Impactful role of women for freedom struggle in India and their contribution

The untold, unheard and unseen facts of the struggle for an Independent India. The role of Indian women freedom fighters in the journey of freedom struggle. Everyone speaks about the prominent role played by the male freedom fighter. However, without female freedom fighters achieving Independent India would remain a dream. From being considered as second citizens, being victims of domestic violence, uneducated population, practising sati system to transforming themselves into great freedom fighter leaders has remained unknown to a lot of people. Indian women have played an impactful role in this journey from being part of the non-cooperation movement to practising saytagraha and promoting Khadi and picketing up of liquor shops. Women like Usha Mehta, Rajkumari Gupta, Aruna Asaf Ali, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Rani Gaidinliu, Amal Prabha Das, Azizam Bai, Gulan Kaur, Sarojini Naidu has played paramount role in making India free from British rules. Their participation in all the freedom struggle is significant and respectful.

Gender Discourses and the Making of the Indian Constitution

Indian democracy was constituted after a long struggle for self- determination, which ultimately culminated in the making of a constitution for independent India. This article seeks to revisit gender discourses during the constituent assembly debates when women members were seeking for complete gender equality to be written into the constitution. The nationalist discourses on ‘Indian womanhood’ prevalent during the years of the freedom struggle were articulated and reflected in the debates and impacted the writing of the text of the constitution. The final text contains gender progressive provisions on which consensus had been achieved during the nationalist struggle but excludes explicit provisions that would have challenged the roots of patriarchal structures. Thus, while the nationalist movement provided a platform for women to organise for their rights, it also constrained the agenda of transformation.

Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community boycott and helped usher in a new chapter of the Black freedom struggle. Her bus stand was part of a lifetime of courage and political activism. Born in Tuskegee and raised in Pine Level, Alabama, Rosa Parks spent nearly twenty-five years of her adult life in Montgomery, tilling the ground for a broader movement for racial justice to flower. Joining a small cadre of activists in transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter, she served as secretary of the branch for most of the next twelve years and in the late 1940s was elected secretary for the Alabama state conference of the NAACP. Through the organization, she pressed for voter registration, documented white brutality and sexual violence, pushed for desegregation, and fought criminal injustice in the decade after WWII. Coming home from work that December evening, she was asked by bus driver James Blake to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. “Pushed as far as she could stand to be pushed” she refused and was arrested. That act of courage galvanized a year-long community boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses, catapulting a young Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention and leading to the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses. Parks’s act and the bus boycott it produced is often seen as the opening act of the modern civil rights movement which rippled across the South and culminated in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Facing continued death threats and unable to find work, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott’s end for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. While the public signs of segregation were thankfully gone, she didn’t find “too much difference” between the extent of housing and school segregation they encountered in the North from that of the South. And so she spent the second half of her life fighting the racism of the North. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, when she died in October 2005 she became the first civilian, the first woman, and the second African American to lie in honor in the US Capitol. In February 2013, a statue in her honor was installed in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first full statue of a Black person to be put there. Parks is arguably one of the most known and regarded Americans of the 20th century. Yet the story that is regularly told and taught is clouded with myth and misinformation—wrongly asserting that Parks was tired, old, meek, middle-class, and/or an accidental actor. On top of these distortions of her bus stand, most people would be hard-pressed to go beyond that courageous moment on the bus to anything else about her life. Corresponding to this tendency, although children’s and young adult books on her abound, scholarly work focused on Parks is surprisingly thin. Scholars of civil rights history, postwar American history North and South, and American politics have largely not paid in-depth attention to Parks in order to investigate other activists in Montgomery, earlier struggles than the bus boycott, and other movements outside of Montgomery. While this provides needed and important dimensions to our knowledge of the period, it leaves our knowledge of Parks’ history incomplete—until Jeanne Theoharis’s ground-breaking biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Parks herself wrote an autobiography aimed at young adults that serves as one of the best accounts of her bus stand, the activism that lead up to it, and the boycott that ensued.

The Indian Freedom Struggle and the Kenyan Diaspora

The connections between the Indian Freedom movement and the Kenyan Indian diaspora after the First World War led to the involvement of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi in the struggle of the Kenyan Indians for equality and equal treatment with the British white settlers in Kenya. The Congress considered that the success of the equality struggle in Kenya would also lead to equal treatment of Indians in India itself. This was consistent with the prevailing political goal of the freedom movement in India in 1919, which was self-rule through Dominion Status under the British Crown. But when the struggle of the Kenya Indians failed and equality was denied to them by the famous Devonshire Declaration in 1923, there the Indian freedom movement realized that this signalled unequal status and a denial of self-rule to India itself. Historic consequences followed. This was the turning point and over the years immediately after the Kenyan decision (1923–1929), the Indian National Congress changed its political aim from Dominion Status to Full Independence as a Republic, realized over the 17 years to 1947.

FROM REGIONALISM TO KOSLI NATIONALISM AND BEYOND: THE DEMAND FOR A SEPARATE STATE IN WESTERN ODISHA

If we analyze the discourses on regionalism in India or even while trying to make sense of such a tendency, we may find that from a long time, even during the period of British colonialism, regional forces have had their impact at the level of organization of political system in their own ways. Needless to recall that when the Britishers entered India, they could sense the regional variations very well and therefore, established ‘divide and rule’ policy to suit their administration as well as to be fitted to the regional demands and peculiarities. It is, no wonder therefore, to find that the anti-colonial freedom struggle was not a process free of contradictions and variations over different regions. The fact of the matter was that the ‘national’ issue, namely, to establish a free independent and sovereign India superseded all the parochial claims of various regions and their demands. And it is, needless to say that these regional interests and demands, which were subdued during the freedom struggle found an expression and were articulated even within the first decade of India’s independence, which has, in fact, grown both in its number and its intensity with every passage of time, which are reflected in various regional movements, over the period. In this paper, we discuss such a movement taking its stride with every passage of day, in the western part of Odisha—both in its historical as well as contemporary contexts. We make an attempt to bring out what have been the historical causes which have given birth to such a tendency and the contours and trajectories that such a movement is going through over the period, including the current state of affairs as regards Kosal Movement, which is increasingly becoming so vociferous that we can hardly ignore it—either as an observer, as an analyst or as an activist—for or against the call for a separate state in Western Odisha.

Introduction

In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal famously identified the “American Dilemma,” an inherent tension between widespread faith in equal opportunity on one hand and discrimination against African Americans on the other. This book traces a similar phenomenon in northern public schools, which promised an equal education for all and then consigned Black children to second-class facilities. This paradox generated the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools in a legally desegregated system would more effectively advance the Black freedom struggle. This book offers a social history of northern Black debates over school integration in the North. It chronicles an extraordinary range of Black educational activism in the North stretching from the common school era to the present, and analyzes how this work—much of it carried out by women and youth—inspired the larger civil rights movement and created substantially more equal public schools.

Netaji Subbash Chandra Bose’s Relation with Japan in Historical Context and Contemporary Perspectives

Subhash Chandra Bose was one of India’s greatest freedom fighter. He revived the Indian National Army, popularly known as ‘Azad Hind Fauj’ in 1943 which was initially formed in 1942 by Rash Behari Bose. He provided an influential leadership and kept the spirit of nationalism burning during the slack period of national movement in India. Netaji was a patriot to the last drop of his blood. In his passionate love for the motherland, he was prepared to do anything for the sake of liberating his country. Subhash Chandra Bose is a legendary figure in Indian history. His contribution to the freedom struggle made him a brave hero of India. However, there has been controversial debates about Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s political views in his struggle for India’s freedom till date. This paper studies about 1. Controversy on Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s political views; 2. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s relation with Japan from contemporary perspectives; and 3. Subhash Chandra Bose’s relation with Japan in comparison with that of Phan Boi Chau in Vietnam. Received 9th December 2020; Revised 2nd March 2021; Accepted 20th March 2021