Contesting Identities: Involvement and resistance of women in the Indian National Movement

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I have examined the construction of forms of historical consciousness in narratives or schools of narrative by treating historical fiction as the literary dimension of nationalist ideology. By focusing particularly on the politics of representation of women in the 1930s national movement in India, I have tried to show that the idea of nationalism and its manifestation in historical fiction, which underwrites the freedom struggle, and the actual roles played by women in that struggle, diverge widely. One of the ways of demythologising the homogeneous histories of the national movement is through the demystification of the genre of historical fiction, for it is common to find that existing stereotypes of Indian women were affirmed and solidified in the process of building Indian national identity through literature and its writing by the Indian nationalist intelligentsia. I have considered Raja Rao's (1938) novel, Kanthapura (Delhi Orient) to shed light on the construction of the Ved...