Abstract
The last two decades have witnessed academic works dealing with histories of upper caste Hindu women in colonial India. This anthology which is a part of the series on Critical Thinking in South Asian History has widened the field of study by delineating experiential diversity of women (Hindu, Muslim, Dalit) utilising new opportunities provided by reforms and nationalism. Some of the central concerns of this collection are historiographical debates and interface among gender, caste, class, religion, social reforms, communalism and nationalism in colonial India. The combination of vernacular and official, oral and print, memories and myths, material realities and rhetorical representations has expanded traditional archives, introducing methods and sources often neglected in much of earlier historical research. While women’s participation in nationalist movement and their struggles for inclusion in economic structures have not been adequately addressed in this volume, the addition of regional complexities to extremely rich gendered histories in colonial India is a worthy contribution.
The book opens with a compelling historiographical essay on women and gender in colonial India by the editor Charu Gupta. For weaving thematic unity, her essay draws upon issues such as abolition of sati, passage of Widow Remarriage Act, rise in the age of consent, abolition of infanticide, eradication of purdah, women’s education and subsequent venturing of women into print and popular culture, caste and the rhetoric of reform and politics. This lends a panoptic view of some of the important developments of the period. What is of added importance in this anthology are three translated primary texts, originally published in Malayalam, Punjabi and Hindi. The Malayalam polemical piece penned by ‘Sarojini’ deals with inherent instability of the new category of ‘woman’ and how womanliness is often superior to manliness. The Punjabi poem by a male reformer Bhai Sadhu Singh from the Sikh Singh Sabha Movement shows deep concern regarding the behaviour of women who had digressed from Sikh practices. A proscribed Hindi tract of this period Stri Shiksha, penned by an Arya Samajist Shiv Sharma Mahopdeshak, reflects anxieties regarding interaction between Hindu women and Muslim men who threaten Hindu patriarchal order and community identity.
There are twelve engaging essays by leading and emerging feminist scholars, mostly reprints. Mrinalini Sinha’s work has tried to engage in new aspects to scholarship on history of masculinity in colonial India traversing axes of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, religion and ethnicity. Andrea Major maps the trajectories that colonial debates on sati have taken since the seventeenth century, situating the early nineteenth-century debate in the context of a longer history of European interactions with the rite. She shows in a nuanced manner how the ideals of religiosity, devotion to husband, chastity and sacrifice remained objects of admiration as they were associated with wider nationalist constructions of the new and ideal woman. Tanika Sarkar’s essay illuminates on the disciplinary strictures on upper caste, Bengali, Hindu widows in nineteenth-century Bengal despite enactment of Widow Remarriage Act. Though remarriage was hardly enacted among the large sections of the upper castes, the campaign and the law created a chink in earlier orthodox mandates and possibilities for gender equality came to the fore. Gail Minault’s essay highlights how the early generation of Muslim reformers, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Nazir Ahmad Delhavi and Khwaja Altaf Husain Ali, mostly argued that elite sharif Muslim women should be given home education through ustani (female teacher) for they were to become better companions, better mothers, better homemakers and pious Muslims. She conveys how despite control of female education through male perspective, many elite Muslim women, such as Azizunnisa, Begams of Bhopal and Bibi Ashraf, managed to educate themselves. J. Devika argues that in the late nineteenth-century Kerala, women received an education that was to equip them for modern domesticity and prepare them to be efficient housewives and good companions to modern-educated husbands. But in the twentieth century, Malayalee public sphere saw the re-imagining and rewriting of the woman’s space that extended her domain of functioning without necessarily compromising ‘Womanliness’. The inner/outer distinction broke down in Malayalee society as state was called upon to legislate on issues of marriage and family.
Anshu Malhotra explores forms of popular and bazaar literature, such as jhagrras and kissas, to demonstrate their relationship to reforms. While jhagrras dealt with the need to control women’s unbridled sexuality, reform literature portrayed how women’s culture called for containment as it threatened male prestige. The reformers used the concern shown in kissas against bride price and used it to warn against the loss of caste and the rise of child widows that this practice entailed. ‘Selling’ of daughters was identified as a sinful act since they were likened to compliant cows. She also stresses that in the 1920s in Punjab, many kissas and bazaar literature resounded with a nationalist agenda with the ideal nationalist woman spinning khadi as opposed to the degenerate Westernised woman. The essay by Lata Singh reveals how the female performer/actor in theatre was regarded as the ‘other’ of the domesticated, ‘pure’, ‘spiritual’ middle-class woman who epitomised respectability. Moral disquiet pertaining to respectability/reformist discourse made the middle-class associate popular culture with licentiousness and vulgarity relegating the female performers to the margins of mainstream ‘moral order’. Their mobility between the home and the world having unsettled social boundaries, their struggles and contestations with patriarchy were undermined. They were not identified as workers and artisans fighting for dignified livelihood.
The essay by Prem Chowdhry explicates how in Punjab–Haryana caste endogamous marriage being the bedrock of caste system saw re-invention of tradition to denigrate inter-caste marriages. While inter-caste marriages were legally sanctioned by the colonial law courts, the British denounced it morally and ethically making the issue contentious. Even the karewa custom (remarriage of widow to the late husband’s brother) which accommodated inter-caste marriage was debunked by the British as disreputable and came to be associated with low castes. Moreover, classes and caste groups, such as the menials and untouchables, who were beyond the pale of endogamous marriage faced its legal enforcement. Anupama Rao’s essay elucidates the intersectionality of caste and gender as forms of social difference around which demands for social transformation among lower castes had been organised in western India. Since the plight of lower castes was as miserable as women, both were perceived as impure, polluting and subject to regulation. While caste ideology was challenged by rethinking marriage and sexuality, it is equally true that disciplinarian practices by Dalit patriarchs were introduced into the household. Caste radicals used reforms around gender and sexuality to constitute anti-caste politics when peculiarly non-Brahmin, Dalit politics increasingly took a masculine turn. Charu Gupta’s essay expands, decentres and recasts official archives by tracing otherwise obliterated histories of gender, transgressive sexuality and obscenity in north India. While love, sexual and bodily pleasure created panic in Hindi writers, it boosted erotic consumerism of an obscene literary canon, a subversive subculture. She shows how vernacular didactic manuals’ construction of a Dalit woman’s body as brazenly sexual was countered by popular Dalit literature which portrayed Dalit women as viranganas, symbols of respectability and redemption.
Pradip Datta illustrates how in the 1920s with the escalation of communal tensions, Hindu publicists deployed newspapers, pamphlets, meetings, novels, myths, rumours and gossips to represent Muslims as miscreants who abducted Hindu women. Concomitantly while women’s bodies became sites for demarcating and violating the boundaries of communities, the Hindu women were allowed agency in defence of their community by being identified as sisters who like their brothers could publicly participate in the culture of physical strengthening during revolutionary agitation. Thus, images of masculinity were offered to her and she was ‘empowered’ as an agent perpetrating violence against the communal other. Nonica Datta’s essay through the testimony of Subhasini reflects on a myriad of issues: the relationship between violence and partition, memory and history, testimony and experience, events and non-events and women as both victims and victimisers. For Subhasini, 1942 being the year of her father’s ‘martyrdom’, was a violent rupture. The horrors of partition to her were moments of celebration for avenging her father’s murder. Her essay not only unfolds the ambiguities and silences in an individual woman’s memory but also questions academic construction of 1947 as a collective historical event in a nation’s memory.
The scholarly essays in the collection thus delineate how patriarchies of all shades—orthodox and liberals, reformers and revivalists, law-makers and nationalists—were challenged and destabilised in colonial India. However, unrest and insecurities within the reforming patriarchs, unease with resistances to patriarchal norms and continuous subversions opened up latent possibilities. One would recommend this compendium for students and scholars who are keen on enlightening themselves about the dynamics of this trajectory in gendered histories and popular cultures in colonial India.