Women Demanded New Shastras in Colonial Times: Today, Reclaiming Agency is Required to Rewrite History

 In colonial India, women expressed their concerns and demands for equal citizenship rights through a variety of strategies and platforms, navigating the deeply patriarchal structures of both colonial governance and indigenous traditions. They participated actively in reform movements, formed women's organizations, and engaged in public debates on social and political issues. One significant avenue of this activism was the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), which became a prominent forum for articulating women's rights.

Historian Janaki Nair noted how women assertively and intellectually engage in forging equality during heated debates on raising the age of consent for marriage.  

"When Madan Mohan Malaviya, an early ideologue of Hindu nationalism, articulated his opposition to raising the age of consent for marriage in 1928 by citing the sanctions of the sastras (Hindu scriptures), some women of the All India Women’s Conference demanded ‘new sastras’.’ This signified a recognition by the Indian middle-class women’s movement of the need to enter the world of knowledge production, and anticipated by several decades the demand of feminist historians not just for new histories but for a reinvention of the historical archive."

This was not simply a rhetorical flourish—it signified a radical challenge to the male-dominated religious and intellectual order that had long been used to justify the subordination of women.

By calling for new sastras, these women asserted the right to reinterpret religious texts and cultural traditions through a feminist lens. As Janaki Nair notes, this demand anticipated, decades later, calls of feminists to forge new ways of writing history. These early activists recognized that true citizenship for women would remain incomplete without challenging and reshaping the very foundations of knowledge and authority that underpinned social inequality.

This feminist assertion—the willingness to challenge foundational structures of authority and to claim the right to reinterpret cultural, religious, and historical narratives—is notably absent or diminished in many contemporary feminist movements in India. Where early 20th-century women boldly confronted patriarchal traditions by demanding not only political rights but also intellectual and cultural agency, today’s feminist discourse often finds itself either co-opted by institutional frameworks or constrained by the pressures of identity politics, state nationalism, or neoliberal agendas.

That spirit of epistemological rebellion, of questioning the very foundations of tradition and authority, has in many ways given way to more cautious or fragmented interventions. While feminist activism today continues in important and diverse forms—from legal battles to social media campaigns—there is often a lack of engagement with the deeper structures of cultural and religious authority that continue to shape gender norms in insidious ways.

Moreover, in the current socio-political climate, where majoritarianism and a renewed emphasis on cultural "authenticity" have taken center stage, feminist voices that question scripture, reinterpret tradition, or critique nationalism are frequently marginalized or labeled as "anti-national" or "Westernized." The space for the kind of radical feminist reimagination that AIWC women called for in 1928—one that sought not just inclusion but transformation—is shrinking.

Reclaiming that legacy today would mean going beyond policy reforms or symbolic representation. It would require confronting dominant narratives, rethinking inherited epistemologies, and insisting on women's central role in producing knowledge, shaping culture, and reinterpreting tradition. In a time when the past is often invoked to justify gender hierarchies, the feminist challenge must rewrite that past—and to demand not only new laws, but new sastras, new histories, and new imaginaries of justice.

References

Nair Janaki (1994) On the Question of Agency in Feminist Historiography, Gender and History, 6(1) 82-100

Nigam Shalu (2025) Resisting Gendered Citizenship: The Politics of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Maternalism in India, Gender and Women’s Studies, 6(1) 1-24 DOI: 10.31532/GendWomensStud.6.1.001