-hunting practices, scanty clothing, supposedly lax sexual norms, and lack of formal modern education. Extensive mission-led social engineering included the setting up of Sunday schools, as also mission schools that focused primarily on Bible teaching and preaching. There was a great emphasis on personal hygiene, sanitation, modest clothing, and deportment to supplant the earlier warlike masculinity and a relatively mobile and confident Naga femininity.
The British had granted sanads (charters; warrants) to the conquered hill states in the western Himalayan region in 1815-16. These included social provisos such as those prohibiting widow immolation and female infanticide, which had been common among the local Rajput and Hinduised royal lineages. But the British did little to enforce these provisos. Nor did the Baptist Mission at Simla try particularly hard to change traditional marriage practices among the agricultural Khash-Kanet communities.
From the early 20th century these customs began to invite strong censure from high-caste Hindus who alleged that plainsmen were enticing hill women in order to sell them into prostitution; also that parents encouraged their daughters to repeatedly dissolve their marriage tie to procure themselves a bride price several times over. In 1924 an association of these high-caste Hindus, the Himalaya Vidiya Parbandhani Sabha, petitioned British officials to block such practices. It also appealed to the wives of these officials to persuade their husbands against what they believed was a social malpractice. Protracted triangular discussions followed between the British, the rulers of the native states, and Hindu politicians. Some rulers legally modified aspects of the marriage form, and in some cases, group marriages survived by adopting a Hindu ceremony. The British, however, felt that the Hindu alternative of an indissoluble child marriage was harsher for hill women than the reet system. Eventually, a compromise divorce law allowed the dissolution of marriages, but under stringent conditions.
As the 20th century progressed, customary norms became progressively redundant with tribal land and forests falling under enclosures, dams, industries, and mining – processes hugely exacerbated in the post-colonial era. Massive evictions and dispossession, and radical changes in their environment, livelihood, and community ties forced tribal populations to migrate as cheap labour for factories, mines, and tea gardens. Sometimes they joined the mobile population of construction workers in cities. Their new lives as an urban precariat have not afforded them much access to better employment opportunities. Though cities have provided for girls’ education from the early 20th century, displaced tribal women are seldom able to access such education.
Excerpted with permission from Religion And Women in India: Gender, Faith, and Politics 1780s-1980s, Tanika Sarkar, Permanent Black.
