Feminism in Modern India the Experience of the Nehru Women (1900-1930)
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Feminism in modern India The experience of the Nehru women (1900-1930) Elena Borghi Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute Florence, 16 October 2015 European University Institute Department of History and Civilization Feminism in modern India The experience of the Nehru women (1900-1930) Elena Borghi Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute Examining Board Prof. Dirk Moses, European University Institute (Supervisor) Prof. Laura Lee Downs, European University Institute (Second reader) Prof. Padma Anagol, Cardiff University (External Advisor) Prof. Margrit Pernau, Max Planck Institute for Human Development © Elena Borghi, 2015 No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author. ABSTRACT The dissertation focuses on a group of women married into the Nehru family who, from the early 1900s, engaged in public social and political work for the cause of their sex, becoming important figures within the north Indian female movement. History has not granted much room to the feminist work they undertook in these decades, preferring to concentrate on their engagement in Gandhian nationalist mobilisations, from the late 1920s. This research instead focuses on the previous years. It investigates, on the one hand, the means Nehru women utilised to enter the public sphere (writing, publishing a Hindi women’s journal, starting local female organisations, joining all-India ones), and the networks within which they situated themselves, on the national and international level. On the other hand, this work analyses the complex relations between the feminist and nationalist movements at whose intersection the Nehru women found themselves. The vicissitudes of the Nehru family—and of its female members in particular—work as a lens through which a different light is shed on the political and social realms of early- twentieth century India. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that its protagonists were all but the passive recipients of others’ choices and priorities: their stances—resulting from time to time in resistance, negotiation, acquiescence, or critique—were actually dictated by strategic considerations of political or social expediency, and bespoke an emerging feminist agency. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii NEHRU FAMILY TREE iv INTRODUCTION 1 What kind of history is this history? On genres and terminology 3 On sources and content of chapters 7 1. BECOMING A NEHRU 19 Swarup Rani, Bibi Amma and the Nehru joint family 21 Kamala and Lado Rani 24 Uma 26 Rameshwari 31 Kamala and the other younger women 35 2. PERFORMING PROGRESS 39 Motilal Nehru 40 Home 45 Towers of strength and ceramic dolls 58 3. FIRST STEPS INTO THE PUBLIC SPHERE (1909-16) 71 Language and identity politics in colonial India 77 Strī Darpaṇ: for the nation or for the women? 81 Devotion, efficiency and modesty 86 Education? 93 Strī jāti, an imagined community 106 4. WINDS OF CHANGE (1917-19) 115 Uma Nehru, a discordant voice 118 Pan-Indian and international aspirations: the Women’s Indian 131 Association The WIA, freeing women slaves from indentured labour, and 142 demanding women’s franchise 5. ENTER GANDHIJI: CONVERSIONS AND ADJUSTMENTS AT THE NEHRUS (EARLY 1920S) Intimate interventions 153 A different life, “that does not trouble him as much as it does us”: 162 home, affects, and the female body during non-cooperation Reworking non-cooperation 170 6. “THE TIME HAS NOW COME FOR WOMEN TO REVIEW AND REFORM THIS SYSTEM” (LATE 1920S) The AIWC and female education: “teaching in the ideals of 177 motherhood” “A self waiting to be developed”: women’s subjectivity, astute 188 rhetoric, and the debate over child marriage 7. NEHRU WOMEN’S “FULL SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITIES ” (EARLY 1930S) A burdensome political context 199 Kamala Nehru 204 Uma Nehru and her reply to Mother India 206 Rameshwari Nehru 213 CONCLUSIONS 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary sources 235 Secondary sources 241 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have accompanied me through the journey that has led to the writing of this thesis; to each of them I am deeply grateful. At the European University Institute, the most enriching academic environment I could wish to be part of, Professor Dirk Moses and Professor Laura Lee Downs have been encouraging and extremely conscientious advisors, as well as scholars whose teachings I have appreciated immensely. Professor Padma Anagol, from Cardiff University, has proven a priceless external advisor, and a historian to whose works I have returned countless times during these years as a PhD researcher. I am honoured to have benefitted from their patience, learning, generosity and passion as historians. Dirk, Laura and Padma: thank you so much! I owe a note of thanks also to the archivists and librarians I have encountered along this journey. They have helped me find my way through the collections of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Marwari Library, the National Archives of India, and the library of the All-India Women’s Conference, in Delhi; the British Library and the Women’s Library, in London; the Archive of the Centre for South Asian Studies, in Cambridge; the library of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, in Varanasi, and that of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, in Allahabad. I am equally grateful to the colleagues I have met in the various archives, with whom I have shared many hours of fascinating work. My gratitude and admiration go to many EUI friends and colleagues, a brilliant and inspiring bunch of people. My sincerest thanks to the people who have supportato (supported) and sopportato (tolerated) me in these last few years of intense work. My family and closest friends have displayed incredible amounts of patience and understanding, glossing over the many occasions in which I have taken time from them, to devote it to this thesis. The energy all this has required has derived largely from their love and support, for which I am deeply grateful. Last but not least, to my partner, who has shared with me all the joys and the worries, the enthusiasm and the anxiety, the hardships and the pride, as well as countless nerdy conversations and readings. For your unfailing support, love and understanding (and for being still around!), thank you. iii NEHRU FAMILY TREE Names in bold are those of the women who, each in her own way, participated in the nascent feminist movement. iv INTRODUCTION The protagonists of this work are a few Indian women who lived between the late nineteenth and the second half of the twentieth century. They were married or born into the renowned Nehru family, which would pass into the annals of history as the main character of the anti-colonial movement and the leading dynasty of independent India. The women on whom these pages focus were the daughters, wives, sisters and cousins of men like Motilal Nehru, his only son Jawaharlal and his many nephews, prominent among the makers of modern India. The oldest of the Nehru women around whom this story develops was Swarup Rani, Motilal’s wife and the orthodox soul of the family. Kamala Dhar, Lado Rani, Uma and Rameshwari belonged to the next generation, and entered the Nehru family between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, as the teenage brides of Motilal’s nephews. Kamala Kaul was the youngest among the women who became a Nehru through marriage; she married Jawaharlal in the mid 1910s and was approximately the same age as his sisters, Sarup (called Vijaya Lakshmi after her marriage) and Krishna. At various stages, all these women, their husbands and children lived together as a joint family in the affluent Nehru household in Allahabad, in today’s Uttar Pradesh, in a mansion that Motilal had named Anand Bhawan, ‘The abode of happiness’. There, women witnessed at close quarters the developments of a momentous part of Indian history. They made acquaintance with the most prominent personalities and the latest trends of their time, travelled more than most of their fellow Indian women would ever dream of, and were drawn into the diverse enthusiasms of late-colonial India, from the nineteen-century modernising frenzy that seduced local elites, to the austerity and abnegation of Gandhian politics from the 1920s onward. The Nehru ladies also played an essential role in another wave that traversed the Indian political landscape in the early twentieth century, namely the women’s movement. The so-called “women’s question” had until then been the monopoly of male- led reform movements that, oscillating between revivalism and quest for modernisation, often referred to the “Indian woman” mainly as a category through which indigenous identity could be shaped, rather than a subject whose condition was the actual priority.1 1 Lata Mani, Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India (London: University of California Press, 1998); Rochona Majumdar, ‘Self-sacrifice versus self-interest: a non historicist reading of the history of women’s rights in India’, Comparative Studies on South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 22, nos. 1-2 (2002), pp. 20-36. 1 By the turn of the twentieth century, the first autonomous women’s groups emerged, which would eventually unite in pan-Indian associations that led the struggle for women’s rights, built ties with the broader international women’s movement, and participated in all major political developments of late-colonial India. The women at the centre of the following pages were among the beginners of the feminist movement in their region, known at the time as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, in northern India (approximately corresponding to the present-day states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand).