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 revolutionized the Indian handloom and textile industry, and with that rural women’s livelihood. She also transformed the field of theatre in independent India, played a key role in refugee-rehabilitation and in enhancing the socio-economic standing of women in India by launching the co-operative. Contemporary feminist historians (like Uditi Sen for example) 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 wanted to bring women to the forefront of the anticolonial public-political struggle. Feminist historians (like Vishakha N. Desai, for example) 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, perhaps one of the most crucial performances of civil disobedience movements launched against the British empire.[2]
While acknowledging the importance of this existing feminist articulation of dissonance between Gandhian nationalism and Kamaladevi’s anticolonial 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.
Key illustrations of Kamaladevi’s attitudes towards Gandhian political and social thought can 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.’[3] Most crucially, it is here that she suggests that her own internal conflicts over exploitation of women found an answer in Gandhiji’s approach to the Depressed Classes, namely the harijan (meaning ‘children of god’, a term coined by Narsinh Mehta, a Gujarati poet-saint of the Bhakti movement – a religious movement of medieval Hinduism that focused on the devotee), rendered unequal by the hetero-patriarchal Brahminical structures of oppression.[4] For Gandhi, swaraj or political sovereignty could only be achieved if the evils of untouchability were removed from Indian social structures, and most crucially if the Brahmin or the ‘upper’ caste person could ‘become a harijan’, i.e. engage in self-purification and reparations by performing the manual tasks that the harijan was made to perform, supposedly owing to their hereditary obligations. Similarly, for Gandhi, like the act of ‘becoming harijan’, the key to swaraj also lay in the anticolonialists ‘becoming women’, i.e. emulating the act of self-sacrifice (fasting, for example) in their performances of civil disobedience movements against the empire.
In What Gandhiji Has Done for Women (published in 1946), she 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.[5] 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. 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; and the change that this gift entailed, as Gandhi was quick to realise, could primarily have been brought about by Indian women.[6] Most crucially, Kamaladevi emphasises how Gandhi’s attitudes towards women went beyond humanitarianism to recognise 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).
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, herself a child widow, 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. 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 a 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.
In Mahatma Gandhi and One World (published in 1968 in an edited book), 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.[7] 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 highlights with great importance,
My notion of Purna Swaraj is not isolated independence but healthy and dignified interdependence […][8] 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.[9]
It was this idea of sacrifice preceding self-interest, where violence is identified as a cultural invention and not a biological necessity, that was of utmost interest to Kamaladevi in Gandhi’s work. [10]
In her aforementioned memoir Inner Recesses, Kamaladevi draws our attention to how she, in her work on young women’s education, borrowed from Gandhi’s idea of ‘Nai Talim’ or ‘New Education’.[11] 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.’[12] Further, this would primarily involve an idea of education that puts a significant amount of premium on manual skills and labour with materials (instead of putting an exclusive focus on intellectual labour). In fact, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty had argued, Universal Adult Franchise preceded Universal Adult Education in India, i.e. unlettered peasants were granted the right to vote by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (independent India’s first Vice President who was also a philosopher and a Sanskritist) and therefore could become citizens overnight, precisely because they were identified as being already ‘civilized’, owing to the cognitive skills that they developed via their everyday engagements with manual tasks.[13] Development of manual skills were therefore key for the expansion of this nai talim (new education). Kamaladevi’s fascination with Kasturba Gandhi, Gandhi’s wife, also stemmed from the latter’s capacity to prioritise skill development via manual labour, primarily by performing her chores with acute dexterity and swiftness, and also by engaging in an exaltation of the figure of the harijan, the ‘lower’ caste dalit worker who was hereditarily (and often forcibly) engaged with manual scavenging.
Ameena Tyabji, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Kasturba Gandhi, perhaps at Sabarmati Ashram, March 1930[14]
Finally, Kamaladevi’s pioneering work in relation to revolutionising the handicraft industry in India and thereby women’s labour was distinctly informed by Gandhi’s ‘philosophy of handicrafts’ (as she called it), as was evident in his serious engagements with the charkha (spinning wheel) and the khadi (home-spun and woven cotton cloth).[15] 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.[16]
Therefore, to summarise, 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 of non-violence against imperialist expansion and conquest will be led by women; 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.
[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] Chattopadhyaya, Kamaladevi. 1986. Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs. New Delhi: Navrang, p. 47.
[4] Each time Kamaladevi referred to Gandhi, she added the suffix ‘ji’. It is a suffix that is often added after a person’s name or title in South Asian languages as a mark of reverence.
[5] DuBois, E.C. and Lal, V. eds., 2017. A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. New Delhi: Zubaan.
[6] Ashis Nandy made this argument in 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] A Passionate Life, p. 142-147.
[8] Purna Swaraj means complete self-rule.
[9] Ahluwalia, B.K. ed. 1968. Facets of Gandhi. New Delhi: Lakshmi Publishing House, p. 154.
[10] For the argument on sacrifice preceding self-interest in Gandhi, see Devji, Faisal. 2012. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The argument that violence/ war is a cultural invention, not a biological necessity, was first made in 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.
[11] Kamaladevi translates ‘nai talim’ as ‘basic education’. However, since the Hindi word ‘nai’ means ‘new’, I have used the phrase new education instead of basic education.
[12] Inner Recesses, p. 190.
[13] Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Unlettered peasants getting identified as being already ‘civilized’, owing to the cognitive skills that they developed via their everyday engagements with manual tasks, is my own suggestion
[14] 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.
[15] Inner Recesses, p. 68.
[16] Inner Recesses, p. 67.