1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:05,550 So that's that very warm and generous introduction, and thank you for inviting me. 2 00:00:05,550 --> 00:00:15,300 And hello, everyone. Thanks for joining, and I look forward to a robust conversation with you after the talk. 3 00:00:15,300 --> 00:00:23,490 I should apologise that I'm afraid I will need to be sticking very closely to a written script. 4 00:00:23,490 --> 00:00:33,810 I wrote. The stork is a provocation built for myself and for this event, and I'm not sufficiently distanced from it to be able to do. 5 00:00:33,810 --> 00:00:43,050 I let go of the script. I also apologise for not having the mandatory PowerPoints to share. 6 00:00:43,050 --> 00:00:49,600 I'm just too too much of a Luddite to try and manage both on Zoom. 7 00:00:49,600 --> 00:00:54,420 So sorry, you will just be hearing me talk then. 8 00:00:54,420 --> 00:01:04,780 OK? The decades of the 1980s and 90s marked a moment of considerable ferment and innovation in the writing of Indian history. 9 00:01:04,780 --> 00:01:14,860 When old notions about modern India story as a great clash of imperialism and nationalism were under considerable challenge, 10 00:01:14,860 --> 00:01:22,660 the challenge came from several directions. New approaches focussed amongst other things, and structural approaches to politics, 11 00:01:22,660 --> 00:01:29,290 the Cambridge school and capturing the voices of subaltern and studies on the effects of knowledge 12 00:01:29,290 --> 00:01:36,070 and power postcolonial studies and demonstrating the gendered nature of all historical processes. 13 00:01:36,070 --> 00:01:40,190 Feminist historiography on and re-evaluation of the media. 14 00:01:40,190 --> 00:01:44,410 Pre-colonial period, the early modern school and an anti caste. 15 00:01:44,410 --> 00:01:53,500 Critiques of Indian history and historiography that have coalesced more recently as valid studies over the last 40 years. 16 00:01:53,500 --> 00:02:03,860 Of course, there has been considerable expansion of the field, with new attention to areas of history and the histories interdisciplinary connexions. 17 00:02:03,860 --> 00:02:13,650 New work has also opened up alternative approaches to historical sources, including visual and material culture. 18 00:02:13,650 --> 00:02:26,130 Arguably, however, the challenges both posed for the field in the 1980s and 90s have been absorbed at best, only selectively and unevenly. 19 00:02:26,130 --> 00:02:32,910 This is perhaps most evident in the case of feminist historiography. 20 00:02:32,910 --> 00:02:39,750 The important 1989 edited volume recasting women essays in Indian colonial history. 21 00:02:39,750 --> 00:02:49,830 But some diary and surveys read came closest to offering a general statement of a new shift in feminist historiography, 22 00:02:49,830 --> 00:02:57,840 a re conceptualisation of history that argued, and I quote, that every aspect of reality is gendered. 23 00:02:57,840 --> 00:03:05,780 End of quote. Despite the vast and sophisticated corpus of feminist historical work since then, 24 00:03:05,780 --> 00:03:10,760 as John McIntyre has argued, the disciplinary foundations of history, 25 00:03:10,760 --> 00:03:21,430 its thematic orientation and periodisation have remained relatively unchanged by the work of feminist historians. 26 00:03:21,430 --> 00:03:32,610 Feminist history, she suggests, has been allowed to add to without recontextualizing historical investigation itself. 27 00:03:32,610 --> 00:03:43,500 In a couple of articles, the troubled relationship of feminism in history and Indian historiography, and its resolution of feminists questions, 28 00:03:43,500 --> 00:03:53,280 nature offers some compelling diagnoses of the field of modern Indian history and its relationship to feminist historiography. 29 00:03:53,280 --> 00:04:04,070 These are peculiar to the Indian case and quite different from what we can only inadequately describe as historical phase of the global West. 30 00:04:04,070 --> 00:04:15,470 She notes, for example, the anomaly of the lateral spread of Indian feminist historiography, the other social science disciplines, sociology, 31 00:04:15,470 --> 00:04:27,290 anthropology, literary criticism and even economics, where it has made more substantial difference than in the professional practise of history. 32 00:04:27,290 --> 00:04:34,910 The discipline of history, for the most part, seems to have found a means of quarantining feminist historiography. 33 00:04:34,910 --> 00:04:43,580 This takes several forms. One is that a peaceful coexistence and despite feminist challenges to the 34 00:04:43,580 --> 00:04:49,610 historical common sense and several important themes in modern Indian history, 35 00:04:49,610 --> 00:04:55,160 social reform, the narrative of modernisation following the colonial encounter, 36 00:04:55,160 --> 00:05:03,020 the familiarisation of Indian family forms debates and modernity and tradition politics. 37 00:05:03,020 --> 00:05:06,970 There is little widespread revision in the field. 38 00:05:06,970 --> 00:05:14,980 The one exception, perhaps, as I have also noted elsewhere, is in the study of nationalism adhered to. 39 00:05:14,980 --> 00:05:22,130 The engagement with feminists historically has arguably not challenged larger claims. 40 00:05:22,130 --> 00:05:33,500 The path of peaceful coexistence, as nature puts it, has denied feminist historians quote even the excitement of denunciation and of course, 41 00:05:33,500 --> 00:05:42,470 along the lines of anti feminism as in the case of historical fees of some of the countries. 42 00:05:42,470 --> 00:05:49,010 Another response to feminist history that no notes indeed is the politically correct one of 43 00:05:49,010 --> 00:05:56,370 gesturing towards the formidable body of feminist scholarship without engaging with it. 44 00:05:56,370 --> 00:06:05,200 This is in sharp contrast to the very public engagement it's around, it's about support and studied scholarship. 45 00:06:05,200 --> 00:06:12,700 She offers this evidence the emblematic status of parts of outages generated yet also contested 46 00:06:12,700 --> 00:06:19,960 formulation of the nationalist resolution and the woman question in the 19th century. 47 00:06:19,960 --> 00:06:30,100 Despite more detailed feminist challenges and refinements to Chatterjee's influential proposition, it continues to dominate the field in part, 48 00:06:30,100 --> 00:06:37,660 and I quote as a shorthand used by a wide range of scholars who wish to signal their engagement with the woman's 49 00:06:37,660 --> 00:06:48,610 question in ways that do not demand knowledge or engagement with rich veins of feminist historiography and the world. 50 00:06:48,610 --> 00:06:53,920 By contrast, strategies own engagement with some of the feminist critiques of his original 51 00:06:53,920 --> 00:06:59,830 formulation and his revisiting of the relationship between women and gender. 52 00:06:59,830 --> 00:07:05,140 Points to the potential of dialogue exchange. 53 00:07:05,140 --> 00:07:16,990 Yet Noah's overall diagnosis holds true, the larger field of Indian history has, for the most part, found it easier to appropriate women's history, 54 00:07:16,990 --> 00:07:25,750 as in the willingness to accommodate a chapter on women in a book or to acknowledge women's contributions in a variety of arenas. 55 00:07:25,750 --> 00:07:32,390 To take on the deepest challenge posed by the feminist historical feat. 56 00:07:32,390 --> 00:07:37,460 The reasons for this impasse are many, but they are beyond the scope of my talk today. 57 00:07:37,460 --> 00:07:47,010 I would be happy to speculate about some of them during the Q&A. As a historian of colonial India and a feminist historian, 58 00:07:47,010 --> 00:07:56,690 I find Nas argument a provocation to respond to this trajectory of missed historical graphical connexions. 59 00:07:56,690 --> 00:08:06,290 I will attempt to do so today through reframing some of the aspects of my own previous work and ongoing work. 60 00:08:06,290 --> 00:08:15,800 I focus on two different modalities in the Constitution of women as political subjects, in separate historical junctures. 61 00:08:15,800 --> 00:08:23,510 Explore what they tell us about the nature of the political in late colonial India. 62 00:08:23,510 --> 00:08:29,840 My 2006 book, Spectres of Mother India, The Global Restructuring of Empire, 63 00:08:29,840 --> 00:08:41,640 offers my first example about the modality of the Constitution of women as political subjects and its implications for understanding the political. 64 00:08:41,640 --> 00:08:52,420 The book focuses on the interwar conjuncture of the 1920s and 30s in India and on the politics of the nascent All India women's movement. 65 00:08:52,420 --> 00:09:01,890 It was conceived against certain trends then dominant in both Indian historiography and in Indian feminist historiography. 66 00:09:01,890 --> 00:09:09,810 It is justly influential, both the nation and its fragments, but I had argued that and I quote, 67 00:09:09,810 --> 00:09:15,060 unlike the women's movement in 19th and 20th century Europe or America, 68 00:09:15,060 --> 00:09:24,070 the battle for the new idea of womanhood in the era of nationalism was waged in the home end of quote. 69 00:09:24,070 --> 00:09:36,050 His argument was that national difference in India was elaborated in the to a private sphere instead of in the outer material public sphere. 70 00:09:36,050 --> 00:09:46,910 In choosing to focus on women's association politics as a force in the high politics of colonial India or in the outer material sphere, 71 00:09:46,910 --> 00:09:56,240 I had hoped to show the difference was a viable category in the latter, no less than in the inner spiritual sphere. 72 00:09:56,240 --> 00:09:57,440 By the same token, 73 00:09:57,440 --> 00:10:07,160 my choice to study women's public politics also went against the tide of much feminist historiography from at least the 1990s onwards, 74 00:10:07,160 --> 00:10:12,220 in which histories of political women had fallen by the wayside. 75 00:10:12,220 --> 00:10:18,010 The earliest scholarship on Indian women's movements by Jana Ever, Abigail Pearson, Gilman, 76 00:10:18,010 --> 00:10:24,730 Minal and others no longer inspired new work in the field as feminist scholars in 77 00:10:24,730 --> 00:10:30,730 India and elsewhere looked suspiciously at women's rights in the public arena, 78 00:10:30,730 --> 00:10:40,350 which masked their subordination in the private realm. In returning to the history of political women in the war period, 79 00:10:40,350 --> 00:10:51,210 I hoped to bring insights from this new feminist scholarship on the domestic and private to rethink Women's Public Association or politics. 80 00:10:51,210 --> 00:10:58,200 My questions were shaped by the contemporary moment of the late 1990s with mainstream feminism, 81 00:10:58,200 --> 00:11:08,840 and India was in crisis and the challenges to it were being equated to a similar unravelling of white Anglo American feminism. 82 00:11:08,840 --> 00:11:15,830 The critiques of mainstream Indian feminism as Salvana or upper class, predominantly Hindu, 83 00:11:15,830 --> 00:11:24,010 largely elite, the middle class and heteronormative had been very long in the making. 84 00:11:24,010 --> 00:11:32,620 While the situation of Indian feminisms at first glance familiar in terms of what had happened earlier to white feminism, 85 00:11:32,620 --> 00:11:42,790 I suspected that the historical conditions that had led each to their moments of crises were in fact, quite different. 86 00:11:42,790 --> 00:11:54,460 Spector's mother, India, argued, amongst other things, that inter-war Indian feminism was rooted in a politics of agonistic liberal universalism, 87 00:11:54,460 --> 00:12:02,970 a vocabulary of rights that developed, built alongside and against the grain of European liberalism. 88 00:12:02,970 --> 00:12:10,530 The classic liberal civil and political rights against the state when the case of the struggles of women and other 89 00:12:10,530 --> 00:12:20,630 marginalised groups in India tempered by claims against exclusionary systems of authority and control in society. 90 00:12:20,630 --> 00:12:24,620 I was building on the work of feminist historian Annika Sarkar, 91 00:12:24,620 --> 00:12:31,400 who argues based on her exploration of three 19th century social reform movements that were aimed at 92 00:12:31,400 --> 00:12:39,540 women abolition of the custom of setting widow remarriage and the age of consent for sexual intercourse, 93 00:12:39,540 --> 00:12:53,810 the vocabulary of women as a rights bearing individual was first framed in opposition to and I quote her community as a culture bearing entity. 94 00:12:53,810 --> 00:12:59,030 But bringing Saka's insights from the private to the public sphere or in the 95 00:12:59,030 --> 00:13:04,100 vocabularies of the period from the domain of the social to the political, 96 00:13:04,100 --> 00:13:09,590 I demonstrate that the politics of Indian feminism was founded on a different set 97 00:13:09,590 --> 00:13:16,340 of oppositions that between women and the community than your American Feminisms, 98 00:13:16,340 --> 00:13:21,680 and likewise its resulting paradoxes a constitutive contradictions. 99 00:13:21,680 --> 00:13:26,920 We're also different. I said just then, a very different history. 100 00:13:26,920 --> 00:13:34,740 Early in June, feminism and by extension of the fruits of its contemporary crisis. 101 00:13:34,740 --> 00:13:40,170 The process by which women with guns defeated is political subjects in their own right, 102 00:13:40,170 --> 00:13:47,220 over and against the community based on the case for a different genealogy with the vocabulary 103 00:13:47,220 --> 00:13:54,890 of individual rights and for the reformulation of the political in late colonial India. 104 00:13:54,890 --> 00:14:03,050 The convergence of different historical forces in the interval period created a crisis for the colonial sociology of India, 105 00:14:03,050 --> 00:14:09,770 comprising differently constituted communities or with claims over their own women, 106 00:14:09,770 --> 00:14:17,180 and created an opening for the production of women as a new political constituency. 107 00:14:17,180 --> 00:14:26,420 Hindu and Muslim women of the privileged classes mobilised on behalf of the constituency of women that had to be imagined, 108 00:14:26,420 --> 00:14:33,960 the force in cross communal cross class and cross customs. 109 00:14:33,960 --> 00:14:41,640 The triumph of these efforts came with the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act or the Shah Act in 1929, 110 00:14:41,640 --> 00:14:47,620 the first and since then also the only law on marriage in India that got a grasp 111 00:14:47,620 --> 00:14:54,740 with the laws of different religious communities to be applicable universally. 112 00:14:54,740 --> 00:15:05,410 The feminist supporters of the act to constituted women and not the community as the subjects and the objects of this reform. 113 00:15:05,410 --> 00:15:14,770 The act in bypassing separate religious personal laws to be universally applicable, albeit as a penal measure, 114 00:15:14,770 --> 00:15:20,530 provided support for the efforts to extricate women from the tight embrace of the community 115 00:15:20,530 --> 00:15:27,820 and to reconstitute them as political subjects with independent claims of the state. 116 00:15:27,820 --> 00:15:38,050 This fragile political coalition represented a novel political force in the community driven colonial Indian public sphere. 117 00:15:38,050 --> 00:15:43,960 It presented the hard won political making of women as political subjects, 118 00:15:43,960 --> 00:15:51,010 women's political agency on behalf of women in a deliberate realignment of the social with the 119 00:15:51,010 --> 00:16:00,840 political intervened to change the terms of the public politics and the contours of the political. 120 00:16:00,840 --> 00:16:05,340 The radical rhetorical invention of women are women, 121 00:16:05,340 --> 00:16:12,270 unlike with Denise Riley has shown in the case of Victorian Britain could not occur in India in 122 00:16:12,270 --> 00:16:20,160 the domesticated domain of the social safely circumscribed from the domain of high politics. 123 00:16:20,160 --> 00:16:29,220 Rather, it was precisely in the domain of high politics, the legitimation of intervention by the state in the internal affairs of the community, 124 00:16:29,220 --> 00:16:34,650 that a universal language of individual rights which constituted women themselves 125 00:16:34,650 --> 00:16:42,560 was right bearing subjects independently of the mediation of the community arose. 126 00:16:42,560 --> 00:16:50,690 To be sure, this development was given the specifically nationalist dimension as women activists invoked the examples of Turkey, 127 00:16:50,690 --> 00:16:57,050 Japan and many of the progressive princely states and India against the colonial state that had 128 00:16:57,050 --> 00:17:04,860 been ceded the welfare of women to the internal regulation of separate religious communities. 129 00:17:04,860 --> 00:17:07,740 This nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding, 130 00:17:07,740 --> 00:17:15,480 there was much more at stake than a refurbished or modernised national collectivity in the campaign of women. 131 00:17:15,480 --> 00:17:21,720 Something new had emerged language into individual rights alongside the hitherto 132 00:17:21,720 --> 00:17:28,710 familiar language of the collective rights of the community or rather the communities, 133 00:17:28,710 --> 00:17:38,090 plural, that these communities would, of course, often in rival groups and competitive relations with one another. 134 00:17:38,090 --> 00:17:48,800 Not surprisingly, therefore, arguments made on behalf of women in the campaign were framed increasingly in this new political language of rights. 135 00:17:48,800 --> 00:17:52,970 As you wrote the email responding to criticism of the bill. 136 00:17:52,970 --> 00:17:59,720 Orthodox Hindus argued quote It is the most important question vitally concerning the 137 00:17:59,720 --> 00:18:05,330 women and children of this country who should have self-determination in this matter. 138 00:18:05,330 --> 00:18:14,000 They alone, she wrote, have the moral right to say whether they want the bill or not, and the men should have no voice in passing it. 139 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:26,530 However much they protest and the quote, she just summarily dismissed the argument in men as protecting angels, uneducated and unfit women. 140 00:18:26,530 --> 00:18:30,460 Education is not needed to form an opinion in this matter. 141 00:18:30,460 --> 00:18:42,580 She argued for which women's experience is sufficient. Similarly, in a provocatively titled article Dominion Status in Matrimony, 142 00:18:42,580 --> 00:18:50,200 Mrs. Munshi likens the relationship between husbands and wives to that of the Dominion colonies within the British Empire, 143 00:18:50,200 --> 00:18:58,410 acknowledging the right to secede along ensured the stability of both. 144 00:18:58,410 --> 00:19:06,930 The secession metaphor was carried further in the welcome address of Lakshmi Amor at the first women's conference in May 1930, 145 00:19:06,930 --> 00:19:17,180 organised under the auspices of the Self-respect Movement. If men were to persist thus in not giving in to women's demands for freedom 146 00:19:17,180 --> 00:19:21,200 and if they were to persist in the belief that women were their playthings, 147 00:19:21,200 --> 00:19:32,010 she argued women will have no choice but to practise a policy of non-cooperation with respect to the men in the law in their lives. 148 00:19:32,010 --> 00:19:40,080 The language of autonomy and sovereignty, as encapsulated in references to secession and non-cooperation, 149 00:19:40,080 --> 00:19:46,260 had arrived in the domain hitherto insulated from such political language. 150 00:19:46,260 --> 00:19:56,450 The self-consciousness of this rhetoric indeed, make clear that you need space to be emerged to provide public agency for women. 151 00:19:56,450 --> 00:20:01,730 When the Viceroy began to weaken on the question of granting Muslims exemption from the 152 00:20:01,730 --> 00:20:08,180 operation of the Sadat Act because it supposedly interfered with Muslim personal law, 153 00:20:08,180 --> 00:20:15,060 a deputation of Muslim women activists laid out their objections and unambiguously. 154 00:20:15,060 --> 00:20:23,400 They denied the right, a self-proclaimed spokesman of the community to declare on a matter whose effect was to be felt most on women 155 00:20:23,400 --> 00:20:31,620 and children who were not consulted in the defence of the supposed to be collective interests of the community. 156 00:20:31,620 --> 00:20:43,280 The shark, the act, as the All India Women's Conference insisted, was far more important than its significance than the act abolishing City in 1829. 157 00:20:43,280 --> 00:20:47,180 Where is the latter affected only a section of Hindu women? 158 00:20:47,180 --> 00:20:55,800 The Shah that had implications, they argued for women of every class, class and creed in India. 159 00:20:55,800 --> 00:21:01,380 The Northern Alliance, a women's organisation with radical and PARTICULAS organisations, 160 00:21:01,380 --> 00:21:06,000 especially in a province like Madras with a strong non Brahmin movement, 161 00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:16,390 signalled further the kind of broad cross community alliance that had become possible in the campaign for the Shah Act. 162 00:21:16,390 --> 00:21:26,170 At stake in the campaign was precisely what Barr has called the ambiguous universality of women. 163 00:21:26,170 --> 00:21:33,070 The actual experience of constituting women is oppressed community identity against the symbolic 164 00:21:33,070 --> 00:21:42,550 identification of women as the bearers of separate community identities was a hard won political achievement. 165 00:21:42,550 --> 00:21:48,300 And as such, it was necessarily transient. And even if Amazon. 166 00:21:48,300 --> 00:21:51,120 The category women, of course, was always open, 167 00:21:51,120 --> 00:22:01,680 potentially to a variety of alternative combinations and combinations along other possible axes of political identifications. 168 00:22:01,680 --> 00:22:08,340 The fraught nature of this political achievement, not withstanding it, had profound implications. 169 00:22:08,340 --> 00:22:15,030 The very act of imagining a collective identity for women on the basis of a shared political agenda, 170 00:22:15,030 --> 00:22:23,570 bridging sectional and communal differences was an achievement worthy of note in the public realm in colonial India. 171 00:22:23,570 --> 00:22:29,540 The collective political identity of women was mobilised quite self-consciously during the campaign for 172 00:22:29,540 --> 00:22:39,460 the Sharbat Act as both above and separate from allegiances to other collectively constituted identities. 173 00:22:39,460 --> 00:22:44,440 Just give the moment a political significance, that was twofold. 174 00:22:44,440 --> 00:22:51,670 Above all, it provided the precarious construction of the universality of women constituted by a shared political 175 00:22:51,670 --> 00:23:01,090 agenda as the basis for a critical re-imagination of the national polity in terms of individual citizens, 176 00:23:01,090 --> 00:23:09,830 women rather than men, provided the basis for imagining the universal individual citizen of the new nation. 177 00:23:09,830 --> 00:23:18,080 In addition, and this point is widely neglected, the alignment of the social with the political rising women, 178 00:23:18,080 --> 00:23:29,090 apart from the tight embrace of community communities, had introduced a language of individual rights beyond the collective rights of communities. 179 00:23:29,090 --> 00:23:35,360 It is no coincidence, perhaps, that soon after the Shah, the Act in December 1929, 180 00:23:35,360 --> 00:23:42,260 the Indian National Congress announced a major shift in its official demands from Dominion status for India 181 00:23:42,260 --> 00:23:50,360 within the British Empire to complete political independence and following not long after the shock of the act, 182 00:23:50,360 --> 00:23:58,490 the Congress, at its annual session at the Roxy in 1931, passed the Fundamental Rights and Economic Programme. 183 00:23:58,490 --> 00:24:05,810 The first official statement of demands for political vision of India based on universal individual rights. 184 00:24:05,810 --> 00:24:15,920 And while the scholarship is divided between the influence deferring influence of various political figures on this resolution, 185 00:24:15,920 --> 00:24:28,160 the All India Women's Conference claims its influence on this because they visited Gandhi and the Working Committee the night before. 186 00:24:28,160 --> 00:24:34,000 The clause had been added in the 1951 resolution. 187 00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:38,380 The moment of the the act that's provided through its unexpected, say, 188 00:24:38,380 --> 00:24:49,480 politicisation of the social domain with an expanded understanding of the political and the new language of individual rights. 189 00:24:49,480 --> 00:24:55,590 Yet for the women's movement in India, this ultimately proved to be a pyrrhic victory. 190 00:24:55,590 --> 00:25:05,040 The colonial state, partly in recognition of the constituency building experiment of women's organisations in the campaign for the Sharbat Act, 191 00:25:05,040 --> 00:25:09,630 conceded for the first time that women constituted a political group to be 192 00:25:09,630 --> 00:25:17,550 recognised as such in any proposed new constitutional framework for colonial India. 193 00:25:17,550 --> 00:25:23,760 Ironically, the altered conditions for the political recognition of women in the 1930s, 194 00:25:23,760 --> 00:25:33,330 leading up to the proposed colonial constitutional reform in the Government of India Act in 1935 provoked an agonising crisis for 195 00:25:33,330 --> 00:25:44,880 the agonistic liberal universalism of Indian feminism with negative consequences for the citizenship bill to women and minorities. 196 00:25:44,880 --> 00:25:51,450 By the 1930s, for example, the feminist movement in India had become deeply divided over the terms of women's 197 00:25:51,450 --> 00:25:58,070 political representation in the proposed new classes on your constitution for India. 198 00:25:58,070 --> 00:26:04,340 To be sure, the competing sides in the debate made the arguments in language made familiar, 199 00:26:04,340 --> 00:26:09,590 but parallel debates amongst feminists in Europe and North America, 200 00:26:09,590 --> 00:26:19,200 that is, they grounded their claims of the competing foundations of women's equality, width and difference from men. 201 00:26:19,200 --> 00:26:29,820 Yet this classical liberal paradox of Euro American feminists is not what informed feminist debates over women's political representation. 202 00:26:29,820 --> 00:26:39,420 Indian feminists report in a very different paradox that was rooted in their investment in an agonistic liberal universalism. 203 00:26:39,420 --> 00:26:49,970 The simultaneous disavowal and constitution of collective community identities in the claims made on behalf of women. 204 00:26:49,970 --> 00:26:53,420 The very conditions that had once enabled them, 205 00:26:53,420 --> 00:27:02,630 as in the campaign for the Shadow Act to constitute themselves as distinct from the collective identities of different religious communities, 206 00:27:02,630 --> 00:27:07,890 confronted Indian feminists now with impossible choices. 207 00:27:07,890 --> 00:27:16,440 In the absence of a satisfactory general settlement and the vexed political question of communal or proportional representation, 208 00:27:16,440 --> 00:27:22,340 the precise terms for women's representation became especially fraught. 209 00:27:22,340 --> 00:27:27,920 The majority position within women's organisations favoured a joint electorate, 210 00:27:27,920 --> 00:27:34,520 an electorate constituted a territorially combining when men and women of all communities. 211 00:27:34,520 --> 00:27:35,750 This put it in conflict, 212 00:27:35,750 --> 00:27:45,410 potentially with the demands for separate considerations by religious minorities and by the so-called depressed classes in India. 213 00:27:45,410 --> 00:27:50,780 Soon, a section of disaffected Muslim women activists broke from the majority position of 214 00:27:50,780 --> 00:27:55,730 women's organisations to support reserved seats in separate electorates for women 215 00:27:55,730 --> 00:28:01,250 on a communal basis decided with the major mosque and political parties will favour 216 00:28:01,250 --> 00:28:07,180 the composite rather than a unitary constitution of the revised national polity. 217 00:28:07,180 --> 00:28:17,650 At the same time, women's associations in the name of consistency and uniformity took the unilateral decision to remove any 218 00:28:17,650 --> 00:28:25,790 special provisions for the membership of women of depressed classes from even their own organisations. 219 00:28:25,790 --> 00:28:34,430 The insistence under these circumstances and women as a uniform political class identified the movement with Hindus 220 00:28:34,430 --> 00:28:43,840 as the majority community and the dominant upper class who had most to gain from a homogenous conception of women. 221 00:28:43,840 --> 00:28:54,400 The potential infirmity abuse issues standard, the women's movement marked a subtle shift in the articulation of a collective politics of women. 222 00:28:54,400 --> 00:29:03,070 That is from a political individualism that had hit the two acknowledged women as part of communities and always already in 223 00:29:03,070 --> 00:29:13,450 relation to other social identities to a new abstract individualism invested in the view of women as completely separate, 224 00:29:13,450 --> 00:29:20,940 unencumbered in the service of the construction of an abstract Indian citizen. 225 00:29:20,940 --> 00:29:28,170 The outcome of the constitutional wrangling of the 1930s was the return willy nilly of women as symbols. 226 00:29:28,170 --> 00:29:36,180 Once again, a reconstituted group Identities Women's Collective agency had now become 227 00:29:36,180 --> 00:29:42,210 harnessed for remaking the figure of the newly imagined Indian citizen as male, 228 00:29:42,210 --> 00:29:53,300 Hindu and upper class. The legacy of the colonial era paradox continues to play out in India in the way women are positioned between 229 00:29:53,300 --> 00:30:01,470 community and state in public controversies surrounding the rights of minority religious communities. 230 00:30:01,470 --> 00:30:07,890 The entanglement of women's rights with the rights of subordinate subordinated groups has its origins in 231 00:30:07,890 --> 00:30:18,360 the historical conditions of the production of women as a political constituency during the The Act. 232 00:30:18,360 --> 00:30:26,430 At the same time, the legacy of the agonistic liberal universalism of Indian feminism also lives on in 233 00:30:26,430 --> 00:30:33,550 the expanded contours of the political in the Constitution of the Republic of India. 234 00:30:33,550 --> 00:30:36,910 The legal scholar Botham Patel, for example, 235 00:30:36,910 --> 00:30:45,460 reads the constitutional provisions against horizontal discrimination in India against societal structures of power, 236 00:30:45,460 --> 00:30:53,080 which modifies the classical liberal influences of claims of vertical rights from the state as 237 00:30:53,080 --> 00:31:00,750 carrying the imprint from colonial era struggles for the rights of women and the fight against Gus. 238 00:31:00,750 --> 00:31:12,540 The possibility of such an alternative genealogy of the political becomes visible precisely through an emphasis on the specifically historical would 239 00:31:12,540 --> 00:31:24,530 the conjuncture that enables the politics of early Indian feminism to redefine the language of rights that is and the contingency of this development? 240 00:31:24,530 --> 00:31:32,420 I attended the invocation of history and its vocabulary in its full disciplinary force and to suggest the 241 00:31:32,420 --> 00:31:42,730 disciplinary difference itself is sometimes a resource rather than an impediment to a common language. 242 00:31:42,730 --> 00:31:47,530 My second example is from the period leading up to the First World War, 243 00:31:47,530 --> 00:31:56,020 and it was a very different modality in the political constitution of women as DeMoss. 244 00:31:56,020 --> 00:32:05,530 This draws from an ongoing book project and the political making of the people as a new historical black anti-colonial politics in India, 245 00:32:05,530 --> 00:32:12,460 not in the sense of an already existing sociological category such as peasants or the poor, 246 00:32:12,460 --> 00:32:19,000 nor has died in any simple way to a shared ethnicity, origin or common history. 247 00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:28,010 They produced in the context of a common struggle. I do not start with the familiar markers were telling such a history, 248 00:32:28,010 --> 00:32:32,720 either Gandhi's involvement with local peasant struggles upon his return from South 249 00:32:32,720 --> 00:32:39,110 Africa or his spectacular mass movements that famously brought vast numbers of peasants, 250 00:32:39,110 --> 00:32:44,810 amongst others, into the fold of Congress led anti-colonial struggles. 251 00:32:44,810 --> 00:32:50,630 I start instead with the movement for the abolition of indentured labour from India. 252 00:32:50,630 --> 00:32:57,380 The struggle is gone these days in South Africa and the early years after his return to India, 253 00:32:57,380 --> 00:33:04,090 the movement that only likely bears the footprint of Gandhi's leadership. 254 00:33:04,090 --> 00:33:10,180 The elite nationalist political case against against indenture is by now well known. 255 00:33:10,180 --> 00:33:17,860 My focus is on the more popular protests led by returning its indentured workers and their allies, 256 00:33:17,860 --> 00:33:27,030 ordinary men and women, and supported by an increasingly abolitionist vernacular print culture, especially in Hindi. 257 00:33:27,030 --> 00:33:32,010 I argue, contrary to some recent studies based on the same material, 258 00:33:32,010 --> 00:33:38,490 that this movement was an important moment in the democratising of the nationalist movement. 259 00:33:38,490 --> 00:33:46,140 It's democratising significance does not lie in the involvement of this, of that hitherto marginalised groups. 260 00:33:46,140 --> 00:33:56,030 And there were many such groups peasants, it's indentured workers, middle class women, Dalits in the campaign against an indenture. 261 00:33:56,030 --> 00:34:07,900 Rather and more crucially, it lies in the Constitution of the people or Demus as a collective political subject of the movement. 262 00:34:07,900 --> 00:34:17,740 For our purposes today, what it is relevant is the way women figure in Indian abolitionist constitution of the people. 263 00:34:17,740 --> 00:34:24,430 At the centre of the movement in India was the figure of Kunti, an indentured worker in Fiji, 264 00:34:24,430 --> 00:34:29,170 whose purported letter to the press was printed in the Hindi language abolitionist 265 00:34:29,170 --> 00:34:36,530 paper The Pirate Mitra in 1913 that made her a cause celeb in India. 266 00:34:36,530 --> 00:34:42,020 She was identified in the press as a married woman belonging to the untouchable 267 00:34:42,020 --> 00:34:47,450 Jamarcus to Go report in the erstwhile united provinces of eastern India, 268 00:34:47,450 --> 00:34:53,170 the cheap labour exporting region under the indentured labour system. 269 00:34:53,170 --> 00:35:01,360 In a letter Kennedy recounted in harrowing detail her escape from a sexual assault by a white overseer on a plantation, 270 00:35:01,360 --> 00:35:13,980 Fiji, where she was indentured. Versions of a story proliferated in abolitionist materials, plays, poems, tracks, folk songs and pamphlets. 271 00:35:13,980 --> 00:35:22,410 Scholars have identified in this story the paternalistic, even sexist logic of abolitionist propaganda, 272 00:35:22,410 --> 00:35:28,590 with its outsized focus on the protection of women workers who were only a small part of 273 00:35:28,590 --> 00:35:37,170 the total recruitment into the work from sexual exploitation on the overseas plantations. 274 00:35:37,170 --> 00:35:47,140 The discrediting of these charges in a government investigation that also claimed her letter was written by an ex indentured worker and in August, 275 00:35:47,140 --> 00:35:59,460 some of just activists in Fiji had told her story has offered further reason for scholars to estimate the implications of her story. 276 00:35:59,460 --> 00:36:06,900 We may never know the full truth of these stories, though she did as part of a deliberate abolitionist strategy, 277 00:36:06,900 --> 00:36:14,580 sign an affidavit on her return to India before one Amylin to send a Calcutta police magistrate on January eight, 278 00:36:14,580 --> 00:36:22,430 1916, swearing her accusation against the overseer was true. 279 00:36:22,430 --> 00:36:28,910 Even though the purported purpose behind the abolitionist strategy of collecting and disseminating 280 00:36:28,910 --> 00:36:36,230 affidavits from returning convention workers is meant for publication in vernacular newspapers, 281 00:36:36,230 --> 00:36:40,190 couldn't these affidavits, along with that of some others, 282 00:36:40,190 --> 00:36:48,590 arrived just before the government of India as enclosures, with the memorial asking for abolition. 283 00:36:48,590 --> 00:36:54,260 She also had a brief moment in the public when she shared a platform with Europeans or not. 284 00:36:54,260 --> 00:37:04,610 Bustle, a member of the Legislative Assembly, at a large public meeting against indenture in Calcutta in August 1915. 285 00:37:04,610 --> 00:37:15,320 The multiple layers of mediation that went into producing these affidavits suggest that, unlike the helpless victim of sexual assault, 286 00:37:15,320 --> 00:37:24,200 in her letter to The Pirate Mitra, she was staged and new as a reconstituted subject of a popular political protest. 287 00:37:24,200 --> 00:37:39,080 In her affidavit? The apotheosis of this story against his background represents more than a common elite national discourse of patriarchal chivalry. 288 00:37:39,080 --> 00:37:45,680 Needle Co. identified unambiguously in the bar mitzvah as a low class Jemmott. 289 00:37:45,680 --> 00:37:55,370 No, but an indentured Muslim woman booker, whose story likewise was reported in the press with the kind of women who would typically made the 290 00:37:55,370 --> 00:38:04,440 objects of reverence and recognised as deserving of protection in discourses of national honour. 291 00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:15,020 The strategic use, perhaps of the gender discourse of protection for women like consistency will not subject asset protection allowed for the shift, 292 00:38:15,020 --> 00:38:18,810 but shifting the terrain of politics. 293 00:38:18,810 --> 00:38:29,760 It enables a network of obscure and ordinary men and women abolitionists in the colonies and in India to change the elitist nationalist opposition 294 00:38:29,760 --> 00:38:41,280 to indenture from an initial concern about the affront to the nation's honour in the mist recognition of all Indians in the colonies as fools. 295 00:38:41,280 --> 00:38:46,910 Two subsequent identification of the plight of indentured workers themselves like 296 00:38:46,910 --> 00:38:54,180 committee as a real affront to the honour of the nation or the community as a whole. 297 00:38:54,180 --> 00:39:01,140 The story of Candy and others like her had enabled anti-Indian to activists to generalise 298 00:39:01,140 --> 00:39:07,770 the cause of indentured workers as not the cause of only those most vulnerable. 299 00:39:07,770 --> 00:39:21,010 But as the cause of the whole of society enabling in effect a sub-Saharan junta, ordinary public to stand in for the nation as a whole. 300 00:39:21,010 --> 00:39:27,850 One supplied. Others like her became the responsibility of Indian society as a whole. 301 00:39:27,850 --> 00:39:38,050 Then the stakes of abolition were no longer limited to a critique of the system of indenture, but were making a broader claim to quality, 302 00:39:38,050 --> 00:39:45,580 showing up or upending the hitherto partial conception of the national parliament that had allowed the sectional 303 00:39:45,580 --> 00:39:54,300 interests of the powerful and privileged classes to be identified with the nation or the entire society. 304 00:39:54,300 --> 00:40:02,720 This is how a gender discourse of protection from sexual assault came to contribute to the making of the people. 305 00:40:02,720 --> 00:40:09,350 What would follow would be precisely counter attempts to tame the implications of this new political subjects, 306 00:40:09,350 --> 00:40:19,850 the people or the demons by reassigning it to fix a particular designated place in an elite re appropriation of the Commons, 307 00:40:19,850 --> 00:40:31,250 the part that is of the pre given sociological category of the masses, the peasants, women workers, Dalits for the plebeian. 308 00:40:31,250 --> 00:40:35,690 Yet the potentialities and capacities generated by this movement, 309 00:40:35,690 --> 00:40:42,050 not least the intervention of subordinated groups in producing knowledge about the situation 310 00:40:42,050 --> 00:40:50,560 and the making of a popular national born out of a shared struggle are worth excavating. 311 00:40:50,560 --> 00:40:59,950 What do my disparate exemplars of two very different modalities of constituting women as political subjects show? 312 00:40:59,950 --> 00:41:07,810 I would hope for one, that it demonstrates in the words of a feminist following the men in the creation of women as subjects 313 00:41:07,810 --> 00:41:16,180 in sub at best as only an endpoint in the feminist historiography and not its starting point. 314 00:41:16,180 --> 00:41:24,720 And it is only then that we can begin to engage the process as historical all the way down. 315 00:41:24,720 --> 00:41:34,860 This emphasis on the historical in the sense of that creates the potential of questioning what we know and of stopping fresh. 316 00:41:34,860 --> 00:41:38,460 I hope that my story size different moments. 317 00:41:38,460 --> 00:41:49,770 The political in late colonial India creates an opening, but thinking about the many spaces of the political and how it is constituted. 318 00:41:49,770 --> 00:41:55,040 Thank you.