Gloria Steinem’s early year in India profoundly shaped her understanding of feminism and activism.
Gloria Steinem was 22. In 2014, she told Rajya Sabha TV that she was struck by the role women had played in India’s Independence movement and by women’s struggles against oppressive practices. During a visit around 2014 with economist Devaki Jain, Steinem spoke about how her time at Miranda House had helped her forge friendships with women, and influenced her engagement with social justice and equality.
Because i didn’t learn as much as I should have here, in 2011, she told the then Asia Society president, “Going to India helped me enormously. On Steinem’s 90th birthday two years ago, Miranda House college marked the occasion with women’s rights and anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta and announced a Gloria Steinem Travel Grant for work on gender issues.
Long after, the journalist, activist and feminist said it was in India that she began to understand feminism without yet knowing the word for it. Steinem lived for about a year in Miranda House hostel in Delhi, according to the college principal. The trip to India, she is said to have recounted later, appealed to her not merely as a chance to step away from the life she knew, but as a way of discovering for herself a country whose history and culture had long interested her. “I didn’t know what feminism was,” she said in the interview. Miranda House principal professor Bijayalaxmi Nanda said Steinem visited the college twice and remained closely connected to her memories of the institution. When she visited, she spoke about how the college had transformed her life and how she had made many women friends here,” Nanda said. Though the grant has not yet been used, Nanda said the college may now revive it in Steinem’s memory. “We will also plan a conference or some event so that the present generation knows about her contributions and what she stood for,” she said.
Having graduated from Smith College, she received a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship that gave her the chance to spend a year in India. She then travelled to Calcutta, southern India and Bombay, wrote about the country, and learnt grassroots organising from the followers of Mahatma Gandhi. Steinem even featured in sari ads, as a way of supplementing her income in India . Women such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay showed her a history of female activism she had not encountered in United States. “She consistently spoke about women’s rights in the workplace and society, bodily autonomy, and was a strong voice against child trafficking and pornography. For instance, I didn’t understand Dalit culture. At the time, Dalits were still being referred to as ‘untouchables’. I was deeply affected.