Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader , and: Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India , and: Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader, and: Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India, and: Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal Catherine H. Warner (bio) and Priti Ramamurthy (bio) Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, 560 pp., $75.00 hardcover, $29.95 paper. Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India by Mytheli Sreenivas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, 192 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $21.95 paper. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal by Rochona Majumdar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 360 pp., $94.95 hardcover, $24.95 paper. The three books under review focus on "social reform": nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial and Indian efforts to rid Indian society of its most illiberal practices, many of which—such as "sati" (widow immolation), child marriage, and strictures against widow remarriage—were directed toward women. Together, the three volumes destabilize some of the foundational definitions upon which the history of reform in India has been written and investigate how the family is idealized and contested at the critical intersection of colonialism and modernity. They provide excellent resources by which to consider the family as an historical institution and an arena of social inquiry in India and beyond. Women and Social Reform in Modern India, edited by the distinguished historians Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, is a comprehensive collection of key essays and articles on social reform in India. It includes a broad range of recent essays by contemporary scholars and excerpts of original essays by men and women social reformers written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—primary documents that students will now be able to read. In their introduction, Sarkar and Sarkar argue that social reform needs to be understood in the context of changing "gender norms and practices" informed by regional and material specificities, including the development of print cultures, to which the historical excerpts contributed. They question the utility of terms like the [End Page 211] "middle class," arguing that it should not be treated as a fully formed identity and the presumed target and beneficiary of reform; instead, the process of the constitution of the middle class is worthy of exploration. This cautionary note applies to the contemporary moment when the burgeoning new middle classes in India and China are presumed to be a self-evident category. Similarly, the term "debate," commonly used to refer to the contestations between colonial and Indian authorities over the antecedents, shapes, and forms of specific reforms, should be opened up to study how the public sphere came to be, in which debate was possible. In order to illuminate the social and cultural contexts obscured by such shortcuts, Sarkar and Sarkar suggest using nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reform to analyze concurrent shifts in gendered systems of social regulation, especially through religious orthodox and revivalist movements, and gendered engagements with the state, especially through law. Women's investments, agency, and political activism are central to the reforms, whether as women writers, itself a newly available identity, or as social activists and critics. The Sarkars' project, however, is much larger than creating a more accurate narrative of social reform in late-colonial India. As they put it: "[W]e revision colonialism and modernity in the light of the broad discussion of social reforms" (5). This ambition is met in the two other books under review as well. In her award-winning monograph Wives, Widows, and Concubines, Mytheli Sreenivas presents an in-depth analysis of social reform in one region—the Tamil region of South India—by focusing on "the tensions and displacements between the family as an ideal, as an embodied institution, and as a site of lived experience" (7).1 Sreenivas demonstrates how a bourgeois, monogamous notion of conjugality that privileged the husband/wife relationship became the ideal among professional groups during the late-colonial period. We are now able to understand how the "conjugal family ideal" came to be, instead of simply assuming that it was available for Indian nationalist projects as the grounds upon which to assert...