Gandhi and Women in the Indian Freedom Struggle

At a time when toxic masculinity is directing the course of politics in our world, I thought it would be relevant to explore the challenge that the Indian National Movement was able to put up to the ‘the brute masculinity of British power’ through an essentially and deliberately feminised struggle. This struggle was called satyagraha by its leader, M.K. Gandhi. It included an unprecedented number of women, created an unmatched number of women leaders in politics and society, and feminised, through a process of transformation, millions of men who participated. It began in India on 18 April 1917, when Gandhi refused an order of British colonial authorities to leave the district of Champaran, where he was documenting the plight of farmers who had been forced to grow indigo for British planters instead of essential food crops. He agreed to submit without protest to the penalty of disobedience ‘in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of con- science’. Thirty years and multiple satyagrahas later, including the famous Quit India movement, the British were forced to leave India in 1947, after two hundred years of domination. When the British left peacefully, the world learned a new possibility from this first case of a nation that gained its independence without a war. It laid the foundation for other struggles of the weak against the mighty and eventually liberated the largest numbers of humankind in the world – stretching from South Africa to the US.