Fallen Through the Nationalist and Feminist Grids of Analysis: Political Campaigning of Indian Women against Indentured Labour Emigration

Introduction: Identifying Diasporic Compatriots

Following Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s call for the abolition of Indian indentured migration in the Legislative Council in 1912, nationalist agitations against the labour trade increased. In March 1916, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya moved a resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council demanding the abolition of indentured labour (Gandhi, 1968, p. 596). The Viceroy’s concession remained vague, which motivated Gandhi to delve deeper into the labour conditions and start an all-India satyagraha for the abolition of the practice. The protest against the practice of recruiting and hiring labourers for work in British plantation colonies such as Fiji and South Africa, voiced by a group of elite Indian women at the centre of the nationalist movement in Allahabad is a form of women’s mobilisation that reaches beyond topics usually covered under the rubric of the women’s question. ¹ It engages with a topic typically sidelined by elite Indian women prior to the 1920s, that is, the concerns of the working classes and rural population.

English-language historiographies of the Indian nationalist and women’s movements have to date not acknowledged the first women’s political delegation in British-Indian history that emerged out of the protest against indentured labour. A look at the vernacular documentation of the time moreover disrupts the paradigms on social feminism and national feminism against which the Indian women’s movement is often read. Scholarly work generally lists the women’s delegation to the Montagu-Chelmsford Committee of 15 December 1917 as the first such delegation (Forbes, 1998, p. 92). Led by Sarojini Naidu, this delegation asked for equitable representation in legislative and electoral politics for women as well as reforms in the education and health sectors. Elite women are primarily associated with their campaigns for franchise and legal rights, issues centred on upper-class and high-caste women as well as all the issues raised by the social reform movement led by men (sati, widow remarriage, age of consent, dowry practice, property and inheritance rights, among others). Prominent women’s organisations that were part of both the nationalist and women’s movements were the Women’s Indian Association (established in 1917), the National Council of Women in India (established in 1925) and the All India Women’s Conference (established in 1927). Through these organisations women would unite across regions and repeatedly petition the highest authority in British India on women’s representation in legislative and electoral politics, access to education and amelioration of women’s social status. An investigation solely oriented around the proceedings of these major national women’s organisations, however, will make this particular women’s delegation addressing indentured labour emigration fall outside the grid of the women’s and the nationalist movements.

Primary vernacular sources provide evidence of this earlier instance of a women’s delegation visiting the viceroy (Chelmsford, 1917, p. 171; R. Nehru, 1917c, p. 171). At the height of the nationalist campaigns against indenture in the second half of the 1910s, a delegation of women from different British-Indian provinces, led by women from the Bombay Presidency, presented what they called their ‘own’ petition in this matter to the viceroy. Mrs Jahangir B. Petit read out the petition, which was also signed by Sarojini Naidu, Lady Meherbai Tata, Uma Nehru, Dilsahab Begam, Shrinivas Shastri, Rangaswami Aiyyar and a number of Western women in favour of the abolition of the practice. The date 24 March 1917 thus marks the first ever Indian women’s delegation to a viceroy, which would be followed by several more in the months and years to come. Thus, the Indian women’s delegation petitioning Lord Chelmsford to end indentured labour preceded the well-known petitions and campaigns for which Indian women of the early 20th century are remembered today. One of the prime movers of this delegation was the women’s organisation Prayag Mahila Samiti in Allahabad (established in 1909), which also organised a conference on the issue of indentured labour. ² What might seem incidental—a reasonable number of elite women who were not involved in labour movements organising themselves around an issue reaching beyond their elite and middle-class concerns—should, I suggest, be commemorated as an early example of women’s involvement not only in the Hindi public sphere but also on the mainstream political scene. This may be read as an emancipatory move in a period of Indian history when organised forms of political participation for women were lacking, especially in the United Provinces. It may also be read as an all-Indian, if not pan-Asian, preparatory move for a feminist-induced nationalist campaign, in which women would unite across regions and repeatedly petition the highest authority in British India. This preparatory move took place prior to the formal establishment of all-India women’s organisations. It was constituted by the actors of specific local institutions, including the Prayag Mahila Samiti considered in this article.

The Prayag Mahila Samiti was established under challenging conditions since it operated in a society where conservative attitudes impinged on gender roles, hindering the majority of women from frequenting the public sphere (Thapar-Björkert, 2006, pp. 66, 83). It was led by elite women in Allahabad including women of the Nehru family, and had made it an objective to organise and mobilise women in the United Provinces. The Prayag Mahila Samiti had a remarkably high membership of 200 and its mouthpiece, the periodical Stri Darpan (Women’s Mirror), had approximately 1,000 subscribers (Nijhawan, 2012, pp. 38–39). ³ Stri Darpan, which was published in Allahabad, disseminated the Prayag Mahila Samiti’s political activities, linking the political movement against indentured labour emigration with the fledgling Indian women’s movement. Between February and April 1917, Stri Darpan regularly carried essays and reports in Hindi on indentured labour, including editorials, reprints of speeches delivered in Hindi at the conference held on indentured labour organised by the Prayag Mahila Samiti itself, the speech made in Allahabad to an audience of women by the educationist and priest Charles Freer Andrews, who had investigated the working and living conditions of indentured labourers in Fiji, and two open letters addressing Indian women (translated from English into Hindi) written by the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, and Andrews respectively. This article is based on these primary vernacular sources (listed in the References) and two memoirs written by women activists of the time (Pandit, 1981; Sahgal, 1994) as well as one independent inquiry into the conditions of indentured labour in Fiji (Andrews and Pearson, 1917).

Events connected with indenture were thus extensively reported in Stri Darpan. The editor of the periodical, Rameshwari Nehru (1917b, p. 170) commented on the delegation: ‘In India’s history this [deputation] is something new.’ She was full of praise for the women’s delegation and proudly announced that as a result of the joint efforts of women, the recruitment of indentured labourers would be discontinued with immediate effect, while the ultimate abolition of the practice would be tackled after the end of World War I (R. Nehru, 1917b, p. 170). Stri Darpan also printed the response of the viceroy in the editorial, who was highly appreciative of the new political development that had made ‘a delegation of Indian ladies’ visit him: ‘In the history of the British-Indian Empire this is the first occasion that women petition in front of the Viceroy’ (Chelmsford, 1917, p. 171). Vernacular sources thus have addenda to offer to the history of the abolition of indenture: the women’s delegation to the viceroy may be read as feeding into liberal-idealist reforms based on notions of responsible government as articulated by the liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, in the declaration of December 1917 and the subsequent Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 (in which women were also involved with a delegation). Women’s political participation, as voiced in their claim to rights on grounds of freedom and equality as subjects of the British Raj, in fact received recognition from the highest ranks of British-Indian administration, as the viceroy (Chelmsford, 1917, p. 171) acknowledged in his open letter in Stri Darpan. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1968, p. 599), who had drafted his first petition against the practice of indenture in 1894, also applauded the efforts of the activist Mrs Jahangir ‘Jaiji’ Petit and the women’s delegation. Appreciative of the women’s support, he incorporated their campaign into his all-India satyagraha against indentured labour.

The Conference: New Alliances at a Secure Distance

The conference on the condition of indentured plantation workers abroad, held at the Laila Bhawani Prasad Hall, Allahabad, was an exceptional public expression of the concern of Indian women for exploited labourers and called for the cessation of shipments. A number of speakers gave detailed accounts of the social and economic conditions of workers in the plantation colonies as well as the implications of indenture for India and Indian women. ⁴ They gleaned their information from official reports and speeches on the recruitment, shipping, transit, living and working conditions of indentured labourers, most notably the report, an independent inquiry, on the working conditions of indentured labourers in Fiji by Charles Freer Andrews and William W. Pearson (1917) that circulated in the English media of the time. Though the origin of sources is not specified by the conference speakers, it is likely that the case of Fiji, as Reddock (1985, p. WS86) remarks, served as a proxy, ‘a generic concept’, for elaborations on the conditions in plantation colonies. Apart from documenting the living and working conditions of indentured labourers for female audiences, to whom media coverage on indentured labour might otherwise not have been accessible, the conference speakers also extended calls to women to mobilise and campaign against the practice in their respective localities.

The speakers at the conference attempted to relate the plight of Indian women and men in Fiji to the lives of elite urban women in Allahabad. Rameshwari Nehru (1917a, p. 168) narrated an incident in which a respectable woman from the United Provinces had been abducted, hired under false promises and then shipped to the colonies, where she was forced to live under deplorable conditions. Such an incident could have happened to any one of the women present, as Allahabad’s markets, temples and railway stations were central places for recruitment.

For Svarup Kumari Nehru (later called Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit), the conference was her first exposure to the world of politics. More than that, she also pointed out the significance of such a meeting for the public emergence of women:

The meeting itself was, I imagine, unique for the time. It took consistent and patient effort for many days to persuade women to leave their homes for one afternoon and go out to hear other women speak. Outings at that time were confined to specific social occasions when one dressed up in one’s best and could look forward to a good meal, and this new idea was not appreciated. South Africa was very far away, but what good could result by some women getting together and talking about it in Allahabad? A packed hall finally rewarded the efforts of the organisers and the meeting was hailed by the newspapers next morning as a great step forward in arousing the social conscience of the women of Uttar Pradesh.

Svarup Kumari Nehru posed the central question: ‘South Africa was very far away, but what good could result by some women getting together and talking about it in Allahabad?’ Perhaps it was precisely the safe distance and seemingly non-emancipatory topic that had enabled women to leave their homes. After all, the matter of indenture did not immediately affront the patriarchal oppression and corrupted customary tradition under which many middle-class women suffered.

Nandrani Nehru, mother-in-law of the most active women of the Nehru family, Uma and Rameshwari, presided over the conference of the Prayag Mahila Samiti. In her keynote speech, she shared her dismay about Indian complicity in the recruitment of labour migrants:

Today, we have gathered to raise our humble voices to save our suffering brothers and sisters who are deceived out of their houses and forced into slavery. You might ask who coerces them into slavery. The answer is that our own brothers and sisters deceive them.

According to Nandrani Nehru, who repeatedly turned to the use of fraud and deceit in methods of recruitment, there was no question that the emigration of the majority of labourers made possible by procurers and procuresses—some of them returnees from the plantation colonies—took place under objectionable circumstances. The intention to emigrate may have been voluntary, Nehru conceded, but added that the outbound labourers were nevertheless misled by wrongful information about their future lives in the plantation colonies (N. Nehru, 1917, p. 154). ⁵ She was hesitant to consider other recruitment arrangements—those, for example, that promised family emigration. She refused to seriously acknowledge that labour emigration could have also been an escape from social and economic pressures and an opportunity for single men and women as well as entire families and groups. ⁶ Instead, she reported on stories of kidnappings and forceful recruitment also of middle-class women. The abductors could have been neighbours and people disguised as helpers of women in need, or simply deceivers who recruited by providing incorrect descriptions of life in the plantations:

One was told that she would teach, but in fact she had to work as a coolie…. One girl said she had been with her father who had been in disagreement with her husband and was not letting her go back to her in-laws. One day a neighbour of hers announced that a telegram from her husband had come with the message that he was very ill. The neighbour said she would herself take her. She was simple just like all women in India. She left at once without even informing her father and ended up in Fiji…. Another woman told Mister Andrews that she had gone on a pilgrimage to Kashi with her family. In the pushing and shoving she fell behind. A man who saw her weeping said that he would bring her back to her family. He took her and she was sent to Fiji. ⁷

Nandrani Nehru showed full empathy for innocent women who had been deceived and abducted. She also described the procedures around the signing of the labour contract as heinous and a step into slavery:

We women all know the normal procedures of employment. A potential employee comes to you, you settle the wage, if he agrees you will keep him. He will be employed as long as he wishes. He may quit whenever he wishes. This agreement is what is called employment. If he does not have the right to terminate the employment and if the employer has the right to make use of him as much as he wishes, like an ox made to work night and day, can this then be called employment? No, this must be called slavery. This is exactly what is happening to our brothers and sisters.

Savitri Devi, another speaker at the conference, focused on the everyday realities of Indian women and men in plantation colonies. Like Nandrani Nehru, Savitri Devi narrated how female and male indentured migrants were deceived into labour contracts and exploited as plantation workers. She appealed to her fellow sisters to follow the example of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his wife Kasturba to educate women in their vicinities about the pitfalls of indentured labour emigration such as the deceitful practices of recruiters and the harsh working conditions awaiting them in plantation colonies (quoted in R. Nehru [1917a, p. 116]).

The new widespread concern regarding diasporic labour might have been a very immediate response to the abduction of a middle-class woman by a recruiter as well as to the realisation that high-caste and upper-class women also migrated to the plantation colonies either on their own or with their families. There were in fact various categories of women who migrated to the plantation colonies and not all necessarily signed a labour contract (Carter, 1994, p. 3). ⁸ The announcement of the viceroy to place more emphasis on the domestic value of women migrants as homemakers in the plantation colonies and, thus, to increase their shipments in order to balance the unequal sex ratio, was rejected by the Allahabad women. In her opposition to increase the number of women in the plantation colonies, Nandrani Nehru also voiced her concern about the repercussions on the honour of Indian women back in India:

Our Governor-General has said that more women will be sent in order to avoid such problems. I do not accept this proposal under any circumstances. An Indian woman would never leave if she were not deceived or taken by force. I politely ask the Governor-General that he not do this because doing so will give the aforementioned recruiters even more opportunities for deceit. I request that our honour be preserved, not the creation of even more opportunities to take it.

It is clear from this passage that Nandrani Nehru did not want to upset the rhetoric of indenture being a forced labour system. ⁹ Her concern was also a reaction to an open letter and various essays of Andrews, one of the leading inquisitors into indentured labour practices from 1915 onwards, calling upon ‘the women of Hindustan’ to act on behalf of their sisters in the colonies. ¹⁰

The Allahabad women were well aware that female indentured labourers were exploited in the capitalist production scheme of the plantation economy. They demanded better working conditions for plantation workers and also critically engaged with the lack of educational and public health institutions in the plantation colonies as well as with the disenfranchisement of Indians in Fiji. The dominating idiom of the speeches, however, centred on saving women’s and the nation’s honour. This could only happen if labourers, women in particular, were no longer sent to the plantation colonies, and most of the speakers consequently ended their speeches with the call to cease the shipments.

At the conference, signatures for the petition to the viceroy were collected and a call was issued to campaign against indentured labour in local villages. How many readers followed this call was not reported in subsequent issues of Stri Darpan. Stepping out of the protected private sphere into a gendered political public sphere was an important move for north Indian women, as pointed out by Svarup Kumari Nehru. Moving into the villages would have been daunting for elite and middle-class women bound by notions of respectability. Yet, such a move into the rural areas, as it was also sanctioned by Gandhi and modelled by Kasturba Gandhi, was not unlikely in this particular political era.

A Question of National Honour

In a time and atmosphere incited by nationalist debates on regulating the domestic sphere and upper-middle-class women’s roles and responsibilities therein (Banerjee, 2004; Chakrabarty, 1994; Sangari, 1999), concerns over women’s respectability ineluctably also infused the debates on indenture. Integral therein was woman’s honour in the plantation colony, which was threatened by men who could be relatives, strangers or overseers in the plantation fields. In a self-reflexive move by Indian middle-class society, the sexual exploitation of female indentured labourers was seen to threaten the honour of women back in India, and with it the honour of the nation as a whole. The line drawn between the images of the female plantation worker as victim and as one who was complicit in her own sexual and moral degradation was blurred. The theme of unrestrained immorality was prevalent in debates in the colonial public sphere (Faruqee, 1996) and was also a popular theme in women’s periodicals of the time. A report circulated in the Indian vernacular and English media in 1913 was the story of Kunti, an indentured labourer in Fiji, who had been sexually harassed by her overseer while weeding an isolated banana patch. She freed herself, jumped into a river and was saved. This story immensely stirred the emotions of Indians in British India and forced several investigations of the case by the colonial government (Lal, 1989, p. 164). In the press, Kunti’s courage to speak out was applauded and she was added to the list of honourable and brave ladies in Indian history (Lal, 1989, p. 163). There were others, however, for whom Kunti represented the morally unrestrained, low-caste Chamar woman who was partly responsible for what had happened to her. Kunti’s alleged immorality threatened Indian women who were involved in the ensuing debates. Was Kunti’s nature amorous and quarrelsome, as reports had suggested or was she the victim of systemic oppression? Had she concocted the incident as the British tried to prove, or was she a true victim? The case, lucidly analysed by Brij Lal (1989), is symptomatic of the complexity of the debate and its Trojan-horse character: the victim, who was also perpetrator, aroused in the elite and middle-class woman in India both compassion and fear.

Concern for the female labourers’ sexual exploitation, that of prostitutes in particular, was expressed by nationalists and women’s organisations in Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Godhra, Surat and Amraoti (Reddock, 1985, pp. 82, 86). Their worry that the alleged immoral actions of women in the plantation colonies blemished the image of India in the world and particularly that of Indian women was shared by the women in Allahabad. Nandrani Nehru’s incisiveness regarding the need to differentiate between individual and systemic exploitation made her deplore the prevailing image of the sexually lax female indentured labourer, before she absolved her and blamed men for the loss of honour amongst women:

Over here, Indian women mind if any man other than her husband stares at them. Over there, they change their husband one after the other. One man regretted in front of Mr. Andrews that our women are extremely shameless for changing their husbands as they do their clothes. My question is whether these poor and ignorant women are even at fault? They are first deceived, then taken away and transported like cattle. Men and women together are loaded. There is no distinction between the good and bad, gentle and wicked. Eating, drinking, sleeping, waking up, standing and sitting—all in the same spot for a long period of time. And that also in the company of people who consider it a game to dishonour women. What else can happen under such circumstances? First you dishonour them and then accuse them of being morally lax. What kind of justice is that?

Furthermore, choice was not a factor in labour migration. Women, according to Nandrani Nehru, never migrated voluntarily; ¹¹ they were either deceived or succumbed to social pressure:

Some people wonder why we should stop those who go voluntarily. I have said before that this is a matter of deception…. There only needs to be a quarrel in the house or greed of money and there arises the opportunity for the recruiters. There only needs to be increased anger or greed for jewelry and she will run away. Introduced to the boss, she will sign or apply her thumbprint on to a paper that I will call a contract into slavery and away she goes. She has sold her honour.

At the heart of Nehru’s argument lies the vulnerability, specific to female indentured labourers, to sexual exploitation at the hands of co-workers and superiors; this was also foregrounded in public debates to emphasise how the honour of Indian women and consequently the Indian nation was put at risk. When women signed the labour contract, they sold off not only their individual honour, but also that of the nation, so the reasoning went.

In the indenture debates featured in Stri Darpan, two contracts became metonymic for the loss of honour: the labour contract into indenture and the marriage contract that was in force in plantation colonies such as Fiji. Nandrani Nehru deplored that the practice of registration of marriage at the immigration department of plantation colonies had replaced the customary Hindu and Muslim weddings, which were not even recognised in the plantation colonies. Legal marriages, she further held, allowed for divorce (the so-called memorandum of agreement for separation that was in place in Fiji), and that, according to her, was the root of moral degradation (N. Nehru, 1917, p. 157). While she also acknowledged laws favourable to women, her mode of reasoning was similar to that of Andrews, who was straightforward on the matter of sex trafficking. He identified the sex ratio of 1:3 between female and male labourers as the primary cause for the abominable sexual exploitation of women by their fathers, husbands, other superiors and overseers on the plantations. He also drew connections between jealousy resulting from illicit relationships and the high rates of suicide and murder amongst the Indian indentured community in Fiji. Andrews and Pearson (1917, p. 34) regretted that the people in the plantation colonies had forgotten about the supposed sanctity of marriage. In Stri Darpan, Andrews (1917, p. 104) held that ‘somebody compared the condition of coolies in Fiji with the morals of poultry. This comparison is drawn correctly and it pierces the heart’. Andrews and Nehru both absolved the labourers of allegations of immorality, the threat for middle-class women’s honour, however, remained imminent.

The colonial discourse on indenture displayed diverse attempts to control the supposedly threatened morality of the labourers. Faruqee (1996, p. 62) observes aptly,

Contradicting the moralistic rhetoric of colonial officials and observers, the indentured labour system engendered the exploitation of and violence against Indian indentured labourers, especially women, by reinstituting many of the worst aspects of slavery. In order to reconcile the contradiction between its moralistic rhetoric and the reality on the estates, the colonial discourse sought to implicate, and consequently control, the morality of the ‘coolie’ woman.

Also staying within the boundaries of colonial civilising discourse, Gandhi’s initial motivation to garner support amongst Indian nationalists and protest the indenture practices of the colonial government focused precisely on the alleged moral and sexual degradation of lower-class female labourers (Tambe, 2009, p. 32). From the second half of the 19th century, there was pressure on the colonial government to control the morality of ‘coolies’ by balancing the disproportional sex ratio of male to female labourers, decreasing the crimes committed by coolies and tackling the sexual exploitation of coolie women by bettering their living and working conditions. The Allahabad women operated within the colonial civilising discourse by pointing to the negative image that the category of the coolie had on their lives. Their concern increasingly revolved around the labour contract, the signature on which bore consequences not only for the individual who signed it, but also for the nation at large. Speaking at the Prayag Mahila Samiti conference, Begam Sahab was particularly concerned about the poor reputation of Indians overseas and thus inevitably spoke about class concerns when addressing issues of national honour and self-respect. She did not want ‘coolies’ to stand as proxy for Indians. Rameshwari Nehru summarised her speech and concluded with a call for national awakening:

Begam Sahab said in her speech that the residents of the colonies call our brothers and sisters coolies—regardless of whether they are labour migrants or just travelers—as if our entire nation, Hindu or Muslim alike, are the country’s coolies. When the colonies were in need, we offered people with the consequence that now we are being degraded to the status of coolies regardless of how noble and rich we may be. My dear sisters please ask yourselves carefully whether God the Almighty has created us Indians for the sole purpose of lackeying for the good of other countries. Is there no capacity for progress left in our country? Can we not make more out of this dear India that is called the jewel of the world? No, we certainly can, but only if we unite.

Indian nationalists had subverted the civilising discourse on the alleged immorality of coolie women by highlighting the divergence of the British imperial mission when it came to the treatment of indentured labourers, thereby questioning the legitimacy of colonial rule in British India (Faruqee, 1996, p. 74). Moreover, the Allahabad women worried equally about their own (women’s) honour and that of Indians generally in British India when addressing the working and living conditions of indentured labourers. Ending her speech with a call for self-respect and mobilisation, Begam Sahab addressed women in a manner that Andrews, too, had chosen in his speech delivered in Allahabad. He had also made the plight of people living under indenture an immediate concern of Indian women. He also reached out to them by emphasising motherhood as shared experience between women in the plantation colonies and those in Allahabad:

In this far away country, they came to see me daily and asked for relief of their plight. Their eyes were filled with tears when they showed me their small children who lived in stench and deplorable conditions. If we do not rise up against this condition it is possible that this shame and sorrow continues and that more children will be born under these conditions.

The children Andrews spoke of were projected as children of the Indian nation; hence the nation’s responsibility towards them, the future citizens. In a note to Andrews’ speech, Rameshwari Nehru joined his call directed at women to publicly speak out against the recruitment of labourers and respond to the indentured women’s cries for help:

Can we people remain silent upon hearing that they [the recruiters] deceive our sisters and take them away and that every woman has to live with up to four husbands and that also not one after the other, but all at the same time? No, never will we remain silent. Awaken, sisters, look at our countrymen who deceive our simple sisters and force them into misconduct. It is said that all Indian women are morally lax. There is no place for this defamation! It is our work to remove this stain from us. Until it is not washed off, we will not be able to rest.

Apart from appeals directed towards the political awakening of women, their middle-class domestic role always remaining central and untouched, calls were also made to men appealing to their sense of national honour. With a woman’s honour, Nandrani Nehru claimed, stands and falls man’s honour; thus, it becomes man’s duty to defend woman. Not surprisingly, considering the circumstances of women’s condition in the United Provinces of the early 20th century, the nationalist movement is relocated into the home:

Sisters, arise! Keep reminding your men that we are severely being dishonoured. It is their highest duty that they prevent any dishonour. A mark of disgrace is upon us. It is their duty to wash it off. If you ever meet anybody, make this bad practice known and teach others to do the same in this manner. Let us see how menfolk will take into consideration the dishonouring of their sisters once the movement breaks out in the homes!

We have seen before how speakers at the conference used the language of victimisation to evoke the importance of maintaining national honour and self-respect amongst the women of Allahabad. Like Andrews, they emphasised the sexual exploitation of the labourers and the implications of this for Indian women’s collective honour. They used fictive female kin terms, but, more importantly, they claimed to be speaking as informed female citizens on behalf of the Indian nation, and not solely on behalf of elite Indian women.

Conclusion

Svarup Kumari Nehru had asked: what good could result from the conference on indenture organised by the Prayag Mahila Samiti discussing a theme far removed from the lives of women in Allahabad? The media of the time had hailed the conference as a success as it had demonstrated that women were capable of acting as informed and involved citizens in the public sphere. The debate on indenture held at the Prayag Mahila Samiti and the publication of the proceedings thereof in Stri Darpan disrupts preconceptions about elite Indian women’s political interventions. At this distance in time we could attempt to assess the nature of their intervention.

Indian women’s emergence on the political scene is generally understood in relation to the anti-colonial and nationalist struggle (Agnew, 1979; Basu, 1976; Basu and Ray, 1990; Ray, 1995; Sharma, 1981). In this particular campaign, women entered the world of mainstream politics not as ‘threatening feminists’ but ‘devout’ nationalists. Putting the nationalist cause first and supporting the male-defined nationalist agenda might have galvanised the women of Allahabad into political awareness. From such a perspective their campaign may be termed ‘gendered nationalist’, geared towards displaying the vested political interest of Indian women. As Antoinette Burton (1992, p. 152) reminds her fellow historians, ‘feminism(s) are and always will be as much quests for power as they are battles for rights.’ Thus, we may assume that a reasonable number of Indian women were seeking political recognition when speaking on behalf of plantation workers. In Stri Darpan, the temporary abolition of the practice in 1917 was discussed in the idiom of victory for the women who had fought on behalf of the plantation workers and only secondarily as a victory for the workers themselves. I therefore read the issue of indentured labour also as an enabling discourse for women seeking a political role. By espousing the cause of Indian workers in plantations, Indian women displayed a sense of responsibility and an awareness of political opportunity: to speak for their own oppressed. ¹²

Women’s strategic use and appropriation of the plight of plantation labour recalls the aims of many 19th century British feminists who, as ‘maternal imperialists’ (Ramusack, 1992, p. 119) were often trying to gain political ground in their own country. As Burton (1992, p. 152) analyses,

British feminists’ strategic use of the ‘Indian woman’ will no doubt be considered by some to have borne little relation to their real attitudes towards ‘real’ Indian women. The very important distinctions between rhetoric and practice, between tactical expedience and personal philosophies are certainly matters for future consideration. In a crucial sense, British feminists of the period were trapped within an imperial discourse they did not create and perhaps which they could not escape.

Arguably, the elite Indian women’s sense of responsibility towards oppressed and degraded fellow Indians in plantations, conjuring up the idiom of the ‘burden’ to help, resembled Burton’s description of British feminists who were concerned with the condition of Indian women. In her analysis of the Contagious Disease Acts of the late 19th century, Burton paid special attention to the role of Josephine Butler, who in her campaigns against the Acts in India (1886–1915), spoke of Indian women as her ‘Indian fellow subjects’ (Burton, 1992, p. 142). Butler’s memorandum presented to the government of India in 1888 offers parallels to Nandrani’s speech: both argued that political stability was dependent on the condition of female subjects, in the case of Butler, Indian prostitutes, and in the case of Nehru, Indian indentured labourers. While femaleness transcended national and racial barriers among British feminists, femaleness transcended barriers in the Indian case by virtue of imagined citizenship. Plantation labourers were conceptualised as liminal citizens. Sisterhood remained an important invocation, but not the only one since categories of belonging were too diverse to be limited to a single attribute.

The elite Indian women’s concern for an unfortunate subaltern group of society did not feature race as a defining category to the extent that it did in the relationship between British and Indian women; instead there were other hierarchical categories such as caste and class that crystallised as a vantage point for the appropriation of the female indentured labourer by elite Indian women. More importantly, the bond of imagined citizenship mitigated differences rooted in race, gender, caste and class.

As women’s respectability featured as a central motif in the articles in women’s periodicals of the early 20th century (Orsini, 1999), it was not unusual that women’s honour was described as jeopardised. Physical threat, izzat lena (literally, the taking of honour), could emerge from within and outside a woman’s family. Fiction published in women’s periodicals even described the private sphere as a dangerous one (Nijhawan, 2012, p. 146). Similarly, the female plantation worker faced physical threat from men both at home and the workplace. At once victim and offender against respectability, she could be threatening to Indian women’s collective honour. Bearing this in mind, class was no longer the determining factor—what was at stake was national honour.

Clare Midgley (1992, 1993), who has revisited the participatory role of women in the British anti-slavery movement, describes her research as disruptive and informative and has articulated the need ‘to rewrite existing general histories of anti-slavery, and to reconstruct the frameworks upon which they rest’ (Midgley, 1992, p. 4). I concur: a central aim of writing women’s history is not solely that of adding examples of women’s participation in the public sphere, but of acknowledging the socio-political implications of this involvement. After all, the anti-slavery movement in Britain was central to the political reforms of the turn of the century (Midgley, 1992, p. 5), and the campaign against indentured labour emigration was important in the political self-representation of Indian nationalists. While this article is written as a corrective to the Indian women’s movement and its first women’s delegation, as well as an addition to the history of the nationalist campaigns against indentured labour emigration, the vernacular sources alone have allowed me to make such a claim. Midgley, in her work, likewise draws on neglected sources of local organisations and individual women activists and writers (in her case pamphlets of local ladies’ anti-slavery associations, memoirs and works of fiction written by women), to also come to the conclusion that a reconsideration of what constitutes an archive and its ensuing research breaks with the classification of women as puppets of male abolitionists. By tracing the distinctive roles of women activists and showing how they developed specific female approaches and perspectives with regard to anti-slavery policies and ideology, Midgley (1992, pp. 3–4) summarises:

Through piecing together information from such sources, it becomes clear that women, despite their exclusion from positions of formal power in the national anti-slavery movement in Britain, were an integral part of that movement and played distinctive and at times leading roles in the successive stages of the anti-slavery campaign.

I have tried to show with my analysis of vernacular publications that the Prayag Mahila Samiti’s involvement in the abolitionist campaign and the subsequent publication of its conference proceedings in Stri Darpan deserves a closer look for a better understanding of Indian feminism, nationalism and indentured labour. Engaging with the diasporic plantation worker enabled women to become active in politics before agitational non-cooperation politics took sway and drew an even larger number of women into the struggle. ¹³ Certainly, the possibility to enter politics through an issue that did not attack patriarchy, but rather perpetuated notions of women’s honour and purity, making ‘woman’ the symbol of national honour, prodded women activists. Important to note, though, is the feminist component in these debates that also played into debates on franchise and civil rights, debates which are typically branded as being social feminist (Forbes, 1998, p. 93).

In using idioms of national honour, sisterhood and patriotism, the women of Allahabad petitioned the viceroy. These idioms remind us of British suffragist strategies with regard to their particular feminist agenda. As commented upon by Geraldine Forbes (1998, p. 120):

British women took up the cause of Indian women as part of their own feminist agenda but with a firm belief in the efficacy and value of British rule. They too were petitioners on behalf of Indian women. They genuinely wanted rights for Indian women but they also wanted credit for extending Britain’s civilising mission. When all was said and done, they believed British rule served the interests of Indian women.

The women in Allahabad sought credit for supporting the nationalist cause. They had also embarked on their own civilising mission, this time against colonial practices of indenture and Indian complicity. When all was said and done—to rephrase it in Forbes’ words—they believed Indian women served the interests of diasporic Indian citizens, all Indian women and Indian nationalists.