Reconstructing and Reinterpreting the History of Women in India

Abstract

Review Reconstructing and Reinterpreting the History of Women in India Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: KaU for Women, 1989,372 pages.* J. Krishnamurty, ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State. DeUu: Oxford University Press, 1989, xn+247 pages. Lalita K, et al, eds., "We Were Making History"... Life Stories of Women in the Telengana People's Struggle. New Delhi: KaU for Women, 1989,290 pages. Janaki Nair In post-colonial sodeties sudi as India, the narrativization of women in history has assumed a variety of forms. The burgeoning of women's studies since the mid-1970s has encouraged critiques of conventional historiography, the "insertion" of women in history, and the reconceptualization of Indian historiography altogether. Such reconceptualization has, as elsewhere, had to overcome the shocking archival süences and absences by questioning the very structure of the archive and its withholding of the "permission to narrate." This has meant laying bare the claims of "gender neutral" methodologies in history even while uncovering new sources and approaches that acknowledge every aspert of reality as gendered. The three books under review, pertaining largely to women in colonial Indian history, are examples of the range of responses that gender as a category of historical analysis has generated. Women in Colonial India adopts the "additive strategy" that explores conventional sources (official reports and data sets) to reveal the place of women in colonial soriety. In this coUection of essays, women are a new "subject area." Nearly aU the artides in the volume consider the impact of "sodal and economic forces working through government poUcy, legal systems and social institutions, reUgion and politics and the market on the Uves of Indian women in the past" (p. ix). The question of female agency therefore remains somewhat secondary in these analyses. Recasting women, as its title suggests, is a more ambitious project, articulating the basis of a feminist historiography as a choice open to aU, one which "rethinks historiography as a whole and discards the idea of women as something to be framed by a context, in order to be able to think © 1991 Journal of Wqmen-s History, Vol. 3 No. ι (Spring)_________________ * The Rutgers University Press reprinted this work in the United States in 1990. 132 Journal of Women's History Spring of gender difference as both structuring and structured by the wide set of sodal relations" (p. 3). Gender is here developed as an analytical category, and the difficulties of archival sUences are overcome in the extensive use of discourse analysis, which enables tracing the constitution and re-constitution of patriarchies. The imperatives of generating new sources for a narrativization of women's history neverthdess remain. "We were Making History" is therefore the oral testimony of women who partidpated in the Telengana armed struggle of the 1940s and early 1950s. The very process of calling into question the dominant left-wing narrative of the struggle generated this oral history: it is at once a source, an addition to history, and a chaUenge to Left historiography. The production of a "contributory" as opposed to a "compensatory" history foregrounds female agency without losing sight of the re-articulation of patriarchy even within an ideology of Uberation. To take the "conventional" approach first (conventional is used advisedly since women, even as subjects of history, are by no means fuUy accepted): A number of contributors to Women in Colonial India deny or provide support for certain widdy hdd notions about women in colonial India. Were the women workers in Bombay textile mills really the secondary wage earners they were presumed to be? asks Radha Kumar. Were the female indentured laborers in Fiji really the moraUy lax women thenoverseers made them out to be? asks Brij V LaI. Evidence for such propositions is not found. But equaUy, evidence is found for the marginaUzation of women as hand-miUers of rice when rice nulls were introduced in Bengal (Mukul Mukherjee). Or, as Atchi Reddy has shown, there is evidence of sexuaUy ddermined agricultural tasks and wage differentials in the NeUore District. Accumulating empirical evidence to contest the certainties with which we have become so familiar is...