Introduction
This chapter examines the late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century literary and news stories which narrate the New Woman as a signifier that destabilizes established meanings within the nation. Middle-class females modify or subvert their assigned roles by freely embracing a lifestyle of their choice that breaks with normative gender and class expectations specific to their contexts. Partap Sharmaâs novel Days of the Turban, published in 1986, looks at gender within the context of Sikh nationalism in the 1980s. Gulnari breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of different castes and faiths. Anita Nairâs novel, Ladies CoupŃ, published in 2001, looks at gender in the 1990s. Akhila, a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, buys a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. She breaks conservative Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behaviour when she decides to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories of the 2012 Park Street rape case of Kolkata, Suzette Jordan, a single working mother, broke a number of taboos when she was gang raped: of being out late, of accepting drinks at a bar, and of taking a ride home from strangers. These fictional and news stories are juxtaposed with each other and close read as narrative speech-acts ,1 each of which represents specific moments within a decade. These narratives are contextualized against representative interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and nationalism over the past 30 years in India. In these stories, the womenâs choices serve as flashpoints within the nation, problematizing its self-definition as a modern entity.
This chapter wishes to look at border as method; in so doing, it leans on Mezzadra and Neilsonâs (2013) discussions of the border. Under the late twentieth-century capital, they opine; crises in transformations of state sovereignty disallow borders from firmly demarcating spaces, people, and activities by failing to trace clear lines between what remains inside or outside of territories. It is in this ambivalent space of temporary borders that this chapter examines how womenâs bodies and sexuality serve as important boundary markers of power and citizenship, of violence and exclusion, and of negotiation and transformation. Border struggles, then, refer to everyday practices by which women internalize or resist these constraints and open up new possibilities. The women in these stories trespass on disallowed terrain and experience violence. Using the idea of a border as method, this chapter seeks to reflect on a 30-year national discourse of modernity and neoliberal challenges during a globalized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive female bodies. Borders are sites where the fault lines of these contradictions emerge, revealing other relationships between gender and nationalism under global capital.
The New Woman Then and Now
In order to examine relationships between gender and nationalism in the late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century postcolonial texts, it is necessary to analyse icons of the New Woman in this period and trace her genealogy to the nineteenth-century imperial British debates concerning the woman question. Offen (2000) points out that the nineteenth-century nationalism made womenâs conditions, roles, and responsibilities central to nation-building efforts. Women were to be trained as wives and mothers, because these roles were essential to the nation. Such efforts at gender training opened the door to feminist activism regarding womenâs equal access to knowledge, print culture, the arts, and professions; womenâs freedom to move in public, to vote, to express their sexuality, and to enjoy full citizenship rights; and womenâs state recognition and support for motherhood and childcare. By the late nineteenth century, the New Woman came to denote educated, employed, single, upper-middle-, and middle-class women. She threatened marital monogamy by experimenting with her sexuality. She could take to the streets in political protest. She drank, smoked, and enjoyed a hectic social life. As per Otto and Rocco (2011), by the early decades of the twentieth century, media representations made the New Woman at once a symbol of progress and decadence.
These contradictions also occur in colonial India . As scholars on gender in South Asia have argued, the construction of Indian womanhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged in the interstices of anti-colonial struggle, tied the emergence of a ârespectableâ middle-class female subjectivity closely to the nation.2 Professional and semi-professional occupations marked a new, comprador class under the British that functioned as an aspirational elite, comprised predominantly of English-educated, upper-caste Hindu men who were rooted in land revenue rather than business. This national bourgeoisie, finding itself disempowered and culturally critiqued as backward and uncivilized by the British, divided the nation into public and private domains. The public domain was the official world under British rule, while the private realm of the home was where the moral and spiritual values of the nation were protected. The upper-caste, upper-middle-class New Woman, who embodied those values, belonged to this domain. The nationalist elite enacted laws against child marriage, legalized widow remarriage, and promoted womenâs education to a limited extent.3 The New Woman drew upon notions of bourgeois domesticity, ideals of Victorian womanhood, and a purified Vedic past in order to reinvent traditions for the project of national regeneration. She was to be educated and modern in order to be an appropriate wife for these elite men and contribute to the larger body politic. However, unlike westernized women, she was also to remain chaste, pious, disciplined, modest, and unselfish. The New Woman stood for an imagined, unified India. The lower-class and lower-caste working woman was excluded from this ideal.
Given such a history, feminist scholars point out how each successful challenge to orthodox patriarchy by middle-class women has also strengthened the new nationalist patriarchy and the class/caste stratifications of Indian society. This ambivalence has led Jayawardena (1986) to pessimistically conclude that the nationalist struggle did not permit a revolutionary feminist consciousness in India. However, Sangari and Vaid (1989) argue that a feminist historiography recognizes that all aspects of reality are gendered and that gender differences are structured by the wide set of social relations: race, ethnicity, class/caste, nation, and sexuality. It is from within such challenges of feminist historiography that Mrinalini Sinha (1994) poses the problem of locating Indian womanhood and the politics of feminism in colonial India: the simultaneous proliferation of discourses about women and their surprising marginalization in these same discourses. By insisting on historicizing the identity of the Indian woman, we can begin to critique the implications of the resurgence of an essentialized and ahistorical identity, divorced from the political and economic contexts in which it is produced and which it helps sustain (Sinha 1994). In the same spirit, Durba Ghosh (2013) reveals how women revolutionaries became inscribed in nationalist historiography as New Women who, as ideal mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, acted violently to resist British rule and whose radical violence, while not respectable, was deemed noble in support of the national project (Ghosh 2013, p. 356).
Consequently, various feminist scholars attribute to these nineteenth-century icons of the New Woman, the task of laying the foundation for future reforms through the twentieth century.4 The womenâs movement evolved rather slowly at first, from the early twentieth century through 1947. For instance, the first all-India conference was held in the 1920s. By the 1970s and 1980s, it had splintered into rural and urban groups5 which variously protested against child and alcohol abuse, sex slavery, rape, dowry, bride burning, atrocities against Dalit women , and lack of alimony for divorced Muslim women and upheld the need for equal inheritance laws for Christian women , equal wages, maternity leave, and working womenâs hostels. These struggles were in solidarity with Dalits, peasants, landless labourers, and union workers. Womenâs studies burgeoned in colleges where feminist historians dismantled the Hindu nationalist narratives by uncovering other suppressed histories. Through the 1980s, womenâs organizations agitated for open, gender-sensitive democratic processes. The 1990s and 2000s provided contexts for neoliberal policies of market-led economic growth, the rise of a new and expanded middle class, and the increased destitution of the working poor. Icons of the New Woman, circulating once again a century after the colonial moment, become the means through which these tensions are negotiated.
The late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century icons of the New Woman are hybrid and even contradictory. Such a woman is often aggressive, confident, and urban. She fuses middle-class respectability with a professional career, Indian values with global citizenship. She is projected as possessing a pan-Indian identity. She is emancipated and yet heteronormative. She may indulge in illicit forms of sexuality but remains the guardian of the nationâs morality; therefore, the discourse of the state renders invisible adultery, domestic violence, and forced marriages. She consumes newly available commodities and enjoys the benefits of economic liberalization. Not all working women have high salaries, however. Poor women are forced to work but are ignored by the emancipatory discourse of the neoliberal state, which upholds the middle-class New Woman as its prime beneficiary; the latter affirm the need for neoliberalism just as the nineteenth-century New Woman affirmed the need for empire.
Days of the Turban: Gulnari in the 1980s
The female character Gulnari in Days of the Turban is forced to commit suicide because her society is simply unable to pardon the many freedoms that she claims for herself. She is an educated, middle-class woman from a prosperous, rural Punjabi merchant family in the early 1980s.
She is first glimpsed in the novel trespassing outside the world of confining domesticity and into the larger world of Sikh militancy, clutching an apron filled with vegetables, to secretly conspire with Kumhareya, a lower-caste Punjabi man, against the Indian government. In this deliberate camouflage, she is a player moulding social rules to enhance her freedom. She demands the same military training as her male colleagues. She is unafraid of being caught or imprisoned. Her actions bring her in conflict with the Indian state, which frames her as an anti-national. Her family are also jeopardized as suspects of harbouring anti-nationals. The Akali movement in the early 1980s accused the Indian government of internal colonization, underdevelopment, and exploitation of Punjab; hence, it demanded a separate stateâKhalistanâthat would embody and encapsulate the Sikh identity. This demand was repressed by the Indian government as terrorism, resulting in communal riots, the ...