Revolutionaries as Political Women

Female Cadres of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA)

Abstract

The purpose of studying women’s participation in radical movements, as the classical study We Were Making History notes, is ‘an attempt to broaden the history of that struggle by recovering the subjective experience of women, to capture women’s voices from the past and to present issues as they were perceived by women’ (Stree Shakti Sanghathana, 1989, 2). Taking this framework as the point of departure, this article seeks to explore the history of women’s participation in the secessionist politics of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Deviating from the existing scholarships on the subject that rightly focus on the lack of adequate women’s representation at the leadership level, this article argues that representation at formal political negotiations is not the only form of political activity that women aspire to. Instead, in their own way, many of these revolutionaries have in fact turned into ‘political women’. Fictional writings in the Assamese language are more forthcoming than academic scholarship in recognizing this alternative, informal politics in which women engage. At the same time, it is important to note that these ‘political women’ need not be free from conventional gendered prejudices.