Steps taken to Ameliorate Women’s Position

Because of the indefatigable efforts of the reformers, a number of administrative measures were adopted by the government to improve the condition of women.

Abolition of Sati Influenced by the frontal attack launched by the enlightened Indian reformers led by Raja Rammohan Roy, the government declared the practice of sati illegal and punishable by criminal courts as culpable homicide. The regulation of 1829 (Regulation XVII, A.D. 1829 of the Bengal Code) was applicable in the first instance to Bengal Presidency alone, but was extended in slightly modified forms to Madras and Bombay Presidencies in 1830.

Preventing Female Infanticide The practice of murdering female infants immediately after their birth was a common practice among upper class Bengalis and Rajputs who considered females to be an economic burden. The Bengal regulations of 1795 and 1804 declared infanticide illegal and equivalent to murder. An Act passed in 1870 made it compulsory for parents to register the birth of all babies and provided for verification of female children for some years after birth, particularly in areas where the custom was resorted to in utmost secrecy.

Widow Remarriage The Brahmo Samaj had the issue of widow remarriage high on its agenda and did much to popularise it. But it was mainly due to the efforts of Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91), the principal of Sans- krit College, Calcutta, that the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, 1856, was passed; it legalised marriage of widows and declared issues from such marriages as legitimate. Vidyasagar cited Vedic texts to prove that the Hindu religion sanctioned widow remarriage.

Jagannath Shankar Seth and Bhau Daji were among the active promoters of girls’ schools in Maharashtra. Vishnu Shastri Pandit founded the Widow Remarriage Association in the 1850s. Another prominent worker in this field was

Karsondas Mulji who started the Satya Prakash in Gujarati in 1852 to advocate widow remarriage. Similar efforts were made by Professor D.K. Karve in western India and by Veerasalingam Pantulu in Madras. Karve himself married a widow in 1893. He dedicated his life to the upliftment of Hindu widows and became the secretary of the Widow Remarriage Association. He opened a widows’ home in Poona to give the high caste widows an interest in life by providing them with facilities for vocational training. The right of widows to remarriage was also advocated by B.M. Malabari, Narmad (Narmadashankar Labhshankar Dave), Justice Govind Mahadeo Ranade and K. Natarajan among others.

Controlling Child Marriage The Native Marriage Act (or Civil Marriage Act), 1872 signified legislative action in prohibiting child marriage. It had a limited impact as the Act was not applicable to Hindus, Muslims and other recognised faiths. The relentless efforts of a Parsi reformer,

B.M. Malabari, were rewarded by the enactment of the Age of Consent Act (1891) which forbade the marriage of girls below the age of 12. The Sarda Act (1930) further pushed up the marriage age to 18 and 14 for boys and girls, respectively. In free India, the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Act, 1978 raised the age of marriage for girls from 15 to 18 years and for boys from 18 to 21.

Education of Women The Christian missionaries were the first to set up the Calcutta Female Juvenile Society in 1819. The Bethune School, founded by J.E.D. Bethune, president of the Council of Education in Calcutta in 1849 was the first fruit of the powerful movement for women’s education that arose in the 1840s and 1850s. Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was associated with no less than 35 girls’ schools in Bengal and is considered one of the pioneers of women’s education.

Charles Wood’s Despatch on Education (1854) laid great stress on the need for female education. In 1914, the Women’s Medical Service did a lot of work in training nurses and mid-wives. The Indian Women’s University set up by Professor D.K. Karve in 1916 was one of the outstanding institutions imparting education to women. In the same year Lady Hardinge Medical College was opened in Delhi.

Health facilities began to be provided to women with the opening of Dufferin Hospitals in the 1880s.

Participation in the swadeshi and anti-partition and the Home Rule movements during the opening decades of the twentieth century was a major liberating experience for the otherwise home-centred Indian women. After 1918, they faced lathis and bullets and were jailed during political processions, picketing, etc. They actively participated in trade union and kisan movements, or revolutionary movements. They voted in, stood for and got elected to various legislatures and local bodies. Sarojini Naidu went on to become the president of the Indian National Congress (1925) and later the governor of the United Provinces (1947-49).

After 1920, aware and self-confident women led a women’s movement. Many organisations and institutions such as the All India Women’s Conference (established in 1927) came up.

Women’s Organisations In 1910, Sarla Devi Chaudhurani convened the first meeting of the Bharat Stree Mahamandal in Allahabad. Considered as the first major Indian women’s organisation set up by a woman, its objectives included promotion of education for women, abolition of the purdah system and improvement in the socio-economic and political status of woman all over India. Sarla Devi believed that the man working for women’s upliftment lived ‘under the shade of Manu’.

Ramabai Ranade founded the Ladies Social Conference (Bharat Mahila Parishad), under the parent organisation National Social Conference, in 1904 in Bombay.

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati founded the Arya Mahila Samaj to serve the cause of women. She pleaded for improvement in the educational syllabus of Indian women before the English Education Commission which was referred to Queen Victoria. This resulted in medical education for women which started in Lady Dufferin College. Later Ramabai Ranade established a branch of Arya Mahila Samaj in Bombay.

In 1925, the National Council of Women in India, a national branch of the International Council of Women, was

formed. Mehribai Tata played a vital role in its formation and advancement. She opined that the purdah system, caste differences and lack of education prevented women from working to solve societal problems. Other women who held important positions on the executive committee of the council included Cornelia Sarabji, India’s first lady barrister; Tarabai Premchand, wife of a wealthy banker; Shaffi Tyabji, a member of one of Mumbai’s leading Muslim families; and Maharani Sucharu Devi, daughter of Keshab Chandra Sen. However, according to critics, the philanthropic style that was being followed by these women was that of upper-class English women.

The All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), founded by Margaret Cousins in 1927, was perhaps the first women’s organisation with an egalitarian approach. Its first conference was held at Ferguson College, Pune. Important founding members included Maharani Chimnabai Gaekwad, Rani Sahiba of Sangli, Sarojini Naidu, Kamla Devi Chattopadhyaya and Lady Dorab Tata. Its objectives were to work for a society based on principles of social justice, integrity, equal rights and opportunities; and to secure for every human being, the essentials of life, not determined by accident of birth or sex but by planned social distribution. For this purpose, the AIWC worked towards various legislative reforms before and after India’s independence, some examples being Sarda Act (1929), Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act (1937), Factory Act (1947), Hindu Marriage and Divorce Act (1954), Special Marriage Act (1954), Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act (1956), Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act (1956), the Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women Act (1958), Maternity Benefits Act (1961), Dowry Prohibition Act (1961) and Equal Remuneration Act (1958, 1976).