Gendering the Nation: Women, Law, and Political Rights in Colonial India

Abstract

This panel explores the legal and ideological entanglements through which women’s rights were shaped in colonial India during the 19th and 20th centuries. This period witnessed significant legal and social transformations in colonial settings, revealing how questions of gender and citizenship were negotiated under imperial rule. By examining women’s legal struggles within the broader context of colonial governance, nationalist movements, and global feminist ideas, the panel demonstrates that the development of women’s rights in India was marked by conflict, resistance, and strategic negotiation. Colonial legal changes—such as the abolition of sati (1829), the Widow Remarriage Act (1856), the Age of Consent Act (1891), and the franchise reforms under the Government of India Acts (1919 and 1935)—were presented as “civilizing measures” intended to protect women while reinforcing the empire’s moral authority. Yet these reforms often upheld patriarchal control, viewing women primarily as dependents or moral subjects rather than as autonomous citizens. The colonial government’s selective approach to women’s legal reform revealed its struggle to balance modernizing rhetoric with the imperative to maintain local power structures and imperial order. Simultaneously, Indian women reformers and organizations such as the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and the Women’s Indian Association (WIA), along with leaders like Sarojini Naidu, Herabai Tata, and Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz, articulated feminist demands grounded in both global discourses of equality and local reform traditions. They connected women’s rights to the broader struggle for national independence, asserting that women’s emancipation was essential to the legitimacy of the freedom movement. However, their activism often unfolded within nationalist frameworks that prioritized independence over gender equality. The pursuit of legal equality, therefore, required balancing imperial dominance, nationalist pragmatism, and feminist aspiration. The panel examines the circulation of statutes, petitions, and reformist ideas across imperial spaces, tracing how legal concepts traveled, were reinterpreted, and returned in altered forms. Rather than viewing colonial reforms as mere transplants of English law or as purely indigenous achievements, the panel interprets them as hybrid outcomes forged through negotiation among Indian women reformers, nationalists, evangelical reformers, and colonial administrators—all of whom claimed authority over the “woman question.” Figures such as Pandita Ramabai, Sarojini Naidu, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain emerge not merely as recipients of legal modernity but as active agents who redefined its meanings. Drawing on feminist jurisprudence, legal history, and postcolonial critique, the panel traces how British debates on morality, sexuality, and domesticity shaped colonial governance, and how Indian reformers adapted or resisted these ideas. The panel investigates how colonial law both defined and constrained women’s rights in India, and how reformers and women’s organizations challenged these imperial frameworks through activism and legal engagement. It also explores the paradoxes within the nationalist movement, which simultaneously advanced and restricted women’s rights. Collectively, the papers highlight that women’s citizenship in modern India emerged from negotiations shaped by the intersecting forces of empire, feminism, and nationalism.

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Negotiating Vote: Women Suffrage in Colonial India	View Paper Details
The Nation’s Daughters: Gendered Emancipation and Legal Symbolism in India’s Independence	View Paper Details
Women, work and the All-India Women’s Conference, 1930-1950	View Paper Details
Sacred Laws, Civil Wrongs: Gender and the Raj’s Reframing of Minority Women’s Rights in Colonial India	View Paper Details