BOOK REVIEW / Cultural baggage: The history of doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and feminism in India, 1800-1990 by Radha Kumar, Verso pounds 12.95

'DANCE] Rejoice]' exclaimed the Indian poet, Subramanya Bharati: 'Those who said it is evil for women to touch books / are dead. / The lunatics who said / they would lock women in their houses / cannot show their faces now. / They showed us our place in the home / as if we were bullocks, bred / and beaten to dumb labour./ We have ended that./ Sing and dance]'

Bharati's call - originally made in Tamil in the 1920s - could be called premature. Radha Kumar's book documents the movement for women's rights in India from 1800 onwards, and in it she shows that women are hardly dancing freely in the streets.

But they have been mobilising and organising almost constantly, under a variety of banners. And in the process they have, as a movement, accumulated a range of themes and constituent issues. These include work, wages, the environment, health, sex, religion, caste, community, individual and social relationships, and much more. The women's movement in its current form may be split, and feminists themselves often tired and bruised but, seen as a whole, argues Kumar persuasively, it has a breadth and richness of reference that makes it unique internationally.

The issue of women emerged out of flux. During the 19th century, India was washed by streams of new ideas on social reform from the West. At the same time, it was undergoing change internally. Men at the forefront of the urgent debates agreed that the position of women constituted a legitimate cause for concern. Education cried out for consideration. Child marriage and the ban on the remarriage of widows needed addressing, as did the practice of suttee (in which widows burned themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres). Although they were initially seen as matters of natural justice, however, the basis for these changes gradually came to seem less simple. The polarities (not unfamiliar in the West) have continued to have implications ever since.

On the one hand, women were held to have a unique nature, distinct from that of men. Nurturing and noble, they deserved proper treatment to flower with their true potential, as mothers of men. The counter rationale regarded women as intrinsically equal with men, but subordinated and oppressed by sexual divisions such as those manifested in divisions of labour.

The earliest campaigners for women were men, and they tried to use the legal system to combat abuses. Some memorable cases are recorded. There was Rakhmabai, for instance, who had been married as a child to Dadaji Bhikaji but refused to live with him when she grew up. The appeal court in 1884 supported his claim for conjugal rights. But Rakhmabai refused to obey, paid a hefty fine and then went to England where she qualified as a doctor. Returning home, she practised medicine and died at 91.

Pioneers like Rakhmabai were gradually joined by less extraordinary women - those, for instance, who were delegates to the 1889 session of the Congress Party, even though they did not yet have speaking parts. And as the impetus of the Independence movement grew, so did organisations like the powerful Women's Indian Association (which was the first to take up women workers' demands) and others. Campaigner Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya graphically describes the April day in 1930 when thousands disobeyed the Salt Laws to gather salt on the seashore with Gandhi.

But the tide of change slowed drastically after Independence in 1947, and women came to realise that their needs and expectations were being disregarded by legislators. In the 1970s, the impetus revived, building on the separate protest movements - by village women against the sale of alcohol, for example. These were succeeded by high-profile campaigns against suttee, dowry deaths and rape. Women were effective in pursuing restitution for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy.

The history of the past 190 years is diverse, contradictory and complex. It has also, inevitably, been one of conflict, self-analysis and schism, particularly in recent years. Radha Kumar's own traumatic moment was when she found herself, on a march against suttee, picketing other women who were marching in support of it. But it is one of Kumar's several strengths that she is honest and clear-headed about her subject. Her book will need some perseverance on the part of people with no knowledge of the Indian context, but it provides a fascinating historical survey and splendid illustrations, with a number of intriguing nuggets. It also offers a strong counterblast to the hostile claim that feminism in India is an irrelevant import from the West, brought in by jet-setting deracinated Indian women in their expensive Louis Vuitton luggage.