The 'womanly vote' and women citizens: Debates on women's franchise in late colonial India1

Abstract

This article explores the formation and gendering of Indian nationalist ideologies of citizenship through an examination of suffrage debates in India in the period 1917 to the 1940s. The article draws attention to citizenship as a terrain of struggle, where a multitude of socio-political forces and ideological formulations exist in unequal and conflicting relationships. It starts from the premise that the defining parameters of citizen ship in India emerged in the historical context of the anticolonial movement and the assertion of a national self-identity. The 'vote' assumed significance in this context as a claim to equality and to the political rights of citizenship that were denied to colonised subjects. However, the debates surrounding the vote as a measure of equality, disclose complex intersecting layers of socio-political forces-nationalist, colonialist, feminist, masculinist and conservative. This article focuses on the debates over women's franchise and the manner in which gendered meanings came to be attributed to the 'vote', with wide ranging implications for articulating women as citizens.