Women’s Engagement in Leftist, Workers, and Peasant Movements in Colonial India

When we think about women’s activism in colonial India, the images that most readily come to mind are of middle-class reformers, nationalist leaders, or participants in Gandhian civil disobedience. But there is another, equally powerful story – one that unfolded in the fields of Bengal, the factories of Ahmedabad, and the villages of Telangana. It is the story of working-class and peasant women who stepped into leftist and labor movements not as symbols or supporters, but as organizers, fighters, and leaders challenging both colonial rule and the patriarchal structures that confined them.

The colonial context: why class and gender were inseparable 🔗

Colonial rule didn’t just drain India’s wealth – it restructured its agrarian and industrial economy in ways that placed immense burdens on the rural and working poor. Factory production began in India in the early 1860s, driven by a colonial pattern where raw materials were extracted from India and finished goods were manufactured in Britain and sold back to the colony. The introduction of land revenue systems like zamindari, ryotwari, and mahalwari intensified peasant exploitation, pushing rural communities – particularly women, who had no legal land rights – deeper into poverty and dependence.

For women from lower-caste and working-class backgrounds, oppression came from multiple directions at once: from the colonial state, from landlords and mill owners, and from patriarchal norms that denied them economic autonomy. It was precisely this intersection of class, caste, and gender that made leftist and labor movements a meaningful space for women’s resistance. These movements offered, at least in principle, a framework that recognized exploitation as a structural problem – not merely a personal or social one.

Women in the labor movement: factories, unions, and the fight for fair wages 🔗

India’s organized labor movement gained momentum from the early twentieth century. The first trade union was established in April 1918 in Madras by B.P. Wadia, and in the same year, Mahatma Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in Ahmedabad. By 1920, the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay. Women workers were present in these industries from the beginning – but their formal recognition as leaders took a pioneering act.

Anasuya Sarabhai and the Ahmedabad textile workers 🔗

Anasuya Sarabhai (1885-1972) is regarded as the first woman to lead India’s labor movement. Born into a wealthy Ahmedabad industrialist family, she pursued education in England, came under the influence of Fabian socialists, and returned to India committed to the cause of workers’ rights. Her entry into labor organizing came after she witnessed female mill workers returning home after grueling 36-hour shifts – a sight that galvanized her to act. She helped organize textile workers in a 1914 strike in Ahmedabad, and was also involved in a month-long strike in 1918 where weavers were demanding a 50 per cent wage increase.

Popularly known as “Motaben” (elder sister in Gujarati), Sarabhai became the founder of the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (Majdoor Mahajan Sangh) in 1920, India’s oldest union of textile workers. Her work was extraordinary not only because of her gender but because she went up against her own brother, Ambalal, who was a prominent mill owner. She focused on building a cooperative model of labor relations – advocating for fair wages, better working conditions, and maternity benefits for women workers, while keeping dialogue open between workers and owners. Her legacy endured directly: the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of the most significant women’s labor organizations in the world, grew out of the Women’s Wing of the TLA in 1972.

Women workers in the broader AITUC and strike movements 🔗

Sarabhai was not alone. Ushabai Dange and Parvati Bhore emerged as Communist leaders within the textile workers’ movement. During the Bombay textile mill workers’ strike of 1928-29, women took on significant leadership roles, much like their counterparts in the Calcutta strike that occurred during the same period. As the 1940s approached, an increasing number of women workers came to the forefront of workers’ struggles, particularly as wartime conditions worsened – rising prices, longer working hours, and wage cuts fueled waves of strikes across the country.

From the Tebhaga and Telangana peasant movements to the militant dock and textile worker strikes led by the AITUC, women were fearless organizers. Their activism was revolutionary in two ways: it challenged colonial and feudal structures, and simultaneously broke the confines of the domestic sphere. Women created parallel economies during boycotts, formed vigilance squads, and ran underground communication networks to keep movements alive when male leaders were imprisoned.

The Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti: organizing women from famine to peasant struggle 🔗

In Bengal, one organization became a crucial bridge between women’s self-defense and mass peasant agitation. The Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS), or Women’s Self-Defense Association, was formed in 1942 by Communist women, with its main focus on working among poor women in the context of the devastating Bengal Famine. MARS branches were set up in every district of Bengal, and by 1944 the movement counted 43,500 members. Its work during the famine – providing relief, establishing women’s service centers, and teaching self-employment skills – gave rural women a political education rooted in their own survival.

The importance of this groundwork cannot be overstated. By the time the Tebhaga movement started, a critical factor had been at work: the sustained interaction of urban MARS and Communist Party activists with a devastated rural population during the Bengal Famine had prepared both urban and rural women for participation in peasant struggle. This made women’s participation in Tebhaga qualitatively different from earlier agrarian movements – it was organized, politically conscious, and on a scale never seen before.

The Tebhaga movement: peasant women on the frontlines 🔗

The Tebhaga movement (1946-1947) was a significant peasant agitation initiated in Bengal by the All India Kisan Sabha, the peasant front of the Communist Party of India. The demand was to reduce the landlords’ share of the crop to one-third, up from the existing fifty-fifty split that left sharecroppers with barely enough to survive. The movement spread rapidly across undivided Bengal, engulfing at least 19 districts. And women were at its core.

The Nari Bahini: women’s militia in the fields 🔗

One of the striking features of the Tebhaga movement was the participation of peasant women on par with men. The landless and poor peasant women formed fighting units called Nari Bahini (Women’s Force) and took a frontline role in defending the gains of the movement and countering state repression. Armed with little more than red flags, brooms, and chili powder, they descended on jotedars’ threshing floors, harvested paddy and stacked it in community granaries, and chased off local police who came to suppress the movement.

One of the most remarkable figures in this history is Bimala Maji, a Dalit widow from Midnapur who had survived the Bengal Famine. She joined MARS under Manikuntala Sen and, when the Tebhaga Movement turned violent and the CPI withdrew support, it fell upon Bimala to organize women into a militia. Under her leadership, they destroyed jotedars’ threshing floors, seized and sold paddy shares, and organized dozens of villages into collective action. Her story illustrates something critical: this was not a women’s movement subordinate to a class movement – it was a movement where women acted with independent agency, often when the formal party apparatus had stepped back.

Research by scholar Adrienne Cooper reveals an important tension: though women were more militant than men in the Tebhaga movement, they were generally excluded from the formal organization of the Bangiya Pradeshik Kisan Sabha and the Communist Party. This gap between women’s contributions on the ground and their exclusion from formal leadership structures would remain a recurring contradiction within leftist politics in India.

Class, caste, and community: who were these women? 🔗

The women who participated in the Tebhaga movement in North Bengal did not belong to the upper strata of society. They came from poor, downtrodden, and middle-class sections of peasant society – Oraon, Muslim, Santhal, and Rajbanshi women who joined the movement alongside their male counterparts. Their participation was not organized by the Communist Party from the top down; in many areas, women’s involvement surpassed that of men and was entirely spontaneous, driven by the direct experience of hunger, exploitation, and the recognition that the land they worked was being taken from them.

Women from scheduled caste and tribal backgrounds organized themselves as local leaders when the men were arrested or had gone underground. They often overpowered the police. The participation of Muslim peasant women in Dinajpur, Rangpur, Medinipur, and 24 Parganas demonstrated that revolutionary consciousness was not confined by religion or community. The ethnic and communal solidarity of these women owed much to the earlier MARS activities that had built networks of trust across social divides.

The Telangana struggle: women in armed peasant resistance 🔗

In the Deccan, a parallel but distinct movement was unfolding. The Telangana Peoples’ Struggle (1946-51) was an anti-feudal and anti-caste armed movement against the Nizam of Hyderabad’s oppressive regime. In many ways, it was inherently feminist – with numerous women leaders advocating for socio-political reform that included caste justice, labor protection, and women’s freedom.

Central to the Telangana struggle were the Sanghams – village committees organized by the CPI-linked Andhra Mahasabha. Prominent feminists disillusioned with the Congress formed the Mahila Navjeevan Mandali in 1941, which later joined the Andhra Mahasabha and eventually the Communist Party by 1943. These women were not simply participants in a class struggle – they were bringing a feminist critique into the heart of the peasant movement.

Among the movement’s most celebrated figures was Chakali Ilamma (Chityala Ailamma), a lower-caste labouring woman whose defiance of the Razakars – the Nizam’s paramilitary – became a rallying symbol. As a Bahujan labourer, her militant resistance to the Razakars inspired hundreds of women to join the armed struggle, defy gendered domestic expectations, and challenge structural oppression at the hands of land-owning caste-Hindus. The Telangana struggle thus expanded not only the spaces where women could engage in politics, but also – crucially – the question of who was considered a political subject at all.

Dual challenge: colonial power and patriarchal structures 🔗

What distinguished women’s participation in leftist and peasant movements from other forms of women’s activism in colonial India was its dual character. These women were not primarily asking to be included in an existing political framework – they were challenging two systems of domination simultaneously. Their activism challenged colonial and feudal structures while simultaneously breaking the confines of the domestic sphere.

Yet the contradiction that Bimala Maji’s story points to – women’s militancy on the ground alongside their exclusion from formal party structures – was widespread. Women who embraced leftist political perspectives were engaged in the labor movement and participated in revolutionary peasant struggles, but the organizations they built and sustained did not always reflect their leadership. The party often engaged women as cadre and mobilizers without extending them equal decision-making power. A woman factory worker faced not just exploitation as a worker, but specific gendered experiences – lower wages for the same work, sexual harassment, and the expectation of unpaid domestic labor. The left’s class analysis, while powerful, was not always equipped to address this layered reality.

Legacy: from peasant fields to organized women’s movements 🔗

The participation of women in leftist, worker, and peasant movements left a lasting imprint on India’s political landscape. Women’s participation in the Tebhaga movement broadened the base of the women’s movement, bringing rural, lower-caste, and tribal women into a tradition of organized resistance that had largely been the preserve of urban, upper-caste reformers. At the height of MARS’s influence during the Tebhaga movement, its membership reached forty-three thousand women, mostly from rural areas.

Groups like the Nari Bahini became symbols of women’s agency, influencing the broader women’s movement in India. The National Federation of Indian Women, inaugurated in 1953, drew directly on the networks and experiences of leftist women from Bengal, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh who had cut their political teeth in these peasant and labor struggles. The Tebhaga Movement significantly influenced land reforms, increased political awareness among peasants, empowered women, and inspired future agrarian movements in India.

The story of women in colonial India’s leftist movements is, in the end, a story about what happens when gender and class are taken seriously together – not as competing frameworks, but as inseparable dimensions of the same struggle. These women did not wait for a separate women’s movement to vindicate their rights. They seized the political moment available to them, transformed it, and left behind a legacy that still shapes how we understand collective action in India today.

What do you think? Women in the Tebhaga and Telangana movements were often more militant than their male counterparts yet were sidelined in formal party structures – does this suggest that class-based movements are inherently limited in addressing gender inequality? And how do we recover and center the histories of lower-caste and tribal women like Bimala Maji and Chakali Ilamma, whose contributions have been consistently overlooked even within the movements they helped build?

References

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2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasuya_Sarabhai
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