Women in Phule-Ambedkarite Ideology and its Relevance to

Contemporary India

Written by Hemangi Kadlak Published on 13 December 2018

Hemangi Kadlak

This is a transcript of speech given at Bangalore.

Today, I am going to talk about ‘Women in Phule-Ambedkarite

ideology and its relevance to contemporary India’, from Buddha
to Babasaheb and after. As male and female are biologically
different and they are complementary to each other, both are
very important for reproducing and sustaining society. When a
male or a female child is born they are equal in their physical
dependence, capacities, needs, life cycle, movements, etc., but
gender makes them different from each other. Gender is a
sociological term, to which socio-cultural factors are attached.
The process of socialisation for the female and male child differs
in many ways. The most apparent form of difference is seen in
the allotment of work, dressing style and expected behaviours.
In this paper I will first talk about the times in our history where women were perceived and treated as
capable and equal partners. I shall later talk about the position of women in contemporary society..

Buddha allowed women to enter into the Sangha and they could attain enlightenment by their own
capabilities and potential. An example is Gargi, a bhikuni who attained Arhanthood in her lifetime.
Buddha saw a woman as a human being first, without any attachment to the notion of gender. Buddha
saw a woman as a capable, equal, complementary natural counterpart to the male.

Samrat Ashok sent his daughter Sanghamitra and his son Mahendra to Srilanka to spread Buddhism. He
saw them as capable, equal and separate individuals. He considered both his children as equal and
complementary to each other despite their biological differences.

There was Jijau and Shivaji Maharaj. Jijau was Shivaji’s mother, but more than that she was a guru
(teacher) to him. She inspired him by her interactions with him and through her teachings to think like a
King and hence from his childhood he aspired to be a leader. She introduced him to the idea of ‘Swaraj’
while he was still a child. His success as a king can be largely attributed to Jijau.

Jyotiba Phule and Savitri Mai Phule were an ideal couple in many ways. They had mutual understanding,
shared goals, and had common thinking and complementary work styles. We see them as two different,
capable, potential individuals irrespective of their biological differences. They both fought for women's
rights such as education for women, child marriage problem, and widow remarriage. Savitri Mai was the
first Indian woman teacher.

Birsa Munda fought for women’s dignity and self-respect. He specifically fought for the rights of tribal
women in Jharkhand. During his time tribal women were not allowed to wear blouses and he fought for
it.

Periyar, the social reformer, introduced the concept of ‘self-respect marriages’ which allowed women to
give up some of the traditional customs like wearing a mangalsutra at the time of marriage or choosing
how to dress themselves. He also supported the participation of women in the military. /
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar fought for women’s rights, security, dignity and self-respect and his efforts
resulted in the Hindu Code bill which among other things, for the first time, gave women equal rights
over their parents’ property. He believed that the relationship between husband and wife should be one
of closest friends.

In our society we mostly come across two categories of people. Those who don’t believe that women are
and can be capable and equal partners and those purport to follow this belief but are unable to put it in
practice. So what we face today in society is that women are not considered equal and capable partners
even though you and I believe in that idea. We have instances in our history, as I mentioned earlier,
where our forefathers were pro-women or saw women as capable, full of potential, and equal individuals
when compared to their male counterparts. But in parallel we also see discriminations, atrocities
committed against women. What are we to do? I put this question out to you. I feel we need to talk on
these issues seriously in such conferences. We need to chalk out our agendas, plans, strategies as to
how we can contribute towards propagating this ideology and minimising discrimination and atrocities on
women. I feel that we must have a two-fold plan. We have to empower women, make them stronger
educationally, financially, mentally, emotionally, educate them about their rights, teach them to oppose
discrimination, and to fight against atrocities committed on them. At the same time we need to work to
change the mindset of people, to make them more receptive, accommodative, accepting women in a
different light than they have seen thus far so that women may feel secure in this new role. For the
latter, we have to educate, sensitize both men and women in our society. We have to slowly but surely
work towards eliminating the gender gap.

Unfortunately, gender is not the only factor responsible for women being victimised by society, facing
atrocities, being discriminated against. Women are victimized in issues of caste, class, region and
religion. History says that illiteracy, less education, child marriage placed restrictions on women; these
problems were also there among upper varnas but upper varnas have now improved their position in
these issues. But data on pre-birth sex determination, female sex abortion shows these issues to be
more prevalent in upper class, educated and in urban regions. If you see the present scenario in the
upper varnas, that is Brahmin women, they are on the top and in a dominant position in most of the
working places compared to other castes and varnas. This is because they got the cultural capital from
their past generations. But if you see history carefully these women were not allowed to study or did not
have the same rights as their men did. Then how did this happen? Because of social reform movements
from lower varnas/castes the women from the upper varnas got benefited.

Irrespective of that, together we have to work on the implementation part. If we want to transform our
society we will have to change the culture of our society. If we take our forefathers example they first
tried to change the existing mind-set, rules, regulations, beliefs, by believing that people are equal
irrespective of caste, class, religion, region and gender. We need to transform the existing established
institutions of the society that are carriers of patriarchy like family and marriage institutions. These are
very important institutions which carry patriarchy from generation to generation and surprising thing is
that nobody questions them. Nowadays inter-caste or inter-religion marriages are more common but the
position of women in these marriages has not changed, irrespective of their education, class, caste, and
region. In a typical family, where there is a husband, wife, and their children, if we ask who is the head
of the family the answer is almost always - the husband.

After marriage a woman goes to her husband’s house. I consider this act a displacement of the woman.
People who are displaced cannot really do what they are capable of doing. It takes time for them to
resettle in the new environment and reestablish themselves in all aspects--environmentally, financially,
mentally, and emotionally. Women have to go through this process and the feeling of detachment from
the family for herself and from her parental home. In fact a woman is called “paraya dhan”. This system
displaces her from her own parents’ house where she can live freely with her close ones. Furthermore
she has to change her surname. Her children carry their father’s name and title. Such established
institutions are strategically designed to limit the progress of the woman and make the man superior to
the woman or to keep the woman and her next generation under the man’s control whether she is
educated, earning good salary, any caste, class or region. This is a sign of maintaining patriarchy. As she/
is considered “paraya dhan”, even if she gets education or earns good salary she still has less standing
in her own family because she doesn’t carry their family name. We will have to change this status quo
and it is in our hands. We can show the changes when we can distinguish ourselves from the existing
norms. Admittedly, cultural change is very difficult to see as it is a very slow process and we have to
start now – with ourselves.

If we look at our current political platform - from Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Sheila
Dixit, to Jayalalithaa - all these women held top political posts in our country and the interesting fact is
that they are all either single, widowed or unmarried women. However, men in similar positions are
almost all men with families. What should we infer from this? Is it that for women to pursue higher,
focused careers they have to be either unmarried, separated from their husbands, or widowed? That is
definitely not what we want for our future generation of women to believe. We need to change this
scenario. Our goal is to sensitise both men and women to see women as equal, capable, partners in our
society. Thank you.

I have lot more things to say but because of limited time I could touch upon those issues which I felt
have always been neglected but we see this picture in the society irrespective of class, caste, and
region.

~~~

Hemangi Kadlak works as Assistant Professor at Amity University, Mumbai. She is the founder member
of InfinIdea Foundation and an active member of the Phule-Ambedkarite movement.