Annie Devenish - Debating Womens Citizenship in India, 1930-1960

In this amazingly comprehensive and confident history of womens enactment of citizenship in the struggle for and experience of Indian national independence, Annie Devenish has provided readers, historians of India and of women alike, with an entirely new investigation of the years of early nationhood and womens role as agents of change. This book goes a long way into solving the vexing problem of how the vigorous womens activism of the 1920s and 1930s didor did notflow into the creation of the Indian nation, and what historical resources contemporary Indian feminists can turn to in reviving their battle for womens dignity and rights.

Ellen Dubois

Distinguished Professor, History and Gender Studies

Department of Gender Studies

University of California Los Angeles

Womens organisations have made a significant contribution to womens development and empowerment in India. Yet, little scholarly work has so far been done to assess their contribution. This book, therefore, is a welcome addition to the existing literature on the subject. It explores the question of what the coming of independence meant to a generation of feminists and nationalists by focusing on the leading members of two prominent womens organisations of their timethe All India Womens Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women. It draws on autobiographies and oral interviews as well as archival records. It is a very well-researched book and should be read not only by scholars interested in womens studies but by all students of modern Indian history.

Aparna Basu

Former Professor of Modern History

University of Delhi

In this lucid account of the modern Indian womens movement, Annie Devenish invites us to consider the variety of ways that citizenship was conceptualised at the intersection of nationalist and feminist politics at key moments in the history of Indian democracy. Centring both the stories of individual women and the new imaginaries of and for gender that their words and work enabled, Debating Womens Citizenship in India argues for the role of a particularly energetic, strategic cohort of Indian women in shaping the contours of state practice, civil society and the post-war, postcolonial international order all at once.

Antoinette Burton

Professor of History

Department of History

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Debating Womens
Citizenship in India

19301960

Debating Womens
Citizenship in India

19301960

Annie Devenish

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First published in India 2019

This edition published 2019

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ISBN: HB: 978-9-3882-7195-0; eBook: 978-9-3882-7196-7

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Contents

Citizenship in India today remains a highly contested terrain. There is ongoing lobbying for the re-categorisation of Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCTs), as various communities seek access to state resources and entitlements. Civil society groups are challenging the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which effectively strips four million people, mainly Muslim Bengalis in the north-eastern state of Assam, of their citizenship because they are unable to prove that they came to the state before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence in 1971. LGBTI petitioners, while celebrating the September 2018 Supreme Court ruling decriminalising Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, are also bracing themselves for the ongoing battle of changing conservative social attitudes, which continue to discriminate against queer communities. Meanwhile, peoples movements across India carry on the fight with state governments and corporations over access to coastal fishing regions, forests, minerals and land in the face of development and dam building projects, asserting their right to local control over natural resources and economic livelihoods.

Indian women are prominently present in such struggles, as well as in many other specific campaigns that are seeking to apply and broaden the meaning of citizenship to their everyday lives. Women are speaking out in academia, the media and politics to demand their right to safety and bodily integrity with the recent arrival of the international anti-sexual harassment #MeToo movement.