En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
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Diana Holmes doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400103
En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives Sangeeta Ray; Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2000, ISBN: 0-8223-2453-9 (Hbk) ISBN: 0-8223-2490-3 (Pbk) In Engendering India, Sangeeta Ray examines the multiple and shifting articulations of gender in British colonial, Indian national, and postcolonial discourses. Concentrating on the period between the 1857 Mutiny and the subcontinental partition in 1947, she traces the construction of the ‘authentic woman’ of India in four separate chapters through texts that she finds equally preoccupied with the production of a ‘national space called ‘India’.’ Most of the writers she examines (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Anita Desai and Bapsi Sidhwa) have already received much attention in critical analysis. Yet Ray’s refreshing perspectives that analyze the nationalist and imperialist nexus of the domestic and the political in the works of these authors further reinforce their centrality to her own argument, which is that ‘after 1857 the figure of the Hindu woman begins to function as a crucial semiotic site in and around which the discourses of imperialism, nationalism, and Indian postcolonialism, and feminism are complexly inscribed.’ (p.8). She devotes the first chapter to Bankim Chandra’s novels Anandamath (1882) and Devi Chaudhurani (1884) to illustrate the production of a Hindu identity that draws on a glorious (imagined) Hindu past in the initial moments of the empire’s consolidation in India, and, in so doing, builds itself around a discourse that simultaneously celebrates and limits the power of women. Chapter 2 examines texts by non-Indian writers such as Harriet Martineau, Meadow Taylor and Flora Annie Steele to show how, in their fictions about the 1857 Mutiny, these writers recast India as Hindu and feminine and deploy this rhetoric to impose a false unity on an otherwise diverse nation. She devotes Chapters 3 and 4 to the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the 1947 subcontinental division to examine the interplay of women and nationalism in male discourse through Tagore’s writings, and to render visible, through an analysis of Desai and Sidhwa’s novels, female critiques of the rather problematic male nationalist agenda. Since Ray’s focus throughout the book is largely political, her historical grounding of the texts is very productive and enables her to avoid reading the literary texts in the void. She simultaneously places these texts within a sound theoretical
book reviews
feminist review 74 2003
113
framework that is attentive to the ‘differentially positioned’ and contradictory imperialist and nationalist narratives that engage in the inter-related constructions of a singular Hindu India and a fixed female Hindu identity. Her theoretical method thus enables her to expose the contradictions fraught in nationalist discourse and the limits of nationalist and imperialist liberalism when it comes to the question of Indian women. At the same time, what makes her reading
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