Universal Rights and the Specters of Indian Feminism, Part I: A Review by Susan Pedersen

This is Part I of a twentieth-anniversary retrospective on Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. An interview with Sinha will be published next Wednesday as Part II. Susan Pedersen writes, I wrote a review of Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India soon after its publication in 2006, but for reasons I no longer entirely recall (my lateness? backed up pieces at the journal?) the piece, which was written for a general audience, wasn’t published. I thus sent it to Sinha, whose work I’d always admired, as I thought she might like to have it. After Sinha mentioned the review in her interview with the JHI Blog, Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa contacted me to ask if they might publish it alongside the interview. Much time has passed, but I hope readers might find it helpful. Katherine Mayo was sixty-eight and already well-known in America as a muck-raking journalist and writer when she set out in 1925 to examine social conditions and public health in India. British officials were happy to smooth her way. They were used to curious travelers eager to view poverty and degradation at close hand, and Mayo had already made clear her utter lack of sympathy for the nationalists’ cause. So Mayo was shown hospitals and government offices and introduced to doctors and social workers. The lady journalist, it was thought, would transmute her impressions into yet another account of the benefits of Britain’s civilizing work in India. In one sense, those officials got what they expected, for when Mother India appeared in the summer of 1927 it certainly took an unabashedly pro-British line. In another sense, however, the book was a shocker. Mrinalini Sinha, rather primly, calls it “graphic,” but that word doesn’t quite capture the voyeuristic sensibility and near-pornographic style Mayo brought to her task. Readers of Mother India weren’t simply informed of the evils of child marriage or early motherhood; rather, vivid descriptions of raped and diseased girl children, and of their depraved and predatory debauchers, were laid before their horrified eyes. Purported eyewitness accounts piled up, lending a spurious facticity to Mayo’s sensational claims that, for example, over two-thirds of young adult men were impotent, or that Indian mothers routinely sexually stimulated their children to keep them quiet. Sexual decadence, Mayo insisted, was India’s (or, as Mayo put it, “the Hindu’s”) defining trait, the “rock-bottom physical base” on which “the whole pyramid of [his] woes” rested. Sexual degeneracy alone explained why Indians were “poor and sick and dying.” Lest anyone have missed the point, it also explained why “their hands are too weak…to seize or hold the reins of Government” (p. 80). This was strong stuff—so strong that even the officials who had helped Mayo were taken aback. True, copies were flying off the shelves in three continents, and in Britain the whole Cabinet was reported to be devouring the book. Yet, while some positive reviews appeared (especially in Britain), outraged repudiations came hard behind. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and a host of noted Indian reformers weighed in, but activist Indian women, diasporic Indian or American radicals, and even some sympathetic Englishmen also took up their pens. Sister India, The Fair Sex of India, Unhappy India, The True India, A Son of Mother India Answers, An Englishman Defends Mother India—for two years, the torrent of prose showed little sign of slackening. A sub-genre of “tu quoque” retorts sprang up, among them C.S. Ranga Iyer’s Father India, which described in robust detail the sexual depravity of American urban youth, and K. L. Gauba’s Uncle Sham, an exposé of American racial oppression that enjoyed a wildfire success in India all its own. The controversy overflowed the Anglophone world, with translations and responses appearing in several vernacular Indian and many European and Asian languages, and spread beyond the print media as well. From Madras to Chicago to London, men and women gathered in conferences and meetings to support, debate, or deplore Mayo’s book. Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire is a comprehensive study of this controversy. Sinha has large claims to make. Since Mayo wrote her book as a provocation, deliberately timing it to precede (and, she hoped, curtail the scope of) the scheduled decennial review of the 1919 Government of India Act, it is hardly surprising that it proved controversial. Yet, no-one could have anticipated the whirlwind that followed. Like a few other intensely debated texts (for our times The Satanic Verses, perhaps, or Hitler’s Willing Executioners), Mother India acted less as a mirror than a catalyst, mobilizing readers and groups and producing effects it could not contain. It became, Sinha contends, “a disruptive and enabling event,” one that “generated various new configurations—alternative visions of community and subjectivity—the political outcomes of which were as yet not determined” (p. 65). When those “outcomes” crystalized, moreover, they were unrecognizably distant from what Mayo intended. A book written to document India’s ineluctable backwardness and legitimize British colonial rule significantly helped destabilize that rule and consolidate the nationalist case. How could Mayo’s plan so comprehensively backfire? Her American location, and the global character of the controversy, certainly had something to do with it. Not that United States policy was anti-imperialist exactly, especially given the country’s own adventures in the Philippines—in defense of which Mayo had, not coincidentally, written an earlier book. But Wilsonian and isolationist ideas made Americans more skeptical about the claims of European empires, and a diasporic community of Indian revolutionary exiles within the forty-eight states undercut Mayo’s claims to expertise. American reception of the book was, then, very mixed, with political radicals, African-American leaders, and prominent social reformers like Jane Addams condemning it, and religious leaders and women’s organizations—groups that might have been expected to sympathize—keeping their distance as well. Mayo’s literary strategy backfired too. Mayo found this enraging and almost impossible to understand. “Facts are facts,” she insisted: if the instances and evils she cited were correct, her conclusions must inevitably follow. Yet, to her own and her supporters’ intense frustration, critics disagreed, insisting (as Gandhi most famously put it) that the book was “without doubt untruthful, be the facts stated ever so truthful” (p. 109). Mayo contended that her “facts” captured Indian society’s unchanging essence; simply by spotlighting them, she told one friend, was to give “plain, spade’s a spade reasons” for the “imperative necessity…that Britain should stand firm in India.” A good portion of her readers, however, interpreted those same “facts” differently. Too many Indians were indeed poor and uneducated, they agreed; too many women and girls were subjected; conservative elites and traditions held far too much power. But who was to blame for this sorry situation? British rule in India was, after all, now well over a century old; it could hardly be absolved of responsibility. Indeed, as the veteran social reformer Kamakshi Natarajan put it in Miss Mayo’s Mother India: A Rejoinder, far from helping Indian politicians in their efforts to combat conservative elites and address social problems, colonial administrators “invariably throw their weight on the side of the status quo” (p. 122). Britain’s oldest argument for empire—the claim that imperial rule would uplift and civilize barbarous populations—was stood upon its head. Far from modernizing India, colonial rule had worsened its “backwardness,” preventing Indians from working out their own salvation. And among those reform-minded Indians figured, most prominently, women. Mayo claimed to speak on behalf of India’s suffering and “voiceless” women—another claim with a long genealogy in colonial writing. Indian women, however, almost unanimously repudiated her patronage, insisting strenuously on their capacity to speak on their own behalf. The Indian women’s movement did not owe its birth to the Mayo controversy, with the critically important All-India Women’s Conference formed just before, and not in response to, the book’s publication, but it spurred recruitment and ignited activism. Many young women cited the controversy as the moment of their political awakening, and an older generation found in it new opportunities to state their claims. The controversy brought Radhabai Subbarayon and Jahanara Shahnawaz to London as women’s delegates to the Roundtable Conferences; it gave the brilliant and eloquent Amrit Kaur the chance to argue face-to-face with Cabinet ministers and British feminists alike; in Madras, Muthulakshmi Reddi exploited Mayo’s charges to shame male legislators into supporting her feminist reforms. Sinha, rightly, stresses the significance of that political mobilization. Penning protests, holding meetings, and winning the ear of nationalist politicians and Cabinet ministers alike, women not only demonstrated their own political capacity; they shattered conceptions that had structured Indian politics for decades. For while these women activists joined their male colleagues in repudiating the colonial state’s claims to stand for progress and civilization, they also rejected the view, which many Indian male politicians had shared, that social questions involving women were best left to communal authorities and in the realm of the “private.” Their mobilization forced the passage of the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act, the first piece of legislation regulating marriage across communal lines; it also enabled women to present themselves, remarkably, as the archetypal modern citizen, consciously free of the shackles of community and caste. Organized women brought this stance into the debates over constitutional reform in the early 1930s, where they stood—against both communal politicians and an imperial parliament eager to proliferate communities and electorates to be granted separate representation—for a principled, individualistic, liberalism. This moment of women’s incarnation as the universal citizen couldn’t last. As the Simon Commission gave way to the Roundtable Conferences and then to the horse-trading over the 1935 Government of India Act, women came under tremendous pressure to do what other “interests” were doing and come to terms. Sinha captures well the complex and profoundly ambiguous role played in those negotiations by British feminists, who, divided or ambivalent about Indian nationalism, were willing to compromise in ways many of their Indian counterparts were not in order to expand the female franchise and win “reserved” women’s seats. When those seats were awarded communally, Indian women who had helped make the case felt profoundly betrayed, aware of how that result would undermine their cross-communal organizations and their capacity to stand, rhetorically, for a genuinely universal vision of the nation. But if organized women were, through these machinations, less represented than contained, understandings of India’s political order and likely future had decisively shifted. Far from bolstering British rule, the Mayo controversy, and the constitutional reforms that followed, discredited the modernizing claims of the colonial state, elevated Indian nationalism, and “went a long way towards fostering the realization of the British Raj as conspicuously terminal” (p. 42). The uproar over Mother India was, before Sinha’s book, hardly unknown. But Mayo’s text is so unsavory, and the whole episode was so extreme, that once the furore died down historians (especially political historians) tended to look away. The controversy was relegated to the subfields of family or feminist history; the grand narratives of nationalism, devolution and constitutional reform gave it hardly a mention. Sinha’s book shows, however, just how wrong-headed that was, for Mother India was nothing if not “political.” It was written to influence politics, catalyzed new political forces and claims, and affected the trajectory of empire—if in ways its author never, ever, intended. Sinha has, then, not only established the significance of this episode; she has also rewritten, I hope to lasting effect, the “high political” history of devolution and constitutional reform in the 1930s. Make no mistake: this is a wonderful, important book. I am figuratively wearing all that academic regalia Virginia Woolf found so off-putting as I write that line, though, for it is also anything but an easy read. Unlike another recent book-about-a-book, Samuel Moyn’s A Holocaust Controversy (2005), which lays out a clear narrative of events and wears its prodigious learning lightly (Moyn’s controversy had Lévinas and Sartre in the fray), Sinha’s book has a thematic rather than strictly chronological structure, provides no detailed summary of Mayo’s text, and makes many of its points in abstract and highly conceptual language. Even readers persuaded of the need to situate the controversy in its full, global, context, for example, might be less than enlightened by Sinha’s explanation that her point in doing so “is to acknowledge the constitutive effects of the competing and contradictory force fields in which the controversy simultaneously operated, and with which it was itself coextensive, to disclose its more unruly history in the interwar period” (p. 27). Prose like this doesn’t exactly entice the reader. Yet, against my usual preferences for plain style, I feel compelled to justify—or at least to try to explain—Sinha’s stylistic choices. For Sinha is writing not only within and about Indian and imperial history but equally within and about postcolonial studies, than which no scholarly subfield is more rarified. True, the field’s founder, Edward Said, wrote in a sparkling and lucid style, but at least some of his followers have tended more towards the (as Amit Chaudhuri put it recently) “exuberantly impenetrable.” Sinha has something to say to this mandarin community, though, and to be heard on equal terms she has written within its idiom. I am no expert in this realm, but even as a lay reader I can detect four significant revisionist challenges to influential, even dominant, paradigms. These vary in importance and persuasiveness, and some have been advanced by other writers as well, but taken together they establish the book’s must-read status for those who don’t much care about the 1935 Government of India Act but care a great deal about the theoretical debates that have swirled through the linked fields of political theory, cultural studies, and the “new” imperial history for the past twenty years. A first challenge is methodological. Postcolonial scholars have made it their urgent goal to dethrone the paradigmatic status of Western history and demonstrate the integrity, or even rival modernity, of non-Western societies. This effort has led, particularly in Indian history, to a close attention to local relations of production and power, as well as to the process by which Western paradigms are locally adapted and made new. Sinha, however, takes a very different approach, seeking to trace how all local articulations are shaped by the wider “imperial social formation”—that is, by that global web of linked but different and unequal societies—of which they are a part. This is an approach that owes more to Immanuel Wallerstein than to Edward Said, but its explanatory value is considerable. Sinha’s attention to global connections, for example, drove her to track the controversy in the United States and hence to capture the degree to which both Indian reformers and British politicians, aware of the new vulnerability of British power, made their arguments with an eye on the behemoth across the seas. This “insistently global and intersecting” approach, Sinha suggests, is another—and may be a better—way of “provincializing Europe” (p. 15–16). A second revisionist claim deals with Indian nationalism and especially with its relationship to the vexed “woman question.” Here, Sinha draws upon, but also recasts, Partha Chatterjee’s influential arguments about how Indian nationalists sought to establish the cultural integrity of their movement by constructing “the social” as a separate realm of unsullied national virtue and tradition—a resolution that enabled them at least partially to protect that social realm from the state’s incursions but that identified Indian women in particular with the domestic and the private. Yes, agrees Sinha, nationalists may indeed have tried to do this, but that “resolution” proved fragile and contingent, with the women’s mobilization of 1927–29 “open[ing] up the way for a reintegration of social and political reforms in the service of an expanded nationalist project” (p. 124). This may not be the most elegant way to say this—the distinct tectonic plates of “the political” and “the social” shift into alignment and then, with a creak, move back out of gear—but Sinha’s basic point is, simply, that nationalisms and their “resolutions” are themselves artifacts of social forces and choices that can shift over time. Even the most persuasive paradigm, in other words, is historically bounded, and it behooves us to pay attention to those moments when “common sense” changes, alignments shift, and the hidden and voiceless become visible and audible. In the Mayo controversy many of those unmuzzled voices belonged to women, and simply by crediting their impact and power Sinha is making a third important revisionist point. For if imperialist rhetoric posited indigenous women more as victimized than vocal, much recent scholarship has done more to dissect than discover the limits of that logic. Colonized women, we are told, figured as the grounds on which empire was contested, the object in whose name men of all races and European women struggled and spoke. That cacophony of appropriating voices echoes through the archives, rendering any hope of recovering the words of the colonized themselves impossibly utopian. Several influential studies—most notably Lata Mani’s history of sati—have laid bare this dynamic, and certainly Mayo and some of the British women allied with her assumed Indian women’s “voicelessness” as well. Yet such expectations were confounded; in this case the logic of colonial discourse did not hold. Subaltern they might have been, but when confronted with Mayo’s charges Indian women had no trouble speaking, and if their words were sometimes misunderstood or used against them, this was a fate shared by many others—not least, obviously, Mayo herself. Indian women, Sinha robustly states, emerge in this controversy as “far more than just the ‘ground’ on which imperialists and male nationalists elaborated competing definitions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’” instead constituting themselves as “a legitimate constituency in their own right” (p. 153). But it is in analyzing the content—and not simply the eloquence and extent—of that women’s speech that Sinha’s arguments become most original and transgressive. For by admitting that organized women deployed the language of liberalism, repudiating all offers of special franchises or rights, Sinha documents—in this utterly colonial context—universalist liberal rhetoric at work for emancipatory ends. It is hard to overstress how intriguing and unexpected—at least in light of recent scholarship—this finding is. For few old assumptions have been more thoroughly discredited in the last decades than the claim that liberalism’s promises “translated” across the imperial divide; in Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire, for example, we instead see liberal thinkers and liberal thought playing a crucial and constitutive role in the construction and justification of British rule. The self-actualizing individual subject worthy of bearing rights so often turned out, in the colonial context, to be synonymous with the colonizing, white, man; descriptions of the attributes of that subject became reasons to bar any marked by difference from the polity. Viewed from the standpoint of the colonized, nineteenth-century liberalism could appear less inadequate or incomplete than consciously exclusionary—as nothing more than a cloak worn to disguise particular interests as timeless and universal. Sinha accepts all this. She is aware, she writes, that “the universal political subject of liberal thought was marked by specific cultural attributes that issued in ‘liberal strategies of exclusion’”; she agrees that “the withholding of political rights under colonialism was not an aberration of, but intrinsic to, the universalistic doctrines of liberalism” (p. 12); indeed, her own earlier work on the deployment of the trope of “effeminacy” in late nineteenth-century Bengal documented just such an exclusionary dynamic at work. Yet, in the 1920s liberalism also emerged as a vehicle for Indian women’s claims, and Sinha is a good enough historian to be determined to figure out why. Once again, she contextualizes: if we take seriously the point that ideologies—even those claiming universal validity—are mobilized in particular and historical circumstances and have particular and historical effects, she reasons, we can explain this seeming paradox. For, from the standpoint of politicized Indian women between the wars, universalist liberalism hardly looked like a “governing ideology.” Rather, with British authorities pursuing political stability through the recognition and separate representation of “differences” of all kinds (and, when confronted with charges of women’s subjection, perfectly willing to add women to the list), and with many Indian politicians also eager to define women communally, small wonder women began voicing a claim to political rights based on their status as self-actualizing, rational beings alone. Colonial conditions, in other words, themselves laid the basis for women’s articulation of “an agonistic or truly adversarial liberalism” (p. 13). Sinha’s powerful revisionist claims explain, then, the rather dense conceptual language of this book. There are, as a result, some costs: human personalities and dramas emerge only fitfully; occasionally, indeed, political actions are evaluated less in terms of the pragmatic options available at the time than in terms of how well they mesh with the conceptual understanding the actor might have if he or she had already read Sinha’s book. Historical outcomes that don’t accord with pervasive scholarly paradigms are described, too often, as “ironic” (a word used possibly a dozen times in chapters two and three), a formulation that makes sense really only if we accept that it is reasonable to expect historical actors of the 1920s to behave in ways paradigms developed by literary scholars or historians working on nineteenth-century subjects might suggest. To Sinha’s great credit, however, when those paradigms and her historical findings come into conflict, she consistently turns her critical intelligence on the paradigms themselves. She does not reject them: as should be clear by now, Sinha is anything but a card-carrying empiricist; she is writing within the tradition she revises and contests. She has, however, subjected some important conceptual frameworks to a remorseless historicization, an effort that has provided us not only with a better portrait of the political ferment of interwar India but also with a more precise—and hence more useful—understanding of the temporal “reach” of particular explanatory paradigms. It would be interesting to follow Sinha’s own method and track the reverberations of this unusual and admirable book. Susan Pedersen is Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University, where she teaches British, European, and International History. She is the author of several books, including The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, which won the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four, which used the intimate correspondence between two aristocratic daughters who married into the Balfour family to trace the changing relations of marriage and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appeared from John Murray this May. Featured image: “The Other Roundtable,” drawing by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa depicting five of the interwar Indian feminists discussed in Specters. From left to right, Sarojini Naidu, Radhabai Subbarayon, Muthulakshmi Reddi, Amrit Kaur, and Jahanara Shahnawaz.