Recasting Women

Essays in Colonial History

Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid

• Publisher: Zubaan Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9789383074624
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This landmark collection on colonial history is now available in a brand new edition as part of the Zubaan Classics series to celebrate Zubaan's 10th anniversary.This collection of essays stands at an unarticulated conjuncture within the feminist movement and women's studies that have emerged in India since the 1970s. The anthology attempts to explore the inter-relation of patriarchies with political economy, law, religion and culture and to suggest a different history of 'reform' movements, and of class and gender relations. The book seeks to uncover the dialectical relation of feminism and patriarchy both in the policies of the colonial State and the politics of anticolonial movements. The writers in this volume include scholars from various disciplines.

Whatever Happened to the
Vedic Dasi?

Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past

UMA CHAKRAVARTI

Men and women in India, whether or not they have formally learnt history, carry with them a sense of the past which they have internalized through the transmission of popular beliefs, mythology, tales of heroism and folklore. Formal history also percolates down, often in a transmuted form, to a wider range of people through articles in popular journals, discussions, and through what may be termed as the ‘dispersal effect’, so that elements of oral history may be overlaid by more serious historical conclusions forming a sort of medley of ideas. It is just such a medley of ideas that forms the basis of our understanding of the status of women in ancient times; and is also part of our deeply embedded perceptions of the past in a more general sense.

Particular elements that constitute a given community or group’s sense of history are not, however, timeless and unchanging. Perceptions of the past are constantly being constituted and reconstituted anew. At specific junctures the sense of history may be heightened and the past may be dramatically reconstituted, bringing into sharp focus the need of a people for a different self-image from the one that they hold of themselves. One such juncture for India, when historical consciousness was being reshaped, came in the nineteenth century. In the new script for the past the women’s question held a key place, but it is important to bear in mind that it was only one element in a set of related elements, all of which were being constituted at the same time and through the same process, ultimately ending in the creation of a Hindu- Aryan identity. The new self-image fulfilled a growing need of the emerging middle classes since it enabled them to contend with the ‘burden’ of the present, especially with the loss of self esteem following the British conquest of India.

What was gradually and carefully constituted, brick by brick, in the interaction between colonialism and nationalism is now so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the middle classes that ideas about the past have assumed the status of revealed truths. Any suggestion that we might fruitfully analyse the manner and the different stages by which this body of knowledge was built up, or how and when we came by our immediate intellectual and cultural heritage (which is often only a hundred and fifty years old) would therefore be considered quite unnecessary or even futile. But for women in particular this heritage, this perception of the past, of the ‘lost glory’, is almost a burden. It has led to a narrow and limiting circle in which the image of Indian womanhood has become both a shackle and a rhetorical device that nevertheless functions as a historical truth.

This paper attempts to demonstrate the factors and the stages spanning roughly the last century and a half, but focussing particularly on the second half of the nineteenth century, in the formation of the present historical consciousness; I will also outline here the different elements within a complex structure of ideas wherein knowledge about the past ultimately ended in the creation of a persuasive rhetoric, shared by Hindu liberals and conservatives alike, especially in relation to the myth of the golden age of Indian womanhood as located in the Vedic period. This image fore grounded the Aryan woman (the progenitor of the upper-caste woman) as the only object of historical concern. It is no wonder then that the Vedic dasi (woman in servitude), captured, subjugated, and enslaved by the conquering Aryans, but who also represents one aspect of Indian womanhood,1 disappeared with out leaving any trace of herself in nineteenth century history. Since no one had noticed her existence, it is natural that there was no one to mourn her disappearance.

My intention in this essay is not to rescue the Vedic dasi, which of course needs to be done and requires a separate study, but to situate the nineteenth century historiography of the women’s question within the cultural and ideological encounter between England and India. This is the story of how the Aryan woman came to occupy the centre of the stage in the recounting of ‘the wonder that was India’ representing an amalgamation of brahminical and Kshatriya values. In this essay the process of the reconstruction of the past has been divided into three phases and is dealt with in three sections. Each phase was marked by certain trends although neither the phases nor the trends were watertight or exclusive. The first section provides a brief summary of the major ideas and themes in the work of the Orientalists, Anglicists and Evangelists, and the proto-nationalists, covering the period upto 1850; the next section deals with the succeeding group of Orientalists, namely Max Muller and two European women writers who extended his romantic reconstruction of the Aryan past to women, as well as the emergence of cultural nationalism in the period between 1850 and 1880. This was expressed in the writings of R.C. Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Dayananda among others, and highlighted Kshatriya/Aryan values in the reconstruction of a new identity for Indian womanhood. The third section examines the relationship between such images of womanhood and the actual experiences of women in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

I

In the nineteenth century we recovered our long lost ancient literatures, Vedic and Buddhistic, as well as the buried architectural monuments of Hindu days. The Vedas and their commentaries had almost totally disappeared from the plains of Aryavarta where none could interpret them; none had even a complete manuscript of the texts. The English printed these ancient scriptures of the Indo-Aryans and brought them to our doors.

Jadunath Sarkar, 19282

The contribution of Europeans to the rediscovery of India’s past was widely accepted by scholars and popular writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The perception of the past was influenced by European, more specifically British, perceptions in two separate and contradictory ways. One strand was represented by the Orientalists whose reconstruction of the glory of Indian civilization in the ancient past was taken over lock, stock, and barrel, by nineteenth century Indian writers to build a picture of Indian civilization not just for a particular region like Bengal (which contributed substantially to the building of this picture, especially in the early years of writing), but for the whole of India. The other strand was the Utilitarian and Evangelical attack on contemporary Indian society, especially on the visibly low status of women. Orientalism and Utilitarianism coalesced in the works of the early nationalist writers whose most enduring and successful construction was the image of womanhood in the lost past as a counter to the real existence of women in the humiliating present. Among the Orientalists who contributed most substantially to the notion of a ‘golden age’ which had existed in a remote and unchartered period of Indian history were William Jones (1746–94) and H.T. Colebrooke. Closely associated with the Asiatic Society, their researches covered a wide range of themes in Sanskrit literature, history, and philosophy which were refined and elaborated in later years. It is significant, however, that glossing over certain aspects of the past was a characteristic feature of the work of the Orientalists who did not particularly react to the specific forms of inequality of caste, class, and gender prevailing in India. In part this may be due to the fact that status distinctions were deeply ingrained in British society, but partly the lack of concern may be explained as a natural consequence of their heavy reliance on the conservative indigenous literati, the Brahmin pandits.

The women’s question, notably, was not one of the themes that were foregrounded in the earliest work of the Asiatic Society. Jones, for example, did not pay any attention to sati (widow immolation) and made only a passing reference to Gargi, whom he described as “eminent for her piety and learning.”3 More important than Jones in influencing the actual reconstruction of the past was the work of Colebrooke whose original researches earned for him the admiration of Max Muller. With Colebrooke the Orientalists came to focus their attention directly upon the women’s question by compiling evidence bearing on women from the ancient texts; predictably, the focal starting point was the ritual of sati. One of Colebrooke’s first pieces of research was “On the Duties of the Faithful Hindu Widow”4 wherein he presented the textual position on sati. The essay reflects all the characteristic features of the historiography of the women’s question: the reference to a variety of ancient texts, the special authority given to texts over custom, the search for the ‘authentic’ position as contained in the older and more authoritative texts, and the confusion in reconciling contradictory evidence. However, it is significant that there is nothing in Colebrooke’s essay to suggest that the Vedas were recognized as either the oldest or the most authentic texts; the past was as yet unstratified and was perceived as one homogenous whole.

The focussing on the ‘duties’ of the ‘faithful’ Hindu widow, would most likely have had a great impact on Europeans who were the main readers of the Asiatic Researches. For many decades there after a reference to Hindus appears to have evoked the image of a burning woman as recorded by Max Muller almost eighty years later.5 Whatever other research Colebrooke engaged himself with in reconstructing the ‘glories’ of the ancient Hindus, an unintended consequence of his essay on the ‘faithful widow’ was to add the weight of scholarship to the accounts of travellers and other lay writers whose descriptions of burning women came to represent an integral part of the perception of Indian reality. Colebrooke’s account of sati highlighted an ‘awesome’ aspect of Indian woman hood, carrying both the associations of a barbaric society and of the mystique of the Hindu woman who ‘voluntarily’ and ‘cheerfully’ mounted the pyre of her husband.

Colebrooke’s essay on the Vedas6 was the first piece of work drawing attention to the texts as a major achievement of the ancient Aryans. Of interest to us are the references to Gargi and Maitreyi,7 two of the oft-quoted examples of the glory of ancient Indian womanhood. It is significant that Colebrooke attributes no particular importance to the account of the conversation between Maitreyi and Yajnavalkya. Gargi too appears merely as one of the contenders, neither more nor less important than the other participants in the debate with Yajnavalkya.

Jones, Colebrooke and a whole range of students at the Fort William College who formed the earliest group of the Orientalists, saw themselves as engaged in reintroducing the Hindu elite to the ^impenetrable mystery’ of its ancient lore. The Sanskritic tradition, ‘locked up’ till then in the hands of a closed priesthood, was being thrown open and its treasures made available to the people in its pristine’ form;8 the truths of indigenous traditions were being recuperated.9 In sum, the Europeans who had successfully constituted their own ‘true’ history were now engaged in giving to Indians the greatest gift of all—a history.10 But the first stage of the Orientalist enterprise in reconstructing the past was hardly a case of “giving back to the natives the truths of their own little read and less understood Shaster (sic),”11 as portrayed by the Orientalists. The indigenous intelligentsia were not functioning within a political and social vacuum. The natives were no passive recipients of the perception of the past, then in the process of being reconstituted. In fact the indigenous literati were active agents in constructing the past and were consciously engaged in choosing particular elements from the embryonic body of knowledge flowing from their own current social and political concerns.

The implications of the British position on social and cultural questions and the possibilities of generating certain changes through legislation became fairly clear in the early nineteenth century. The reconstruction of the past thereafter assumed a practical and utilitarian function. The question was no longer one of discovering fragments of texts, or translating them, but as the movement for abolition gained momentum, stratifying the texts to establish authenticity became crucial. All this meant that apart from a general increase in historical consciousness, the past was beginning to be classified and analysed more rigorously to argue the debates of the present. What was of lasting significance from the point of view of historical consciousness was the fact that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Recasting Women: An Introduction
• Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past
• Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India
• Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal
• That Magic Time: Women in the Telangana People's Struggle
• Feminist Consciousness in Women's Journals in Hindi: 1910-20
• The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question
• Tracing Savitri's Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image of Women in Indo-Anglian Literature
• Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization
• Customs in a Peasant Economy: Women in Colonial Haryana
• Rural Women in Oudh 1917-47: Baba Ram Chandra and the Women's Question
• Notes on Contributors