Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction

Abstract

In our time, when intimacy saturates all aspects of the public sphere, from politics to culture to law, its regimes and temporalities are certainly as instrumental in pacifying the citizenry and securing social cohesion as were those of the workplace when work ruled the land. – Laura Kipnis, “Adultery” (p. 29) Intimacy is not solely a private matter: it may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique. – Svetlana Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy” (p. 228) Much scholarship both in India and abroad has explored how Anglophone South Asian fiction represents women and female agency in colonial and postcolonial India. Including a consideration of writers from the colonial period such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as postcolonial writers such as Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie, literary and cultural criticism on gender in nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asia has largely revolved around the relationship between women and nationalism in these works. In particular, the work of feminist and subaltern studies scholars such as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid ( Recasting ), Sangeeta Ray ( En-Gendering ), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ( In Other ), Dipesh Chakrabarty ( Provincializing ), and Partha Chatterjee ( Nation ), among others, has been influential in two principal ways: first, it has mapped the aesthetics and politics of texts in which women are represented either as victims of Indian patriarchal discourses or as symbols of national and cultural community. How ethnicity, religion, caste, and class shape these representations of women has been important to elucidating a complex, historical analysis of women in Indian literature. Second, this work has collectively foregrounded how the modern representation of Indian women – of their voice and agency – shores up relations of neocolonial power between men in national and international contexts. This scholarship has thus called for greater self-reflexivity and care around questions of representation, voice, and subalternity in the Indian nation. In this chapter, I will not review this important and by now canonical scholarly analysis of cultural representations of women and nationalism in modern India; instead, I will use it as a starting point to signal two directions for future scholarly consideration of gender and sexuality in the Indian novel.