Abstract
This essay examines the earliest articulations of “civic subjecthood” and women’s networks that were facilitated by the newly emergent print cultures in colonial Punjab, through a close reading of the novel Cosmopolitan Hinduani (1902) by Susila Tahl Ram. It argues that the formation of women’s identities at the time must take into account cultural flows between the colonies and the imperial centre, in the form of print networks, travel, and commercial publishing, rather than employing only communal and nationalist perspectives. Cosmopolitan Hinduani is discussed to exemplify how print space was used by middle-class women to re-fashion the self, contest the matrices of power in which they were situated, and imagine new, transnational grids of relationships and social imaginaries beyond the local, provincial, and national boundaries. The essay re-inscribes women into histories of print technology, literary cultures, and language debates at the turn of the nineteenth century in Punjab.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Vivek Bhandari (2007) refers to print publics in Punjab as “multiple publics.” See also Neeladri Bhattacharya (2005) who characterizes the publics in Punjab as trying to achieve consensus on the one hand and reaffirming community identities on the other. He refers to them as “fractured” publics (143) and “incommensurable” publics (144). The plural used here suggests that there were various competing and contending groups claiming to represent public interest rather than a singular one. The print space was an important representational space that opened up, especially in the nineteenth-century India, when the medium of print came into the hands of private individuals rather than being monopolized by the colonial state. This space allowed for the generation of public opinion on issues that were perceived as “common good” through debates and discussions in newspapers, periodicals, books and pamphlets. Though ideally accessible to all, the print space consisted of groups and communities with different interests, powers of negotiation and accessibility to the print medium. The communities that constituted these publics are discussed further in this chapter in Sect. 2.
- 2.
Scholars who have questioned the normativity of Eurocentric models in the context of South Asian print culture include Robert Fraser, J. Barton Scott, Sandria Freitag, Francesca Orsini, Veena Naregal, Vinay Dharwadkar, Arjun Appadurai, Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty.
- 3.
Some of these include Strishiksha (“The Education of Women”), Istriyon ka Pahrawa (“The Attire of Women”), Fashiondaar Rannaa (“Fashionable Women”), Istri Sudhar (“The Reform of Women”), Sushikshita Istri (“The Educated Woman”), Istri Chikitsa (“The Medical Treatment of Women”), Patibrat Dharma (“The Code of Loyalty to Husband”), and Istriyon ke Jeevan Charitra (“Biographies of Women”).
- 4.
The statistics for 1902 indicate that the ratio of girls going to school to the total number of school-aged girls was 1:58 (Report on Public Instruction in the Punjab and its Dependencies for 1901–1902, Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1903).
- 5.
On this note, see Corinne Sandwith’s essay in this collection, which indicates a similar contradiction for women publishing in Bantu World where their insertion into the world of commercial publishing was simultaneously marked by the limitations in the issues they could pursue.
- 6.
Some examples of these periodicals include Punjabi Bhain, Bharat Bhagini, Istri Samachar, Panchal Pandita, Azad Bhain and Indian Ladies Magazine.
- 7.
Tanika Sarkar (2012), for example, points out in her essay “Wicked Widows”: “Liberalism, which developed in an imperial West, nonetheless played a revolutionary role in slave insurrections elsewhere” (86).
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. 1983/2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol Breckenridge. 1995. Public Modernity in India. In Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol Breckenridge, 1–20. New Delhi: Oxford UP.
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2011. Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonial Critique. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, 313–328. Farmham: Ashgate.
Bhandari, Vivek. 2007. Print and the Emergence of Multiple Publics in Nineteenth Century Punjab. In Agents of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron et al., 268–286. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Bhattacharya, Neeladri. 2005. Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public. In Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, ed. Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld, 130–156. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Brinda, Maharani of Kapurthala. 1953. Maharani: The Story of an Indian Princess. New York: Henry Holt.
Catalogues of Books Registered in Punjab Under Act XXV of 1867 and Act X of 1890, 1867–1921, India Office Records, British Library.
Chaudhurani, Sarala Debi. 1911. A Women’s Movement. Modern Review 10: 344–350.
———. 2010. The Many Worlds of Sarala Devi: A Diary. Trans. Sukhendu Ray. New Delhi: Social Science Press.
Dharwadkar, Vinay. 1997. Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India. In Language Machines and Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten et al., 109–136. London: Routledge.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. 2 Volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forbes, Geraldine. 1996. The New Cambridge History of India, IV. 2: Women in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fraser, Robert. 2008. Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script. London/New York: Routledge.
Frietag, Sandria. 1991. Introduction. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14 (1): 1–13.
Gupta, Abhijit, and Swapan Chakravorty, eds. 2016. Founts of Knowledge. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hardevi. 1888a. London Yatra. Lahore: Oriental Press.
———. 1888b. London Jubilee. Lahore: New Imperial Press.
Majeed, Javed. 2012. Literary Modernity in South Asia. In India and the British Empire, ed. Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malhotra, Anshu. 2002. Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mir, Farina. 2010. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 1984. Reality and Realism: Indian Women as Protagonists in Four Nineteenth Century Novels. Economic and Political Weekly 19 (2): 76–85.
Naregal, Veena. 2001. Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Nijhawan, Shobna. 2012. Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Orsini, Francesca, ed. 2012. The History of the Book in South Asia. Surrey: Ashgate.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2002. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History. In Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge et al. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Ram, Jhinda. 1893. My Trip to Europe. Lahore: Mufid-I-Am Press.
Regan-Lefebvre, Jennifer. 2009. Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Report on Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British India During the Year 1902. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903. India Office Records, British Library.
Rhodes, Jacqueline. 2005. Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modern. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rudolph, Susan Hoeber, Lioyd I. Rudolph, and Mohan Singh Kanota, eds. 2002. Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India. Boulder: Westview Press.
Saraswati, Dayanand. 1908. Satyarth Prakash. Trans. Durga Prasad. Lahore: Virjanand Press.
Sarkar, Tanika. 2012. Wicked Widows: Law and Faith in Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere Debates. In Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism, ed. Charu Gupta, 82–108. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
Scott, J. Barton, and Brannon D. Ingram. 2015. What Is a Public? Notes from South Asia. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (3): 357–370.
Singh, Raja Jagatjit of Kapurthala. 1895. My Travels in Europe and America 1893. London: Routledge.
Stark, Ulrike. 2007. An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Tahl Ram, Susila. 1902, February. Spring at the Kutub. The Indian Ladies Magazine 1 (8): 355–358.
———. 1902. Cosmopolitan Hinduani: Depicting Muhammadan and Hindu Life and Thought in Story Form. Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press.
Trubner’s American, European and Oriental Literary Record, Vol. 2, January–December 1882. India Office Records, British Library.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Minocha, A. (2020). Fashioning the Self: Women and Transnational Print Networks in Colonial Punjab. In: Aliakbari, R. (eds) Comparative Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36890-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36891-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)