Postcolonial Identity as Feminist Fantasy A Study of Tamil Women’s Short Fiction on Dowry

Abstract

Abstract In Canada in 1996, an Indian man’s massacre of almost all of his ex-wife’s family in the British Columbia town of Kelowna was immediately misrepresented in the media as a fatal consequence of the Indian system of arranged marriages, so that the incident was portrayed as something other than family violence and as indicating an Indian cultural pathology. The Inda-Canadian community stepped in to correct this misrepresentation and argue that the perpetrator of violence was operating from within patriarchal ideologies common to most cultures, including those of the West. However, for the West, even feminist studies departments, Indian dowry culture continues to function as the vehicle for a Western imperialist epistemology of India as its Third World “other.” The Indian nation’s central meanings are deliberately and reductively quilted to the experiences of the Indian woman’s body to produce an India that is culturally retrogressive and, more particularly, to represent its culture in sexual metaphor as a masculinity that is always-already pathologically inadequate in its greed and brutal perversity and as always-already less than masculine. This discourse has entailed the West’s willful refusal to recognize Indian women’s response to the dowry system as intending subjects of resistance and also to misrecognize one aspect of Indian culture as the representative of the whole. This burden-the excessive meaning that the dowry system is made to bear as signifier-is also made possible by the West’s imaginary perception of the dowry system as present everywhere in India and in the self-same form; in actual fact, dowry practices occur in specific pockets of the country and involve different activities, sometimes generating meanings for women that are other than disempowerment. For instance, in some southern parts of India, as well as in the diaspora, women are given control over their dowry money, and it is not unheard of for them to use this money for additional education.