ABSTRACT
In his influential essay, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, Partha Chatterjee noted that, contrary to received scholarly opinion, the women’s question did not disappear from the nationalist agenda in India towards the end of the nineteenth century, but rather came to be folded into it – thus ‘resolved’ – as the ‘spiritual’, ‘inner’ content of the nation, a domain of cultural and spiritual sovereignty presided over and preserved by women.1 The question that other scholars have asked since, and that I wish to revisit in the present essay, is what kind of figure is this woman that becomes the spiritual symbol of the nation? What are the specific processes of sublimation or (as I shall suggest) erasure that go into its making? Or to put it somewhat more polemically, might one argue in an extension of Chatterjee’s point, that it was not the disappearance of the women’s question, but the disappearance of women as historical subjects, that was the issue – and the centre-piece of the nationalist ‘resolution’ of the women’s question? I make this argument here by focusing on what I call the figure of the girl-child/woman, a figure that works to undo the matter of reform and education from the very inception of the debate on the woman question.
