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Journalism of Courage
In 1881, a 24-year-old widow from Olpad, a village near Surat in Gujarat, found herself at the centre of a tragic situation. Vijaylakshmi was arrested after the lifeless body of her newborn was discovered on a rubbish heap. Confronted by the authorities, she allegedly confessed to killing the infant to avoid the stigma of being a widowed mother.
Vijaylakshmi’s case, which reflected the harsh realities faced by Brahmin and high-caste Hindu women who got married young and were expected to maintain strict chastity if widowed in 19th-century India, sparked widespread public debate. It also inspired one woman to pick up her pen and write a passionate rebuttal in a book considered to be India’s first feminist text. Her name was Tarabai Shinde.
Deeply disturbed by the way Vijaylakshmi was being portrayed, in 1882, Tarabai published Stri-Purush Tulana (A comparison of women and men) in Marathi, directly challenging the blame placed on women for society’s ills.
As scholars Susie Tharu and K Lalita note in their 1991 book, Women Writing in India (Volume I), Tarabai’s work was a response to an article in the weekly Pune Vaibhav that attacked Vijaylakshmi and condemned women like her for their ‘loose morals’. The work remained largely unknown until 1975, when it was discovered and republished by the Marathi scholar S G Malshe.
Despite the privileges of her caste and education, Tarabai’s writing was nothing short of revolutionary. She fearlessly confronted issues of social reform, remarriage, and the damaging portrayal of women in popular literature. Yet Stri-Purush Tulana raises provocative questions: Who was she writing for? What drove her to put pen to paper? Was Shinde simply seeking sympathy, or did she want women to rise?
Tarabai Shinde’s life spanned much of the second half of the nineteenth century. She came from a prominent family in Buldhana (in present-day Maharashtra) in central India. Her father, Bapuji Hari Shinde, served as a head clerk in the deputy commissioner’s office. The only daughter among five children, Tarabai was reportedly deeply loved by her father.
Bapuji Hari Shinde was an early member of the Satyashodhak Samaj, a reformist organisation founded in 1873 by the radical Jyotirao Phule. A close family friend, Phule, and her father had a profound influence on Tarabai.
As historian Rosalind O’Hanlon notes in her book A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (1994), where she has translated Tarabai’s writing, “Without her father’s reformist commitments, it is most unlikely that she would have learned to read or write…”.
Tarabai was married but her husband lived with her at her father’s house, an unconventional practice at the time. The couple had no children.
While Tharu and Lalita suggest that parts of Tarabai’s writing probably reflected her own experience of being married to a man who failed to meet her expectations, O’Hanlon notes, “If these were indeed her domestic circumstances, they would have significantly contributed to Tarabai’s ability to break into the masculine world of reading, writing, and publishing.”
Tarabai Shinde’s 52-page book printed by Shri Shivaji Press in Pune sold for 9 annas and explored a wide range of topics. With her bold opening, as cited by O’Hanlon, Tarabai challenged the prevailing societal views: “So is it true that only women’s bodies are home to all kinds of wicked vices? Or have men got the same faults as we find in women?”
This question set the tone for the writing that followed. “I wanted this to be shown absolutely clearly, and that’s the reason I’ve written this small book, to defend the honour of all my sister countrywomen. I’m not looking at particular castes or families here. It’s a comparison just between women and men,” Tarabai asserted, as per O’Hanlon.
Tarabai also confronted one of the most contentious issues of the time: widow remarriage. She questioned the logic behind the severe austerity imposed on widows. “Where does it get you if you snatch away all the happy signs of a woman’s marriage, if you chop off one woman’s hair and wipe off another’s kumkum from her forehead? Women still have the same hearts inside…You can strip the outside till it’s naked, but you can’t do the same to the inside, can you?” she asked.
Tarabai also criticised the foundations of the shastras, accusing male authors of bias. She wrote: “But in fact the people who wrote all these books ought to be ashamed of themselves, shastras, puranas…and so on.”
She pointed out the contradictions within these texts, using historical examples to illustrate her point. For instance, she asked, “Take Draupadi—she had five husbands, but that did not stop her from secretly desiring Maharaja Karna.”
O’Hanlon notes that Tarabai also called out the contradictions of Satyavati and Kunti, both of whom were regarded as virgins yet had sons who played pivotal roles in Hindu mythology, Ved Vyas and Karna. She noted that if women in contemporary society were to have children outside of wedlock, they would be labelled very differently.
With biting irony, she added, “I will say my prayers to the gods and ask them to excuse me if I have thrown a bit of blame on two or three of them here. They may forgive me, they may not; they will go on being gods in any case.”
Tarabai also targeted men. She wrote, “It was male reformers, politicians, journalists and writers who now demanded that women continue to conform to these rules, in a society where everything else was changing and the same men themselves were gaining a whole range of new rights and freedoms.”
She went on to challenge the patriarchal traditions that governed women’s lives. “Can any of these ancestors of yours produce any evidence direct from God that it is best for a wife to die before her husband, or a husband before his wife?” She demanded to see the evidence that justified such expectations and asserted, “In fact, what is good for a woman ought to be good for a man as well.”
According to O’Hanlon, Tarabai highlighted the injustices that women faced, writing, “Women in this world are forever putting up with all sorts of hard toil, difficulty, hunger and thirst, harassment and beatings—and all they ask is a kindly word from you.”
In her concluding remarks, Tarabai made an unapologetically bold statement: “You men have only one thing to do, and that is fill up the cart. It is in her hands to look after it and drive it forward.”
However, despite being an educated upper-caste Maratha with significant political and paternal support, Stri Purush Tulana remained Tarabai Shinde’s only publication. According to O’Hanlon, one reason for this was the damage to her image, particularly among the printing press community and reformists. Yet Tharu and Lalita assert that the “Stri-Purush Tulana is probably the first full-fledged and extant feminist argument after the poetry of the bhakti period.”
Sadly, the questions raised by Tarabai Shinde still hold.
