Indian Suffragettes: Networks, Transnationalism and International Feminism, 1918-1950

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This project will research the ways in which Indian female suffragettes created and operated within various transnational networks with individuals and organisations in Britain, America, Europe, Australia and North Africa during the early twentieth century. This project focuses on the campaign for female suffrage specifically as it emerged from 1918, following the first campaigns by Indian women for the vote, up until 1950 when full adult franchise for all over-18s was awarded in India. The particular focus is on Indian suffragettes who travelled outside of India to gain support for the cause, looking at the ways they used their experiences and networks abroad to shape the political future of India, and exploring issues of class, gender, nationalism, and internationalism. This history focuses on Indian women and their activities to reshape and add a broader dimension to the field of global history and histories of feminism by demonstrating the ways in which Indians were also global migrants during the time of empire.There is no complete study of the history of the female suffrage movement in India, despite early works by Geraldine Forbes and Jana Matson Everett, and no consideration of the ways in which Indian women were utilising imperial and global networks to travel within the empire and beyond to campaign for voting rights. This project highlights the global movements of Indian women and not only how they were influenced and inspired by feminist groups and campaigns around the world but also how they, in turn, influenced ideas about suffrage and feminism globally. This project builds upon my existing research on various types of Indians (students, artists, religious figures, doctors) who travelled to Britain in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, at the height of the British Empire, who established various social and political networks, which they then used when they returned to India. This research reshapes the field of existing migration studies which tend to focus on travel in only one direction; the focus here will be on the circular movement and therefore the multiple global impacts made by these Indians. Indian women were granted the vote in local elections in Bombay and Madras in 1921, dependent on property and literacy, and other regions soon followed, but universal suffrage for all women and men over-18 was only granted in India in 1950. This historical research will give added context to understandings of the position of women and feminist networks today. The Indian subcontinent has a rich history of female participation in politics from prominent female nationalists to the appointment of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister of India in 1966 and Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1988 to a large number of female state ministers and politicians in both India and Pakistan in the present day. This project considers the ways in which race, class and imperialism were understood and inflected in the rhetoric and reception to these Indian suffragettes. Therefore, it will make a substantial contribution to our understanding of class, imperialism and gender during the twentieth century, and also of conceptions of transnationalism, migration and global social networks.With the hundred year anniversary of the female vote granted to British women coming up in 2018, the media interest in the suffragette procession during the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and the continued activism of the descendants of the Pankhursts, as well as the need to highlight the wealth of valuable material held in the Women's Library (recently transferred to the LSE), and as debates continue to hold forth about women's social and political rights in contemporary India especially with forthcoming elections in May 2014, this is a particularly appropriate time for historians to return to a study of suffragettes that is removed from the metropole and apply it to new understandings of imperial and global history.