Looking for Feminism

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Looking for Feminism

Mahua Sarkar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In a recent talk given at a North American University, a prominentfeminist scholar from the United States observed that the contributionsof Black women in mass political movements have been given shortshrift in both conventional male-centred narratives of revolutionarymovements (such as the Black Power movement in the USA), andmainstream feminist accounts of women’s activism, because interven-tions by Black women do not always conform to the usual definitions ofeither revolutionary or feminist action.1 Drawing her examples from pro-tests launched by Black working-class women – especially mothers –against Pass Laws, and restricted access to housing and educationalopportunities in mid-1950s South Africa, the speaker commentedthat feminists, especially those of colour, need to ‘see feminism in themost unlikely places’. She further stressed that feminists need to‘acknowledge’ instances of ‘indigenous feminist action’, which remainmostly undocumented or unknown otherwise.2

While I share this concern over the limitations of dominant represen-tations in principle, the speaker’s comments regarding the need to lookfor feminism in ‘unlikely’ places, as well as questions that followed fromthe predominantly North American audience (such as ‘how do we knowit is feminism when we see it’, again, presumably in such ‘unlikely’contexts as the working-class struggle against apartheid in South Africa),threw up a set of questions that resonate with my current preoccupationswith the problems of writing histories of difference in general, andfeminist history in particular. What, for instance, is the definition of‘feminism’ being deployed here as apparently transparent, but in factremains remarkably unspecified in such usage? Who or what determineswhat ‘unlikely’ and, by logical extension, ‘likely’ contexts for ‘feminist’politics might be? Does resistance3 by women to any (or multiple)form(s) of oppression and injustice – regardless of its myriad sitesand modalities of enunciation – necessarily have to be baptised ‘feminist’in order for it to be appreciated, indeed visible, within academic

# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233Mahua Sarkar, ‘Looking for Feminism’Gender & History, Vol.16 No.2 August 2004, pp. 318–333.

discourses? In what terms, then, are we to understand/apprehend acts ofresistance by women that do not readily lend themselves to such a billing?And last, while I understand how feminist history is enriched throughanachronistic inclusions of revolutionary actions initiated by women any-where within its folds, I am not convinced that histories of such struggleshave necessarily something to gain from recognition/acknowledgement byfeminists fifty or one hundred years later. In my reading, such claims to theabilities/rights of feminists living and working in ‘the West’4 – regardless oftheir national/ethnic/racial positioning – to validate acts of resistance under-taken elsewhere, thus, seem to echo an old misunderstanding that hasproved to be remarkably obdurate within Western modernisationist/liberalthinking regarding the direction of flow of value – in terms of both ideasand material goods – in the capitalist world system.5 I raise this issue not tobe contrary for the sake of it, but because it would seem that the intellec-tual politics implicit in such uses of language, no matter how unconscious,is not entirely divorced from larger formations of power – geopolitical,social, economic or otherwise.

While these questions are clearly at the heart of the politics of know-ledge production in the West, especially in its use and appropriation ofhistories of peoples and places outside the margins of its self-imagin-ation,6 this paper grapples with a slightly different, albeit related, problemin the light of the questions I raise above. Here, I want to focus on waysin which metropolitan intellectual politics7 influences knowledge pro-duction within third-world or anti-imperial locations – defined geograph-ically or otherwise – about subjects from or in the third world, whichhave been ignored by one or more form(s) of normative historicalnarratives. Specifically, I will examine certain tendencies within a grow-ing body of research on Muslim women in colonial India – a subjectcategory that, until recently, has received relatively little attention withinmainstream, and even feminist, historiography of India. Through thisdiscussion, I will reflect on ways in which a particular notion of femi-nism, as a metanarrative of emergence and progress towards an appar-ently known end,8 operates to inform and shape this historiography andits underlying structure of desires, best exemplified in the recurringmetaphors of visibility and voice,9 in specific, if unintended ways.

I take my cue here from Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who insists thather critique of the ‘analytical strategies’ of ‘Western feminist’ discourse,which produce ‘the West’ as the ‘implicit referent, i.e., the yardstick bywhich to encode and represent cultural Others’, also applies to ‘thirdworld scholars writing about their own cultures’.10 It seems that whilecriticising the ‘ethnocentric universalism’11 or ‘sanctioned ignorances’12

in the work of scholars from the geographic West has become somethingof a commonplace in postcolonial scholarship,13 the strategies used by

Looking for Feminism 319

# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004.

postcolonial/third-world writers themselves in their attempt to rewritehistory remain relatively unscrutinised. Mary E. John expresses a similardiscomfort regarding the lack of reflection on the kinds of ‘co-constructednarratives’ used at times by Indian feminists to retrieve their histories,about what ‘becomes sayable at particular historical conjunctures’and within what ‘institutions and practices’.14 As Mohanty and Johnsee it, the task of formulating an explicitly situated postcolonial feministintellectual agenda does not stop with simply critiquing ‘sanctionedignorances amongst Western intellectuals’; it also necessarily involvesan ongoing examination of the ‘enabling constraints’ produced bypostcolonial scholars’ own locations within – or vis a vis – the West.15

This paper is a product of precisely such ongoing reflection on thechoice of narrative strategies and categories available to postcolonial/third-world scholars as they attempt to produce histories of peoplesfrom the third world, often for the Western academy. The main purposehere is to offer a critical reading of certain unacknowledged conventionswithin such scholarship that, in my view, undercut its stated commitmentto exploring diverse histories. The paper in this sense is no more than anexercise in space-clearing – or what Martina Kessel calls a ‘think piece’16

– which presents not a fully developed alternative argument, but a set ofreflections that need further elaboration, but which are nonethelessuseful in their current form in mapping, or perhaps re-defining, thecontours of an ongoing debate within both feminist and postcolonialscholarship, often in tandem. What follows, therefore, is both a criticalengagement with a specific body of literature – on Muslim women incolonial India – and an attempt to think through some of the problemsof writing histories of difference in and around the cracks of normativeteleologies of the modern.

I should also clarify that I do not aspire to present an exhaustive reviewof the existing literature on Muslim women in the Indian subcontinenthere.17 My concern is restricted mostly to scholarship on Muslim womenin colonial India – a rather understudied area within Indian historiog-raphy. The empirical focus of the paper is further narrowed to a fewrecently published, influential works in this area that make explicit use ofthe idea of ‘feminism’. Metaphors of change and ‘emancipation ofwomen’, however, are certainly not the sole preserve of the texts citedbelow. The broader implications of the arguments presented here, there-fore, may well be relevant to feminist histories written in other contexts.

Burden of proof

In recent decades, feminist scholarship in the West has been subjectedto much criticism for its continued, if unacknowledged, adherence to its

320 Gender and History


liberal roots, especially its investment in preserving the coherence of‘woman’ as a category which, like the liberal ‘individual’, hides itsspecific ethno-class18 composition behind a language of universalism.19

As critical interventions led by black, third-world and/or lesbian femi-nists20 have rightly pointed out, insistence on a universal category such as‘woman’, based on a single axis of identification/signification, occludesthe simultaneous workings of other axes such as race, class or sexuality(to name a few), that necessarily inflect one’s experience of genderoppression or privilege.21 Given these homogenising tendencies stem-ming from a liberalism that Ann Snitow describes as ‘an essential thread’running through ‘Anglo-American feminism’22 – albeit increasinglyacknowledged23 – it is perhaps not surprising that feminist scholarsinterested in writing histories of difference have taken up the task ofmaking experiences of previously marginalised women visible as animportant counter-strategy. The recent burgeoning of historical researchon Muslim women in colonial India can be read as part of a similar moveto counter both the overwhelming visibility of Hindu middle-classwomen, and the near invisibility of Muslim women, or their persistentrepresentation as ‘backward’, within normative historical accounts.24

However, to the extent that this ‘writing back’ is reactive and mooredto a project of recovery, it is often beset by some typical problems.

For one, much of this research simply takes categories of difference,such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’, for granted, without attempting a relationalreading of how such difference is constructed in the first place, and towhat end. Consequently, the descriptive labels that mark differentwomen also often end up naturalising these differences.25 More import-antly, as Joan W. Scott has argued for women’s history in general, the‘herstory’ mode of rewriting history, which characterises much of thisliterature, tries to simply ‘fit a new [or previously ignored] subject – [inthis case, Muslim] women – into received categories, [such as modern, orliberal, or feminist] interpreting their actions in terms recognizable . . .’within the dominant historiographic tradition in question.26 The effect,I would argue, is precisely to flatten the very difference that apparentlymandated this ‘new’ history in the first place, and produce Muslimwomen as ‘just like’, or rather ‘almost like’, the fabled subject positions‘liberal’ or ‘feminist’. As a result, what might have been a rich andcomplex history of negotiation and resistance is reduced to yet anothertired exercise in the service of producing sameness.

In much of the scholarship on Muslim women in colonial India, theoverwhelming purpose of the arguments seems to be to prove that they(Muslim women) underwent a set of changes – variously described as‘enlightenment’, ‘awakening’ or ‘modernisation’, and defined in termsof a familiar infusion of Westernised practices in institutions such as



education, seclusion and family – that modernising women everywhereare supposed to go through on the fast track of Progress. For instance, inthe introduction to her recent book on Indian Muslim women, AzraAsghar Ali describes the main goals of the text as tracing the ‘chain ofdevelopments that gradually opened up a space for Muslim women’ inthe decades before independence, and in turn facilitated the ‘emergenceof feminism’ among them.27 Once formulated in these terms, the task inmuch of the book is then reduced to simply recording the familiar‘transformations’, defined almost always as an increased presence ofMuslim women – in specific institutions of education, health care, socialand political legislature and literary culture – which contributed to theirpresumed arrival at or ‘evolution’ into, as the author would have it, an alreadydetermined end – feminism/feminist consciousness or subjecthood.28

In another important recent work on Muslim women in colonialBengal, Sonia Amin discusses the applicability of terms such as bhadralok(gentleman) and bhadramahila (gentlewoman), which were born in thecontext of rapid modernisation among a Hindu middle-class in thenineteenth century, to the men and women of the newly emergingMuslim middle-class in the early twentieth century:

If we place the Zobedas and the Rabeyas and the Monwaras29 of 1920 alongsidethe Ashalatas and Swarnalatas and the Anupamas,30 we see the close resemblance.At first glance one would not be able to tell them apart. They looked the same,spoke the same language, wore the same sari and chemise, inhabited the samegeographical space, and shared many vital concerns such as husband, home,children etc. It is only on a closer scrutiny that the differences would emerge—inreligious belief and ritual life, in notions of a past heritage and mythology, and inpolitical stands.31

It is curious that neither Amin’s book nor her two articles32 dedicatedmore explicitly to the problem of appropriate nomenclature, give thereaders an adequate sense of why the applicability of these terms meritsso much attention. Surely, the Muslim middle-class was free to refer toitself by whatever name it chose? And if not, should that not be a part ofthis discussion on nomenclature? In an earlier article, Amin makes thebarest of gestures towards the source of the problem when she writes:

A scrutiny of contemporary literature reveals that the non-Muslim community,Hindu and Brahmo in the main, did not refer to their Muslim counterpart asbhadralok, the term being apparently reserved for their own kind.33

So a discussion of the politics underlying the marking of differencethrough the use (or withholding) of terms such as bhadralok andbhadramahila inheres in Amin’s work, but she does not address it. Instead,her work seems preoccupied with simply proving that Muslim experiences



of ‘reforms’ at the turn of the nineteenth century were akin to thoseundertaken by Hindus and Brahmos half a century earlier, as if theseprocesses were discrete, unrelated occurrences that could be treated asseparate moments in a narrative of linear progress towards modernity.Differences, in this discussion, appear as somehow essential, belonging tosomething of an inner world, beyond the reach of immediate vision, thatapparently need no explanation as products of specific lived histories andpolitics, even though conceptions of difference around such naturalised‘notions of past heritage and mythology’ have resulted in periodiceruptions of violence everywhere in the subcontinent – involving the deathsand displacement of millions – throughout its career in modernity, both inits colonial and post-colonial moments.

Feminist grounds

Another striking feature of the literature on Muslim women is its frequentuse of and relationship to the idea of ‘feminism’.34 On closer scrutiny,what emerges is something of a paradox: an automatic invocation, on onehand, of the terms feminism/feminist in discussions of the life and worksof Muslim women in late colonial India, and a simultaneous uncertainty inusing them. Consequently, many of the texts seem to be quite preoccupiedwith proving their subjects as adequately feminist.35 Take, for example,the following passage, in which Amin considers similarities betweenBritish and Bengali women, only to follow swiftly with an apologeticdisclaimer:

[Were] Bengali women experiencing a similar construction of the private and publicand erosion of its distance, as Victorian/Edwardian women? . . . A cogent, apparent,and historically concrete ground for comparability of Victorian/Edwardian and colo-nial Bengali women was the phenomenon of ‘First Wave Feminism’ . . . It is in the[large, multifaceted] nature and the objective of this feminist movement that thelinkages between the British and Bengali—Brahmo and Muslim—models are dis-cernible. At the same time it must be pointed out that this is only an analogy . . . validonly from a distance far enough to blur incongruencies.36

The author seems to be quite clear here that ‘First Wave Feminism’provides the ‘ground’ – perhaps the only one – for comparing subjectswho are sufficiently different from each other to warrant such compari-sons otherwise. Note also her invocation of terms such as ‘cogent’ and‘apparent’, which establish ‘feminism’ as a standard beyond question,whose meanings are both transparent and shared across temporal andspatial contexts.

Now it may well be that the particular women in question are in factfeminists, according to standards established in the West. Or it may bethat they do not qualify as such. My problem, however, stems from my



inability, or perhaps refusal, to see the usefulness of such comparisons,which routinely hijack attempts to understand/appreciate Muslimwomen’s works in the teeth of intense opposition in colonial India ontheir own terms, shifting our focus in the process to a discussion of howMuslim women fared in a race to an already determined feminist finish-ing line. What I object to, in other words, is the way in which feminismfigures in these discussions as the epistemic ground that defines, indeedmonopolises, the very terms within which we are obliged to pose ques-tions of women’s agency in any context. In my reading, this preoccupa-tion with ‘feminism’, as an adequate measure of women’s agencyeverywhere, signals the continued importance of the old modernisation-ist notion that all impetus for change or ‘progress’, including thoseaffecting women, originate in the West and then get imported elsewherein an entirely unidirectional traffic of ideas. The picture, of course, isconsiderably more complicated.37 As Anisuzzaman, in writing aboutwomen’s emancipation in late colonial Bengal, poignantly reminds us,

Many [scholars] have assumed that the [19th century] Bengal renaissance wasinspired entirely by the infusion of western ideas. But in reality, it is difficult totrace the path to self-definition of a colonized society38

Or as Roushan Jahan argues in her introduction to Rokeya SakhawatHossain’s Sultana’s Dream, ‘feminist sentiments [can] grow from indi-genous roots, without depending on foreign influence’39 – a point thatwe will revisit presently.

I am also troubled by what seems to be a wholesale acceptance ofpost-enlightenment notions of visibility and voice in the public sphere asthe only legitimate markers of subject-hood, and the automatic equationof such visibility/voice with a feminist subject position in many of theseaccounts. For instance, in her book, The Emergence of Feminism, AzraAsghar Ali seems to conflate uncritically feminist consciousness withwomen’s public appearance or participation in mass political move-ments. For those of us on the VHP/BJP (two arms of the powerfulHindu Right based in India) watch,40 it is of course increasingly difficultto automatically celebrate the presence of vocal and visible women inmass political movements. But my objection to Ali’s deployment offeminism as a politics of only rights-bearing subject-hood turns on theway in which such analytical conflations foreclose upon the possibility ofappreciating other, perhaps more collective, forms of agency and resist-ance that women have historically deployed within the ‘private’, andhence less visible, sphere to cope with gender oppression.41

We are all familiar with stories of women braving social ostracism intheir fight against seclusion and purdah that constitute a staple offeminist accounts of women in colonial India. However, accounts of



resistance by women who did not wish to pander to their liberal hus-bands’ desire for appropriately ‘modern’ consorts seem to get routinelyglossed over, as so much inconvenient detail that unnecessarily compli-cates the story of modernity as the ‘normalized telos of a developmentalprocess’,42 even in its embattled feminist version. Such elisions point,I think, to the continued purchase of feminism’s foundational liberalpremises in the praxis of feminist intellectual politics, even if we think wehave tackled the beast in theory.

Out of place, out of time: the problem of coevalness

In the concluding chapter of her book on Muslim women in colonialBengal, Sonia Amin wisely cautions against making hasty comparisonsbetween Bengali Hindu, Muslim and British women. As she writes:

In respect of the time frame alone, for instance, the three categories of womenstand apart—British women started experiencing modernization from the earlynineteenth century, Brahmo women from the middle of the century and theMuslim women from the first decades of the twentieth century.43

Amin is of course confident that notwithstanding the many ‘diversecultural and material differences’, by the 1940s

. . . a Brahmo bhadramahila, a Muslim bhadramahila and an English lady . . . wouldhave much ultimately to say to each other—much in terms of territory gained orlost in their struggle for ‘emancipation’ . . . [The] modern, urban dwelling, middle-class Muslim bhadramahila had emerged.44

In other words, in spite of their different starting points on this pathtowards ‘emancipation’ (/feminism), by the mid-nineteenth century,Bengali women – even Bengali Muslim women – had in fact caught upwith British women. What, then, is the difficulty in comparing them?The answer, it would seem, lies in the problem of time. Or to be moreprecise, in the perception that British, Brahmo and Muslim womenachieve ‘emancipation’, defined presumably by their arrival or emer-gence in the field of public vision, at different times.

One could of course argue45 that the so-called ‘modernisation’ ofBritish women in the early nineteenth century and the ‘lack’ of itamong women in parts of the world colonised by Britain might justhave something to do with each other. Any discussion of developments– economic, political or social – in either of these locations shouldtherefore take into account the relational nature of these processes,especially since the particular definition of ‘emancipation’ beingdeployed here turns so heavily on the trope of visibility/voice in a ‘public’sphere that is defined by the condition of colonial domination.



The problem, I believe, stems from the practice of evaluating experi-ences that are spawned by very different social and cultural contexts, interms of a single measure of achievement derived from a specific set ofhistorical contingencies – European/metropolitan imperial experiences –but touted as a transhistorical universal goal/standard to be emulatedeverywhere. One consequence of fetishising a particular set of experiencesas ‘progress’ is to interpret all difference in terms of ‘distance’ (temporal, asin ‘lagging behind’, and/or substantive, as in ‘different/deviating’) from thatideal and apparently common end, forcing them in the process into ahierarchy, rather than to consider them laterally, in their full measure ofcomplexity and richness.46 A second consequence, as we have seen before,is to oversimplify or even ignore altogether those experiences that do notlend themselves easily to this scheme of actualisation/failure of the normal-ised telos. The problem of ‘time’ that Amin runs into in the quote above isthus clearly an instance of what Johannes Fabian has called the denial ofcoevalness47 – a consequence of ordering social and cultural differencesthat exist in a common temporal present into a hierarchical sequence ofhistorical epochs or evolutionary stages. Difference, in such formulations,is understood as points on a vertical scale of inferiority/superiority, pre-sence/lack or advancement/backwardness, rather than on a horizontal fieldof plurality in which no point has definitional advantage over the others.

The final problem I want to raise here also has to do with the problem oftime, but it brings us back more specifically to the unpleasant business of‘unlikely’ contexts for feminist action. It is not uncommon to find withinthis literature particular Muslim women being presented as exceptional, inthe sense of ‘ahead of their time,’ and often even ‘out of place’. Thisparticular formulation is most apparent in discussions of Rokeya SakhawatHossein48 and the formidable legacy of her work. Scholars are frequentlymoved to try to locate the roots of her critical thinking in a context otherthan the zenana49 in late colonial Bengal. Consider the following quotesfrom an article by Sonita Sarker,50 in which she attempts to place

. . . this particular Bengali woman’s engagement with modernity in a milieu largerthan Bengal so as to emphasize that her membership lies also in a greater com-munity of thinkers, namely in the company of women intellectuals in other parts ofthe world . . . women who address the roles of technology and its rationality indescribing the new woman who can own the property of reason.

And later, Sarker comments on Rokeya’s now famous piece Sultana’sDream (1905):51

In conceiving [the world of Sultana], Hossein should be seen as a contemporary of thefeminist writers of utopias . . . such as the North American Charlotte Perkins Gilman(in Herland, published in 1915) and the Britisher Virginia Woolf (in Three Guineas,published in 1938) who also placed Women in direct relationship to science.52



I draw our attention to these quotes to highlight in what terms these andother similar attempts at establishing Rokeya as exceptional, constructthe temporal and spatial contexts that she did inhabit. For if we are toaccept Sarker’s description of Rokeya as a ‘new woman who can own theproperty of reason’, or concur with Sonia Amin’s indictment of thezenana only as ‘the repository of weakness, ignorance and temptation’,53

then we in fact ignore a history of courage and grit, of a long line ofwomen (and men) who were engaged in the work of cultural andpolitical resistance and reform for over half a century before Rokeyawas born.54 So why should it be so hard to imagine that her criticalitycould have been fostered within the material and discursive contextsof her life – albeit in specific, situated, perhaps even limited ways?Why must we trace the genealogy of Rokeya’s critical consciousness to acommunity of intellectual women who were publishing ten to fortyyears after Sultana’s Dream was published – in English – but by allaccounts never as much as acknowledged her work, when her ownworld was full of women and men with fortitude and resourcefulness?

Unless, of course, our theoretical language is still moored to thebinary thinking of colonial/imperial discourse – a discourse that needsthe ‘zenana as the cavernous depths of idolatry and superstition’ trope55

to secure daily its own sense of liberal (or liberated) self. This is theirony: the zenana did change. The veil has come to embody a widevariety of complex meanings in Muslim societies all over the world,including its creative deployment in anti-imperialist struggles.56 But theprivileged position(s) accorded to the zenana and the veil as quintessen-tial sites of medieval depravity remains remarkably unchanged withinliberal feminist discourse. Consequently, although the variety of mean-ings women give to life in zenanas interrupt this economy of transparentmeanings often enough, they are recuperated (or made visible) withinthe enlightened folds of feminist accounts only as exceptions – asinstances of feminist consciousness out of time/place. We are back, inother words, in the murky business of hunting for gold in ‘unlikely’ contextsto fill the coffers of feminism, re-instating in the process the zenana, and itwould seem Muslim (/third world) womanhood itself, to the oppressionand victim-hood they are routinely associated with within Western feministdiscourse, produced in the geographic West or elsewhere.

NotesI am grateful to a number of people for directly or indirectly helping me formulate thearguments I make in this paper: Antoinette Burton, Beverly Silver, David Scott, Siba Grovogui,Bilgin Ayata, Prasad Kuduvalli, Indira Ravindran, Preeti Sampat, Smita Sampath, DharnijaVasudevan and Wale Adebanwi for many insightful conversations over the years. Discussionswith my colleagues Gladys Jimenez-Munoz, Tiffany Patterson and Lisa Yun at BinghamtonUniversity prompted me, in part, to write this paper; I thank them too. Earlier versions of the



paper were presented at the Feminist Interventions: Rethinking South Asia Conference at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, 3–4 May 2002, and the Coloniality Working GroupConference, Binghamton University, SUNY, 9–11 May 2002. I thank the participants, espe-cially Anjali Arondekar, Malathi De Alwis, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Parama Roy, Raka Roy,Srirupa Roy, Bhaskar Sarkar and Kamala Visweswaran for their comments. Special thanks toBorocz Jozsef for his many critical insights.

1. M. Bahati Kuumba, ‘You’ve Struck A Rock: Transnational Black Feminism(s) in Com-parative Perspective’. Paper presented at the 4th Annual Symposium of Women’s Studies,‘Transnational Feminisms’, at Binghamton University, 20 April 2001.

2. Kuumba used the term ‘unsupported’ in this context. I have used the words ‘undocu-mented’ and ‘unknown’ in my attempt to paraphrase what I understood to be the generalthrust of her statement.

3. According to Ranajit Guha, ‘resistance’ is the opposing aspect of ‘domination’ within a‘social relation of power’ as typified by the relationship between a dominant group (say,landlord) and a subordinate group (say, peasants). Resistance, in such an understanding,represents the ‘autonomous domain’ of the consciousness of the subordinated. RanajitGuha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1983). See also Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of Guha’s work in The Nation

and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1993), p. 161. I begin with Guha’s formulation of the term. However, I believe thatresistance, as an autonomous domain of subaltern consciousness, ought not to be roman-ticised, since such neat separation of dominant and subaltern realms is quite impossible inpractice, if not in theory. For incisive discussions on the vexed relationships betweendominant and subaltern realms of consciousness/memory/politics, see Ann L. Stoler andKaren Strassler, ‘Castings for the Colonial’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(2000), p. 4; Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim

Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 9.4. Mary E. John has recently defined ‘the West’ as not so much ‘a geographical or temporal

entity’ but a ‘social, economic, cultural,’ and as Ashis Nandy would have it, ‘psychologicalspace’. In her words, it is ‘a transnational category, capable of extending geographicaldeterminations and creating new and specific loci of power/knowledge through the manifoldprocesses of Westernization’. Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and

Postcolonial Histories, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 8–9. See alsoAshis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1983). I use ‘the West’ as a conceptual space that is neitherrestricted to the geographies with which the term is conventionally associated, nor neces-sarily representative of all intellectual/political/cultural/social spaces within such geograph-ical boundaries. I am indebted also to Dipesh Chakrabarty for his specific use of the idea of‘Europe’ from which I derive my own understanding of the ‘West’. In his recent bookChakrabarty writes, ‘ ‘‘Europe’’ and ‘‘India’’ are treated here as hyperreal terms in that theyrefer to certain figures of imagination whose geographic referents remain somewhatindeterminate . . . I realize that . . .Liberal-minded scholars would immediately protest thatany idea of a homogenous, uncontested ‘‘Europe’’ dissolves under analysis. True, but just asthe phenomenon of Orientalism does not disappear simply because some of us have nowattained critical awareness of it, similarly a certain version of ‘‘Europe,’’ reified and cele-brated in the phenomenal world of everyday relationships of power as the scene of the birthof the modern, continues to dominate the discourse of history. Analysis does not make it goaway’. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 27–8.5. For a critique of Euro/West-centric histories, see Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An

Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York:Monthly Review Press, 1976); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist



Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (SanDiego: Academic Press, Inc., 1974); James M. Blaut, The Colonizers’s Model of the World:

Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guildford Press, 1993).6. For some important examples of critical work on the construction and maintenance of the

idea of Europe see, Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989);Robert Miles, ‘Representation of the Other’ in Racism (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 11–40;Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Stuart Hall, David Held,Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson (eds) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 185–228.7. The Euro-American academy is perhaps the most obvious locus of such knowledge

production and deployment, but it is by no means the only one.8. For a discussion of the continued purchase of modernisationalist teleologies in the social

sciences as practised both within the geographical West and elsewhere, see Jozsef Borocz,‘Social Change with Sticky Features and the Failures of Modernizationism.’ Innovation 10(1997), pp. 161–70. See also James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings

of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (University of California Press, 1999), pp. 1–37.9. For incisive discussions of the importance of the metaphors of vision and voice see Joan

W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), pp. 773–97; AntoinetteBurton, ‘Optical Illusions’, The Women’s Review of Books 17 (2000), pp. 21–2.

10. Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Dis-courses,’ in Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World

Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991),pp. 52–5. Mohanty uses the term ‘western feminist’ to refer to ‘feminists who identifythemselves as culturally or geographically from the ‘‘West’’’.

11. Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Dis-courses,’ in Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World

Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence

Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1988), pp. 271–313.

13. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: Reading between East and West, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

14. Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories,(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 26.

15. Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 22–7, 146. For other relevant reflections,see Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1987); Toni Cade Bambara, ‘On the Issue of Roles’ in Toni C. Bambara (ed.), The Black

Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970), pp. 101–110.16. Martina Kessel, ‘The ‘‘Whole Man’’: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-

Century Germany’, Gender & History 15 (2003), p. 2. I thank Helmut Puff and Nancy RoseHunt for bringing this piece to my attention.

17. For discussions of Muslim women in contemporary India, see K. N. Jehangir, Muslim

Women in West Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva, 1991); Mohini Anjum (ed.), Muslim Women in

India (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1992); M. Indu Menon, Status of Muslim women in

India: A Case Study of Kerala (New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1981); Patricia Jeffery,Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (London: Zed Press, 1979). While individualstudies vary in terms of both substantive focus and tone, the works cited above are largelyinvolved in explaining Muslim women’s perceived ‘backwardness’, often in terms of certaintaken-for-granted indices of modernisation – such as formal education, participation in thepublic political rites of the nation-state etc. – in contemporary India. It is not uncommon,therefore, to find in studies of Muslim women, statements such as the following: ‘Tradi-tionally, Muslim women are subordinated to men and secluded from the outside world



which [sic] reduces their importance as individuals. But Westernisation and modernisationare primary forces loosening these traditional restraints on women’. K. N. Jehangir, Muslim

Women in West Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva, 1991), p. 2. Or, ‘[W]omen in the Muslimcommunity are subordinated to men to a greater extent than women in some othercommunities’. Menon, Status of Muslim women, 1981, p. 1. For thoughtful recent work onMuslim women in contemporary India, see Shahida Lateef, Muslim Women in India:

Political and Private Realities, (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990); Muniza Rafiq Khan,Socio-Legal Status of Muslim Women (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1993); Zakia Pathakand Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘Shahbano’, Signs (1989), pp. 558–82.

18. I borrow this phrase from Sylvia Wynter, ‘Un-Settling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Over-Representation.’ KeynoteAddress, 3rd Annual Coloniality Working Group Conference, Un-Settling the Coloniality

of Power: Comparative Colonialisms and the Production of Knowledge, at BinghamtonUniversity, SUNY, 27–28 April 2000.

19. See Ann Snitow, ‘A Gender Diary’, in J. W. Scott (ed.) Feminism and History (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 505–46; Denis Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and

the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan Ltd., 1988).20. Toni C. Bambara (ed.), The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American

Library, 1970); Bell Hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, MA:South End Press, 1981); Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Bos-ton, MA: South End Press, 1990); Cherrıe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds), This Bridge

Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Womenof Color Press, 1981); Hazel Carby, ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and theboundaries of sisterhood’ in CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s

Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches

(The Crossing Press, 1984); Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: ThirdWorld Women and the Politics of Feminism’ in Third World Women, pp. 12–13; SusieTharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender’, inShahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings in South Asian

History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 232–60.21. For important feminist scholarship that grapples with whiteness/privilege see, among others,

Adrienne Rich, ‘Disloyal to Civilisation: Feminism, Racism and Gynephobia,’ in On Lies,

Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,1979), pp. 275–310; Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location,’ in Blood, Bread and

Poetry, Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton), pp. 210–31; Ruth Frankenberg,White women, race matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993); Minnie Bruce Pratt, ‘Identity: Skin Blood Heart,’ in Elly Bulkin,Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith (eds), Yours in Struggle: Three Perspectives on

Feminism, Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984); AntoinetteBurton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture,

1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).22. Ann Snitow, ‘A Gender Diary’, in J. W. Scott (ed.) Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996), p. 525.23. Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 25.24. For recent informative work on or related to Muslim women in colonial India that I do

not explicitly focus on in this essay see Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British

Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998); Gail Minault,Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1998); Zoya Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Communities and

the State (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994); Afira Hamid, ‘Women’s Journalism inthe 19th Century—Some Magazines Which Were Lost’, Journalism Quarterly, X (1991),pp. 1–17.



25. Joan W. Scott, ‘Introduction,’ Feminism and History, pp. 1–16. As Stuart Hall reminds us,cultural identity is as much ‘a matter of becoming’, as it is ‘of being’. Stuart Hall, ‘CulturalIdentity and Diaspora’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-

Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 392–403. Fordiscussions of islamicisation in the context of colonial India, see Shail Mayaram, Resisting

Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997), p. 34; Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, 1871–1906: The

Quest for Identity, 2nd edition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).26. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press,

1988), p. 19.27. Azra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism Among Indian Muslim Women, 1920–1947

(London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xvii. In the Preface to her recent book onPunjabi Muslim women, Dushka H. Saiyid also invokes a similar formulation when shewrites, ‘The study is organized according to the apparent sequence of events in the slowbut steady emancipation of Punjabi Muslim women from the last quarter of thenineteenth century to the time of independence. The legal system that the Muslimwomen were placed in, western education which created an intellectual climate criticalof purdah, along with the public participation of Muslim women in politics, brought manyof them out of seclusion’. Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From

Seclusion to Politics (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998), p. xiv.28. In Asghar Ali’s words, the ‘new public spaces’ were ‘central to the evolving position

of Indian Muslim women from the end of the nineteenth century’. Azra Asghar Ali,The Emergence of Feminism Among Indian Muslim Women, 1920–1947 (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), p. xviii.

29. Muslim names.30. Hindu names.31. Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E. J.

Brill, 1996), p. 12.32. Sonia Amin, ‘Bengali (Muslim) Identity and the Women’s Question: The Debate over

Terminology’, Theoretical Perspectives (Dhaka, 1994); Sonia Amin, ‘The Early MuslimBhadramahila: The Growth of Learning and Creativity, 1876–1939’, in Bharati Ray (ed.)From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press,1995), pp. 107–48.

33. For example, Sonia Amin, ‘The Early Muslim Bhadramahila: The Growth of Learningand Creativity, 1876–1939’, in Bharati Ray (ed.) From the Seams of History: Essays on

Indian Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 108.34. Sonita Sarker, ‘Larger than Bengal: Feminism in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s

Dream and Global Modernities’, Archiv Orientalnı: Quarterly Journal of African and Asian

Studies 68 (2000), pp. 441–56. Azra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism Among Indian

Muslim Women, 1920–1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000).35. Curiously, while earlier commentaries by authors such as Roushan Jahan, or Susie Tharu

and K. Lalitha simply describe Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein as feminist, authors in later worksseem burdened with the need to substantiate their claim. Roushan Jahan, ‘Introduction’ toRokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream and Selections from The Secluded Ones

(New York: CUNY, The Feminist Press, 1988); Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, Women Writing

In India, 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).36. Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E. J.

Brill, 1996), p. 278, emphasis added.37. See Ghulam Murshid, Rasasundari Theke Rokeya: Naripragatir Ek Sha Bachhar, (Dhaka:

Bangla Academy, 1993).38. Anisuzzaman,’Naarimukti, Shamakaal O Begum Rokeya’, in Farida Pradhan (ed.) Begum

Rokeya O Nari Jagaran (Dhaka: Dhaka University, 1995), pp. 17–22. Translated fromBengali original by author.



39. Roushan Jahan, ‘Introduction’, to Rokeya S. Hossein, Sultana’s Dream and Selections from

The Secluded Ones, ed and trans. Roushan Jahan (New York: The Feminist Press atCUNY, 1988) p. vii.

40. Vishwa Hindu Parishad – a Hindu right-wing umbrella organisation – and its political wing,the Bharatiya Janata Party – which until recently led a coalition government in India. TheHindu Right is responsible for the pogroms against Muslims in the state of Gujarat since thespring of 2002. See ‘Genocide: Gujarat 2002’, Communalism Combat 77–78 (March-April,2002); Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra’’,Economic and Political Weekly (July 13, 2000). For a collection of works dealing with women’sparticipation in right-wing Hindu organisations, see Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (eds),Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1995). Seealso, Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and

Politicized Religion in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 1998).41. Antoinette Burton, book review of The Emergence of Feminism by Azra Asghar Ali (2000),

The American Historical Review 106 (2001), pp. 965–6. Also see the review of Asghar Ali’sbook by Mahua Sarkar, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2 (2001).

42. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton UniversityPress, 1999).

43. Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 1996), p. 278.

44. Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 1996), pp. 278–9, emphasis in the original.

45. I am thinking here of the works of a whole line of scholars, starting with the UnitedNations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), dependency, and world-systems schools, to those that fall roughly under the rubrics of empire/postcolonial studies.

46. I thank Borocz Jozsef for sharpening my understanding of this point.47. See Johannes Fabian, Time And The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the

Religious Life: A Study of Religious Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1915).48. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein lived and worked in Bengal between 1880 and 1932. Apart from

being a prolific writer, Rokeya is also remembered for her efforts to bring formal educationto women in seclusion by starting a school for Muslim girls that helped them maintainpurdah but still get formal education. In their introduction to Rokeya’s work, Tharu andLalitha describe her as a ‘courageous feminist writer and activist who worked all her life toremove what she called the ‘purdah of ignorance’ . . . ’ Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, Women

Writing In India, 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 340.49. Separate quarters for women. Also known as andarmahal (literally inner quarters) in Bengal.50. Sonita Sarker, ‘Larger than Bengal: Feminism in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s


Studies 68 (2000), p. 445.51. Sultana’s Dream has been billed as a feminist fantasy. See Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha,

Women Writing In India, 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).52. Sonita Sarker, ‘Larger than Bengal: Feminism in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s Sultana’s


Studies 68 (2000), p. 449.53. Sonia Nishat Amin, ‘Childhood and Role Models in the Andar Mahal: Muslim women in

the private sphere in colonial Bengal,’ in K. Jayawardena and Mulathi De Alwis (eds),Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia (London: Zed Books,1996), p. 71. It is important to note that contrary to common assumptions, life in thezenanas was not always uniformly oppressive for all women, everywhere. See BrajendranathBandopadhyay, Mogul Juge Stri Shiksha (Calcutta: Manashi Press, 1919), pp. 1–3.

54. For discussions of women’s work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seeShaheen Akhtar and Moushumi Bhowmik (eds), Zenana Mehfil: Bangali Musalman



Lekhikader Nirbachita Rachanam 1904–1938 (Calcutta: Stree, 1998); SombuddhaChakraborty, Andare Antare: Unish Shatake Bangali Mahila (Calcutta: Stree, 1995);Ghulam Murshid, The Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization,

1849–1905 (Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, Rajshahi University, 1983); Ghulam Murshid,Rasasundari Theke Rokeya: Naripragatir Ek Sha Bachhar, (Dhaka: Bangla Academy,1993); Anisuzzaman,’Naarimukti, Shamakaal O Begum Rokeya’, in Farida Pradhan(ed.) Begum Rokeya O Nari Jagaran (Dhaka: Dhaka University, 1995); Morshed ShafiulHasan, Begum Rokeya: Samaye o Sahitya (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1982); SamsunnaharMahmud, Rokeya Jibani (Calcutta: Bulbul Publishing House, 1937); S. Tharu and K.Lalitha (eds), Women Writing In India, 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. I & II (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Tanika Sarkar,Words To Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography (Delhi: Kali forWomen, 1999). For a discussion of the reformist impulses within Islam outside Bengal,see Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan 1857–1964 (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1970); Gail Minault, ‘Sayyid Mumtaz’ Ali and Tahzib un-Niswan:Women’s Rights in Islam and Women’s Journalism in Urdu’, in Kenneth W. Jones(ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (NewYork: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 179–199.

55. See Janaki Nair, ‘Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in English-women’s Writings, 1813–1940’, Journal of Women’s History 2 (1990), pp. 8–34, for anincisive analysis of the place of the zenana in colonial discourse.

56. See Homa Hoodfar, ‘The Veil in their Minds and On our Heads: the Persistence ofColonial Images of Muslim Women,’ Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation sur

la recherche feministe, RFR/DRF, 22, pp. 5–18; Vivian Bradford, ‘The Veil and the Visible’,Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999), p. 115. See also Gillo Pontevorco (dir.), The

Battle of Algiers (1965).



Looking for Feminism

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