The Gandhian Legacy of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
By Dr Sreenanti Banerjee
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903-1988) was an Indian anticolonial feminist activist, a social worker and a social reformer. She, among other things, revolutionized the Indian handloom and textile industry, and with that rural women’s livelihood. Further, she played a key role in enhancing the socio-economic standing of women in India by launching the co-operative. Contemporary feminist historians of Modern South Asia have often interpreted her legacy as one that was antithetical to the modes of nationalism espoused by the Indian anticolonial leader and thinker, Mohandas Gandhi. They suggest that while Gandhi often held conservative views about women’s role in political leadership and in the public sphere, Kamaladevi intended to bring women to the forefront of the anticolonial public-political struggle. Feminist historians also hold the view[1] that it was because of Kamaladevi’s efforts that Gandhi agreed to the participation of women in the salt satyagraha or salt march[2], perhaps one of the most crucial performances of civil disobedience movements launched against the British empire.
While acknowledging the importance of this existing feminist articulation of dissonance between Gandhian nationalism and Kamaladevi’s anticolonial feminist work, here I would like to argue that the dissonance can only be fully appreciated to the extent that we simultaneously acknowledge how Kamaladevi was deeply appreciative of the legacy of Gandhian anticolonial praxis. This blog is about the significance that Gandhian legacies had for an early practitioner of welfare feminism (like Kamaladevi) in India.[3]
In What Gandhiji Has Done for Women (published in 1946),[4] Kamaladevi shows how it is Gandhian nationalism which ensured that women’s plight, owing to unjust British laws, could now be fully acknowledged in the public domain. These laws, among other things, firstly imposed a salt tax (where the prohibitive salt prices affected rural women the most); and secondly, systematically destroyed India’s textile industry and thereby wrecked the key source of income for rural women in India, notably the spinning of cloth. Further, Kamaladevi draws our attention to how Gandhi put an unprecedented amount of premium and hope on individuals who were, either by choice or compulsion or both, the harbingers of a new method of living predicated upon non-violence.[5] In fact, as the psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Ashis Nandy had once pointed out, India is the first country to have gifted a theory of non-violence to the world because European Enlightenment, despite its claims to liberty and equality, is yet to produce a thinker who gave precedence to non-violence in politics[6]; and the change that this gift entailed, as Gandhi was quick to realise, could have been brought about primarily by Indian women.
Most crucially, Kamaladevi also emphasises how Gandhi’s attitudes towards women went beyond humanitarianism to recognising how women and men ought to share a relationship of true comradeship where men realise that (for women) to be equal (to men) is not to be the same (as men).[7] In addition to this, Kamaladevi’s involvement with the cause of widow remarriage in India vis-a-vis the violence meted out against young widows also distinctly bore the influence of Gandhi. She notes with astute wonder how Gandhi instructed young men to make a resolve that they are not going to marry any woman who is not a widow.[8] Kamaladevi also draws the readers’ attention to Gandhi’s capacity to uniquely redefine the violence of widow immolation (sati) in India. Since true marriage, Gandhi argued, means union of the soul (and not just that of bodies), and the soul is immortal and unchangeable, forcibly ensuring that the body of the woman ‘unites’ with that of the husband when the latter dies (by making the woman die along with her deceased husband on the same burning pyre), Gandhi notes, is not a sign of enlightenment but of severe unawareness on the nature of the soul.[9]
In Mahatma Gandhi and One World (published in 1968 in an edited book),[10] Kamaladevi claimed that a key trait that she observed in Gandhi was that he redefined the idea of being a social scientist by testing the hypothesis first on his own self.[11] The second crucial thing that she imbibed from Gandhi was that nationalism (which, for Gandhi, was not the opposite of internationalism) is not pegged to animosity between races. Gandhi argues, Kamaladevi underscores with great importance,
My notion of Purna Swaraj[12] is not isolated independence but healthy and dignified interdependence […] Just as the cult of patriotism teaches us today that the individual has to die for the family, the family has to die for the village, the village for the district, the district for the province, and the province for the country, even so, a country has to be free in order that it may die, if necessary, for the benefit of the world. My love, therefore, of nationalism or my idea of nationalism, is that my country may become free, that if need be, the whole country may die, so that the human race may live. There is no room for race hatred there. Let that be our nationalism.[13]
It was this idea of sacrifice preceding self-interest,[14] where violence is identified as a cultural invention and not a biological necessity,[15] that was of most interest to Kamaladevi in Gandhi’s work.
Key illustrations of Kamaladevi’s attitudes towards Gandhian political and social thought can also be found in a memoir written by her in the year 1986, entitled Inner Recesses Outer Spaces: Memoirs. In Inner Recesses, Kamaladevi argued that ‘the real political history of India begins with the Gandhi era.’[16]
Further, in this memoir, Kamaladevi draws our attention to how she, in her work on women’s education, borrowed significantly from Gandhi’s idea of ‘Nai Talim’ or ‘Basic Education’.[17] This education would imply pushing for an idea of swaraj that did not necessarily desire to assume authority but rather to ‘regulate and control authority.’[18] Moreover, this would primarily involve an idea of education that, instead of putting an exclusive focus on the practice of intellectual labour, puts a substantial amount of premium on the training of manual skills and labour. Development of manual skills was therefore key for the expansion of this nai talim. In fact, Kamaladevi’s fascination with Kasturba Gandhi, Gandhi’s wife, also stemmed from the former’s capacity to prioritise skill development via the performance of physical labour.
Ameena Tyabji, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Kasturba Gandhi, perhaps at Sabarmati Ashram, March 1930[19]
Finally, Kamaladevi’s pioneering work in relation to revolutionising the handicraft industry in India and thereby women’s labour was distinctly informed by, what she called, Gandhi’s ‘philosophy of handicrafts’,[20] as was evident in his serious engagements with the charkha (spinning wheel) and the khadi (home-spun and woven cotton cloth). In her memoir, Kamaladevi says the following:
But it was only after I met Gandhiji that I came to understand the deep relationship of handicrafts with our daily life. How enormously beneficial it was for us “to live with them and make them an integral part of our everyday existence”, to quote him. The pleasurable sensation I enjoyed by the mere feel of the object and the tender sensitivity it breathed into the air, were experiences I valued and I still cherish like harmonious tones of music that echo in one’s being even after the sound itself has died away, and the sensations that tingle in one’s veins at the sight of mingling colours.[21]
Therefore, to conclude, there are four key ideas highlighted by Gandhi – ideas which were gathered from the people of India itself – that held special significance for Kamaladevi, one of India’s early anticolonial feminist activists, dedicated to the causes of social work and women’s welfare. First, his unique realization that this movement against imperialist expansion and conquest has much to gain if it is led by women, as the latter primarily deploy non-violent political tactics; second, nationalism, grounded upon patriotism and neighbourliness, is not race-hatred; third, true education upholds the role of manual labour in human development; and finally, the ‘philosophy of handicraft’ which meant that the oppressed often develops their own pedagogy; a pedagogy that is integrally linked to the labour that they perform in their everyday lives. It is a pedagogy that has the potential to simultaneously teach the historically privileged the need to unlearn their practices of education.
Footnotes
[1] Asia Society. Feminism and the Indian National Movement: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. October 3, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTn5mJ5n4pU&t=1s&pp=ygUzcm91bmQgdGFibGUga2FtYWxhZGV2aSBjaGF0dG9wYWRoeWF5IGdsb3JpYSBzdGVpbmVt
[2] The salt satyagraha was a historic non-violent civil disobedience movement that took place in colonial India. It was a twenty-four day march which began on 12th March 1930 and ended on 5th April of the same year. The protests were a response to the doubling of the price of salt, making it illegal for Indians to produce their own salt, and thereby making salt unreasonably exorbitant for the people who were most impoverished.
[3] In demonstrating this significance, I primarily draw from a key book on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, entitled A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (2017), edited by Ellen Carol Dubois & Vinay Lal, especially the section entitled ‘Gandhi: Liberator and Mentor, Autocrat and Magician’ (127-166).
[4] I draw key arguments of this text from DuBois, E.C. and Lal, V. eds., 2017. A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. New Delhi: Zubaan.
[5] Passionate Life: 133.
[6] Vajpei, Ananya and Nandy, Ashis. ‘Nandy, Ashis: Why Nationalism and Secularism Failed Together’, in Reset Dialogues. 18 October 2016. https://www.resetdoc.org/story/ashis-nandy-why-nationalism-and-secularism-failed-together/
[7] Passionate Life: 134.
[8] Passionate Life: 136.
[9] Passionate Life: 135-136.
[10] A Passionate Life: 142-147.
[11] Passionate Life: 144.
[12] Purna Swaraj means complete self-rule.
[13] Ahluwalia, B.K. ed. 1968. Facets of Gandhi. New Delhi: Lakshmi Publishing House: 154.
[14] See Devji, Faisal. 2012. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, where he shows how Gandhian anticolonial thinking was primarily about giving precedence to sacrifice over self-interest.
[15] See UNESCO. 1991. The Seville Statement on Violence; edited with commentary by David Adams. disseminated by decision of the General Conference of UNESCO at its twenty-fifth session Paris, 16 November 1989, where violence was identified as a cultural invention and not a biological necessity.
[16] Chattopadhyaya, Kamaladevi. 1986. Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs. New Delhi: Navrang: 47. Also see, Passionate Life: 147.
[17] Passionate Life: 160-161.
[18] Inner Recesses: 190. Also see, Passionate Life: 158.
[19] Karlekar, Malavika. 2020. ‘A Fistful of Salt: How Women Took Charge of the Dandi March’, in The Wire. https://thewire.in/women/women-dandi-march-gandhi. The photograph is from the National Gandhi Museum newspaper archives, New Delhi, India.
[20] Inner Recesses: 68.
[21] Inner Recesses: 67.