History

Preliminaries: The Problem with 'Master' Paradigms Transitional moments in history have typically been associated with 'events', understood initially as political: new dynasties, wars, and such moments shaping 'history' in the rise-and-fall mode of marking the passage of time. In India, this periodisation of history led to outlining the rise and the decline of the Magadhan Empire, or the decline of the Mughal Empire, as if there is, or can be, an inherent stability to political power. As historians, we know that power and control over resources are inherently unstable, always challenged and rearticulated. This mode of writing history has been particularly disastrous for women in the writing of Indian history since the nineteenth century, as the rise-and-fall thesis came to rest on the fall of the 'Hindu' woman's status from her earlier glorious position in the 'ancient' and imagined past, to one of degradation in the 'barbaric' medieval times under Muslim rule, to regeneration of the Indian people under the impetus of the social reform movement, led of course by male social reformers. Nationalist history was largely enmeshed in either explaining the decline of dynasties, or the decline of culture with serious implications for gender. Later, especially since the mid twentieth century, even as the rise-and-fall thesis was displaced, what came to dominate the historical imagination was the modes-of-production thesis of history, marking the inevitable progress of history as the history of social formations. Within this admittedly broader framework as well, the messiness of history—the unasked questions, the complexities of history, were contained within the sweep of social and economic

This article examines the linkages between women's education and women's development as these have been understood and forged by feminists. The rhetoric of empowerment is examined to see what is included among its indices. The article explores questions about the goals of women's education as understood by policy makers and educa-tionists. These are examined in relation to the feminist commitment to women's right to autonomy, to fulfilling their own potential as human beings, to thinking for themselves and to changing the structural conditions that obstruct their autonomy. I argue that education, unless con-ceptualised in the ways in which Jotiba Phule and Paulo Freire did—as a traitiya ratna, or a third eye that opens up a way of understanding the world, and as a pedagogy of the oppressed, respectively—is otherwise of little use to women, as it is for all those outside the field of power.

Looking back to 1984 what is frightening is the recognition that the survivors can return to a semblance of normalcy and everyday patterns of living when the generalised sense of fear has been transferred upon another community: Now it is the Muslims who live in anguish and anger, subject to everyday forms of humiliation in normal times and fear for their lives during the riots.

This paper examines widowhood within the larger structure of relations, material and ideological. Distinctive cultural codes form the basis for caste hierarchy and control of female sexuality with permanent enforced widowhood at the apex is the index of high rank. Conversely, widow re-marriage is not only an ideological rationale for low caste rank but provides a demographic basis for production relations. A single caste framework functioning both at the level of ideology and material arrangements requires distinctive patriarchal arrangements and cultural codes among the hierarchy of castes to reproduce the structure of production.

Towards the late 1980s the stage was set for a conflation of an ongoing social and political crisis of a high order with the surfacing of middle class insecurities about the state of 'their' nation and of 'their' hegemonic position within it. This was the background to a rightward shift of politics, the rise of a fascist hindutva brigade and a shift of upper caste, middle class allegiance to Hindu majoritarian ideological and political formations. The ideological context for this shift was a crisis of the legitimacy of the state. One way of dealing with the crisis is to 're' construct the nation's 'glorious' past. And this is being done today not through powerful writing but through the power of the visual medium, the cinema and the television. It was a fairly conscious move by the state to telecast religious mega serials, 'Ramayana' and 'Mahabharata'. 'Chanakya' took off on the theme of a fragmented nation, carrying the mythological tradition forward in a more coherent way emphasising a joint 'xenophobia' against the enemy within. Although 'Chanakya's appeal was limited to an upper caste elite, it was part of a larger process in which a brahmanic Hindu view of history and culture was consolidated along with a rightward shift in politics.

Sociological analyses of stratification in India have in recent years raised new issues relating to the caste system, particularly its existence at the level of the infrastructure. But in the existing state of knowledge the issue of whether caste is infrastructure or superstructure cannot be subjected to a meaningful analysis because of the inadequacies of the data used by scholars who have relied primarily on secondary sources. Before one can argue that caste constituted infrastructure, or was part of the superstructure, we need to have a full-fledged diachronic study of caste which combines Indology with history and anthropology: there is need for both chronological clarity and the rigorous use of sources. There is also a need to show the relation between caste categories and other social and economic categories over time. This paper intervenes in the discussion by bringing in the evidence of Buddhist literature and the earliest group of inscriptions available for research, both of which have been totally ignored by scholars writing on caste. This evidence is in our opinion the most reliable set of sources for an empirical analysis of social and economic categories in ancient India.

Elections have become an increasingly central element in the conjunctures which have produced communal riots. In Khurja in 1990-91, tension and violence mattered much more to Hindu communal parties than to other national political parties who have also been responsible for using them for electoral gain. Given the long-term strategy of the BJP to capture power at the centre, the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign alone was insufficient: though it could demonstrate that Hindu sentiments had not been 'respected' by the state, it could not establish that Hindus were physically endangered. Therefore while the campaign organised Hindu consciousness and 'ideological' needs around a central symbol and a projected act of violence, the accompanying riots tried to orchestrate the need for 'protecting' and 'preserving' Hindu interests against the projected threat from Muslims.

Women, like other subordinate groups in society are among the muted or even silent voices of history. They have been excluded both as actors and as authors from featuring in history as they should and remain one of its most neglected subjects. The exercise of rewriting the past has been confined to invisibilising women: their presence has only been negatively registered, mainly through a vast silence. However; it is necessary to draw attention to the fact that while in general women have been invisible in historical writing this invisibility varies vastly over time and space according to differences in social and cultural practices. The Indian situation represents an example of the relative visibility of women in historical writing particularly with regard to 'ancient' India wherein historians created a certain space for women in the reconstruction of the past, but the space conceded to them existed only within clearly defined parameters as this review will show. In this paper we undertake, first, a broadly representative rather than comprehensive historiographical survey of studies on women in early India. The survey does not concentrate on factual details, important though these may be, but on the preconceived notions or assumptions which may have determined the kinds of facts considered historically relevant. Second, attention is paid to the kinds of explanations offered for changes in women's status. And finally we examine possible alternatives.