What significant role did women play in the Indian National Movement?

Answer:

Women moved from the margins to the centre of the Indian national movement between the Swadeshi years and independence. They participated in every major campaign, founded their own organisations, and in doing so transformed both the movement and their own social position.

Early participation

• Women joined the Swadeshi movement in Bengal from 1905, picketing and spinning.
• The Women's Indian Association was founded in 1917 and the AIWC in 1927.
• Sarojini Naidu, Annie Besant and Muthulakshmi Reddy provided early leadership.
• A deputation to Montagu in 1917 demanded the franchise for women.

The Gandhian phase

• Gandhi made women's participation central, seeing satyagraha as peculiarly suited to them.
• During Non-Cooperation women picketed liquor and foreign cloth shops and spun khadi.
• In Civil Disobedience Sarojini Naidu led the Dharasana salt raid after Gandhi's arrest.
• Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay organised salt satyagraha in Bombay.
• Thousands courted arrest, and women's participation became a mass phenomenon.

Revolutionary and radical participation

• Pritilata Waddedar led the Pahartali European Club raid in 1932.
• Kalpana Datta and Bina Das took part in armed revolutionary action.
• Aruna Asaf Ali and Usha Mehta led the underground during Quit India.
• The Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the INA under Lakshmi Sahgal enlisted women as soldiers.

Significance and limitations

• Participation legitimised women's presence in public life permanently.
• It strengthened the demand for the franchise, granted universally in 1950.
• Participants were largely from educated and urban middle-class backgrounds.
• Leadership at the highest level remained predominantly male.
• Gandhi's idealisation of feminine self-sacrifice has itself been criticised.

Beyond the movement

• Women's organisations pressed for legal reform in marriage and inheritance.
• The Hindu Code Bill debates of the 1950s carried these demands forward.
• Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian woman Congress president in 1925.
• Fifteen women sat in the Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution.

Women therefore played a role in the national movement that was both extensive and transformative. As historians such as Geraldine Forbes have shown, their participation not only strengthened the struggle but permanently altered assumptions about women's place in Indian public life, preparing the ground for the equal citizenship the Constitution conferred.