Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Once India achieved independence, the Constituent Assembly of India passed a number of laws supporting basic rights for women. On paper, modernity was achieved, but the immediate concerns were not constitutional proposals but hard realities. Partition and communal violence reached ferocious levels, resulting in the world's largest migration. Women and children often bore the brunt of hardship, including abduction of 80,000 to 150,000 women. By 1957 the two states, as stand-in patriarchs, had “recovered” over 30,000 women. For many, it was indeed a case of getting out of a traumatic experience. But others had adjusted to the situation, and the recovery in turn created a trauma. Middle-class and upper-class women and the mainstream liberal organizations like the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) were drawn into a share of the administrative work by the government. Since the 1930s the women's movements had sought to pass a Hindu Code Bill, aimed at abolition of polygamy, equality in the right to divorce of men and women, raising the age of consent and marriage, and giving women the right to maintain an inheritance of family property. This was sharply challenged by Hindu communal and right-wing nationalist forces, including President Rajendra Prasad and Home Minister Ballavbhai Patel. The comprehensive package for which the women had fought was dropped, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar , the ... log in or subscribe to read full text