In the late 1970s, when second-wave feminism—which sought social, legal, and economic equality after securing suffrage during the first wave—was gaining momentum, American feminist activist Gloria Steinem came to India hoping to create a blueprint for women’s movements worldwide using Gandhian tactics of non-violent resistance.
Steinem, along with her co-author, Gandhian economist Devaki Jain, interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi and co-founder and first secretary of the All India Women’s Conference, at her home in New Delhi in 1976.
In her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road (Random House), Steinem recalls explaining their project to Chattopadhyay as she sat rocking on her verandah, sipping tea. Once they were done, pat came the response: “Well, of course, my dears,” she said. “We taught him everything he knew.”
Chattopadhyay, the first woman to be arrested by the British government during the 1930 Satyagraha movement, explained that Gandhi himself had been inspired by a massive women’s movement in India against the practice of sati.
Gandhi had also studied the suffrage movement in England (1866 to equal voting rights in 1928), Chattopadhyay told Steinem and Jain, and had urged activists to emulate the Pankhursts (followers of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia) who embraced arrest as a core political strategy once they realised peaceful lobbying was failing.
Unlearning the ‘Great Man’ theory
In looking for Gandhian tactics to use for women’s resistance, Chattopadhyay pointed out to Steinem and Jain that they had essentially fallen for the Great Man Theory—a 19th-century concept holding that history and major world events are shaped and driven by exceptional individuals—forgetting that the tactics they were drawn to were those of ordinary people.
Steinem writes she was reminded of the words of British novelist Vita Sackville-West: “I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.”
Giving up ‘memsahib travel’
Gloria Steinem photographed in India in the 1950s. (Instagram/ gloriasteinem)
Incidentally, Steinem learnt how to organise grassroots movements during her association with Gandhian groups during her two-year stay in India, 20 years ago.
The famous journalist, known for her exposé of the Playboy magazine, came to India in 1956 after securing the Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship upon graduating from Smith College, and stayed in the country for two years.
Initially she was wary of travelling with the people, but after her friends encouraged her to give up “memsahib travel” (using a car and driver) and take a women-only railway car, a legacy of the British Raj, she decided to travel from Calcutta to Kerala on her own, “stopping at villages and temples on her way to the oldest part of India at its southern tip.”
In her book, she describes the third-class car as “a dormitory on wheels,” where women of different ages and sizes sat in groups, talking, nursing babies, sharing meals from tiered brass tiffins. As a foreigner in a sari, Steinem inspired curiosity, and she was exposed to the very Indian habit of asking personal questions.
“Why hasn’t your family found you a husband?” “All Americans are rich, so why are you with us in third class?” “How do American women keep from having too many babies?” were some of the questions put to her, she recalls. But it also taught her that women were likely to share their issues freely in safe spaces where their concerns could not be downplayed by men.
From Indian villages to American talking circles
It was in Ramnad, now known as Ramanathapuram, in Tamil Nadu, which had just witnessed riots over caste, that Steinem learnt her most enduring lesson about outreach and organistation for a mass movement in 1957.
As the area was cordoned off, with even journalists denied access, Steinem joined a group of Gandhian activists walking from village to village, carrying only a cup and a comb.
“Without possessions,” she wrote, “I felt oddly free.”
In the evenings, villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles, lit by kerosene lamps. “It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time,” she wrote.
The Gandhians taught her, she wrote, “if you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.”
Little did she know that, a decade after leaving India, similar “on-the-road organizing” would take up most of her life.
“I had walked in Indian villages in the 1950s,” she wrote, “sure that they had no relevance to my own life. But now a women’s revolution was springing from talking circles of our own.”
On her return to America, she went on to visit battered women’s shelters, freestanding women’s clinics, women’s centers on campuses, and protests by single mothers trying to survive on welfare. Her becoming an itinerant feminist organiser, she realised, was just a Western version of walking in villages.
“That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change,” she wrote.
Gloria Steinem at a women's conference held at the LBJ Library in 1975. (Wikimedia Commons) 
Gloria Steinem photographed in India in the 1950s. (Instagram/ gloriasteinem)
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