Hidden Histories
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Several scholars have written about the impossibly difficult task of constructing a history of women in India due to an utter lack of resources. However, in recent years, the growing recognition of the need to identify and uncover the missing histories of women has led to a number of projects that aim to create archives and biographies of ‘hidden’ figures in history.
This project was also conceived in just such a context. An initiative of the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at Ashoka University, the project was born from an urgent need to understand and document the various kinds of feminisms that were present within the South Asian context before the concept of ‘feminism’, as it was understood in the West, became part of the everyday narrative in the region.
Specifically, it was intended to seek out and identify the various women within the histories of this region who were largely ignored by historians and, consequently, within history books, but who were nevertheless significant in terms of their life, work, and social location; they were women who transcended various social and cultural boundaries and who, through their lives, challenged norms and changed the landscape of Indian women’s lives and histories.
Our task then, was to piece together the biographies of these women, to compile a list of the most important figures within the history of India and South Asia, who were all women. The looming question, of course, was where does one even begin to start with such an ambitious undertaking?
Journey:
In retrospect, our involvement in this project was both, accidental but also almost inevitable. As students of the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, the programme mandated that we work on a year-long project as part of the Experiential Learning Module and, fortuitously, the CSGS decided that work on this project would begin with a group of students from within the Fellowship.
So, when this project was floated in August 2018, 5 of us — incidentally all women — came together to discuss the possibility of working on it for the next year. We had barely interacted with each other before this, we came from diverse backgrounds — in terms of academic interests and professional experience — however, we were all fascinated with and interested in learning more about issues of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Ironically, when we were interviewed by the CSGS, one of the very real concerns raised was the fact that our group consisted of only women — would we really be able to approach the task with the nuance it deserved? More importantly, were we diverse enough as a group to be able to critically examine the histories we would be examining? This possibly, might be one of the many limitations that this project began with but, we hope, as more researchers and archivists contribute to these histories in the future, this will cease to be the case.
For the time being, however, we were to be the ones to do the work, but the real problem was what were we supposed to do, and how were we — with our limited knowledge of feminism, particularly in the Indian context — to do it? So, we began reading in an attempt to delve deeper into understanding what feminism(s) meant within a South Asian context and, more importantly, who is a feminist?
To this end, we had extensive discussions and read different perspectives on feminism. In the South Asian context, when the category of ‘woman’ itself is fraught with so many different, often conflicting, social identities like caste, class, religion, and so on, we knew that we could not apply a simplistic, one-fits-all understanding of feminism; we had to consider a pluralist understanding of it that would do justice to the lives and work of the women of the subcontinent.
Grappling with the idea of feminisms, we kept questioning the limitations of our own understanding of the concept in order to make it more comprehensive and relevant. We studied several women as representatives of different kinds of feminisms in South Asia to expand our perspective. For instance, Rassundari Devi, the author of the first autobiography in Bengali, exemplified the feminist notion of “personal is political”. In her autobiography, she gives detailed descriptions of the drudgery that was imposed on women in the domestic sphere and describes how she taught herself to write. By writing about the complexities of her life within the household, she challenged the public-private binary that existed for women. Even though she didn’t venture into the public sphere, she changed what it meant to be a woman in her time.
The discussion about Rassundari Devi helped inform our understanding of feminisms. Our biggest learning was that there is no singular feminism and we have to embrace its plurality. We thus, chose to focus on women who through their work or life changed what it meant to be a woman, keeping in mind that in our context, there is no universal category of “woman”. By including a variety of women, we also hoped to prompt a discussion around different kinds of feminisms: how would we envision an interaction between these women? Would there be an intersection in their different understanding of feminism?
The beginning of this project had us all quite overwhelmed. We didn’t know where to begin or how to dive into research without first establishing reference points and a clear structure. We first decided that our period of focus would be the 20th century. For purposes of streamlining our research process, we decided to divide different fields/disciplines amongst us, each of us focusing on women in two-three fields. We realized that several of these decisions were, to some extent, arbitrary and matters of convenience. We would have liked to find women even beyond our set boundaries but due to a severe paucity of time, we moved forward, looking for unsung women in our chosen fields.
