The Inscrutable Irish-Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-American Hegemony, 1917-1947

Abstract

The Inscrutable Irish–Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-American Hegemony,1917–1947 Catherine Candy We have England hand in hand with India, or perhaps that is not quite the expression we might use in regard to it. And we have America in a similar position in the Philippines, so that the West and the East are linked together.1 Recent work on Indian-British-American relations between the world wars has exposed the lengths to which British administrators went to justify their imperial hold on India to American public opinion.2 Not the least part of this propaganda campaign was a massive onslaught against Indian culture and sexuality, during which British government officials sponsored the publication of the 1927 runaway bestseller Mother India by American author Katherine Mayo. No one now doubts that British imperial culture was dependent on the image of the helpless Indian woman.3 However, by presenting before the world an image of a strong and progressive Indian/Asian womanhood, Indian women’s organizations in the interwar period threatened the sexual political values of Anglo-American relations enough to incite a well-orchestrated counter-smear campaign. This paper is an investigation of the roundabout way in which an Irish feminist, Margaret Cousins, along with Indian feminists, managed a public-relations campaign for “the cause of Indian womanhood” both before and after the Mayo campaign. Cousins did so both by appealing to American feminists’ notions of nationalist and imperial individualist modernity and by holding aloft the idea of “America” to shame the British for their imperial actions in India. If Mayo was trying to reassure a conservative American public about the future world order, Cousins was trying to reassure American progressives about the Utopian future of Americanness as the world’s great democratizer. The focus of this paper is a transnational alliance of Irish and Indian feminists during that interwar period (loosely defined as running from 1917 to 1947) when the global center of political gravity shifted gradually from Britain to the United States.4 My project here is to highlight the agency of relatively marginal feminist nationals (Irish and Indian) as they grasped the potential of American public opinion as a lever against British imperial culture, while at the same time holding American intervention in Indian and Asian feminist arenas at bay. Through its creative rhetorical manipulation of Irish, Indian, British, and American nationalisms and national identities in a transnational and bi-imperial context, this alliance made canny rhetorical and material use of America as an emergent global power to parry British imperial designs on the construction of Indian culture, and specifically on Indian womanhood.5 This paper examines ways in which Irish and Indian feminists manipulated domestic diasporic, “ethnic” politics of nation in the United States to undermine Anglo-American imperial politics of nation. It thereby highlights how the well-traveled twentieth-century clichéd narratives about Irishness and Indianness–as countries of emigrants, anti-imperialists, mystics, and losers–could be used as steppingstones to more broad-scale global decolonization.6 What was it about the introduction of America into the British imperial global equation in the twentieth century that enabled a new transnational feminist agency on the part of Indian women’s organizations that was not possible with British women in the nineteenth century? America in the early twentieth century was grappling to justify its isolationism. It did so partly on the basis of an imagined exceptionalism in relation to the European feudal history that America was theoretically invented to transcend.7 With a few striking exceptions, American rhetoricians in general–and feminist ones especially–refused to acknowledge that their nation was in fact eagerly shouldering the white man’s burden.8 America was becoming what Indian historian Gyan Pandey has termed “an empire which refused to see itself as one.”9 The internal agony in America’s sense of global definition–caught between toeing the Westminster line culturally, politically, and militarily and producing a rhetoric of multicultural openness–required lip service to immigrant communities whose votes were balkanized by their diasporic ethnicity.10 Imported “foreign” or “ethnic” nationalisms were solidified rather than dissolved in the United States, making the idea of an imperializing U...