The Quit India resolution, passed on August 8, 1942, demanded an immediate transfer of power from Britain to India and called for a nonviolent, mass struggle under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi. But when all the top members of the Congress Party were arrested, the control of the movement passed from urban middle class men to the more radical peasantry, militant students, and women, who, according to Subaltern Studies historian Gyanendra Pandey, “appropriated the name and symbols of Gandhian nationalism for a politics that was essentially their own.”
My paper examines the resistant role—both nonviolent and violent—of women in Quit India and the resulting subversion of traditional, gendered political and literary history that casts Indian women as silent or absent. As Aruna Asaf Ali, perhaps the most important leader of the movement, explains, the Quit India Resolution appealed directly to women “as disciplined soldiers of Indian freedom.” Thus it was that women took part in the thousands in all phases of the movement, striking and demonstrating in the cities, organizing peasant revolts, joining the secret underground, forming parallel governments, and courting arrest, thereby also presenting striking images of women as independent, empowered, and equal. These images continue to underwrite both the contemporary Indian feminist movement and the very notion of the modern Indian nation as a secular state with universal civil liberties and democratic rights.