Women in colonial India were no less progressive, aware and active in gender, political and socio-economic issues than the women today.
This is one of the facets revealed in the research paper "Ideological Progression of the Women's Question in Colonial India (1820-1947)" by Manoj Panjani, a research staff member of the Doon library and Research Centre. The women in India were aware and active and the national trends were also followed in the region which now constitutes Uttarakhand, reveals the paper to be published by the DlRC.
Panjani states that the 19th century social reform was focused on issues like Sati, female infanticide, child marriage, female illiteracy and no sanction to widow remarriage. "It took Raja Ram Mohan Roy nine years to convince the colonial authorities that there was no mention of Sati in the Hindu scriptures. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar dedicated his life to widows' remarriage and was able to get 60 widows remarried at a time when such marriages had to be solemnised under police protection and when such couples used to be ostracised by society.
However orthodoxy apparently gained some legitimacy when Bal Gangadhar Tilak opposed the age of consent act which hiked the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12 years, stating that colonial authorities have no right to interfere in our social affairs.The women's agenda sprouted when Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay said in 1929 that a woman should decide when and whom to marry and the fit age for motherhood apart from demanding the right to divorce and inherit property," said Panjani.
He further informed, "From 1930 to 1947 issues like economic independence of women, co-education, similar curriculum for both genders, new look at gender relations and emancipation of women from drudgery of domestic slavery dominated the movement. During the civil disobedience movement in 1930, of the 80,000 people arrested, 17,000 were women.
In the later part of the 19th century Savitri Phue, Mukta Bai, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati and Rasa Sundari Devi questioned the values of the patriarchal order through their writings. In 1917 a delegation of women met the then secretary of State Edwin Montagu demanding voting rights for women submitting memorandums signed by hundreds of women.
By 1926 women candidates were given the right to contest elections and by 1929 all provincial legislatures had granted women the right to vote." Uttarakhand features in all the five chapters of the research paper. In 1911, Mahadevi Kanya Pathshala in Dehradun became the second institution in north India to offer high school education for girls after the Kanya Mahavidyalaya in Jalandhar.
The research paper by Panjani is backed by 17 years of research and its chapters dwell on issues like 19th century women's question-social reform, growth of female intelligentsia and rise of women's movement, Gandhi legitimising women's movement, women participation in civic disobedience movement and women's equality defined. These issues are as relevant today as they were in the colonial era.