- Gunjan Mitra, 2A
Feminism is a wave of movements aimed at achieving the social, political, personal and economic emancipation of women from the paramountcy of their male counterparts. Today, it The movements first emerged in the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century. This was a period that witnessed large scale resistance among the Indian women against the age-old customs of forced widowhood, sati, child marriage, denial of education and other socio-cultural prohibitions. Foremost among the pioneers of Indian feminism was Tarabai Shinde. With the publication of her essay, Stri Purush Tulana (A Comparison Between Men and Women) in 1882, marked a decisive moment in the era of Indian feminist movements.
Born in 1850, Tarabai spent her early life in obscurity as a member of the socially elite Marathi caste in the town of Buldhana in Maharashtra. She never received formal education and was home-schooled by her father, Bapuji Hari Shinde, who was himself a radical. She was a voracious reader, well-versed with both classical and modern literature, which placed her far ahead of the women of her times. Even in her marriage, Tarabai was unconventional. She followed the practice of gharjavai, in which her husband came to live in her household as opposed to the traditional patriarchal custom which requires the woman to move to her husband’s house. She made a deliberate decision to not have children of her own; a choice that she had to defend resolutely in a society that regarded a childless married woman as an example of social perversion.
Tarabai gained most of her experience with reform movements of the time through her association with Jotirao and Savitribai Phule. She was a member of the Satyashodhak Samaj. In 1848, the Phules established a school for the education of lower-caste girls. In 1854, a shelter was set up by them for upper-caste widows who were socially repudiated and forbidden from remarrying. Tarabai was involved in both these ventures and it was her encounters with these initiatives that went a long way in shaping her ideas regarding the oppression of caste and gender in Indian society.
Tarabai’s extensive knowledge on the unfair treatment meted out to women ultimately found expression in her 40-page essay, Stri Purush Tulana. Originally written in Marathi, the composition was Tarabai’s response to the well known Vijayalakshmi case, in which a young brahmin widow was executed for aborting her illegitimate child. After the incident, a series of articles were written in the Pune Vaibhar that denounced the Indian women for having “loose morals.” Tarabai’s work was a scathing criticism of these publications and the prevalent upper-caste patriarchal practices.
The Stri Purush Tulana dared to ask openly the question: “But do men not suffer from the same flaws that women are supposed to have?” In her work, Tarabai urges her reader to consider the supposition that men are in fact just as fallacious as they consider women to be and not the divinely evolved beings that they put themselves out to be. Like sharp-witted banter, she lists out one-by-one the socially-manufactured deficiencies women supposedly have, and rebuts them. The book is an open challenge to the prevalent norms that prohibited widow remarriage and set strict codes of conduct for women. Religions or religious practices that placed superfluous restrictions on the liberty of women were severely criticised. Interestingly, in an age when adultery was considered to be the gravest sin a woman could commit, Tarabai shifted the onus onto the husband by proclaiming him as being incapable of keeping his wife happy. She further argued that the ideal way to prevent adultery was to allow women to marry husbands of their choosing.
Tarabai was a staunch supporter of widows’ right to remarry. In her text, she speaks at length of the brutal transgressions endured by widows. She also assiduously campaigned for abolishing the practices of child marriage and caste or income-based marriages.
Immediately after its publication, Tarabai’s Stri Purush Tulana became a subject of tremendous condemnation and hostility. Articles were published in the local newspapers that viciously ridiculed her work. These sweeping indictments seemed to have silenced Tarabai, for no other publication of hers was to be found after that. It was Jotirao Phule’s reference to her text in his work, Stasar that once more brought to fore the Stri Purush Tulana. Phule postulated that the sharp denunciation received by Tarabai stemmed from the fact that the very men she berated were the ones printing the newspapers.
One need only place Tarabai within the margins of her contemporary social milieu to understand her immense contribution to the feminist discourse in India. She was an analytical thinker who could look beyond existing prejudices and use irony and pantomime to expound her arguments. Through her work, Tarabai was successful in constructing a counter-model for ‘womanhood’ that was in complete contrast to the pre-existent notions. She was among the first activists who went beyond simply identifying issues, and attempted to analyse them within the broader ideological fabric of the patriarchal society. She rejected the idea of men holding a superior place in gender relations while at the same time, conceding to the fact that women did have their own issues to address. However, that none of these issues made women inherently inferior to men remained her central argument, making Tarabai Shinde a revolutionary figure in the Indian feminist movement.
SOURCES :
https://feminisminindia.com/2017/03/01/remembering-tarabai-shinde-essay
http://www.researchscholar.co.in/downloads/47-ms.-manisha-kale.pdf.
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY 