Chair: Antionette M. Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This panel traces the historiography of women in modern India through an analysis of the careers and scholarship of two generations of historians of women and gender. Women’s and gender histories are generally categorized as advancing through three stages. The initial one is a recovery of sources and individuals with an add and stir of women into existing historical frameworks. The second stage decenters existing master narratives. In the third stage historians seek to construct more inclusive, more nuanced narratives sensitive to issues of race, class, ethnicity as well as gender. In the context of Indian history, British social reforms designed to "uplift" Indian women and Indian women who participated in the nationalist movement were the primary topics of the initial phase. Next there was a critique of the British construction of Indian women as legitimation for British authority and of nationalist reconstitution of new forms of patriarchy. The third stage of developing new, more inclusive paradigms is more difficult and remains in its infancy. We seek to examine how the careers and scholarship of three historians have moved through these various stages. Our collective goal is to envision what would be the concerns of a feminist women’s history if colonial discourse, the nationalist project, or its communal alternative were not the dominant paradigms in South Asian historiography and to speculate how gender considered in relationship to race, class, and ethnicity would impact the writing of non-feminist and feminist history in South Asia and the British empire.

Geraldine Forbes, State University of New York, Oswego

This presentation will trace my career as a researcher and efforts, by myself and other historians, to locate and preserve records by and about women. There were no history courses on women or gender during my graduate education so when I began to work on women’s history it was by accident rather than design. During my first trip to India, as a graduate student engaged in dissertation research, I met Shudha Mazumdar, read her memoirs, and received her permission to edit them for publication. Working on the context of Shudha’s life to introduce this memoir, I quickly discovered that archives had not collected women’s documents and papers. My quest for sources led me to women’s organizations and their members who opened their gowdowns and trunks to produce records of women’s associations, diaries, and eventually photographs. Photographs became a reference for recapturing memories of past events for which there were no written records. Others searching for such material included Neera Desai, Gail Pearson, Meredith Borthwick, and especially C. S. Lakshmi who founded SPARROW [Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women]. Watching women’s history crumble and disappear before our eyes we became preservationists and recoverists by necessity. Only later did we begin to theorize a feminist historiography.

Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati

The history of India has long been on the margins of history in general and Asian history in particular. When I began to study the interaction among Indian and British women regarding women’s rights issues in 1976, my research was deemed on the margins of both South Asian and women’s history since it focused on elite women and appeared to privilege imperial relationships over Indian nation building. My paper will analyze how subsequent research in this arena by scholars such as Antoinette Burton and Mrinalini Sinha fostered a reintegration of British domestic and imperial history with Indian nationalist history and has prodded imperial historians to rethink the binary categories of west and non-west while others such as Kamala Visweswaran have ably critiqued the insufficient attention of subaltern historians to issues of gender and their separation of women from the category of subaltern. New questions emerge such as how Indian nationalists used images of British women as both positive and negative models of behavior for Indian women and how Indian women responded in diverse ways toward British women as role models but also as collaborators. This diversity reflects the subtle imbrication of British and Indian cultural values. Consequently I argue that current scholarship presents more nuanced arguments about the power relationships involved in the interaction among British and Indian women which highlight racial and class factors while dissolving the binaries of east and west.

Sanjam Ahluwalia, University of Cincinnati

Through my dissertation research on the history of birth control in North India from 1885–1994, I argue for the need to rethink the national boundaries within which we locate our historical narratives. Instead of isolated national histories, we need to move towards interconnected histories, dismantling the received ideas of the supremacy of nationhood and national sovereignty, and demonstrating intellectual movements as interactive and evolving through cross continental discursive loops. This approach will allow us to recognize the complex historical agencies in non-western societies, and also help dismantle western parochialism within mainstream scholarship. Adopting the ideas of interconnectedness and cross-continental discursive loops, as articulated by Antoinette Burton and Kumkum Sangari, enables us to discard simplistic readings of non-western societies and histories as either mindless mimetic gestures or as derivative, imperfect or copies of western societies.