Hindu social reform movements

Overview

Recall questions on Hindu women's movements, widows, daughters and the education of women, caste and the feminist movement, attitudes to untouchability, dalit education, Dalit Solidarity Networks and dalit movements, and whether reform can come through religion or from within.

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   What have Hindu women's movements campaigned about?

   Model answer

   Their agenda has been shaped by the specific conditions of Hindu society rather than imported wholesale. In the nineteenth century the central campaigns were against widow burning, against the prohibition of widow remarriage, against child marriage and for the education of girls. In the twentieth, they extended to property and inheritance rights, the reform of marriage and divorce law, and the vote. More recent campaigns have concerned dowry and dowry-related violence, sex-selective abortion, sexual violence and its prosecution, representation in politics, and access to temples and to priesthood. Much of this work has been done by Hindu women arguing from within the tradition, though it has also drawn on secular law and international movements.

2. 2

   What has been the position of widows in Hindu society, and how has it changed?

   Model answer

   In the classical framework a woman's duty was defined by marriage, so widowhood removed her role rather than merely her husband. High-caste custom in particular discouraged remarriage, and widows were expected to live austerely, with restrictions on dress, ornament, diet and participation in auspicious occasions, and in some communities the head was shaved. Widows without family support gathered, and still gather, in pilgrimage towns living on charity. Reform came through law and campaigning: remarriage was legalised in 1856, widow burning had been prohibited earlier, and modern inheritance law has given widows rights in property. Practice has changed more slowly than law, and the restrictions have weakened much faster in cities and among the educated than in villages.

3. 3

   What rights do daughters have in Hindu families, and how has this been reformed?

   Model answer

   Traditionally a daughter was provided for by dowry at marriage rather than by inheritance, and property passed through sons, on the reasoning that she joined another family. Statutory reform in the 1950s made daughters equal heirs with sons to a parent's separate property and turned women's limited estates into full ownership, and a further amendment in 2005 made daughters coparceners in ancestral property on the same terms as sons, including the right to demand partition. Dowry was prohibited in 1961. The gap between law and practice remains wide, since many daughters are pressed to waive their claims in favour of brothers in order to preserve family relations, and dowry continues to be given under other names. The reforms are nonetheless significant because they were enacted for Hindus specifically and required a public argument about what Hindu tradition permitted.

4. 4

   Why has the education of women been a central reform demand?

   Model answer

   Because exclusion from learning was the mechanism that made everything else self-perpetuating: the study of the Vedas was traditionally reserved to males of the twice-born classes, so women could not become the authorities who interpret the tradition, and a woman without literacy could not know her legal rights, earn independently or teach her children differently. Reformers therefore treated schooling as the point of leverage. A school for girls was opened in Pune in 1848 by Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule in the face of considerable hostility; the Arya Samaj founded girls' schools on a large scale; Pandita Ramabai established institutions for widows and destitute women; and Vivekananda argued that no improvement was possible while women were uneducated. Female literacy in India has risen enormously since independence, though it still lags behind male literacy and lags furthest among dalit and tribal women.

5. 5

   Explain how the feminist movement in India has been criticised over caste.

   Model answer

   Dalit feminists have argued that the Indian women's movement was led by educated, urban, upper-caste women whose priorities, such as representation, workplace equality and marriage law, reflected their own situation, and that it treated women as a single category with a single interest. Dalit women, they argue, face a compounded oppression in which caste, class and gender cannot be separated: the sexual violence used against them is caste violence, manual scavenging and landlessness are caste conditions, and the higher-caste household in which a dalit woman may work is itself a site of her subordination. They also argue that dalit politics has treated caste as the real issue and gender as a distraction, so they are spoken over from both directions. The counter-argument is that fragmenting the movement weakens it, that solidarity across caste is what produced legal change, and that some demands really are common to all women.

6. 6

   Outline the religious and cultural attitudes towards untouchability found in India today.

   Model answer

   Public Hindu opinion overwhelmingly condemns it, and the major religious organisations, the reform movements and the political parties all disavow it; temple entry is general and refusing it is unlawful. Underneath this, attitudes are more varied. Purity practices around food, water and domestic space persist in many households without being described as untouchability. Endogamy remains near-universal, and inter-caste marriage still provokes hostility and sometimes violence. Some traditionalists maintain that ritual purity in temple and kitchen is a religious matter distinct from social discrimination, a distinction that dalit critics reject as a distinction without a difference. Meanwhile substantial numbers of Hindus regard the persistence of the practice as a scandal that the religion has an obligation to end.

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