Women In Colonial India Research Articles

Book review: Ipshita Nath, Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India

Ipshita Nath, Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India. Harper Collins, 2022, 325 pp., ₹699 (Hardbound). ISBN: 978-93-5629-008-2.

Ipshita Nath. Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India. London: Hurst Publishers, 2022. Pp. 496. £30.00 (cloth).

Ipshita Nath. Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India. London: Hurst Publishers, 2022. Pp. 496. £30.00 (cloth).

Exploring the Role of Women’s Print Media in the Indian Nationalist Movement: A Study of Select Women’s Magazines in Colonial India

This research paper explores the role of women’s print media in the Indian nationalist movement, focusing on select women’s magazines in colonial India. The study examines the ways in which these magazines facilitated the participation of women in the movement and contributed to the dissemination of nationalist ideologies. Through a qualitative analysis of primary sources, including magazines such as Stri Dharma and Bharati, the study uncovers the diverse ways in which women’s magazines engaged with nationalist discourse. These magazines served as a platform for women writers to express their views on political issues, and also provided information on the activities of the nationalist movement. The study finds that women’s magazines played a significant role in shaping the political consciousness of women in colonial India, and that they provided a space for women to participate in nationalist discourse. The magazines also served as a means of building solidarity among women, as they shared stories of struggle and celebrated the achievements of female nationalists. Furthermore, this study contributes to our understanding of the role of women in the Indian nationalist movement and highlights the importance of women’s print media in shaping political discourse during this period. The findings suggest that women’s magazines were instrumental in creating a space for women’s voices in the nationalist movement, and played a significant role in shaping the political consciousness of women in colonial India.

Rising of Muslim Women in Colonial India: A Case Study of Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah

This qualitative study deals with the social and political status of 20th century colonial Muslim women under the British Raj. The 20th century has witnessed many symbols of the struggle and progress of females in their socio-political and professional life. Many movements were initiated by indigenous people to address the women question; a number of reforms took place to enhance women status by British government. As a result, women emerged as professional ladies and participated with men in every field of life. At that time with many prominent Muslim women Fatima Jinnah also steps forward to empower Muslim Women of colonial India. After the establishment of Pakistan, as Madr e Millet, she continued her services to give power to women in their professions and their political participation in newly established country. She also had to face criticism from fundamental class of Pakistan but she continued her struggle till her death. The hurdles and problems for women to participate in politics due to the patriarchal social structure still exist in present time, which need to be addressed by political and constitutional reforms.

Missing Women in Colonial India

Missing Women in Colonial India

Rethinking The Thorny Journey: Medical Women in Colonial India.

While analyzing the status of the women in science and technology we often forget to address the remarkable work and contribution of Indian women in medical science. This paper aims to assess and historicise 1) the struggle for medical education by the women of India in colonial period through gender lens; 2) Impact of the medical education on social reform movement and women’s empowerment irrespective of caste, class race and region; 3) Intervening role of colonialism in growth and development , achievement and accomplishment of medical profession for Indian women; 4) Certain aspects that universalized the experience of some of the earliest Indian female doctors being a medical women and last but not least concurrency among the feminist consciousness, social reforms and emancipation of women socially and economically in 19th century India.

Gender and nationality: Experiences of “foreign” women in colonial India during the war years

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to open up a field of enquiry and focus on encounters between the colonial regime in India and “foreign” women around the time of the World Wars. The terms on which trans-continental lives were negotiated came to be embedded in legal regimes which were continuously evolving. The interface of women and the colonial state needs to be studied from multiple socio-political locations. The lens of gender, generally invoked with reference to Indian women subjects, does not encompass the different categories of women with whom the state established formal juridical relations, through routes and relationships that had evolved over long periods of history. War and conflict led to the fracturing of the binary of Indian and foreign/ western women. Apart from British women, who traveled across the seas to “join” their families, there were other European women as well. Given the regulatory regimes of the times, their experiences were highly gendered and complex. Women from “hostile” countries came to be marked by their origins, identities and nationalities. Focusing on aspects of Citizenship and Gender, this paper underscores the need to trace these different trajectories, to uncover the layered experiences of “foreign” women, caught across borders in times of conflict.

Question of Women Rights: Stri Dharma on the Hindu Women’s Rights Violation in In Colonial Tamilnadu, 1926 – 1936

The status of women in India has been subject to many changes over the span of recorded Indian history. Practices such as female infanticide, dowry, child marriage and the taboo on widow remarriage, which began in upper-caste Hindu society in Northern India, have had a long duration, proving difficult to root out, and in the instance of dowry have spread to all castes, classes, and even religions. Women in colonial India were no less progressive, aware and active in gender, political and socio-economic issues than the women today. Stri Dharma a woman edited journal exposed the problems of women to the world. The struggling of women in their life from birth to death was brought to light by Stri Dharma a Women's Journal. In its Columns it filled the news related to women issues. Even under the rule of British Raj women wrote the issues against the women particularly Social issues.

Print Capitalism

Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as in the colonies. Print capitalism and nationalism shared a similar relationship in the Indian subcontinent too that remained a British colony for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. Employing Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s novel, Mir’āt al-‘Urūs (1869), I argue that the introduction of print capitalism proved crucial to the rise of Muslim national consciousness and for Muslim women’s education to redefine their sociopolitical role in the new Muslim imagined community under British colonization. Print capitalism, via the possibility of mass-produced books like Mir’āt al-‘Urūs, transformed the Muslim national imagination by making Indian Muslims a community in anonymity. I offer this new reading of Mir’āt al-‘Urūs to trace the interaction of print capitalism, Muslim national consciousness, and new roles for Muslim women in colonial India.

Women, gender and sexuality: Changing historiographies of colonial India—A bibliographical essay

Drawing on fragmentary examples from women’s histories in colonial India, this paper underlines the problems and possibilities in historiographies of modern India. Feminist scholars argue that the three terms—women, gender and sex—have often been used interchangeably. However, the commonsensical term woman is neither a natural category (of non-men) nor a homogeneous community (of sisterhood), for there are historically many ways of being a woman in different times. Further, gender is not merely a natural or biological identity of a person. It is a historical, social and political construction of how to be a man or a woman. Even sex is no longer seen as the biological ground upon which gender is constructed, as sexualities too are socially produced and regulated by dominant discourses, which establish one kind of sexuality as normal and relegate others into the domain of deviance, perversion or criminality. Through selective readings from discourses around women’s education and conceptualisation of the modern women in colonial India, the paper reflects on how a gender-sensitive perspective produces a more complex and textured view of historical processes. While patriarchies were recast in more powerful, though subtle ways, they were also subverted, or at least questioned, in colonial India.

Malika Begum’s Mehfil: The Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu

Ostensibly, Muslim women in colonial India only rarely wrote travel narratives, particularly in Urdu. In truth, women’s travel writing in Urdu is anything but chimerical, but persistent archival and methodological limitations have led to the neglect and even irrevocable loss of this writing. A recalibrated approach to travel writing and archival practices divulges a vast corpus—but only if we attend to the specific ways in which women’s narratives were produced and circulated. This article offers a primary typology of the formats and fora most often employed by women writing in Urdu, including semi-private (but orally consumed) letters, family newspapers and women’s journals. Using extensive quotations from previously unknown sources, it reintroduces a forgotten corpus to the study of Indian history, literature, and gender studies alike.

Translation and the Christian Conversion of Women in Colonial India: Rev. Sheshadri and Bāḷā Sundarābāī Ṭhākūr

ABSTRACTThis article foregrounds the interstitial and hybrid third voice of a nineteenth-century Christian convert in colonial India. Bala Shundoree Tagore, a Bengali woman and wife to the esteemed Gyanendra Mohan Tagore, was declared spiritually Christian by missionaries, even though she died before being baptised. Bala's narrative production by her biographers and translators obfuscated and transformed her voice, writing her into the history of Indian missions as a success story. Refashioned as a gendered symbol for Indian Christian women from the nineteenth century, Bala's narrative was utilised by missionaries by divesting her of the agency she possessed.

Social Reform with a Nationalist Agenda: The Sarda Act of 1929

On September 20th 1929, the Indian Central Legislative Assembly passed the Sarda Act. The Sarda Act was the result of ongoing discussions in India in the early twentieth century that revolved around the age of consent and the age of marriage. Har Bilas Sarda, a member of the Assembly since 1924, introduced the bill in 1927 as the Child Marriage Restraint Act. In history, this bill is celebrated for improving the living conditions for women in Colonial India by addressing the potentially negative physical and social effects that having sex and giving birth could have on young girls. However, what is not discussed in history is the motivations that Har Bilas Sarda had in introducing the bill. Using primary sources, I would like to argue that the Sarda Act was part of a larger nationalist agenda espoused by a Hindu nationalist group called the Arya Samaj which aimed to restore the legacy of the ancient Hindu civilization. I will conclude by linking the themes in Sarda’s writings with the broader historical context to demonstrate that that Sarda’s motivations for campaigning for a higher age of marriage was tied to a Hindu nationalist agenda.

Imperial Inheritances

This essay examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inheritance laws in India in order to analyse the intersections between state power, heteronormative reproductivity and colonial structures of race. In particular, I focus on the case of Troup et al. v. East India Company, which involves the estate of Begum Sumroo, one of the wealthiest women in colonial India. I explore the ways in which the normativization of western notions of inheritance, allied with reproductive heterosexuality, worked to undergird the racialized expansion of Empire. I argue that, by law, inheritance and gain came to be reinforced as heteronormative (in its definition, procreative) and patriarchal virtues under colonial rule. Begum Sumroo's place within this legal scheme poses serious challenges to the logic of colonial inheritance. I use the Begum's case to expose the mechanisms through which, in order for colonial rule to take effect, sexual normativity was heightened to secure the goals of territorial expansion, thus yoking the notion of private property to various controls over bodily and sexual privacy. I read the Sumroo case as an instance of counter-colonial juridical claims to inheritance and possession that in their violent suppressions reveal the brutality of British power and the illogic – racial and sexual – of early colonial governance.

Smoke and mirrors: railway travel and women in colonial India

Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explores the anxieties and imperatives that regulated the presence of women in railway spaces in colonial India. Examining the entry of women into the public space of the railway, it emphasizes how an axiomatic relationship between female seclusion, respectability and mobility became pivotal to the conversation about women passengers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This correlation both cemented a masculine affinity across racial boundaries and became, simultaneously, a discursive frame for arguing colonial difference. The article argues that even as railway spaces were meant to be moulded to the strict norms of female seclusion, the demands of profitability ensured that – in practice – most Indian women travelled in accommodation similar to that provided for women in other parts of the world. This disjunction between theory and practice did not dim the discursive correlation between female seclusion in railways and respectability. Neither did it undercut a masculine logic that used the security of Indian women passengers to negotiate racial politics in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century India. Thus, while women became increasingly visible as railway passengers in colonial India, they remained virtually invisible as interlocutors, even when the conversation about their safety and security during railway travel increasingly occupied the public domain.

Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine, and Historiography by Geraldine Forbes Women, Education, and Politics: The Women's Movement and Delhi's Indraprastha College by Meena Bhargava and Kalyani Dutta Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India by Sikata Banerjee

Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine, and Historiography by Geraldine Forbes Women, Education, and Politics: The Women's Movement and Delhi's Indraprastha College by Meena Bhargava and Kalyani Dutta Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India by Sikata Banerjee

Looking for Feminism

This paper explores the linkages between metropolitan intellectual politics and the process of knowledge production within third‐world/anti‐imperial locations – defined geographically or otherwise – about previously understudied subjects from or in the third world. Specifically, the paper focuses on the growing body of research on Muslim women in colonial India to foreground ways in which a certain notion of feminism, as a metanarrative of emergence and progress towards an apparently known end, informs and shapes this literature. In terms of its broader implications, the paper is an attempt to think through some of the problems of writing histories of difference, and especially feminist histories, in any context.

Fashioning Women in Colonial India

Fashioning Women in Colonial India

‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’ Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914

Contemporary historians imagine reformist activity relating to women in colonial India as a series of public debates scattered across the nineteenth century. Whether such historians discuss sati, widow remarriage, the Rakhmabai case or the Age of Consent controversy, they privilege highly specific vocabularies of contestation, forms of argument and forums of expression. Judicial reformist activity, occurring incrementally within the technical vocabularies of law, tends largely to be disregarded. This disregard is hardly new. Anglo-Indian judges themselves recognized that their reformist activity was shielded from scrutiny when they boasted that ‘judicial decisions have silently promoted the cause of female emancipation and progress.’

Reconstructing and Reinterpreting the History of Women in India

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...