Front matter
The Life and Times of
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REWRITING HISTORY
The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai
UMA CHAKRAVARTI
kali for women Se
ISBN 81-85107-79-3
Typeset in India by Scribe Consultants B4/30 Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi 110 029 Printed at Raj Press, R-3 Inderpuri, New Delhi -110 012
For my grandmothers Alamelu and Lakshmi, who experienced the routine humiliations of adult' widowhood, dependence, and a reluctant maintenance from their sons my aunt Parvathi, who was — married at twelve, mother at fifteen, deserted by her husband in her twenties — widowed at thirty-four — mortified eleven years later by the painful death from consumption of her eldest daughter, condemned to replace her as an unpaid domestic drudge for the twenty-four remaining years of her life my father, P.S. Doraswami, who, even at the age of ninety, suffered the guilt that some sensitive men have felt at not being able to do enough to prevent the anguish caused to the widows in their families my mother, Saraswathy, her sister Vijayalakshmi, and their father P.V. Aghoram, who resisted and broke with the oppressive practices of Brahmanical patriarchy so that I and my sisters and our daughters could have a better today and for the named and unnamed widows who feature in this book CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY Libriag
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Acknowledgements The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for the grant of a Fellowship that enabled me to do the bulk of the work on this book; the British Council fdr financial assistance that made it possible for me to use the India Office Library; Miranda House for the grant of leave relievitig me of my teaching duties; and the Haven's Center, Madison, for providing me with an opportunity to present some of this material at seminars; Madhu Malti Deshpande and Sudhanwa Dashpande for generous help in translating material from Marathi to English; Geetanjali Gangoly for accessing material for me from various archives in Bombay;
Kumkum Sangari for academic support over many years and especially for extensive suggestions on the first draft of this work;
Ram Bapat, G.P. Deshpande, Gail Omvedt, Prem Chowdhry, Svati Joshi, Tanika Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Aijaz Ahmed, Kumkum Roy,
Rajul Sogani, Indira Gupta, Patricia Uberoi, Sudesh Vaid, C.V.
Subbarao and my colleagues at Miranda House for creative academic interaction which has helped to shape this work when it was in the making; Antoinette Burton, Tanika Sarkar, Inderpal
Grewal and Edith Blumhofer for sharing their work in manuscript form and providing useful references; Mrinalini
Sardesai for introducing me to her mother Madhu Malti Deshpande who not only generously gave of her time but enthusiastically got into the spirit of the work and identified completely with the travails of the nineteenth century women whose writings in Marathi she translated for me; my brother Anand Doraswami who began by finding the time from his over-stretched schedule to edit this work but went on to be so moved by the anguish of the widows that the work is now as much his as it is mine; Prem Chowdhry for especially creating the evocative painting reproduced on the cover; Urvashi
Butalia for patiently and, for the most part, good-humouredly watching this work grow alarmingly in size; Ritu Menon, Jose,
Acknowledgements v Elsie, and Jaya for making me feel so much at home at Kali For Women; Juhi for preparing the index; Anuja for unfailing support in preparing this manuscript and bailing me out from every imagined or real crisis at home and outside during the last five years; Siddhartha for sharing his experiences of working towards a redefined masculinity; and finally to Anand Chakravarti for a lifetime of shared interests and concerns.
Contents Prologue / vii
Caste, Gender and the State in Eighteenth Century Maharashtra / 1
Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender / 43
Law, Colonial State and Gender / 121
Men, Women and the. Embattled Family / 200
On Widowhood: The Critique of Cultural Practices in Women's Writing / 246 Gin Structure and Agency: A Life and a Time / 301
Bibliography / 351 Index / 362
Prologue Why has the life and work of Ramabai and, more importantly, her critique of society been marginalised from mainstream history! which otherwise is more than generous to the great men (and occasionally women) school of history? Ramabai had all the elements required for a 'great' character: she was articulate, learned, confident and forceful — a woman who got considerable media attention when she first burst upon the public arena in the 1870s.
Men of the nineteenth century, both reformists and traditionalists who had been waxing eloquent on the 'glorious' position of women in ancient India, suddenly found an embodiment of such womanhood in the person of Ramabai. Welcomed and feted in Calcutta in 1878-79, Ramabai was soon honoured with the title of 'Saraswati' for her learning and eloquence, not just in any 'vernacular but in Sanskrit (from which women had been traditionally excluded) — an apt title that was soon to become ironic. The goddess Saraswati is associated with learning but also with vac (speech or voice). Unfortunately, as Ramabai was to discover, unless this voice or speech tied into what men wanted to hear and what they themselves were saying, it was regarded as dissonant. Ramabai's critique of Brahmanical patriarchy and her decisive break with its oppressive structure through her conversion to Christianity were too much for those riding the high tide of history and for whom nationalism was synonymous with Hinduism. Ramabai became at best an embarrassment and at worst a betrayer. Her marginalisation then is not the mere consequence of gender bias in history, although that certainly accounts for a part of it. It is not merely an obscuring, an invisibilising, as is commonly the case with women, but a suppression. Our task then is not just
viii
REWRITING HISTORY
to retrieve forgotten histories but to explore the histories of suppression.
That Ramabai's absence from dominant history is not a case of forgotten history but a case of suppression is evident from accounts of Annie Besant, whose life and work invariably find mention in any history of modern India. In many ways Annie Besant's life was a counterpoint to that of Ramabai and was probably perceived as such. Before Annie Besant came out to India she had been an active member of the women's suffragette movement." Once she was in India she threw herself into the task of the spiritual and national regeneration of the country. The nation's regeneration itself was inextricable from a revival of Hinduism. Within a few years of her arrival in India Annie Besant established herself as an outstanding revivalist of Hinduism in south India as she held forth vigorously on the 'glories' of ancient and modern Hinduism. What is significant is that reform itself was irrelevant in her national and spiritual revivalist agenda.? Hindu culture was 'blessed' in her view and needed no major changes. The chief target of her ridicule, especially in the late nineteenth century, was the social reformers whose influence she regarded as 'debilitating.' The impact she had was tremendous, the more so because here was a cultivated European woman outlining the virtues of Hinduism in all its facets as she besought Hindus to avoid the pitfalls of so-called western advancement and revere their own culture.* The newly constituted
Englisheducated elite fraught with ambivalent feelings about themselves and their society found it most réassuring that a member of the ruling race was vigorously defending Hindu society. Annie
Besant's defence of Hindu society and civilization enabled this class to exorcise any sense of guilt they might have especially in relation to the low status of women in their own families and in the wider community. Further, as she idealised many controversial practices, including celibate widowhood by a refusal to sanction widow marriage, her sex, her eloquence, her antecedents and her nationality," all worked together to undermine the basis for social reform which a section of the educated elite had begun to recommend.
Over the ete Annie Besant revised her position on reforms to some extent? but continued to speak and write fervently about Hinduism, with nationalism and Hinduism being intertwined in her social and political agenda. Her approach to women's issues
Prologue ix remained cautious and in her later years she concentrated her energies on building up the Theosophical Society and on the Home
Rule Movement. Despite the changes in her position on the need for reform Annie Besant continued to be associated in the minds of men with her pleas for a revival of Hinduism and for the foundation of nationalism as lying in Hinduism — 'Without Hinduism there is no future for India,' as she put it."
An important facet of Annie Besant's career both in England and in India is that like Ramabai's it was deeply controversial. But what needs to be noted is that unlike Ramabai, in the final analysis, the controversies around Annie Besant were not of the kind incapable of being accommodated within the dominant nationalist discourse in history, whereas in the case of Ramabai this appears to have been impossible.
Ramabai crossed two Lakshman rekhas: first, she mounted a scathing critique of Brahmanical patriarchy at a time when even contemporary male reformers were shying away from confronting its structure; second, as a high-caste Hindu widow herself, she 'chose' to become a Christian, 'betraying' her 'religion' and thereby her 'nation' in the eyes of nineteenth century Hindu society. Not just that, she had led other high-caste Hindu widows to do likewise. Ramabai's choice represented an audacious challenge to men: a widow was regarded in nineteenth century Maharashtra as someone who should retreat into the dark spaces even within the confines of the home. That such women could choose to accept a new religion and make a break with the faith of their kinsfolk was seen as outrageous. Henceforth Ramabai symbolised a threat to the moral and social order of the kind of nationalism being forged by Hindu nationalists. It was not without reason that Ramabai was regarded as having betrayed the nation; such a label masked the power relations which determined what the political and social agenda within nationalism should be. It was not an agenda which could include a critique of patriarchy, or of Hindu social institutions and religious practices, when it was voiced by a woman publicly and one who had opted out of the faith and customary practices of her ancestors.
; The difference in the way in which Ramabai and Annie Besant have figured in historical writing in both the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as now indicates that there has been an easy conflation not only of nationalism with Hinduism but more importantly of Christianity with colonialism. There is a latent
REWRITING HISTORY
assumption that in opting for Christianity Ramabai and others had accepted the religion of the rulers and had therefore become
'compradors' and were complicit with the colonial presence. Such an assumption is both simplistic and motivated. The mere existence of a relationship between Christianity and colonialism is not enough to treat Christianity automatically as the handmaiden of colonialism. That there were some shared ideological positions is evident but it needs to be noted that there were also major moments and points of tension between the colonial administration and the Christian missionaries. More importantly, for those who were potential or actual 'converts' were Christianity and colonialism the same thing? Did acceptance of Christianity mean acceptance of the colonial relationship or of western dominance over indigenous people? There is no reason to accept such assumptions without an analysis, which has hardly been undertaken, of the many facets of Christianity in India. It is unlikely that such a lacuna is likely to be filled in the near future given the obsession with 'colonial discourse' which is currently dominating historical scholarship.
Practitioners of discourse analysis are unwilling to explore pre-colonial structures or to dismantle colonialism itself into its constituent elements. In practice, therefore, such a view ties in with the agenda of Hindu nationalists both in the past and in the present.
In locating Ramabai in the history of the nineteenth century, and in exploring her conceptualisation of Brahmanical patriarchy and her search for alternatives to it, we find such a paradigm highly restrictive. Gender history forces us to recognise that it is not enough to use methodologies which focus essentially on men, even as they make a passing gesture to gender by writing about the feminisation of the colonised male in relation to the colonising male, thereby reducing gender to a representational phenomenon rather than a material and ideological arrangement. Further, studies using the framework of Said's Orientalism treat the colonised and colonisers as homogeneous entities.' Such an approach ignores the power relations and hierarchies within the colonised, and is unwilling to concede the different histories of social groups and their relationship to each other in pre-colonial times as well as to their experience of colonialism.?
I intend to make a modest beginning in this work to provide an alternative framework of analysis for studies of gender: by treating
Ramabai's controversial life as an entry point | shall explore the
Prologue xi relationship between gender, class, and nation in the nineteenth century. More specifically this will enable me to outline the links between structure and agency in the context of women's lives, And since the nineteenth century saw important transformations in the relationship between gender, caste, class, and the state, I consider it useful to begin my exploration of the larger context of gender in the pre-colonial period to understand the nature of change in the nineteenth century following the establishment of colonial rule.
The eighteenth century thus forms the proper starting-point for this work. To facilitate the outlining of the diverse themes covered by this work the book is in three parts: Part One provides an overview of the structure of society in eighteenth and nineteenth century
Maharashtra; Part Two with issues of gender; and Part Three with the relationship between structure and agency in the specific context of gender as played out in the life and work of Pandita Ramabai.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. The social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India has dwelt at considerable length upon the socio-religious reform movements of the period. Descriptions and analyses of such movements have featured in all the standard text-books and form a part of historical learning from the school syllabi upwards. The centre of this reform movement is admittedly the reforms relating to women's status. Yet the focus of almost all the writing on the nineteenth century is on men — men who spearheaded it and men who resisted it. Ramabai, who spent the better part of her life working for women in general but more specifically on the most powerless section within upper-caste society — the widow —, gets only a passing reference in discussions on reform and no mention at all in any discussion on the 'making of modern India'(see for example G.P. Pillai, Representative Indians, London, Thacker and Company, 1902, where all the representative Indians are men; T.V.
Pavate, Makers of Modern India, Jullunder, University Publishers, 1964, where all 25 of the makers of modern India except one are men — characteristically the only woman is Annie Besant; H.N.
Verma and Amrit Verma, Hundred Great Indians Through the Ages, Campbell, California, G.I.P. Books, 1992, which lists some women among its 'great' Indians such as Mirabai, Ahilyabai, and Andal, but not Ramabai).
2. Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, Chicago,
Xii_ REWRITING HISTORY
University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 1. Nethercot writes that by the age of forty, in 1885, Annie Besant was a Fabian socialist, feminist, and freethinker. Soon after, she was also a union organiser and strike leader. But all these dimensions of her work were left behind when she came out to India where she was transformed into a spiritualist and a revivalist and finally into a fiery nationalist.
C.H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. 255, 312, 315.
Ibid., pp. 327-28.
Ibid.
TIbid., pp. 328-331.
NAW SS . Ibid. p. 329. A survey of Annie Besant's writings over some twenty years does reveal some shifts over the nature of Hindu society and the need to choose between an unalloyed return to the past and a moderate reform programme. However, her attitude to caste and gender issues remained conservative. Unlike Ramabai, who made a sharp critique of the Brahmanical texts including Manu, Annie
Besant believed that Manu provided the 'most orderly and perfectly arranged code' for India (George Arundale (ed.), Annie Besant,
Builder of New India: Her Fundamental Principles of Nation Building, Madras, Theosophical Publishing House, 1942, p. 22). Manu's social organisation of caste, in Besant's view, was based on a recognition of 'different types of human beings.' Even though she came to believe that India no longer needed it she went so far as to explain endogamy as a way to ensure that the Aryan minority was not swamped by the aboriginal majority: heredity was a means by which specific types of individuals were built up (Annie Besant,
Birth of New India: Collection of Writings and Speeches on Indian Affairs, Madras, Theosophical Society, 1917, p. 223). Her writing on women is informed by a dualism. She might occasionally recognise that the status of women in India was low and 'men were selfish' but she wrote that even though women's 'utter sacrifice' was apt to increase masculine selfishness, nonetheless it was in their self-sacrifice that the salvation of India lay (Annie Besant, The Builder of New India, p. 26).
Annie Besant's understanding of what must be done for women and how different this was from Pandita Ramabai's understanding of the women's question is evident in a lecture she gave on 'The Education of Hindu Girls,' published also as a pamphlet in 1904.
She advocated the launching of a 'national movement of girls' education' on 'national lines', which should not be dwarfed by the modern view. Women were to be thought of as mothers, wives, or 'Brahmavadinis' of the older days. Education was not to make
Prologue xiii women think of themselves as rivals and competitors of men in all forms of outside or public employment as was becoming prevalent in the west. The west, in Besant's view, had created an artificial problem between the sexes. The distinction between the public and private domain and a sexual division of labour was thus to be continued to avoid the creation of an 'artificial problem'. The 'natural' function of women was to be wives and mothers.
Education was to socialise and spiritualise them such that 'we could bring back the Gargis and Maitreyis of yore' (Annie Besant, Speeches and Writings, Madras, Natesan and Company, no date, pp. 72-80).
Consistent with her position on caste and gender was the framework within which Annie Besant understood the different institutions prevalent in India: it was its spirituality that was the main characteristic of India. The greatness of India's past had been that everything was done for a spiritual purpose, every act was a religious service. The essence of the Aryan type was spirituality and high morality (Annie Besant: Builder of New India, pp. 19-22 and Speeches and Writings of Annie Besant, p. 128).
. The limitations of the new cultural studies using Said's framework have been succinctly but effectively dealt with by Tanika Sarkar recently ('Rhetoric Against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial
Reason and Death of a Child Wife', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 36, 1993, pp. 1869-1878).
It is also unfortunate that studies that carefully outlined the institutional and legal changes affecting women and were published in the seventies and eighties, such as Lucy Caroll's paper on 'Law,
Custom and Statutory Social Reform:
The Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856 (in J. Krishanamurty (ed.), Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work, and the State, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 1-26), have not been followed up with similar studies in other areas. The most crucial lacuna is in studies which explore what was happening to gender within a larger set of relations during the nineteenth century. A beginning has now been made by some feminist historians (see for example Kumkum
Sangari, 'Relating Histories: Definitions of Literacy, Literature, Gender in Nineteenth Century Calcutta and England', in Svati
Joshi (ed.), Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, Delhi, Trianka Publishers, 1991, pp. 32-123; and Prem
Chowdhry, 'Customs in a Peasant Economy: Women in Colonial Haryana', in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting
Women, Essays in Indian Colonial History, Delhi, Kali For Women, 1989, pp. 302-336).
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PART ONE Ramabai's critique of a patriarchal system as the locus of women's oppression, embodied in the title of her book The High Caste Hindu
Woman, highlighted Brahmanical patriarchy as it prevailed in all parts of India but more specifically in Maharashtra. To understand the structure that Ramabai attempted to analyse, break with, and contest through her work, it is necessary to outline those factors, material and ideological, which provided the basis for a specific set of cultural practices. In Chapter One I shall explore the relationship between caste, gender and the state, and the manner in which gender codes, a crucial component of cultural practices prevalent in the eighteenth century, were upheld, reinforced and reproduced in a patriarchal and hierarchical society backed by the coercive power of the Peshwa state. In Chapter Two I shall examine the extent to which the relationship between caste, gender and the state was transformed by the establishment of colonial rule and the impact of this transformation on cultural practices in the nineteenth century. Further, the manner in which the processes of caste contestation, class formation and the emergence of nationalism shaped issues of gender will form a central aspect of the analysis in Chapter Two.
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