The Women’s Question
The Self-respect movement’s manner of resolving the women’s question in early twentieth century India was both unique and radical. Taking its cues from a variety of influences, including particular campaigns to do with birth control, law reform and reform of marriage practices, the movement advanced a critique of existing gender arrangements that threatened to turn them on their head. The history of the movement’s engagement with gender concerns is yet to be fully mapped. The pages of Revolt are important in this respect, for they chronicle the making of this radicalism, even as it was being articulated.
The years 1928-29 were particularly significant for the politics of gender and feminism that eventually came to prevail in the movement for the next decade and more. For, these years witnessed the constellation of several events. Dr Muthulakshmi tabled the Devadasi Abolition Bill in the Madras Legislative Council in November 1927, and as it was discussed and circulated, gave rise to a vigorous debate on sexual morality, male promiscuity, and conjugal norms in caste society. 1927 also saw the publication of that hugely contentious book, Mother India by Katherine Mayo, which, among other things, hastened the pace of reform in the nationalist camp. (Mayo identified unhealthy sexual and conjugal practices, including child marriage, unhygienic birthing practices and imposed purdah and confinement of women to the zenana as the chief causes of India’s moral and political enervation.) Eager to disprove the charges Mayo’s vituperative pen had laid at their door, nationalist ideologues and leaders sought to re-think their position on at least some of the social customs and practices that had attracted Mayo’s rather prurient imagination.
During this time, in fact, from 1925 onwards, marriage reform was widely discussed. In 1924, H. C. Gour had drafted a bill to amend Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which sought to raise the age of consent in marital and extra-marital relationships. Colonial government was reluctant to act on the bill, but a year later, it proposed its own bill, fixing 14 as the age of consent in extra marital cases and 13 in marital cases. It became clear though that very few instances of the infringement of the law in the context of marriage came to the courts. Gour then turned his attention to the existing marriage law and suggested, through his Children’s Protection Bill, that parents ought not to marry their children off before they attained a certain age. Even as this bill was on the anvil, Har Bilas Sarda, an Arya Samaj reformer who had consistently addressed infirmities faced by women, advanced his own bill, which eventually came to be referred to as the Child Marriage Restraint Bill.
Meanwhile, an Age of Consent Committee had been set up to hear various views on the subject and several women deposed before it. In the course of their depositions, they indicated that they favoured a raising of the age of marriage as well. The All-India Women’s Conference, the nationalist forum for political and social concerns, pertaining to women backed this demand, as did several nationalist men.
This was also a time when birth control arguments were in vogue, and they proved wide-ranging. Some invoked typically Malthusian specters of an overpopulated world, teeming with the wretched and ignorant poor; while others, following Gandhi, spoke of the importance of sexual restraint.
Revolt responded to this conjuncture with its characteristic energy and indignation. Its writers utilized the discursive context which shaped these various debates, on Devadasi abolition, child marriage and appropriate conjugality and birth control to advance a complex argument on equality and justice for women (Several women contributed to this debate.)
In an immediate sense, Revolt’s position did not appear distinctive, since the reform party happened to be in the majority in this case, and only an orthodox fringe, composed entirely of Madras Brahmins, opposed Sarda’s marriage bill (Sarda himself took note of this fact, and utilized it to argue that reformist Brahmins from Madras were in the majority and their orthodox counterparts were vastly outnumbered). Neither were Self-respecters the only ones to speak of the importance of birth-control. Eugenics proved an immensely attractive theme, and several nationalists were – uncritically – impressed by the possibilities of social engineering that it held out.
But for the Self-respect movement, the debates around sexuality and marriage meant more, as is evident from the manner in which they inflected their arguments. The extracts from Revolt that feature in this section demonstrate this difference – which was extremely critical and helped to radicalize the movement in particular ways.
Section One features a set of general essays on the women’s question, comprising a range of views which argue for a reform of women’s status – together they establish a broad consensus as to the desirability of change. There is not much here to distinguish the nationalist reformer from the Self-respecter, as is evident from the views of Rukmini Lakshmipathy (a nationalist) and Kunjitham, who in the following years would emerge as one of the most radical voices of Self-respect feminism.
Section Two comprises a collection of writings on marriage, widowhood and birth-control all of which call into question its viability, in its present form, as a social institution. Here the Self-respect point of view and one that would be developed towards more radical ends in the 1930s is already evident – in ‘Kirk’s imagined dialogue on marriage, where a wife rejects marriage and the security it offers, not because she suffers great hurt, but because she sees the relationship as inherently limiting (‘Kirk’, as we have noted in the general introduction, comprises Tamil syllables, which denote ‘one who is mad.’) Miss Gnanam argues her case for inter-caste and inter-religious marriage, subject to women’s choices. Divorce as not merely a legal option, but also social choice is a theme that figures at large in this section. Of the writings on widowhood, the most interesting is a sentimental short story on a widow’s right to desire, and here we have a coming together of a Brahmin widow and a non-brahmin reformist young man.
The somewhat problematic essays in this section have to do with birth-control, at least one of which smacks of eugenicist rhetoric. Elsewhere, in the Tamil Self-respect journals, we find a different edge to the birth-control debate, central to which were the interlinked themes of women’s choices and the restrictions imposed on women’s lives by compulsory motherhood. Here, the Self-respect response to birth-control is marked by its rationalist approach, rather than its feminist politics.
Section Three comprises two short features on the law, being reports of Hindu Law reform conferences, held under the aegis of the Hindu Mahasabha. However critical Self-respecters were of religion, they did not hesitate to take in reformist views advanced even by groups whose politics they did not approve of – in this case, the views of the liberal Mahasabha leader, M. P. Jayakar.
The fourth section is the most exciting of all, featuring as it does editorial and other views on the Child Marriage Restraint and Age of Consent bills. Here we find characteristic Self-respect themes: the importance of law in advancing social change; the counterposing of the rationality of legislation to the imbecilities of faith; the fury against Brahmin orthodoxy, and a startlingly brilliant indictment of its slippery and spurious logic on the subject of reform. In fact, it might be said that it was this unrepentant yet canny orthodoxy in the social sphere, so evident in its misogyny and selective use of tradition, which mediated the Self-respecters view of nationalist Congressmen in Madras (see Part 1). For it is this they criticize endlessly, especially in its political guise, which they see for what it is – a modernist garb that conceals a limited and oppressive social imagination.
The arguments in this section also gesture towards a secularism that challenges the re-invention of the past. Such acts of re-making defined the colonial Indian intellectual class’s encounter with the world of science, democracy and progress. Self-respecters though did not take this path – they were less concerned about the corrosive effects of the modern world, and were inclined to understand modernity in dialectical terms, as offering possibilities which would work against the grain of oppressive custom and authority. They aligned themselves with the ‘other’ England of rationalists, sexual reformers and freethinkers and did not fear colonial criticisms of their lives and history (they were not incensed by Mayo’s book, and challenged nationalists to prove her wrong.)
Since tradition did not appear a source of anxiety, neither did religion – they had nothing to lose, argued the Self-respecters, by turning their back on either. Importantly, they proposed an ethic of social affection and respect, and so they did not retreat into an arid and cynical rationalism.
The penultimate section comprises news on women’s education and conferences. The last section comprises articles that answer those who criticized reforms, be it Gandhi, other Congressmen or leaders of the Justice party.
These pages from Revolt demonstrate the making of radical thought in the Tamil country, in the context of debates about women’s status. The Self-respecters’ views on the links between caste and women’s subordination, nationalism and Brahminism, and their impatience with strategic Non-brahminism were shaped by the events of 1928-29 – as they found themselves arguing for marital choice, inter-caste and inter-faith marriages, a politics that was leavened by progressive reform and a social life freed from the imperatives of faith and custom.
