ABSTRACT
Indian gender and women’s history since the early 1970s. However, if one examines the historiographical concerns of the early social history of India (1960s and the 1970s) and later feminist scholarship (1970s and 1980s), the reasons for the neglect of women’s agency become apparent. The position of women in Indian society has been looked at either as part of broader studies in the social and cultural history of India or more directly, in the attempt to trace the changing role of women in colonial India. Such scholars have argued that improvements in the status of women came about from the nineteenth century onwards, not as the product of a process of conscious assertion on the part of Indian women, but through programmes of social reform devised and carried out by Indian men and the colonial state. In many ways the picture, which emerges of Indian women as passive recipients in these processes, has been predetermined by the approaches, which scholars have adopted. In the ‘Western impact-Indian response’ paradigm that informs their work, there is little room for women as conscious agents.8 Instead, Indian women are projected as a monolithic and oppressed entity and reduced to mere beneficiaries of the ‘awakening’ experienced by their men folk because of contact with Western influences.9 These problems have been compounded by a Eurocentric bias in charting protest and self-assertion movements in Afro-Asian women’s history due to an absence of an alternative approach to define the experiences unique to women in colonial societies. The use of Western models to explain the situation of Indian women has resulted in sympathetic Indianists hesitating to describe even the most radical women as ‘feminists’.10 Meredith Borthwick, for instance, who has greatly enriched our
understanding of the changing conditions of the bhadramahila [‘respectable’ middleclass Bengali women] during the period 1850-1905, has utilized approaches originally devised to study the history of women in the West. Following the Westernimpact/Indian-response paradigm, she finds that the bhadramahila was emerging as a response to the bhadralok [middle-class Bengali men], who in turn were reacting to British rule.11 Therefore, it is not surprising that she finds that the bhadramahila did not display any ‘feminist consciousness’. She states:
One could argue here that the expectation was misguided, not because such a feminist perception did not exist, but because its absence was already predetermined by Western connotations of feminism.13 Ghulam Murshid’s work on the response of Bengali women to modernization labours under similar problems even though a large part of the vernacular source material he uses are journals edited by women, some of which even include writings by some radical women of the period.14 Malavika Karlekar in Voices from Within, on the other hand, has offered a refreshingly different analysis. By treating autobiographical writings as ‘personal narratives’, she showed the range of responses made by nineteenth-century Bengali women. While tracing the formation of women’s subcultures in the antahpur [inner house], she effectively demonstrated how literacy and education enabled at least an elite section of Bengali women to question male constructions of Indian femininity.15
