National Federation of Indian Women

The meanings of citizenship as well as gender justice kept on broadening, narrowing, being contested, and pursued across different spheres of public life.

Her focus is on a cohort of leading figures within two major organizations, All India Women's Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women, and also she looks at the trajectories of women in India's constituent assembly.

Annie, thank you so much for joining us today.

And I want to start with this particular question.

And then the question was, well, did they recede? Did they, were they co-opted by the state into state positions? Did they sort of recede from activism, assuming that the state would take over the role of kind of, um, instituting a gender equality and empowerment? Or were they doing things and we just don't have, we haven't, uh, collected enough material to kind of document where they, what they were doing? Um, and I noticed that the historio- historiography tended to assume the former, that there wasn't a lot going on, that women were co-opted or they tended to recede, um, that they weren't very active.

So I began to, you know, look at the source material, and I was lucky that there was quite a lot of, um, material available.

That's why I chose to kind of have a two-pronged approach to study two different women's organizations, uh, that were active nationally but also had many local branches, so the All India Women's Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women.

Um, and then within that, I chose a cohort of women who were members of those organizations, um, but were active in a range of different ways.