En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives Yumna Siddiqi Sangeeta Ray. En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 198 pp. In Engendering India, Sangeeta Ray examines the ways in which a number of South Asian and British writers treat ideologies of gender in their fictional portrayals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian nationalism. Her point of departure is the fiction of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the nineteenth-century Bengali writer and nationalist whose name has an almost incantatory resonance [End Page 210] among scholars of Bengali culture. Ray argues that in the two novels Devi Chaudharani and Anandamath, Chatterjee offers us female protagonists who are veritable warrior women, rejecting at least in part conventional codes of domesticity and sexuality. However, Ray claims, ultimately the representation of these female rebels serves to shore up the “male religio-political subject of Hindu nationalism.” Interestingly enough, the characterization of Indian women as suttees by the Victorian writers Harriet Martineau, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Flora Annie Steele is, despite the protocols of the stereotype, far more ambivalent—but then, as Bhabha has pointed out, colonial stereotypes are ambivalent. In British Rule in India, Martineau exhibits a curious reticence about suttee although the trope of suttee was one of the commonplaces of Victorian writing about India. Ray regards this silence as a consequence of both the contradictory nature of British colonial policy (explored by Lati Mani), and the ambivalence that marks descriptions of Sati, and ambivalence that frustrates a Manichean, binary coding. Meadows Taylor’s representation of Seeta, the exceptional Hindu widow who becomes the domestic partner of an Englishman against the backdrop of the mutiny, is again complex and ambivalent, though the novel moves towards emphasizing her difference in order to “shore up the identification of English national character with the Englishwoman in the Empire.” Flora Annie Steele falls back upon a “reified image of the burning widow” in her Mutiny novel On The Face of the Waters, but even she offers momentary possibilities of identification between the Indian woman and her English counterpart. Ray’s chapter on Tagore’s The Home and the World and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s utopian feminist short story “Sultana’s Dream” is the most interesting in the book for its nuanced analysis of the complex relationship between an upper-class Indian woman, her forward-thinking aristocratic husband, and his self-serving, philandering nationalist friend. Ray builds on Partha Chatterjee’s work on the representation of woman as the untainted, inner essence of India that is advanced as the privileged ground for building the incipient nation to show how this ideology is, on the one hand, grappled with by Tagore, and on the other hand, rejected outright by Hossein. In the final chapter, Ray explores the ways in which ideologies of gender are treated in what has become a veritable academic cottage industry, partition fiction. She suggests (as have the historians Urvashi Bhutalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin) that the violence of the partition was in fact gendered, and that Baapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India portrays the symbolic and literal gendering of partition violence, albeit from an elite perspective. Anita Desai’s Clear Lightof Day is only peripherally a novel of the partition, but according to Ray, it too portrays the elite negotiation of what turns out to be a persistent trope—that of the traditional, domestic dependent woman—upon which Indian nationalism is predicated. To conclude, while charting fairly familiar ground, both in the choice of novels and in the critical debates she draws from, En-gendering India is a useful contribution to the discussions of gender and nationalism in the Indian context. Yumna Siddiqi Middlebury College Copyright © 2002 symploke