During the last decade of 20th century a number of historical works in the field of women’s history have appeared. This has forced mainstream historians to recognize an sometimes even cash in on the market created by feminist scholarship. A review of these writing can be carried out.
The first notable move of feminist scholars was that of dismantling the dominant nationalist narrative glory of Hindu womanhood during the ancient past, specifically during the Vedic period. They broke up the Hindu/Vedic woman into the ‘Aryan’ and dasi woman and sought to draw the attention to the differing histories of women according to respective social locations. They plotted the history of women in different arenas and in different types of struggles. This distinctive experience of women in the context of class was built into the analysis of gender.
A second feature of the thrust in writing women’s history was the painstaking uncovering and compiling of an archive of women’s writing. Putting together of this archive has been very significant given the male biases of the sources generally relied upon by the mainstream historians, and the difficulties experienced by feminist historians in finding an alternative sources. It has helped to break down the canonization of certain sources which are no longer in variably regarded as more reliable but, more correctly, as having achieved authoritative status through their closeness to power. At the same time some extremely rich and sensitive readings of women’s writing have developed in the country.
An overview of women’s history and the insights derived from the new writings lead to the recognition that gender as a tool of analysis has been vary unevenly used to explore the three conventional chronological phases of ancient, medieval and modern India.
The bulk of new writing in women’s history is being done for colonial and post-colonial India and there is very little of such writing for ancient and even less for medieval India. This may be because deriving information from the sources for medieval and ancient India was difficult as they are mainly written in classical languages. Thus, the dominant contemporary theoretical concerns were focused solely on colonial and post-colonial Indian society.
The new writing demonstrates how our understanding of the past is expanded and enriched when gender is included as a category of analysis. A recent study by Kumkum Roy on the emergence of monarchy in early Indian is significant because she uses the Brahamanical texts on which Indologists have always relied. This study links the inter-relatedness of the different axes of stratification to outline the processes by which hierarchies were set up and legitimize through the use of Brahmanical rituals. This work breaks down the divide between gender history and the mainstream history.
The writings, which have attempted at exploring women’s histories, covered issues like caste, class, patriarchy and the state, and the dynamics of the household in early India. There are also studies on the changing versions of myths and other narratives, prostitution, motherhood, labouring women, property relations, women as gift givers and women as rulers. Studies are also now under way on a range of theme such as genderness of language, landownership, inheritance, the politics of the royal household and women against women in polygamous households.
One of the more rigorous areas of research in women’s history during the colonial period has been the analysis of the way in which new colonial structures especially the law shaped the lives of women. For example, a study by Bina Agrawal has focused on the way law shapes gender relations by denying women access to productive resources in the form of land. It thus provides an understanding of the political economy of the vulnerability of the women.
The new writings have also covered the issue of women’s education. Initially scholars plotted the different stages by which opportunities for women’s educated were created and expanded in the context of the movement for social reform. Now it has been expanded to examine the crucial role of education and the relationship of schooling for women to processes of class formation. Women took to writing after they were drawn into literacy and education. Since the later part of 19th century, women have been writing letters, memoirs, essay, biographies, poetry, stories and travelogues.
The rewriting of history has also tried to cover the history of labouring women. A number of studies are under way on women in unorganised sector, especially in the context of globalisation. These studies, being the first of their kind, have however retained a largely imperical approach. May be with more studies documenting the daily life of labouring women, historians can be able to write an account of the making of the working class from woman-centred point of view.
Among the more significant studies in writing about women’s labour within the historical frame is the issue of domestic labour. This has been a central issue in feminism resulting in a considerable body of scholarship, in the West as well as the Third World. Its relationship to capitalism has been repeatedly emphasized in Western faminst studies. Indian studies have analysed domestic labour in its relationship to caste to class, widowhood, hierarchies within the household and the capacity of household to buy domestic services.
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