women rulers and leaders: jijabai, tarabai b, ahilyabai, savitribai and tarabai s
there is a particular way women are made to disappear from history even when their names are technically still there. they are remembered, but not always as historical actors. they become somebody's mother, somebody's wife, somebody's widow, somebody's inspiration, somebody's loyal companion. their achievements are softened into virtues. political judgement becomes maternal wisdom. military leadership becomes bravery. intellectual work becomes education. organising becomes service. authorship becomes “influence.”
this is not the same thing as forgetting women altogether. in some ways it is more subtle. the woman remains visible, but the language used to describe her makes her achievements smaller.
jijabai becomes the mother of shivaji. ahilyabai becomes the benevolent queen. tarabai bhonsle becomes the warrior queen. savitribai becomes the wife of jyotirao who helped educate girls. tarabai shinde becomes the woman who wrote an early feminist text.
none of those descriptions are necessarily false. the problem is what they leave out.
if a man had educated and politically formed a future ruler, we would be comfortable describing him as a political mentor. if a man governed a state for nearly three decades, we would call him a sovereign and administrator. if a man organised prolonged military resistance against the mughal empire, we would call him a strategist and statesman. if a man established schools and developed a new educational philosophy, we would call him an educationist and social reformer. if a man wrote a sustained critique of sexual double standards, we would call him a political thinker.
women should not have to become exceptional enough to earn the vocabulary men receive automatically.
that is where jijabai, tarabai bhonsle, ahilyabai holkar, savitribai phule and tarabai shinde become so interesting together. they were not the same kind of woman. they did not hold the same beliefs, operate in the same political circumstances or pursue the same goals. they should not be artificially turned into five versions of a modern feminist. jijabai was not writing a theory of patriarchy. ahilyabai was not leading a women's liberation movement. tarabai bhonsle was not a feminist theorist. savitribai and tarabai shinde, however, give us much more direct evidence for anti-patriarchal and anti-caste intellectual work.
what connects them is something more fundamental: each of them pushed against the boundaries that determined what a woman was supposed to be allowed to do.
jijabai and the politics hidden inside motherhood
jijabai is perhaps the clearest example of how women's labour can be made invisible precisely because it takes place within a role considered “natural” to women.
she is usually introduced as shivaji's mother. that is true, but it is historically inadequate.
motherhood is often treated as though it happens outside politics. the mother raises the child, while the father makes history. the child becomes a ruler, warrior, administrator or intellectual, while the labour of producing that person disappears into the category of family life.
but raising a political subject is not politically neutral.
jijabai lived through an intensely militarised and politically unstable seventeenth-century deccan. her life was intertwined with the political world of shahaji and the emerging maratha political order. shivaji spent substantial periods of his formative years under her care while his father was occupied with political and military affairs. modern scholarship on maratha political culture has increasingly drawn attention to the importance of the household and the mother in producing the disciplined political subject that the maratha state required. a recent study of maratha masculinity, drawing on scholars including stewart gordon, s.n. sen, rosalind o'hanlon and uma chakravarti, explicitly identifies jijabai as central to the production of the political and masculine ideal surrounding shivaji.
that does not mean we should invent a story in which jijabai single-handedly designed the maratha state. it means something much simpler and more important: her intellectual and formative labour was part of political history.
the irony is that the more conventional description of jijabai as a “great mother” can actually obscure the scale of what that role meant.
if a male tutor had spent years educating a future ruler in political morality, cultural traditions, discipline and conceptions of sovereignty, historians would have little difficulty treating him as an important influence on the formation of that ruler. when the educator is a mother, the work becomes “raising her son.”
that is precisely the kind of historical category feminist history needs to question.
jijabai also complicates the distinction between the household and the state. the household was not merely a private refuge from politics. in premodern political societies it was one of the places where political identities were produced, property was managed, alliances were maintained and future rulers were educated.
her achievement therefore isn't that she was somehow “shivaji in female form.” it is that she demonstrates how much political history can be hidden inside activities historians have traditionally called domestic.
there is also something important about refusing to reduce her to shivaji's mother. shivaji should not disappear from his own history, obviously, but neither should jijabai disappear into his. a woman does not become historically interesting only because she produced a famous son.
her significance lies partly in the fact that she was herself a participant in a political world.
ahilyabai holkar and the refusal of political invisibility
if jijabai demonstrates the political importance of supposedly domestic work, ahilyabai demonstrates something even more direct.
ahilyabai holkar became ruler of the holkar state in malwa in 1767 and remained in power until her death in 1795. her reign is associated with administration, justice, public works, military organisation, economic activity and extensive patronage. maheshwar developed under her rule, and she became known for the attention she gave to governance and the welfare of her subjects. john keay famously described her as the “philosopher queen,” while older accounts by figures such as john malcolm also contributed to the long-standing reputation of her administration.
what is striking is not simply that a woman became a ruler.
it is that she performed the actual work of ruling.
she made decisions. she dealt with officials. she managed resources. she maintained political authority. she participated in questions of defence and diplomacy. she supported economic and cultural activity.
and yet the language surrounding women rulers has historically had a tendency to turn political competence into personality.
the male ruler is a statesman.
the female ruler is benevolent.
the male ruler administers.
the female ruler “cares for her people.”
the male ruler builds infrastructure.
the female ruler is remembered for her generosity.
there is nothing wrong with describing ahilyabai as compassionate or religious. the problem arises when those qualities become the only vocabulary available for describing her political work.
she deserves to be discussed as a ruler.
not merely as a good woman who happened to rule.
this is particularly important because ahilyabai's political authority did not come from some fantasy of a modern egalitarian society. she operated within an eighteenth-century social order with its own hierarchies and constraints. calling her a “radical feminist” in the modern ideological sense would therefore be anachronistic. what can be argued much more securely is that her exercise of sovereign authority challenged the assumption that political competence and legitimate rule were naturally male domains.
even contemporary commemorations of ahilyabai continue to emphasise her governance, infrastructure, economic development and leadership, although modern political narratives sometimes fold those achievements into contemporary agendas about women's empowerment.
her historical achievement should belong to her rather than to whatever modern political project wants to claim her.
tarabai bhonsle and the woman who was not supposed to be the commander
tarabai bhonsle makes the problem even harder for traditional history because her contribution sits squarely in the realm of warfare and statecraft.
after the death of her husband, rajaram, she assumed leadership of the maratha resistance during the war against aurangzeb. she operated from panhala and became responsible for sustaining political and military resistance at an extraordinarily difficult moment. historian jaysingrao pawar has spent decades arguing that her role has been badly underestimated, describing her as an intelligent strategist who led military operations and helped expand maratha power. his extensive work on her life explicitly treats both her struggle against the mughals and her later political conflicts with the peshwas as central parts of her history.
that matters because warfare is one of the places where the historical record has traditionally been most comfortable assigning importance to men.
a male commander organises armies.
a male ruler conducts war.
a male strategist negotiates with enemies.
a male political leader preserves a state under military pressure.
all of those things receive the language of statecraft.
when a woman does them, the story is often turned into a tale of courage.
tarabai was certainly courageous. but courage alone is an inadequate description.
she exercised political judgement.
she coordinated military resistance.
she maintained authority.
she navigated internal political conflicts.
she kept a political project alive under conditions in which its survival was far from guaranteed.
the phrase “warrior queen” is flattering, but it can also be strangely diminishing. it turns a political actor into an archetype. she becomes an extraordinary woman rather than being analysed with the same seriousness given to male commanders.
jaysingrao pawar has repeatedly criticised precisely this marginalisation, arguing that the focus on better-known male figures has pushed tarabai's contribution to the margins of maratha history.
and there is something particularly striking about the fact that tarabai's most important political work happened after the death of her husband.
her authority was not simply decorative.
she did not spend the war waiting for a male relative to return and take over.
that is historically significant even before we attach the word feminism to it.
the invisible women behind visible victories
this is where the histories of these women point toward a much larger problem.
traditional history likes visible events.
but every one of those events depends upon an enormous amount of labour that rarely enters the narrative.
children have to be raised.
wounded people have to be cared for.
households have to survive the absence of men.
information has to move between communities.
kinship networks have to be maintained.
people have to reproduce the social world in which armies, states and economies can continue to exist.
much of this labour was disproportionately performed by women.
it disappears partly because it is repetitive and ordinary. history is attracted to the extraordinary moment. feminism forces us to ask what made the extraordinary moment possible.
the king rides into battle.
who maintained the household while he was gone?
the soldier returns wounded.
the state collects agricultural revenue.
who produced and processed much of the food on which that economy depended?
who carried, birthed and raised that child?
the historian records a dynasty.
who transmitted the language, customs, stories and social expectations through which the next generation understood itself?
this is not an argument that women secretly did everything and men did nothing. it is an argument against the absurdity of treating one category of labour as historical and another as background noise.
feminist historians have spent decades making precisely this point: reproduction and care are not outside history simply because they occur outside formal political institutions.
jijabai makes that visible at the level of political formation.
ahilyabai makes it visible at the level of formal government.
tarabai makes it visible at the level of military survival.
and then savitribai and tarabai shinde take the argument somewhere much more structural.
savitribai phule and the right to become a subject
savitribai phule's significance cannot be reduced to “women's education.”
education sounds harmless when detached from the society in which it occurs.
in nineteenth-century western india, however, deciding who could learn, who could read, who could teach and whose knowledge counted was deeply connected to caste and gender.
savitribai entered precisely that battlefield.
she became a teacher, poet, organiser and social reformer. she worked with jyotirao phule to establish schools for girls and for communities excluded from dominant educational institutions. the phule educational project was not simply about adding women to an existing system. it challenged the social hierarchy governing access to knowledge.
this is where sharmila rege's scholarship becomes indispensable.
in “education as trutiya ratna,” rege develops a phule-ambedkarite feminist pedagogy and criticises both colonial and nationalist ways of imagining knowledge. she points out how knowledge in india was repeatedly normalised through a brahmanical framework, with serious consequences for curricula, pedagogy and whose experiences were treated as legitimate knowledge.
that makes savitribai's work far more radical than the phrase “women's education” suggests.
she was not merely helping girls enter a classroom.
she was participating in a struggle over who gets to possess knowledge at all.
and this is where caste becomes impossible to separate from feminism.
uma chakravarti's gendering caste through a feminist lens provides one of the major theoretical frameworks for understanding this relationship. she argues that caste and gender are intertwined systems, with the control of women's sexuality, marriage, labour and access to material resources playing a crucial role in maintaining caste hierarchy. this is what she describes through the concept of brahmanical patriarchy.
savitribai's work therefore cannot be understood adequately as a generic campaign for “empowering women.”
with access to whose schools?
those questions change the entire story.
her educational work opened possibilities for women to become not just literate but intellectually and socially autonomous. and the significance of the students who emerged from that environment matters too. mukta salve, a young student associated with the phule educational world, became an important early voice questioning caste exclusion and the relationship between caste and access to religious and social authority.
this is why savitribai deserves to stand beside the great social reformers of nineteenth-century india rather than behind them.
jyotirao's contribution should not be diminished. but savitribai's should not be absorbed into his either.
if a man had taught girls, built schools, written poetry and participated in a movement challenging caste and gender hierarchy, we would comfortably call him an educationist, writer and social reformer.
savitribai deserves those nouns too.
tarabai shinde and the refusal to accept the sexual double standard
then there is tarabai shinde, who gives us something different again.
she did not simply demonstrate that women could occupy institutions created by men.
she questioned the rules themselves.
in 1882 she published stri-purush tulana, written in response to the public condemnation of vijaylakshmi, a young widow who had been prosecuted after the death of her newborn. the controversy exposed the brutal double standard surrounding women's sexuality: a woman could be condemned for sexual behaviour while the male participant in the same social reality could remain almost invisible.
shinde was furious about this.
and her fury became theory.
as susie tharu and k. lalita explain in women writing in india, shinde's text emerged directly from this controversy and attacked the assumptions behind the condemnation of women. the work was radical precisely because it did not simply plead for compassion for one unfortunate woman. it interrogated the larger gender relations that produced such situations.
rosalind o'hanlon's a comparison between women and men: tarabai shinde and the critique of gender relations in colonial india is even more directly relevant. the very title tells us how seriously shinde's work can be read: not simply as a feminist pamphlet, but as a critique of gender relations.
this is where the language of radical feminism becomes much more defensible.
shinde was asking why society constructed radically different moral expectations for men and women.
why was female sexuality treated as evidence of moral failure?
why were women expected to embody chastity while men were allowed sexual freedom?
why did religious and social authority so often become a mechanism for disciplining women?
those are structural questions.
she was not merely asking men to be nicer.
she was questioning the arrangement itself.
that does not make her identical to a twentieth-century radical feminist theorist. historical context matters. but it does mean that there is a genuine intellectual lineage between her work and later feminist critiques of sexual double standards.
women as thinkers, not just symbols
tarabai shinde also exposes another kind of historical erasure.
women's intellectual work is often treated as biographical decoration.
a male intellectual writes a political text.
a female intellectual writes a political text.
the man becomes a thinker.
the woman becomes “a feminist writer.”
again, the problem isn't that the description is false.
it is that it can be incomplete.
shinde was thinking about morality, sexuality, caste, religion, gender and social power.
savitribai was thinking about education, caste, knowledge and social transformation.
these women were not merely living exemplary lives. they were producing ideas.
and ideas are historical action.
what these women believed matters too
there is another mistake that can happen when we recover women from history: we turn them into symbols so polished that their actual beliefs disappear.
jijabai lived within the religious and political world of seventeenth-century maharashtra. her political imagination cannot simply be translated into modern secular feminism. her importance lies in the political agency she exercised within her own intellectual and cultural universe.
ahilyabai was deeply religious. her governance was shaped by her devotional worldview and by the political culture of eighteenth-century maratha society. that should not be erased merely because modern readers want a secular feminist heroine.
in fact, it makes her more interesting.
a woman does not have to share our politics to demonstrate female political capacity.
tarabai bhonsle was concerned fundamentally with sovereignty, dynastic legitimacy and the survival of the maratha state. again, that is not modern feminism. but her exercise of power still disrupts the assumption that sovereignty belongs naturally to men.
savitribai and tarabai shinde are different because their work moves much more directly toward social critique.
savitribai's educational politics connected women's emancipation with the destruction of caste-based exclusion from knowledge. rege's scholarship is especially valuable here because it prevents us from separating her feminism from the phule-ambedkarite critique of caste.
shinde's politics was confrontational in another way. she was willing to attack the moral double standards imposed upon women and to question the social and religious authority used to justify them. o'hanlon's scholarship is particularly useful for understanding this as a critique of gender relations rather than a collection of isolated complaints.
none of these women need to be made identical to each other to be placed within a feminist history.
in fact, they become more interesting when their differences are preserved.
their male counterparts are useful, but they should not be the centre
comparisons with male figures are useful because they expose the double standard.
jijabai can be compared, in function, with political educators and mentors rather than merely with mothers of famous men.
ahilyabai deserves to be discussed in the same vocabulary used for sovereign rulers: administration, statecraft, political judgement, economic policy.
tarabai deserves the vocabulary used for military leaders: strategy, command, diplomacy, political organisation.
savitribai deserves the vocabulary used for educationists and social reformers: pedagogy, institution-building, intellectual production, social transformation.
shinde deserves the vocabulary used for political and social theorists: critique, ideology, sexual morality, gender relations, social power.
but the point is not that these women were “the female equivalents” of men.
that framing still leaves men as the original standard.
the better argument is that the achievement itself was already theirs.
ahilyabai does not need a male comparison to prove she was a ruler.
tarabai does not need a male general to prove she understood warfare.
savitribai does not need jyotirao standing beside her to prove she was an educator.
shinde does not need a male intellectual to validate her analysis.
the comparisons are useful only because they reveal how differently history talks about comparable work.
the visible and invisible contribution
this also brings us back to the larger question of women's historical labour.
there are women whose names survive because they entered traditionally male institutions.
and there are millions whose names do not survive because their work happened in kitchens, fields, workshops, childbirth rooms, courtyards, schools, markets, temples, refugee camps, farms and households.
those women mattered too.
the history of a kingdom cannot be reduced to its ruler.
the history of a war cannot be reduced to its generals.
the history of a movement cannot be reduced to its male intellectuals.
the history of education cannot be reduced to the men who wrote its official reports.
the history of social reproduction cannot be reduced to statistics about births.
women's labour has often been treated as infrastructure rather than achievement.
and infrastructure is noticed most clearly when it collapses.
a household functioning smoothly is rarely described as an accomplishment.
a child growing up educated is rarely recorded as the result of years of maternal labour.
a community surviving war is rarely credited to the people who maintained its social fabric.
a political movement surviving repression is rarely attributed to the women who kept networks, homes, food and communication systems functioning.
that is the invisible half of history.
and there is a final irony
women are often told that their historical importance comes from being exceptional.
ahilyabai was exceptional.
savitribai was exceptional.
but that explanation can actually make the problem worse.
because if women only become historically interesting when they are extraordinary, we never ask what happened to ordinary women.
the feminist task is not merely to add five remarkable women to a textbook written around men.
it is to change what we think deserves to be in the textbook.
it is to recognise care as labour.
education as political work.
reproduction as social infrastructure.
household management as economic activity.
community organisation as political activity.
writing as intellectual production.
resistance as history even when it never produces a throne.
and that is why these women matter beyond the comforting category of “women's empowerment.”
jijabai shows us that the formation of political power can begin in a space historians dismiss as domestic.
ahilyabai shows us that a woman can occupy sovereign authority without becoming a footnote to the men around her.
tarabai bhonsle shows us that military and political strategy were never inherently male capacities.
savitribai shows us that education can become an attack on the caste and gender monopoly over knowledge.
tarabai shinde shows us that a woman can look directly at the moral architecture of patriarchy and say that the problem is not simply individual cruelty but the rules themselves.
their lives also remind us that feminism does not require turning every historical woman into a modern feminist.
sometimes the feminist act is recovering a woman whose political labour was hidden inside motherhood.
sometimes it is refusing to describe a sovereign as merely benevolent.
sometimes it is calling military leadership military leadership when the commander happens to be a woman.
sometimes it is recognising a teacher as an intellectual rather than someone's wife.
sometimes it is taking a woman's anger seriously enough to recognise it as political thought.
and perhaps the most important point is this:
women did not suddenly enter history when feminism began writing about them.
they were governing, teaching, organising, fighting, writing, caring, producing, transmitting knowledge, preserving communities and making political worlds possible.
what changed was not whether women acted.
what changed was whether historians were willing to recognise those actions as history.
that is why recovering women like jijabai, tarabai bhonsle, ahilyabai holkar, savitribai phule and tarabai shinde is not an exercise in adding a few inspirational names to an otherwise unchanged historical narrative.
it is an argument about the narrative itself.
history should not merely ask who ruled?
it should ask who educated the rulers, who sustained their households, who maintained their economies, who preserved their communities, who challenged their moral authority, who created alternatives to their institutions and who made survival possible when the men whose names eventually entered the chronicles were away fighting, governing or writing.
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