Women,gender and sexuality: Changing historiographies of colonial India—A bibliographical essay

Gendered Historiographies

Traditional histories of nationalism have largely been written from a genderless, that is, a male perspective. ² However, the trajectory of women in colonial India shows that their first historical accounts date mainly from the period of social reforms in the nineteenth century. Though largely initiated by men, they marked anxious debates around gender questions. But by the end of the century, women had begun to organise themselves and by the 1920s, women’s movement in India had taken off significantly, along with active involvement in the freedom struggle. Historiographical shifts vividly point to the layered relationship between gender, reforms and nationalism. Most British colonial and missionary writings viewed the position of women in India before their advent as one of extreme degradation. In fact, the condition of women in India became one of the principal means for the Empire to justify its ‘civilising mission’ and ‘reform’ the ‘depraved’ customs of India. James Mill argued that the status of women indicated a society’s rung on the ladder of civilisation and India featured a long way below on this front. ³

Nationalist and reformist writings too analyse the social reforms and national movements as a relatively straightforward affair. Following a positive teleology, they assume a step-by-step evolutionary advance in the condition of Indian women, from social reforms to education, to political participation. They too argue that reforms led to the emancipation of women from the stagnating condition in which they had been earlier placed. ⁴ They further claim that the urge for reforms was a result of indigenous efforts and not due simply to British critiques. In this uncritical adulation, social reforms emerge as a truly liberating force, leading to the abolition of sati, beginning of female education, widow remarriage, raising of the age of consent, eradication of purdah (veil) and an end to ‘obscene’ representations of women in literature and art. For a section of these writers, it also became imperative to paint the earlier period, particularly medieval times and the eighteenth century, as one of darkness and stagnation. Simultaneously, the ancient past was depicted as a ‘golden age’, where women were valued and occupied positions of high status. In the context of nationalism and women too, this school of thought took a linear view of history. A chronic leap in women’s politicisation was linked here directly with their social progress and emancipation. ⁵ These early writings also saw women in the freedom struggle largely in the context of participation, with focus on prominent and outstanding women, largely belonging to the Hindu middle classes and upper castes. As Gail Pearson has remarked, women’s participation provided in some sense the basis for universalising the national movement as a whole. ⁶

A group of later historians, broadly leftist, along with early feminist writings, however, pointed to various lacunae in the reform movements and nationalism. Regarding reforms, they argued that all the earlier initiatives on the women’s question were taken largely by men; that the reformers belonged mostly to the upper castes and emerging elite classes; that they compromised with colonialism in many ways; that they mainly addressed problems of upper caste–middle class Hindu women; and that they distanced themselves from syncretic and popular religious and cultural practices, particularly of women. ⁷ Concerning nationalism too, these scholars pointed to the uneven nature of development and its various contradictions. They also examined regional variations and studied women’s participation at various levels, in terms of consciousness, perceptions and action. ⁸ Gail Minault, for example, spoke of the language and metaphor of the ‘extended family’: With nationalism, the whole country was perceived as a family and the specific idea of a nurturing woman and the Indian family was idealised and extended to the whole nation. ⁹ In Gandhian movements too, participation was largely perceived as a religious duty, with a language of fasting and sacrifice. It needs to be noted that for the moment, this did signal a positive change, as it permitted movement of feminine space. However, while there was an increase in participation, conservative norms prevailed and perceptions were not radically altered. Once the ‘crisis’ was over, it was assumed that women would revert back to traditional roles. Geraldine Forbes remarks that women’s issues that did not threaten patriarchal society could comfortably co-exist with the nationalist movement. ¹⁰

Ashis Nandy’s landmark study brought in a significant new dimension to the relationship between gender and the nation. ¹¹ His work suggested that gender histories would be incomplete without examining masculinity, which is as vital for gender analysis as ruling classes are for class analysis. ¹² Examining images and stereotypes, he pointed out how the colonial discourses saw the Empire as masculine and India as feminine. Seeing the former as superior, the manly British were contrasted with the effeminate colonial subject. ¹³ Nandy went on to argue that Gandhi subverted these notions by articulating that feminine was worthier and preferred. Gandhi glorified sacrifice and the ability to suffer, which he specifically identified with women. Nationalists actually worked out various versions of masculinity, from Vivekananda to Gandhi, from Sanatan Dharmists to Arya Samajists and from notions of brahmacharya (celibacy) to the images of a warrior Krishna, signifying changing constructions of masculinity in this period. ¹⁴ It needs to be emphasised here that in spite of different images, national manhood was overwhelmingly constructed as a Hindu upper caste story. Mrinalini Sinha’s work particularly has brought in new aspects to studies on masculinity. ¹⁵

Nandy’s work, while influential, has also been assessed critically by gender historians. One argument that they have made is that Nandy while arguing that modern Western colonialism introduced authoritarian and de-humanising impulses, has tended to celebrate pre-colonial, indigenous, traditional pasts as not only more tolerant, so that their recovery is presented as the hope for the future. ¹⁶ This has had significant gender implications, as various scholars implicitly and explicitly have argued that there was increasing conformity and marginalisation of women’s space and popular culture due to colonialism, modernity and enlightenment, while the earlier period had more flexible sexual codes. ¹⁷ While possibly partially true, this argument presents only one side of the picture.

Furthering the debate, the critical work of Partha Chatterjee has had a significant impact in perceiving the relationship between social reforms, nationalism and women. He argued that the reformers and the nationalists drew a distinction between the inner and the outer, by separating the home and the world. While the Indian male had lost out in the public sphere, the private sphere was one in which the superiority of India could be proved. Woman was here perceived as the main harbinger of the spirituality of this inner sphere. Her body became a metaphor for an un-violated, chaste space, the ultimate site of virtue and the last refuge of freedom. He further argues that with the growth of the national movement in the early twentieth century, the women’s question was co-opted to the larger political project and put ‘on hold’, pending achievement of other objectives. ¹⁸ Chatterjee offers a persuasive argument, but it needs to be qualified to an extent. His formulations may be largely true for Bengal, but they have often been used in the context of other regions as well. In fact, frequently, Bengal has provided much of the theoretical framework for discussions on gender, social reforms and nationalism in colonial India. But regional and caste variations must be taken into account. In North India, for example, reformist endeavours and the ‘woman’s question’ did not fade away with the nationalist movement. In fact, they reached their peak precisely in the period coinciding with nationalist fervour. It also needs to be noted that the nationalist movement was not totally successful in situating the woman’s question in an inner domain of sovereignty, removed from the arena of political contest with the colonial state. J. Devika, for example, contends that Partha Chatterjee’s model does not apply to Malayalee society, as the early twentieth century was exactly the period of the high point of reforms when inner/outer divisions broke down. ¹⁹ Further, as Anupama Rao shows, it was precisely in the period when reforms centred on women seemed to largely disappear from the upper-caste agenda, that they made their mark in other arenas like the emerging political activism of women themselves, as well as in anti-caste movements like those of Ambedkar and Periyar. ²⁰

Subaltern historians, particularly in their search for non-elite perspectives for understanding historical processes, have also left their mark on gender historiography of colonial India. They too point to the coercive power of modernity and argue that the central question regarding women in the nineteenth century was not what women wanted but rather how to modernise them, and this came with its own coercive package. Many scholars show how existing inequalities between men and women were enhanced and irrevocably institutionalised in the colonial period. At the same time, subaltern histories have had an uneasy relationship with feminist historiographies. There have been essays within its volumes that have interrogated the project, even while participating in the ongoing deliberations on the subaltern gender. ²¹ Moreover, fresh insights have built on and yet defied and interrogated the subaltern paradigm, by introducing categories like ‘white subalternity’, pointing to gender and class deviances, and systems of differentiation and hierarchy within the colonisers. ²² Simultaneously, multi-ethnic and inter-racial families, which formed a constitutive part of Anglo-Indian colonial society in its formative areas, provide new dimensions to representations of gender and social hierarchies. ²³ Such views also complicate homogenous classifications of colonial masculinity.

Most importantly however, many feminist historians, especially writing in the last thirty years, have attempted to present an alternative account of reforms and nationalism from a gender-sensitive perspective, through a close reading of various initiatives and the debates that ensued. ²⁴ Even at the risk of appearing to condone the pernicious social practices and forms of violence against women that the reformers had endeavoured to eliminate, they have sought to produce a more complex and textured view of these processes. Many have contended that things were not as they appeared, that supposedly philanthropic concerns for women were motivated by more than abstract principles of humanitarianism. Most debates over social issues and political participation denied women complex personalities and agency and continued to evoke gender stereotypes. It has also been pointed out that the liberation of India from British rule actually did not do much for women’s freedom. A scholar argues that nowhere has feminism in its own right been allowed to be more than the maidservant of nationalism, including India. ²⁵ Feminist scholars also point out that reforms and nationalism told us little about women’s desires and emotions, their health and work, and economic questions largely remained untouched. A significant study argued that modern nationalist and liberal feminist historiographies of colonial India have largely been Hindu centric and have discursively and materially rendered Muslim women as invisible, oppressed and backward, even while they were exercising all kinds of agency. ²⁶

The double-edged implications of colonial law in India too have been highlighted by many studies. It became a symbolic site where various laws for an improvement of women’s position were enacted and where the state increasingly became a critical player. However, the efficacy of law has been questioned, for it is shown to have brought about no significant changes in the existing nexus of gender relations. In fact, many laws often led to new patriarchies and social disciplines. ²⁷ Colonial jurists were convinced, for example, that joint family formed the mainstay of Hindu domestic and legal life, and worked towards strengthening the power structures of the propertied Hindu male community. ²⁸ Property rights for women were thus marked by the intersection of colonial law with the patriarchal Hindu joint family. ²⁹ Reformers also revealed almost no concern for women working in factories, ³⁰ the problems faced by tribal women due to encroachments of a modern market economy or what commercialisation of agriculture had done to peasant women.

Simultaneously, feminist scholars have recognised the potential and possibilities of these endeavours, and the pioneering role played by some great liberal reformist and nationalist individuals, who operated against various orthodoxies and conservativisms. They further stress the importance of avoiding the placement of women in an overarching category of ‘woman’ and point to the fallacy of viewing women as homogenous entities. They take into account differences of caste, class and religion. They further show how, in spite of various limitations, many women carved out spaces for themselves and paved ways for social and political activism, both in private and public domains, implicitly and explicitly. After all, this was also a period when caste hierarchies and patriarchies were interrogated and qualified to an extent. Reforms and nationalism did signal new opportunities for women, however, limited they proved to be. There was a growing awareness of women’s roles and rights and their increasing articulation in the public-political sphere. Laws against sati and in favour of widow remarriage did reveal a tension between what was becoming illicit practice and what was now legally permissible. Often unintentionally, the changes instituted in these times also paved the way for a rich variety of experiences and practices, indifferent to and sometimes subverting the stated aims of reforms and nationalism. For example, arranged marriages and extended families evolved as part of modern marriage practices in late colonial Bengal, entering into competition and conversation with new ideals of companionate and monogamous marriages. ³¹ Alongside, the customary demarcation of gendered spaces was becoming untenable. Prescriptions offered by orthodox and conservative sections, reformers and revivalists, law makers and nationalists were often fragile, resulting in unintended consequences and contentious situations. Once set in motion, the very same vocabulary and processes that were first employed to control women acquired their own dynamic in print, education, literature, law, marriage, political sphere and popular culture.

Paradoxical Gendered Legacies

I will now briefly touch on some of these paradoxical gendered legacies of modern Indian history through some fragmentary examples from my own work on colonial UP. These reveal not only how patriarchies were recast in more powerful, though subtle, ways, but also how they were subverted or at least questioned in this period. For example, if we examine the debates around the removal of purdah, we see that the Hindu reformers moved on a pendulum. While opposing purdah in clear terms, they also supported it selectively as is clear from their celebration of lajja as the Hindu woman’s best adornment. With greater access of women to public places, selective appearance of purdah was thought necessary and good for women themselves, particularly at railway stations, markets, public ghats and roads, and in interactions with outside shopkeepers and other men. An article in a magazine Stri Darpan thus stated:

‘These days women have constructed completely opposite meanings of purdah. As soon as they enter their homes, they pull a yard-long veil, and when they go out to fairs, they have their face totally uncovered. Singing obscene songs, they walk on the streets at the time of marriages. In such situations, can they be thought of as purdah-bearers just because their faces are covered?… Then again in the month of Kartik, they take bath in rivers, where thousands of people see them. Then they do not feel at all ashamed… The true purdah is that which existed between Sita and Lakshman.’ ³²

Pictures and cartoons critiqued purdah at home and exposure outside. ³³ The arguments betrayed anxieties about women’s behaviour, movements and relationships outside the household. Women bathing semi-nude in public ghats were seen as signs of shame, and a licensed misdoing in open space. To take another example, women were urged to observe purdah at railway stations, to escape the lustful eyes of railway staff, passengers and porters. ³⁴ The discourse on purdah thus revealed an ambiguity, leading to simultaneous condemnation and endorsement, as reformers were at times afraid of the subversive potential of completely doing away with purdah. ³⁵ It paralleled other attempts to control and isolate women and at the same time to support reforms in order to appear civilised.

Let me move to the example of women’s education, which appeared high on the agenda of both missionaries and reformers. In pre-colonial India, education of women was largely frowned upon and female literacy rates were very low. The British, particularly the missionaries, began an effort to change this, especially from early nineteenth century. ³⁶ Slowly, reformist groups like Brahmo Samaj, Prarthanda Samaj, Arya Samaj and Theosophical Society adopted the campaign, assigning a native air to the cause.

We need, however also to see the language in which education for women was camouflaged, both for Hindu and Muslim women. The central aim of it was said to make women better wives and mothers. It was not linked to employment and was highly controlled by male perspectives. It was religious and moral education to be imparted to women that were emphasised. There were also increasing fears about what education might do to women. It was, for example, quoted in a newspaper that it was better that women remained uneducated, as educating them could signal deterioration in morals and subversion of privacy of homes. Girls’ education moreover had to be on national lines. Annie Besant, the leading reformer, thus defined what women’s education’s real aims should be:

The national movement for girls’ education must be on national lines: it must accept the general Hindu conceptions of women’s place in the national life, not the dwarfed modern view but the ancient ideal… It cannot see in her the rival and competitor of man in all forms of outside and public employment, as woman, under different economic conditions, is coming to be, more and more, in the West… India needs nobly trained wives and mothers, wise and tender rulers of the household, educated teachers of the young, helpful counsellors of their husbands, skilled nurses of the sick, rather than girl graduates, educated for the learned professions. ³⁷

The effect of education on men was underscored through visual vocabularies as well. A whole series of cartoons expressed fears of women getting educated. They poked fun at wives for letting their husbands make tea, seeing in this a sign of disaster. ³⁸ A cartoon continued in the same vein stating: ‘The wife is writing a terrific note on the present state of women and the god-like husband is looking after the child outside! Whoever laughs on seeing this natural scene, may God give him such a firebrand wife’! ³⁹

In the discourse on women’s education were embedded caricatures of the modern, westernised woman and the immoral, hedonist memsahib. ⁴⁰ Excessive education was seen as leading to sexual licentiousness and dangers of unbridled women. Western education, it was argued, cultivated irreligious and immoral tendencies in women. A poem acutely expressed the fear of the modern educated woman. Titled ‘Western View: Letter of a Civilised Wife’, it went as follows:

I learned dancing,

And singing along with it,

Now I will watch and show,

And learn and teach,

I will be a beautiful butterfly,

flying always over flowers,

I will go to the theatre,

And will bring sparks and flowers. ⁴¹

Went another poem:

I have learnt English,

I will not remain under the veil….

I will go to play the ball,

I will flirt with men….

Husband should be young and English,

And can be Christian or Muslim. ⁴²

The educated modern Indian woman apparently used her ‘western’ education to dress tartly, act shamelessly and acquire fancy habits. This fashionable woman spoke English and spent an inordinate amount of time dressing herself, which included bathing with Pears soap, applying make-up, sporting fancy hairstyles and using glasses. She played tennis and visited the theatre, and was a spendthrift who made a fool of her husband. ⁴³ Chand, the leading Hindi magazine carried a series of cartoons caricaturing the daily routine of a modern woman. She took bath at 7 am, dressed her hair at 8, fashioned herself at 9, went to college at 10, took a joy ride at 5 pm, listened to radio at 8 and read a novel at midnight, ending with a question mark on time for household chores. ⁴⁴ Education created a new language of distinction where the opulent ‘bad’ housewife was contrasted to the dependable woman that the nation required and fashioned. These efforts at cultivating a new nationalist woman marked an intricate link between citizenship, nationalism, gender formation and education. There, thus, appeared a large amount of didactic literature, addressing itself to women. Noted one:

Our home is our school, and the mistress of the house is established there like a Saraswati, to impart us education …. Home is a temple, in which various religious duties are performed. Home is like a small state, whose ruler is the woman and the subjects are her children …. Actually, the mother can easily teach what big educationists of Oxford and Cambridge cannot teach after years of education. ⁴⁵

To take another example, it was stated:

The purpose of education is not to make one literate but to make one worthy …. Our education does not mean that our sisters acquire degrees of B.A and M.A and indulge in fun, luxury and entertainment. The real purpose of our female education is sacrifice, endurance and self-elevation. ⁴⁶

Education for women was thus a moral imperative and a national investment, designed to domesticate the woman and assign her more enlightened role for greater compatibility in marriage. Even women reformers could not escape such views completely. With the significant exception of Pandita Ramabai, reformers such as Mataji Tapaswini and Annie Besant advocated schools that still trained women in modern domesticity rather than equal education. It was not intended to be conducive to employment but rather envisaged as an instrument of self-improvement. Nowhere was education given such a moral fervour, a pure character and a virtuous flavour, as in the case of women’s education.

However, it is not enough to emphasise only the limits of the educational avenues of women and the function of education in the subordination of women. A study of education for women would be incomplete without drawing attention to levels other than that of the formal script. Many elite Muslim women like Azizunnissa, Begums of Bhopal, Bi Amman and Bibi Ashraf of north India educated themselves against all odds. ⁴⁷ Rashsundari Debi, an upper-caste Bengali woman, taught herself to read and write in greatest secrecy. She chronicled for the first time the life of a Hindu housewife and wrote the first recorded autobiography printed in the Bengali language by an Indian woman, called Amar Jiban, in 1876. ⁴⁸ Some upper-caste widows of Banaras used education to reject stereotypes of widows and to manipulate the ascetic model to carve out a space for themselves. ⁴⁹ As education blossomed, many middle-class women used it to participate and become visible in the public realm, such as publishing in magazines and journals and singing songs at literary and political functions. Even when cast in a reformist mould and accepting some of the structures of male reformers, women’s journals created endless opportunities for women to argue for a voice of their own in family and educational life. Letters written by women in various women’s magazines asserted their right to feel and allowed a space for solidarity in a covert and tentative way. ⁵⁰ In spite of various limitations, there emerged a number of dynamic women like Pandita Ramabai and Begum Rokeya Hussein, who benefited from the spread of women’s education in the period. They flowered as editors and educators. These women were deciding for themselves what they wanted. We see a kind of proto-feminism and a language of rights being expressed in the print-public sphere.

Even the reading habits of women in this period point to different directions. While one could limit and frame syllabi and order prescriptive texts, once women were educated, it was difficult to control what they read and the uses to which they put their knowledge. Yashoda Devi, an ayurvedic reformer, while expressing her frustration for the lack of demand for her prescriptive books, wrote:

For two-three years I sent my books on women’s education to the Magh Mela on the banks of Triveni. The women who used to come to purchase books used to go away after seeing my stall. They used to take the names of many juicy novels and used to demand them specifically, as well as the likes of Albela Gaviya and Ghazal Sangraha. Other shops that sold such useless novels reported brisk sales. ⁵¹

Print and education had revolutionised reading habits and possibilities and penetrated into all sorts of time and spaces within everyday life by its sheer portability. Thus, while education may have been intended to reinforce the power of the male over the female, it also empowered its female beneficiaries in ways unanticipated by the reforming patriarchs. It created unpredictable but undeniable opportunities for some women.

To conclude, there are many arenas where gendered perspectives can provide us with more nuanced and layered understandings of histories. Gendered histories teach us to be innovative with our resources. They compel us to include, indeed set at the centre, materials that are often erased or elided in archival research. Pointing to erasures and silences in the archives and historical accounts, gendered histories teach us to read between the lines, by including archives of emotion, of memory as testimony and creatively using other archives. ⁵² Moreover, they not only discuss cataclysmic events from our pages of history but also focus on the mundane, the anecdotal and the everyday. They are as much about intimate spaces as about open ones, messing up their distinctions. They talk of gender not just as an autonomous entity but as deeply intermeshed with caste, class and religious identities. They probe femininities and masculinities. They interrogate the state and the community, where British and Indian patriarchal forces colluded with each other. In them, both colonisers and the colonised emerge as actors and initiators. They not only tell us how patriarchies found new expressions and language in colonial India but also how they were constantly challenged and interrogated. They inspire us to come to terms with ‘difference’ and conflict and live with such differences. Gendered histories highlight the ambiguities and tensions of simultaneous operations of patriarchal norms and constant resistances, of conservative dominations and assertions of freedom and sharing that constantly subvert hierarchies, offering us arenas of potential possibilities for changing our present and future.