"Self-sacrifice" versus "self-interest": A non-historicist reading of the history of women's rights in India

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 22, Issue 1-2, 2002, Pages 20-35

  Majumdar, Rochona ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34648839557     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: 1548226X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-22-1-2-20     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. Srimati Basu, She Comes To Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4.
2. Basu, She Comes To Take Her Rights, 5.
3. Basu, She Comes To Take Her Rights, 157.
4. Mr. and Mrs. 55, released in 1955, was produced and directed by Guru Dutt. Guru Dutt, Madhubala, Lalita Pawar, and Johnny Walker were the main cast. The film was based on a play by Abrar Alvi.
5. It must be noted here following J. D. M.Derrett that, "The name Hindu Code Bill is now obsolete, since the projected Code was broken up for ease of treatment and was introduced, Bill by Bill, into the Indian Parliament. But the old name, which originates, sticks, and it is as such that the public know of the project." J. D. M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present (Calcutta: A Mukherjee & Co., 1957), 55.
6. We are reminded in this context of Joan Scott's discussion of modern French feminism. Scott helps us to see a paradox that historians chronicling Indian women's participa tion in public life from the beginning of the twentieth century often encounter and sometimes reproduce. Much like women in many other parts of the world Indian women's political struggles involved a demand for rights that would make them equal to men. Simultaneously, in making this demand for the erasure of sexual difference Indian women, like Scott's examples of French feminists, had to make their claims on behalf of "women" thereby reaffirming sexual difference. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, French Feminists and The Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
7. Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).
8. Chakravarti, Rewriting History, viii.
9. Chakravarti, Rewriting History, xii-xiii, note 7.
10. Chakravarti, Rewriting History, ix.
11. Geraldine Forbes, Indian Women and the Freedom Movement: A Historian's Perspective, RCWS Gender Series (Bombay: Research Centre for Women's Studies, S.N.D.T. Women's University, 1997), 10-11.
12. Forbes, Indian Women and the Freedom Movement.
13. Forbes, Indian Women and the Freedom Movement, 9-10.
14. Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 233-254.
15. Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution."
16. Madhu Kishwar, Off The Beaten Track (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 212.
17. Kishwar, Off The Beaten Track.
18. Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim (London: Asia Publishing House, 1965). ed., by Sisir Kumar Bose.
19. Ranajit Guha, "Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming," The Oracle 24, no.2 (August 2002): 18-19.
20. See Antoinette Burton, "The Feminist Quest for Identity: British Imperial Suffragism and 'Global Sisterhood,' 1900- 1915," Journal of Women's History (Fall 1991): 46-81.
21. For a more detailed statement about the relationship of the images of Indian women to imperial feminism see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865- 1915, (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
22. Mrinalini Sinha, "The Lineage of the 'Indian' Modern: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act in late colonial India," in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modenities, ed. Antoinette Burton (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 217.
23. Sinha, "The Lineage of the 'Indian' Modern."
24. Cited in Sinha, "The Lineage of the 'Indian' Modern," 217.
25. M. K. Gandhi, "The Position of Women," Young India (17 October 1929).
26. Cited in Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women's Struggle: A History of the All India Women's Conference, 1927-1990 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990), 49.
27. Ray and Basu, Women's Struggle, 49-50.
28. Ray and Basu, Women's Struggle, 50.
29. Sinha, "The Lineage of the 'Indian' Modern," 218.
30. For a detailed and rich analysis of Muslim women's reform activity at the turn of the twentieth century see Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876- 1939 (Leiden, New York, London: E.J.Brill, 1996).
31. Amales Tripathi, Vidyasagar: The Traditional Modernizer (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1974);
32. Sumit Sarkar, "The Women's Question in Nineteenth Century Bengal," in A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus Press, 1985), 71-76;
33. Tanika Sarkar, "Rhetoric Against The Age of Consent: Reason and Death of a Child-Wife," Economic and Political Weekly, 4 September 1993, 1869-1878;
34. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly' Englishman and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995);
35. Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal 1890-1930 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
36. Basu and Ray, Women's Struggle, 2-3.
37. Swarnakumari Devi became editor of this journal from 1884.
38. Abhijit Sen and Abhijit Bhattacharya, eds., Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha(The Collected Works of Swarnakumari Devi) (Bikalpa: Calcutta, 1998), 208.
39. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha.
40. For more details see Chitra Deb, Thakurbarir Andarmahal (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1980),. 57-58.
41. These essays are, "Ramabai" (1889), "Streeshiksha O Bethune School"(Female education and the Bethune School, 1887), "Purusera Sresthatva (Male Superiority, 1888), "Sakhisamiti" (1891), Saat Batsare Sakhisamiti" (Seven Years of Sakhisamiti, 1893), and "Bibhababibaha O Hindupatrika" (Widow Remarriage and Hindupatrika, 1909) in Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha.
42. Himani Bannerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (New Delhi: Tulika), 169-170.
43. Tanika Sarkar, "Strishiksha and Its Terrors: Re-Reading Nineteenth Century Debates On Reform," in Literature and Gender: Essays for Jasodhara Bagchi, ed. Sajni Mukherjee and Supriya Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Orient Longman), 155.
44. I use the phrase "uneven developments" here in the same spirit as it was coined and used in Mary Poovey , Uneven Developments, The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
45. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 211.
46. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 98-99.
47. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 103-104.
48. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 110.
49. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 110.
50. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 110-111.
51. 46Poovey, Uneven Developments, 69-70.
52. Sarkar, "Strishiksha and Its Terrors," 154.
53. Swarnakumari Devi, Snehalata ba Palita, in Srimati Swarnakumari Granthavali (Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, 1916).
54. Rajul Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 181.
55. Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature, 186 (Emphasis mine).
56. Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature, 186.
57. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 67.
58. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 187.
59. Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature, 187.
60. Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature.
61. Cited in Bannerji, Inventing Subjects, 141.
62. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 113.
63. Sen and Bhattacharya, Swarnakumari Devira Samkalita Prabandha, 115.
64. Historians who have dealt with the development of child welfare and female education mention the work done by the SNDMA in their accounts. See Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal 1890- 1930 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 148, 183-184.
65. G. S. Dutt, A Woman Of India, Being the life of Saroj Nalini (Founder of the Women's Institute Movement in India) (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1929), 113.
66. Dutt, A Woman Of India, 116.
67. Dutt, A Woman Of India, 116.
68. Dutt, A Woman Of India, 116-117.
69. Dutt, A Woman Of India, 117-118.
70. Dutt, A Woman Of India, 117.
71. For a few representative samples see Amritabazar Pa trika, 6 February 1926; 11 February 1926; 13 February 1926; 21 February 1926; 15 July 1928, 18 July 1928. The fifteenth anniversary of the organization in 1940 saw the publication of a large number of reports. See Statesman, 16 January 1940 noted that SNDMA founded in 1925 had established 400 Mahila Samitis. It reported that, "The movement had helped to solve the economic problems of a large section of women."
72. Statesman, 20 January 1940.
73. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 98.
74. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 99.
75. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 139-140.
76. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 82
77. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 71.
78. Statesman, 20 January 1940, 75-76.
79. See for instance, "Women's Education: Conference to meet in Calcutta," Statesman 11February 1938;
80. "Education of Girls in Bengal, Women's Conference," Statesman 18 February 1938;
81. "Provision for Council Chamber Criticized: General Discussion on Bengal Budget Opens," Statesman, 22 February 1938;
82. "Calcutta Women's Conference: Ideals of Communal and Social Harmony," Statesman, 26 November 1939.
83. Uma Nehru, "A Call to the Women of Today," Statesman, 19 November 1939.
84. Nehru, "A Call to the Women of Today."
85. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
86. According to Macpherson, from the seventeenth century there arose a notion of the subject grounded in the right of private ownership of one's own person. According to Macpherson, possessive individualism implies a "conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as the owner of himself." Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 3.
87. For details on the strike and Dr. Prabhabati Das Gupta's arrest during this strike see articles entitled: "Scavenger Strike and The Police-Recent Arrests: Great Indignation at Worker's Meeting," Amritabazar Patrika, 1 July 1928;
88. "Massive Strike: Subhas Bose Involved," Amritabazar Patrika, 5 July 1928.
89. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890-1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 145-146.
90. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, 145.
91. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, 141.
92. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, 144.
93. Krishna Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl," Statesman, Sunday, 21 January 1940
94. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
95. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
96. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
97. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
98. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
99. Hutheesing, "The Modern Girl."
100. Manjari, "Feminism," The Statesman, 18 August 1940.
101. Manjari, "Feminism."
102. Manjari, "Feminism."
103. Manjari, "Feminism."
104. Manjari, "Feminism."
105. Sarkar's essay, "Hindu ein committee r bill sambandhe koyekti katha" (Some reflections on the legislation of the Hindu Law Committee) was originally published in Anandabazar Patrika, 12 Kartik (October) 1954.
106. Reprinted in Saralabala Racanasamgraha, vol.2, ed. Chitra Deb, 624-626.
107. Sarkar, "Hindu ein committee," 626.
108. Sarkar, "Hindu ein committee," 626.
109. Anurupa Devi, Sahitye Nari: Srastri O Srishti, (Women in Literature: Creators and their Creations) (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1949), 7. This text is a compilation of the Lilaflectures delivered by Anurupa Devi to the University of Calcutta in 1944.
110. See Saba Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival, " Cultural Anthropology 16, no.2 (2000): 202-236.