Tarabai Shinde

Tarabai Shinde was a feminist activist who protested patriarchy and caste in 19th century India. She is known for her published work, "Stri Purush Tulana" ("A Comparison Between Women and Men"), originally published in Marathi in 1882. The pamphlet is a critique of upper-caste patriarchy, and is often considered the first modern Indian feminist text. It was very controversial for its time in challenging the Hindu religious scriptures themselves as a source of women's oppression, a view that continues to be controversial and debated today.

Social work

Shinde was an associate of social activists Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule and was a member of their "Satyashodak Samaj" ("Truth Finding Community") organisation. The Phules had started the first school for Untouchable caste girls in 1848, as well as a shelter for upper-caste widows in 1854 (who were forbidden from remarrying), and shared with Shinde an awareness of the separate axes of oppression that constitute gender and caste, as well as the intermeshed nature of the two.

Stri Purush Tulana

In her essay, Shinde criticised the social inequality of caste, as well as the patriarchal views of other activists who saw caste as the main form of social antagonism in Hindu society. According to Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, "...Stri Purush Tulana is probably the first full fledged and extant feminist argument after the poetry of the Bhakti Period. But Tarabai’s work is also significant because at a time when intellectuals and activists alike were primarily concerned with the hardships of a Hindu widow’s life and other easily identifiable atrocities perpetrated on women, Tarabai Shinde, apparently working in isolation, was able to broaden the scope of analysis to include the ideological fabric of patriarchal society. Women everywhere, she implies, are similarly oppressed."

"Stri Purush Tulana" was written in response to an article which appeared in a "Pune" newspaper about a criminal case against a Brahmin (upper-caste) widow, Vijayalakshmi, who had been convicted of murdering her illegitimate son. Having worked with upper-caste widows who were forbidden to remarry, Shinde was well aware of incidents of widows being impregnated by relatives. The book analyzed the tightrope women must walk between the "good woman" and the "prostitute".

Quotes

From the introduction::"I'm just a poor woman without any real intelligence, who's been kept locked up and confined...But every day now we have to look at some new and more horrible example of men who are really wicked, and their shameless lying tricks. And people go about pinning the blame on women all the time, as if everything bad was their fault. When I saw this, my whole mind began churning and shaking.. I lost all my fear, I just couldn't stop myself writing about it in this very biting language."

:"So is it true that only women's bodies are home to all the different kinds of recklessness and vice? Or have men got just the same faults as we find in women?"

ee also

* Babasaheb Ambedkar, another non-Brahminical revolutionary who fought for the rights of women and dalits.

References

* Shinde, Tarabai. 1882. "Stri purush tulana". (Translated by Maya Pandit). In S. Tharu and K. Lalita (Eds.) "Women writing in India. 600 B.C. to the present. Volume I: 600 B.C. to the early 20th century". The City University of New York, New York : The Feminist Press.
* Gail Omvedt. 1995. "Dalit Vision", Orient Longman
* Chakravarti, Uma and Gill, Preeti (eds). "Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood". Kali for Women, Delhi.
* O'Hanlon, Rosalind. 2000. "A Comparison Between Women and Men : Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India". Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, 144 p., ISBN 0-19-564736-X.
* O'Hanlon, Rosalind. 1991. "Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western India", in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds) "Contesting Power. Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia", Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
* O'Hanlon, Rosalind. 1994. "For the Honour of My Sister Countrywomen: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India", Oxford University Press, Oxford.