In the period from the birth of the unified Indian women’s rights movement in the 1920s to the Hindu Code Bills in the 1950s, the struggle for equality and gains in human rights was fought primarily by women themselves (through credit has often gone to the men who eventually passed the legislation.)392 In many ways it was the manner in which women participated in the Independence movement, and the manner in which this participation was framed by male leaders of the push for Independence, that led to the diminishment (or at the least, stagnation) of female rights and participation in politics in the post-colonial period.393 Ironically, Usha Chandran blames this partially on the Gandhian legacy, where women were typecast as self-sacrificial and expected to be eager to forgo power or benefit on their part for an abstract notion of the common good.394 Another burden women faced in the postcolonial era was that, despite legal advances and the hard work of the Indian feminist movement, they were still considered to be “cultural emblems of the nation”.395 This was also reflected in the
media landscape in the post-Independence period, which focussed on the establishment and veneration of myths around ‘Indianness’ – something which was epitomised in the 1957 film
Mother India.396 This carries on from the leitmotif during the independence movement of
392 Lateef, “Whither the Indian Women’s Movement?,” 1948. 393 Sreenivas, “Women’s and Gender History in Modern India,” 164.
394 Usha Chandran, “A Woman’s World,” India International Centre Quarterly 36, no. 3/4 (2009): 289. 395 Chaudhuri, “Gender in the Making of the Indian Nation-State,” 118.
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Bharat-Mata, where India was framed as sacred and pure, a feminine figure to be protected
from the violation of Western colonialism and imperial influence.397
The immediate post-independence era was characterised by the need to devise a sturdy Constitution.398 Part of this Constitution did involve a fulfilment of the promise to women’s rights activists of legal gender equality. The Indian Constitution as adopted in 1949 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.399 Article
16 of the same text prohibits discrimination on the same grounds in regards to employment or appointment to office,400 and Article 39 stipulates that the State will direct policy towards
guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender.401
The establishment of this Constitution, therefore, gave women official legal rights. However, issues relating to marriage, guardianship, and inheritance traditions remained significant enough to warrant the implementation of the Hindu Code Bill. These laws were aimed to reform archaic and patriarchal practices “…in relation to marriage and divorce (1955), adoption and maintenance (1956), minority and guardianship (1956) and succession and inheritance (1956), among others…”402 This undermined the political equality that women had fought for through the early part of the twentieth century – yet the undeniable official legal equality granted by the Constitution resulted in increased difficulties in approaching what was a complex sociocultural and economic issue.
These laws were not as protective as they seemed to be. The Hindu Marriage Act
1955, for instance, set minimum ages of marriage at eighteen for girls, and twenty-one for
boys. This reflected the belief that female sexuality developed earlier, and thus needed to be
397 Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 43.
398 A.B. Mathur, “State Politics in India: The Shape of Things to Come,” The Indian Journal of Political
Science 48, no. 4 (1987): 644.
399 Constitution of India 1949 Art 14(1). 400 Constitution of India 1949 Art 16(2). 401 Constitution of India 1949 Art 39(b).
106 restrained by marriage from an earlier date. The Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act 1956, despite modifying aspects of the earlier Act, maintained that the father would remain the natural guardian of their children, save in cases of neglect or child abuse.403 More
significantly, these laws were not applicable to non-Hindus, due to the INC’s fear that this might impinge upon the rights of minorities. In doing so this contributed not only to
continued inequality for non-Muslim women, but also carried a very particular implication: that the Indian government could legislate for Hindus as citizens of India, but defined non- Hindus as “other”, or as outside the jurisdiction and definition of a “true” Indian citizen. Moreover, as previously mentioned the fading of agitational and nationalist-fuelled politics and activism meant that the remainder of pre-Independence feminist goals were left
unfulfilled, and though female leaders attempted to push for further reform, apathy and increased resistance – particularly with the rise of Hindu conservatism – a number of legal changes were left unimplemented.404
Legislation aside, whether the theoretical aims of the Hindu Code Bill would manifest in consistent action, was an entirely different question. Former INC president Madan Mohan Malaviya, during preliminary parliamentary debates over the Bills, stated that “…In the brahman society, the woman has been given the highest place. There is nothing higher than the mother.”405 Malaviya’s statement echoed the traditional understanding of gender roles
within a patriarchal society that had, intentionally or not, become wound into the narratives around which the postcolonial nation had formed itself. Within this structure, the women’s movement had been heard to the extent that they managed to influence some legislative reform. However, in the greater scheme of the new nation, their words rang hollow. They had talked, but in speaking they had not been heard.
403 Sinha, “Images of Motherhood,” 53.
404 Sreenivas, “Women’s and Gender History in Modern India,” 164. 405 Sinha, “Images of Motherhood,” 49.
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