So that's that very warm and generous introduction, and thank you for inviting me.
And hello, everyone. Thanks for joining, and I look forward to a robust conversation with you after the talk.
I should apologise that I'm afraid I will need to be sticking very closely to a written script.
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.
I let go of the script. I also apologise for not having the mandatory PowerPoints to share.
I'm just too too much of a Luddite to try and manage both on Zoom.
So sorry, you will just be hearing me talk then.
OK? The decades of the 1980s and 90s marked a moment of considerable ferment and innovation in the writing of Indian history.
When old notions about modern India story as a great clash of imperialism and nationalism were under considerable challenge,
the challenge came from several directions. New approaches focussed amongst other things, and structural approaches to politics,
the Cambridge school and capturing the voices of subaltern and studies on the effects of knowledge
and power postcolonial studies and demonstrating the gendered nature of all historical processes.
Feminist historiography on and re-evaluation of the media.
Pre-colonial period, the early modern school and an anti caste.
Critiques of Indian history and historiography that have coalesced more recently as valid studies over the last 40 years.
Of course, there has been considerable expansion of the field, with new attention to areas of history and the histories interdisciplinary connexions.
New work has also opened up alternative approaches to historical sources, including visual and material culture.
Arguably, however, the challenges both posed for the field in the 1980s and 90s have been absorbed at best, only selectively and unevenly.
This is perhaps most evident in the case of feminist historiography.
The important 1989 edited volume recasting women essays in Indian colonial history.
But some diary and surveys read came closest to offering a general statement of a new shift in feminist historiography,
a re conceptualisation of history that argued, and I quote, that every aspect of reality is gendered.
End of quote. Despite the vast and sophisticated corpus of feminist historical work since then,
as John McIntyre has argued, the disciplinary foundations of history,
its thematic orientation and periodisation have remained relatively unchanged by the work of feminist historians.
Feminist history, she suggests, has been allowed to add to without recontextualizing historical investigation itself.
In a couple of articles, the troubled relationship of feminism in history and Indian historiography, and its resolution of feminists questions,
nature offers some compelling diagnoses of the field of modern Indian history and its relationship to feminist historiography.
These are peculiar to the Indian case and quite different from what we can only inadequately describe as historical phase of the global West.
She notes, for example, the anomaly of the lateral spread of Indian feminist historiography, the other social science disciplines, sociology,
anthropology, literary criticism and even economics, where it has made more substantial difference than in the professional practise of history.
The discipline of history, for the most part, seems to have found a means of quarantining feminist historiography.
This takes several forms. One is that a peaceful coexistence and despite feminist challenges to the
historical common sense and several important themes in modern Indian history,
social reform, the narrative of modernisation following the colonial encounter,
the familiarisation of Indian family forms debates and modernity and tradition politics.
There is little widespread revision in the field.
The one exception, perhaps, as I have also noted elsewhere, is in the study of nationalism adhered to.
The engagement with feminists historically has arguably not challenged larger claims.
The path of peaceful coexistence, as nature puts it, has denied feminist historians quote even the excitement of denunciation and of course,
along the lines of anti feminism as in the case of historical fees of some of the countries.
Another response to feminist history that no notes indeed is the politically correct one of
gesturing towards the formidable body of feminist scholarship without engaging with it.
This is in sharp contrast to the very public engagement it's around, it's about support and studied scholarship.
She offers this evidence the emblematic status of parts of outages generated yet also contested
formulation of the nationalist resolution and the woman question in the 19th century.
Despite more detailed feminist challenges and refinements to Chatterjee's influential proposition, it continues to dominate the field in part,
and I quote as a shorthand used by a wide range of scholars who wish to signal their engagement with the woman's
question in ways that do not demand knowledge or engagement with rich veins of feminist historiography and the world.
By contrast, strategies own engagement with some of the feminist critiques of his original
formulation and his revisiting of the relationship between women and gender.
Points to the potential of dialogue exchange.
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,
as in the willingness to accommodate a chapter on women in a book or to acknowledge women's contributions in a variety of arenas.
To take on the deepest challenge posed by the feminist historical feat.
The reasons for this impasse are many, but they are beyond the scope of my talk today.
I would be happy to speculate about some of them during the Q&A. As a historian of colonial India and a feminist historian,
I find Nas argument a provocation to respond to this trajectory of missed historical graphical connexions.
I will attempt to do so today through reframing some of the aspects of my own previous work and ongoing work.
I focus on two different modalities in the Constitution of women as political subjects, in separate historical junctures.
Explore what they tell us about the nature of the political in late colonial India.
My 2006 book, Spectres of Mother India, The Global Restructuring of Empire,
offers my first example about the modality of the Constitution of women as political subjects and its implications for understanding the political.
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.
It was conceived against certain trends then dominant in both Indian historiography and in Indian feminist historiography.
It is justly influential, both the nation and its fragments, but I had argued that and I quote,
unlike the women's movement in 19th and 20th century Europe or America,
the battle for the new idea of womanhood in the era of nationalism was waged in the home end of quote.
His argument was that national difference in India was elaborated in the to a private sphere instead of in the outer material public sphere.
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,
I had hoped to show the difference was a viable category in the latter, no less than in the inner spiritual sphere.
By the same token,
my choice to study women's public politics also went against the tide of much feminist historiography from at least the 1990s onwards,
in which histories of political women had fallen by the wayside.
The earliest scholarship on Indian women's movements by Jana Ever, Abigail Pearson, Gilman,
Minal and others no longer inspired new work in the field as feminist scholars in
India and elsewhere looked suspiciously at women's rights in the public arena,
which masked their subordination in the private realm. In returning to the history of political women in the war period,
I hoped to bring insights from this new feminist scholarship on the domestic and private to rethink Women's Public Association or politics.
My questions were shaped by the contemporary moment of the late 1990s with mainstream feminism,
and India was in crisis and the challenges to it were being equated to a similar unravelling of white Anglo American feminism.
The critiques of mainstream Indian feminism as Salvana or upper class, predominantly Hindu,
largely elite, the middle class and heteronormative had been very long in the making.
While the situation of Indian feminisms at first glance familiar in terms of what had happened earlier to white feminism,
I suspected that the historical conditions that had led each to their moments of crises were in fact, quite different.
Spector's mother, India, argued, amongst other things, that inter-war Indian feminism was rooted in a politics of agonistic liberal universalism,
a vocabulary of rights that developed, built alongside and against the grain of European liberalism.
The classic liberal civil and political rights against the state when the case of the struggles of women and other
marginalised groups in India tempered by claims against exclusionary systems of authority and control in society.
I was building on the work of feminist historian Annika Sarkar,
who argues based on her exploration of three 19th century social reform movements that were aimed at
women abolition of the custom of setting widow remarriage and the age of consent for sexual intercourse,
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.
But bringing Saka's insights from the private to the public sphere or in the
vocabularies of the period from the domain of the social to the political,
I demonstrate that the politics of Indian feminism was founded on a different set
of oppositions that between women and the community than your American Feminisms,
and likewise its resulting paradoxes a constitutive contradictions.
We're also different. I said just then, a very different history.
Early in June, feminism and by extension of the fruits of its contemporary crisis.
The process by which women with guns defeated is political subjects in their own right,
over and against the community based on the case for a different genealogy with the vocabulary
of individual rights and for the reformulation of the political in late colonial India.
The convergence of different historical forces in the interval period created a crisis for the colonial sociology of India,
comprising differently constituted communities or with claims over their own women,
and created an opening for the production of women as a new political constituency.
Hindu and Muslim women of the privileged classes mobilised on behalf of the constituency of women that had to be imagined,
the force in cross communal cross class and cross customs.
The triumph of these efforts came with the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act or the Shah Act in 1929,
the first and since then also the only law on marriage in India that got a grasp
with the laws of different religious communities to be applicable universally.
The feminist supporters of the act to constituted women and not the community as the subjects and the objects of this reform.
The act in bypassing separate religious personal laws to be universally applicable, albeit as a penal measure,
provided support for the efforts to extricate women from the tight embrace of the community
and to reconstitute them as political subjects with independent claims of the state.
This fragile political coalition represented a novel political force in the community driven colonial Indian public sphere.
It presented the hard won political making of women as political subjects,
women's political agency on behalf of women in a deliberate realignment of the social with the
political intervened to change the terms of the public politics and the contours of the political.
The radical rhetorical invention of women are women,
unlike with Denise Riley has shown in the case of Victorian Britain could not occur in India in
the domesticated domain of the social safely circumscribed from the domain of high politics.
Rather, it was precisely in the domain of high politics, the legitimation of intervention by the state in the internal affairs of the community,
that a universal language of individual rights which constituted women themselves
was right bearing subjects independently of the mediation of the community arose.
To be sure, this development was given the specifically nationalist dimension as women activists invoked the examples of Turkey,
Japan and many of the progressive princely states and India against the colonial state that had
been ceded the welfare of women to the internal regulation of separate religious communities.
This nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding,
there was much more at stake than a refurbished or modernised national collectivity in the campaign of women.
Something new had emerged language into individual rights alongside the hitherto
familiar language of the collective rights of the community or rather the communities,
plural, that these communities would, of course, often in rival groups and competitive relations with one another.
Not surprisingly, therefore, arguments made on behalf of women in the campaign were framed increasingly in this new political language of rights.
As you wrote the email responding to criticism of the bill.
Orthodox Hindus argued quote It is the most important question vitally concerning the
women and children of this country who should have self-determination in this matter.
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.
However much they protest and the quote, she just summarily dismissed the argument in men as protecting angels, uneducated and unfit women.
Education is not needed to form an opinion in this matter.
She argued for which women's experience is sufficient. Similarly, in a provocatively titled article Dominion Status in Matrimony,
Mrs. Munshi likens the relationship between husbands and wives to that of the Dominion colonies within the British Empire,
acknowledging the right to secede along ensured the stability of both.
The secession metaphor was carried further in the welcome address of Lakshmi Amor at the first women's conference in May 1930,
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
and if they were to persist in the belief that women were their playthings,
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.
The language of autonomy and sovereignty, as encapsulated in references to secession and non-cooperation,
had arrived in the domain hitherto insulated from such political language.
The self-consciousness of this rhetoric indeed, make clear that you need space to be emerged to provide public agency for women.
When the Viceroy began to weaken on the question of granting Muslims exemption from the
operation of the Sadat Act because it supposedly interfered with Muslim personal law,
a deputation of Muslim women activists laid out their objections and unambiguously.
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
and children who were not consulted in the defence of the supposed to be collective interests of the community.
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.
Where is the latter affected only a section of Hindu women?
The Shah that had implications, they argued for women of every class, class and creed in India.
The Northern Alliance, a women's organisation with radical and PARTICULAS organisations,
especially in a province like Madras with a strong non Brahmin movement,
signalled further the kind of broad cross community alliance that had become possible in the campaign for the Shah Act.
At stake in the campaign was precisely what Barr has called the ambiguous universality of women.
The actual experience of constituting women is oppressed community identity against the symbolic
identification of women as the bearers of separate community identities was a hard won political achievement.
And as such, it was necessarily transient. And even if Amazon.
The category women, of course, was always open,
potentially to a variety of alternative combinations and combinations along other possible axes of political identifications.
The fraught nature of this political achievement, not withstanding it, had profound implications.
The very act of imagining a collective identity for women on the basis of a shared political agenda,
bridging sectional and communal differences was an achievement worthy of note in the public realm in colonial India.
The collective political identity of women was mobilised quite self-consciously during the campaign for
the Sharbat Act as both above and separate from allegiances to other collectively constituted identities.
Just give the moment a political significance, that was twofold.
Above all, it provided the precarious construction of the universality of women constituted by a shared political
agenda as the basis for a critical re-imagination of the national polity in terms of individual citizens,
women rather than men, provided the basis for imagining the universal individual citizen of the new nation.
In addition, and this point is widely neglected, the alignment of the social with the political rising women,
apart from the tight embrace of community communities, had introduced a language of individual rights beyond the collective rights of communities.
It is no coincidence, perhaps, that soon after the Shah, the Act in December 1929,
the Indian National Congress announced a major shift in its official demands from Dominion status for India
within the British Empire to complete political independence and following not long after the shock of the act,
the Congress, at its annual session at the Roxy in 1931, passed the Fundamental Rights and Economic Programme.
The first official statement of demands for political vision of India based on universal individual rights.
And while the scholarship is divided between the influence deferring influence of various political figures on this resolution,
the All India Women's Conference claims its influence on this because they visited Gandhi and the Working Committee the night before.
The clause had been added in the 1951 resolution.
The moment of the the act that's provided through its unexpected, say,
politicisation of the social domain with an expanded understanding of the political and the new language of individual rights.
Yet for the women's movement in India, this ultimately proved to be a pyrrhic victory.
The colonial state, partly in recognition of the constituency building experiment of women's organisations in the campaign for the Sharbat Act,
conceded for the first time that women constituted a political group to be
recognised as such in any proposed new constitutional framework for colonial India.
Ironically, the altered conditions for the political recognition of women in the 1930s,
leading up to the proposed colonial constitutional reform in the Government of India Act in 1935 provoked an agonising crisis for
the agonistic liberal universalism of Indian feminism with negative consequences for the citizenship bill to women and minorities.
By the 1930s, for example, the feminist movement in India had become deeply divided over the terms of women's
political representation in the proposed new classes on your constitution for India.
To be sure, the competing sides in the debate made the arguments in language made familiar,
but parallel debates amongst feminists in Europe and North America,
that is, they grounded their claims of the competing foundations of women's equality, width and difference from men.
Yet this classical liberal paradox of Euro American feminists is not what informed feminist debates over women's political representation.
Indian feminists report in a very different paradox that was rooted in their investment in an agonistic liberal universalism.
The simultaneous disavowal and constitution of collective community identities in the claims made on behalf of women.
The very conditions that had once enabled them,
as in the campaign for the Shadow Act to constitute themselves as distinct from the collective identities of different religious communities,
confronted Indian feminists now with impossible choices.
In the absence of a satisfactory general settlement and the vexed political question of communal or proportional representation,
the precise terms for women's representation became especially fraught.
The majority position within women's organisations favoured a joint electorate,
an electorate constituted a territorially combining when men and women of all communities.
This put it in conflict,
potentially with the demands for separate considerations by religious minorities and by the so-called depressed classes in India.
Soon, a section of disaffected Muslim women activists broke from the majority position of
women's organisations to support reserved seats in separate electorates for women
on a communal basis decided with the major mosque and political parties will favour
the composite rather than a unitary constitution of the revised national polity.
At the same time, women's associations in the name of consistency and uniformity took the unilateral decision to remove any
special provisions for the membership of women of depressed classes from even their own organisations.
The insistence under these circumstances and women as a uniform political class identified the movement with Hindus
as the majority community and the dominant upper class who had most to gain from a homogenous conception of women.
The potential infirmity abuse issues standard, the women's movement marked a subtle shift in the articulation of a collective politics of women.
That is from a political individualism that had hit the two acknowledged women as part of communities and always already in
relation to other social identities to a new abstract individualism invested in the view of women as completely separate,
unencumbered in the service of the construction of an abstract Indian citizen.
The outcome of the constitutional wrangling of the 1930s was the return willy nilly of women as symbols.
Once again, a reconstituted group Identities Women's Collective agency had now become
harnessed for remaking the figure of the newly imagined Indian citizen as male,
Hindu and upper class. The legacy of the colonial era paradox continues to play out in India in the way women are positioned between
community and state in public controversies surrounding the rights of minority religious communities.
The entanglement of women's rights with the rights of subordinate subordinated groups has its origins in
the historical conditions of the production of women as a political constituency during the The Act.
At the same time, the legacy of the agonistic liberal universalism of Indian feminism also lives on in
the expanded contours of the political in the Constitution of the Republic of India.
The legal scholar Botham Patel, for example,
reads the constitutional provisions against horizontal discrimination in India against societal structures of power,
which modifies the classical liberal influences of claims of vertical rights from the state as
carrying the imprint from colonial era struggles for the rights of women and the fight against Gus.
The possibility of such an alternative genealogy of the political becomes visible precisely through an emphasis on the specifically historical would
the conjuncture that enables the politics of early Indian feminism to redefine the language of rights that is and the contingency of this development?
I attended the invocation of history and its vocabulary in its full disciplinary force and to suggest the
disciplinary difference itself is sometimes a resource rather than an impediment to a common language.
My second example is from the period leading up to the First World War,
and it was a very different modality in the political constitution of women as DeMoss.
This draws from an ongoing book project and the political making of the people as a new historical black anti-colonial politics in India,
not in the sense of an already existing sociological category such as peasants or the poor,
nor has died in any simple way to a shared ethnicity, origin or common history.
They produced in the context of a common struggle. I do not start with the familiar markers were telling such a history,
either Gandhi's involvement with local peasant struggles upon his return from South
Africa or his spectacular mass movements that famously brought vast numbers of peasants,
amongst others, into the fold of Congress led anti-colonial struggles.
I start instead with the movement for the abolition of indentured labour from India.
The struggle is gone these days in South Africa and the early years after his return to India,
the movement that only likely bears the footprint of Gandhi's leadership.
The elite nationalist political case against against indenture is by now well known.
My focus is on the more popular protests led by returning its indentured workers and their allies,
ordinary men and women, and supported by an increasingly abolitionist vernacular print culture, especially in Hindi.
I argue, contrary to some recent studies based on the same material,
that this movement was an important moment in the democratising of the nationalist movement.
It's democratising significance does not lie in the involvement of this, of that hitherto marginalised groups.
And there were many such groups peasants, it's indentured workers, middle class women, Dalits in the campaign against an indenture.
Rather and more crucially, it lies in the Constitution of the people or Demus as a collective political subject of the movement.
For our purposes today, what it is relevant is the way women figure in Indian abolitionist constitution of the people.
At the centre of the movement in India was the figure of Kunti, an indentured worker in Fiji,
whose purported letter to the press was printed in the Hindi language abolitionist
paper The Pirate Mitra in 1913 that made her a cause celeb in India.
She was identified in the press as a married woman belonging to the untouchable
Jamarcus to Go report in the erstwhile united provinces of eastern India,
the cheap labour exporting region under the indentured labour system.
In a letter Kennedy recounted in harrowing detail her escape from a sexual assault by a white overseer on a plantation,
Fiji, where she was indentured. Versions of a story proliferated in abolitionist materials, plays, poems, tracks, folk songs and pamphlets.
Scholars have identified in this story the paternalistic, even sexist logic of abolitionist propaganda,
with its outsized focus on the protection of women workers who were only a small part of
the total recruitment into the work from sexual exploitation on the overseas plantations.
The discrediting of these charges in a government investigation that also claimed her letter was written by an ex indentured worker and in August,
some of just activists in Fiji had told her story has offered further reason for scholars to estimate the implications of her story.
We may never know the full truth of these stories, though she did as part of a deliberate abolitionist strategy,
sign an affidavit on her return to India before one Amylin to send a Calcutta police magistrate on January eight,
1916, swearing her accusation against the overseer was true.
Even though the purported purpose behind the abolitionist strategy of collecting and disseminating
affidavits from returning convention workers is meant for publication in vernacular newspapers,
couldn't these affidavits, along with that of some others,
arrived just before the government of India as enclosures, with the memorial asking for abolition.
She also had a brief moment in the public when she shared a platform with Europeans or not.
Bustle, a member of the Legislative Assembly, at a large public meeting against indenture in Calcutta in August 1915.
The multiple layers of mediation that went into producing these affidavits suggest that, unlike the helpless victim of sexual assault,
in her letter to The Pirate Mitra, she was staged and new as a reconstituted subject of a popular political protest.
In her affidavit? The apotheosis of this story against his background represents more than a common elite national discourse of patriarchal chivalry.
Needle Co. identified unambiguously in the bar mitzvah as a low class Jemmott.
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
objects of reverence and recognised as deserving of protection in discourses of national honour.
The strategic use, perhaps of the gender discourse of protection for women like consistency will not subject asset protection allowed for the shift,
but shifting the terrain of politics.
It enables a network of obscure and ordinary men and women abolitionists in the colonies and in India to change the elitist nationalist opposition
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.
Two subsequent identification of the plight of indentured workers themselves like
committee as a real affront to the honour of the nation or the community as a whole.
The story of Candy and others like her had enabled anti-Indian to activists to generalise
the cause of indentured workers as not the cause of only those most vulnerable.
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.
One supplied. Others like her became the responsibility of Indian society as a whole.
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,
showing up or upending the hitherto partial conception of the national parliament that had allowed the sectional
interests of the powerful and privileged classes to be identified with the nation or the entire society.
This is how a gender discourse of protection from sexual assault came to contribute to the making of the people.
What would follow would be precisely counter attempts to tame the implications of this new political subjects,
the people or the demons by reassigning it to fix a particular designated place in an elite re appropriation of the Commons,
the part that is of the pre given sociological category of the masses, the peasants, women workers, Dalits for the plebeian.
Yet the potentialities and capacities generated by this movement,
not least the intervention of subordinated groups in producing knowledge about the situation
and the making of a popular national born out of a shared struggle are worth excavating.
What do my disparate exemplars of two very different modalities of constituting women as political subjects show?
I would hope for one, that it demonstrates in the words of a feminist following the men in the creation of women as subjects
in sub at best as only an endpoint in the feminist historiography and not its starting point.
And it is only then that we can begin to engage the process as historical all the way down.
This emphasis on the historical in the sense of that creates the potential of questioning what we know and of stopping fresh.
I hope that my story size different moments.
The political in late colonial India creates an opening, but thinking about the many spaces of the political and how it is constituted.
Thank you.