Women

In Gandhi’s words, “To call women the weaker sex is a libel; it is man’s injustice to women.” Gandhi played an important role in uplifting the status of women in India.

Gandhi was instrumental in bringing women out of their homes to take part in the struggle for freedom. It was, as scholars point out, the most radical of his ideas. It involved bringing women out of the purdah – a system that was prevalent among Hindus as well as Muslims of the time. It involved the possibility of being jailed and thus being separated from their families. These were steps that were revolutionary for those times.

Apart from bringing women into the struggle for swaraj, he vehemently opposed various social ills affecting women like child marriage, the dowry system and female infanticide, and the treatment of widows.

He considered men and women to be equal and declared that men should treat women with respect and consideration. However, in the matter of the roles of men and women, Gandhi would be regarded as patriarchal and traditional by present standards. He wrote in 1937: “I do believe that woman will not make her contribution to the world by mimicking or running a race with man. She can run the race, but she will not rise to the great heights she is capable of by mimicking man. She has to be the complement of man.” Again, in 1940, he wrote: “Whilst both are fundamentally one, it is also equally true that in the form there is a vital difference between the two. Hence, the vocations of the two must also be different. Her duty of motherhood….requires qualities which man need not possess. She is passive, he is active. She is essentially mistress of the house. He is the bread winner, she is the keeper and the distributor of the bread. She is the caretaker in every sense of the term. The art of bringing up the infants of the race is her special and sole prerogative. Without her care, the race must become extinct.”

Gandhi considered women to be the presiding deities

of the home. It was their dharma to take care of the home. “If they do not follow dharma, the people would be totally destroyed,” said Gandhi. However, Gandhi also said that dharma did not imply brutish behaviour from men treating women as chattel. Women should not tolerate ill-treatment from their husbands. But he did not ask women to walk out of their homes and launch agitations, personal or public, against their plight or a satyagraha within their exploitative domestic environments. He did say in 1940 that domestic slavery of woman is a symbol of our barbarism, and she should be “freed from this incubus”. He also wrote: “Women may not look for protection to men. They must rely on their own strength and purity of character and on God, as did Draupadi of old.”

Clearly, his ideal woman, as Judith Brown observes, was

not the ‘modern woman’, free of the restraints imposed on her physically, socially and economically by virtue of her being born female. He drew his symbol of his ideal woman from the figure of Sita who bore patiently and bravely all the injustices heaped on her by Rama. “Gandhi preached female virtues of bravery and independence, and a capacity to bear suffering; the model he offered to Indian women was the virtuous and faithful wife,” says Judith Brown.

Subhash Bose had a more robust view of women. Differing from the German National Socialists (Nazis) and the Italian Fascists, who stressed the masculine in almost all spheres of social and political activity, Bose considered women to be the equals of men, and thus they should be prepared to fight and sacrifice for the freedom of India. He arduously campaigned to bring women more fully into the life of the nation. In his presidential address at the Maharashtra Provincial Conference in May 1928, he declared: “The status of women should be raised and women should be trained to take a larger and more intelligent interest in public affairs… it is impossible for one half of the nation to win freedom without the active sympathy and support of the other half.” When, as Congress President in 1938, Bose set up the Planning Commission, he insisted that there should be a separate planning commission for women. This commission was chaired by Rani Lakshmi Bhai Rajawade and was to deal with the role of women in planned economy in future India.

Later, in 1943, he called on women to serve as soldiers in the Indian National Army. This was a most radical view. He formed a women’s regiment in the INA in 1943, named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Many women were enthused to join the regiment commanded by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan (Sahgal after marriage).While those less suited to combat duties were employed as nurses and in other support roles, the majority were trained as soldiers. They were given the same treatment as the men and received no special privileges.

In Bose’s view, women should be given a high position in the family as well as in society. He believed in female emancipation, in liberating women from age-old bondage to customs and man-made disabilities, social, economic and

political. He wanted women to get all-round education including not only literacy, but physical and vocational training. He was all for abolition of purdah and also supported widow remarriage. Women, he said, should also be made conscious of their social and legal rights as well as their duties as citizens.