Preface
This paper was first published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.1, October 1977. The context in which it was researched and written was the period between 1974 and 1978, a period of intense debate and discussion within and between some of the socialist groups claiming a Marxist heritage in India. The one with which I was associated was the Revolutionary Bolshevik Circle (RBC) in Bombay, but I had major disagreements with it. One was the perspective of building a vanguard Leninist party, which, in practice, involved extremely sectarian and polemical interactions with other socialist groups. The idea that any of these groups – even the RBC, which undoubtedly took theory, the study of Marx, the legacy of the Russian revolution and a critique of Stalinism more seriously than any other group – could claim exclusive leadership of a socialist revolutionary movement seemed questionable. This was connected to a second criticism: designation of the industrial proletariat working in large-scale enterprises as the sole motor force of the revolution. One of the groups with whose members we were having discussions was working with agricultural labourers and the rural poor: mightn’t these sections too have to be involved in any revolutionary movement?
However, the criticism that preoccupied me most was that this perspective excluded the vast majority of proletarian women, only a tiny proportion of whom were employed in large-scale industry. I began working on a critique of this marginalisation of working-class women, drawing on two sources. One was a study of Marx’s writings on domestic labour, which seemed to be marked by inconsistencies and contradictions. The other was my own experience taking care of a household and two little pre-school children on a very small income: we had no washing machine or fridge; I cooked on a kerosene stove that often made pots and pans sooty; queued up at the ration shop for kerosene and inferior rice from which stones had to be picked out before cooking; used cloth nappies for my baby until he was toilet-trained; and although we had running water in our flat, the supply was limited to a few hours in the morning and an hour or two in the evening (and occasionally failed to come even at these times), so we had to store water in a drum for washing and bathing etc., and in a matka for drinking and cooking, and there were times when it ran short.
It was hard work, but working-class women living in urban shanty-towns and poor rural women had an incomparably harder time, queueing up to collect water from a common tap or well and carrying the heavy waterpots home; in some cases collecting firewood for cooking; collecting wheat from the ration shop, taking it to the mill to be ground, and making chapatis from the atta; cleaning made so much more difficult because there wasn’t a proper floor; and so on: all extremely heavy, time-consuming tasks.