If India is to progress along the right lines, it is incumbent on women to seek to play their rightful part in building a solid society, writes Rajkumari Amrit Kaur
India today is standing on the threshold of a new life which is pulsating within her veins. We are struggling to find ourselves and evolve for ourselves what we consider to be our rightful place in the world. In this transition period, as is only natural, there is a conflict of opinion, an internal turmoil, which may, at times, obscure the goal we all have in view. The womanhood of India has awakened from an age of slumber and the responsibility of seeing and feeling aright our duties at this critical period of our history is very great. The women’s organisations of the country are today pressing for the recognition in the New Constitution of our inherent right to citizenship-citizenship which will give us the same political rights as are enjoyed by men.
The crying need of our country today is social and educational reform and the burden of social service lies heavily, at the moment, on the shoulders of a few selfless workers. If India is to progress along right lines it is incumbent on us women to seek to play our rightful part in the building up of a structure of society which shall have solid foundations.
1. In a land, such as ours, of universal marriage, motherhood as well as household work is in itself a vocation. The proper ethical training of children is the sacred task entrusted to women, to instill into their young hearts love of country, love of humanity, hatred of wrong, to train them to follow the paths of virtue and to live and sacrifice for truth is to make them worthy citizens of the India of tomorrow.
2. It is the bounden duty of women to see to it that our daughters as well as our sons are given opportunities for education and we must continue to press that such education shall be of the right type.
3. I feel very strongly that it is possible for a wife and mother to command sufficient leisure for an active interest in the wider life around her and contribute to the well-being and advancement of those less fortunate than herself in every way. There is room for endless voluntary workers in our schools, our hospitals, among our own servants, in our maternity and child-welfare centres, in our large industrial centres amongst our women labourers, amongst our fallen sisters-and, above all, in our villages where the large majority of our population lives and where ignorance breeds disease and increases poverty. I am sure that we who have had the privileges of education and live for the greater part in towns have been negligent of the needs of our sisters in the village. Believe me when I say that there is an awakening amongst women in the villages; they are anxious to have schools for their daughters, they welcome with open arms those of us who can even occasionally find time to go and talk to them and take an interest in their conditions of living. We owe an enormous duty to them and we should consider it a privilege to stretch out the right hand of fellowship and help to them.
4. We who are convinced of the terrible results of early marriage should band ourselves into groups pledged to banish this evil from our midst not only by non-co-operating with all such of our own class of society who still persist in following this custom, not only by doing our best to bring to book those who violate the Sarda Act, but also by doing endless propaganda among those who are victims of an age-long habit from sheer force of tradition and ignorance.
5. It should be our aim to create a healthy public opinion against such harmful customs as “pardah”, polygamy, the dowry system, immoral traffic in women and children and others that still exist in our country. Social legislation, however necessary, can never wholly eradicate evils but as soon as society realizes that an evil exists its day is, ipso facto, over.
6. We must believe in and value the dignity of human labour so that the sin of untouchability may be cast out from our midst.
7. One of the greatest contributions we women can make to India today is the creation within us and around us of that spirit of unity without which our true welfare is wholly impossible. If we ourselves realize that we are members one of another and that the gain or loss of one is equally the gain or loss of the other and if we inculcate this ideal in the minds of our children we shall indeed be laying the cornerstone of a national structure which shall endure. The value of cooperation cannot, in my opinion, be too highly estimated.
I have touched very briefly on the practical side of such work as I believe lies within the power of all of us to do. In particular I should like to appeal to the younger generation to come forward in their hundreds for the field of work is immense and the labourers few. It is not so much in the actual attainment of the goal as in the earnest endeavour to accomplish what we believe to be a noble purpose that the measure of success lies. It was so with Browning’s Grammarian. Men laughed at him while he lived, but what did that matterIJ In the end they paid their homage to him and when he died they laid him to rest in the highest place they knew.
Aristotle’s dictum that “The State comes into existence to make life possible, it continues to exist to make life good” is true for all time.
lastly, therefore, and above all else, the women of India must see to it that our State is a great moral agency. We must, at all costs, stand by principles for principles alone are constructive and ideals are never translated into fact without faith. Great things are never achieved except by “the rejection of individualism and a constant sacrifice of self to the common progress”.
Women as the embodiment of devotion and sacrifice have got to realise that the things most worth having cannot be had without much toil and self-denial is a lesson that began to be inculcated while man was still a savage and never ceased to be reiterated generation after generation. If, therefore, we want to become citizens in the fullest sense of the term we have got to give the highest place to the moral and spiritual values of life without which all material gain or political freedom is mere dross.
Excerpted from Patriots, Poets and Prisoners: Selections from Ramananda Chatterjee’s The Modern Review; edited by Nilanjana Roy, Anikendra Sen, Devangshu Dutta; published by HarperCollins, Rs450