Feminism in India is a set of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and opportunities for women in India. It is the pursuit of women’s rights within the society of India. Like their feminist counterparts all over the world, feminists in India seek gender equality: the right to work for equal wages, the right to equal access to health and education, and equal political rights. Indian feminists also have fought against culture-specific issues within India’s patriarchal society, such as inheritance laws.
The history of feminism in India can be divided into three phases: the first phase, beginning in the mid-19th century, initiated when reformists began to speak in favour of women rights by making reforms in education, customs involving women; the second phase, from 1915 to Indian independence, when Gandhi incorporated women’s movements into the Quit India movement and independent women’s organisations began to emerge; and finally, the third phase, post-independence, which has focused on fair treatment of women at home after marriage, in the work force, and right to political parity.
Despite the progress made by Indian feminist movements, women living in modern India still face many issues of discrimination. India’s patriarchal culture has made the process of gaining land-ownership rights and access to education challenging. In the past two decades, there has also emerged a trend of sex-selective abortion. To Indian feminists, these are seen as injustices worth struggling against and feminism is often misunderstood by Indians as female domination rather than equality. As in the West, there has been some criticism of feminist movements in India. They have especially been criticised for focusing too much on privileged women, and neglecting the needs and representation of poorer or lower caste women.
This has led to the creation of caste-specific feminist organisations and movements. Women’s role in pre-colonial social structures reveals that feminism was theorised differently in India than in the West. In India, women’s issues first began to be addressed when the state commissioned a report on the status of women(clarification needed) to a group of feminist researchers and activists. The report recognised the fact that in India, women were oppressed under a system of structural hierarchies and injustices. During this period, Indian feminists were influenced by the Western debates being conducted about violence against women.
However, due to the difference in the historical and social culture of India, the debate in favour of Indian women had to be conducted creatively, and certain Western ideas had to be rejected. Women’s issues began to gain an international prominence when the decade of 1975-1985 was declared the United Nations Decade for Women. Indian feminists face certain obstacles in Indian society that are not present or as prevalent in Western society. While Indian feminists have the same ultimate goal as their Western counterparts, their version of feminism can differ in many ways in order to tackle the kind of issues and circumstances they face in the modern-day patriarchal society of India. Indian feminists attempt to challenge the patriarchal structure of their society in a variety of ways.
Sampat Pal Devi is a former government worker and mother of five, who noticed domestic abuse and violence within her own community as she grew up in India. As a result, she decided to start a vigilant group known as the ‘Gulabi Gang’ who track down abusers and beat them with bamboo sticks until it is believed that they have repented and victims have been sufficiently avenged. In the area of religion, Indian feminists draw attention to the powerful image of female Goddesses in Hinduism.
They also point out the matriarchal pre-history of Indian society and emphasise on the fact that there have been periods of Indian history that were not patriarchal and communities that were largely female-orientated and matriarchal, existed. The eighteenth century was an age of anarchy from a political point of view, torn as it was by wars, conquests and annexations. The character of Indian novel is bound to vary from language to language and is bound to be conditioned by the regional, linguistic and cultural peculiarities characteristic of the writer and his environment.
But the Indian novel, whether in English or in any other Indian languages, has an individual quality, a distinctiveness which calls for serious critical attention and the Indian novel in English has this distinctiveness much more than the novels in other languages of the country, a distinctiveness which transcends all the peculiarities characteristics of different linguistic and cultural milieus. Though this would mean our accepting the Indianness of the Indian novel in English as one of the important frames of reference in all critical studies of the genre, one has to guard oneself at the same time, against the danger of the Indianness’ becoming, with the writer and the critic alike, an obsession, an unhealthy pre-occupation with “orientalism, lush scene painting and with a desire to “pander to the national self esteem of the Indians or gullibility of European intellectuals.”
A novel written by an Indian writer will certainly be Indian without any conscious effort on the part of the writer to the extent to which it depicts Indian life and culture, reflects faithfully the life and spirit of the Indian ethos and grapples with the problems and tensions generated by the rather unique way in which an individual’s life and character are determined by home, family and society in the Indian social milieu. It can be peculiarly Indian in respect of its form, narrative techniques employed and the manner in which it adapts the English language to the native sensibility.
It can be much more characteristically Indian in its moral and spiritual content and in the values and ideals it upholds and it may even show another worldliness, a predilection for myth and fantasy, a tendency to turn one’s back on the here and now and show “a basic hunger for the unseen- all deriving from the Indian writer’s unconscious affiliation with the world of legends, fables and puranas Indian fiction in English has emerged as a separate entity for the study of the rapid change and development in social, economic, political and psychological facets of Indian society.
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