Saluting the brave men who fought for women

The intent of matrimony is not for man and wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence, and educate their children with discretion, said an anonymous author in an American Magazine, way back in 1807, exemplifying the almost universally accepted view on marriage.

Marriage was for alliances — political and economic — it secured bloodlines, it created economic units, it trained the next generation. All those kinder gentler ‘emotions’ that we talk about today, like love and companionship, were not even part of the overall equation. It was also a time when the woman was property, a belonging. She was owned by her parent’s family before marriage and her husband’s family after marriage, decisions made for her by her father, husband, and later, her son or the oldest male relative. Few women in that period were educated, even fewer had control over their lives or destinies. For most, life was to be led in complete and utter obedience to the prevalent system.

India was no exception to the miserable state of women. The powers that be, at that time, possibly thought that there was nothing wrong with the way women were treated; it was after all, for their own good. Women could be carried away by enemies, by their own sexuality, by freedom. They needed to be protected from all of it. That meant locking them up behind closed doors, all their life. And, if she needed to be killed to be protected, so be it. A woman had no status without a man to protect her. Wives, widows, daughters, daughters-in-law, mothers, sister were all treated badly. Some women rose up to be matriarchs but their role was to impose the rigid rules of patriarchy.

It took men of exceptional vision and courage to change the status of women in India. We rattle off names like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chander Vidyasagar, Jyothirao Phule, Haribilas Sarda, Maharishi Karve, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru little understanding the public and social pressure, revilement and censure these men had to face to take up the cause of rights for women.

Roy fought to ensure that Sati was banned. He went against Hindu orthodoxy. He agitated for the women to inherit property. He worked towards education for women. Vidyasagar worked tirelessly to ensure the rights of widows, including working to get the Widow Remarriage Act, of 1856, passed. Phule worked to prevent female infanticide, widow remarriage and girls education.

Life was further complicated for Phule because he was from the Mali caste and had to combat caste discrimination and strictures to fight for the right of women. Karve, the founder of SNDT university, not just fought for the rights of widows, he married one. 

Sarda sponsored the bill that outlawed prepubescent marriages. The Sarda Act, named in his honour, set the marriageable age of Indian — not just Hindu — girls to 14. The next major blow against orthodoxy and for the rights of Hindu women was the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. It allowed Hindu women the right to divorce.

Championed by Ambedkar and made an election issue by Nehru it was fought tooth and nail by the Hindu Orthodoxy, which lost.
For every leap of women’s rights, the bogey of destruction of family has been raised. In each case, it has been defeated. An institution that stands on the exploitation of one party will break sooner or later. Women’s rights will not make families weaker, they will make them stronger.

Today, as women stand on the threshold of yet another leap forward to women’s rights with the proposed amendments to the Hindu Marriage Act, including the right for the woman to claim 50% of ‘joint’ property, as well as faster divorces, it is time we paid a silent tribute to all the men who over the decades who fought for the rights of women. Without them it would have been impossible to get this far. Finally, is tragic that the rights of women, in India, are divided by religion; Muslim women are deprived of the rights that Hindu women are given by law. It is sad they had no champions to fight for their rights and that successive Indian governments sacrificed the rights of Muslim women in order to woo the orthodoxy for electoral gain.

Harini Calamur is a media entrepreneur, writer, blogger, teacher,
& the main slave to an imperious hound. She blogs at calamur.org/gargi and @calamur on Twitter