About the
Author
Mahua Sarkar is
an associate professor of sociology and a faculty member of the women's studies
and the Asian and Asian-American studies programs at Binghamton University,
State University of New York.
Introduction
This book
studies the production of Muslim women as invisible and oppressed/backward in
the written history of late colonial Bengal. Unlike in projects of
recuperation, the intent here is not to correct the problem of
invisibility/silence of Muslim women by recovering them as visible/vocal subjects
within the familiar terms of conventional history-a history that denied them
such presence in the first place. Instead, my focus is on understanding the
discursive and material contexts that have historically produced Muslim women
as victimized, invisible, and/or mute. What I seek to make visible in this
project, in other words, is not so much Muslim women but rather the contexts of
their specific (dis) appearances in writing and the ways in which they have
been marginalized and/or made to (dis)appear within both the conventional
(colonial and nationalist) and critical historiography of colonial Bengal.
Feminist
scholars have amply documented the phallocentric tendencies of normative
historiographies that typically ignore women as historical subjects. Recently,
feminists in India have engaged in further reflection about the implicit Hindu
majoritarian biases of not just nationalist/normative histories but even
feminist scholarship. These recent intellectual developments provide important
normative historiographies that typically ignore women as historical subjects.
Recently, feminists in India have engaged in further reflection about the
implicit Hindu majoritarian biases of not just nationalist/normative histories
but even feminist scholarship. These recent intellectual developments provide
important points of departure for my research. However, I do not read the
relative absence of Muslim women within the history of colonial Bengal simply
as an effect of the (unintentional) phallocentrism and majoritarian preoccupations
of extant histories. Instead, I locate their invisibility or erasure in writing
at the intersection of two discourses of modernity: nationalism, which treats
nations as the rightful subject of modern history, and liberal feminism, which
privileges certain notions of agency while discounting others as the proper
markers of feminist/modern subject hood. As I will argue later in this chapter
and hope to show throughout the book, the nation-centeredness of history as a
discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together
produced Muslim women as the oppressed, mute, backward, and eventually
invisible "other" of the normative modern (read conscious and/or
rights bearing, Hindu/Iiberal, citizen/feminist) subject within the written
history of colonial Bengal, even when they (Muslim women) exercised all kinds
of agency whether as subjects who should have been easily recuperable within
the terms of nationalist or feminist accounts or as subjects who refused the
lures of a modernity that exceeded the limits of their comfort or perceived
abilities.
The book, thus, investigates silence itself as
constitutive, and not simply an oversight, of dominant-conventional and
critical-historical accounts. History appears in this study not as an
"incomplete record of the past" in need of correction but an active
participant in the "production of knowledge that [Legitimizes] the
exclusion and subordination'?" of subaltern groups such as Muslim women-designated
as nonmodern in an ongoing process of producing and reaffirming a normative
modernity," For progress, as Walter Benjamin's insights into the
"temporal paradox of modernity" teach us, can only be mapped through
the systematic invention of images of the archaic, of what is superseded,
perhaps even destroyed," An important underlying concern of this study,
therefore, is to explore the very possibility, and hence the difficulties, of
writing a feminist history that reads difference not as "lack" or
"lag," but as indicative of the "complex genealogy of the
modern.'" To this end, I also interrogate the somewhat uncritical uses of
the notion of "agency" and "subject hood" as they figure,
at times, in feminist scholarship, especially in the small but growing body of
work on Muslim women in colonial India. And, finally, while the widely
acknowledged importance of the past for understanding the present certainly
informs it, this study is also an ongoing reflection on the myriad ways in
which the present influences how we read or approach the past.
I begin in this introductory chapter with a
critical engagement with recent significant feminist and postcolonial
scholarship to map out "when and where" Muslim women
"enter" into the written history of colonial Bengal," In four interrelated
chapters, the substantive core of the book then traces Muslim women as they
appear or disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings
in late colonial Bengal, as well as in the private memories of pre-partition
Bengal of both Muslim and Hindu women today. The concluding chapter of the book
ends with some reflections on the linkages between the"epistemic
violence"? Of past representations and the very real corporeal violence
against Muslim women in contemporary India.
The project began with the following
observation: while recent decades have seen an extraordinary explosion of
scholarship on women in colonial India, much of this literature is preoccupied
with Hindu (typically upper caste or middle class) women." When Muslim
women do appear-more often in studies of post independence India-they are often
portrayed as oppressed and lagging behind,"
A common assumption underlying the silence
about Muslim women in the literature on colonial Bengal is that very few among
them wrote or did anything that merits attention," Indeed, a survey of
mainstream periodicals, popular magazines, and newspapers - which together made
up a nascent public domain based in crucial colonial cities such as Calcutta
and Dhaka in the mid-nineteenth century would seem to confirm this impression.
The dominant issues, such as sati, widow remarriage, or even the
Sanskritization of Bengali, being debated at that time on the pages of these
periodicals were all concerns of a new, predominantly Hindu middle class. The
fortunes of this Hindu gentry, now known as the bhadralok: in Bengal, was
intimately tied to the fate of the colonial economy, and especially the
prominence - both economic and cultural- of Calcutta as the main seat of
colonial rule in nineteenth-century India," By all accounts, Muslims in
Bengal were marginal to this early process of middle-class formation," Nor
were they part of the cultural "renaissance" spearheaded by a mainly
Calcutta-based, middle-class, Brahmo and Hindu intelligentsia in response, at
least in part, to British criticism of the putatively inherent inferiority of
colonized subjects."
However, recent research has revealed that by
the third quarter of the nineteenth century a small but growing body of middle-class
Bengali Muslims had themselves taken to the print media, and were even
cultivating Bengali as a language, in the teeth of concerted opposition from
the Muslim orthodoxy. Faced with both colonial attempts to classify them as
largely fanatical and "low-caste Hindu converts" and Hindu
representations of them as dissolute, alien, and inferior, Muslims began
systematically questioning, developing, and honing their identity as a
community. In Bengal, this attempt resulted in the publication of a slew of
Muslim-edited periodicals and popular magazines, which began to appear
sporadically, mostly out of Calcutta, by the end of the nineteenth century.
These publications together provided an important discursive space in which
Muslim intellectuals could express themselves and contest the dominant
constructions - both colonial and Hindu of community and class identities in
late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Bengal. Some of these
journals further problematized Muslimness by encouraging Muslim women to
publicly call into question their specific gender oppressions. Consequently, we
find that by the first decade of the twentieth century many Muslim women in
Bengal were writing, some quite prolifically, in the Muslim and Hindu journals
spawned by the vibrant material and cultural economies of urban centers such as
Calcutta and Dhaka. Records of similar efforts by Muslim women outside of
Bengal, in cities such as Lahore and Bombay, are also not uncommon," Their
contributions in the form of articles, short stories, poems, autobiographies,
and travel accounts all of which helped to change women's roles within the home
and outside-have been considerable.
Yet it
is not easy to find mentions of Muslim women or their contributions in Indian
nationalist or even postcolonial history," The recorded history of women
in pre-partition Bengal, for instance, continues to be overwhelmingly a
narrative of the reformist experiments of a small minority of Hindu/Brahmo
women, who actively participated in the modernizing projects of the new
"liberal" elite," Needless to say, the intellectual and reform
efforts of many accomplished Muslim women in other parts of colonial India have
gone similarly unnoticed." Until recently, even much of feminist
scholarship has failed to highlight the work of Muslim women, presumably
because, as Meredith Borthwick puts it, it "deserves a separate
study" or because "the Muslim gender system differed significantly
from the Hindu," as Dagmar Engels would have it.The assumption, it would
seem, is that Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent have separate histories
that can be, indeed, need to be, recorded as discrete, largely self-referential
accounts.
In the course of the last decade, more nuanced
and/or revisionist efforts have attempted to redress this lacuna, but such
attempts have rarely gone beyond the inclusion of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's
(1880-1932) work," ignoring in the process other Muslim woman writers who
made significant literary and critical contributions in pre-partition
Bengal.How does one explain this continued occlusion of Muslim women in much of
the written history of colonial Bengal produced in postcolonial India?
The connection between "woman" and
"nation" has been the focus of much feminist inquiry." While
"hegemonic theorizations" of nations and nationalisms and, I would
add, even the more critical readings by such scholars as Benedict Anderson and
Etienne Balibar that recognize the nation form as modem, imagined, and
constitutive of identities-typically pay little attention to the workings of gender,
feminist theorists insist that the nation is in fact a gendered construct that
accords unequal access to power and resources to men and women. What is more,
as feminist writers such as Carole Pateman, Carol Delaney and Deniz Kandiyoti,
to name only a few-contend, the gendered inequity in modem society is not
accidental but rather constitutive of the very definition of the nation and the
modem (nation)state. Women are often constructed within nationalist discourse
as "inherently atavistic the conservative repository of the national
archaic," and as such they are considered fundamentally undeserving of
membership in the national political community except as the dependents of men
and under the latter's moral supervision. Consequently, as feminists point out,
the twentieth century may have brought impressive gains in terms of formal
political rights for women, with their "promise of justice and
equality," but women's substantive positions as citizen-subjects in the
public realm are still undercut by their very "real subordination"
within the private/familial domain, or what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has recently
called the "masculinity of nationalist ideolog[ies]" and the
"fictions of citizenship."
Meanwhile, this continued marginalization of
women stands in stark contrast to the almost compulsory foregrounding, even
valorization, of women as emblematic of nations and communities.'? To quote
Kandiyoti, the centrality of women to the nation is "reaffirmed
consciously in nationalist rhetoric where the nation itself is represented as a
woman to be protected" or manifested "less consciously in terms of an
inordinate degree of attention on women's appropriate sexual conduct.")!
In their influential work, Nira-Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias also highlight
this "intense preoccupation" with controlling women and their
sexuality in processes of national and ethnic identity production, which
understand the principal role of women to be bearing sons for the nation."
That haloed place, strategically accorded within nationalist discourses to the
idealized construct "woman," has meant that any attempt to raise the
issue of women's positions or rights, both in the colonial and post colonial
era, are invariably enmeshed in larger debates over "women's appropriate
place and conduct" that are widely considered to be crucial "boundary
markers" of the "cultural authenticity and integrity" of
communities/nations as they embark on various modernizing projects." As
feminist scholars argue, analyses of the position of women in any society must
therefore be grounded in an examination of the historical processes of nation
and state formation and the specific ways in which women were incorporated into
these projects.
Contents
|
Acknowledgments |
|
|
Introduction: Writing Difference |
1 |
1 |
The Colonial Cast: The Merchant, the soldier, the "writer" (clerk), Their Lovers, and the trouble with "Native Women's" Histories |
27 |
2 |
The politics of (In) visibility: Muslim women in (Hindu) nationalist discourse |
48 |
3 |
Negotiating Modernity: The Social production of Muslimness in Late colonial Bengal |
78 |
4 |
Difference in memory |
133 |
|
Conclusion: Connections |
196 |
|
Notes |
205 |
|
Bibliography |
287 |
|
Index |
331 |
About the
Author
Mahua Sarkar is
an associate professor of sociology and a faculty member of the women's studies
and the Asian and Asian-American studies programs at Binghamton University,
State University of New York.
Introduction
This book
studies the production of Muslim women as invisible and oppressed/backward in
the written history of late colonial Bengal. Unlike in projects of
recuperation, the intent here is not to correct the problem of
invisibility/silence of Muslim women by recovering them as visible/vocal subjects
within the familiar terms of conventional history-a history that denied them
such presence in the first place. Instead, my focus is on understanding the
discursive and material contexts that have historically produced Muslim women
as victimized, invisible, and/or mute. What I seek to make visible in this
project, in other words, is not so much Muslim women but rather the contexts of
their specific (dis) appearances in writing and the ways in which they have
been marginalized and/or made to (dis)appear within both the conventional
(colonial and nationalist) and critical historiography of colonial Bengal.
Feminist
scholars have amply documented the phallocentric tendencies of normative
historiographies that typically ignore women as historical subjects. Recently,
feminists in India have engaged in further reflection about the implicit Hindu
majoritarian biases of not just nationalist/normative histories but even
feminist scholarship. These recent intellectual developments provide important
normative historiographies that typically ignore women as historical subjects.
Recently, feminists in India have engaged in further reflection about the
implicit Hindu majoritarian biases of not just nationalist/normative histories
but even feminist scholarship. These recent intellectual developments provide
important points of departure for my research. However, I do not read the
relative absence of Muslim women within the history of colonial Bengal simply
as an effect of the (unintentional) phallocentrism and majoritarian preoccupations
of extant histories. Instead, I locate their invisibility or erasure in writing
at the intersection of two discourses of modernity: nationalism, which treats
nations as the rightful subject of modern history, and liberal feminism, which
privileges certain notions of agency while discounting others as the proper
markers of feminist/modern subject hood. As I will argue later in this chapter
and hope to show throughout the book, the nation-centeredness of history as a
discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together
produced Muslim women as the oppressed, mute, backward, and eventually
invisible "other" of the normative modern (read conscious and/or
rights bearing, Hindu/Iiberal, citizen/feminist) subject within the written
history of colonial Bengal, even when they (Muslim women) exercised all kinds
of agency whether as subjects who should have been easily recuperable within
the terms of nationalist or feminist accounts or as subjects who refused the
lures of a modernity that exceeded the limits of their comfort or perceived
abilities.
The book, thus, investigates silence itself as
constitutive, and not simply an oversight, of dominant-conventional and
critical-historical accounts. History appears in this study not as an
"incomplete record of the past" in need of correction but an active
participant in the "production of knowledge that [Legitimizes] the
exclusion and subordination'?" of subaltern groups such as Muslim women-designated
as nonmodern in an ongoing process of producing and reaffirming a normative
modernity," For progress, as Walter Benjamin's insights into the
"temporal paradox of modernity" teach us, can only be mapped through
the systematic invention of images of the archaic, of what is superseded,
perhaps even destroyed," An important underlying concern of this study,
therefore, is to explore the very possibility, and hence the difficulties, of
writing a feminist history that reads difference not as "lack" or
"lag," but as indicative of the "complex genealogy of the
modern.'" To this end, I also interrogate the somewhat uncritical uses of
the notion of "agency" and "subject hood" as they figure,
at times, in feminist scholarship, especially in the small but growing body of
work on Muslim women in colonial India. And, finally, while the widely
acknowledged importance of the past for understanding the present certainly
informs it, this study is also an ongoing reflection on the myriad ways in
which the present influences how we read or approach the past.
I begin in this introductory chapter with a
critical engagement with recent significant feminist and postcolonial
scholarship to map out "when and where" Muslim women
"enter" into the written history of colonial Bengal," In four interrelated
chapters, the substantive core of the book then traces Muslim women as they
appear or disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings
in late colonial Bengal, as well as in the private memories of pre-partition
Bengal of both Muslim and Hindu women today. The concluding chapter of the book
ends with some reflections on the linkages between the"epistemic
violence"? Of past representations and the very real corporeal violence
against Muslim women in contemporary India.
The project began with the following
observation: while recent decades have seen an extraordinary explosion of
scholarship on women in colonial India, much of this literature is preoccupied
with Hindu (typically upper caste or middle class) women." When Muslim
women do appear-more often in studies of post independence India-they are often
portrayed as oppressed and lagging behind,"
A common assumption underlying the silence
about Muslim women in the literature on colonial Bengal is that very few among
them wrote or did anything that merits attention," Indeed, a survey of
mainstream periodicals, popular magazines, and newspapers - which together made
up a nascent public domain based in crucial colonial cities such as Calcutta
and Dhaka in the mid-nineteenth century would seem to confirm this impression.
The dominant issues, such as sati, widow remarriage, or even the
Sanskritization of Bengali, being debated at that time on the pages of these
periodicals were all concerns of a new, predominantly Hindu middle class. The
fortunes of this Hindu gentry, now known as the bhadralok: in Bengal, was
intimately tied to the fate of the colonial economy, and especially the
prominence - both economic and cultural- of Calcutta as the main seat of
colonial rule in nineteenth-century India," By all accounts, Muslims in
Bengal were marginal to this early process of middle-class formation," Nor
were they part of the cultural "renaissance" spearheaded by a mainly
Calcutta-based, middle-class, Brahmo and Hindu intelligentsia in response, at
least in part, to British criticism of the putatively inherent inferiority of
colonized subjects."
However, recent research has revealed that by
the third quarter of the nineteenth century a small but growing body of middle-class
Bengali Muslims had themselves taken to the print media, and were even
cultivating Bengali as a language, in the teeth of concerted opposition from
the Muslim orthodoxy. Faced with both colonial attempts to classify them as
largely fanatical and "low-caste Hindu converts" and Hindu
representations of them as dissolute, alien, and inferior, Muslims began
systematically questioning, developing, and honing their identity as a
community. In Bengal, this attempt resulted in the publication of a slew of
Muslim-edited periodicals and popular magazines, which began to appear
sporadically, mostly out of Calcutta, by the end of the nineteenth century.
These publications together provided an important discursive space in which
Muslim intellectuals could express themselves and contest the dominant
constructions - both colonial and Hindu of community and class identities in
late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Bengal. Some of these
journals further problematized Muslimness by encouraging Muslim women to
publicly call into question their specific gender oppressions. Consequently, we
find that by the first decade of the twentieth century many Muslim women in
Bengal were writing, some quite prolifically, in the Muslim and Hindu journals
spawned by the vibrant material and cultural economies of urban centers such as
Calcutta and Dhaka. Records of similar efforts by Muslim women outside of
Bengal, in cities such as Lahore and Bombay, are also not uncommon," Their
contributions in the form of articles, short stories, poems, autobiographies,
and travel accounts all of which helped to change women's roles within the home
and outside-have been considerable.
Yet it
is not easy to find mentions of Muslim women or their contributions in Indian
nationalist or even postcolonial history," The recorded history of women
in pre-partition Bengal, for instance, continues to be overwhelmingly a
narrative of the reformist experiments of a small minority of Hindu/Brahmo
women, who actively participated in the modernizing projects of the new
"liberal" elite," Needless to say, the intellectual and reform
efforts of many accomplished Muslim women in other parts of colonial India have
gone similarly unnoticed." Until recently, even much of feminist
scholarship has failed to highlight the work of Muslim women, presumably
because, as Meredith Borthwick puts it, it "deserves a separate
study" or because "the Muslim gender system differed significantly
from the Hindu," as Dagmar Engels would have it.The assumption, it would
seem, is that Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent have separate histories
that can be, indeed, need to be, recorded as discrete, largely self-referential
accounts.
In the course of the last decade, more nuanced
and/or revisionist efforts have attempted to redress this lacuna, but such
attempts have rarely gone beyond the inclusion of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's
(1880-1932) work," ignoring in the process other Muslim woman writers who
made significant literary and critical contributions in pre-partition
Bengal.How does one explain this continued occlusion of Muslim women in much of
the written history of colonial Bengal produced in postcolonial India?
The connection between "woman" and
"nation" has been the focus of much feminist inquiry." While
"hegemonic theorizations" of nations and nationalisms and, I would
add, even the more critical readings by such scholars as Benedict Anderson and
Etienne Balibar that recognize the nation form as modem, imagined, and
constitutive of identities-typically pay little attention to the workings of gender,
feminist theorists insist that the nation is in fact a gendered construct that
accords unequal access to power and resources to men and women. What is more,
as feminist writers such as Carole Pateman, Carol Delaney and Deniz Kandiyoti,
to name only a few-contend, the gendered inequity in modem society is not
accidental but rather constitutive of the very definition of the nation and the
modem (nation)state. Women are often constructed within nationalist discourse
as "inherently atavistic the conservative repository of the national
archaic," and as such they are considered fundamentally undeserving of
membership in the national political community except as the dependents of men
and under the latter's moral supervision. Consequently, as feminists point out,
the twentieth century may have brought impressive gains in terms of formal
political rights for women, with their "promise of justice and
equality," but women's substantive positions as citizen-subjects in the
public realm are still undercut by their very "real subordination"
within the private/familial domain, or what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has recently
called the "masculinity of nationalist ideolog[ies]" and the
"fictions of citizenship."
Meanwhile, this continued marginalization of
women stands in stark contrast to the almost compulsory foregrounding, even
valorization, of women as emblematic of nations and communities.'? To quote
Kandiyoti, the centrality of women to the nation is "reaffirmed
consciously in nationalist rhetoric where the nation itself is represented as a
woman to be protected" or manifested "less consciously in terms of an
inordinate degree of attention on women's appropriate sexual conduct.")!
In their influential work, Nira-Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias also highlight
this "intense preoccupation" with controlling women and their
sexuality in processes of national and ethnic identity production, which
understand the principal role of women to be bearing sons for the nation."
That haloed place, strategically accorded within nationalist discourses to the
idealized construct "woman," has meant that any attempt to raise the
issue of women's positions or rights, both in the colonial and post colonial
era, are invariably enmeshed in larger debates over "women's appropriate
place and conduct" that are widely considered to be crucial "boundary
markers" of the "cultural authenticity and integrity" of
communities/nations as they embark on various modernizing projects." As
feminist scholars argue, analyses of the position of women in any society must
therefore be grounded in an examination of the historical processes of nation
and state formation and the specific ways in which women were incorporated into
these projects.
Contents
|
Acknowledgments |
|
|
Introduction: Writing Difference |
1 |
1 |
The Colonial Cast: The Merchant, the soldier, the "writer" (clerk), Their Lovers, and the trouble with "Native Women's" Histories |
27 |
2 |
The politics of (In) visibility: Muslim women in (Hindu) nationalist discourse |
48 |
3 |
Negotiating Modernity: The Social production of Muslimness in Late colonial Bengal |
78 |
4 |
Difference in memory |
133 |
|
Conclusion: Connections |
196 |
|
Notes |
205 |
|
Bibliography |
287 |
|
Index |
331 |