Remembering women as the agents of history

Hindustan Times

30-04-2025

Women's History Month came and went in India without much noise. In a nation that prides itself on women-led panchayats, goddesses on currency, and women in uniform, the silence was not just absence — it was telling. Why does Women's History Month remain a footnote in India?
The question is not merely cultural, but structural. In India, history is not just what is remembered — it is also what is not erroneously erased. The absence of a popular commemorative culture around women's contributions is not for lack of material but because memory here still follows the grammar of power — masculine, monocultural and unitary. There are women freedom fighters we forget until a tweet appears from a government handle. Hansa Mehta, whose contributions to both the Indian Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were ground-breaking, barely finds mention in textbooks. Dakshayani Velayudhan — the only Dalit woman in the Constituent Assembly — remains unknown to most. Rani Gaidinliu led armed resistance against the British from the Northeast as a teenager; she has no memorial in the capital. Sucheta Kriplani, who sang patriotic songs in prison and became independent India's first woman chief minister, is a footnote in civics lessons. Tarkeshwari Sinha, among the youngest MPs in the first Lok Sabha and a sharp advocate of socialist reform, rarely features in political discourse today. Beyond politics, other trailblazers too lie buried beneath the weight of selective memory. Anna Chandy, who became India's — and the Commonwealth's — first woman judge in the 1930s, remains absent from mainstream legal histories. Homai Vyarawalla, India's first woman photojournalist, documented the birth of the Republic with a Rolleiflex in hand — yet her name is rarely invoked outside niche retrospectives.
From science to tribal resistance, women have shaped the nation in ways both visible and unseen. And yet, our national calendar remembers dates of battles and laws, but not women who waged them — with pen, protest, policy, and sometimes, pistol. Even in the popular imagination, woman as a historical figure remains trapped in the trifecta of tropes -- mother, martyr, or muse. She earns reverence as the mother of a nation, but rarely respect as its maker, critic, or architect. It's easy to celebrate Kalpana Chawla or Mithali Raj. Their achievements are undeniable, marketable, and largely unthreatening. But we don't quite know what to do with the legacies of women like Phoolan Devi, Bhagwati Devi or Captain Lakshmi Sahgal. We ignore them. Or we retell their stories in ways that blunt their politics and smoothen their jagged truths.
This absence is not accidental but structural — reflecting a deeper discomfort with women as agents of history, not subjects alone. What would it mean to build a museum of Indian women's political history — of manifestos, speeches, arguments, debates, songs, and jail records? A memorial, not just of stone or sculpture, but of struggle and speech. Imagine walking through a hall lined with Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha transcripts of women parliamentarians who reshaped debates with precision and defiance. Imagine rooms that echo with protest songs sung by rural women who rewrote sanskar geets — ritual songs of weddings and festivals — into verses of resistance against the British Raj. Jail letters from the likes of Kalpana Datta. Flyers from anti-Emergency campaigns, handwritten petitions of tribal women demanding forest rights, and campaign audio from panchayat elections.
Such a place would not be an exercise in nostalgia — it would be a blueprint for justice. It would not only commemorate women's roles in building the republic, it would restore them to the centre of our constitutional and cultural imagination. India doesn't need another statue. It needs a structure of memory.
Globally, countries have taken deliberate steps to mark Women's History Month as a cultural intervention. In the US, the National Women's History Museum is federally supported. In Australia and New Zealand, indigenous women's stories are being brought into national memory through memoir, policy, and protest. And yet, India — despite having one of the world's richest and most diverse traditions of women's leadership, imagination, and institution-building — treats its powerful feminine past as peripheral. But it was never marginal. It was elemental. This is the land where the cosmic principle of creation is incomplete without its feminine force — Shiv is shav (a corpse) without Shakti. From temple lore to tantra, from bhakti poetry to matrilineal traditions, Indian civilisational thought did not place the feminine outside of power—it placed her at its axis. Women were not merely resistors of patriarchal structures; they were builders of alternate orders, custodians of knowledge, funders of reform, and anchors of spiritual and political authority. To remember them is not an act of redress — it is an act of return.
It is tempting to argue that women's issues should be mainstreamed into every day — not cordoned off to a month. But that argument only works when the everyday is already equal. In a country where women's history remains subterranean — scattered across footnotes, family lore, and fading murals — commemoration must become an act of intention. We must choose to remember, actively and audaciously, until memory becomes culture, and culture becomes justice. We owe our daughters more than representation. We owe them memory.
Shubhrastha is co-author of The Last Battle of Saraighat: The Story of the BJP's Rise in the North-east. The views expressed are personal