A. Devenish: Debating Women's Citizenship in India

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Titel
Debating Women's Citizenship in India, 1930–1960.


Autor(en)
Devenish, Annie
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269 S.
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£ 76.50
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Shobna Nijhawan, York University, Toronto

In Debating Women's Citizenship in India: 1930–1960, the historian Annie Devenish explores how a generation of Indian women's rights activists stepped on to the political stage and shaped debates on Indian citizenship. The nation-building project of these elite political actors was situated at the intersections of nationalism and (social) feminism and enacted as well as claimed women's citizenship by demanding that the concept be rooted in "a clearer definition of, and commitment to, equality" (p. 227). Devenish focusses on some of the central female politicians and leaders of women's regional and national organizations, most notably Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Amrit Kaur, Hansa Mehta, Rameshwari Nehru, Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Muthulakshmi Reddi. Their involvement in the making of critical political documents such as the Karachi Resolution (1931), the Report on Women's Role in Planned Economy (1939) and the All India Women's Conference's Indian Woman's Charter of Rights and Duties (1945), Devenish argues, "set the parameters for the drafting of India's democratic constitution" (p. 41).

Conceptualizing women's citizenship from 1930 to 1960 allows Annie Devenish to explore the emergence of elite women as political actors in British India as well as independent India as a continuum uninterrupted from the colonial-postcolonial divide marked by the year 1947. In the respective chapters, Devenish considers gendered approaches to state policies and public demands to citizenship in a variety of socio-political contexts including debates on reproductive rights, family planning, social work, the notorious Liaquat-Nehru Pact (1950) that foresaw the so-called recovery of abducted women during the Partition of British India and women's involvement in the United Nations.

What falls through the grid of Devenish's work (except for statements on pp. 30, 48) are the extraordinary (inter-)regional and international networks built by Indian women writers and feminist-nationalist activists, which laid the groundwork for the politicization and mobilization of middle-class women in vernacular public spheres such as the Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Tamil ones. Not every work on Indian feminist and nationalist activism needs to consult South Asian vernacular sources; it would have, however, benefited the research had Devenish included some of the influential English-language publications on women's socio-political organizing and activism in vernacular public spheres over the entire twentieth century.1 Such studies have been published by an increasing number of scholars of interdisciplinary South Asian studies in the past two decades and could have made for a stronger argument even more so, since many of the women whose writings and speeches are consulted in the monograph at hand were prolific writers, editors (of women's journals) and public speakers who frequently addressed gendered audiences in vernacular languages. This notwithstanding, it needs to be acknowledged that Devenish set out to explore the relationship of gender justice, citizenship and equality focusing on the specific primary sources she selected, which are official colonial documents and reports as well as (auto-)biographical narratives produced and delivered by actors who stood close to two prominent women's organizations of the time, i.e. the All India Women's Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women. There is no doubt that these documents undergo close reading and thorough analysis by Devenish.

Devenish's monograph may be understood as part of the research of a generation of scholars who have proposed new ways of theorizing South Asian studies as well as understanding nationalist-feminist and transnational feminist movements and historiography in general. It is not clear, which of these publications Devenish was able to consult for her work as a bibliography is missing from the book. Her introduction draws from the by now canonical writings by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Partha Chatterjee, Radha Kumar and Geraldine Forbes, amongst others.2 Other sources such as work on international and transnational women's organizing from Asian centers remain absent despite a chapter titled "The Indian Woman as a Global Citizen". Research into regional and South-South networks created by female socio-political actors, writers and editors could have strengthened the argument with regards to Devenish's investigation of Gandhian nationalism, which, as she recognizes, had a fairly clear role defined for women. As vernacular sources written by women reveal, Indian women contested such roles in the early decades of the twentieth century. The argument that Gandhian nationalism "facilitated the entry of women into nationalist politics" (p. 48), while true, could have been expanded by showing that women themselves played a major role in laying the networks that Gandhi and the Indian National Congress drew on in the nationalist movement.

The seven chapters are organized around women's role in the writing of the Indian constitution and stay close to the argument of women's claim to citizenship through social feminism and an inherent belief and commitment to equality. As a small number of female politicians such as Hansa Mehta and Vijayalakshmi Pandit gained access to the international political stage, they began "to rethink the boundaries and connections between citizenship rights and nationality through the notion of human rights" (p. 248). At this intersection, the proceedings of the All-Asian Women's Conference (1931) would have served as an excellent example of women's South-South organizing for representation at the United Nations, among other things. They could have broadened the understanding and contextualization of the women's movement as "efforts to rework the social contract" (p. 44). Devenish rightly observes and concludes that the political agendas of these women were marked by their elitist outlook and that their individual political success stories did not translate on to the status and recognition of Indian women in general.

Annie Devenish's narrative of women's articulation of citizenship during the movement for Indian independence and in post-Independence India makes a compelling case for shifting the focus from a State-centric historiography of nation-building on to "civil society as the agent of change and social justice, and presenting an alternate picture of Nehruvian India more open to both civil society and the influence of international developments" (pp. 251–252). The book is an invaluable contribution to the history of modern India and offers a fresh disciplinary perspective on to feminist-nationalist thinking, organizing and the articulation of political demands by a small, but politically influential group of socio-economically and educationally privileged Indian women between 1930 and 1960.

Notes:
1 K. Mohan, Fashioning Minds and Images. A Case Study of Stree Darpan (1909–1928), in: Aparna Basu / Anup Taneja (eds.), Breaking Out of Invisibility. Women in Indian History, New Delhi 2002, pp. 232–271; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere. 1920–1940. Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, Delhi 2002; Charu Gupta, The Gender of Caste. Representing Dalits in Print, Seattle 2016; Shobna Nijhawan, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere. Periodical Literature in Colonial North India, New Delhi 2012.
2 Kumkum Sangari / Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women. Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi 1989; Geraldine Forbes, Women in modern India, Cambridge 1996; Radha Kumar, The History of Doing. The illustrated account of movements for women’s rights and feminism in India, 1800–1990, New Delhi 1993.

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