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not yet won the right to vote.
    Gandhi did have his limitations as an emancipator. The role of women in the freedom struggle was for the most part supportive and auxiliary, limited to spinning, picketing, distributing literature and attending meetings. Gandhi himself saw women as long-suffering vessels of self-sacrifice, who should neither earn the principal wages in a family nor disrupt the balance at home. But he nonetheless moved a large step forward from the nineteenth-century reformers by seeing women as active participants in their own progress and not, in the words of the feminist Madhu Kishwar, “as helpless creatures deserving charitable concern.” Certainly Indian women responded to Gandhi in a way they never had to any other male leader, a phenomenon that has always interested Romila Thapar, who believes the psychological connection between Gandhi and the masses of women has not been adequately explored. “There’s something about him,” she told me, “that makes him very much like us.” Erik Erikson, in
Gandhi’s Truth
, the Pulitzer Prize–winning psychoanalytic study of the Indian leader, suggests what that might be. Gandhi, Erikson argues, believed in the “natural superiority” of the self-sacrificing woman but could not tolerate this notion “without a competitive attempt at becoming more maternal than the most motherly of mothers.” Gandhi thus saw himself as a “mother” to his mother, his father and India “herself.” (Erikson, in one of his most seductive meditations, also explains his belief that India is essentially feminine, or, more precisely, that “Father Time in India is a Mother.” Indians, Erikson says, live in “a feminine space time,” a world in which they feel enveloped and carried along as participants in a larger continuum.)
    The next major development in the history of Indian women did not come until the mid-1970s, after the government released “Towards Equality,” an explosive, far-reaching report on the status of India’s women that revealed that conditions for many of them had actually regressed in significant ways since independence. It is this report which serves as a basis for the current women’s movement in India, although feminists prefer to categorize the present movement as the natural “third stage,” after the nineteenth-century reform in Calcutta and women’s participation in the freedom struggle. Historically this view is correct, but it is also a way for Indian feminists to distinguish themselves from the Western women’s movement and to emphasize their often-repeated point that feminism has a different context and set of goals in India.

    THROUGHOUT MY JOURNEY, I WAS ALWAYS AWARE OF AN OUTSIDER’S limitations in a foreign country. I struggled daily with the problem of what standards to apply. There have been Western journalists who romanticized India, and there have been others who saw in it only those things that reinforced their own sense of cultural superiority. One member of the latter school was Katherine Mayo, a reform-minded American free-lance journalist who wrote a book called
Mother India
, which included many chapters on the condition of Indian women. It was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1927, to an explosion of criticism on the subcontinent, and it quickly became a best-seller in England and the United States. India was then struggling for independence from the British, but Mayo came to the conclusion that the Indians were not ready to rule their own country because, among other things, they overindulged in sex. She asserted that all of an Indian’s woes—“poverty, sickness, ignorance, political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness” and the “subconscious conviction of inferiority”—could be blamed on the effects of widespread child marriage. Mayo argued that men ineptly raised by child brides were physically feeble, given to unrestrained sexual appetites and of morally “bankrupt stock” at an age when “the