Women and Political Mobilization in Colonial Punjab: A Historical Study of Women’s Participation in the Pakistan Movement, 1930–1947

Abstract

This article examines the agency of Muslim women in the political mobilization that led to the creation of Pakistan, with particular reference to Punjab between 1930 and 1947. Drawing on a source-critical synthesis of archive-based historiography, digitized photographic collections, published memoirs and oral histories, and secondary statistical data from the 1941 Census and provincial election returns, it reconstructs women’s involvement across three periods: the reformist-associational period (1930–1937), the organizational-incorporation period (1937–1945), and the electoral and street-mobilization period (1945–1947), culminating in the Muslim League’s civil disobedience campaign of January–February 1947. Using social movement theory (repertoires of contention and framing) and feminist theories of nationalism, the article argues, first, that the mobilization of Punjabi Muslim women did not discard a respectable, family- and community-based moral economy but carried it into the public arena; second, that women’s visibility gave the League symbolic and tactical capital against the Unionist-led coalition ministry at a decisive moment; and third, that although incorporation into the League was vital to this mobilization, it produced little lasting formal authority for women. Secondary data underline the narrow base from which this mobilization began: only four of the 175 seats in the Punjab Legislative Assembly were reserved for women, and literacy among Punjab’s Muslims stood at about 7% in 1941. The study offers a chronology that links organizational history, cultural framing and contentious performance, and identifies gaps in the evidence, especially regarding rural, non-elite and non-Muslim women, as priorities for future archival research.

Keywords: women’s history, Pakistan Movement, Punjab, Muslim League, political mobilization, Partition, gender and nationalism