tender & History ISSN 0953-5233

janaki Nair, ’Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography’

Gender dr Hisfory, Vo1.6 No.1 April 1994, pp. 82-100.

On the Question of Agency in Indian

Feminist Historiography
JANAKI NAlR

When Madan Mohan Malaviya, an early ideologue of Hindu nationalism,

articulated his opposition to raising the age of consent for marriage in 1928
by citing the sanctions of the sastras (Hindu scriptures), some women of the
All India Women’s Conference demanded ‘new sastras’.’ This signified a
recognition by the Indian middle-class women’s movement of the need to
enter the world of knowledge production, and anticipated by several
decades the demand of feminist historians not just for new histories but for
a reinvention of the historical archive.2 Feminist historiography, after all,
aims to produce not just a ‘new historical subject’ but a critique of the
supposedly gender-neutral, but in fact gender-blind, methodologies of the
discipline itself.
In the past two decades, feminist political activity in India has won vital
recognition within the academy. It is therefore particularly appropriate to
emphasize at the outset the intensely political nature of the feminist historical
challenge that I discuss in this article. A reconceptualization of history that
argues ’that every aspect of reality is gendered’3 is necessarily a contesta-
tory act, a political struggle whose retreats and advances must be charted as
such. The material conditions of feminist historical production in India are
not even remotely comparable to the expanding institutional privileges of
women’s studies in Euro-America, yet Indian feminist studies are in large part
sustained and nourished by political work outside the academy. In turn, a
feminist interpretation of history forms a critical first step in the movement
towards feminist social transformation. The feminist critique of the histori-
ography of colonial India has been strongest, especially since epochal
changes were telescoped into less than two centuries of colonial rule in
India and British domination has had enduring material and ideological
consequences.
The uses of history for the contemporary women’s movement are clear,
but how, in turn, have the insights of contemporary feminism informed the
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 83

practice of history? How do the political imperatives of the feminist call to

collective transformatory action today shape the questions asked of history
and its methodological assumptions?This article will consider some of the
ways in which the practice and production of an ’interested’ critique of the
discipline of history has been undertaken in feminist historical research on
colonial India. The focus on theoretical challenges here is necessarily
schematic: therefore the article i s not intended to be a survey of the field so
much as to mark the political consequences of’certain strategies for reading
questions of power and agency in feminist h i ~ t o r y . ~
The woman-as-victim paradigm has been an empowering one for feminist
historians, but, as Linda Gordon has pointed out, ‘it i s false and impossible
to see the history of female experience as powerless’.5 Being less powerful,
after all, ‘is not to be powerless, or even to lose all the time‘. Still, the point
is not to put a canny subaltern in place of ’the victim’, for the paradigm of
rebellious heroine could become just a compensation for reductive con-
ceptions of female agency. Developing a: complex and dynamic conception
of female agency which does not pose these paradigms as contradictory or
exclusive is essential for feminist historical knowledge, especially as it
confronts the figure of woman as ‘always already victim‘.6
At the same time, the rethinking of female agency that has been prompted
by post-structuralismcannot easily be transposed to the Indian context, since
the emphasis on the subjectivity of victims of oppression could, and does,
pave the way for liberal assertions of the freedom of the individual to act
against or despite oppressive conditions.7 This article confronts the contra-
dictions of such a move with reference to a series of critical contributions to
Indian historiography. It argues that the question of female agency in history,
whether that agency takes the form of consent, transgression or subversion,
can neither be wholly contained within a delineation of structures of
oppression nor exhausted by accounts of female presence in history, but
must be posed within specific contexts and placed along a continuum where
various forms of agency may coexist. Feminist historiography must elaborate
the parameters within which specific historical instances offer potential for
and limits to women’s power, in order that feminist political practice may
develop the strategies and visions appropriate to the thoroughgoing social
reconstruction that it envisages.
Before addressing the question of agency in Indian feminist historiography,
we must acknowledge the significance of the earliest efforts that made
women visible in history. Challenges to the historiography of colonial India
which has systematically excluded women from its purview have been
mounted at a variety of levels. In this connection, Sandra Harding’s dis-
cussion of feminist challenges to science posits an important analytical
distinction which may be of value to historians.8 She distinguishes between
those who see sexist assumptions in the scientific enterprise as a result of
simply practising ‘bad science’ and those who see the problems emerging
from the very nature of the scientific enterprise or ‘scienceas-usual’. In
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84 Gender and History

history, as in science, the former may more easily be reformed through a

feminist empiricism that adheres to the notion of the historical enterprise as
value-free and objective.
This early and still far from insignificant strand has aspired to a richer,
better, account of the world, i.e. correcting the imbalances of ’bad history’
by fresh empirical research. The first feminist historical efforts served to
redress the imbalances of conventional history by locating and placing in the
foreground the activities of women nationalists, reformers, revolutionaries
and missionaries in colonial India.9 Some historians have extended the
discussion to include the lives of Muslim women; others have moved away
from the public glare of political participation to the no less important
domestic sphere.10
The project of redressing the biases of ‘bad history’ by discovering women
in history, however, soon runs aground on the categories of ’history-as-usual‘
that are clearly insufficient to analyze gender.” These categories are inex-
tricably linked with the hierarachies and privileges of patriarchy; no amount
of methodological rigour can redress a problem which calls for a recon-
ceptualization of the categories of the historical enterprise itself. It i s in this
sense that feminist historiography cannot be just additive, for if such histori-
ography is already hampered by the nature of the archive, which dispro-
portionately reflects the interests and concerns of the dominant classes, then
the search for fresh ‘evidence’ could obscure the need for a critique of the
techniques, and even disciplines, by which patriarchies remain resilient.
The burden of feminist historiography, therefore, lies not merely in con-
testing conventional historical practices but acknowledging that correcting
certain biases in history or questioning some categories of historical analysis
does not necessarily challenge gender-neutral categories. Even one of the
most acclaimed recent strands of Indian historiography, the ‘subaltern
studies’ project, remains singularly inattentive to questions of gender in
historical analysis.12 While the project has laid bare the unmistakably elitist
biases of most Indian historiography, and claims to recover the history of the
historyless by imaginative readings of conventional sources, there are but
few signs that the questions raised by feminist historiography have genuinely
been taken on board by these historians.13
Indeed, feminist historiography has, more successfully than other inter-
pretations, challenged existing categories of historical analysis. For instance,
many scholars have found inadequate, even misleading, the binary opposi-
tion of ’tradition‘ to ‘modernity’ and have attempted to dislodge these
~ateg0ries.l~ Nor is this merely a transposition of contemporary intellectual
discomfort: the recovery of women’s writings of the colonial period clearly
indicates the incipient stages of a critique of modernity. Similarly, studies
of the differential impact on Indian social groups of the technologies of
‘modernization’ (a process that was necessarily incomplete under colonial-
ism) call into question the various registers, not the least of which is gender,
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 85

on which modernization’s transformatory agenda must be measured. The

chronology of modernization may therefore be seriously ruptured when
gender becomes an analytical category: technological advances of the
nineteenth century, such as mechanized‘rice milling, translated into distinct
economic setbacks for rural Bengali women.
The challenge to gender-neutral methodologies has been made most
forcefully in the field of economic history, where the limits of modernization
have been clearly exposed. As a consequence, the theme of marginalization
has had extraordinary appeal in studies of the colonial economy. Nirmala
Banerji plots the systematic disruption of the traditional economy of
nineteenth-century India as it affected both men and women, although men
were somewhat better compensated by the emergence of a technologically
modern industrial sector. Mukul Mukherji’s study of a single industry, rice
husking, shows how a traditionally female occupation was transformed into
a male occupation with the introduction of machinery.15 Radha Kumar’s
discussion of women in the Bombay textile hdustry between 1919 and 1939
goes further, showing that ‘rationalization’ in the sphere of production
frequently encompassed ‘rationalization’ in the field of reproduction as well.
The emerging definition of the concept of a ‘family wage’, which excluded
female-headed households, combined with the reorganization of the textile
industry to reduce the substantial presence of women in the work force.16
Tracking the marginalization of women in the colonial economy, not only
vis-a-vis men but also vis-a-vis their own pasts, clearly cannot be accom-
modated within the conventional gender-neutral categories of economic
history. Official sources neglect the gender segmentation of the labour
market, which disadvantages women at the point of entry itself, and refuse
to acknowledge the complex negotiations made by women of their work
and family responsibilities. Gender-neutral methodologies are therefore
sustained by the structure of the conventional archive, which privileges
the public sphere of production rather than, say, reproduction. Even when
reproduction is spoken of, as in the census, the sources reflect the demo-
graphic concerns of the state rather than a concern for the lives of women.
Yet economic historians have disrupted the easy equation of archival silence
with historical absence by interrogating conventional sources such as the
censuses with fruitful results. The distinction between public and private
domains, so strictly drawn and observed by the archive itself, becomes a
crucial starting point for feminist history.
Even so, the existing archive has certainly not yielded an embarrassment
of riches for all aspects of historical work on India, although more recently
cultural historians have found a rich vein to mine in vernacular literatures.
Yet is the study of women’s history to be only as good as its sources?
Continued handwringing over the paucity of historical sources yields few
insights. Indeed, the frustrations expressed with the fragmentary and in-
complete nature of the sources could become a basis for the dismissal
of women’s history by the custodians of the discipline. In such a context,
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86 Gender and History

we cannot overemphasize the triumph of the women’s movement and

women’s studies in India in insisting on a revision of the categories of ’work‘
in the latest Indian census (1991) to better reflect the complexities of female
1ab0ur.l~
The dilemmas of mounting a critique of an ’historical objectivity’ that has
systematically excluded women while simultaneously fashioning a strategic
notion of ‘feminist objectivity’ have been the concern of many theorists.
Donna Haraway makes a persuasive argument for a conception of feminist
knowledges as ‘situated knowledges’, which by their very partiality reveal
the ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating’ and
thereby create ‘the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge
claims’.la There is thus a role for fresh empirical work, but always along-
side an acknowledgement of its limits, namely alongside the development
of a feminist standpoint.19 If feminist historiography is not to lapse into a
ceaseless notation of female presence in history, it should vigorously con-
tinue the negativecritical task of unmasking gender-neutral methodologies.
In some cases, this has been inaugurated by questioning the sovereignty of
the source, looking less at the ways different kinds of historical data may
corroborate a single truth and more at the ways in which truth claims are
constructed. This insight, no monopoly of feminist historians, derives much
of its force from the formulations of post-structuralist philosophers such as
Michel Foucault and from advances in other disciplines, notably anthre
pological and literary theory.
Strategies such as discourse analysis have often met with unconcealed
hostility rather than critical engagement within the discipline.20 Never-
theless, Lata Mani’s use of such analysis has advanced not only our
understanding of sari (widow immolation) but also of nineteenthcentury
nationalist-modernist impulses by mapping the overlapping discursive fields
within which a knowledge of sari was produced. She argues that the extra-
ordinary amount of attention paid to women’s issues during the nineteenth
century-in both prescriptive and punitive legislation, whether regarding the
age of consent, sari, or widow remarriage-was indicative of the debate over
Indian tradition: ‘tradition was thus not the ground on which the status of
women was being contested. Rather the reverse was true. . . . What was at
stake was not women but tradition.Ql Thus, even a source which purports
to speak about women remains silent about them: how then may the feminist
historian read such material?
In the context of interpreting ideology, Pierre Macherey says, ‘What i s
important in a work is what it does not say.’ This, he continues, is no simple
equation with what it refuses to say ‘but rather this: what the work cannot
say is important, because there the elaboration of the utterance is carried out,
in a sort of journey to silence.’22This project i s indeed what historians such
as Lata Mani and Uma Chakravarti hope to undertake. The discourse on sari,
constructed as it is on the basis of ’reforming Indian tradition’, cannot
speak of female agency, whether of complicity or resistance. Similarly, the
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 87

recuperation of ideal Vedic womanhood that took place in the nineteenth

century, Chakravarti suggests, was predicated on Orientalist knowledges of
the Indian past. The partiality of that perspective, which cannot speak of
lower castes, reverberates through successive interpretations of Indian
history which continue to use such constructions as if they were gender and
class neutra1.23
Questioning conventional sources for their absences cannot be an
adequate substitute for the historian’s search for the positive content of
historical identities. Despite i t s power in questioning the methodologies of
history-as-usual, an immanent critique such as discourse analysis remains
insufficient. The problem seems less intractable for the more recent period
of Indian history, where oral traditions and cultural practices have enabled
the reconstruction of female ~ubjectivities.2~ The search for the pure,
unmediated utterances of women in history continues to hold considerable
appeal, especially in order to redress the biases of the archive. The most
recent recovery of wanen’s historical voices is the set of interviews,
conducted by a women’s collective in Hyderabad, with sixteen women who
participated in the Telengana Armed People’s struggle between 1946 and
1951. ‘We Were Making History. . .’ not only compiles a painstaking record
of women’s heroism within the peasant guerilla war, but recalls a period rich
with ambiguities, when the Telengana women were both empowered by
and inadequately accommodated within the program of the Communist
Party.25
The members of the collective claim that ’in this history, women are not
spoken about but speak for themselves.’26 History becomes a twestep
process, first a collection of data and then an analysis. According to the
collective, ’an analysis could follow at any time, but ... their voices had to
be heard.’27Gayatri Spivak has drawn attention to the impossibility of such
a move: the attempt to efface the interlocutor, and thus her own agency in
locating and recording these histories, may easily be mistaken for a shirking
of responsibility on the part of the members of the collective.28 The
historian’s aspiration to transparency could return, unwittingly perhaps, to
the very notion of objectivity that feminists set out to contest.
Women’s participation in the Telengana armed struggle has never been in
doubt and had been amply acknowledged in leftist narratives. The unique-
ness of the insights of the women interviewed lies in their assessment of what
the movement did for them as women, especially in arousing expectations
that remained unfulfilled. The interviews have demonstrated that the
scrupulous notation of female presence in such struggles remains incomplete
if it is not accompanied by a recognition of the ways in which gender
structured the possibilities for social and cultural liberation.
Oral histories and autobiographies cannot be the only legitimate source for
feminist historiography, but they form the basis for the history of women
finding a voice or developing a notion of s e l f h ~ o d .Women
~~ Writing in
India: 600 B.C. to Present, a selection of women’s writings in several Indian
languages, i s accompanied by a history of the circumstances under which
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88 Gender and History

‘illegitimate’ acts, such as writing autobiographies, were made possible in

the colonial period. Thus Rassundari Debi’s autobiography testifies to the
painful efforts of scratching letters on the blackened kitchen walls.3oShanta
Nag’s literacy was a process of appropriating knowledge intended for
another: since she learned to read Bengali from watching her brother being
instructed, for some years she could only read texts upside down.” Count-
less others learned by night, in secrecy, and against all odds. Even the
achievements of privileged women, then, were the result of opportunities
wrested from those hostile to their intellectual development.
Has the recovery of women’s own voices shattered the unities of Indian
history and led to the emergence of two distinct histories rather than one?
As in economic history, the narrative of ’historical progress’ has been
strenuously denied in discussions of women’s legal status,3* but the con-
cept of a ‘lost female world’ has received its clearest articulation in the field
of cultural history. Sumanta Banerjee recovers the robust, separate world of
female popular culture in nineteenthcentury Bengal. The cultural produc-
tions of lowercaste female Vaishnav performers and their uppercaste
patrons were in ‘derisive defiance of patriarchal norms, irreverent drollery,
at the expense of the divinities, and bold assertion of their own desires
although often under the somewhat transparent veil of allegory’. This culture,
he claims, vanished in the face of Western-style education and the
censorious nationalist culture that was taking shape among the Bengali
bhadramahila (middle-class women).33 Amrit Srinivasan traces a similar
moment of decline in the Bharatanatyam, a classical dance tradition of the
Devadasis (literally, slaves of god), under the onslaught of colonial reformers,
even as the dance was gradually regulated within the new ‘nationalist
culture’ as a Sanskritised and ‘purer’ performance by uppercaste Hindu
women.34As these examples illustrate, if some, usually middleclass, women
gained a place in the emerging national public culture, it was frequently at
the expense of large numbers of other, usually lower-class, women.
The attention paid in these works to the appropriation of popularAower-
caste cultural practices by an increasingly hegemonic nationalist culture is
noteworthy. Yet such an approach also displays a marked nostalgia similar
to the conservative longing for an idealized pre-capitalist/pre-colonial social
order. The ‘autonomous’ cultural domain itself was an expression of a sexual
division of labour appropriate to the socially, economically and politically
dominant groups in these societies. The refusal to engage with the ways in
which material inequalities were masked by cultural compensations i s
problematic. The construction of a separate domain for women on the basis
of the distinct set of rituals and values which was rooted in the specific
labouring experiences and the shared emotional and physical resources of
a particular group is fraught with difficulties even when it i s done by feminist
historians.
Furthermore, it might be asked whether or not the ’bawdy, erotic’ tradition
in verse, dance or song was completely sanitized or sterilized by the new
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 89

nationalist p a tria r~h yAlthough

.~~ the spheres of the retreating and emerging
cultures were far from equivalent, women’s writings of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries from various parts of India ’broadened the scope of the
women’s question as it had been posed in the reform movement, infused it
with new feminist strains, and even subverted its original commitments.’36
This development occurred within a predominantly middle-class/upper-caste
public sphere, but whether it did so ‘in a desired version of Indian culture,
and in desired versions of ideal women’ is less certain.37 Certainly the
writings of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, lndira Sahasrabuddhe and Lalitambika
Anterjanam embody frequent and significant transgressions of ‘desirable’
codes. Women negotiated and contested the terms of the newly emergent
nationalist patriarchy of the early twentieth century as much as they con-
sented to its hegemonic aspirations. But nationalist ideology empowered
women of the middle class in a very limited way, engaging them in the task
of building a consensus for the incipient nation-state while rendering
‘natural’ the privileges they enjoyed vis-his the vast masses of men and
women whose aspirations they hoped to represent.
Despite the increased availability of materials which enable a‘reconstruc-
tion of the fractured subjectivities of women in history, the insights of Indian
feminist historiography have been diluted precisely because certain r e
lational aspects of gender ideology are rarely There are few
studies, for example, of changes and transformations within families or of
masculinity in colonial lndia.39 Yet feminist history need not necessarily be
women’s history, and a study of the formation of masculinities need not
display complicity with patriarchal discourses. Concentrating on female
worlds of love and ritual can come dangerously close to proposing their
complete self-sufficiency. The notion of ‘difference’ in the relationship
between the sexes can, and often does, function to obscure patriarchal
domination and imply neutral symmetry.40
Narratives of marginalization, lost cultural worlds, resounding archival
absences and subjugated knowledges-in short, the contracting opportunities
for the exercise of female power-by no means exhaust the historical
possibilities for women in the Indian subcontinent. ‘Celebrating a lineage of
resistance’ has long been particularly attractive to left historians of India.41
Although such historiography has fiercely combated the seamless unities of
colonial and nationalist Indian history by pointing to the marked divisions
expressed in class conflicts,42 it has often subsumed questions of gender to
those of class and sometimes collapsed the two in analysis. Witness, for
example, Renu Chakravamy‘s detailed memoir of women activists in the
communist movement appearing under the title Communists in the lndian
Women’s M~vement.~) More recent work has negotiated the multiple axes
of class, caste and gender, especially in revealing the failure of a revolution-
ary movement (such as the Telengana Movement of 1946-51) to deal with
the specificities of patriarchal oppression. Peter Custers emphasizes the
critical role played by women in the Tebhaga movement in Bengal in 1946,
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90 Gender and History

despite little or no party support; indira Munshi Saldhana charts the

widespread involvement of Warli women in the western Indian movement
of 1945-47 alongside their. confrontations with tribal patriarchy; and
V. Meera catalogues the struggles of coir workers in Alleppey between 1938
and 1950.44These monographs point repeatedly to the ways in which
broader political imperatives often dictated both the form and the parameters
of women’s resistance. Unmistakable advances were all too often accom-
panied by checks and limits. The unevenness of advances made by women
within wider, ‘successful’ movements must therefore always be noted:
enabled by Gandhian strategies to enter the public sphere of politics, but
only as spiritualized, traditional essences; enlightened by the educational
opportunities offered by societies such as the Arya Samaj, but under the
strict tutelage of men; empowered by the Communist Party to stand shoulder
to shoulder against class enemies, but also shouldering the burden of sexual
morality.45 Not all instances of collective action in which large numbers of
women participated necessarily empowered them. Nor were all forms of
empowerment necessarily replicable across caste and class divisions. indeed,
some forms of empowerment were only enabled by the disempowerment of
others, and in this sense women were no exception.
The gloomy balance sheet of retreats and advances that feminist histori-
ography has found difficult to avoid, coupled with the widespread dismay
and disillusion with revolutionary social transformations in the concluding
decades of the twentieth century, has created the space within which some
historians have forged alternative notions of power and agency. Michel
Foucault’s notion of power has been central to this theoretical tendency.
Foucault’s location of power in the capillaries that traverse a unitary frame-
work runs counter to conventional perceptions of power as emanating from
a central authority or underlying foundation which then becomes the focus
of politics. This new formulation asserts that there is ‘neither a centralized
source of power nor a location devoid of power‘.46 While it allows for
a great deal of analytic complexity and is therefore attractive to feminists,
it could well become politically paralyzing. For scholars-even historical
materialists-seized by a fear of replicating universal or hegemonic struc-
tures of powerknowledge, only ‘practices that are irreducibly local, regional
and individual are admitted as defensible strategies‘.47
The recoil from such concepts as class struggle, organized protest or
seizure of state power has produced the space within which James Scott’s
formulations have had enduring influence. in Weapons ofthe Weak: Evey-
day Forms of Peasant Resistance, he makes a powerful argument for
identifying ‘between abject unquestioning deference and violent outrage .’. .
the massive middle ground in which conformity is often a self-conscious
strategy and resistance is a carefully hedged affair that avoids all or nothing
confrontation^'.^^ This runs parallel to Foucault’s location of power in the
capillaries, for if power is everywhere, then resistance may similarly be
constructed as a web, ‘always already present’.
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 91

The result is the dilution of powerhesistance to a relatively weakened

concept, far removed from an emancipatory agenda. This is evident in Veena
Talwar Oldenburg’s study of the courtesans of Lucknow, whose very
’lifestyle is resistance’. According to Oldenburg, these dancing and sing-
ing women were among the richest and the most powerful of colonial
Lucknow society, and their lifestyles continue to articulate a critique of
patriarchy.

Their way of life is not complicitous with male authority: on the contrary, in their
own self-perceptions, definitions and descriptions, they are engaged in ceaseless
and chiefly non-confrontational resistance to the new regulations and the resultant
loss of prestige they have suffered since colonial rule began.49

‘Ceaseless‘ functions opposite ’episodic‘ to suggest ever-present critique,

while ‘non-confrontational’ stands opposite James Scott’s representation
of ‘violent outrage’ as one end of the vir.$m-terebellious-heroine scale.
Oldenburg suggests that the kotha (courtesan’s quarters) constitutes a sanc-
tuary for both men and women, representing for women an escape from
the ‘hell’ of a society governed by patriarchal values. In addition, she finds
a strong tradition of performative critique, or ‘a private consciousness’. When
Oldenburg extols the virtues of the burga (long overcloak worn by these
women with net for the eyes) and the ‘freedoms’ it offers women (quoting
Gulbadan, she says ‘they [men] are deprived because we blinkered them’),
however, she reveals not only the limits of relativism but also its, conse-
quences. According to her, ’these women had appropriated the power of the
gaze while eluding the leer of sexually frustrated men’, a formulation which
sounds remarkably similar to the original Islamic injunction. As final proof
that this world of women is powerful, autonomous and a challenge to
patriarchy, Oldenburg produces their strategically split sexuality: coupling
with men for money, while deriving their sexual pleasures from each
other.50
The valorization of the ’self-sufficiency‘ of the women’s world in this
account is problematic because it fails to come to terms with wider
patriarchal structures as they are aligned with or disjunct from modes of
social and economic domination, and ignores the ways in which complicity
and resistance are organic constituents in relations of subordination. For
patriarchies can, and do, operate by empowering some women vis-A-vis
others, so the ‘power and freedom’ of the kothas cannot be understood as
distinct from the ‘captivity’ of the faithful housewife. Oldenburg cites with
approval Gulbadan’s confession of the way the materiality of her interests
overrides concerns for the housewife, and denies any complicity between
the two spheres by the trick of ’voluntarism’, i.e. transforming the oppres-
sions faced by non-courtesanal married women into a question of ‘consent’.
Anyone who traces complicity, she suggests, can only be ’insisting on the
ideal instead of the possible in the struggle for power’.
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92 Gender and History

Emphasizing the ‘possible’ over the ‘ideal’ speaks of a pragmatism that

undercuts the possibility of a specifically feminist struggle. Feminist histori-
ography must insist, despite Foucault, on a ‘differential access to power, on
the basis of which we identify oppressors and not merely a privileged
group’.51 The distinction between a female and feminist consciousness,
which is dissolved in Oldenburg’s account, must be rigorously maintained
’for the female is the basis of the feminist, yet the feminist arises out of
a desire to escape the female‘ (in a social, not biological sense) and does
not spring fully formed from these ‘transgressions’ which by their very
systematicity serve to uphold rather than undermine patriarchy.52 While the
concerns of feminism today structure the kinds of questions we may raise
about the past, the past can neither be written as the prehistory of the
feminist movement nor be used to demonstrate the redundancy of feminist
ideology.
In ‘Chandra’s Death‘, Ranajit Guha offers us another optic on the female
world: a female world whose operations result in failure but nevertheless
reveal the interstices where power resides and subjugated knowledges reign.
He provides extraordinarily rich detail about the caste, class and kinship
structures against which we may understandthis instance of a failed abortion
resulting in the death of a Bagdi peasant woman. Chandra’s natal family and
their kin became involved in terminating her pregnancy, which resulted from
an illicit relationship with her sister-in-law’s husband, Magaram.53
Throughout his careful delineation of the context of a fragmentary
document (the statements of defendants arrested for the death of Chandra),
Guha does not minimize the effects of patriarchy as it operates among the
subaltern communities of mid-nineteenthcentury Bengal. Magaram‘s power
within the family structure is amply evident from the rather narrow choices
which he presented to Chandra’s family: if they did not undertake to perform
the abortion, he would arrange ‘to put her into bhek’, i.e. force her to don
the Vaishnav’s habit which signified her withdrawal from society. Yet b e
tween the pronouncement of the threat by Magaram and the execution of
the abortion, Guha detects the .‘middle ground’ of solidarity and resistance:
The solidarity born out of fear contained within it another solidarity activated by
a different, indeed, contradictory principle-namely empathy. If it was the power
of patriarchy which brought about the first, it was the understanding of women
which inspired the second.

‘The destruction of the foetus’, he says, ‘was a desperate but consciously

adopted strategy to prevent the social destruction of another woman, to fight
for a right to a life with honour within her own society.’54
Guha rules out the donning of the Vaishnav’s habit as a viable choice, for
it was no more than a ‘living death’. This account of Vaishnav life runs
counter to 0thers.55 Indeed, Guha himself suggests that Vaishnavism offered
an equal chance of relatively liberal conditions as of living death for its
adherents.56 Even if that were not the case, however, highlighting this
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 93

moment as an instance of ‘the solidarity of women’ surprisingly undoes the

careful delineation of patriarchy that he undertakes in the rest of the text by
ignoring that the choices were at the outset provided by Magaram. Natalie
Davis has given us an instance of the shadowy margins inhabited by
nineteenth-century French peasant women, embodying a destructive power
that at once had to be curbed (lest it turned the wine sour) and yet deployed
to advantage (in destroying the Yet it was a power that was in both
instances defined by the needs of a patriarchal*political economy.
A strategy of reading ‘choice’ in such historical instances has regressive
consequences for feminist politics. The ’self-sufficiency’ of women in both
the instances cited above and their emergent ‘solidarity’ make a specifically
~ ~ a critique i s not meant to suggest that
feminist politics r e d ~ n d a n t .Such
‘seizure of state power‘ is the only legitimate form of resistance: indeed, such
seizures have not always altered women‘s lives significantly. Yet the dis-
illusion among the ranks of post-modern academics with the metanarratives
of Marxism, leading to the ‘war on totality’ that precludes other totalizing
narratives such as feminism, may not be universally shared. Indeed, the very
attractions of such critiques of oppressive and reductive theories can be
politically nullified if the distinction is not made between the continued
existence of social totalities (such as class, global capitalism, patriarchies)
and the metanarratives used to make sense of them.59 Relativism as an
alternative to the legitimacy of purportedly universal beliefs may often only
be a solution ‘from the perspective of the dominating groups’ and threatens
to become a master narrative in its own right.so
We must ask, therefore, what particular political purpose is served, or
deferred, in posing the question of female agency. It would be difficult to
contest the fact that the technologies of patriarchal power are continually
forged and deployed because women refuse to take their place as dominated
bodies, and feminist historiography must track this process.6’ However, if it
does not simultaneously suggest how this strategy advances the potential
for an emancipatory agenda, such historiography evades its promise of
contesting hegemonic structures. Posing the question of female agency-
consent, choice or solidarity-within patriarchal structures defers the
question of advancing the possibility of an escape from patriarchal oppres-
sions altogether. Tracking instances of female social power within ghettoized
female spaces may produce only ’the illusion of conquest where there is in
fact docility’.6* Everyday resistance or transgression could and did become
an important expression of the challenge to patriarchy, especially when
allied with an ideology of liberation.
By way of illustration, consider the women who were involved in the
Telengana movement. Manikonda Suryavathi recalls that traditional cradle
and wedding songs were infused with ‘new ideas’ and Mallu Swarajyam
remembers singing cradle songs in the fields to challenge the landlord who
forbade labouring women from feeding their babies while at work.63 A shift
in either the content of the cradle song or the context of its performance
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94 Gender and History

became an act of rebellion within the wider framework of an overall

challenge to the social order. As long as these transgressions or survival
strategies do not prefigure larger systemic transformations they remain
cultural and historical curiosities, doing little to address the more persistent
continuities of patriarchy and its ability to recast itself along with evolving
forms of social and economic power.
Such continuities.are most evident in the recent recrudescence in the
subcontinent of cultural practices that aggressively challenge the increased
visibility of women in economic and political life. As the Indian ruling
classes attempt to secure a place within emerging global configurations
of power and organizations of production, relieved in the post-Soviet
Communist world of even the mask of concern for the rights of subaltern
classes, attacks on the bodies, livelihoods and lives of women are likely to
increase. Feminist historical analyses cannot afford to ignore this trend,
especially since history itself has become the ground on which fresh claims
and justifications for the oppression of women are being made. Two recent
discussions of contemporary events serve as valuable sign-posts for con-
ceptualizing power and agency at a multiplicity of levels and within specific
contexts.
Perhaps no other subject in Indian feminist historiography has been so
thoroughly saturated with the question of women’s ‘volition’ as the ideology
of ‘sari’. In a recent article, Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari have offered
a dynamic understanding of the operations of this ideology without either
seeing ‘solidarity’ in certain kinds of female action or minimizing the
grotesquely uneven ways in which power is distributed through Indian
society. Their detailed investigations of two recent instances of widow
immolation, that of Om Kanwar in 1980 and Roop Kanwar in 1987, reveal
the institutions, beliefs and ideologies by which these instances are con-
stituted as ‘sari’ and the centrality to this process of the question of female
volition. Thus, they say, ’once proclaimed, sat only creates a space for the
woman’s consent, not for her resistance-for not only does the declaration
of sat itself depend on others who can attest to the miracles but it opens the
way for community participation’.64Further, this attestation itself appears to
be mediated by clasdcaste positions: Harijan (lower casteklass) women
repeatedly produce less idealized versions of the efforts of the widow to free
herself from her fiery fate. The article analyzes the variety of strategies by
which contradictions between an absolute female volition and obvious
community participation are displaced, but not resolved, in the ideology of
sari. While the internalization of the beliefs and ideologies of sari testify
to a popular consent to patriarchal subjugation of women, thoroughly
modernized apparatuses commercially exploit an extremely local event.
Together, these processes reveal the ramifications of ‘sari’ in much wider
ideological formations and material structures.
The authors painstakingly expose the variety of determinations-of caste,
class and ethnicity, and not just gender-which produce a tolerance of such
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 95

brutal manifestations of patriarchal power within the social, economic,

political domains. These instances become the means to combat the growing
visibility of the ‘dangerous non-mother‘ in contemporary Indian life and to
compensate the Rajput community for its declining fortunes. The feminist
historian can only begin by challenging the insistence on female agency that
undergirds the discourse on ‘sati’. Indeed, by unpacking the various forces
which made not only the practice but its celebration possible, Vaid and
Sangari clearly point to the impossibility of fashioning a counter-hegemonic
agenda that isolates or focuses solely on the question of gender hierarchies.
If this discussion points to a forceful reassertion of patriarchal domination
which attempts to construct afresh woman as spiritualized essence, other
contemporary events involving the Hindu right-wing movement (led by the
Bharatiya Janata Party) have offered unique possibilities for women in public
life. As Tanika Sarkar has shown, one of the most paradoxical aspects of the
growing strength of the right wing has been its increasing reliance on the
participation of women. Thus some sections of Indian middle-class women
have found a new political voice within the growing Hindu fundamentalist
movement in contemporary India, to the extent of aggressively inciting
violence among men.65
May we then demarcate this new sphere of female empowerment as
‘feminist’? Is such empowerment desirable for all sections of Indian women?
This mobilization occurs within precisely defined limits which are set by the
male leadership and within an aggressively communal (i.e. far from demo-
cratic) sphere of politics. As such, it is quite distinct from the mobilization
of women under Gandhian nationalism or in left-wing movements, with
their respective modernizing and democratic features. ‘It prepares the
woman’, says Sarkar, ‘to be a citizen of an authoritarian Hindurashtra, to
wreck secular democratic politics.’ Such a programme bears little or no
resemblence to feminist aspirations. Indeed, the programmatic assertions of
the totalizing ideology of Hindutva are those that subcontinental feminist
politics must imaginatively challenge or counter on equal terms to reduce
the risk of being completely marginalized.
By pointing to the renewed vigor with which the ideology of ‘sati’ has
gained currency in contemporary Indian society and to the ways in which
female political participation i s being massively redefined, repudiating the
emancipatory legacies of a nationalist, left or feminist politics, these authors
suggest the outlines of a feminist praxis that cannot afford the luxury of
’pragmatism’ or of a politics ‘irreducibly local in scale’. The responsibility of
feminist historiography, in the face of anti-feminist, indeed antidemocratic,
forces that are rapidly regrouping, is to contextualize the question of female
agency in a way that does not conceal how consent for broader patriarchal
structures has been historically obtained. Only then can feminist histori-
ography register its refusal to be complicit with the agenda of history-as-
usual, which may admit new historical subjects and even admit feminism as
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96 Gender and History

one of several possible historical interpretations but does little to question its
own gender-neutral methods.
It is no coincidence that the two instances cited above, where *the
distinction is finely drawn between women‘s transformatory capacities for a
feminist agenda and the agency of women within patriarchal structures, both
relate to contemporary history. Clarifying the boundaries between the
’female‘ and ’feminist‘ worlds becomes a far more demanding and com-
plicated task the further back one goes in history. After all, the political
possibilities offered by feminism are more recent than the dispersed,
episodic or discontinuous struggles of the past. The task of feminist histori-
ography is to understand the complex ways in which women are, and have
been, subjected to systematic subordination within a framework that simul-
taneously acknowledges new political possibilities for women, drawing on
traditions of dissent or resistance while infusing them with new meanings.

Notes

Other versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association, Chicago, December 1991,and the American Association for Asian
Studies Meeting, Washington, D.C., April 1992. It has been greatly enriched by the
detaiied comments of Linda Alcoff, Sara Schoonmaker, Keith Osajima, Cameron
McCarthy, Mary John and Madhava Prasad, as well as two anonymous reviewers for this
journal. Special thanks to Stephen White of Colgate University for assistance.
1. Geraldine Forbes, ‘Women and Modernity: The Issue of Child Marriage in India’,
Women‘s Studies International Quarterly, 2 (1979), pp. 407-1 9, esp. 41 5.
2. Throughout the nineteenth century, male social reformers and their opponents
framed their arguments with reference to what was sanctioned.in the Hindu scriptural
texts. The valorization of the texts as authority was a result of Orientalist efforts to produce
stable and usable interpretations of Indian society.
3. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Introduction’, in Recasting Women: Essays in
Indian Colonial History, ed. Sangari and Vaid (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick,
19891, pp. 1-26, esp. 2.
4. For such a survey, see Barbara Ramusack, ’From Symbol to Diversity: The Historical
Literature on Women in India’, south Asia Research, 2 (19901, pp. 139-57; Aparna Basu,
’Women’s History in India: An Historiographical Survey’, in Writing Women’s History:
International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen et al. (Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
19911, pp. 181-211.
5. Linda Gordon, ‘What’s New in Women’s History?’, in A Reader in Feminist
Knowledge, ed. Sneja Gunew (Routledge, London, 19911, pp. 73-83, esp. 76.
6. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses’, Boundary 2 (1 984), .pp. 333-46.
7. See Lata Mani, ‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-
national Reception’, Inscriptions, 5 (19891, pp. 1-23, esp. 2 1-23.
8. Sandra Harding, ’The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory’,
Signs, 4 (19861, pp. 645-64, esp. 650.
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Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography 97

9. See B. R. Nanda (ed.) Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity (Vikas, New
Delhi, 1962); Manmohan Kaur, Women in India’s Freedom Struggle (Sterlirrg, New Delhi,
1985). See also several articles by Geraldine Forbes: ’In Search of the Pure Heathen’,
Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), 17 (26 April 1986); ’Goddesses or Rebels? The
Women Revolutionaries of Bengal’, in Women, Politics and Literature in Bengal, ed. C.
Seely (East Lansing, 1981); ’The Politics of Respectability: Indian Women and the Indian
National Congress’, in The Indian National Congress: Centenary Hindsights, ed. D. A.
Low (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1988).
10. Gail Minault (ed.) The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India
and Pakistan (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1981); Hanna Papanek and Gail
Minault (eds) Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia (Chanakya, Delhi, 1982);
Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905 (Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1984).
11. Atchi Reddy traces the almost consistent preponderance of women in agricultural
work in Nellore District for 100 years after 1881, and the equally consistent though
narrowing gap between male and female wages, and yet offers no more than a biologistic
explanation for the phenomenon: the ’lightness’ of female agricultural tasks compared
with the ’hard physical labour’ of men. See ‘Female Agricultural Labourers of Nellore,
1881-1981’, in Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State, ed.
j. Krishnamurty (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989), pp. 218-30, esp. 227.
12. See Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies: Writings in South Asian History and
Society, 1-6 (Oxford University Press, 1983-1 990), and Partha Chatterjee and Shahid
Amin (eds) Subaltern Studies, 7 (Oxford University Press, 1992). Gayatri Spivak has noted
this failure of the subaltern studies project. See ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing
Historiography’, in Subaltern Studies, 4 (19851, pp. 330-63.
13. A notable exception is Ranajit Guha’s ‘Chandra’s Death’, Subaltern Studies, 5
(1987), pp. 135-65.
14. Critiques of modernization are by no means unique to feminist historiography, and
have been raised in several discussions of economic and social history. For a more recent
cultural critique of modernity, see Tejaswini Niranjana, Vivek Dhareshwar and P. Sudhir
(eds) Interrogating Modernity (Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993).
15. Nirmala Banerji, ‘Working Women in Colonial Bengal’, in Recasting Women,
ed. Sangari and Vaid, pp. 269-301. Mukul Mukherjee, ’Impact of Modernisation on
Women’s Occupations: A Case Study of the Rice Husking Industry of Bengal’, in Women
in Coloniel India, ed. Krishnamurty, pp. 180-98.
16. Radha Kumar, ’Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry,
1919-1 939’, in Women in Colonial India, ed. Krishnamurty, pp. 133-62.
17. See ‘Census: A Different Lens’, EPW, 26 (16 February 19911, pp. 324-25, for a
brief report of the breakthrough achieved by the UNIFEM-SNDT Research Centre for
Women’s Studies, Bombay.
18. Donna Haraway, ’Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of a Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14 (19881, pp. 575-99,
esp. 589.
19. This has been recognized by Gordon, ‘What’s New in Women’s History?’;
Harding, ‘The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory’; and Sangari and
Vaid, ‘Introduction’, in Recasting Women.
20. Witness for example the trivializing critique of Joan Scott’s ‘On Language, Gender,
and Working Class History’, International Labor and Working Class History, 31 (1 9871,
pp. 1-13, by Bryan Palmer in ‘Response to Joan Scott‘, ILWCH, 31 (19871, pp. 14-23.
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98 Gender and History

21. Lata Mani, ’Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in
Recasting Women, ed. Sangari and Vaid, p. 118.
22. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Routledge,
London, 1987), p. 87.
23. Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?’, in Recasting Women,
ed. Sangari and Vaid, pp. 27-87.
24. Prem Choudhry reveals that patriarchal Jar customs in Haryana which culturally
devalued women were systematized and reinforced by the colonial legal-juridical
structure even though women were key agents in the agrarian economy. Choudhry,
’Customs in a Peasant Economy: Women in Colonial Haryana’, in Recasting Women, ed.
Sangari and Vaid, pp. 302-36. This made patriarchal control over women’s productive
capacities more secure, and later legitimized the gradual erosion of those capacities. See
Michelle Maskiell, ’Gender, Kinship and Rural Work in Colonial Punjab’, Journal of
Women‘s History, 2 (19901, pp. 35-72.
25. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We WeE Making History. . .’ (Zed Books, London, 1989).
26. ‘We Were Making History’, p. 26.
27. ‘We Were Making History’, p. 281,
28. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ’Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois
Press, Urbana and Champaign, 19881, pp. 271-313.
29. Ruth Roach Pierson, ‘Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing
of Canadian Women’s History’, in Writing Women‘s History, ed. Offen, pp. 79-106.
30. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds) Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present,
Vol. 1 (Feminist Press, New York, 19911, p. 190.
31. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Their Own Words?Women’s Autobiographies from 19th Cen-
tury Bengal‘ (ms., Institute of International Studies, University of Minnesota, October
19911.
32. Lucy Carroll, ‘Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widow’s
Remarriage Act of 1856’, and Gregory Kozlowski, ‘Muslim Women and the Control of
Property in North India’, both in Women in Colonial India, ed. Krishnamurty, pp. 1-26
and 114-32.
33. Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalisation of Women‘s Popular Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Bengal’, in Recasting Women, ed. Sangari and Vaid, pp. 127-79, esp. 165.
34. Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance’, EPW, 20
(19851, pp. 1869-76.
35. Himani Banerjee voices a similar critique of Sumanta Banerjee’s work in
‘Fashioning a Self: Educational Proposals for and by Women in Popular Magazines in
Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 (26 October 19911, pp. WS50-63,
esp. 50.
36. Tharu and Lalita (eds) Women Writing in India, p. 176.
37. Sangari and Vaid, ’Introduction’, in Recasting Women, p. 12.
38. Natalie Davis, ’Women‘s History in Transition: The European Case‘, Feminist
Studies, 3 (Spring/Summer 19761, pp. 83-103; Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis’, in Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia
University Press, New York, 1988).
39. See however, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial
Attitudes and Policies and their Critics 1793- 7905 (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1980),
and Mrinalini Sinha, ’Manliness: A Victorian Ideal and Colonial Policy in Late Nineteenth
Century Bengal’ (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stonybrook, 1988).
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40. As for example in Lindsay Beth Harlan, ‘The Ethic of Protection Among Rajput
Women: Religious Mediations of Caste and Gender Duties’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, 1987).
41. ’We Were Making History’, p. 19.
42. Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives
from Indian Historiography‘, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (1990),
pp. 383-409.
43. Renu Chakravartty, Communists in the Indian Women‘s Movement (People’s
Publishing House, Delhi, 1980).
44. Peter Custers, ‘Women’s Role in Tebhaga Movement’, EPW, 43 (25 October 1986),
pp. WS97-104; lndira Munshi Saldhana, ‘Tribal Women in the Warli Revolt: 1945-47’,
EPW, 21 (1986), pp. WS41-52; V. Meera, ’Women Workers and Class Struggles in
Alleppey, 1938-50’, Social Scienfist, 2 (1 983).
45. Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women’, EPW, 20 (5 and 12 October 19851,
pp. 1691-1 702 and 1753-58; Sujatha Patel, ’Construction and Reconstruction of
Women in Gandhi’, EPW, 23 (10 February 19881, pp.377-87; Partha Chatterjee,
‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonised Women: The Contest in India’, American
Ethnologist, 16 (November 1989), pp. 622-32; Tanika Sarkar, ‘Politics and Women in
Bengal: The Conditions and Meaning of Participation’, in Women in Colonial India, ed.
Sangari and Vaid, pp. 231-41; Madhu Kishwar, ‘Daughters of Aryavarta’, in Women in
Colonial India, ed. Sangari and Vaid, pp. 78-1 13; ‘We Were Making History . . .’,
especially the testimony of Regalla Acchamamba, pp. 160-71.
46. Linda Alcoff, ‘Feminist Politics and Foucault: The limits of a Collaboration’, in
Crisis in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arlene Dallerz and Charles Scott (State University
of New York Press, New York, 19901, pp. 69-86, esp. 81.
47. See, for example, Arun Patnaik‘s critique of intellectual trends within Indian
academic Marxism, ‘Reification of the Intellect’, EPW, 25 (27 January 19901,
pp. PE12-29.
48. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1985), p. 285.
49. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of
Lucknow’, Feminist Studies, 2 (1 990), pp. 259-87 (emphasis mine).
50. Oldenburg, ‘Courtesans of Lucknow‘, pp. 273, 283.
51. Alcoff, ’Feminist Politics and Foucault‘, p. 75.
52. Gordon, ‘What’s New in Women’s History?‘, p. 82.
53. Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’.
54. Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’, pp. 160, 162.
55. See, for example, the description of Vaishnav women in Sumanta Banerjee,
‘Marginalisation of Women’s Popular Culture’.
56. Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’, p. 159.
57. Natalie Davis, ‘Women’s History in Transition’, p. 90.
58. Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan, ‘The Subject of Sati: Pain and Death in the Contemporary
Discourse on Sati’, Yale journal of Criticism, 3 (1 990), pp. 1 -27.
59. Teresa Ebert, ’Postmodernism’s Infinite Variety’, Women’s Review of Books,
8 Uanuary 19911, pp. 24-25.
60. Sandra Harding, ’The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory’,
p. 657. See also Nancy Hartsock, ’Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’, in
FeminismPostmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (Routledge, New York, 19911,
pp. 157-75, esp. 163.
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61. For an example of an effort to produce 'docile bodies' in the late nineteenth
century, see Barbara Metcalf, Perfeang Women: Maulana Ashraf Thanawi's "Bihishti
Zewar" (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).
62. Christine Faure, 'Absent From History', Signs, 7 (19611, pp. 71-60, esp. 80.
63. 'We Were Making History', pp. 149, 237.
64. Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari, 'Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow
Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan', EPW, 26 (27 April 1991)' pp. WS2-18,
esp. WS5.
65. Tanika Sarkar, 'The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram
Janambhoomi Movement', EPW, 26 (31 August 19911, pp. 2057-62.

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