Unsung heroines of Independence
Making history: Women picketers preparing for a protest in Madras in 1930. Photo: The Hindu Archives
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Women’s participation in the freedom struggle, barring a few cases, has received little attention in post-1947 male-centric historical records
Though India’s freedom struggle saw a significant participation of women, unfortunately several of them have remained invisible to this day — unknown and unsung. The few women freedom fighters who made it into history books invariably came from elite or middle class backgrounds and their male relatives had often encouraged them to join the movement. In contrast, there were innumerable ordinary women, with no formal education or very little schooling, hailing from poverty-stricken, conservative homes, who got involved in the struggle with undaunted spirit and great commitment.
Raj Kumari Gupta was one of them. Born about a century ago in the little-known Banda zilla of Kanpur, she and her husband worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi and Chandrashekhar Azad. Her crucial contribution to the Kakori dacoity case barely figures in the narratives of freedom. Raj Kumari, who was given the charge of supplying revolvers to those involved in the Kakori operation, apparently hid the firearms in her undergarment and set out in khadi clothes to deliver them, with her three-year-old son in tow. On being arrested, she was disowned by her husband’s family and thrown out of her marital home.
There is also the case of Tara Rani Srivastava. She was born in Saran near Patna and participated actively with her husband Phulendu Babu in the Quit India movement. On Gandhiji’s call, Phulendu assembled a massive crowd of men and women in front of the Siwan police station to hoist the national flag on its roof. The just-married couple stood in front of the crowd and raised slogans. Phulendu soon fell to police bullets but Tara Rani was not deterred. Demonstrating exemplary courage, she bandaged his wounds and marched with the national flag straight towards the police station. By the time she returned, her husband had died.
Whether these women can be considered as revolutionaries or not, there can be no denying that they fought against great personal odds for the freedom of the country. They displayed great resolve despite seeing their children ascend the gallows. It is said that the night before activist Ram Prasad Bismil, a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republic Association, was to be hanged on December 18, 1927, in Gorakhpur jail, his mother came to see him. On seeing her, Bismil’s eyes became moist, but his visitor remained calm. She had never actively participated in politics but she understood the underlying importance of her son’s passionate espousal of revolution. She apparently told Bismil not to shed tears like a kayar (coward). Bismil is then said to have answered saying that he was crying because he would not have a mother like her. Steeled by her son’s death, she is believed to have said in a speech subsequently that she was ready to give another son to the nation. Saying this, she had raised the hand of Bismil’s brother.
Given domestic constraints, many women found it difficult to get directly involved in public action, but contributed in their own ways. Many took to spinning the ‘charkha’ as a mark of support for the Swadeshi movement. Others acted as secret envoys and messengers — passing on proscribed material, helping fugitives from the law shift from one place to another and ensuring that they were fed and looked after.
Ganga Devi from Uttar Pradesh had no formal education and had been married at the age of 13 into a home which had over 60 family members. Her husband, a government employee, enforced strict restrictions on her movement so as to keep her away from the raging political ferment of those times. But that did not stop Ganga from encouraging her children to be sympathetic to the rebels. She saved money from the household expenses and cooked food for men in hiding while her husband was asleep, washing the utensils herself to keep the matter a secret even from family retainers.
The stories of these women do not generally surface in contemporary India save for efforts like those undertaken by the Gandhi Smriti in Delhi recently, when it launched a permanent exhibition on ‘Great Indian Women Freedom Fighters’.
According to Charu Gupta, associate professor, Department of History, Delhi University, history writing in the 60s did not register the role of ordinary women in the freedom movement. She observes, “Implicitly the history of that time projected only a select group and this gave rise to a distorted vision.” She points out how the entire portrayal of the freedom struggle tended to be male-centric, bourgeois and upper caste, with the participation of women being seen as an extension of their domestic roles of serving their families.
The lack of the presence of ordinary women in historical work, according to Ms. Gupta, was due to several factors — the biggest constraint being that history writing was generally based on official records. She, however, believes that this approach has been undergoing a change, with historians now more inclined to base their work on “creative sources” like personal diaries, family histories, newspaper reports, magazine articles and oral narratives.
As Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert observes in her book Women in the Indian National Movement Unseen Faces and Unheard Voices, 1930-42: “Reinterpreting Indian nationalist history required going beyond archival, official and unofficial sources.” On oral narratives, she says, “As a methodological tool, these narratives revealed the individual subjectivities of participants in the nationalist movement. Documenting these life histories opened a new world before me: a world more real than officials records.”
Women like Abadi Bano Begam, a widow and a freedom fighter from Lucknow, known by her honorific ‘Bi Amman’, need acknowledgement. She observed strict purdah all her life and when the time came to speak on behalf of her jailed son, she did so from behind her burqa in 1917. This was, perhaps, the first time a Muslim woman in purdah had addressed a political gathering. (Women's Feature Service)
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