Gendering English: Sexuality, Gender and the Language of Desire in Western India, 1850?1940

Abstract

British India’s first ‘native’-managed high school for Indian girls, the Poona Native Girls’ High School (PNHS), was inaugurated in 1884. The school was founded by proponents of women’s English-language education; it taught its pupils until the stage of the matriculation examination – a rite of passage otherwise synonymous with preparing ‘native’ men for government employment and certifying their acquisition of the English language.1 Despite the support of colonial and native elites, the school drew sharp attacks from those who opposed women’s English education. One of the most controversial of such criticisms was made in the play TaruniShikshanNatika.2 Primarily intended to lambaste the promiscuous ways ascribed to the school’s female students because of their desire to learn English, the play quoted an opponent of the new education for women as saying that he did not think that ‘women should be imprisoned at home in a burkha, but nor should they be allowed to participate in balls’.3 Implicitly elevating a belief in an immutable indigenous culture and Hindu brahminical patriarchy, these words characterised the larger struggle over signification ushered in by British colonial modernity. At the heart of the conflict was that ‘Indian women’ were learning ‘English’.4 But such rhetoric indicated a wider development – that the constitution of both gender and language in this period brought ideas of national culture and sexual difference into alliance. Drawing attention to the artifice of gender even as they sought to fix it, statements such as this formed instant identifications with the parallel process of distinguishing the English language from other, ‘indigenous’ languages. In this article, I argue that the process of ‘indigenising’ the English language in colonial India drew sustenance from the equally charged process of fixing sexual difference. Conversely, the project of locating indigenous women as the locus for sexual difference made ready and regular reference to the (emerging) hierarchy between ‘English’ and ‘indigenous’ languages. This article thus seeks to illustrate the details of the increasingly mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘Indian’ English and colonial gender regimes. Feminist historians of western India have demonstrated how the sexuality of the Hindu Brahmin woman was, at least from the eighteenth century, deployed to sanction