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Reading Mother India : Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice

1994; Binghamton University; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jowh.2010.0352

1527-2036

Mrinalini Sinha,

Australian History and Society

Reading Mother India-. Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice* Mrinalini Sinha Empires and nations are gendered ideological constructs. They are constituted by men and women and in turn become constitutive of men and women's identities in different ways. The voice of the colonized subject is not only always gendered—that is, marked as male or female— but also is always mediated through the discourses of empires and nations. In examining the debate over widow-burning in early colonial India, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that the voice of the colonized female is lost between the object-constitution of imperialism, "marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind," and the subject-constitution of patriarchal nationalism, which "apparently grants the woman free choice as subject."1 Yet by the 1920s, between both colonial and male nationalist constructs of the colonized female, a socalled "authentic voice of modern Indian womanhood" had emerged.2 This paper explores the conditions of this development through an examination of Indian women's participation in the controversy generated by Katherine Mayo's Mother India, published in 1927. In engaging directly with the controversy, certain sections of women in India were able to intervene in the imperialist-nationalist debate over representations of India and of Indian womanhood. I argue that the various positions that women in India could and did occupy in order to become the 'subjects' rather than just the Objects' of the controversy demonstrate both the successes and the limits of women's implication more generally within dominant Indian nationalism in the emerging idea of Indian nationhood . According to Partha Chatterjee's pioneering work on Indian nationalism , debates about the representation of Indian womanhood were central to the fundamental problem of national identity in the discourse of official Indian nationalism.3 The central contradiction confronting Indian nationalism was to modernize indigenous society to keep pace with the West while at the same time to avow a unique and distinctive cultural identity for the nation, on the basis of which the political claim to nationhood could be made. The nationalists addressed this contradiction by elaborating the © 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. 2 (Summer) * Versions of this paper have been presented at Language, Gender, and the Subaltern in South Asia, Anthropology Conference, University of Minnesota, April 1991; Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota, May 1991; American Historical Association Annual Meeting, December 1991; and Smith College, February 1992. 1994 Mrinalini Sdmha 7 spiritual and material domains of culture as distinctive and autonomous spheres. Indian nationalism, Chatterjee suggests, located "its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and hence undominated and sovereign." Furthermore, Chatterjee suggests that this system of dichotomies was related to the socially prescribed roles of men and women. Women, as the preservers or guardians of tradition or "culture," became the embodiments of that inner spirituality which lay at the core of national identity. Having located the essence of national identity in the spiritual sphere, with women as the embodiments of this spirituality, nationalists were now free to "modernize" or make any concessions to the West in the material world.4 Chatterjee and others have also spelled out the implications of this particular nationalist resolution for the articulation of the "woman question" in colonial India. The emancipation of women, for instance, was now located within the broader nationalist agenda of restoring Indian "culture" (including the position of women) to the pristine position of some idealized Golden Age. The reform of women's present position and the creation of the "new woman" was now made into a legitimate nationalist preoccupation.5 Women's emancipation and national liberation, especially under M. K. Gandhi's leadership of the nationalist movement from the 1920s onwards, became part of the same struggle; the identification of women's struggles with the national struggle was summed up in the popular slogan, "India cannot be free until its women are free and women cannot be free until India is free."6 As long as women retained their essential "spirituality" or culture, the sphere of women's activities could be extended naturally from the home to...