Abstract
This chapter is about two important, though lesser-known Indian English novels, Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Woman (1895) by Sevantibai M. Nikambe, and Clarinda (1915) by A. Madhaviah. Both books have women at the centre of the narrative; the first is also written by a woman, while the second, although authored by a man, wishes to foreground women’s issues. What makes these books so remarkable is that they map overlapping and contentious domains: they are not only about the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity of a certain section of Indian women, but also about caste, class, conversion, colonialism, and national consciousness. Most of these books could not have been published without the active support and encouragement, if not patronage of British authorities—or their spouses. From the British side, such literature was useful in conveying the impression that the Raj was benign and beneficial to the natives. That is to say, the British ruled not so much through coercion but consent. It is clear that one such mask of conquest was the whole discourse of “Improvement,” which both the Liberals and Utilitarians employed to justify empire. The native elites also lent support to this imperial project by championing various kinds of social reform movements. Of course, the two were neither exactly the same nor were they comfortably compatible with each other. The Indian reform project often ran afoul with imperial authority, increasingly so as the national struggle for liberation gathered force. Women occupied a curious pride of place in both these discourses. The signifier “woman” not only encompassed real people who by all accounts were an oppressed group, but also a highly politicized space which was sought to be appropriated by the various competing forces of the time. “The woman’s question” was thus at the heart of the very self-constitution of modern India.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar questions are also raised in Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), where some of this material reappears.
- 2.
The title of this chapter is inspired by the phrase “subject to change,” with its multiple meanings. Though used several times as a book title earlier, it alludes to Susie Tharu’s book about the discipline of English Studies in India. More than anything else, it is feminist studies that has pushed disciplinary and hermeneutical boundaries in recent times, something that this chapter wishes to foreground in its reading of forgotten Indian English texts by women of the late nineteenth century. This chapter may also be read as my indirect response to “De/Siring Women: Re-addressing Gender Relations in Indian Novels,” a PhD Dissertation by Sharon Pillai, (Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2007). Pillai uses desiring in at least three senses of the word—what women desire, what is desired of them, and how they “de-sire,” or re-engender themselves out of patriarchal determinations—all of which are relevant to my readings of these texts. I am also grateful to Sharon for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter.
- 3.
See for instance Pat Barr’s The Memsahibs; The Women of Victorian India (1989).
- 4.
This despite the interest in her work in the last few decades with books such as Uma Chakravarti’s and Meera Kosambi’s studies and editions of Pandita Ramabai.
- 5.
Besides these, a number of other women writers, activists, and reformers were active in Maharashtra. They include Anandibai Karve and her sister Parvatibai Athavale, both widowed when they were young; Soonderbai Powar, an associate of Pandita Ramabai; Dr. Rakhamabai, who refused to use either her father’s or husband’s last names, struggled to enforce “the age of consent,” and was India’s first practising lady doctor; Kashibai Kanitkar, who secretly educated herself and became a novelist; Krishnabai Malvadkar, who edited a women’s magazine called Simantini; and even an “ordinary” housewife like Lakshmibai Sardesai, who wrote a memoir. Several of them are mentioned in Kosambi’s book, Crossing Thresholds (2007).
- 6.
Anadibai got her medical degree in Philadelphia in 1886, the same year that Kadambini Ganguly, another Brahmin girl from Kolkata, became the first woman to graduate from the Bengal Medical College.
- 7.
Indeed, even within the subcontinent and in very recent years, the writings of Taslima Nasreen have been banned, burned, and have evoked death threats on the author.
- 8.
See their website: “Ramabai Mukti Mission”, last modified 22 December 2011, accessed 17 January 2012, http://www.ramabaimuktimission.com/index.html
- 9.
Perhaps, we might discern a similar pattern in the Dalit movement half a century later when, after the initial conversation of Dr. Ambedkar and his followers to Buddhism, education and government jobs are seen as a more direct route to social empowerment than conversion.
- 10.
Some portions of my analysis of this text appeared earlier as the “Afterword” to the latter edition.
- 11.
Abigail McGowan uses shoes as a starting point in her essay on nineteenth century Maharashtrian women as consumers who had access to and control over goods.
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Paranjape, M.R. (2013). Subjects to Change: Gender Trouble and Women’s “Authority”. In: Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4661-9_6
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