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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
as partners of men outside home. In India also, multitudes of women Occupy a similar position ; only, they reinain deprived of the right which should be theirs legitimately, in return for the economic responsibility they shoulder. They do labour and consequently contribute to the family exchequcr ; but they do not do so as independent in liviciuals ; they are treated as bcasts of burden. all women belonging to the lower classes, particularly the peasantry, are in that position. The glorious ideal of Indian womanhood is not for them. For the bulk of Indian womanhood, the idical stands naked as chattel-slavery.
Thereforc, Desai did not know what he was talking about, when he advised women not to "enter the arch of the struggle for existence which belongs to man". Whatever may be the wisdom of this advice, given by our modern Draco, it certainly has no sense for the majority of Indian worden, who arc deeply involved in the struggle for exist. ence, have been so from time imincmorial, even in the legendary Golden Age', not by choice, with any perverse spirit of antagonism, but out of stark necessity. Now, even the women belonging to the next higher stratum of society are being drawn ir that striggle. Thanks to the break-down even of the precarious skeleton of the joint family, an increasingly large number of middle-class women are finding it difficult to have the traclitional protection of husbands who, in return for that ques
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