Vijaya Ramaswamy - Women and work in precolonial India: a reader

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Contents

Vijaya Ramaswamy

Julia Leslie

T. R. Sharma

M. A. Indra

Sukumari Bhattacharji

Kavita Gaur

Vijaya Ramaswamy

Jaya Tyagi

I. B. Horner

Uma Chakravarti

Upasana Dhankhar

Anant Sadashiv Altekar

Anant Sadashiv Altekar

M. A. Indra

N. N. Bhattacharyya

Kanakalatha Mukund

A. Padma

Vijaya Ramaswamy

A. Padma

Anna Varghese

Uma Chakravarti

Shireen Moosvi

Vatsyayana Mallanaga

Leslie Orr

Shalini Shah

Sukumari Bhattacharji

It is with some hesitation that I write this Foreword. Firstly, because I am not a scholar of ancient and medieval India with which this volume is largely concerned and secondly, because I am not a labour historian. I agreed to write at the insistence of Professor Vijaya Ramaswamy for whose scholarship and dedication to her work, I have the greatest admiration and respect. She asked me perhaps because I have worked extensively in the area of womens history, but of colonial and contemporary India.

The majority of women in every country and in all ages have usually been workers. Their participation as workers has always been necessary for social and economic development. In all societies, they are usually involved in household activities such as child rearing, cooking, cleaning, fetching water and fuel and care of the elderly and sick. This kind of work is not recognised as work but as a womans duty. Women have worked outside the home as well, especially in the domain of craft work and labour. Womens participation as workers in the public sphere increased in Europe and Great Britain after World Wars I and II when men were fighting and women had to work in factories and offices.

In India, with womens participation in the freedom struggle and growing womens education and awareness, women started emerging out of the kitchen and began to take their place alongside men as supplementary breadwinners. Today, women can be seen as doctors, lawyers, journalists, architects, in the media and in almost every profession. However, as wage earners or self-employed entrepreneurs, they continue to be responsible for their domestic duties. Thus, women bear a double burden, unless they are affluent and can afford domestic help. They have to balance their jobs with looking after the children and other housework. Therefore, women suffer from a sense of guilt about their inability to do adequate justice to either their jobs or their duty as homemakers.

The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of great creativity in Indian labour history. Study of labour moved from trade unions to a study of workers themselves. The growing interest in labour history led to the first conference devoted to Indian labour history at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995 and the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians in the following year. The dynamism of the intellectual horizons of Indian labour history in that period is captured in the work of three labour historiansRaj Chandavarkar, Dipesh Chakravarti and Chitra Joshi.

In the majority of labour histories, however, till a few decades ago, the presence of women in the domestic or public domain as workers was missing. Their contribution to the household income or the overall economy was absent. Women were represented either as good wives or prostitutes. In more recent times, we have had feminist historians such as Samita Sen, Tanika Sarkar, Chitra Joshi, Bina Agarwal, Jayati Sen, Devaki Jain, Radha Kumar and others who have focused on womens labour.

Womens work when outside the home was sporadic, ill-paid and mostly in the unorganised sector. Even today, 94 per cent of Indian women work in the unorganised sector. Men were regarded as producers, as breadwinners and women as consumers. Men performed work outside the house which was more hazardous, since it was believed that outside work required physical strength. Mens work was considered to be the opposite of womens work.

This volume is a scholarly study of womens unrecorded presence in the household economy as well in the wider production process. It covers a vast historical span and links the theme of woman and work from ancient to late medieval India. It stops at the beginning of colonial rule in Indian history, as feminist economic historians have worked on this theme.

This anthology is perhaps the first of its kind in mapping ways of looking at women and work in precolonial India through essays by distinguished scholars drawing on a variety of sources such as the Upanishads, Arthashastra and other epigraphical records as well as literary works and canonical texts. It deals with themes such as changing production role of Tamil women from tribe to caste, womens property rights in ancient and medieval India, devadasis and prostitution in precolonial India and various other issues.

The volume provides a panoramic survey of women and work in precolonial India. The authors have salvaged available data on womens paid and unpaid, visible and invisible in order to highlight their contribution work to the economy.