Maharanis by Lucy Moore

Author:Lucy Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

8

While Indira took up the reins of government in Cooch Behar, Chimnabai continued her campaign to help emancipate India’s women. ‘If only the right spirit could stir India’s women today,’ she sighed to Miss Tottenham, echoing Sunity Devi’s sentiments, ‘what wonderful things could happen.’

The women’s movement had come a long way since the early days of activism in Bengal when Sunity Devi and Chimnabai first met. Its leaders were still, by necessity, from privileged backgrounds but its organization and aims were vastly more sophisticated. The Women’s Indian Association, linked to the suffragettes in Britain, was founded in 1917 and demanded equal rights for the first time, and the National Council of Women in India, a philanthropic group whose membership was drawn from the privileged elite of Indian women, was set up in 1925. In 1926, Chimnabai accepted its presidency and she was also made president in 1928, and again from 1930to 1934 and 1936 to 1937.

In 1927 Sarojini Naidu (now an important member of Congress and one of Gandhi’s early supporters) persuaded Chimnabai to preside over the first All-India Women’s Conference at Poona. ‘No one is better fitted than Her Highness to preside over our deliberations on this occasion,’ said the conference’s opening speaker, introducing Chimnabai and describing her ‘wide experience and enlightened judgement’ and the years in which she and Sayajirao had worked to promote education for women and better the conditions in which they live. Chimnabai, who paid for the publication of the conference’s report, was described by Sarojini as ’the fairy god-mother of that Cinderella of Indian education — the interests of India’s girls‘.

The conference originally intended to discuss improving education for women, but found it could not address this without addressing all the social problems women in India faced. ‘Here, with the rising tide of revival of Indian culture; here, at the beginning of what may be rightly regarded as an Indian renaissance, we are assembled to discuss that which, more than all else, goes to the root of a rebirth of a great people,’ said Chimnabai at the beginning of her speech to the conference. ‘We are assembled to discuss those things which are essential for the education and general well-being of the future mothers of the race.’

For the nation’s good, she continued, women must have healthy souls as well as healthy bodies: they must have all that is implied by the phrase (a favourite of Sayajirao’s) mens sana in corpore sano. The curse of sati was no longer upon them, but child-marriage was still a problem. ‘If we are to have strong and vigorous sons and daughters, we must have strong and mature mothers.’ When child-marriage was eradicated, she believed, education for women would follow.

The greatest evil of all, though, was purdah.

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