Counting the Numbers: Nationalism and the Question of Surplus Women

Abstract

The ‘evils’ of sati and widowhood constituted two of the major elements of social reformation and women’s progress in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ‘evils’ were rooted in casteist and sexist ideologies and practices, aspects that remained largely unrecognised by the dominant reformist agendas. The narrative of social progress of women focused only on the upper-class and upper-caste women whose lives were prescribed by brahmanical and patriarchal ideals of chastity, purity, and devotion to husbands. Consequently, ‘patriarchy’ was interpreted as a traditional system oppressing the upper-class upper-caste women. The social reformations such as companionate marriage, widowhood, sati, were practices predominant only in upper-caste communities. It is also significant to note that social reformation was intended to revive the ‘great’ Hindu tradition and rid it of its bad elements exhibited through the practice of sati. This article, through a comparative reading of the discourses on sati and widowhood by Raja Rammohan Roy and the idea of endogamy by B. R. Ambedkar, examines the roots of brahmanical patriarchy to delineate the gendering of caste in imposing a false homogeneity of nationalism.