Women's Movement Media (India)

Historical Background

The women's movement in India can be traced to the early 19th century. Jayawardena's canonic cross-national survey of the emergence of women's movements in global South anticolonial activism combats the misconception that feminism was an alien Western ideology in South Asia. In the early to mid19th century, public consciousness of women's emancipation spread as Indian male social reformers campaigned to liberate Indian women from practices that the British colonizers had deemed “barbaric”—sati or widow burning, isolation of widows, child marriage, and polygamy.

Gradually, the more pressing issue of women's education began to take center stage, and as women gained the benefits of literacy and forms of public participation, the seeds were sown for the rise of the modern women's movement in postcolonial India. Mahatma Gandhi's ascent within the independence movement during the first half of the 20th century and his “indigenous” articulation of Indian women's equality within the patriarchal logic of Hinduism brought a much larger and more diverse group of ordinary urban and rural women into the nationalist movement.

[Page 543]Although male reformers in the urban centers of India initially were the primary agents of change, educated middle-and upper-class/caste Indian women in urban centers across India began to assume leadership roles in the movement by the end of the 19th century. The establishment of women's service associations like the Women's Indian Association, Sakhi Samiti, Arya Mahila Samaj, Seva Sadan, Prayag Mahila Samithi, Mahila Seva Samaj, and the Hindu Ladies Social and Literary Club extended the movement into wider regional and national networks.

A burgeoning body of women's print culture emerged from this closely knit web of pioneering women leaders and formal women's organizations. Women's periodicals, non-fiction books, novels, memoirs, essays, poetry, and letters and columns in the mainstream press transported the ideas and philosophies of the nascent Indian women's movement into hundreds of homes, clubs, and libraries. Women's literature addressed a range of topics and issues, from more conservative material on domesticity and culinary skills to more radical ideas on women's education and economic independence, religion's oppression of women, widows' rights to remarry, and women's participation in the political and legal realms of public life.

Vernacular language periodicals in Marathi (Arya Bhagini, Swadesh Bhagini, and Subodhini), Hindi (Stree Darpan, Grihalkashmi, and Mahila Sarvasv), Telugu (Hindu Sundari, Savithri, and Anasuya), Bengali (Bharati), and Tamil (Penn Kalvi, Kirahalakshmi, and Matar Marumanam) enabled ordinary women to critique patriarchy and debate strategies to improve women's lives.

Matar Marumanam (Widow Remarriage) was unique for its attention to transgressive issues of romantic love, companionate marriage, emotion, and sexual pleasure in women's lives. Stri Dharma (Women's Duty, 19181930s), an English and vernacular periodical originally founded by Indian, British, and Irish women in Madras (now Chennai), was among the most feminist in tone of these periodicals, with editorial content that described international advances in women's legal rights and in women's campaigns for suffrage. Pandita Ramabai's feminist albeit Orientalist tract The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887) offered a searing critique of Indian women's oppression in Hinduism's patriarchal traditions. Tarabai Shinde's Stree

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