ABSTRACT
When Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, the pioneering work of South Asian feminist scholar Kumari Jayawardena was published in 1986, few could have predicted that within a decade it would become a scholarly commonplace to study nationalism, especially anti-colonial nationalism, through the prism of gender ( Jayawardena 1986). Jayawardena’s book, to be sure, intervened at a favorable academic conjuncture. Feminist scholarship, especially in the AngloAmerican context, which had previously eschewed serious consideration of nationalism, was beginning to overcome its initial reluctance. In addition, the scholarship on nationalism was taking a new turn as scholars paid renewed attention to the cultural lineaments of nations (Sinha 2006a). Moreover, events outside the academy also pointed to the need for a greater dialogue between scholars of nationalism and of gender. In countries across South Asia, for example, revanchist religious and cultural nationalisms were on the rise; their claims to “authenticity” were frequently articulated, albeit in different ways, through the gendered subjectivities of women and men. Nowhere was the impact of these disparate developments felt more profoundly, perhaps, than in the scholarship on nationalism in South Asia. Indeed, there are arguably few areas of South Asian scholarship that have been more seriously impacted by the study of gender than that of nationalism, especially anti-colonial nationalism, but also a variety of other forms of nationalism both in the past and in the present.
