The young generation of feminists finds inspiration in their previous generations and carries their legacies forward. The foundations built by some are carried to their final stages by others. Prem Chowdhry is one such foundation of feminist writing in Haryana. Her first book titled “The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana (1880-1980)” and the cover sketch made by Prem herself, depicting a group of Rural Haryanvi women holding each other in their arms, fill oneself with joy, a kind of ‘feminist joy.’
A joy where you see that the pain of a people who have always lived under the shadow of deprivation, shame, and violence did not go unregistered. The joy that while the nation was fighting for its freedom, there was someone looking at those, unfree by birth.
Who is Prem Chowdhry?
Prem Chowdhry is an eminent Indian historian, social scientist, and well-recognised artist. An alumna of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, Prem has taken various positions, such as the former Professor of History at Miranda House, Delhi University, Senior Professorial Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Academic Fellow at the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), and a Life Member of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS).
Prem Chowdhry’s academic journey has been long and wide-ranging. Prem Chowdhry’s artwork has been exhibited at different art galleries and museums in India and abroad. Her paintings portray the status and realities of Haryanvi women, focusing on their manner of dressing, facial expressions, and body language, set against the flora and fauna of the rural milieu.
Prem’s personal background
Born in the Chhara village of the Jhajjar district of Haryana to Hardwari Lal, a former MP, education minister, and MLA in the Haryana government. Prem hails from a family with a strong academic tradition where she was, in her own words, “literally pushed into doing her BA, MA, and Ph.D.”
When asked by a journalist how much of her passion for academics has been inherited by her, she replied, “Quite a lot. But in reality, there were very few professions that a female could choose at the time I was growing up. Unlike these times, which offer a huge number of options to women, even unorthodox ones, then it was academics or medical which were the socially acceptable fields for women. Left to myself, I may have chosen to go into fine arts- but that was out of question at that time, with my father’s marked preference for higher education.”
Despite these limitations, Prem managed to bring her art into her academics, or, we can say, transformed her academics into art. Prem’s works, although falling broadly into the category of academia and scholarly research, break the confines of monotonous and comfortable scholarly writing and launch a radical inquiry into the social and political condition of Haryanvi women. During the 1970s and 80’s, when Prem began her fieldwork, Haryana, although riding on the wheels of economic and industrial growth, was a deeply regressive society where educated and strong women were a distress for the majority. Deciding to partake in this journey of feminist inquiry in those times is itself an act of resistance and strength.
What makes Prem Chowdhry stand out?
Haryana has produced prominent feminist literary figures ranging from poets, writers, and scholars engaged with various humanities and social science fields, but what makes Prem worthy of the title of ‘The Feminist of Haryana‘ is her deep commitment to documenting the lived realities of Haryanvi women, which she pursues through her fieldwork in the state for so many decades. Others have given their feminisms a poetic or fictional route, a route that often saves you from the labour of becoming one with the women whose liberation you are seeking. Prem doesn’t only become one with the woman she writes for but also allows them the space to express themselves fully.
Nowhere in her work does Prem speak on behalf of her rural, often illiterate women. Prem adopts the technique of ‘oral history‘ to document the original accounts of women and men in their own languages, sharing their experiences, opinions, and views about collective life with others. Even though Prem Chowdhry belongs to the most dominant caste of Haryana, the ‘Jats,’ and has a very priviledged and upper-class background, her work with women and men across the various class and caste lines and across ages and occupations proves her act of shedding her privilege and actually adopting pro-marginalised stand in all her writings.
A brief of her works
Prem Chowdhry’s first book in the series of her most prominent works is “The Veiled Women.” “The Veiled Women,” with the help of archival sources, try to understand the life of a peasant woman in the colonial era, where Haryana was a part of Punjab and the colonial interests, along with the interests of the native men, colluded to exploit the peasant woman.
Prem stresses certain peculiar customs that worked against the agency of peasant women, like the ‘Karewa‘ where a widow was forcefully married to another man in the family, only to prohibit her from asking for a share in the ancestral property, or the practice of child marriage, dowry, and female infanticide. Prem has given special attention to ‘The Household‘ as the centre of exploitation for women, where the structure of the family and the dynamics of power amongst them play to reduce the role of women as purely utilitarian for the purposes of production and reproduction.
Prem has also deconstructed the ‘Ghunghat‘ tradition in Haryana and explained in simple terms how this piece of cloth on the face of a woman is symbolic of her inferior identity. In her subsequent works, “Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste, and Patriarchy in Northern India,” published in 2007, Prem deals with the infamous extra-judicial justice delivery system that runs in Haryana and adjoining areas in the name of ‘Khaps‘ which is often in the headlines for committing the worst crimes in the name of caste and honour.
The couples who decide to marry against caste and class norms are generally the targets of these Khap men’s frustrated masculinity. Prem also stresses how the state machinery and the police become complicit in these cases. Through her later work, “Political Economy of Production and Reproduction,” published in 2011 and “Gender, Power, and Identity: Essays on Masculinities in Rural North India,” published in 2019, Prem Chowdhry carries forward the task of understanding the changing or not so changing relationships between gender, caste, and power. Her historically informed insights are carried over into contemporary research and commentary on gender conflict in Haryana today. Her understanding of how modernity has impacted patriarchally organised peasant castes and put notions of masculinity at risk can be followed in the issues of Economic and Political Weekly and is cited as much by journalists and activists against caste and gender violence as they are by social scientists.
Why is Prem Chowdhry relevant today?
Chowdhry’s work attains much more relevance in the kind of times that we find ourselves today where an entire state-backed, anti-feminist, and anti-gender-minority brigade has made it their mission to dehumanise, criminalise, and terrorise all the efforts taken in the direction of women and gender minority rights. Defending the misogyny of the past, and especially in India, of the Hindu majority in the name of protecting India’s culture and values has become quite a trend where challenging any regressive and discriminatory practice is instantly labelled as ‘western propaganda‘ or defaming our great religion. It is in this atmosphere that intellectuals like Prem Chowdhry who have presented factual, evidence-based, and ground research on gender historiography become much more relevant. Her texts need to be revised and revisited, especially in the context of Haryanvi society.
It is not very easy to document the lives of unprivileged and vulnerable women anywhere in the world, especially in places guarded and controlled by masculine forces. Haryana is such a place. There are eyes on the lookout for anything that might ‘spoil,’ or ‘brainwash,’ their ‘innocent women,’ into a direction of agency and a better life. The importance of Prem Chowdhry’s of Haryana is not vanishing anytime soon; it is only increasing. It is the responsibility of the younger generation of feminists to take her legacy forward.
