Women and Indian Nationalism

The political role of women as a subject for research is of recent origin in India. It is significant that there are so few studies of women's role in the nationalist movement or of the implications-social or political-of their momentous entry into the public sphere. Important works on the national movement mostly fail to examine the significance of women's participation in the struggles. Analysis in this area so far has received insufficient attention in histories of India both before and after 1975 when the need to study women's role in history began to be acknowledged world-wide. One searches in vain for an adequate study of women's participation in nationalist historiography.