Session 162: Gendered Constructions of National Identity in Early 20th-Century Periodical Literature

Organizer and Chair: Anita Anantharam, College of New Jersey

Keywords: gender, nationalism, periodicals.

The papers in this panel are linked on the basis of the interplay that has existed (and continues in some cases to the present day) between print cultures and national imagination in both a pre-partition and an independent India. We are concerned here with how knowledge about nation, citizenship, social/communal identities, and values comes to be represented and contested in the pages of Indian journals. Because journal editors and contributors are motivated by, in more cases than not, political/social movements and organizations, the larger literary public sphere in which these journals are embedded comes to have significance in all four papers.

The theoretical questions with which these four papers engage are the following: How are nationalisms engendered during these key moments of religious revitalization? How do print cultures (specifically periodicals) disseminate and perpetuate particular hierarchies of class, caste, and communal identity? How do concepts of "motherhood," "femininity," and the sexualized female body complicate and consolidate national identity for Hindu and Muslim women differently? How is the nation imagined across geographical and linguistic boundaries?

From Shahbano to Kausar Bano and Beyond

Huma Dar, University of California, Berkeley

To be a Muslim in India is to be constructed as a problem—perhaps even the Problem. The Hindutva self-definition directly or indirectly revolves around an obsessive "othering" of Muslims, its three major demands being the establishment of the Ramjanmabhoomi Mandir in Ayodhya, the abolition of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, and the enforcement of the UCC—the Uniform Civil Code of law. A unique rallying point for the last of these three, where some feminists, some secularists, and all Hindutvawadis found themselves on the same side of the fence was the controversial ruling of the Supreme Court in 1985, which upheld the right of a divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano, to maintenance, followed by the even more controversial legislation passed under Rajiv Gandhi, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986. The main focus of this paper will be to analyze and compare the multiple discourses around Shah Bano, and compare them to those around the anti-Muslim program in Gujarat, India, March 2002 as depicted in the pages of Manushi and other organizations. Kausar Bano and her story are a compelling synecdoche for the especially gruesome sexual violation of Muslim women in Gujarat at the hands of the Hindu Right, and the comparison brings some startling realizations.

Gendered Citizenship? Feminist-Nationalist Questioning in Hindi Women’s Journals (1910–1930)

Shobna Nijhawan, University of California, Berkeley

Hindi women’s journals of the early twentieth century were confronted with the dilemma of allying with the legacy of those actors who had initiated reforms for women defined within patriarchal frameworks and of envisioning a society that considered women’s political emancipation a precondition to the end of colonial domination. This paper investigates how Hindi women’s journals, most notably Stri Darpan (Women’s Mirror, 1909–1928), conceptualized their writings as a struggle for women’s personal and national liberation, emancipation, and rights. I will show how the contributors distinguished between the rights for women as they were based on sexual difference from those highlighting the "non-gendered" subject. I argue that women’s journals were instrumental to the development of a feeling of self-worth in women that would amount to the perception of women as individuals and as members of a political community. Women’s journals drew upon widespread journalistic networks. They regularly reported about campaigns led by women all over the world and applauded achievements that had been implemented in the name of the worldwide women’s cause. At the same time, they scrutinized feminist agendas from the West in pointing to the positive and negative aspects of Western women’s emancipation. Within this process, the journals fashioned new discourses of Indian ‘feminist nationalism’ and ‘nationalist feminism’ alike. Nationalism was imbibed with a new Indian—often Hindu—terminology and feminism was conciliated with traditional images of virtuous, chaste, and nurturing Indian womanhood.

Voices from Home and Abroad: Constructing a Modern Indian Nation and Canon in the Pages of the Hindi Literary Journal Sarasvati

Sujata Mody, University of California, Berkeley

In the first decades of the 20th century, the Hindi journal Sarasvati (1900–1982) participated in two interrelated nationalist projects: the construction of both a modern Hindi literary canon and a modern Indian identity. While many of Sarasvati’s contributors were men active in local Indian public life as writers, teachers, and public servants, the journal also drew on contributions from women who wrote from their secluded positions at home, and men who left India to pursue their educational and professional interests abroad. Though Sarasvati largely projects the image of an ideal Indian woman at home, taking care of her family, or the ideal Indian man, at home in India, working for the progress of his country, it also makes room for writers whose contributions complicate the narrative of Indian nationhood. Female authors—like ‘Banga Mahila,’ the most frequently published woman in Sarasvati—though still confined to a domestic setting, provide their comments on the state of an Indian canon and nation or their ideals of Indian womanhood; Indian correspondents like Satyadev Parivrajak (Chicago) and Pyarelal Mishra (London) participate in the aforementioned nationalist projects with their essays on the status and development of Hindi literature and their discussions of race and gender in the context of an Indian national identity as negotiated abroad. In this paper, I discuss the space Sarasvati provides for negotiating a modern Indian identity that connects a predominantly male, local, Indian perspective with articulations of nationhood from women in India as well as Indian men living abroad.

East/West Encounters: "Indian" Identity and Transnational Feminisms in Manushi

Anita Anantharam, College of New Jersey

This paper is a study of the politics of feminist publishing as reflected in the women’s journal Manushi. Since its founding in 1984 as a Marxist-oriented, collectively edited journal, Manushi has remained one of the longest-running women’s periodicals in modern South Asia. Over the years, the Collective has disappeared, leaving Manushi in the hands of its founding editor Madhu Kishwar. This paper examines the shift in Manushi’s politics with the rise of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Special attention will be given to the question of cultural essentialism and authenticity as reflected by activists and feminists in the pages of Manushi. Numerous articles in the pages of Manushi over the past 25 or so years produce and reproduce hierarchies of "East" versus "West," Indian womanhood and Western feminism, and Hindu and Muslim identity. A study as this one will narrate a complicated story about the relationship between women, power, politics, and society.