Up until 1993, 20 women had been either presidents or prime ministers of their country. If those who have held office for two years or less are excluded from this elite group, the number who have held power for a significant period comes down to 15. One third of these (five in number) have held the office on prime minister in South Asia. Reasonably widely-known and reported upon are Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world's first female prime minister, who headed the Sri Lankan government from 1960-65 and 1970-77, and Indira Gandhi who held the same position in India between 1966 and 1977 and 1980 until her assassination in 1984. More recent, and less reported upon are Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to the present day and Khaleda Zia, holder of the same position in Bangladesh from 1991 to the present. The very recent addition to this elite group is Chandrika Kumaratunga elected to the Sri Lankan prime ministership previously held by her mother Mrs Bandaranaike in August this year (1994). (See Table 1 for full details.)

Out of the total of 171 years of independence enjoyed by the four South Asian states, they have had female prime ministers for at least part of 41 of them. In contrast the United States of America can boast only of an (unsuccessful) female vice-presidential candidate , in Australia some columnists are getting excited about the prospect of a female prime minister and in Canada they had a female prime minister for ?, elected by her male colleagues into the role when all was lost electorally. These are nations in which in social and public life women have made some progress to equality, certainly more than has been made in South Asia, where women are still profoundly disadvantaged compared to men.

This is an apparent paradox which has been identified by both popular writers and academics. As an American journalist wrote about India recently, how could a country "that is home to hundreds of millions of illiterate and impoverished village women" also produce Indira Gandhi "one of the most powerful women in the world"? A scholar has similarly asked, "why countries so long associated with patriarchy and the subordination of women should be the focus for so many politically prominent females"?

The common explanation for the paradox is also shared by popular writers and academics. They attribute it simply to inheritance, what Antonia Fraser has labelled "the appendage syndrome". Each of these women is a widow or daughter (or in Chandrika's case granddaughter) of a slain male leader, a leader vital in the history of their respective countries. So a journalist writes for women in Asia "the tried-and-trusted avenues towards political success are to chose one's father carefully, or a husband who is likely to be assassinated". Less flippantly, Jouhan writes that their "assumption of power was `mediated' by a male relative, as opposed to those whose careers were shaped from the beginning by their own choices, attributes and efforts". The other major writer on this subject, Richter, takes a similar line, saying: "women have tended to move into top positions of power in south and southeast Asia under the most dramatic of circumstances - as a result of assassinations, coups, sudden death of the previous leader or by moving to the forefront of the opposition against nondemocratic forces." In fact in the example of Mrs Gandhi, many commentators subsequently changed their tune. One for example said the only thing accidental about Mrs Gandhi's rise was the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri. "Nothing else about her actions or her personality was accidental."

But overall the image is presented that these women arrived in this position solely by chance, through the death of their male-associated figure and the lack of an alternative strong leader. They are seen to be like puppets, jerked around by (perhaps ill) fate. The same sort of picture is painted about women at lower levels of sub-continent politics, although curiously the same suggestion is less often applied to males who come into politics under similar circumstances. And there are no shortage of examples at the lower levels of politics, as India Today wryly reported with regard to the 1989 elections: "The list of candidates for the coming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections would make any geneticist conclude that human chromosomes have an as-yet unidentified political gene. The roster of fathers and sons, sons and mothers, sisters and brothers and sisters and sisters contesting simply goes on and on".

The idea is often presented, either overtly or subtly that the five women on which I am concentrating were "mere" housewives, who one second were at home doing the cooking and washing and the next minute governing their country. This was particularly overt in the case of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, and in her case as in the situation of the women I'm considering here it was simply false.

What is occurring in these dismissal of these women's rise to power as insignificant and their identification of them as puppets is not entirely accidental, I would suggest. It can partly be attributed to an effect identified by Genovese and Thompson: "If a woman is already at or near the top of the elite as she begins her political career because she inherited position and status from her parental family or because she has acquired it through close association with her husband, then observers with a conscious or unconscious interest in preserving gender bias in the political system can discount her as an anomly unlikely to be repeated or attribute her success to family and spouse rather than her own skill or efforts."

Even disinterested observers may well be influenced by their pre-conceived ideas about gender relations in these countries. Under the sway of these views they may dismiss as unsignificant and accidental occurences which this essay will suggest are both systematic and important.

Another response has been to effectively ignore the gender of these prime ministers and treat them as de facto males. This is a glaring factor in an otherwise worthwhile study (with a large number of authors contributing) titled India: The Years of Indira Gandhi. In part the overall shortage of academic treatment of the fascinating paradox is a function of the very recent nature of interest in gender issues. A review noted as recently as 1978 there was little serious interest within the academic community for "the category of `woman' as a way of approaching the study of Indian society". But this excuse can not be applied to the book just mentioned and it sometimes seems the avoidance is because women in this role do not fit authors' preconceptions about South Asia, or the problem is too difficult to tackle.

Before going further it is important to take up a point raised by Richter. As in the Ching article already mentioned it is often stated, or at least implied, that the passing on of a father or husband's political mantle to widow or daughter is a somehow uniquely Asian phenomenon. Certainly it is only on where to draw the geographical boundaries of its spread that authors disagree. This is yet another example of a stain of Orientalism which still strikes in many areas of scholarship about Asia.

What is pointed out far less frequently is that in the United States of America from 1920 to 1970 all women elected to the Senate only took up public political roles following the death of their husbands. It was not until 1978 that a woman not following her husband into politics (Nancy Landon Kassebaum) was elected to that prestigious and powerful role. And she was the daughter of a governor of Kansas and a presidential contender.

Returning to the central paradox of female prime ministers balanced against the poor position of the vast majority of South Asian women, this work will argue that succession to head the government is not, and never can be, and automatic, accidental process. In Chapter 1 I will explore the way in which succession always has to be "constructed", set up, in any situation, even a hereditary monarchy. To illustrate this point I will consider in some detail the rise to power of these five women. This will illustrate that comments such as Jahan's, that "they were initially chosen by male party leaders to fill the vacuum created when a charismatic leader was suddenly removed before having had time to groom a well-defined political successor" are fundamentally misleading. These accounts will show that all but Mrs Gandhi had to win popular elections, usually after significant periods of campaigning or political struggle, while Mrs Gandhi did not in fact succeed her father as the Congress' choice for prime minister. The picture of their rise to the prime ministership is thus far more complex than is commonly portrayed.

In Chapter 2 this essay will tackle the difficult paradox already outlined and begin to try to answer the question "how have these women managed to take power?" For while they have had the essential family background for the task, they have still had to overcome the huge barrier of being female. What factors could possibly have led so many men who believe in their own natural dominance over women in society to vote for a female as their most powerful citizen? In this chapter I will suggest there are many possible advantages which elite women can hold over elite males. Going further, in Chapter 3, this work will present a thesis that these women have not presented themselves as de-facto males, or even asexual, but have instead been able to exploit the tradition of bi-sexuality in South Asia. By this I am not referring to sexual practice, but to tradition of religion and myth, even of the social tales of family structure, which means both male and female, uniting into some sort of whole, not asexual but bi-sexual, is not a strange prospect in South Asian culture.

I will argue this is a tradition that these women have used to be able to exploit the potential advantages outlined in Chapter 2, while avoiding many of the social pitfalls which could outweigh those. Some of the advantages outlined are fundamentally contradictory, and these women's actions certainly break many social norms and rules, but these women are able to avoid potential conflict by in fact "having it both ways".

In the final chapter this work will answer a final argument of those who have sought to dismiss the rise of these five women to the prime ministership is insignificant, because they are not perceived to have acted any differently to men might have in the same situation, or to have furthered the progress of their own gender. This is not a central plank of this thesis, because judging the both political motives and degree to which an individual (even a prime minister) can alter long-term social conditions is extremely difficult. Additionally in the cases of Mrs Kumaratunga and to a lesser extent Benazir Bhutto and Khaleda Zia the relatively short period of their governance makes any such judgments virtually impossible.

But this section will seek to show that in some cases, particularly with Benazir Bhutto, there have been promises and significant attempts to improve the position of women within insurmountable political constraints. In India it has been suggested that the success of one woman in becoming Prime Minister has been counterproductive, in shielding the general lack of progress of women and the argument has also sometimes been used in the other countries of South Asia. Although this effect may be seen in some respects, particularly the views of outside observers, this essay will argue the mere existence of a role model of a woman running the country is likely to have an positive influence on the position of women within that country, however impossible that may be to measure.

Another point which deserves attention is the fact that three of these women are still in power and therefore it is impossible to write a final study on their importance or long-term effectiveness. Certainly Mrs Bandaranaike and Mrs Gandhi have set them great models in this regard, but as in the rest of the world (as we've seen recently with regard to Eastern Europe and the Middle East) making even medium-term predictions about political fates is a risky business. It is for this reason, as well as the complexities of assessing political causes and motives already discussed, that this essay is concentrating on the rise of these women to power rather than the period after that. In the long-term whether history judges the rise of so many women to prime ministerships in South Asia as significant or not may well depend on these women's fates and long-term survival in office, but without this hindsight it may be possible to actually look more clearly at their rise.

But brief consideration suggests these women are probably as securely in power as any elected prime minister is likely to be in South Asia. Benazir Bhutto appears relatively firm in her position, with the army seemingly resigned or even satisfied with her role. In the case of Khaleda Zia she is under some pressure from opposition parliamentary boycotts but seems at present likely to remain in power at least until the scheduled February 1996 elections. For Mrs Chandrika it is of course very early days, but she has made bold moves towards establishing peace with the rebel Tamil Tiger who have been involved in conflict with the Sri Lankan government since 1972 in a conflict which has claimed more than 30,000 lives.

It is particularly interesting that three of the women, Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia and Chandrika, have been elected during a period of rising religious fundamentalism in South Asia. This has been manifested not so much by political support for fundamentalist religious parties which have performed poorly in electoral contests, at least in the Muslim states. This was demonstrated in both the 1990 and 1993 Pakistan elections and as recently as this February's Bangladeshi mayoral elections.

In these two nations Islamicists have instead achieved great influence through strong street presences, which has seen for example in Pakistan people accused of blasphemy gunned down in the streets or lynched by huge mobs. They were also used by Zia-ul-Haq and other military rulers in the region as a form of legitimation, although some authors have argued Islamicist measures introduced by these men were more "political noise" than serious acts with significant effects. The power of Islamicists is not an entirely new phenomenon, particularly in Pakistan where politicians "have always remained vulnerable to the charge of `Islam Betrayed'". Yet despite this background fundamentalists have targetted author Taslima Nasreen but accepted a female-headed government.

Although in India the rise of fundamentalism, through the form of the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has not been as marked, nor the position of women such a central part of their platform, there has been an increase in a push to return them to their traditional roles. Although ironically these groups have been happy to use women activists they also offer arguments such as "a woman must do everything to preserve her home life". As in Pakistan and Bangladesh the power of this party seems to rest more in influence on the political discourse and street demonstrations than through electoral success.

This attitude is not confined to overt supporters of these parties. Among the evidence for this was the comments of chief justice of the Supreme Court, Brahma Kumaris who made, among other comments condemning claims for equal rights that "god has not created man and woman as equal ... if you try to have an equality frame, love perishes, love dies, love is substituted by a frame". The somewhat different situation in India was illustrated by the fact women's groups were able to force him to withdraw the remarks.

As yet there has been no electoral tests in India to see if this would influence the electoral chances of a woman such as Mrs Gandhi, but certainly the evidence from Pakistan and Bangladesh suggests it would not. It is not the intention of this work to trace the disadvantaged position of women in South Asia, but a brief exposition will provide some ideas of the barriers which these five women have overcome.

In each of the nations under consideration, formal provisions give women formal access to equal rights to men, including access to public life. But this is in terms of women's lives little more than window dressing or an occasional buttress for middle-class or higher educated woman who wants to fight the system. Often this supposed equality is severely hedged, as in the case of the 1972 constitution of Bangladesh. It provided for equality of the sexes in all areas of life, but allowed for the reservation for one sex of any position if "it is considered by its nature to be unsuited to members of the opposite sex".

Equally it may be hedged by male attitudes, as demonstrated by an Indian study which showed men had strongly negative attitudes about female managers. And as in the case of dowry deaths, which in the four years up until 1992 claimed more lives than the Sikh revolt in Punjab (which of course received far more publicity), women often do not receive the same protection from the law.

The simple fact is that throughout South Asia as one author has put it, society "prescribes male dominance". There is thus an obvious aversion or even apparent prohibition for females holding public positions of power over males. Vatuk argued "there seems to be a clear and consistent tendency in South Asia to fear the power of women who are not under external control."

Further women are simply regarded as less valuable than men. This is illustrated by differential sex ratios throughout the sub-continent which see men significantly out-numbering women. This difference in sex numbers has been attributed to "differential allocation of food, of medical attention, and of love". The higher percentage of men has been increasing in a long-term trend illuminated in India by the major government report Towards Equality, released in 1970. Since then the trend appears to have continued, with the latest figure showing a ratio of 933 women in 1000 men in India. And with the spread of technology which is leading to the abortion of perhaps tens of thousands of female fetuses each year, it is a trend which looks likely to only increase.

In Sri Lanka traditionally these conditions were modified by Buddhism, and perhaps also by the remains of a mother-right tradition, that is succession through the female line, although there is less evidence this was accompanied by the same sort of matriarchal control which characterised some groups in Kerala. Yet even in Sri Lanka the government information office's own journal interestingly published an article in its journal Ceylon Today in the issue after Mrs Bandaranaike's election titled `Women in Buddhism'. It traces the formal position of woman in Buddhism, briefly details the lives of famous Buddhist women of the past and concludes with "admirable women rulers like Queen Lilavathie it is no wonder that Lanka has produced the world's first woman Prime Minister". It was still an idea to which the public had to become accustomed.

The above brief discussion has concentrated on "traditional" South Asian society, yet there are also many further factors which mean such an analysis of women's position is overly simplistic. South Asian society has changed and economic and non-traditional influences are also at work.

There is agreement across many sources that economic development and "modernisation" have actually led to reductions in status for many women. Part of this has been attributed to increasing "Sanskritization" and partly to the effects of Westernisation which from the courtesans of Lucknow The Sankritization has often followed economic developments with groups which have progressed economically seeking to increase their social status by putting increased controls on their women.

But this view is not held universally. There have also been claims, by politicians and in the popular media, such as the major article "The Changing Woman" in India Today in 1992 which claimed "women are becoming the kind of men they wanted to marry". It highlights the first women air force cadets, female mechanics, currency dealers and entrepreneurs.

Certainly a few women have done wonders in breaking down barriers which confronted them across South Asia. Kiran Bedi, a controversial and high-ranking police officer and now prison superintendent, who once crossed paths with Mrs Gandhi when she had her car towed away was the first woman to enter the upper levels of the elite Indian Police. In Sri Lanka Rajani Thiranagama was a prominent academic and political activist assassinated in 1989. There has also been some evidence of grass-roots women's movements, from village women agitation against arrack in Andhra Pradesh to significant protests in many cities against dowry deaths. But these have been isolated incidents and individuals in the vast sea of the South Asian population, and the picture for women in general still appears bleak. As the above brief outline indicates there are differences in the position of women in the various countries of South Asia, although the overall position could fairly described as poor, although some might prefer dreadful! It is well summarised by the Index of Women's Advancement, an attempt to rank countries on their achievements in advancing the position of women. Out of 106 countries Sri Lanka was ranked 40th, India 76th, Pakistan 90th and Bangladesh 97th.

But is it reasonable to group them together? They are after all four countries which are dominated three different religions, differing in political and economic systems and size, with Sri Lanka being in both population and area smaller than an average Indian state. I believe it is reasonable. For the purpose of this essay the women of these four countries share a much inferior position to men in public life and the countries in terms of history have a great deal in common, despite differing major religions, and of course they also share geographical proximity. In terms of history the four countries of course share a considerable period of colonialism. In Sri Lanka the colonialism was for the longest period, from the establishment of Portugese control since early in the 17th century until (arguable) the declaration of a republic in 1972. On the sub-continent itself it was not until the English established their hegemony that control was exercised, a control which also extended to Sri Lanka. In terms of women's position, all states shared the common heritage of this being a major source of debate and struggle between colonisers and colonised.

With regard to the independence struggle, its effects were weakest in Sri Lanka but shared (with important religious differences) across the other three modern nations. Gandhi, whose importance to the position of women in independence movements will be discussed later, had an influence well beyond the borders of what is now India. The young Solomon Bandaranaike, later to be Sri Lankan prime minister chose to be married in a hand-loomed outfit, following Gandhi's influence although the drive for independence spearheaded by Gandhi had far less influence in Sri Lanka than in the rest of South Asia. Instead Sri Lanka enjoyed "a cordial tango towards a transfer of power". In terms of modern political structures there are again both similarities and differences in the four countries under consideration. All are fundamentally representative democracies and in the case of India and Sir Lanka this institution has proved remarkably resilient despite internal insurrections and terrorism. In contrast Pakistan and Bangladesh are both characterised by a political dominance of a "bureaucratic-military oligarchy" which has been expressed by alternating patterns of representative democracy with considerable military influence and straight-out military dictatorship. But in the case of the women prime ministers I am considering all have been elected in substantially free and fair elections to a representative democracy. I thus believe it is reasonable to consider these countries as a group. There is also a question as to whether I should have spread the net wider in considering women who have governed countries beyond the boundary of South Asia. Certainly Corazon Aquino, widow of martyred popular leader Ninoy and president of the Philippines from 1986 appears to have many similarities to the women in this study. She was also operating in a society which expected men to be leaders and women followers, centred around home and nurturing tasks. But including her in the study would involve another religion (Catholicism), very different colonial histories and a vast spread of geography so while I would suggest it is worth noting the similarities, to group the two areas of Asia is perhaps going too far. After all if the Philippines were to be included then it might be necessary to extend the situation even further, to South and Central America, where a number of female leaders also appear to fit the pattern being discussed in this work.

Even closer to South Asia is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. The daughter of the Burmese nationalist leader Aung San, murdered on the eve of the nation's independence, fits within the parameters of the women of my study in terms of her connection with a male figure and success in winning a popular election which should have seen her as the country's chief executive. She also fits within my arguments in having greatly built upon her original position of birth. As Kreager writes, "facts of parentage may have provided her with immediate and special public recognition ... but it is the guidance she has brought to a highly unstable situation, sustained by the personal force, courage and sound judgement ... that continues to provide the main hope for Burma."

Burma also shares a common colonial history with India, having been ruled by the British as part of that nation, and in terms of post-colonial political history has similarities with both Pakistan and Bangladesh in terms of the power and influence of the military. But Suu Kyi has not taken power in Burma, having been held since 1990 under house arrest by the Burmese military. Information about her background and election win has thus been limited and she doesn't strictly fit within the prime ministerial criteria of this work. In addition, Burma, while sharing Sri Lanka's Buddhism, has cultural factors and historical differences flowing from its position in South-east rather than South Asia. I thus believe again her similarities to the main figures in my study should be noted, but that she should be regarded as only incidental to it.

In terms of the sources which are available for this work, they are very limited, at least in some of the cases. For Mrs Kumaratunga, elected only three months ago, I am also wholly dependent on journalistic sources, both international and indigenous. There is a little more academic-style work on Khaleda Zia but again my dependence on journalistic sources is strong. For the other three women more authors, academic and general, have provided information although contemporary journalistic information remains valuable in providing information on attitudes and ideas at the time of their elections.

In using this information, the method of this essay is essentially comparative. It will look at the rise of each of the five women to the prime ministership and consider the similarities and differences to find some of the patterns already described in the outline above. Some scholars might like to attempt to approach this topic statistically, but I would suggest this has very limited usefuness. I've already mentioned the number of years in which South Asian nations have been governed by women but the size of the sample at only five women and the obvious complexity of the factors involve make this more of an interesting illustration of the situation rather than a figure susceptible to statistical manipulation. Including other female political figures might boost the sample somewhat, but would not I suggest produce any useful results, nor anything more than an "interpretation, not a presentation of objective facts".

Finally in this section there seems today to be some need to defend this entire endeavour against those who might level charges of "orientalism" against it. At the extreme, some authors might argue as a "Western" woman, far removed from the situation I am considering, I should not dare to write on the subject at all. Yet as Prakash argues this view recreates local scholars as "native informants" and privileges them into what is finally a demeaning position. And when dealing with relatively contemporary events, having some form of distance, even physical can be valuable in attaining a clearer view of occurences under study.

As already discussed at its essence my method is comparative, grouping four countries in South Asia together and looking for similarities among similar events within them. Some might again argue that by doing this I am denying the diversity of the sub-continent, but as O'Hanlon and Washbrook argue "we cannot actually do without some categories and some means of evaluating orders of certainty, in order to comprehend, to explain, to elucidate".