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The Politics of Gender and Community: Non-Governmental Relief in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial India

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Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series ((PMSTH))

Abstract

Maria Framke discusses the rendering of non-governmental relief in North and East India in the months before, during and after the partition within the ambit of gender, violence and humanitarianism. By taking up the examples of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha and the All-India Women’s Conference, the chapter broadens the understanding of the diversity of Indian non-state relief initiatives, as both organisations were normally not involved in humanitarian actions but rather active in the social and political field. By analysing their complex aims, strategies and relief practices, she shows not only the ways in which humanitarian aid was informed and shaped by these organisations’ notions of gender but also how humanitarian work influenced their norms of femininity and masculinity.

I am indebted to Nitin Sinha, Jana Tschurenev, Francesca Piana and the editors of this volume for their comments and criticism of earlier versions of this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  2. 2.

    C. A. Bayly, “The Pre-History of ‘Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1985), 177–203; Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  3. 3.

    Andrew J. Major, “‘The Chief Sufferers’: Abduction of Women during the Partition of the Punjab,” South Asia 18, Special Issue (1995), 57–72; Pippa Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” Cultural and Social History 6, no. 4 (2009), 467–483; Deepa Narasimhan-Madhavan, “Gender, Sexuality and Violence: Permissible Violence Against Women During the Partition of India and Pakistan,” HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4, no. 2 (2006), 396–416. Urvashi Butalia touches briefly on the “myth of women’s non-violence” during partition and points out that women occasionally took up arms and fought, either individually or as part of volunteer organisations, such as the Muslim League National Guard. These incidents, however, must be understood as “isolated” and do not alter our understanding of the partition violence as mainly male violence (See Urvashi Butalia, “Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition,” Economic & Political Weekly 28, no. 17 (1993), WS12–WS21+WS24, here WS16).

  4. 4.

    Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 89–90.

  5. 5.

    Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, “Gendering Oral History of Partition: Interrogating Patriarchy,” Economic & Political Weekly 41, no. 22 (2006), 2229–2235.

  6. 6.

    Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” 468.

  7. 7.

    Major, “The Chief Sufferers”; Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” 467–483; Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Bhardwaj Datta, “Gendering Oral History of Partition,” 2229–2235; Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade. Translated by Anis Kidwai (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2011).

  8. 8.

    Joya Chatterjee, “Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–1950,” in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 74–110; Ian Talbot, “Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 1 (2011), 109–130; Pallavi Chakravarty, Post-Partition Rehabilitation of Refugees in India, Occasional Paper, History and Society, New Series 46 (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [NMML], 2014); Elisabetta Iob, Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947–1962 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). First insights into the relief work of non-state organisations can be found in: Catherine Rey-Schyrr, “The ICRC’s Activities on the Indian Subcontinent Following Partition (1947–1949),” International Review of the Red Cross 323 (1998), 267–291; Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 56–58 and 168–176; Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156–157.

  9. 9.

    Amongst them one could find Indian branches of international organisations, such as the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A. the St. John Ambulance Association, the Indian Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides and the National Christian Council. Alongside these branches of international organisations, various non-South Asian organisations actively helped partition victims, such as the British Red Cross Society, the Catholic Relief Service and the Friends’ Service Unit. And, finally, humanitarian relief was provided by various national, regional and local organisations, voluntary party associations and individuals, for instance, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Marwari Relief Society, the Servants of India Society, the Tata Institute of Social Science, different University Volunteer Corps, the Congress Seva Dal, the Pakistan Voluntary Service, Jam’iat al Islam, the Hindu Sahayata Samiti and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

  10. 10.

    Richard Gordon, “The Hindu Mahasabha and the Indian National Congress, 1915–1926,” Modern Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (1975), 145–203; Prabhu Bapu, Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915–1930: Constructing Nation and History (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Nandini Gondhalekar and Sanjoy Bhattacharya, “The All India Hindu Mahasabha and the End of British Rule in India, 1939–1947,” Social Scientist 27, no. 7–8 (1999), 48–74.

  11. 11.

    http://aiwc.org.in/ (last accessed 24.06.2017); Aparna Basu and Ray Bharati, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference 1927–1990 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990).

  12. 12.

    Rakesh Batabyal, Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943–1947 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), chapter 2; The All-India Women’s Conference: Seventeenth Session, April 7, 1944 to April 10, 1944 (Bombay : AIWC, 1944), 122. The AIWC collected funds and provided aid in connection with natural disaster in India, such as famines, floods and earthquakes. In 1940, it also started a Turkish Relief Fund, for victims of the Erzincan earthquake in Anatolia in December 1939. Furthermore, the organisation contributed to the China Relief Fund, set up to send an Indian Medical Mission to China during the Second Chinese-Japanese War. See All-India Women’s Conference: Thirteenth Session, December 28, 1938 to January 1, 1939 (Bombay: AIWC, 1939), 12 and 203; All-India Women’s Conference: Fourteenth Session, January 27 to 31, 1940 (without place: 1940), 49–50; All-India Women’s Conference: Seventeenth Session, 3, 8–10, 22, 50, 78.

  13. 13.

    Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. Hasan, ed., India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization. Themes in Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); Nicholas Mansergh, E. W. R. Lumby and Penderel Moon, eds., The Transfer of Power, 1942–1947, vol. 1–12 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983).

  14. 14.

    Khan, The Great Partition, 63–77; Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Paul R. Brass, “The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: Means, Methods, and Purposes,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 1 (2003), 71–101; Batabyal, Communalism in Bengal.

  15. 15.

    In this chapter, I focus on the provision of aid by the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal in 1946 and early 1947. Equally considered are the organisation’s initiatives and strategies for relief work and community defence that aimed at an all-India level. What is left out here are relief activities of regional and local Hindu Mahasabha branches in different violence-affected places in South Asia outside of Bengal before, during and after partition. For the relief work of the Hindu Mahasabha in Bombay, see Namrata R. Ganneri, “The Hindu Mahasabha in Bombay (1923–1947),” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 75 (2014), 771–782. On the relief activities of other Hindu Nationalist organisations, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Sahatya Samiti, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst & Company, 1993), 75–76; Jean A. Curran, “The RSS: Militant Hinduism,” Far Eastern Survey 19, no. 10 (1950), 93–98, here 93–94.

  16. 16.

    B. V. Deshpande and S. R. Ramaswamy, Dr. Hedgewar: The Epoch Maker: A Biography (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu, 1981), 95–96; Muhammedali T. “In Service of the Nation: Relief and Reconstruction in Malabar in the Wake of the Rebellion of 1921,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 68, no. 1 (2007), 789–805. An even earlier example of communal aid was a volunteer unit set up by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in the early 1910s. This unit provided relief for Hindus after a communal riot in Calcutta. See Gwilym Beckerlegge, “The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s ‘Tradition of Selfless Service’,” in John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt and Vernon M. Hewitt, eds., The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 105–135, here 107.

  17. 17.

    Beckerlegge, “The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s,” 115; Ian Talbot, Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 2. For the support of refugees by the Hindu right in Uttar Pradesh, see Yasmin Khan, “The Arrival Impact of Partition Refugees in Uttar Pradesh, 1947–52,” Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 4 (2003), 511–522, here 516–518. For an insider account of the relief activities by the Hindu Nationalist volunteer organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, see H. V. Seshadri, RSS: A Vision in Action (Bangalore: Jagarana Prakashana, 1988), 203–204.

  18. 18.

    Without author, Short Report of Hindu Mahasabha Relief Activities during “Calcutta Killings” and “Noakhali Carnage” (Calcutta: Noakhali Rescue, Relief and Rehabilitation Committee, without date), 2. For the activities of the police during the “Great Calcutta Killings”, see Ranabir Samaddar, “Policing a riot-torn city: Kolkata, 16–18 August 1946,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 1 (2017), 39–60.

  19. 19.

    See for this: NMML, Manuscripts, Syama Prasad Mookerjee Papers [SPM Papers], II.-IV. Instalments, 2. Subject Files and NMML, Manuscripts Hindu Mahasabha Papers [HMS Papers], Subject Files. See for Mookerjee’s political career in the1940s and 1950s: Gondhalekar and Bhattacharya, “The All India Hindu Mahasabha,” 57–74; B. D. Graham, “Syama Prasad Mookerjee and the Communalist Alternative,” in Donald A. Low, ed., Soundings in Modern South Asian History (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), 330–374.

  20. 20.

    Without author, Short Report, 3-Appendix K.

  21. 21.

    NMML, Manuscripts HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-110, “Letter by S. K. Datta Choudhury to S. S. Bhattacharya, 27.11.1946.”

  22. 22.

    See letters in: NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-110 and File C-136A; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalments, 2. Subject Files, File 143, File 150 and File 152.

  23. 23.

    NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by V. K. Arya to S. P. Mookerjee, 18.11.1946.”

  24. 24.

    NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-110, “Letter by S. K. Datta Choudhury to S. Bhattacharya, 27.11.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-136A, “Letter by S. K. Datta Choudhury to S. H. Chakrabarti, 19.12.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by B. Agharkar to S. P. Mookerjee, 25.11.1946.”

  25. 25.

    See, for instance, NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by President of Arya Samaj Birla Lines to S. P. Mookerjee, 18.11.1946” and “Letter by P. C. Mehta to S. P. Mookerjee, 23.11.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-110, “Letter by S. K. Datta Choudhury to K. L. Bhattacharya, 18.11.1946.”

  26. 26.

    Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 42.

  27. 27.

    Gyanendra Pandey, “Hindus and Others: The Militant Hindu Construction,” Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 52 (1991), 2997–3001, 3003–3005, 3008–3009, here 3004.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 3003–3004; Papiya Ghosh, “The Virile and the Chaste in Community and Nation Making: Bihar 1920’s to 1940’s,” Social Scientist 22, no. 1–2 (1994), 80–94.

  29. 29.

    Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 104.

  30. 30.

    See several letters in: NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-110 and File C-136A; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalments, 2. Subject Files, File 143, File 150 and File 152.

  31. 31.

    One donor, for instance, described the Hindu victims in East Bengal as “helpless” and “defenceless” against Muslim atrocities. Another one stressed the importance of strengthening the masculinity of Hindu men by appealing to the main organiser of the Hindu relief fund, the Bengali politician and Hindu Nationalist Syama Prasad Mookerjee, to adhere to the traditions of famous Hindu and Sikh military leaders, such as Rana Pratap, Guru Gobind Singh and Shivaji Bhonsle. NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by Secretary Hindu Sabha Bhiwani to S. P. Mookerjee, 10.11.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalments, 2. Subject Files, File 150, “Letter to S. P. Mookerjee, 31.10.1946.”

  32. 32.

    Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

  33. 33.

    Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 136.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 52–53. See for the formation of discourses regarding masculinities in the (Hindu) nationalist field in the (late) colonial period, including discussions of effeminacy of Hindus: Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘Character Building and Manly Games’: Viktorianische Konzepte von Männlichkeit und ihre Aneignung in der Ideologie des frühen Hindu-Nationalismus in Britisch-Indien,” Historische Anthropologie 9, no. 3 (2001), 432–455.

  35. 35.

    Physical culture activities to strengthen the male body, and eventually the nation, were not restricted to colonial India, but were promoted in many countries. See, for instance, Svenja Goltermann, “Exercise and Perfection: Embodying the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” European Review of History 11, no. 3 (2004), 333–346; Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Joan Tumblety, Remaking of the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  36. 36.

    Gondhalekar and Bhattacharya, “The All India Hindu Mahasabha,” 48–74; Bhuwan K. Jha, “Militarizing the Community: Hindu Mahasabha’s Initiative (1915–1940),” Studies in History 29, no. 1 (2013), 119–146.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 130; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, chapter 6; Charu Gupta, “Articulating Hindu Masculinity and Femininity: ‘Shuddhi’ and ‘Sangathan’ Movements in the United Provinces in the 1920s,” Economic & Political Weekly 33, no. 3 (1998), 727–735, here 732.

  38. 38.

    NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-108, “Draft resolution by N. C. Chatterjee on Noakhali, undated.”

  39. 39.

    NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-143, “Letter by A. Lahiry to Rai Saheb Gur Prasad Kapoor, 06.03.1947.”

  40. 40.

    Gondhalekar and Bhattacharya, “The All India Hindu Mahasabha,” 64; Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), 48–50.

  41. 41.

    The setting up of the Hindustan National Guards proved to be both time consuming and not entirely successful. A training camp for workers who were supposed to organise provincial units was arranged in Delhi in February 1947. However, the Hindu Mahasabha struggled to solicit adequate financial support to build up a nation-wide organisation. NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-144, “Circular by Order of the President All India Hindu Mahasabha, 05.01.1947”; NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-143, “Letter by A. Lahiry to Rai Saheb Gur Prasad Kapoor, 06.03.1947.”

  42. 42.

    See, for instance, NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, I. Instalment, B. Subject Files, File 32, “Narayanpur Hindu Mahasava Camp: Visit 16.06.1947” and “Borali Relief Camp: Visit on 16.–17.05.1947.” Although, the available sources do not state explicitly that women were debarred from these defence units, all volunteers listed in them are male (see the different reports on Hindu Mahasabha relief camps in: NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, I. Instalment, B. Subject Files, File 32).

  43. 43.

    NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, I. Instalment, B. Subject Files, File 32, “Letter by Secretary of Bengal Sufferer’s Relief Committee Simla to S. P. Mookerjee, 05.11.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by Secretary Hindu Sabha Bhiwani to S. P. Mookerjee, 10.11.1946”; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by N. P. Srivastava to S. P. Mookerjee, 15.11.1946.”

  44. 44.

    Gwilym Beckerlegge, “Swami Vivekananda and Seva: Taking ‘Social Service’ Seriously,” in William Radice, ed., Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 158–193; Carey A. Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  45. 45.

    Franziska Roy and Ali Raza, “Paramilitary Organisations in Interwar India,” South Asia 38, no. 4 (2015), 671–689, here 675.

  46. 46.

    Ganneri, “The Hindu Mahasabha in Bombay,” 774; Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, 243–259; NMML, Manuscripts, HMS Papers, Subject Files, File C-108, “Draft Resolution by N. C. Chatterjee on Noakhali, undated”; NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by R. R. Kochhar to S. P. Mookerjee, 07.11.1946.” The discussion around abduction and the honour of abducted women was and is a strong and enduring topos. It comprises elements of rape and even mass rape but also of consensual marriage. Both are not distinguished in this topos.

  47. 47.

    Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 169.

  48. 48.

    Major, “The Chief Sufferers,” 57–72; Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” 469 and 472; Butalia, “Community, State and Gender,” WS16-WS21 and WS 24.

  49. 49.

    NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by President of Dayanand Salvation Mission Hoshiarpur to H. C. Ghosh, 27.11.1946.”

  50. 50.

    Ganga P. Upadhyaya, The Origin, Scope and Mission of the Arya Samaj (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1940), 126.

  51. 51.

    NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, II.-IV. Instalment, 2. Subject Files, File 152, “Letter by President of Dayanand Salvation Mission Hoshiarpur to H. C. Ghosh, 27.11.1946.”

  52. 52.

    NMML, Manuscripts, SPM Papers, I. Instalment, B. Subject Files, File 32, “Letter by General Secretary, All-India Hindoo-Dharm-Rakshini-Sabha to S. P. Mookerjee, 14.11.1946.”

  53. 53.

    Ibid. The general secretary did not elaborate on how this validation should be accomplished. However, we know from the descriptions of state recovery workers who went into households with the help of the police to search for abducted women and children that they determined religious identities by speaking with the concerned persons and with other members of the household, the neighbours and larger (village) community. Often, they received a hint beforehand that an abducted person was hidden in a particular place or enlisted the help of local people to find missing women. But there were also instances in which recovery work involved irregular activities, such using pressure and physical violence to obtain information. In some cases, the problem remained that of determining beyond any doubt who had been abducted and who had voluntarily converted and married a member of the other community (see Menon and Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries, chapter 3).

  54. 54.

    In the files available, it remains unclear whether this suggestion was taken up by the Hindu Mahasabha. Furthermore, the reasons behind the suggestion to assign the recovery work to women are not further elaborated. In this period of excessive violence and communalisation it seems doubtful that the All-India Hindoo Dharm Rakshini Sabha would have adopted an open approach that respected all communities. Rather it could be possible that the society wanted to avoid any resurgence of disturbances.

  55. 55.

    For Pakistani initiatives, see Virdee, “Negotiating the Past,” 473–477.

  56. 56.

    NMML, Microfilm, All-India Women’s Conference Papers [AIWC Papers], I. Instalment, File 389, “Letter S. Ramaturani to Honorary Secretary AIWC, 12.12.1946”, “Letter by K. Sayani to A. Gupta, 02.12.1946” and “Appeal by Mrs. S. Sen, undated”; NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, II. Instalment, File 32, All-India Women’s Conference, Calcutta Branch, Half-yearly report, January to June 1947.

  57. 57.

    The All Bengal Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS) had previous experience of working in humanitarian crises. Organised by leftist women leaders in Bengal, MARS had links with the Communist Party of India and provided relief during the Great Bengal famine of 1943. See Gargi Chakravartty, “Emergence of Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti in the Forties: Calcutta Chapter,” in Tanika Sarkar and Sekar Bandyopadhyay, eds., Calcutta: The Stormy Decades (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 177–203.

  58. 58.

    Renu Chakravartty, “Humanity Uprooted at Noakhali and Chandpur,” Roshni I, no. 10–11 (1946), 101–107, here 105–106. The AIWC cooperated on various occasions during and after partition with other non-state organisations and relief initiatives, such as the United Council of Relief and Welfare. Organised in India in autumn 1947, the United Council was led by the former Vicerine Lady Edwina Mountbatten and supported by the postcolonial government. It brought together various non-state relief organisations with the aim of providing coordinated and joint aid, thereby avoiding overlaps and any duplication of effort. Donald F. Ebright, Free India: The First Five Years. An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief and Rehabilitation (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1954), 58–60.

  59. 59.

    NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, II. Instalment, File 32, All-India Women’s Conference, Calcutta Branch, Half-yearly report, January to June 1947.

  60. 60.

    The role of women as peacemakers and corresponding notions of femininity have a long-standing tradition in women’s activism worldwide. See, for instance, Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914–1920): Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2008); Erika Kuhlmann, “The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and reconciliation after the Great War,” in Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp, eds., The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–1919 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 227–243; Melinda Plastas, A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011).

  61. 61.

    All-India Women’s Conference: Eleventh Session, December 23 to 27, 1936 (Ahmedabad, 1937), 28–29; All-India Women’s Conference: Thirteenth Session, 73.

  62. 62.

    All-India Women’s Conference: Eleventh Session, 40. Rani Lakshmibai Rajwade had received a medical education in Bombay and Great Britain and had worked as practical physician before her late marriage. She was an active member of the AIWC and had been its honorary secretary in the early 1930s. Rajwade was a supporter of reproductive control and served as the chairwomen of the Subcommittee on “Woman’s role in planned economy” in the National Planning Committee after Indian independence. See, Barbara N. Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920–40,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 2 (1989), 34–64.

  63. 63.

    See, for instance, NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, I. Instalment, File 389, “Appeal by Mrs. S. Sen, undated.”

  64. 64.

    Chakravartty, “Humanity Uprooted,” 106.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 106–107. See for similar appeals in December 1947: Basu and Bharati, Women’s Struggle, 101.

  66. 66.

    For a history of women’s life, status and participation in public affairs in colonial India, see Geraldine Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India. IV.2: Women in Modern India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also: Suruchi Thapar, “Women as Activists: Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian National Movement,” Feminist Review 44 (1993), 81–96.

  67. 67.

    NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, I. Instalment, File 422, “All India Women’s Conference Resolutions from Branches, 20th Session, Madras 1947.”

  68. 68.

    See, for instance, NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, I. Instalment, File 413 and File 422; NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, II. Instalment, File 32 and File 35.

  69. 69.

    Without author, “News and Notes,” Roshni II, no. 8 (1947), 50–53, here 53.

  70. 70.

    NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, I. Instalment, File 422, “Circular from President AIWC to Members of the Standing Committee, 10.10.1947.”

  71. 71.

    See, for instance, British Library [BL], Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections (APAC), IOR/L/I/1/1020.

  72. 72.

    Without author, “News and Notes,” Roshni II, no. 8 (1947), 52–53; without author, “News and Notes,” Roshni II, no. 10 (1947), 65–66.

  73. 73.

    See for the efforts of the Indian state to provide employment to women: Datta, “Gendering Oral History of Partition,” 2232–2235.

  74. 74.

    NMML, Microfilm, AIWC Papers, I. Instalment, File 413, “The Bombay Branch Central Committee, Draft Minutes, 23.10.1947.”

  75. 75.

    Carey A. Watt, “Philanthropy and Civilizing Missions in India c. 1820–1960: States, NGOs and Development,” in Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann, eds., Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 271–316; David Arnold, “Vagrant India: Famine, Poverty, and Welfare under Colonial Rule,” in A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, eds., Cast out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008), 117–139.

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  1. University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany

    Maria Framke

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    Esther Möller

  2. Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany

    Johannes Paulmann

  3. University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Katharina Stornig

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Framke, M. (2020). The Politics of Gender and Community: Non-Governmental Relief in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial India. In: Möller, E., Paulmann, J., Stornig, K. (eds) Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44630-7_6

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