Women in the Freedom Struggle of South Asia: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article synthesizes a century of scholarship on women’s participation in South Asia’s freedom struggles—from early reformist mobilizations in the late nineteenth century to mass civil disobedience, clandestine networks, and post-war constitutional settlements in the 1940s. It situates women’s activism within overlapping arenas: associational life (women’s conferences, social-reform leagues, student bodies), mass movements (boycott, picketing, marches), underground and militant activity (revolutionary cells, intelligence, the Indian National Army’s Rani of Jhansi Regiment), welfare and relief work (prisoner aid, refugee care), and knowledge production (schools, journals, literary intervention). Drawing on comparative cases from present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, we show how respectability politics, household-public negotiations, caste/community hierarchies, and transnational feminist networks structured opportunity and constraint. We argue that women’s political labor changed repertoires of protest, broadened claims to citizenship, and left complex legacies—emancipatory in opening new publics, yet ambivalent in how domesticity and communal boundary-making re-inscribed limits. The article closes by mapping research gaps on provincial archives, vernacular periodicals, police/prosecution files, and oral histories needed to write more inclusive regional histories.