Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 9781409449256, 9781315567143

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1
Translating Hindustan: Toru Dutt’s
Poems and Letters
2
Gendered Spaces and Conjugal Reform in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life
3
Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai’s Famine Essays
4 The Imperial Family Begins in the Nursery: Cornelia Sorabji’s ‘Baby-fication’ of Empire
5
The Voice of India: Sarojini Naidu’s Nationalist Poetics
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ANGLOPHONE INDiaN WOMEN WRiTERS, 1870–1920 The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks’s study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women’s literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women’s contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory’s tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks’s close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women’s separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the “translatability” of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

ELLEN BRiNKS Colorado State University, USA

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa .business Copyright © Ellen Brinks 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Ellen Brinks has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brinks, Ellen, 1957 Anglophone Indian women writers, 1870-1920. 1. Indic literature (English)–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Indic literature (English)–20th century– History and criticism. 3. Indic literature (English)– Women authors–History and criticism. 4. Women and literature–India–History–19th century. 5. Women and literature–India–History–20th century. I. Title 820.9'9287'0954-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brinks, Ellen, 1957Anglophone Indian women writers, 1870-1920 / by Ellen Brinks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4925-6 (hardcover) 1. Indic literature (English)–Women authors–History and criticism. 2. Women and literature–India–History. I. Title. PR9488.B75 2013 820.9'92870954–dc23  2012026158 ISBN 9781409449256 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgments   Introduction  

vii ix 1

1

Translating Hindustan: Toru Dutt’s Poems and Letters  

25

2

Gendered Spaces and Conjugal Reform in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life  

59

3

Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai’s Famine Essays  

91

4

The Imperial Family Begins in the Nursery: Cornelia Sorabji’s ‘Baby-fication’ of Empire  

123

5

The Voice of India: Sarojini Naidu’s Nationalist Poetics  

171

Epilogue  

209

Bibliography   Index  

215 231

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List of Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

“John Bull’s Christmas Family Party” (from Punch December 27, 1884), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.   “Baby Uganda” (from Punch April 21, 1894), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.   “Nurse Gladstone” (from Punch August 25, 1883), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.   Watercolor portrait from the cover of Sun Babies (1920), courtesy of Richard Sorabji   “Let the Child Come” from Sun Babies (1920), courtesy of Richard Sorabji  

129 131 132 163 165

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Acknowledgments This book has been an exciting and rewarding intellectual journey for me for a number of years now. I have received such helpful support from colleagues, friends, and my home institution Colorado State University, and they all deserve my heartfelt thanks. My first thanks go to Jim and SueEllen Charlton for their outstanding leadership on a Fulbright and Department of Education sponsored trip to India with fellow educators back in 2003, including a substantive, rich seminar on Indian culture and history in the months beforehand. This trip not only opened my eyes to the diversity of the Indian subcontinent and gave me the subject of this book, but it made me want to share my deep interest in South Asian cultures with others afterwards. Both the English department and the Dean’s office in the College of Liberal Arts funded my attendance at many conferences over the past seven years, as I was drafting different portions of the manuscript. They generously supported summer research and writing, including funding for travel twice to the British Library in London. Bruce Ronda, Louann Reid, and Ann Gill have been especially committed advocates of this project over the years and deserve special acknowledgment. I would also like to thank the Program for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Colorado State for their acknowledgment of the project’s value and the award of the Patsy Boyer Scholarship lecture. To Bruno Navasky and Rudrani Sarma I owe the beauty of the cover design. I am incredibly fortunate to have many wonderful colleagues at Colorado State. Without their conversations, this project would have been stalled at various points. A big thanks especially to Mary Vogl, Maricela DeMirjyn, Leif Sorenson, Carol Mitchell, Roze Hentschell, and Pattie Cowell. My largest debt of gratitude is owed to my colleague and friend Aparna Gollapudi, who has been an incisive reader and enthusiastic champion of this project over the years. She has improved this manuscript immeasurably. Ashgate Publishing has been a delight to work with at all stages of the production process. Beatrice Beaup, Whitney Feininger, and Gail Welsh responded quickly and professionally to all my various queries. I especially want to single out Ann Donahue and Pam Bertram for their hard work, responsiveness and valuable expertise. Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in academic journals. Most of Chapter 2 appeared in “Gendered Spaces in Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child Wife,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30.2 (2008) © Taylor and Francis. For permission to reprint material from “Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai’s Famine Essays,” South Asian Review 25.1 (2004), I thank K.D. Verma, editor of South Asian Review.

x

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The illustrations in Chapter 4 from Punch Magazine are reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd. The two illustrations from Cornelia Sorabji’s Sun Babies are reprinted courtesy of Richard Sorabji. The cover design Rudrani Writing is used courtesy of Bruno Navasky. My loving thanks also go to my father and sister, and to my dear friends Bruno, Lee, and Judy, for their unflagging support over the years. Finally, the most pleasurable aspect of this project has been sharing it with Jules, who is a fellow reader in life, my closest friend, an intrepid travel companion, my true love, and the kindest person I know. Thank you for all the adventures you take me on, both close and far from home.

Introduction Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 was conceived in two places halfway around the world from one another. The first was in my college classroom in the United States. My undergraduates began to entertain the question that E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India poses at its beginning: namely, whether, given the racialized politics of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, the British and Indians could be friends. While the novel’s primary concern is with the possibility of male friendships across cultural and racial divides (and how women, especially British and Anglo-Indian women, actively thwart them), it also, at least at one point, raises the gendered question of whether British and Indian women could be friends as well. The bridge party provides an answer to that question. During this scene, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore, eager to form an acquaintance with some Indian women, are disappointed when the party arranged to gratify their request becomes instead a window onto the hierarchized segregation between colonizer and colonized in Chandrapore, which no amount of goodwill can overcome. While my students are not as taken aback at this as Adela and Mrs. Moore are, they are surprised to find that the Indian women at the party reveal some linguistic fluency in English and cultural literacy about the West. These abilities enable them to begin a conversation, something that neither Mrs. Turton nor the other Anglo-Indian women can reciprocate regarding matters Indian. Mrs. Turton’s vaunted knowledge of Hindi and Urdu amounts to little more than the ability to “speak to her servants,” as she knows “none of the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood.”1 Further, in a telling detail, the Indian women at the party possess “a curious uncertainty about their gestures, as if they sought for a new formula which neither East nor West could provide.”2 What exactly was the nature of their uncertainty? What would constitute a “new formula” for interrelating? Where did these women learn English? my students asked. How common was this? Were there other contexts – in England, for example – where friendships could be formed between British and Indian women? Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 began as an inquiry, beyond the scope of Forster’s novel, into the existence of Indian and British women’s cross-cultural communications. It transformed into something else along the way – which leads me to the second place of its origins: the Fulbright Library in New Delhi, where I first came upon Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s wonderful two-volume anthology, Women Writing in   E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, 1924) 42.   A Passage to India 43.

1 2

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

India.3 While it didn’t address the possibility of cross-cultural female friendships under colonialism, it did answer my search for missives between cultures, offering in print some Anglophone writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collected here were excerpts from a larger body of Anglophone Indian women writers’ work, forming a bridge of their own devising between India and Great Britain. It unleashed a flood of questions: how did these women learn English to such a degree of fluency? What made these women choose to write their literary works in English? Who were their imagined audiences? How were their works received? How and to what ends did these Anglophone Indian women writers transmit or translate the colonized cultures of India, in essence, seeking to find some “new formula which neither East nor West could provide”? Most especially, how would a study of these writers adjust our understandings of the cultural positioning and politics of Indian women under colonialism? Anglophone Indian Women Writers grew out of the attempt to answer these questions. Spanning the years 1870–1920, it is a study of the Anglophone literature of five prominent Indian women – in chronological order, Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All were exceptional women with deep roots and connections to both Indian and Western cultures, very well known in their time but largely unknown in ours. They were reformers and activists, contributing to cultural and political nationalism, anti-colonial critique, and in one instance, imperial apology. As an aspect of their activism, their works form a body of literature that reconfigured the relations between India as colony and Great Britain as imperial center. Importantly, they do so from the understudied perspective of colonized women. Their literary writings embrace a variety of genres – memoirs, poems, translations, essays, novels, short stories, and letters – and were widely read in England and in India in their time. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, most of their writings had gone out of print. Dutt and Naidu remained partially visible as authors in India, yet in the West all were largely forgotten. Anglophone Indian Women Writers seeks to correct this obvious, glaring oversight. The recent re-issuing of some of their work and the now ubiquitous electronic availability of many of these out-of-print editions give us a signal opportunity to reconsider the wider range and place of these writers’ works within the literary and sociocultural contexts of colonialism. While their lives are fascinating – including, for example, the first Indian woman to travel and study in England (Dutt), the first woman to study law at Oxford (Sorabji), and the first Indian woman to lead the Indian National Congress (Naidu) – it is their literary endeavors that form the focus of this book. More than that, however, it aims to reconsider the diverse positions and differing postures of Indian women under colonialism. Postcolonial theories of empire have frequently incorporated gender as a category of analysis. Many 3   Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India, 2 volumes (New York: The Feminist Press, 1993). The volumes of the anthology cover the period from 600 bce to the 1990s and not just Anglophone writers.

Introduction

3

notable studies have focused on colonial masculinities,4 stemming from a view of colonialism – and anti-colonial resistance – as male-centered and male-oriented enterprises. Confronting such biases, feminist postcolonial scholarship has done tremendous recovery and theoretical work. Within the last two decades, works by literary critics such as Inderpal Grewal, Ania Loomba, Anne McClintock, Mary Louise Pratt, and Jenny Sharpe, among others, have theorized the feminization of colonial discourses and compelled readers to consider the active contributions of British women to the colonial enterprise.5 These efforts, however, have left our understanding of Indian women under colonialism comparatively understudied. Indian women have not garnered as much attention as the Western and Indian men or the Western women who enabled or resisted colonization. Nationalist and colonialist records and discourses have had a history of “disappearing” Indian women’s voices, even when the discussions are about them, as in the sati or the Age of Consent debates.6 This is perhaps not surprising, though it is unfortunate. Despite their relative scarcity as actors or as writers in the historical archive, Indian women were active participants in reform and political movements from the 1870s onwards, and a number of them were well-known authors of literature. When Indian women have appeared in scholarship, it has most often been to retrace their position as doubly oppressed: as the victims of colonialist and indigenous patriarchal practices. Historical scholarship, for example, has shown how the male 4   See especially Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991); Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Heather Streets, Born Warriors? The Military, Martial Races, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1897–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 5   Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See also the following collections edited by feminist scholars: Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 6   Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism 221.

4

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

and female missionaries and the employees of the Raj intervened in the domestic affairs of Indian social life, as they undertook to reform kinship patterns, family structures, and the status of women over the course of the nineteenth century.7 Indigenous male reformers, sometimes in reaction, sometimes independently, did so as well. Whether these reformist efforts constituted new forms of patriarchal and/or colonial oppression of Indian women that were supplanting older forms, or whether Indian women’s status improved as a result, the “Indian woman” in such studies is largely depicted in monolithic fashion, as the passive object and recipient of others’ reformist energies.8 In literary studies, some of the dominant methodologies have further erased Indian women’s presence and agency. In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a host of studies have looked at how representational strategies and practices reinforce ideologies of difference fundamental to the imperial project. Analyses of orientalizing depictions of Indian women have had the unfortunate consequence of recovering primarily those same patriarchal and colonialist views of them. Other postcolonial and poststructural approaches have read Indian women as discursive constructs, as metaphorical “sites” within dominant discourses (as in the sati debates).9 Such positionings have made it difficult to recover the ways in which real women were subject to oppression as a result of these same colonial and nationalist discourses, “confusing [the nature of] women’s relationship to any social structure.”10 Further, colonial discourse analysis inhibits understanding Indian women as agents or subjects who possess voices of their own. Rosalind O’Hanlon points to the difficulties stemming from this approach when the notion of agency is at stake: Some conception of experience and agency are absolutely required … for it is not clear how a dispersed effect of power relations can at the same time be an 7   See, for example, Charles Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); B.R. Nanda (ed.), Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976); Kenneth Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah: Women in Bengal, 1890–1939 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sudhir Chandra, Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law, and Women’s Rights (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 8   Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005) 3. Malavika Karlekar’s book, which foregrounds Bengali women’s personal narratives of the 1800s, is an exception to this: see Voices from Within: Personal Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Bengali Women (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). 9   Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 10   Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism 222.

Introduction

5

agent whose experience and reflection form the basis of a striving for change. To argue that we need these categories in some form does not at all imply a return to … liberal humanism. Our present challenge lies precisely in understanding how the underclasses … are at once constructed in conflictual ways as subjects yet also find the means through struggle to realize themselves in coherent and subjectively centred ways as agents.11

While O’Hanlon is here referring to the peasant classes in India, her critique of the limitations of poststructural theory is relevant for any project centered on Indian women as well. Critical studies in the West of the literary representations of South Asian colonial experiences have further (and understandably) gravitated toward AngloIndian and British authors: not only is India not well understood in the West, comprised as it is of a tremendous diversity of ethnic and cultural zones, with their own languages, histories, religions, and social arrangements and practices, but publishers have gravitated toward the familiar, making Western editions of early South Asian writers’ works difficult to come by, until very recently. Up to this point, a few pioneering works by historians have illuminated Indian women’s pivotal roles within social reform and nationalist movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870– 1920, in solidarity with these efforts, looks at Indian women for the first time as newly empowered literary agents during this same era. No longer solely the objects of Western and/or indigenous discourses, these women writers emerge as highly visible and engaged wielders of discourse themselves. Reading their works, it becomes clear that overly simplified, abstract notions of the passive native informant, or of English as a de facto instrument of cultural domination or mimicry, no longer hold. As women writers, they pioneered a new arena of literary representation in English, speaking to the condition of India and Indian women under colonialism in the tumultuous years between 1870 and 1920, a period of intense reformist engagement, cultural nationalism, and the awakening 11

  Rosalind O’Hanlon and D. Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.1 (January 1992): 153. 12   Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993); Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India; Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); and Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) 189–97.

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of anti-colonial political resistance. Reaching a wide audience, their poems and novels, their essays and stories were intimately connected with a wider indigenous re-definition of Indian culture, history, and the idea of India as both colony and emergent nation.13 Thus, as we study these women’s works, the explanatory limits of existing methodologies become apparent. Anglophone Indian Women Writers positions these Indian women writers as the creators of both colonialist and anticolonialist narratives. This monograph understands their writings through the diverse cultural contexts about and within which these women wrote. These vary tremendously: they describe worlds from the Madras to the Bombay Presidency, from Calcutta to the Punjab provinces; some are set contemporaneously, while some reclaim tales and legends from the Vedic period; their authors identify themselves variously as Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Indian Christians, and they can be placed on an ideological spectrum ranging from imperial apologist to ardent nationalist, and places in-between. Through its attention to the specific circumstances in which Dutt, Satthianadhan, Ramabai, Sorabji, and Naidu wrote, Anglophone Indian Women Writers seeks to open up a readerly awareness of the nature and pace of regional reform movements, the (cultural) nationalism that shaped these writers’ works, and the responses they elicited. Thus, though the book is structured around the literary works of five women of colonial India, it also offers the reader a view of the various colonial, reformist, and nationalist discourses proliferating during the particularly tumultuous decades between 1870 and 1920. The 50 years in which this study frames these writers’ works mark a watershed between colonization and independence. Their writings were forged during a pivotal time in modern Indian history. We move from a belief that the Raj was an unquestionable, seemingly enduring fact to the conviction that an independent nation must be the goal; from a time in which Indians sought greater social and economic parity with Anglo-Indians, to their widespread presence in organized nationalist movements that promoted India’s economic self-sufficiency and political independence. The women writers considered in this book were deeply engaged with these shifting scenarios of political activism and social reform. And, as a brief overview of the changing political temper of the nation from the 1870s onward will show, the available venues, positions, and outcomes of engagement within colonial politics during this time were continually in flux. Because the writers featured in Anglophone Indian Women Writers were all socially and politically engaged, it is relevant to sketch briefly the contours of Indian political activism and social reform during this time. From the 1870s onwards, a post-Mutiny hardening of social divisions between Indians and Anglo-Indians, itself the product of Anglo-Indian racism and fears of   For this larger context, see Joshi as well as Rosinka Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Calcutta: Seal Press, 2002); and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.), A History of Indian Literature in English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 13

Introduction

7

another revolt, created deep dissatisfaction among upper-class Indians who aspired to social equality and greater access to English-language education and civil service jobs. Unable to attain these aims, they demanded recognition and redress within the vernacular press and through newly emerging voluntary organizations. Although this differed region by region, with Bengal in the forefront, redress was initially sought by turning toward, not away from, the British (the idea of the British leaving India was not entertained until late in the century). Embracing progressive change, politically-engaged Indians made use of the language of Western European liberalism, even as the British were turning to feudal political discourses to justify the increasingly paternalistic tone and tenor of their rule.14 In 1878, for example, the English-educated Indian elite decried the insufficiency of Viceroy Lytton’s famine policies, as well as new legislation that disempowered the vernacular press. In addition, they protested the Arms Act, which deprived Indians of firearms unless their loyalty was first established. The concerted European resistance to the Ilbert Bill in the early 1880s, a bill which allowed Indian judges jurisdiction over British subjects outside Presidency towns, highlighted the lack of “all-India” political organizations channeling and coordinating Indian protests against the Raj. In the next few decades, this lack of political organizations was rectified at local, provincial, and regional levels, and finally at a national one, as Indians sought to advance their own interests via representative government. The founding of the National Congress in 1885 was a hugely important milestone toward this goal. Together, these organizations ran the gamut from those formed by the progressive, Western-leaning, English-educated classes to those by conservative, religious leaders who had already established their authority and reputation. Still, the extension of self-governance to Indians moved slowly and only under pressure, beginning with local governments. In the 1870s, for the first time, Indians could be elected to serve on municipal boards, if only unofficially. These positions, unsurprisingly, were granted to Indians who were loyal to the Raj and/or willing to promote hegemonic local interests. Other changes trickled down over the next two decades: in 1882 a framework for local self-governance, with partially elected and partially appointed boards, was established by Lord Ripon, viceroy at the time; in 1892, the Indian Councils Act widened participation in legislative councils; and in 1909, the Morley Minto reforms, without any intention of encouraging selfgovernment, allowed some Indians to be elected – and not simply appointed – to central and provincial legislatures (though the acts of these legislatures did not have to be recognized by the imperial government). At this time, the electorate consisted of a very small, elite group of Indians. The partition of Bengal in 1905 (rescinded in 1911), undertaken by the Raj for both administrative and political reasons – Bengal was an enormous province and difficult to oversee; it was also the “hotbed” of nationalist energies – did much to energize Hindu nationalism in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. 14   Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 115 and 119.

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

8

Further, after fighting and dying for the British Empire during World War I, Indians were increasingly unwilling to be seen and treated as inferiors incapable of selfrule. By the end of the 50-year period that this study encompasses, the Home Rule leagues had been inaugurated in 1916. The Lucknow Pact, a joint Hindu-Muslim declaration for self-government, called for increased Indian representation within all levels of governance, with Muslims given significant representation as well. To the Rowlatt Act of 1919 and its repercussions, however, can be attributed an irreversible consolidation of anti-colonial nationalism in India. The Act extended war-time (World War I) emergency measures, allowing the Raj to imprison anyone suspected of terrorism for up to two years without trial, an unsubtle and unsuccessful attempt to quell nationalist energies. The protest against the Rowlatt Act in Amritsar culminated in the 1919 Jallianwallabagh massacre, the worst outbreak of colonial violence in India since the 1857 uprising. General Dyer’s armed attack upon peaceful protesters killed hundreds and injured thousands. It also positioned Gandhi as the head of the non-violent movement to push the British out of India, ultimately accomplished in 1947. Most of the women writers I discuss were deeply engaged with matters of social reform that preceded or ran concomitantly with anti-colonial nationalism and the political events sketched above. While Western missionaries in India actively adopted reform agendas, the post-Mutiny Raj largely exercised restraint in matters of social reform, seeking to protect its own overriding political interests on the subcontinent. Despite this caution, it made many mistakes. The 1891 Age of Consent controversy, for example, serves as a case in point. Driven by European and progressive Indian exposure of the physical and psychological toll of child marriage, the Act did not seek to determine the age at which Hindus could marry (which would have violated the principle of non-interference in customary practices); instead, the Raj raised the age of sexual consummation from 10 to 12 years of age within the practice of child marriage. In both Maharastra and Bengal, the orthodox Hindu backlash was particularly intense. Indian reformers as well as the populace were consistently opposed to any Western intervention (missionary, imperial, or feminist) in Indian social practices. Thus, child marriage became a prominent arena in which many Indians, regardless of their religious affiliation (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh) engaged with colonialist discourses and practices.15 Krupabai Satthianadhan’s novel Kamala, discussed in Chapter 2, and some of Pandita Ramabai’s early essays speak to the condition of the child-wife and the controversy of reform “from without or within.” Satthianadhan and Ramabai, along with other indigenous activists, were motivated by Western views of India’s cultural decline and a vocabulary of improvement and progress; some Indian reformers embraced these views, partially or wholly, while   See Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform; Jones, SocioReligious Reform Movements in British India; and Amiya Sen’s introduction to Social and Religious Reform: The Hindus of British India, ed. Amiya Sen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003) 3–66. 15

Introduction

9

others rejected them, attempting to counteract Western biases, misconceptions, and cultural blindnesses. Though many of the issues were secular ones, not all were. In self-defense, and with a self-critical lens, many Hindu reformers sought to define (and homogenize) the plethora of Hinduisms into a religious system that could answer to the utilitarian and social needs of the modern age.16 The adoption of reformist discourses by Indians need not be viewed homogeneously as the internalization of Western criticisms and values. Indeed, many Indian reformers embraced the robust indigenous tradition of criticizing the values of Great Britain and Europe, of envisioning modernization without Westernization, and of locating other authoritative sources found in an Indian past.17 Paradoxical as it appears at first, the break with the past integral to any reformist movement coexisted with an ideal of social renovation via the past’s reclamation or re-definition (the Vedic or feudal period, in particular). Reformers – and writers like Toru Dutt – the subject of the first chapter – re-evaluated the authority of this “invented” past and the need to revitalize it in the interests of the present. In advance of nationalism, and whether internally or externally driven, these social reform debates and initiatives re-defined the relations between Indians and the Raj over the course of the nineteenth century. Though polytheism and idolatry preoccupied early nineteenth-century reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the main arenas of reform, addressed by both Indian and British reformers during the century, were caste and “the woman question.” In terms of this study, it is “the woman question,” comprising the contested issues of sati (widow immolation), female education, the treatment of widows and widow remarriage, conjugal arrangements, and child marriage, which are most often explored by the five writers of Anglophone Indian Women Writers. There was no consensus on these issues in general, and controversy developed between indigenous and Western reformers of various stripes. Further, Indian activists were themselves divided between conservative and progressive positions – ones that would seek to keep Indian women sealed off from Western influences and others that embraced aspects of the West’s modernizing agenda.18 Yet what unifies both the issues and the responses they generated are two things: first, the aspects of “the woman question” considered most worth fighting for concerned women as wives: not as daughters, and certainly not as independent, unattached women. That Pandita Ramabai and Cornelia Sorabji, discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, should direct their literary and activist efforts toward Indian women outside a secure family system, seeking their economic and legal self-empowerment, testifies to their uniqueness as reformers. Second, reformists’ positions on the “woman question,” with few exceptions, preserved conservative gender roles for women. The question of women’s education became tied to conjugality, as reformers repeatedly stressed   Sen, Social and Religious Reform 4 and 15.   Ibid. 47–9. 18   Joshi, In Another Country 173. 16 17

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

10

that the purpose of education was to enable women to better fulfill their tasks as wives (and mothers). The debates about women’s education and gender roles, so vigorous in the late nineteenth century, were gradually overshadowed by anti-colonial nationalism. Many reformers sought to enfold the woman question into the question of the nation. For example, Sarojini Naidu, the subject of the concluding chapter, argued that India’s women were the spiritual “mothers” of the nation; they had proven their right to citizen status by protesting side-by-side with India’s men. These actions, according to Naidu, had already fully “nationalized” them, guaranteeing their right to the franchise. Yet despite the efforts of Naidu and other feminists – indeed, all social reformers of the time – the struggle for independence eclipsed the momentum of women’s rights: [The] needs of greater political mobilization required temporary glossing over, if not altogether denying, the crying need for social reform. In the political sphere, educated Indians could speak of common agendas for they had but one adversary [Great Britain]. In social matters, on the contrary, consensus was hard to come by.19

Indeed, Indian feminists have noted how nationalism effectively “resolved” the woman question by sidelining it.20 The introduction of a modern English-language education in India facilitated not only nationalism but decisively influenced these agendas of reform, their participants, and the medium of communication and exchange. Certainly, the women writers featured in this book had studied and mastered the English language. Their fluency as well as their decision to write literature in the colonizer’s language is deeply implicated in the historical and ideological complexities of English-language propagation in India. In the eighteenth century, Western missionaries brought English-language education to India as they attempted to win over local populations to Christianity. Unsurprisingly, Indians overwhelmingly rejected their efforts at both spiritual and linguistic conversion. Yet, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, English was no longer associated with Christianity but with modernization and economic advancement. Almost two decades before Thomas Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) appeared, Raja Ram Mohan Roy advocated for a modern curriculum in Indian education. For Roy, English as a medium of instruction was insignificant, a temporary phenomenon, compared to the curricular content. He argued for English because vernacular languages at that time were not equipped to teach mathematics and the sciences, though efforts were getting underway to

19

  Ibid. 21.   Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question,” Recasting Women 233–53. 20

Introduction

11

produce textbooks in Bengali in these subject areas.21 Roy was convinced that the study of mathematics and the sciences – a commitment to modernization – would benefit Indians, on their terms. For other upper-class Indians, however, English was a necessary skill as they prepared themselves for employment in the administration of the Raj (Calcutta was the first locus of jobs). English served as a means to greater involvement and command, as well as seeming to promise less distance between the cultures and social worlds of Great Britain and India. Unlike the rationale of the British government (or Anglicists of Macaulay’s stripe), for whom Anglicization of the Indian population was seen as a way to win over the Indian ruling class to Western cultural, political, and religious values and to promote their dissemination – in other words, to cement Indians to the imperial project – the reasons Indians sought English-language education were very different.22 Over the course of the next several decades, in the wake of growing hostility to colonialism, English language fluency would assist Indians as they united across linguistic and regional divides to promote reforms, push for political representation, and foster nationalism. All the writers in this study were shaped by this growing use of English to articulate India’s cultural strengths and to redraw the contours of imperial influence and control. As Krishnaswamy and Burde assert: It must be clearly stated that Indian nationalism and the renaissance of the arts and sciences in India are the unexpected reversals of the aims of British education or, at the most, the by-products of English education that provided the roots for questioning colonial authority and, eventually, subverted it though that was not the intention of the rulers.23

English-language education thus promoted criticism of the British by providing a unifying language with which to do so and renewing interest among the educated middle-classes in questions of self-identity and reform. By the last decades of   See Reena Chatterji, The Impact of Raja Rammohun Roy on Education in India (Delhi: S. Chand, 1983) 64–7. Chatterji notes that Roy was concerned primarily that Indians be given instruction in what considered useful sciences, eg., mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy. The Anglicists formulated Roy’s position differently, as the desire for a Western moral education and the rejection of Sanskrit studies; in fact, Roy never referred to the medium of instruction or to the desirability of including Western literature, philosophy, history and religion. Further, he was not opposed to Sanskrit scholarship; in fact, he had studied and was influenced by the Orientalists. 22   For education as a means of social control, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and the British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 23–44. 23   N. Krishnaswamy and Archana S. Burde, The Politics of Indians’ English: Linguistic Colonialism and the Expanding English Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) 13. 21

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

the nineteenth century, English as a literary language was “indigenized and naturalized.”24 Reform movements were non-homogeneous, differing in their ideas about the pace and depth of reform. Because English education was, for a long time, a “top-down” policy, restricted to colleges and universities and a few high schools, it became associated with the urban Presidency centers – Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras – and therefore, with an elite minority population. This same elite often went on to apply their writing skills to jobs in the government bureaucracy. They also turned these skills to literary endeavors and to writing in various printmedia, the latter becoming a primary vehicle for expressing reformist sentiments. Initiatives for reform characteristically sprung up and were organized largely around charismatic individual reformers, such as Pandita Ramabai.25 Overall, female reformers like Ramabai were few, yet of the writers in my study, four – Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu – can lay claim to being reformers as well as authors of literature in English.26 That so many female authors should be reformers is not accidental but symptomatic of the pervasiveness of reformist energies. As Naidu puts it in one of her letters, there was “a tacit understanding that all talents and enthusiasms should concentrate themselves on some practical end for the immediate and obvious good of the nation.”27 These concerns, in turn, found their way into the literature of the period and the works of the writers in this volume. They created a socially engaged literature that selectively adopted Western ideas and forms of expression, yet by no means slavishly adhered to them. Their works did not only impact the way readers viewed the condition of Indian women but likely energized British women in their own feminist reformist efforts as well.28 Above all, their literary works defined and foregrounded valuable aspects of Indian culture, in response to the de-culturation resulting from colonialism. Engaged with both British and Indian colonial cultures, these writers occupied a place of cultural betweenness. Their self-locations were notoriously pluralistic. This hybridity was the result of locality, language use, education, and cultural exposure, for all but one of my writers (Satthianadhan) traveled to England and spent a significant amount of time studying there, and all but one (Naidu) 24   Joshi, In Another Country 174. Joshi also makes the point that the Indian canon has had a vexed relation to Anglophone writers (174). 25   Sen, Social and Religious Reform 20 and 23. 26   Two, Ramabai and Naidu, were prominent public figures and are remembered more for these efforts than for their literary endeavors. 27   Sarojini Naidu, Selected Letters, 1890s to 1940s, ed. Makarand Paranjape (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996) 47. 28   Joshi mentions that the biographies and writings of and about Indian women became “sources of resistance and resolve for British women in their struggles for social and legislative equity at home.” In education, for example, Indian universities granted women degrees before English universities did so (Joshi, In Another Country 192 and 193).

Introduction

13

converted to Christianity or were the children of Christian converts. Yet there are other reasons as well for stressing their cultural and literary betweenness. The publishers of their works – and their intended audiences – spanned India, England, and sometimes America. Their writings allowed for alliances across the colonial divide, as we see with Ramabai’s essays, which sought to channel international funds from women’s societies for her private relief work, or with Dutt’s personal correspondence with Mary Martin. They adopted Western forms of literary representation (such as the essay, the novel, the feminist polemic) and adapted them to Indian ones (the epic, mystical poetry), as well as to an Indian context. Conceptually, there is no place that their works can comfortably be housed. Rather than see their betweenness, however, as symptomatic of colonial alienation, this study has stressed what Robert C. Young has called the “counter-energy” of hybridity. These writers dislocate existing cultural forms and identities.29 In doing so, their works create new zones of cultural contact and discursive exchange, refashioning their and our understanding of India and of Indian women’s roles and contributions to literature and politics under British colonial rule. Paradoxically, then, the most visible likeness between these five authors is their diverse positioning. It is not simply that they related differently to Indian and British cultures, or to colonialism, or to the condition of Indian women, or even to the role they afforded literature as a mediating force between cultures. Viewed chronologically, their works do not describe a continuous narrative of influence and intertextuality, and there is no evidence that my authors knew or read the works of one another (with one exception explored briefly in Chapter 3). Nor do the chapters seek primarily to establish commonalities between all five writers. That is not to say that there are no recurring thematic, conceptual, or ideological threads that link the works addressed in this study. These texts, in fact, give us the tools to read anew a whole range of issues central to postcolonial theories of hybridity: the relationship of colonized women to metropolitan and indigenous (literary) cultures; Indian and British women’s separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the “translatability” of cultures; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of identity of the converted and/or Englishspeaking, upper-class Indian woman; and the significance and place of cultural difference under colonialism.30 These concerns have shaped my approach to these writers’ works throughout the book. Further, common refrains resound between chapters and include the conflicted nature of domesticity and familial relationships, the centrality of Indian women’s relations with one another, especially between mothers and daughters, the renewed understandings of the Vedic past, and the impact of colonialism and colonial cultures. Yet because no single or set of congruent concerns characterize the five writers’s works, I have chosen to write 29  See Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995) 22. 30   All of these issues are discussed in greater detail over the course of the book and in the epilogue.

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers primarily as a collection of essays. Within this loose organization, there is nonetheless a repeating design. Each chapter is devoted to exploring the connections between one Indian woman writer’s literary works, her historical, cultural, and geographic location, and her engagement with – and re-workings of – colonialist discourses. One of my guiding principles has been that sensitivity to context, to historical and geographical specificity, is necessary if we are to understand the contours of these writers’ discursive agency and their unassimilable literary points of view. Further, preservation of the works’ and authors’ differences has seemed to me the most productive way to chart the changing complexity of gendered social and cultural conditions under colonialism. Through nuanced close readings, each chapter seeks to trace how the problematic of colonialism is addressed from the heterogeneous cultural perspectives of its author, narrators, or lyric speakers, and how indigenous and imperial cultures are re-oriented as a result. Though my writers all belonged to the elite classes of Indian society and all but one were converts to Christianity, my study will not focus on them as writers whose works are examined through the lens of religious identity. Nonetheless, because four of the five authors were Indian Christians, including Dutt, Satthianadhan, Ramabai, and Sorabji, it is important to weigh in briefly on the salience of this shared identity, for their status as Indian Christians within an overwhelmingly Hindu culture was necessarily complex. With the exception of Pandita Ramabai, who converted during her time abroad in England, Dutt, Satthianadhan, and Sorabji were second-generation Indian Christians. Their Christian faith can be said to be a matter of birth rather than the result of a process of spiritual questioning that resulted in a conscious decision, as was the case with Ramabai. Nor does it signify a set of commonly shared doctrinal beliefs: Satthianadhan’s Christianity was, as Chandani Lokugé notes, a synthesis of Brahminism and evangelism; Dutt’s and Sorabji’s Christianity resembled orthodox Anglicanism; and Ramabai’s Christianity was highly heterodox, influenced by a Brahmo-Samajist background, Unitarianism, bhakti components, and an “unconstrained spiritual freedom”; this heterodoxy, coupled with her single-mindedness in advancing Indian women’s welfare, led both Western and Indian Christians to accuse her of being a pagan and a mercenary exploiting Christian sympathy.31 While the role of faith in their lives – and the presence of it in their writings – diverged widely amongst them, as members of a minority community they likely shared certain experiences. In India, widespread ambivalence was directed toward Indian Christians by Europeans and non-Christian Indians alike. Western missionaries, who desired a “truly Indian church,” expressed both their concern and discontent about Indians’ “English” piety, their adoption of Western customs, and what they considered their “unspiritual” demands for 31   Chandani Lokugé, “Introduction” to Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999) 13; for Ramabai’s Christianity, see Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest 18–152 and Anagol, Emergence of Feminism 46.

Introduction

15

English education.32 This led them to parse continually the purity of Indian Christians’ motives for conversion. Hindus, especially those from high-caste backgrounds, were quick to assume a betrayal of religious and cultural values by both Christian schools and converted Indian Christians, equating their interests with those of the colonial government.33 Cultural nationalists saw the religious beliefs of Indian Christians as “foreign,” while conservatives opposed higher education for Indian women and the resulting economic empowerment. In part, these criticisms are justified. Many Indian Christians desired the increased social status and wealth that would come with a Western education, and they actively Anglicized themselves. Their access to English-language education and government jobs exceeded those of other groups. This put them in a unique social space. Toru Dutt notes that, on the one hand, Western Christians in India did not mingle with their Indian counterparts. On the other hand, Indian Christians did not necessarily or even often find community with fellow Indians, due to religious (as well as class) differences. Converted Indians, and Indians who had traveled abroad, were rendered socially “outcast,” since caste rules could not be upheld. Orthodox Hindus could not socialize with them, for fear of contamination. Even elite Hindus open to Western education and modernization largely refused social contact with converted Indians, with whom they may have shared similar beliefs regarding education, politics, or social mores and reform. Among Indian Christians, class differences often prevented social mixing. It would be a mistake to assume that Indian Christians’ conversion was equivalent to wholesale Anglicization or to complicity with imperialism. Instead of de-culturation and colonialist sympathizing, the attitudes of the converted 32   Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 90–1. 33   Some recent historical studies on post-1857 India show that the much feared influence of English curriculum mission schools did not seem to have correlated with successful rates of conversion by the last decades of the twentieth century. See A. Mathew, Christian Mission Education and Nationalism: From Dominance to Compromise 1870– 1930 (New Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1988) and Chandra Mallampalli, “British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras,” The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions 1880–1914, ed. Anthony Porter (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003) 177. Further, Indians seemed to have exercised a great deal of control over these schools, “reproducing their own social, religious and caste” beliefs with them (Hayden J.A. Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007) 74–7 and 5). In part, Bellenoit attributes the low conversion rates to the missionaries’ own slow approach, their desire to have genuine converts to Christianity, not “rice Christians” (those who did so only for the material advantages they anticipated). According to non-Christian Indian accounts, the Christian ethos of the schools was easy to ignore, and the desire for access to upward social mobility made these schools acceptable to them; thus, a crisis of de-culturation was not the automatic or inevitable result of English-language education and its attendant Anglicization. See Cox, Imperial Fault Lines 191 and 214–215.

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reveal something much more variable. According to historian Jeffrey Cox, Indian Christianity was often coupled with an independent-mindedness that ran counter to Western cultural or colonialist practices. As he and Gauri Viswanathan have shown, their Anglicization and minority status could and did afford them a position from which to demand treatment and wages equal to their Western counterparts, including better working conditions. Conversion could be a highly political activity, linked to fights against racism, sexism, and colonialism.34 Padma Anagol notes that Hindu women reformers and feminists rallied to defend Pandita Ramabai when she was accused of converting pupils in her secular school; Ramabai and other Indian Christian women returned the favor and supported Hindu women’s efforts, revealing a feminist solidarity across religious lines.35 Of the Indian Christian writers in this study, Satthianadhan, Ramabai, and Sorabji all criticized the racism of missionary attitudes toward Indians and Indian culture. Ramabai saw herself and the girls and women living at her homes/schools as decidedly Indian and resisted Westernization. To this end the pupils and teachers maintained an Indian diet, dress, and etiquette, and the curriculum at her school was in Marathi as well as English. Cornelia Sorabji’s mother, Francina Sorabji, a pioneer in Indian (women’s) education, opened the Victoria High School in Poona in 1876; among its innovative practices were the co-ed nature of the school; the attention to the needs of the different religious communities of the Indian, Eurasian, and European children who made up the student body; and deliberate attempts to craft a curriculum to the Indian context, using Indian languages, stories, and symbols instead of English primers.36 In many ways, what we see repeated in these efforts was an adaptation of Christianity to an indigenous context, and specifically, to the needs of Indian women. As the authors examined in Anglophone Indian Women Writers reveal, their position as English-speaking Indian Christians made them “neither European nor Indian but simultaneously indigenous, foreign, and hybrid.”37 Undoubtedly, they were more heavily exposed to metropolitan culture as a result of their converted status. In turn, their remarkable fluency in English language and British culture afforded them access to publishing opportunities both in India and in England that separated them from other Indians.38 Dutt’s, Satthianadhan’s, and Sorabji’s identities as Christians reinforced the centrality and significance of their English34   Cox, Imperial Fault Lines 95, 100–1; and Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) xvi. 35   Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism 101–3. 36   Ibid. 49. 37   Cox, Imperial Fault Lines 15. 38   Joshi notes that the period of 1850–80 saw a doubling in the import of English books and the holdings of English books in Indian libraries, which amounted to 95 percent. At the same time, however, there was a concurrent increase in Indian language titles. For Joshi, these figures are indicative of elite Indians’ energetic engagement with both the consumption and production of literature in English and in Indian languages (144).

Introduction

17

language education – and hence, on their future careers as writers of literature in English. With the aid of scholarships and financial support (there seems to have been both state and private support, some stemming from Westerners with imperialist sympathies, others supportive for religious reasons), Toru Dutt, Pandita Ramabai, and Cornelia Sorabji spent years abroad in England pursuing university-level studies; Satthianadhan would have too, had not health concerns prevented her from doing so. Christianity was not, however, a necessary condition for university study abroad; Ramabai went abroad with support before her conversion, and Sarojini Naidu, a Hindu, also studied abroad for a few years. Yet, as mentioned earlier, neither Christianity nor fluency in English should be equated with an unequivocal embrace of Western cultural values. For one thing, in emphasizing their decision to write literature in English, we should not overlook the multilingualism of all these writers; they each spoke fluently between three and eight languages, Indian and European. Further, a stable calculus through which one could link English-language use with English acculturation does not exist. One of the threads, for example, that links these authors’ works is the presence of deeply held identifications with Hindu (and Muslim and Parsi) cultures, despite their Christianity and use of English for their literary endeavors.39 As the literary works, the letters, and personal documents they left behind reveal, their position as Indian Christians was not predictive or determinative of their choice of literary subject matter, their adoption of specific political or identity positions, or evidence of cultural affiliation. Thus, their Christianity has not been a primary category of analysis. The writerly choices of these authors instead reflect externally and internally motivating forces. On the one hand, their works were shaped by a contemporary publishing market and institutions that pushed form and content into alignment with current tastes. The genres in which they wrote can be directly linked to these realities. Toru Dutt’s translations from the Sanskrit, for example, would have appealed to Western audiences who sought out native voices that reinforced their beliefs that India’s culture was essentially timeless and spiritually inclined. Similarly, Naidu’s lyric was read in her time (and continues to be in ours) as a capitulation to Victorian tastes for an overly refined, escapist, and romanticized view of India. Both Pandita Ramabai’s and Krupabai Satthiandhan’s works accorded with preferences for a literature of India’s oppressed womanhood. Ramabai’s writings about a feminized India ravaged by recurrent famines, as a land in need of Western economic intervention, belong to the literature of disaster, flattering Western audiences who desired to rescue Indians in need, especially women and children. Satthianadhan’s novel of an unhappy upper-caste Hindu 39

  The polyglot Toru Dutt’s first literary language was French, and some have argued that it was more her literary home than English; the same can be said to be true of Sarojini Naidu, whose affinities point her equally, if not more, toward the Urdu tradition of verse. For Dutt, see Tricia Lootens, “Bengal, Britain, France: The Locations and Translations of Toru Dutt,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 573–90.

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

child-wife takes its readers into the highly private world of the zenana, otherwise closed to Western eyes. Although Satthianadhan’s and Ramabai’s identities as Indian women writers commenting on the condition of Indian women itself constituted a radical departure, they dramatized the conflict between the sexes as other writers and reformers had, as one between tradition and modernity. Cornelia Sorabji’s work, in direct lineage from Kipling’s popular work Kim, presents India as a land of cheeky, pluckish children whose purpose is to delight and entertain readers. In these ways, certain traditional hierarchies were left intact, and Western audiences could find their conventional viewpoints reinforced. On the other hand, what is fascinating is that, even though these works managed to superficially be in accordance with the demands of Western readers, this conformity does not constitute a satisfactory interpretation of them. Nor does it, to my mind, begin to touch on their importance. The genres they adopted were creatively adapted to convey highly unconventional, subversive ways of colonial India. Their literature in English illuminates wide-ranging concerns, including the cultural relevance of the Sanskritic literary tradition for modern India in Dutt’s poems; the role of Indian women’s solidarity in promoting conjugal reform in Satthianadhan’s novel of a young Hindu wife; how the question of famines and famine relief disproportionately disadvantage Indian women in Ramabai’s autobiographical famine essays; the knitting together of empire’s fraying fabric by creating a literature of “India as child” in Sorabji’s short fiction; or the voicing of impersonality in order to speak for India’s differing populations and to urge the promise of a secular, political unity in Naidu’s lyrics. Further, though published by Western publishing houses and marketed to Western readers, the writings of Dutt, Satthianadhan, and Naidu were neither necessarily intended for nor exclusively read by them. As contemporary reviews made clear, English-educated Indian audiences read them with enthusiasm as well. And while I have tried not to read resistance where it does not exist, the works of both Sorabji and Ramabai, directed solely at Western audiences, manage to reconfigure profoundly the nature of colonial interrelating, toward either long-term independence and self-empowerment, in Ramabai’s case, or in Sorabji’s, toward a deracinated, renewed sentimental bond. The writers of my study thus represent shifting relationships with Western and Indian cultures as well as with colonialism. Their partial Anglicization and their decision to write literature in English prove far too simplistic and homogeneous as explanatory concepts, if they lead us unilaterally to consign these women to the realm of subjected colonial stooges. While the notion of resistance can be overused, it is equally reductive to close off discussion based on fixed subject positions with supposedly predetermined, static worldviews. Instead, I have sought to instead to highlight, not underplay, the faultlines and pluralities in their self-fashioning. In accordance with critics such as Parama Roy, who has called for the opening up of “a field of identity formation … to a more heterogeneous model” and for critical engagement with the “specific conditions of enunciation” rather than looking for essentialist positioning, Anglophone Indian Women Writers begins with the assumption that the choice of English does not necessarily point

Introduction

19

to a retrogressive attitude toward Indian culture nor to an affiliation with Western colonialist values.40 Yes, these authors were molded by dominant Western-inspired ideologies and at times became spokespersons for them. Equally, however, their works resisted them, embodying anti-colonialist attitudes and participating in Indian cultural nationalism. The literary challenges they mounted to colonialism and patriarchy represent a wide spectrum of responses to the status quo. Despite the obvious differences between their works in terms of genre and subject matter, one can nonetheless discern recurring concerns. These include a critical attentiveness to gender in colonial and anti-colonial discourses; to forms of oppression both colonial and patriarchal; to cross-cultural coalitions and solidarities between women; and to the centrality of Indian women in the re-orientation of Indian and imperial cultures’ political and moral compass. Anglophone Indian Women Writers’ first chapter begins with an exploration of Toru Dutt’s translations from the Sanskrit, written in the mid 1870s and published posthumously in 1882. Her “free” translations or “versionings” of Vedic texts are anything but a simple reinscription of the Western Orientalist practices that had singled out and favored this same body of work. At a time of cultural transition, when indigenous writers were rewriting colonialist discourses of Indian history that had emphasized its cultural decline, Dutt’s translations (as well as her letters) prove her to be receptive to a newly fledged cultural nationalism in Bengal. In contrast to critical readings that see a continuance of cultural Eurocentrism and a capitulation to Western audiences’ preferences in her Sanskrit translations, this chapter argues that they reveal a great deal about her affiliations with reformist and proto-nationalist sentiments in Bengal. Her creative translations, replete with authorial digressions that speak to the claims of her own immediate context, are positioned in relation to reform debates that preoccupied Hindu and Anglo-Indian reformers in Bengal at this time. Instead of merely being an instrument of Anglicization or colonization, in Dutt’s hands Sanskrit translation could and did serve the interests of the colonized. This finding contests postcolonial translation theories that colonial culture in India inevitably constrained translation and reproduced imperial modes of representation. Instead, with Dutt’s work, we see the possibilities for critique afforded to Indian translators who reappropriated their Sanskrit literary tradition, wresting it away from European and British Orientalist translators. While Toru Dutt’s English-language writings count among the earliest by Indian women, in the second chapter we turn to Krupabai Satthianadhan’s novel Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (1894), often considered to be the first novel in English by an Indian woman writer. Chapter 2 reads the text as an engagement with and critique of colonialist accounts of the zenana, the women’s quarters where high-caste/class Hindu/Muslim women resided in seclusion. In order to promote and justify intervention into the Hindu family and forms of Hindu 40   Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 3–4.

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conjugality, these traditional accounts sensationalized purdah, the practice of seclusion. The limited physical spaces of women’s lives were used as metaphors for the psychological domination and entrapment resulting from the “backward” customs that denied women educational opportunities, promoted early marriage, and seemed immune to reform. In contrast to these colonialist views of Hindu women’s lives confined exclusively within the private, interior spaces of purdah, Kamala complicates the geographies of the child-wife. It does so by representing a diversity of private and public spaces of high-caste Hindu child wives, including the psychic spaces of fantasy. This manifold spreading out of the everyday places of their lives proves essential for the text’s own exploration of conjugal relations – specifically the contentious issue of child marriage and age of consent legislation – and the articulation of its reformist agenda. During the 1880s and 1890s, aspects of colonial reform movements coincided with internal reform movements, especially regarding the status of India’s women; their paths and ideologies overlapped. Kamala, the chapter argues, incorporates aspects of both. It offers a glimpse onto how Hindu and Christian reform movements could find common ideological ground in a critique of certain patriarchal and imperial practices, and how minority positions within a colonial culture (Satthianadhan was an Indian Christian) could prove to be a privileged site of indigenous agency and reform. Pandita Ramabai’s essays and reports, the subject of the third chapter, chronicle her early life experiences as a famine victim and later as an adult engaged in private famine relief efforts in the late 1890s and early twentieth century. Ramabai’s deeper understanding of famine as a social and political crisis (above and beyond its biological causes and effects), a crisis that creates “winners” and “losers,” is articulated through her attention to the manifold failures of British famine relief projects and policies. These texts make visible the unequal effects of relief on different social groups, but above all on women and girls within afflicted communities. This alone makes these works important documents, unique in “feminizing” India’s famines. In attending to women’s diminished access to food and food security during famine times, Ramabai’s famine essays establish a continuity with her other well-known writings on the high-caste Hindu widow. The widow’s state of chronic hunger, established through personal testimonies, is set on a continuum with the female famine victim’s starvation; together they point to a collusion of imperial and patriarchal politics. As this chapter goes on to examine, these essays, published and circulated to solicit Western women’s donations for Ramabai’s private relief work, rhetorically work to differentiate themselves from the “objective,” scientific discourses of famine writing embodied in the British government’s Famine Commission reports. They do so by a humanitarian appeal to their readers’ sympathetic response to suffering. In aligning themselves with the humanitarian narrative, however, they are subject to its problematic fusion of sentiment and paternalistic intervention. Calling for an international women’s solidarity mobilized on behalf of Indian women in need, Ramabai’s essays reinscribe India’s dependence on the West. At the same time, they assert the presence of an indigenous activism that restores these same women’s agency.

Introduction

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Their existing, collective efforts towards long-term economic and political selfdetermination are foregrounded in great and loving detail. Chapter 4 turns to Cornelia Sorabji, a prolific writer of short stories and memoirs, who made Indian children a central metaphor and subject of her writings. This was no doubt due to her professional work as (the first) female traveling legal counsel in British India for the Raj. Her clients were both the “purdahnashin,” orthodox Hindu women living in seclusion, many of whom were children or child widows, and minors who were wards of state under the Raj’s Guardian and Wards Act. While children appear everywhere in her writings, they are the sole focus of her two volumes entitled Sun Babies, published in 1904 and 1920 respectively; each features a collection of individual portraits and humorous tales of very young Indian children written for a British audience. This chapter explores the ways Sorabji’s works depict India’s children, childhood per se, and the narrator’s parental relations with those children as an allegory for colonial relations between Great Britain and India. In doing so, she draws on and extends a long tradition of familial metaphors to characterize Great Britain’s relations with its colonies. In Sorabji’s cultural moment, these tropes of family, kinship, and adoption can be seen as a strategy to defuse the proliferating arguments against empire, at home and in India, which focused not only on the costs and expropriation of wealth, but on the conflict-ridden nature of relations exacerbated by an increasingly visible, vocal anti-colonial nationalism. In contrast, her literary works represent India as an adorable, plucky infant-child. This “baby-fication” of empire, calculated to appeal to her British readers’ maternal instincts and to their desire to love Indian “sunbabies,” anticipates late twentieth-century rhetorics of transnational charity and adoption. As a device employed by a writer who was herself invested in the Raj’s perpetuation, it encourages the British reader’s emotional investment with an imperial project and with Indian populations with whom they otherwise had little contact. At a time when the maintenance of empire was becoming increasingly contested in Great Britain and in India, Sorabji’s texts work to shore up imperial ideologies of kinship between the metropolitan center and the peripheries. Often dismissed from serious study by feminist and postcolonial critics, Sarojini Naidu’s lyrics have been characterized as derivative of a tired Western romanticism, as an Orientalist pastiche, or as private, apolitical aestheticism unconnected with her prominent political role in anti-colonial nationalism. In contrast to these views, the fifth chapter argues that Naidu’s three volumes of poetry – The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917) – are best understood as an ongoing articulation of an imagined collective voice of “India” speaking to Indian readers. Thus, from the start, they parallel and reinforce her public political engagements with nationalism. In a series of close readings, the chapter uncovers how Naidu is able to position herself as speaker for a national collective. Her creation of an impersonal voice or lyric speaker without individuality, specificity, or particularity, is one way she is able to cast off the solipsistic “I” in favor of larger groupings. So too are her many poems that speak in the first-person plural, as well as those which appear to stem directly

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from oral or folk traditions. These lyric strategies, the chapter argues, constitute an anti-colonialist response to the Raj’s increasing stress on India’s peoples’ myriad differences from one another, which supposedly made them not only unable to unify and govern themselves, but which also made it impossible for any one person or group to speak for any other. As an especially powerful counter-response to the Raj’s “divide and conquer” strategy targeting nationalism, Naidu’s poems also seek to win her Indian audience’s understanding of the long tradition of synthesis between Hindu and Muslim cultures. Not only does she lyrically embrace the Mughal period in ways that underscore the period’s non-sectarian ideology of governance, but a number of her poems overtly allude to the Persianized Sufi poetic tradition, whose depiction of the dissolution of individual boundaries in a longing for a universal humanity resonates with Naidu’s own political efforts on behalf of Hindu-Muslim, and more largely, Indian unity. Taken together, these writers’ fluency in Indian and Western languages and cultures enabled them to create literary bridges. This approach was altogether new, because Indian women, even those in the elite classes, had never before had the opportunity to create literary narratives that could span such cultural betweenness, reimagine the place of cultural difference, or travel between the colonial periphery and the metropolitan center. Unlike E.M. Forster’s Indian women in A Passage to India, who express their collective uncertainty about how to speak of India or Europe, these writers evinced a robust confidence that cultures can be translated and that artistic forms are to be refashioned in ways that allow both sides to participate, even if the terms mediating that exchange remained largely one-sided and unequal. It would be reductive to see their work as an effort, as colonialist discourses were, to reinforce the necessity of Great Britain’s imperial presence. Despite being colonized female subjects, these authors managed to question colonialism’s biases, especially its authority to speak for Indians, and to assert the centrality of Indian concerns for both India and to Great Britain. While each writer comes across as fiercely independent-minded and unique in her creative endeavors, together their work gives a sense of Indian women’s artistic and intellectual contributions within a fervent period of indigenous cultural renewal. Inaugurating an Indian women’s literature in English, one that coexisted alongside women’s literature in India’s many other languages, their complex art was both new and strange for their Indian and Western readers alike.41 They were cultural translators, in the broadest sense, an activity that Ashok Bery has elegantly characterized as being both “here and there” and “neither here nor there.”42 It is still 41   See Tharu and Lalita’s Women Writing in India for English-language translations of these writers’ works. For other important Indian women writers of the period, who wrote in English but whose works are not literary, see Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English, ed. Eunice de Souza and Lindsay Pereira (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 42   Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 120.

Introduction

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surprising today, given our temporal distance from the cultural realities of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet there is one difference: Indian women’s narratives of cultural betweenness are now no longer as unique. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, many authors have extended the tradition of Anglophone Indian women’s writing, formally and geographically, into the global, cultural diasporas of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While formally more sophisticated and reaching larger international audiences, their unrecognized origins are the writers of Anglophone Indian Women Writers, whose plural and diverse cultural backgrounds and self-identifications constitute an important aspect and legacy of Indian women’s agency and experience under colonialism.

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Chapter 1

Translating Hindustan: Toru Dutt’s Poems and Letters [My room] is furnished very strangely, half in the English and half in the Bengali style … A small desk at one corner, covered with sundry English, French, Bengali, and Sanskrit books. Toru Dutt, Letter of August 28, 1876 There is a past to be learned about, but the past is now seen, and it has to be grasped as a history … It is narrated … It is grasped through reconstruction. Stuart Hall

My study begins with Toru Dutt, whose surviving works position her as one of the first, if not the first, Anglophone woman writer from the South Asian subcontinent. Hailing from Calcutta and spending her last years there, Dutt’s brief life (1856–77) was anything but rooted: from 1869 to 1873, Toru and her sister Aru traveled with their family in England and Europe, laying claim to being the first Indian women ever to travel there for pleasure and further schooling (they were educated first in Nice, France, and later in Cambridge, England, attending “higher lectures” addressed specifically to women).1 Such distant travel, for Indian middle-class women, was rare yet momentous, according to historian Meredith Borthwick: “Only a very few … were able to travel beyond India’s borders, but this minority had significance beyond its numbers. They performed the function of intermediaries, as informants for English women wanting to know more about the women of India, and for Indian women curious about the lives of women abroad.”2 The mobility of Dutt’s young adulthood, her exposure to different cultures, the expectation that she and her sister would become authors, and her fluency in multiple languages – all left a formative mark on her writings. Not only did she constitute her authorial persona through diverse languages and literatures, primarily French and English; this mediation of self via other cultures also redirected Dutt’s attention in the last two years of her life to an engagement with Indian literary cultures of the past, through her study and translation of Sanskrit tales. Her life was cut brutally short by tuberculosis, at the age of 21. Despite her illness, she managed to be incredibly prolific. From 1874 onwards, her critical essays on literature and poems  Grewal, Home and Harem 163.   Changing Role of Women 239. The greatest consequence for Indian men and women traveling abroad was a loss of caste status. Since the Dutts were Christian converts, they had already lost their status. 1

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in translation appeared regularly in The Bengal Magazine, and in 1876 her volume of poems translated from the French into English, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, was published simultaneously in Calcutta and London. An unfinished historical romance in English, Bianca, a Spanish Maid, and a complete epistolary novel in French, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, were discovered after her death and published posthumously (1878 and 1879, respectively). A few of her translated Sanskrit tales, as well as her original poems, were published during her lifetime; these, with some unpublished translations and original poems, were collected by her father and published posthumously in a final volume entitled Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882). Toru Dutt’s cosmopolitan perspective and creative output are rare for one so young from any background. Yet her development as a writer, from writer/ translator of French and English works to a writer contributing to cultural nationalism via her translations of a Hindu past, is also strikingly representative of her contemporary Indian milieu and her family’s social position in colonial Bengal. Dutt was the daughter of one of Calcutta’s most renowned and respected families, and her father and his brothers were all English-educated, Christian converts (interestingly, none of their wives converted except Toru’s mother, and then very reluctantly, at first).3 They belonged to the bhadralok, the class of Bengali elites serving within the colonial administration. While her experience as a colonized subject is worlds apart from that of the majority of Indian women, Dutt deserves a place within any critical exploration of Indian women’s condition under colonialism and discursive resistance to the colonial order. She shared her family’s passion for English literature, which was gradually transformed into an interest in versifying Indian history in English – a critical shift that defines Toru’s late work. Her father, Govind Dutt, his brothers Girish and Hur, and cousin Omesh published a volume of English poems, along with translations from the German and French, entitled the Dutt Family Album (1870). Though their defense of a British presence in India is largely unwavering in the volume, their poems inaugurate a rediscovery of an idealized Indian past, a dominant strain in emergent cultural nationalism of the era. To get a sense of how the reconstruction of an Indian past could be crucial to the development of a proto-national identity (full-blown nationalism did not exist until the mid 1880s), consider the following words of Bankim Chandra, one of Calcutta’s most prominent writers during the same period. In an essay written in English, he asks, “‘Why is India a subject country’? … [Because] there is no Hindu history. Who will praise our noble qualities if we do not praise them ourselves? … When has the glory of any nation ever been proclaimed by another nation?’.”4 (Bankim Chandra’s song, Bande Mataram (“Hail, the Motherland”), couched within his historical novel Anandamath (1882), eventually became the national song of India). Sharing a similar interest in Indian history, the Dutt Family Album’s many historical poems celebrate heroic, medieval India. In the preface  Grewal, Home and Harem 165.   Cited in Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 147–8.

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to a subsequent volume of poems, Lotus Leaves (1871), Toru Dutt’s uncle, Hur Chunder Dutt, writes: “We have many histories of India from school-histories up to elaborate treatises, but no work embodying Indian historical incidents and characters and older traditions in a poetical form.”5 Mirroring this familial interest in the Indian past, Toru Dutt loosely translates tales from the Sanskrit tradition; what she adds is a dialectical sensibility toward history that is largely lacking in her father’s generation. Toru Dutt’s cultural and linguistic “inbetweenness,” symptomatic not only of her family but of the bhadralok class in Bengal, reveal her to be an Indian who loved European literature, adopted some English customs and liberal, modernizing attitudes, and one who, though converted, remained proudly connected to Hindu traditions. She combined these hybrid cultural leanings with a strong desire to improve social and political injustices in Bengal stemming directly from colonialism. As Meena Alexander’s dictum, “the habitations that language provides are always piecemeal,” illuminates, however, any stable or consistent perspective within Toru Dutt’s variegated body of work is difficult to locate.6 Her texts do not establish a permanent home but rather continually explore the vicissitudes of cultural alienation and belonging in multiple linguistic abodes simultaneously, as many critics have noted.7 All Toru Dutt’s writings, then, are “translations” in the broadest sense, by virtue of subject matter and intended audience: they intellectually range across multiple cultures and language traditions. Many are, more narrowly,   Rosinka Chaudhuri’s “The Dutt Family Album: And Toru Dutt,” in A History of Indian Literature in English 61. 6   Meena Alexander, “Alphabets of the Flesh,” in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (New York: MIT Press, 1998) 154. 7   Alpana Sharma Knippling categorizes Dutt’s works as a place of “reinvention,” a “productive space in the international arena of textual production and reception” (“‘Sharp Contrasts of All Colours’: The Legacy of Toru Dutt,” in Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, ed. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (New York: Garland, 2002) 217, 213). Natalie Phillips and Christopher Foss are the latest to stress Dutt’s hybrid identity: Phillips, “Claiming Her Own Context(s): Strategic Singularity in the Poetry of Toru Dutt,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 3.3 (Winter 2007): paragraphs 1–15 plus notes and Foss, “‘We, Who Happier, Live/ Under the Holiest Dispensation’: Gender, Reform, and the Nexus of East and West in Toru Dutt,” in Gender and Victorian Reform, ed. Anita Rose (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) 161–77. In another essay, Alpana Sharma claims that Dutt cannot be reduced to either a colonial mimic or to an authentic voice of India, but rather is someone who occupies an “interstitial position” (“In-between Modernity: Toru Dutt (1856–1877) from a Postcolonial Perspective,” in Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945, ed. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) 108); Meenakshi Mukherjee mentions Dutt’s fascination with bi-culturalism, ventriloquism, and transplantation (“Hearing Her Own Voice: Defective Acoustics in Colonial India,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (London: Macmillan Press, 1999) 213). 5

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translations from one language to another, whether strictly or loosely. In Dutt’s case, these movements are not simply between an imperial center and a colonized margin. For example, some of Dutt’s French translations, as Tricia Lootens deftly reveals, show her playing the imperial enemies England and France off one another.8 In fact, her linguistic hybridity can be read as an enabling condition that supports her translations and critical reflections on India’s cultural traditions, an important component of developing nationalism during a period of widespread reform movements. While Dutt cannot be identified politically as a nationalist, as we will see, her works participate in nationalist discourses in two ways.9 First, her subject matter reinforces cultural patriotism. Second, by reconstructing the Vedic past, Dutt lends her voice to indigenous reform projects and emergent cultural nationalism by rejecting Orientalist, colonialist readings of India’s history. The significance of Toru Dutt’s translations from the Sanskrit in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is the primary focus of this chapter. To grasp their import, however, requires that the reader attend to multiple contexts: the cultural environment of translation and the translator; the history of translations from the Sanskrit during the colonial period; and the discrepencies that emerge between the ideological values inhering in the originals and those voiced in her loose translations (primarily, as asides by Dutt’s poetic speakers). Like any literary translations, Dutt’s operate within the conventions of her historical moment. Within this colonial setting, they do so across fascinating and intersecting divides. These include the temporal gap between the Vedic past and the colonized present; the religious divide between a complex Hindu tradition and Dutt’s Indian Christianity; the linguistic rifts between the Sanskrit language of sacred texts, the English of the colonizer and the Indian elite, and Indian vernaculars; and the ideological differences between Western Orientalist translators of Sanskrit and their bhadralok successors. A consideration of these divisions must also take into account the importance of gender, the fact that it is an Indian woman writer who returns to validate and rewrite an indigenous tradition. Before turning to the volume Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, however, I want to begin with a look at some of Dutt’s letters to her English friend Mary Martin. In these letters, Toru fashions herself as a mediator of her culture and extensively chronicles her experiences during the final four years of her life. These letters to Martin comprise a kind of epistolary “translation” of her life in Calcutta as a young Bengali woman(-writer) and offer a very different perspective of her. Instead of being merely a “colonized consciousness” trapped in the “almost, but not quite” dilemma of colonial mimicry, these letters reveal Dutt as a pointed 8

  On playing imperial enemies off one another, see Lootens, “Bengal, Britain, France,” 575, 577, 582. 9   Tricia Lootens’ essay “Alien Homelands” stresses the difficulty of placing Dutt within any national tradition (“Alien Homelands: Rudyard Kipling, Toru Dutt, and the Poetry of Empire,” in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005) 295, 297).

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and passionate thinker about social reform and current politics.10 Especially in the letters she wrote during the last two years of her life, Dutt emerges as someone whose expressions of Anglophilia coexist with an increasing denunciation of British colonial policies and practices that betray a conviction of their inherent superiority. Her family’s elite position (in March 1877 her father was made Justice of the Peace and named an Honorary Magistrate), instead of making it difficult for Dutt to be critical of British or Anglo-Indian attitudes, gave her a privileged position from which to express her own convictions. Attuned to the racial inequalities and tensions between Indians, Anglo-Indians, and British surfacing in her immediate environment, Dutt aligns herself with a community of Bengali English-educated elites who were challenging the colonial double standard. Racialized divisions were a prominent feature of India’s post-Mutiny landscape. After 1857, there was an increasing separation of Indians and AngloIndians, whether that took the literal form of discrete, demarcated spaces, e.g., the civil lines, cantonments, and hill stations versus the old cities, or as hardened mental attitudes concerning unbridgeable racial differences between two cultures. According to the historians Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, British arrogance and contempt were a primary cause of the Mutiny. In the post-Mutiny era, these attitudes rigidified into the belief that Indians were incapable of self-rule and thus conveniently justified an enduring British presence.11 Racial antipathy and exclusivity were apparently particularly egregious in Bengal, Dutt’s home.12 These attitudes gradually sparked nascent political movements, ones that did not get fully underway until the last two decades of the century, after Toru Dutt’s death. Opportunities for Indians to voice their grievances publically and push for reform differed widely by region. It was in Bengal, however, that one found the “most widespread existence of voluntary modern organizations”; indeed, by the 1870s, Bengal possessed the largest number of vernacular and English-language publications dealing with contemporary issues.13 In one of these, The Bengal Magazine, Dutt published her essays, translations, and poems. Bengal’s reform movements influenced Dutt as a colonial subject and as a writer/translator. Their emergence can be traced back to the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1823, Ram Mohan Roy not only argued for increased Indian access to an English-language curriculum; he also protested the East India 10   Chandani Lokugé characterizes the Dutts, including Toru at times, as imperialist in their beliefs (“Introduction,” Toru Dutt: Collected Prose and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) xxii and xli). Meenakshi Mukherjee’s early criticism reads Dutt’s work as “a colonial venture … aspiring to continue the great English tradition” (The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (New Delhi: Heinemann, 1971) 17). 11   Concise History 93–4 and 100. 12   Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984) 21–2 and 29. 13   Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 93.

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Company’s restrictions on the free press. He argued that in taking away “one of the most precious of their [Indians’] rights,” without any provocation, and abrogating the civil privileges that “every Briton is entitled to in England,” the British government in India jeopardized its claims to being benevolent and just. Instead, they resembled the despotic “Asiatic” rulers who desired to keep “a people … in darkness,” in order more effectively to “derive the greater advantage from them.”14 By the 1870s, Ram Mohan Roy’s sentiments had developed into more cogent demands for an end to Great Britain’s economic exploitation, by noted Bengali political reformers such as Siriskumar Ghose and Surendranath Banerjea (founder in 1876 of the Indian Association in Calcutta), who were contemporaneous with Dutt and with whom her stated concerns and viewpoints overlap. Ghose and Banerjea also denounced the inequities that structured the appointment of qualified Indians to the Indian Civil Service, an issue Dutt passionately protested in her letters, as we will see.15 Admission to these positions, highly coveted in India and England, had become all but impossible for Indians. In the 1870s, new strictures were ratified which virtually excluded Indians: since exams were held in London and the maximum age for sitting the exam was lowered to age 19, Indians who wished to compete had to absorb the financial, social, and emotional costs of travel to England and back for well over a year, at a very young age.16 Criticism of the British government slowly began appearing in the vernacular literatures, as Sudhir Chandra’s study illuminates.17 The Hindi poet and journalist Bharatendu Harishchandra stands as one example. His poems on colonial ceremonial occasions (such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s marriage and the Prince of Wales’ illness and subsequent visit to India) depart from traditional panegyric hyperbole as Harishchandra inserts his own subversive politicized scripts: from indirect pleas for Indian unity, to calls for increased resources to alleviate India’s ruined condition under British governance, and to direct exhortation of Indians to reclaim their lost valor. Dutt’s letters on political matters begin two years into her extensive correspondence with Mary Martin. The first refers to the Prince of Wales’ visit to Calcutta in 1876, for which her father had been asked to serve on the “native welcoming committee.”18 Dutt allows herself to be corrected by Mary for calling her countrymen “natives”: “The reproof is just … I shall take care and not call 14   Stephen Hay (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 29–30. 15  Heimsath, Indian Nationalism 64 and 65. 16   Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 120. 17   Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) 27–8. 18   Letter of 9-10-1875, pp. 75 and 76; in Harihar Das (ed.), The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1921). All subsequent references to Toru Dutt’s letters will include the date of letter and page number from this edition.

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them natives again. It is indeed a term only used by prejudiced Anglo-Indians, and I am really ashamed to have used it.”19 Though Dutt’s usage of the term “native” may tempt readers to deduce a colonialist mentality, her letters make increasingly clear, as her response to Mary shows, that she was becoming highly sensitized to racialist oppression. In conjunction with the Crown Prince’s visit and its heavy influx of visitors from Britain, Dutt sympathetically notes an Indian cabdriver’s refusal to accept a white man as his hire, for fear of not being paid, an apparently frequent occurrence. (Dutt seems to relish relating the fact that although the cabbie is aware who the Duke of Sutherland is (“the burra-sahib’s [Governor-General’s] brother”), he still refuses him.)20 Whereas earlier letters never mention such incidents, in the last year of her life, Dutt catalogs a series of humiliations suffered by Indians. She points out, for example, the cruel behavior of Anglo-Indian women toward Indians, either on-board ship where they “are very supercilious and fond de faire la grande dame” or toward their servants at home: “I do not know whether Anglo-Indian officers’ wives are in the habit of horse-whipping the Indian soldiers but it is not unlikely, as I have heard of Anglo-European ladies (?) beating, whipping their Indian servants.”21 Contrary to the interest and warmth which Toru Dutt experienced while traveling in Britain, she notes that in India she is never invited to socialize with Europeans: “Europeans are generally supercilious and look down on Bengalis; I have not been to one dinner party or any party at all since we left Europe.” When other Indians socialize with them, including eating, they do so secretly, reinforcing the racial and cultural divide: “Hindus, liberal ones, will dine at a European’s table without much demur, but it is done en cachette.”22 The government of India blatantly discriminates against Indians, ensuring that only Europeans command Bengali troops; in a region hit by a bad tsunami, Dutt’s cousin is sent to relieve the suffering, because, as she understands it, “no Englishman would stay in a place … strewn with corpses and dead cattle.”23 With a sense of affront, she notes how an Anglo-Indian magistrate on one occasion takes a condescending, rude tone with her father and her family; two months later, she conveys the distress felt by loyal Indians attending a durbar: “Everybody received a card of admittance. But neither Papa nor my Uncle Girish went. We heard from those who were foolish enough to go, that they sadly rued their loyalty, for they had to stand in the sun for three mortal hours, from eleven to two, without any tent 19

  Letter of 3-13-1876, pp. 131–2.   Letter of 1-13-1876, p. 123. Dutt was also very pleased at the celebratory nature of the visit. She praises a Bengali poet’s panegyric to the Prince (3-14-1876, p. 137) and supports the crown’s censorship of the theater in the wake of a Hindu farce targeted at the Prince’s unpopular visit to a zenana (a visit which Dutt supported, since he was invited; see 1-13-1876, pp. 121–2 and 2-28-1876, p. 127). 21   Letters of 3-22-1877, p. 278, and 9-8-1876, p. 204. 22   Letters of 3-24-1876, p. 141 and 1-8-1877, p. 248. 23   Letters of 3-13-1876, p. 132 and 1-15-1877, p. 252. 20

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or shelter over their heads.”24 Dutt’s letters rebel against the intensified racial divisions of post-Mutiny India. The Anglo-Indian contempt for Indians’ abilities and aspirations comes as a shock to her: despite their liberal claims, the British in India instinctively assume a strict, authoritarian posture. Two incidents of vicious Anglo-Indian racism, published in police reports and subsequently in newspapers, preoccupy Dutt in June and July 1876 and provide an occasion for her to deride the egregious forms of legal discrimination experienced by Indians. In the first case, British soldiers on holiday shoot a number of peacocks belonging to a Bengali farmer. The farmer protests, calling his neighbors for assistance, and as the encounter progresses from words to blows, one soldier is severely injured, seven Bengalis are wounded, and nine Bengalis die. The presiding magistrate finds that “the villagers were [to be] fined each and all; the soldiers acquitted.” In the judge’s words, “‘natives should know how precious is the life of one British soldier in the eyes of the British government’.”25 Dutt scathingly reveals this wildly disproportionate measure of the respective value of British and Indian life. Protection of British interests is at stake in a second incident that exposes what Dutt will label a “monstrous … perversion of the law.” Some dogs belonging to a British magistrate attack an elderly woman’s goat. Protecting her goat, a Bengali schoolboy hits one of the dogs, accidentally killing it. Dutt queries, “What do you think he received; commendation, praise, for his pluck in fighting with five dogs, for his humanity in saving a poor old woman’s goat (on which she depended for her livelihood) from being worried?” His sentence, handed down by the magistrate and upheld by the joint magistrate and sessions judge, “all Europeans,” she observes bitterly, is three weeks’ imprisonment with hard labor.26 Toru Dutt’s disposition to favor British imperial rule uncritically begins to erode. She overtly reveals in her letters to Martin a consonance between her political attitudes and those of her family. Her father, according to Toru, believes the British “mismanaged the whole Mutiny,” and he intends to vote in municipal elections for Kristo Das Pal, editor of the Hindu Patriot, a weekly newspaper known for protesting British injustice and corruption and for supporting social reformist causes, such as women’s education and widow remarriage.27 In a letter from September 1876, Dutt complains about the base economic motivation behind the British presence in India: “We have no real English gentlemen or ladies in India, except a very few. People generally come out to India to make their fortunes, you see, and real gentlemen and ladies very rarely leave home and friends for the ‘yellow gold.’”28 In this same month, she refers to her father’s cousin, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, who takes a similar swipe at Anglo-Indian greed. In an essay published in Fraser’s Magazine, he criticizes the British government 24

    26   27   28   25

Letters of 11-13-1876, p. 239 and 1-8-1877, p. 248. Letter of 6-26-1876, pp. 168–9. Letter of 7-15-1876, p. 184. Letter of 6-26-1876, p. 170. Letter of 9-1876, p. 204.

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for its system of taxation in India.29 Taxes on the indigenous population, already suffering from high food prices, he argues, should not be raised, nor should new ones be imposed; instead, export duties (to be paid by foreign consumers) and import duties (to be paid by foreign investors) should be raised. Britain’s tax policies favor the profits of foreign speculators: a bias, Shoshee Chunder Dutt warns, that will foment discontent throughout the country and widen the already large divisions between the governors and the governed. (Similar criticisms of the economic drain of colonialism would become a prominent feature of nationalistic rhetoric in the late 1880s and 1890s.) Toru Dutt’s cousin’s harsh indictment of the economics of imperial rule suggests one refrain in the Dutt family’s discourse on Indian politics, one that surfaces in Toru’s letters when she denounces the British in India as more attached to “yellow gold” than to family and friends. Toru Dutt herself couples her criticism of Anglo-Indian treatment of Indians with open support for various liberal, indigenous reforms. With pride, she encourages Indians in their efforts to compete with the English for academic honors.30 She bemoans the disproportionate cost and pressure on Indians taking civil service exams,31 that highly contentious issue for political reformers in Bengal – indeed, at least one contemporary of Dutt’s characterized it later as the impetus to the formation of a national political movement.32 Unsurprisingly, given her family’s investment in Toru’s and Aru’s education, high-caste women’s education surfaces as an important issue for Dutt, and her letters reflect her support of both British and home-grown reformist efforts in Bengal.33 She expresses scorn at the practice of child marriage: “It is considered scandalous if a girl is not ‘wooed and married and a’ before she is eight years old!”34 Echoing Bengali reformers Ishwarchandar Vidyasagar’s and Keshub Chunder Sen’s support for women’s education, she inquires of Martin whether it would be possible to educate a nine  Shoshee Chunder Dutt, “Taxation in India,” Fraser’s Magazine (September 1876): 302–24. 30   Letters of 3-12-1874, p. 59; 3-13-1876, p. 132; 1-22-1877, p. 255. 31   Letter of 6-9-1875, p. 90. 32   High unemployment among educated middle-class Indians and the inequities plaguing the civil service competition between Indians and British was, according to Dutt’s contemporary, Bipin Chandra Pal, “the beginning of our political conflict under British rule, which was the parent of our new political freedom movement” (qtd. in Heimsath, Indian Nationalism 67). 33   Reviewers praised Dutt for her remarkable talents and education, crediting her with the rebirth of women’s literature. In this vein, The Friend of India, an Anglo-Indian weekly, used Dutt’s example to push their colonialist reform agenda: “When child marriage is abolished, and young girls are properly educated, and woman once more assumes her rightful position in India, we may expect that the influence of the sex on literature, and through literature … will be great indeed. We trust Miss Toru Dutt’s high example will not be without effect on her countrymen” (7–1876, p. 176). 34   Letter of 5-3-1876, p. 152. 29

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year-old Indian girl in England, expresses delight to hear that two Indian women have passed entrance exams to study at university, and speaks out for education as the best means for Indian women to gain more liberties.35 The letters also speak out on numerous occasions for liberal social reforms for high-caste Hindu women. During the controversy over the Crown Prince’s visit to a zenana, Dutt expresses her agreement with the liberal position of The Indian Daily News. She affirms the Bengali gentleman’s right to open up his home to the Crown Prince (i.e., to have the female members of his family appear before the prince, in other words, to violate purdah) and act “as Europeans act,” if, out of self-respect as much as selfdetermination, he is thereby following his own beliefs.36 In one of her last letters, Dutt mentions that Anand Mohan Bose, a prominent reformer and advocate for the abandonment of caste distinction and the promotion of women’s education and literary culture, is encouraging her to help the cause of adult Hindu women’s education.37 Although Dutt’s political views were clearly in a formative stage, attributable to her youth, it is clear that the persona in her letters undergoes a marked change over the last four years of her life. Beginning as an unabashed Anglo- and Francophile, dismissive of her own culture (at times racist), and longing to return for good to England, after two years in Calcutta, her attention has shifted squarely to local politics and daily events and evinces a heightened sensitivity to social and economic forms of colonial oppression. During the last year of her life, her letters temper her deep affection for Europe with strong criticism, and they record her developing pride in Indian life and customs. For example, she chastises the Illustrated London News for its ignorance of the gender of Hindu names; recounts Indian and Bengali folk superstitions with pleasure; proclaims the richness of the Bengali language; asserts the grandeur and sublimity of ancient Indian legends; and, after years of ardently wishing otherwise, she expresses pain at the thought of leaving India to go to England (“It is sad to think of leaving home and wandering in foreign lands”).38 Dutt’s reviewers were also encouraging her to see herself as an “Indian writer,” whether it was a British reviewer seeing in her the landmark return of the woman writer in Hindu culture, or an Indian reviewer urging her to write in the Bengali vernacular.39 Despite the Dutt family’s relative social isolation from both Christian relatives and Hindu relations (a distance heightened by their conversion to Christianity), Toru’s own convictions reflect the ambivalence shared by many elite Englisheducated Indians at the time.40 While the bhadralok generally expressed loyalty and gratitude to the British government for its modernizing policies, at the same 35

  Letters of 11-17-1874, p. 72; 2-14-1877, p. 264; and 2-14-1877, p. 264, respectively.   Letter of 1-13-1876, pp. 121–2. 37   Letter of 3-10-1877, p. 275. 38   Letters of 6-27-1876, p. 171; 6-29-1876, p. 173; 1-24-1877, p. 255; 4-24-1876, pp. 144–5; and 12-25-1876, p. 241 and 3-22-1877, p. 278, respectively. 39   Letters of 10-12-1876, pp. 222–3, and 7-1876 (no day given), pp. 175 and 178. 40   Letters of 1-8-1877, p. 248 and 9-25-1876, p. 213. 36

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time, influenced by Western liberalism and indigenous reform movements, they denounced the egregious racism of Anglo-Indians: Faith in colonialism despite an understanding of its exploitativeness – this was the paradox of educated consciousness in colonial India … The reality of exploitation was seen, and so was the futility of relying on colonial masters; yet the British were appealed to for relief and reform. Faith in the rulers had been internalized, and this influenced not only tactical calculations but also the very perception of colonial rule.41

This tension within the colonized consciousness, according to Sudhir Chandra, cut not only across regions, but across ideological differences between “moderates” and “extremists” in the generation that came of age in Bengal after 1857.42 These stresses are apparent – indeed they define – the contradictory qualities of Toru Dutt’s ideological and cultural habitations. When Dutt writes Ancient Ballads, for example, she re-authorizes Indian culture as Sanskritized culture, much as the Western Orientalists did: “Sanskrit is as old and as grand a language as the Greek,” Toru writes proudly to Mary.43 The cultivation of a discourse of Indian identity that turns to the past for a definition of its uniqueness is characteristic, however, of indigenous rhetoric as well. Concentrated at first in Bengal, reformers sought to revise accounts of India’s history written by the British that, according to Dutt’s contemporary Radhakrishna Das, “planted in young tender hearts [of Indians] the thought that they are worthless and meant to be slaves forever.”44 To highlight India’s past greatness and martial prowess, Das wrote of Vijay Singh, a conquerer who ruled Bengal some two and a half millenia earlier.45 Toru Dutt’s cousin, Romesh Chunder Dutt Keshab, contributed extensively to a literary recovery of India’s past: from 1874 to 1879 he wrote four historical novels and in the 1880s he translated the Rig Veda, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata.46 Chandra Sen, a member of Bengal’s elite and an avid reformer, proclaimed the cultural capital that India possessed in its ancient texts: “All Europe seems to be turning her attention in these days towards Indian antiquities, to gather the priceless treasures which lie buried in the literature of Vedism and Buddhism.”47 Even demands for modernization and innovation could be justified as fostering continuity with the traditions of the Vedic past. As early as 1817, for example, a group of reform-minded Bengali gentlemen led by Ram Mohan Roy were in the forefront demanding English  Chandra, The Oppressive Present 21, 46–7.   Ibid. 21. 43   Letter of 3-13-1876, p. 133. 44   Quoted in Chandra, The Oppressive Present 57. 45   Ibid. 58. 46   Ibid. 59. 47   Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 2, 48–9. 41 42

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education, including education for women (some 18 years before Macaulay’s infamous 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”).48 They called for the same standard of English education that English gentlemen received at home, and for governmental recognition of such a curriculum. They also argued for the education of women, pointing to scholarly women of the Vedic past, such as Maitreyi, Lilavati, and the wife of Kalidas, as evidence of a religious sanction for their position. Along with the work of traditional conservative Hindus such as Radhakanta Deb and Ramkamal Sen, the secular Roy’s efforts, in partnership with David Hare, eventually resulted in the creation of the Hindu College in 1827 in Calcutta, whose curriculum, as stated in their charter, was “in the English and Indian languages and science of Europe and Asia,” without “any trespass upon indigenous religious belief” (my italics).49 Because the modernization of education also highlighted past indigenous traditions, the new curriculum was crafted in language that did not reject old (Indian) ignorance for new (European) knowledge. The reformers’ platform straddled both geographical areas and their accumulated knowledge. When Indian writers “reinvented their tradition,” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, as Toru Dutt would do in her translations, they found themselves in part adopting a discourse of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Orientalists, including William Jones, Edwin Arnold, Horace Hayman Wilson, and Henry Colebrooke. These Orientalists had a deep interest in Indian culture, but they never questioned the legitimacy of British interests there, and their Sanskrit translations served to strengthen colonial control.50 Significant for Dutt’s context here, they also shaped a particular understanding of Indian cultural history

  Education for women was fostered by the Brahmo Samaj; see Chatterji, Impact of Raja Rammohun Roy 37–42. 49   Manju Dalmia, “Derozio: English Teacher” and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Fixing English: Nation, Language, Subject,” both in The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) 47 and 12. I highlight the inclusion of Asian/Indian languages and science in the petition for the creation of the Hindu College to stress the broad-based support the demand for English studies had from Indians across the ideological spectrum. 50   Sponsored in part by the East India Company, their scholarship dovetailed with Britain’s colonial expansion in India. The communication of their findings on ancient Indian cultural traditions was part and parcel of the effort to shore up colonial power on the subcontinent. Gauri Viswanathan notes that “Orientalism was adopted as an official policy partly out of expediency and caution and partly out of an emergent political sense that an efficient Indian administration rested on an understanding of ‘Indian culture’.” Thus, because controlling a subject population is more likely to succeed the more knowledge one has, governor general Warren Hastings recognized that “‘every accumulation of knowledge is useful to the state’” (Masks of Conquest 28 and 29). See also Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. III.4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 9–15. 48

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dominant for the rest of the nineteenth century.51 Fascinated by ancient Vedic and post-Vedic culture, British Orientalists translated almost exclusively from Sanskrit texts belonging to a distant 2,500-year history (1500 bce to 1100 ce), ignoring anything either remotely modern or written in any of the hundreds of other (living) Indian languages. William Jones’ Sanskrit translations included the Shakuntala, the Ordinances of Manu (Brahmin laws and customs), and large sections of the Vedas (with many hymns to deities). Like Edwin Arnold, he translated Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda and the Hitopadesa, a collection of didactic fables. Arnold is also known for his translations from the epic The Mahabharata and the Kashmiri love poem, the Chaurapanchasika of Bilhana. Horace Hayman Wilson’s oeuvre included the Vishnu Purana, and Colebrooke wrote essays on, among other things, the Vedas, Hindu religion, law, customs, caste, ethnicities, arithmetic and algebra, geography, and laws of succession. By choosing Sanskrit works from 1500 bce to 1100 ce as their source texts and with Brahmin pundits aiding them in their interpretations, these Orientalist translators created a specific definition and representation of Indian culture. “India” was in essence Hindu; Brahmins were the predominant group best able to interpret India’s history; “Hinduism” was something that, according to these Orientalists and Brahmin pundits, could be identified as a coherent, separate religion; India’s cultural acme occurred thousands of years earlier, that is to say, it was temporally distant and not merely different; India’s current state represented a decline from its earlier “primitive” magnificence; and, by virtue of their cleansed translations, India emerged as a culture mystically inclined, remote from material and political concerns, and characterized by naturalness and simplicity.52 Texts like Jones’ Gitagovinda, for example, which tells the story of Radha’s and Krishna’s love, was sanitized of explicit erotic content while its spiritual dimensions were foregrounded. Further, authority being conferred upon a specific set of “original” texts alone, while later versions were deemed corrupt and inauthentic, meant that the Orientalists privileged an “unchanging” India. This had tremendous cultural ramifications; when the issue was Indian law, to name just one example, “there was no sense that Hindu [legal] ‘usages’ were 51   The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 52   The Vedic period falls from circa 1500 bce to 200 bce; works written during this time were composed in the Vedic form of Sanskrit. The Sanskrit period is usually dated 200 bce to 1100 ce. The Orientalist canon falls in both these periods, with, for example, the Vedas and the Mahabharata falling into the Vedic period, and the Vishnu Purana and the Ordinances of Manu falling into the Sanskrit period. See Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 10–35 and Mahasweta Sengupta, “Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and Images of Power,” in Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) 160–2.

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responsive to historical change.”53 If Sanskrit literature was not to prove equally binding in the long run, Indian writers had to either respond critically to that tradition, as Dutt would, or create a new literature in the vernacular. In their choice of Sanskrit subject matter, nineteenth-century Indian literary treatments of this period were largely imitative and celebratory. Yet though they reinscribed an idealized past as the Orientalists had, their works also contributed to newly evolving self-definitions.54 Toru Dutt’s generation returned to myths from the epics The Ramayana and The Mahabharata and shaped them into a heroic counter-history to the demoralizing historical accounts of India written by the British: This consciousness [of the importance of myth as communal history] produced the myth of a glorious past as a counterpoint to the myth of the white man’s civilizing mission. The two myths together created a balance in which the Indian’s sense of subjection, while continuing to be galling, ceased to be paralyzing.55

Earlier in the nineteenth century, Henry Derozio wrote two sonnets evoking Vedic age glory, lamenting India’s present decline, and heralding (an unspecified) future liberty. In the same period, the late 1820s, Kasiprasad Ghosh wrote English language poetry and essays on indigenous literature and history and was the first Indian to present the Vedic age as a secular period, parallel to the secularizing impulses of the present. Michael Madhusudhan Dutt’s English language poetry, inspired by Orientalist translations of Indian epics, led him to the idea of India as a fatherland, decades in advance of the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.56 Literary critic Jasodhara Bagchi has argued that “there was a rebirth of the Hindu heroic … under the ‘progressive’ wings of English literary studies. This is the ‘moment’ of the bourgeois nationalist consciousness and the new project of hegemonization of native elite culture,” a moment within which Toru Dutt easily fits.57 Even reformers who resisted Westernization and were staunchly opposed to progressive, secularizing values, such as the prominent Bengali Brahmo reformer Rajnarayan Bose, called for the study of Indian literature and culture. In 1866, the Society for the Promotion of National Feeling, whose goal was the development of the national character, emphasized the importance of knowledge of both Sanskrit  Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 13.  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 16. 55  Chandra, The Oppressive Present 58. 56  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets chapters 1–3. This Dutt is no relation to Toru. The rhetoric of India as “fatherland” was replaced by that of India as “motherland” in the late nineteenth century. 57   Jasodhara Bagchi, “Shakespeare in Loin Cloths: English Literature and the Early Nationalist Consciousness in Bengal,” in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991) 152–3. 53 54

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and Bengali. At times, annual fairs (Mela) worked to foster the idea of a national (Hindu) literature and songs going back to the Vedic age.58 When Toru Dutt began to write tales from the Sanskrit in English in the mid 1870s, the British Orientalists had disappeared. For her, Sanskrit was not a native language, but one that had to be learned and studied; much of its literature was known to the bhadralok in English (or French) translation or as part of a familiar repertoire of orally-transmitted literature. Rather than a complete rupture with earlier Orientalists, then, her generation of translators had assimilated an English poetic idiom and were responding to the demands of the market for episodes based on ancient Indian epics or folktales in English, creating “imitations” and original poetry. Translations could also serve counterhegemonic ends, as Toru Dutt’s translations would do. Within critical debates today, the subversive status of Indian translations of Sanskrit into English is contested, as we will later see, in part because they seem to re-subject and re-position Indians within Western, Orientalist constructions of their history. The activity of translation itself, however, signaled that Indians – including Toru Dutt – were, at the very least, wresting control of this historical archive away from European Orientalists, and in some instances, were rejecting partially or wholly European constructions of Indian identity. Despite her Christian conversion, it was the Sanskrit tradition that enabled Dutt to grapple with contemporary Indian self-definition. Her Christianity seemed to have played little role either in the selection of tales or in her interpretation of them (with one exception, as we will see). Dutt’s letters show that she was familiar with earlier translations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in English and with Clarisse Bader’s Frenchlanguage Women in Ancient India (based on Sanskrit tales and first published in 1864). Also on her reading list were the Shakuntala, the Vishnu Purana, and the Bhagavata Purana.59 Her translations also suggest that some tales were wellknown to her from her mother’s stories in the vernacular. Indians’ education in Sanskrit legends came from other indigenous sources as well. Dutt was acquainted with the work by Bengalis such as Aliph Cheem’s Lays of Ind and the work of Hur Chunder Dutt, her uncle, entitled Lotus Leaves or Poems Chiefly on Ancient Indian Subjects (1871).60 When I speak of Dutt’s translations of Sanskrit tales, then, these translations are best understood as versions of legends, compiled from a variety of sources and including her own creative adaptions. What the exact sources were of any of her translations – ancient Sanskrit texts which she was studying during the last two years of her life, Western Orientalist renditions, the memory of her mother’s tales, or contemporary Indian “versionings” – is not ascertainable from Dutt’s writings. What is clear, however, is that her particular 58   Nemai Sadhan Bose, The Indian Awakening and Bengal (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960) 170–3. 59   A.N. Diwedi, Toru Dutt (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977) 78. 60   Dutt mentions reading Cheem in a letter of 11-13-1876, p. 238; I could not find the date of publication for this volume.

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interest in Sanskrit surfaces after a gradual “repatriation.” After four years of being abroad and two-and-a-half years resettling into life in Calcutta, Dutt declares in her letter of December 25, 1876 that “India is my patrie” and that she is beginning to study Sanskrit in earnest together with her father. The result of her reading and that study is Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. The title and some content of Dutt’s volume, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, conform superficially to the Orientalism that the “patronage culture” of editors, publishers, and critics applauded and who significantly determined the translation practices of the time.61 Yet concurrently, over half of Dutt’s translated tales openly call into question the current relevance of the tales, thereby challenging the authority of these colonialist culture brokers. The tales are worth translating, Dutt’s volume asserts, yet their value does not lie in a renewed transmission of the Orientalist stereotypes beloved by Western audiences or in a recuperation of some unchanging, original intent. In “Buttoo,” better known as the tale of the archer Eklavya from the Mahabharata, for example, the speaker points to the tale’s legendary time: “Up Time’s fair stream far back, -- oh far,/ The great wise teacher must be sought!” (77). Situated in a period when magic reigned, the poet-translator immediately signals an absolute breach that exists between the past and the present with a foregrounded enjambment “No more,” while the adjective “inurned” connotes that past’s morbidity: “In peace, at Dronacharjya’s feet,/ Magic and archery they learned,/ A complex science, which we meet/ No more, with ages past inurned” (77). The speaker’s distance to her material emerges more overtly in “Jogadhya Uma,” a folktale which explains the mythic origins of a local custom, namely, the offering of shell bracelets as a tribute to the eponymous goddess. At the conclusion of the tale, its explanatory value is undercut: “Absurd may be the tale I tell,/ Ill-suited to the marching times,/ I loved the lips from which it fell,/ So let it stand among my rhymes” (64). There is a merit to the tale, but it is not measured by the reauthorization of the content; far from timeless, she condemns the tale as anachronistic and indeed unbelievable. Inserting her voice into a text from the past, the speaker rejects any easy assimilation to the Vedic tradition or confirmation of India’s past glory. In doing so, she “foreignizes” her translation, to use Lawrence Venuti’s term, in two ways.62 First, she foregrounds her own intrusion into the tale, instead of rendering a “seamless” translation, that is, one without a visible translator. Second, her “interrogative” translation differs 61   Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, with an introductory memoir by Edmund Gosse (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1882). All subsequent references to the poems in Ancient Ballads will be indicated parenthetically by page number in the text. For an analysis of the interaction between translation and patronage culture, see André LeFevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (New York: Routledge, 1992) 15–26. 62   Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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from celebratory Orientalist and nativist ones, creating a critical dissonance or discrepancy between their interpretations of ancient India and her own. If there is a contemporary value to “Jogadhya Uma” for the speaker, it lies in her subjective bond to the oral source from whom she first hears it (most likely her mother, as other poems and letters suggest): “I loved the lips from which it fell.” In “Jogadhya Uma,” Dutt makes women’s roles as preservers of the Sanskrit tradition apparent, through their transmission of oral, vernacular versions; she even goes so far as to posit (and reclaim) the tradition’s value as a maternal legacy. Similarly, in the tale of “Sita” drawn from the epic The Ramayana, the speaker alters the stress from the tale’s content to the speaker’s consciousness of the diegesis or telling of it. Situating the children and mother in the evening dusk, the poem does not repeat the mother’s narration (although it does name the moment to which the children are responding, namely, the emotional tableau of Sita’s abandonment). The emphasis, however, shifts away from Sita. Directed toward the speaker’s childhood recollection (“the lay/ Which has evoked sad Sita from the past/ Is by a mother sung” (123)), she suggests that this maternal “archive” is lost: “When shall those children by their mother’s side/ Gather, ah me! As erst at eventide?” (123). The reader’s ability to respond to Vedic age literature, the speaker intimates, depends upon their ability to find a personal connection to the teller, something the speaker validates through her identification of the tale’s provenance – not an ancient text, but the words of a beloved mother.63 This living mother emerges as source of the Sanskrit tradition, mediating the intersection of past and present. In Dutt’s case, her mother’s conversion to Christianity, at first strongly resisted, did not erase her deep feelings for these tales, which she also passed on to her children. This makes Dutt’s activities as a translator different than that of the Orientalists, as she highlights individual experience, voice, and vernacular versions over the authority of ancient texts. If the audience’s relation to the storyteller conditions the capacity to respond to Vedic literature, then the teller assumes greater importance than the narrated content alone. As translator and “speaker” of this oral tradition, Dutt occupies a distinctly feminine role, the place of the absent mother. Reconfiguring these Sanskrit tales’ import continues each time the volume either overtly or implicitly addresses their values. Two of Dutt’s translations from the Vishnu Purana, “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind” and “Dhruva,” undercut the morality espoused by the originals. The first tells of an aged king who gives up his worldly responsibilities to devote himself to prayer and penance and his soul’s wellbeing. The king’s embrace of asceticism adheres closely to the ideology of dharma (the belief that specific duties correlate with life’s different stages). When he grows to love a fawn needing his care, he “[finds] his devotions broken” (68) and “[cannot] think of the Beyond” (69), even in his last moments. The original offers a chastisement of his worldly attachment to the deer, a moral whose telling 63   Lokugé cites a letter from Toru Dutt to Clarisse Bader where she reveals the “when I hear my mother chant the ancient lays of her country, I almost always cry” (“Introduction,” Collected Prose and Poetry xl).

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the translator-speaker interrupts in order to reject: “As the concluding moral of his tale,/ That for the hermit king it was a sin/ To love his nursling. What! A sin to love!/ A sin to pity! Rather should we deem/ Whatever Brahmans wise, or monks may hold,/ That he had sinned in casting off all love/ By his retirement to the forest-shades” (70). Explicitly condemning the dharmic requirement of withdrawal from worldly attachments, the speaker insists on the value of this-worldly love, extended to creatures, and links it explicitly to a Christian spiritual ethos: “we, who happier live/ Under the holiest dispensation, know/ That God is Love” (69). In Dutt’s translation, the speaker’s intrusions direct the reader’s attention to the ways that the tale’s original affective momentum, focused as it is on the hermit’s loving bond with the deer, deviates from its original moral. By constituting herself as co-author, she asks her readers to see the “tradition” as a text that is not only self-contradictory but constantly reassessed by its readers, as she herself stages with her intrusion. Far from timeless, the Hindu tradition is timebound. Direct criticism occurs again in the story “Dhruva,” also from the Vishnu Purana. Dhruva, the son of King Uttanapado’s less beloved second wife Sunneetee, longs for his father’s love. His father favors Uttama, the son of his first wife, Suruchee. Suruchee, protecting her own son’s favored position, chastises Dhruva to “learn [his] place” (72), while her beauty blinds the king to Dhruva’s loving advances: “Led on by Love he [Dhruva] came [to his father’s side], but found, alas!/ Scant welcome and encouragement; the king/ Saw fair Suruchee sweep into the hall/ …/ And dared not smile upon her co-wife’s son” (71–2). Instead of following his own “helpless” and “languid-eyed” (73) mother’s advice to accept his “lowly fortune” (73) within the family and be “meek, devout … full of love … and … humble” (75), Dhruva leaves home and pursues religious devotions, seeking renown from “a place/ That would not know him even, -- aye, a place/ Far, far above the highest of this earth” (75). Because the speaker inserts herself and commends Dhruva for his pursuit, a religious life rewarded with his starry transformation, two criticisms of the tale’s original moral emerge. First, Dhruva’s mother’s believes that the cause of Uttama’s/Suruchee’s favor and Dhruva’s/her disfavor lies in past deeds, which relegate them to an inferior status: “the deeds that thou hast done,/ The evil, haply, in some former life,/ Long, long ago…/ The sins of previous lives must bear their fruit” (73–4). Therefore, any present misfortune, including her own, is well-deserved: “For glorious actions done/ Not in this life, but in some previous birth,/ Suruchee by the monarch is beloved./ Women, unfortunate like myself, who bear/ Only the name of wife without the powers,/ … pine and suffer for our ancient sins” (74). For her, wisdom is to be “content … and [seek] nothing beyond” (74). Dhruva, in contrast to his mother, refuses to accept the social position of despised, subordinate son that his karmic destiny appears to dictate, following her understanding (75–6): “Mother, thy words of consolation find/ Nor resting-place, nor echo in this heart” (75). By focusing on Dhruva’s rejection of this secondary status as he leaves his family, the text is not simply questioning Sunneetee’s interpretation of karmic doctrine. It extols Dhruva’s ambition and individualism, later authorized by the divine merit he acquires in exercising them:

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“There is a crown above my father’s crown,/ I shall obtain it, and at any cost/ of toil, or penance, or unceasing prayer…/ Not with another’s gifts/ Desire I, … to be rich,/ But with my own work would acquire a name” (75–6). Second, the speaker’s criticism of polygamous practices, while not overtly stated, is implied through her focus on the domestic misery of both Sunneetee and Dhruva (and the lack of representation of his spiritual training). Because of the inequality between wives within a polygamous household, the tale suggests, a mother like Sunneetee is more likely to betray her child’s interests, because of the pressure to retain her husband’s favor. Further, relations between genders become inverted. When Dhruva attempts to share his father’s lap with his brother Uttama, the king turns away as soon as “fair Suruchee [sweeps] into the hall” (71). Lacking strength, his decisions are determined by his favorite wife, who, by controlling his sexual desire, controls him: the king “[dares] not smile upon her co-wife’s son” (72). “Dhruva” encourages its readers to reconsider the familial liabilities of polygamy and the potential passivism of karmic doctrine, ideologies central to the code of Manu underlying the Vishnu Purana.64 This is further underscored by Dutt’s decision to tinker with the Puranic original: there Sunneetee encourages Dhruva to leave home and Dhruva, after his spiritual pursuits, returns home to inherit both his father’s kingdom and his love.65 In Dutt’s revisions, Sunneetee encourages Dhruva to stay at home, and Dhruva “never to his father’s house returned” (76). By omitting the reconciliation scene, Dutt ensures that the depiction of the polygamous family remains one torn by favoritism, cruelty, and unhappiness, one where excellence is neither recognized nor rewarded. In one subsequent tale, “Sindhu,” Ancient Ballads again returns to question karmic justice (if only indirectly since the speaker does not directly comment on the tale). Sindhu’s killing of a male bird leads to Sindhu’s own death by the king: “The [female bird’s] wail and sad reproachful look/ In plain words seemed to say,/ A widowed life I cannot brook,/ the forfeit must thou pay/ …/ And so I die – a bloody death” (99). The king’s killing of Sindhu leads to Sindhu’s parents’ death; Sindhu’s and his parent’s deaths lead to the king’s death. Witnessing a horrific chain of consequences derived from a wicked yet limited action, namely, a youth’s careless killing of a songbird, the reader is confronted with a narrative that presents karmic justice as both exorbitant and rigidly deterministic. Beyond questioning the contemporary significance of Vedic and post-Vedic material, the speaker’s commentary brings the rhetoric of reform to bear upon certain traditional social and religious customs. The speaker, for example, targets the corruption of worldly political and priestly power. In “Prehlad,” a tale from The Mahabharata, for example, a youth is imprisoned because he worships the god Vishnu as his ultimate authority instead of the king. The speaker castigates unjustly held political authority and predicts the downfall of any king who issues a similar ultimatum. The “sovereign people” declare in unison that kings should “rule for us 64   Patrick Olivelle, The Law Code of Manu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 65  See http://foss.elsweb.org/toru_dutt, footnote one to “Dhruva.”

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and in our name,” and when they do not, “tyrants of every age and clime” (121), like the king in “Prehlad,” can expect to meet with a similarly violent end (in the tale, he is killed by a lion-headed avatar of Vishnu). Numerous other tales contain these democratizing, anti-authoritarian impulses, including “Tree of Life,” “Buttoo,” “Savitri,” and “Dhruva.” The oppressiveness of class and caste hierarchies, a target of many Indian social reformers of the second half of the nineteenth century, including Kasiprad Ghosh, M. Ranade, G.K. Gokhale, J.G. Phule, and Rabindranath Tagore, also figures prominently in the volume.66 In “Jogadhya Uma,” the pedlar at the ashram praises the priest for inviting everyone to share in the shrine’s blessing, not only those with elevated status or those who can pay: “all the poor/ Ten miles around thy sacred shrine/ Know that thou keepest open door,/ And praise that generous hand of thine” (60). In “Buttoo,” the treatment of caste is much more complex. A renowned teacher of archery refuses to take a “low born” youth as his student, shaming him in front of his pupils and lending a clear note of irony to the tale’s opening characterization of the Vedic period as the era of teachers “great” and “wise” (77). Buttoo leaves, rejecting the teacher’s elitism: “what is rank or caste?/ In us is honour, or disgrace,/ Not out of us” (78). Living in the wilderness and valuing the company of animals who, he notes, “have no pride of caste like men” (82), Buttoo takes “all creatures and inanimate things/ … [as his] tutors” (82). Building a statue of the teacher who has spurned him, he worships the power this icon transfers to him, gaining an (illusory) mastery over the social hierarchy and giving birth to himself over the years as a consummate archer. Buttoo achieves the “goal … [to] which [his] soul points,” the realization of his “waking dream” (79) through his “constant prayer,” “steadfastness of heart and will,” and “courage to confront and dare/ All obstacles”; “unaided he [wins] the fight” (83–4). Years later, however, when the teacher comes across him in his forest retreat, Buttoo exhorts him to “give [him his] due” by recognizing his skill, in return for which he will grant the teacher a favor of his choosing. In a cruel twist, the teacher requests Buttoo’s righthand thumb (88), so that no one can surpass the skill of his high-born, favored pupil, Arjuna. Buttoo complies, tragically losing the power he has so painstakingly claimed as his own. The cost of caste hierarchy in this tale is exclusion and self-mutilation. In Dutt’s version, the struggle against caste injustice becomes equated with the heroism of effort and self-sacrifice, despite the ultimate futility of Buttoo’s efforts, something the “great” teacher also acknowledges: “men shall ever link thy name with Selfhelp, Truth, and Modesty” (88). The speaker’s revisionism extends further to qualify the idealized representations of Vedic age Indian women, the vaunted stereotypes of both Orientalists and emerging nationalists.67 Thus, figures usually associated with virtue, such as Sita and Dhruva’s mother and aunt, in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, display 66   See Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 40–1. 67   Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” in Recasting Women 27–87.

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considerable weaknesses. Sunneetee and Suruchee are deformed either by their lack of power, or possession of too much, respectively; Sita, in the tales “Lakshman” and “Sita,” is represented at the moment of her greatest lack of judgment, where she puts her own chastity and her husband’s and brother-in-law’s lives at risk. While Dutt’s versions prove critical of certain Hindu beliefs stemming from ancient times, the speaker validates other attitudes and practices, long since lost, that dovetail with the agenda of contemporary reform movements. This is especially evident in “Savitri,” a traditional narrative whose main character stands as an unequivocal symbol of ideal wifehood. Instead, Dutt underscores the freedoms that Vedic women such as Savitri possessed, now lost. The speaker notes that “In those far-off primeval days/ Fair India’s daughters were not pent/ In closed zenanas./ On her ways/ Savitri at her pleasure went/ Whither she chose … And so she wandered where she pleased/ In boyish freedom. Happy time! (2–3). “Savitri” also promotes women’s education, as hermit sages “[give Savitri] the best they had” (2), and she develops into a model woman whose spiritual devotion exceeds the bounds of convention. She disobeys Shastric religious orthodoxy when she doesn’t attend to her husband’s funeral rites, but instead obeys her own spiritual inclinations. Further, “Savitri” raises the issue of marital choice; the daughter’s freedom of choice prevails over familial (that is, paternal) and communal sanction. Taking the most unpromising story for a reformist agenda, Dutt makes Savitri not just into a good wife but a strong woman unconfined to the zenana, a place meant to protect her from other men. This educated, free-ranging woman chooses to be the most faithful and devoted of wives. Her independence does not corrupt her but gives her strength to fight death itself for the love of her husband, a perfect fable to allay the anxieties of traditionalists roused by proto-feminist reformist agendas. Through its attention to purdah, women’s education, and spousal choice, and by representing Savitri’s marriage as based on the companionate model, issues central to reformers in both colonial and indigenous communities, “Savitri” reveals a translator who, in her writing of the past, does more than rehearse or mirror orientalizing perspectives. Her translations of “Savitri” and other tales stake out a position within the contentious, complex set of arguments about Vedic and post-Vedic morality, religious and social institutions, gender roles, and the uses of the past. In considering Dutt’s translation practices in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, her decision to translate from Sanskrit into English forms a good starting point. Some postcolonial theorists have argued that by choosing English as the target language of translation, Indian translators have simply reinforced its hegemony in South Asia. For Tejaswini Niranjana, for example, the Orientalists as translators positioned themselves as self-appointed purifiers of Indian culture, men who spoke for Indian culture because Indians could not “reliably” do so. Their translations into English essentially subjected Indian culture to the cultural values of the West by assimilation.68 Indian writers or translators who have chosen or choose English as their medium of expression become complicit with this process.   Siting Translation 11–19.

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This condemnation, serious as it is, neglects to ask the question of why someone like Dutt might have chosen English, instead of a vernacular language, at this historical moment. To answer this necessitates a brief glance at literary language use in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Calcutta, Dutt’s home, was a polyglot city, with at least seven different languages in use: Hindi, Bengali, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Sanskrit, with English emerging as another tongue. Modern literature in India had long been in Persian and Urdu, but both were in decline by the beginning of the nineteenth century.69 Sanskrit was not widely known, and Hindi and Bengali had had such low status for centuries that educated Indians did not consider them literary languages until much later in the nineteenth century. As English-language periodicals and newpapers solicited literary contributions, and as English became not only the language of trade but of civil administration and higher education, Indian poets increasingly used English as their preferred literary language instead of Persian or Urdu. Bhadralok writers such as Henry Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, and the Dutt family (Toru’s father Govind, her uncles Girish and Hur, and cousin Omesh) were heavily influenced by British Romantic poetry and Orientalist translations from Sanskrit, to which they were heavily exposed by virtue of their English education. Yet to write in English was not de facto to be confined to an imitation of existing models, since they also sought and found publication venues for their original literary efforts.70 As Bagchi and Chaudhuri both note, English usage became more than the sign of a colonized status; for many writers, it served the indigenous middle class in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a vehicle for expressing protonationalist sensibilities that eventually led to the promotion of Bengali as a literary language.71 This adaptation of English to Indian literary concerns makes it difficult to categorize English simply as a “foreign” language and vehicle of psychological colonization. It was not until the 1860s that writers began consciously to make Bengali a literary language, often at the encouragement of Indian writers and editors (such as Kasiprasad Ghosh, editor of The Hindu Intelligencer or Lal Behari Dey, editor of The Bengal Magazine), whose own literary careers had first been launched in English. Yet it was a gradual development. In 1872, Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya, one of the first Indian writers to use Bengali as a literary language, underscored the difficulty of shifting from English to the vernacular: “There is one outstanding barrier to the writing of Bengali by educated Bengalis. Educated people do not read Bengali; and what educated people will not read educated people do not wish to write.”72 Editors found themselves urging their readers’ support for efforts in the vernacular. In the March 1874 issue of The Bengal Magazine, for example,  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 58.   Ibid. chapter 4. 71   Ibid. chapters 2–4 and Bagchi, “Shakespeare in Loin Cloths” 158. 72   This quote can be found in Rosinka Chaudhuri’s “The Dutt Family Album: And Toru Dutt” 54. 69

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(an issue which included some of Dutt’s translations from the French), a “Recent Publications” column reviewing a novel written in Bengali praised the emergence of “a taste sprung up among our countrymen for this class of literature.”73 This was very likely written by the editor, Lal Behari Dey, a Christian convert urging the development of a national literature (and later, an ardent nationalist). In the same issue, in a review of a dramatist also writing in Bengali, the review’s author “[hopes] and [trusts] that he will continue his labors of love in a cause, the importance of which cannot be overrated.”74 The magazine also ran nine monthly installments of a history of Bengali literature over the course of the next 15 months in its effort to promote vernacular literatures.75 To accuse Indian authors (Dutt included) of complicity with colonialism during the first seven decades of the nineteenth century – for writing in English – simplifies the linguistic realities of contemporary literary practice and publishing in colonial Bengal and India. Dutt’s translations from Sanskrit into English are positioned right on the cusp of a shift from English to vernacular literatures. Further, even nationalist Bengali poetry itself drew heavily on English poetic conventions.76 When we theorize in general about language use and translation in India, translation theorist Samantak Das notes, we must address the fact that most literate Indians negotiate different and multiple language communities, within which they possess varying degrees of competence. Toru fits well into this kind of interpretive framing, with her facility in multiple languages and given the multiple sources or originals she drew on (French, English, Bengali, Sanskrit) for her versionings in Ancient Ballads. Western and postcolonial theories of translation, in fact, by focusing largely on the source language and the target language, are not complex enough to account for the shifting, multilingual language contexts that Indians have inhabited and that hover around their translated texts.77 What certainly is true is that Ancient Ballads reinforces English as a literary language in India. That such a choice of medium unequivocally represents an assimilation to Western cultural values is not so certain. The volume, for example, undercuts the authority of Western Orientalists, as instructors and interpreters of Hindu culture. Ancient Ballads presents translations by an Indian woman who appropriates a cultural tradition almost wholly associated with British Orientalists. In doing so, she engages in what Ashok Bery characterizes as a critical strategy of colonial identity formation: “[C]ultures that are being translated modify and adapt the versions of their translated selves that are offered to them. In this way, translation   The Bengal Magazine, March 1874, 409.   Ibid. 411. 75   The issues were May, June, August, September and October of 1874 and January, April, May and June of 1875. 76  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 151–2. 77   Samantak Das, “Multiple Identities: Notes Towards a Sociology of Translation,” in Translation, Text, and Theory: The Paradigm of India, ed. Rukmini Bhaya Nair (New Delhi: Sage, 2002) 36–9. 73 74

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can extend the resources available to a society and enable it to find new ways of … representing their own culture, while at the same time resisting the simple imposition of the other culture.”78 Translation within a colonial context, then, has the potential to serve as a channel of empowerment for the colonized. This view of translation is upheld by Michael Cronin, whose scholarly work describes translation within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Cronin contends that after centuries of English scholars translating Irish works into English, an important shift occurred when Irish scholars began to do so. They did so, not to reinforce English, but because English was the language of public debate, and Irish translators wanted to counter erroneous Anglocentric views of Irish history and literature.79 From Cronin’s perspective, translation served as a significant channel of decolonization, despite the privileging of the English language over Irish as a medium of communication. Such reappropriations, I would argue, enabled Indian translators to respond to the racialist assumptions underlying Orientalism. They could also, as V. Dharwadker argues about some translations from Sanskrit into English, offer British readers an image of India which was not utterly foreign, but which shared some similarities with the West. Promoting likeness served as an important arena of cross-cultural understanding during a time when the establishment of difference was central to the justification of a British presence in India.80 Following the same trajectory as the historian David Kopf, literary critic Rosinka Chaudhuri notes that the Orientalists’ scholarship, though serving colonialism, ultimately and ironically also contributed to the development of a unifying idea of a pan-Indian heritage and culture among Indian writers, suggesting a common ground across a huge territory marked by social, political, and religious differences.81 Further, Indian translations from the Sanskrit could highlight the differences between their uses of the past and those of the Orientalists. As the late nineteenth-century Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chatterjee writes, “I have … investigated into how much the Europeans have understood our Sanskrit literature. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more sinful in the world of letters … than to read their translations … nor is there an easier way of establishing their stupidity.”82 Indians’ championing of this remote historical past as a subject for renewed literary re-working or “versioning” in the present (“translation” in a loose sense) not only fostered emerging nationalism   Cultural Translation 20.   Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) 92. 80   V. Dharwadker, “A.K. Ramanujan’s Theory and Practice of Translation,” in PostColonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi (London: Pinter, 1999) 114–40. For the inculcation of difference as an ideological strategy, see Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, especially chapters 3 and 4. 81  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 6 and also David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) 8. 82   Quoted in Bagchi, “Shakespeare in Loin Cloths” 156. 78 79

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and patriotism but challenged deeply rooted assumptions about the degradation of Indian culture. Other critics, however, doubt or deny that Indian translations from the Sanskrit can be ideologically resistant. Mahasweta Sengupta argues that Sanskrit translations worked to legitimize England’s “civilizing mission” by portraying India as primitive.83 For Niranjana, the Orientalists’ oppressive motives “infect” all subsequent Sanskrit translations; she attacks certain indigenous translations, accusing them of assimilating Sanskrit to Christian discourses (which Dutt had indeed done in her tale “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind”).84 Categorizing all translations from Sanskrit to English as instrumental to the colonial enterprise, critics such as Niranjana and Sengupta overlook the resistant energies of specific translations and the various counterhegemonic purposes they serve.85 Dutt stands as an elite Bengali woman coming to terms with aspects of Hindu antiquity; she inherited her interest from a variety of sources, including, most visibly in the tales themselves, the vernacular Bengali versions of her mother; at the same time, she is expressing pleasure in a cultural inheritance deemed valuable by the Orientalists. Is this de facto mimicry, or something else? Unlike either Orientalists or indigenous efforts to idealize the tradition, she is not validating the past at the expense of the present. As we have seen, Dutt’s embrace of Vedic India as her subject matter is tempered by an awareness of the present’s difference from this time period. Ancient Ballads is also an effort to render the past meaningful by interrogating its values. The volume is not so much a conduit of the past as it becomes an agent of its re-working; in translating, Dutt manipulates the ends to which earlier Orientalists’ translation practices had been aimed. In other words, her dialectical orientation to the source texts undermines the authority of the Orientalists’ colonial script and their validation of timeless Indian values. Further, while translation practices in colonial contexts typically reinforce cultural inequalities by privileging the texts of the hegemonic culture, Dutt’s volume destabilizes the dominance of the English canon in India. She transforms the text into literary English, but she is not creating English literature. She achieves this by foregrounding folktales and legends of India, and by including untranslated Sanskrit words, references to religious deities and customs, names of indigenous flora and fauna, all without explanatory footnotes. Her use of both Sanskrit and vernacular vocabularies works to alienate non-Indian readers from their imperial frames of reference. They have to react and re-orient themselves in the face of different historical and cultural presuppositions.86

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  “Translation as Manipulation” 160.   Siting Translation 180–1. 85   See Samantak Das, “Notes towards a Sociology of Translation” 40, and Anuradha Dingwaney, “Introduction: Translating ‘Third World’ Cultures,” in Between Languages and Cultures 8. 86   For a view of the subversive potential of Indian words in a predominantly English text, see G.J.V. Prasad, “Writing Translation: The Strange Case of the Indian English 84

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It is not only by virtue of her critical reflections on the past, however, that Dutt distinguishes herself from the Orientalists: there is also a difference in her conception of the audience for her translations. British Orientalists positioned themselves as the gatekeepers and interpreters of an esoteric subject area for a small, coterie European audience, something to which their heavily footnoted translations with commentary on matters of philology, grammar, and intertextuality attest. Defining Sanskrit culture (as Indian culture) requiring specialists for access, the Orientalists offered a “rediscovered” image of India to an elite European audience. This kind of translation corresponds to what André LeFevere conceptualizes as a “type of rewriting … able to project the … works beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin.”87 One of the great ironies is that these Western translations from Sanskrit into English (or French) also often mediated the bhadralok’s access to their own past.88 Dutt’s presentation of the Sanskrit tradition to her audience, however, differs startlingly. A number of the included stories are represented as permeating daily life in vernacular versions. Further, her handling of the subject matter disrupts expectations and functions as a space of transformation for her audience as well. Less scholarly, less celebratory, less esoteric, and less aestheticized, she asserts to her audience, both Indian and British, that the past is more than an antiquarian, nostalgic, or scholarly endeavor. Ancient Ballads addresses an audience ideally engaged with the reformist issues of the day, including women’s education and emancipation, the injustices of caste, and certain religious doctrines and social customs such as child marriage, karma, and polygamy. Since Dutt’s translations often enfold her interpretations into the very telling of them, they enable a new interface between Indian, British, and AngloIndian readers over constructions of the past and contemporary, contentious issues, even when adopting, as other liberal Bengali reformers did, Western discourses of rights, freedom, and equality. K.R. Ramachandran Nair sees Dutt facilitating a “rapprochement” between England and India.89 In offering timely and accessible tales to a popular audience in Great Britain and to a bhadralok and Anglo-Indian audience in India, she expresses a liberal confidence in the possibility of a mutually beneficial exchange. Her translations function as inquiries directed at her audience, rather than products to be consumed by them. That reading translations, for Dutt, is as active and creative an endeavor as the reading of original works emerges in a sonnet on translation that she writes Novel,” in Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (New York: Routledge, 1999) 48 and 55. 87   Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame 9. 88   By contrast, works of English literature, science, philosophy, and history, introduced into India with the institutionalization of English as the medium of instruction, supposedly did not require a scholarly apparatus for comprehension; it was assumed that this content was universally accessible. Translation into Indian languages was not needed, but rather knowledge of the English language. 89   Three Indo-Anglian Poets: Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt, and Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987) 55.

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in 1875. “Sonnet. ‘À Mon Père’” is appended as the concluding poem of A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields: The flowers look loveliest in their native soil Amid their kindred branches; plucked, they fade And lose the colours Nature on them laid, Though bound in garlands with assiduous toil. Pleasant it was, afar from all turmoil To wander through the valley, now in shade And now in sunshine, where these blossoms made A Paradise, and gather in my spoil. But better than myself no man can know How tarnished have become their tender hues E’en in the gathering, and how dimmed their glow! Wouldst thou again new life in them infuse, Thou who hast seen them where they brightly blow? Ask Memory. She shall help my stammering Muse.90

Dutt projects diminishment as the inevitable consequence of the translator’s calculated rearrangement of the source text. Her verbs attest to this loss of power: the poems “fade,” “lose the colours Nature on them laid,” and become “tarnished” and “dimmed.” They are characterized as fragile flowers that the translator’s labor cannot protect from damage (note the strong masculine rhymes of “soil,” “toil,” “turmoil,” and “spoil”). To reanimate their significance and beauty demands the reader’s mental engagement (here, the reader is her father). By recalling the source text, the reader can reinvigorate the translation. In Ancient Ballads, a similar strategy is at work: the speaker’s direct addresses to her readers work to encourage their mnemonic involvement. When the speaker, for example, interrupts the narrative to enfold her memories of her mother’s original telling of the tales, she models for her Indian readers – for whom these tales would likely have been familiar from tellings by their own mothers or grandmothers91 – how they might revive the tales’ meanings by suturing them to their personal memories. Dutt’s “versionings” require a hermeneutic frame that marks translator and reader as “insiders,” unlike those of the Orientalists. Dutt’s attention to India’s past often directs her readers to question the contemporary colonial and patriarchal status quo. Her translational practices thus challenge Niranjana’s homogenizing claim that “translation participates … in the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed.”92 While Dutt’s reframings do not extend to political 90

  Letter of 11-23-1875, p. 112.   Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Hearing Her Own Voice” 219. 92   Tejaswini Niranjana, “Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English,” in Rethinking English 125–6. 91

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critiques of colonialism per se (as her letters do), certain translations put Sanskrit translation to work in the service of reforming the colonized present.93 She reinforces cultural patriotism while remaining silent about political colonization, a paradox that was common at this historical moment among the bhadralok class. Up until 1875 in Bengal, political rhetoric or agitation for independence from Great Britain was non-existent.94 In fact, a “rhetoric of loyalty” to Great Britain accompanied the growth of the nationalist movement and its opposition to the British.95 Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the formation of national culture may serve to illuminate why Dutt’s literary translations can seem ideologically conflicted, in terms of their place within emergent nationalist or patriotic sentiments. Fanon sketches three phases in the development of a national culture among the colonized: the first phase is assimilationist, the copying of dominant modes of the colonizer.96 The second phase inaugurates a new relationship with the past, defined as a common and collectively shared one. This return to “forgotten” cultural traditions is done uncritically, in a spirit of reverence. Further, it is an immersion in a history without any effort to connect it to present struggles. The third phase puts that history to use, as it were, mobilizing traditional culture to fight against present oppression. By virtue of history’s active deployment and utilization in framing contemporary issues, the understanding of the past itself is transformed; it undergoes reinterpretation. Fanon theorizes this process as a linear one, and winds up generalizing, homogenizing, and rendering tidy what are in fact long, contradictory, and often unresolved struggles to form an idea of nation. If we consider Dutt’s Ancient Ballads, what is striking is that it cannot be easily arranged within any one phase; instead, it seems to fit into all three phases simultaneously. For example, her choice of Sanskrit translation can be seen as an accommodation to the dominant publishing culture of the time, which privileged this subject matter for an English audience who wanted a familiarly Orientalist depiction of India and wanted writings in English. In some of her translations, Dutt’s speaker immerses herself in the past, without overt ties to the present. Yet, as I have argued in my reading of numerous tales, with their surprising interpretive framings, Ancient Ballads can also be seen as a remodeling of the past that radically diverges from the Orientalists’ Vedic definition of India. Beginning with the publication of Ancient Ballads, some critics have imposed a developmental narrative on Dutt’s maturation as a writer. Edmund Gosse’s introduction to the volume sees Toru Dutt as someone who, despite her family’s 93

  Susie Tharu notes that Dutt’s translations of revolutionary French speeches have gone unremarked, even by nationalist literary historians (“The Arrangement of an Alliance: English and the Making of Indian Literatures,” in Rethinking English 167). 94  Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets 128. 95  Ray, Social Conflict 82. 96  See The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Penguin, 1967).

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conversion, remains a “pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood”; one who, after a detour to Europe, “no longer attempt[s] vainly … to compete with European literature on its own ground, but turn[s] to the legends of her own race and country.”97 In other words, Dutt’s return to India via Sanskrit is validated because it links her writing to an essentialized Indian self (incapable of producing European literature). Similarly, as Alpana Sharma notes, Indian critics such as K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar and Amarantha Jha are so eager to claim Dutt for the nationalist project that they see her at the end of her life as becoming “a genuine daughter of Hinduism,” an authentic “Indian” cleansed of her European, colonialist strayings.98 Other critics see in Ancient Ballads an author who goes from following Orientalist translational practices to one who, with the volume’s closing pieces, breaks away from the restrictions of translating and discovers a personal, subjective idiom in original poems such as “Our Casuarina Tree.”99 The imposition of a developmental narrative on any 21-year-old is problematic (or on any volume assembled and published posthumously), but it is especially fraught given Dutt’s wide-ranging abilities and interests which had already contributed to a remarkably “heterogeneous identity formation.”100 Further, Dutt was always writing personal, subjective works alongside translations. Her original pieces did not replace translations in her artistic development, nor did her versions of Sanskrit tales replace her translations from European literatures. As she was learning Sanskrit and writing Ancient Ballads, she continued to translate from the French into English. More importantly, such linear readings overlook the consistency with which the activity of translation, for Dutt, was a way of establishing, defining, and maintaining ties to a plurality of places to which she felt deeply connected. That kind of intellectual and affective restlessness did not alter her involvement with colonial Bengal, as her letters show, or her ability to change in response to that immediate environment. By exploring the “landscape” of the Vedic past and by connecting them to contemporary issues, Ancient Ballads joins the compelling restlessness of travel (here, a voyage to a temporally distant era) with a commitment to place. And though Dutt claimed that one of her next projects would be A Sheaf Gleaned in Sanskrit Fields, who can tell how long she would have tarried there? Toru Dutt’s shifting versions of self also enable us to understand how cultural identity among the bhadralok eludes any simple or stable algorithm based on language community, religion, race, or class. Her translations and letters remind us of her different linguistic allegiances, and as a literary translator she remains resolutely between cultures, a young woman shaped from an early age by a rich   Gosse in the introduction to Ancient Ballads, xi and xxiii.   Alpana Sharma, “In-between Modernity” 105. 99   Chaudhuri, “The Dutt Family Album: And Toru Dutt” 69. 100   Lootens, “Bengal, Britain, France” 579. This view of Dutt as not fitting easily into any identity category is shared by most recent critics of her work, including Lootens and Knippling/Sharma. See Mukherjee, “Hearing Her Own Voice” 213 and Phillips, “Claiming Her Own Context(s)” paragraphs 1 and 2. 97 98

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multicultural, multilingual environment. With differing degrees of competence, she spoke (and/or wrote) Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, English, French, and German. Indeed, her texts abhor exclusivity of all kinds. One could say that she translates to make sense of her world, with all the foreignness it encompasses. Different languages house different and conflicting versions – or extensions – of the self that she explores in her writing. This never appears to be cause for confusion, but rather an occasion for committed and ongoing discernment. Dutt’s Sanskrit translations, I would argue, further complicate the conundrum of Dutt’s cultural affiliation. I want to close this chapter by considering a recurring metaphor in Toru Dutt’s letters and poems that ties together this chapter’s concerns with literary and cultural translation, appropriation, affiliation, and poetic empowerment. The garden is a trope to which Dutt returns often, and it crops up notably at those moments when questions of cultural belonging emerge.101 In her very first letter to Martin, written from her family’s second residence, Baugmaree Garden House on the outskirts of Calcutta, she describes her mother’s gardening efforts after their return from England: “Mamma has planted many English flower plants in our Garden. She brought a packing case, full of bulbs, roots, and seeds from England … I hope Mamma will succeed in her attempt to introduce English plants in India.”102 Her (and her mother’s) love of England, she insinuates, will not disappear through physical distance, but assume material form, taking root in Bengal. With its combination of native and English plants, the garden bears the imprints of Dutt’s migrations between different cultures, just as her letters convey her optimism about the possibilities of propagation and domestication of “nonnative” species. Six months later in May 1874, seeing the world from the vantagepoint of her “Indian” garden, a different sensibility predominates. Dutt contrasts two experiences of space: “The free air of Europe, and the free life there, are things not to be had here. We cannot stir out from our own garden without being stared at, or having a sun-stroke … we seldom go out of our own house and garden. Oh, for the walks in Cambridge with you!”103 Recording a distress paradoxically marked by feeling both too confined (“we seldom go out of our own house and garden”) and too exposed (“we cannot stir out … without being stared at”), Dutt seems unable to acclimate herself to any Indian space, including the garden. Like an object under scrutiny or one stunned by intense light, Dutt feels confined in a de facto purdah, denied the physical mobility she enjoyed while studying and traveling in England and Europe. In both examples, Dutt’s thoughts cycle between India and Europe. The garden as multivalent signifier for this negotiation continues, reappearing twice in 1876, 101

  See Lootens, who reads the symbolic resonances of gardens and flowers in “Our Casuarina Tree” as they relate to cultural identification (“Alien Homelands” 300–1); Phillips reads the flower imagery in the poems “The Lotus” and “Sonnet Baugmaree” as subversive of colonialism and colonialist discourse (“Claiming Her Own Context(s)” paragraphs 3–5). 102   Letter of 12-19-1873, p. 56. 103   Letters of 9-20-1874, p. 67 and 9-21-1874, p. 69.

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a year before her early death. In a letter from December 25, 1876, Dutt compares the various places she has learned to call “home”: Dear old Baugmaree is far better [than the Calcutta garden]; indeed it is as good as England; in some respects, at least in my opinion, it is better. One feels more at home, and more at ease in one’s own house than in a hired one, where one is generally anxious about the cracked water-jug or the loose-stoppered mustardpot!104

Baugmaree with its garden becomes a launching point for a consideration of belonging that emblematizes how India, not Europe, is becoming the place where Dutt feels the ease that comes with ownership. Indeed, here possession grants her the license to be destructive with water-jugs and mustard pots, redefining “home” as that place where one has the privilege of being careless with the surrounding object world (or, one might add, in a spirit of loose translation, the surrounding literary tradition). In one later example, in a poem included in both her letters and Ancient Ballads, Dutt’s “Sonnet. – Baugmaree” discovers the beauty of native flora: A sea of foliage girds our garden round, But not a sea of dull unvaried green, Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen; The light-green graceful tamarinds abound Amid the mangoe clumps of green profound, And palms arise, like pillars gray, between; And o’er the quiet pools the seemuls lean, Red, --red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound. But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes Into a cup of silver. One might swoon Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze On a primeval Eden, in amaze. (135)

Girded though the garden may be, the distress Dutt expressed earlier at her inability to walk outside in an open countryside finds compensation in an expansive visual roving over the garden. Indeed, her pleasure is palpable, and her lavishly descriptive word painting conveys a keen eye for botanical texture, form, and color. Further, the sonnet foregrounds the speaker’s emotional intensity, itself an investment in Indian ground. That Dutt’s discovery of her Indian garden’s beauty is more than descriptive mapping or the discovery of nativist sentiment, however, lies in what I read as 104

  p. 241.

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Dutt’s allusiveness to John Keats’ sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Keatsian allusions, in fact, are present in other poems by Dutt.105 Keats’ poem records Balboa’s [Keats mistakenly identifies him as Cortez] ambitious act of visual appropriation of the Pacific Ocean, an adventure inextricable from the colonialist purpose of his travels: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.106

What stands out is the similarity of the feeling expressed in the concluding octet of Keats’ sonnet and the final couplet of Dutt’s: namely, their speakers’ “newfound” intensity in the wake of discovering a new terrain. Channeling Cortez, Keats’ speaker experiences the enormity of the ocean’s expanse; in Dutt’s sonnet, the speaker, though circumscribed, gazes over “a sea of foliage” (1). Yet the imaginative transport is every bit as large. Dutt rhymes “gaze” with “amaze”; Keats rhymes Cortez’s staring “eyes” with “wild surmise.” In both, the perception directed outward is inextricable from a tremendous mental insight just intimated or fathomed. “Gaze and gaze” registers Dutt’s speaker’s absolute absorption in something newly found, while the enjambment dissolves any sense of confinement. By virtue of being compared to “primeval Eden,” her Indian garden is clearly 105   Lootens and Grewal both illuminate the engagement with British Romanticism (Grewal, Home and Harem 165 and Lootens, “Alien Homelands” 301–5). Dutt’s father and uncles alluded to Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” in the Dutt Family Album in their lines “‘Meek Ruth amid the reapers walking slow’” and “‘Who, on the ‘viewless wings of poesy’,/Have poured – ah, not in vain – a mighty tide of song’” (Chaudhuri, “Dutt Family Album” 59). Looten unpacks a number of Keatsian allusions in “Our Casuarina Tree,” in “Alien Homelands” 301, while Lokugé notes the “Keatsian sensuousness” of both “Jogadhya Uma” and “Baugmaree” (“Introduction,” Collected Prose and Poetry xlii and xxvii). 106   John Keats, The Poetry of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) 34.

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fertile subject matter, so vast it subsumes the intertextual histories of both Milton and Genesis. Time’s sublimity trumps the limitations of physical space. Keats’ speaker is two things: a poetic explorer whose journey through other literatures is troped as originary, comparable to the newly charted terrains of the early voyages of “discovery.” Yet this discovery comes to Keats as a reader of the classical canon: not in its original form but in translation. Homer is something Keats’ speaker has access to via Chapman’s early modern English translation. The speaker’s “map,” then, is a translation, but the future wealth will be his own: paradoxically, a reclamation that is presented as a discovery. Cortez’s travels, for Keats, inaugurate the colonial enterprise, with their pursuit of “realms of gold”; the linguistic “gold” Keats appropriates through his reading of Homer will lead to his recognition as a poet. Like Keats, and as this chapter has explored, Dutt does not hesitate to use the poetry of other cultures (English, French, and Sanskrit, to start) as the basis for her own textual creations. Just as Keats uses Chapman’s translation of a temporally prior work, Homer, to foster his creative energies, in a spirit of repossession and re-working, Dutt draws on a tradition of Sanskrit translations as a vehicle for her timely insights on an India in the process of formation. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that this sonnet stands as evidence that Dutt is putting down roots; in fact, it testifies to her faith in the possibilities of mobility between cultures. The irony of using an English Romantic form to claim an Indian home is neither lost, nor is it inappropriate, given her poetics. Writing this sonnet in an English richly allusive of the Romantics becomes a kind of mapmaking through which she traverses her contemporary Indian garden as a habitable aesthetic space. Just as Keats must acknowledge the presence of other persons in his poetics of “discovery” (Homer and “the bards in fealty to Apollo”), Dutt reclaims a Sanskrit terrain already inhabited with Orientalist and nativist presences. Yet she also finds it large enough to house and transport her imaginatively, just as Keats’ speaker intends to use Homer to create something new. As we have seen, Dutt frequently turns to others’ “maps” – the multiple languages and literatures she inhabits and in which she crafts poems, translations, novels, and letters. In fact, she employs this strategy so often that we can say that, as an author, she proves herself adept at turning an appropriative gaze to those linguistic terrains where she can, at least temporarily, find a home.

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Chapter 2

Gendered Spaces and Conjugal Reform in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life In both expected and unexpected ways, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s biography, her cultural milieu, and the reception of her work mirror those of Toru Dutt. Like Dutt, Satthianadhan was the daughter of Christian converts and received an extensive English-language education. Both families occupied a culturally intermediary position, like many of the English-educated and/or converted Indian elite, retaining deeply felt connections to Hindu culture, welcoming social reforms for women, and sensitive to the racism inherent in a colonized society. They both died young, and their writings were published posthumously to a wider audience, garnering very favorable reviews from both Indian and British critics of varied ideological leanings. Though religious conversion isolated both families socially from traditional Brahmin society, their texts reveal a desire to engage with that world imaginatively to correct distorted, inaccurate, and culturally-insensitive Western perspectives. The reformist cause of advancing Indian women’s education drew both of them to advocate for it in their literary works. Dutt reminds her readers that Vedic traditions encouraged women’s intellectual aspirations and validated learned women as models of feminine virtue. In Satthianadhan’s novels, Hindu women’s access to education as young wives proves integral to improving highcaste Indian women’s conjugal relations and family lives. Writing just a decade after Toru Dutt, however, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s work also encompasses strikingly different worlds from Dutt’s translations, revealing her divergent literary interests and writerly strategies. Satthianadhan neither espouses a cultural nationalism nor turns to Vedic literary traditions, and her texts are firmly situated in the present. She embraces literary realism and the Western genres of the Bildungsroman and the New Woman novel in order to depict the lives of young Indian women, both Christian and Hindu. Unlike Dutt’s restlessness, her far-ranging linguistic and literary traveling, Satthianadhan’s novels assert the primacy of what lies near at hand, seen with a close eye: the psychological and interiorized, as well as the public spaces, of young, upper-caste Indian women’s lives. What distinguishes Satthianadhan’s work above all from Toru Dutt’s is her thoroughly reformist bent. While Dutt is preoccupied in her late poems by the juncture of Indian modernity with a reclaimed Sanskrit tradition and desires to communicate it on Indian terms, Satthianadhan’s penchant for psychological realism chafes against her polemics, as she addresses the social injustices that oppressed the native Christian woman, in

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her first novel, and the high-caste Hindu woman, in her second one. Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, Satthianadhan’s second novel and the subject of this chapter, fully embodies this tension. In fact, it attempts to reveal how the social and the psychological worlds of upper-caste Indian women mutually determine one another, both within and beyond the family unit. Adapting the literary to overtly reformist ends, Satthianadhan’s novel is best understood as a response to late nineteenthcentury discourses of both Western and Indian social reformers. Colonialist accounts of the zenana (the women’s quarters where high-caste/ class Hindu and Muslim women resided in seclusion) typically depict purdah in sensational or voyeuristic fashion.1 In these texts, the dark, confining, and limited physical spaces of these women’s lives serve as metaphors for the psychological domination and entrapment resulting from “backward,” “barbaric” customs that deny them an education or even a circumscribed public life. Anna Satthianadhan, the mother-in-law of Krupabai Satthianadhan (whose reformist novel Kamala is the subject of this chapter), writes in April 1865 for the Madras Christian Observer that she wishes “God [may] be pleased to use us [Indian Christians] … in raising our poor countrywomen from the depth of the degradation in which they are sunk and [in] carrying light into their dark dwellings.”2 By stressing the virtual imprisonment and misery of “poor idolatrous females in bondage” and extrapolating the condition of Indian women in general from the elite spaces of the zenana, colonialist narratives promoted governmental or missionary intervention into forms of Hindu conjugality. They sought to reform the Hindu family by “uplifting” Hindu women.3 In stark contrast to these voyeuristic views, Krupabai 1  By purdah, I mean the idea and/or institution of seclusion. For examples of various stereotypical colonialist readings of the zenana, see the critical work by Janaki Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” Journal of Women’s History 2.1 (Spring 1990): 8–34; Sara Mills, “Gender and Colonial Space,” Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003) 711–12; Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and ‘Heathen Lands’: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s) (New York: Garland, 2000); and Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 128. For primary sources, see, for example, the Adams Matthew Publication microfilm collection of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Archive, Section II, Missions to Women, Part Three, Reel 33, The Indian Female Evangelist vol. 1, no. 1, January 1872, pp. 43–7; vol. 1, no. 2, April 1872, pp. 89–94; vol. 1, no. 4, October 1872, pp. 182–7; vol. 2, no. 14, April 1875, pp. 241–8; and vol. 3, no. 23, July 1877, pp. 292–7. 2   Quoted in E.M. Jackson, “Glimpses of a Prominent Indian Christian Family of Tirunelvedi and Madras, 1863–1906: Perspectives on Caste, Culture, and Conversion,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003) 326. 3   Priscilla Chapman in Hindoo Female Education (1839), quoted in Singh, Gender, Religion 106. Mary Frances Billington wrote in 1885 that the women’s home was “architecturally and artistically its meanest part” (quoted in Grewal, Home and Harem 51).

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Satthianadhan’s novel Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (1894) complicates colonialist geographies of high-caste Hindu women’s lives.4 Abandoning sensationalism, the novel depicts the spaces inhabited by a Brahmin Hindu child-wife as significantly more extensive, varied, and nuanced than her confinement within the stereotypical zenana. In Kamala, three gendered areas – the domestic realm, gender-segregated public spaces, and wild nature – contribute to an understanding of the economic, psychological, and social relations and practices that govern Hindu marriage and the joint family system. These representations, in turn, serve as ideological arenas in which Satthianadhan’s proposed reforms of child marriage and Hindu conjugality, along with her promotion of Indian women’s solidarity across kin and caste lines, become articulated. That Krupabai Satthianadhan would choose to write a reformist novel is not surprising, given her life and her other writings. One of 14 children of the first Brahmin converts to Christianity in the Bombay Presidency, she received an extensive education. After years of tutoring from her elder brother Bhasker and two English missionaries, she studied at a zenana mission school and entered Madras Medical College as one of their first female students of medicine. Although she was academically first in her class, her ill-health compelled her to discontinue her studies. Settling with her Indian Christian husband in the Madras Presidency, she began her reform work, focusing on the education of Indian girls and women: writing articles in journals and newspapers; teaching in a zenana and in an Indian girls’ school; opening a school for Muslim girls; and raising funds for a proposed school for child widows until her death at age 32. Besides her reform essays, she pioneered the “Indian New Woman Novel,” a genre that valued women “as educated and self-reliant individuals and active participants in domestic and public life”: both Saguna (1892), an autobiographical novel, and her first fully fictional novel, Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (1894), belong to this tradition.5 Like most English-educated Indians or Indian Christians, Krupabai Satthianadhan and her husband occupied an uneasy position between the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized. Further, as Chandani Lokugé describes them, the Satthianadhans represented an unusual syncretism of Brahminism and Christianity.6 It is within this context that Satthianadhan’s indigenous feminism, as well as her employment of a Christian and a Hindu rhetoric of reform, must be understood. According to Kent, “the zenana missions were deeply invested in this vision of mature, educated Indian womanhood” (Converting Women, 138). 4   Krupabai Satthianadhan, Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife, ed. Chandani Lokugé (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). All subsequent page references to this edition will be given in the text, in parentheses. Note the editor’s change of title from the original Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life. 5   Lokugé, “Introduction,” Saguna 1 and Joshi, In Another Country 187. Both Saguna and Kamala appeared earlier in serialized form in the Madras Christian College Magazine, in 1887–8 and in 1893–4, respectively (Joshi, In Another Country 176). 6   Ibid. 13.

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We get a sense of the reformist potential and the uniqueness of Kamala’s subject matter – allegedly the first fictional novel in English by an Indian woman writer – if we attend to the reviewers in diverse journals and newspapers who praised its ability to cross the intersecting divides of religion, ethnicity, and gender that splintered reform movements at this historical moment. One Hindu reviewer with The Madras Mail confesses his prejudice against the author as an Indian Christian before reading the novel, only to abandon it afterwards: “We took up the book with a preconceived prejudice that the daughter of Christian converts was the last person fitted to give a true picture of the life of a Brahman household. We laid it down agreeably disappointed.”7 Another Hindu reviewer claimed that “every educated Hindu ought to buy this book, [not] only for the purpose of encouraging Indian literature, but also for the purpose of laying well to heart the lessons it contains.”8 Seeing her as a liaison between cultures, The Eastern Guardian calls attention to Satthianadhan’s capacity to represent both Hindu and Christian worlds in her writing: “To Europeans the life of the higher classes of Hindus written by one of them is of great interest as there is so litte [sic] of this to be met with, especially anything written by Hindu women. The authoress is as capable of describing the Hindu woman of the period as well as the Christian.”9 Other reviewers perceive the novel as promoting more nuanced yet broad-based reforms for women. The Madras Standard finds that Kamala “cannot but find its way through the several vernaculars of the country into the minds of the Hindu women of succeeding generations.” The periodical Woman (London) writes that “Kamala takes us straight into a middle-class Hindu Zenana … with a fullness of detail intensely instructive to a thoughtful reader.” A novel embraced by selfidentified Hindu and Christian reviewers and described as of interest to male and female, Anglo-Indian, British, and Indian readers, was an anomaly indeed. Though Kamala reached both an English-educated Indian and a British audience, there is no doubt that its originality lay in its ability to expand Western readers’ understandings of the lived spaces of elite Hindu women.10 Kamala offers an implicit challenge to Victorian spatial ideologies of the public-masculine 7   This review is included in Satthianadhan’s Miscellaneous Writings (Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1896). Another publication with a primarily Hindu audience, The Hindu, praises the novel’s reformist impulses while remaining respectful of Hindu life: “The authoress, though a Christian, shows a singularly accurate knowledge of the social and domestic customs of the Hindus, and is free from any endeavour to present the moral and spiritual effect of the Hindu religion in an unfavourable light … We cannot but consider [the premature death of the author] as a blow to the progress of Indian women” (125). 8  Joshi, In Another Country 187. 9   This and all subsequent reviews are published in Satthianadhan’s Miscellaneous Writings. 10   Not only were Satthianadhan’s novels printed at twice the usual print runs but, as Priya Joshi notes, they “were part of an inadvertent but significant transaction with a world far outside the Madras Presidency where she lived and wrote” (In Another Country 199 and 176–7).

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and private-feminine spheres that colonialist accounts brought to bear upon the zenana (and whose explanatory power is problematic in both Victorian and Indian contexts).11 This particular discourse of gendered space neglects to take into account the relative situatedness of its own position, problematically mapping Indian spaces and constricting Indian women within a decontextualized Western paradigm. If we think of space, as Satthianadhan’s novel does, as the social “stretched out,” as sets of “superimposed spatial frameworks, as many social spaces negotiated within one geographical space and time,” we can see beyond the public-masculine/privatefeminine and caste-determined spatial frameworks that saturated the colonial texts of the nineteenth century – frameworks that encouraged Indian women writers such as Satthianadhan to protest against such culturally insensitive views.12 In Kamala, the extended spaces of Hindu women’s lives reflect established values and re-conceive those meanings through innovative thought and action. As a text offering a representation of a child-wife whose life pushes against the conservative status quo, the novel Kamala directs our attention to the discourses Indian women writers adopted to articulate their reformist agendas. Their contributions are something that all-too-frequently have been rendered invisible. Ania Loomba writes about the dearth of such accounts: Even though the reform of women’s position seems to be a major concern within nationalist (and colonialist) discourses, and even though female power, energy and sexuality haunt these discourses, women themselves, in any real sense, seem to ‘disappear’ from these discussions about them. From colonial as well 11

  One concern of this chapter is to show how Satthianadhan rejects such simplistic paradigms by virtue of showing women from different castes and classes in a plethora of spaces, both public and private, material and phantasmatic. One confusion results from these writers’ tendency to use the term zenana to signify any practices of female gender segregation. In actuality, the zenana was geographically limited to north, northwestern, and eastern India and restricted to certain classes and castes. See R. Sunder Rajan, “The Subject of Sati,” in R. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Post-Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1993) 15–39 and Hannah Papanek in “Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter,” in Separate Worlds, ed. Hannah Papanek and Gail Minnault (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1982) 42–3. For critical work that unsettles facile assumptions of separate spheres for middle-class men and women in Romantic and early Victorian England, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). B.M. Milroy and S. Wismer, while stressing the interconnectedness of the public and the private, contest the class-blind nature of the concept in “Communities, Work and Public/Private Sphere-models,” Gender, Place and Culture 1 (1994): 71–91, as does Sarah Graham-Brown in “The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory 515. Sara Mills interestingly suggests that extreme aspects of the public/private divide function as an idealization (“Gender and Colonial Space” 699). 12   Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) 2 and Mills “Gender and Colonial Space” 693.

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as nationalist records, we learn little about how they felt or responded, and until recently, there was little attempt to locate them as subjects within the colonial struggle.13

A realist novel that records female agency, Kamala takes on stereotypical colonialist accounts of Hindu conjugality and challenges our critical amnesia regarding Indian women’s public contributions to the rhetoric and practice of reform. Debates about the condition of Indian women preoccupied a spectrum of groups, including Hindu conservatives, reformists, and nationalists, as well as British feminists, missionaries, and Indian Christians. Since colonialist reform movements historically coincided with indigenous reform movements, and later with nationalist movements, their paths and ideologies criss-crossed and, at times, overlapped. In the case of child marriage, one subject of Kamala, colonial policies frequently bolstered the dominance of Hindu patriarchal relations, by adopting positions of strict non-intervention in religious matters and customary practices in deference to conservative (and nationalist) movements. Yet these policies could also work together with internal reform movements promoting women’s education, something at odds with the Hindu conservative agenda. (It was feared that women’s independence would directly result from the abolition of child marriage.) It is not within the scope of this chapter to sketch the complex landscape of reform in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead, my focus will remain on the novel’s reformist agenda within the context of the debates of the 1880s and 1890s on the question of child marriage and the Age of Consent controversy. As we will see, Kamala draws on feminist, Christian, and Hindu discourses in its assessment of high-caste Hindu women’s lives. Its strategic flexibility helps us understand the ways that some commonly held ideological ends – such as the reform of child marriage – allowed for unforeseen alliances between otherwise antagonistic groups as they critiqued the patriarchal status quo. Further, as an Indian Christian woman who supported women’s education and the restructuring of the Hindu joint family system, yet who remained sensitive to Hindu fears of “deculturation,” Satthianadhan underscores how her minority position within a Hindu, patriarchal, and colonial culture could, in actuality, offer a privileged site from which to advocate reform.14 Contemporaneous with Krupabai Satthianadhan’s writing of Kamala was a strong public reaction against the 1891 Age of Consent Act.15 This legislation  Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism 221.   For the centrality of marginal social groups within India’s reform movement, see Viswanathan, Outside the Fold. 15   For an excellent treatment of the Rakhmabai case and its relation to the 1891 Age of Consent Act, see Padma Anagol McGinn, “The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives Participation in the Child-Marriage Controversy in India,” South Asia Research 12.2 (November 1992): 100–18. 13 14

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amended the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure and raised the age of consent – the age at which an individual is considered capable of consenting to sexual intercourse – from 10 to 12 years of age.16 Sexual intercourse with married or unmarried girls before they reached 12 years of age was considered rape and punishable with imprisonment or transportation. A whole decade of debates on the issue of child marriage preceded the legislation: did child marriage damage women’s mental development, and if so, how? Did it interfere with women’s education or not? Did reforming the age of consent constitute state interference in Hindu law and customary practices (prohibited by the proclamation of 1858)? Was such legislation in fact called for by Hindu law, since the smritis and srutis (canons of Hindu religious scripture) did not authorize child marriage? Resistance to child marriage had been a part of the Indian intelligentsia’s reformist agenda since the first half of the nineteenth century. Encountering scathing critiques in British utilitarian writings, travel narratives, and missionary accounts, which measured the degradation of Hindu civilization by the low status of its women, an emerging Indian middle class sought to bolster its own self-esteem by undertaking “reform from within,” in essence creating new social identities for women. Maheshchandra Deb’s 1839 paper critiqued customary practices, foremost among them child marriage, seclusion, arranged marriage, polygamy, and the ban on widow remarriage.17 Over the course of the nineteenth century, this indigenous push for reform spearheaded by upper-caste men was bolstered by Western-British legislative initiatives and missionary critiques. In addition, autonomous feminist movements within India focused on calls for women’s education and the reform of conjugal and family relations, mainly within the upper castes. In the years preceding the Act of 1891, two “moments” stand out as particularly inflammatory. The Native Marriage Act of 1872 sought to outlaw polygamy, to legalize divorce, to raise the minimum age of marriage, and to forbid caste and religious barriers to marriage. Although its reach ended up affecting only Brahmos (followers of a monotheistic, reform-minded movement within Hinduism), it unleashed heated controversy around aspects of Hindu conjugality, in particular non-consensual, indissoluble infant marriage and the prohibition of widow remarriage. Second, from the mid to late 1880s, the celebrated Rakhmabai case had heightened the sense of urgency in reforming child marriage. Rakhmabai, an educated Brahmin woman, was married at the age of 11 to Dadaji Bhikaji, who was 20 years old. The marriage was not consummated (Rakhmabai had not reached puberty at the time of her marriage), and she continued to live with her family. Ten years later, when 16   As Tanika Sarkar notes, marital consent is tied to age (in other words, to biology, the age of sexual maturity), instead of compatibility or choice (“Rhetoric Against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child-Wife,” Economic and Political Weekly 28 (September 4, 1993): 1875). 17   Sumit Sarkar, “The Women’s Question in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” working paper for Women and Culture, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, SNDT Women’s University, 1985, 157–9.

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her husband demanded she move in with him (apparently after finding out she had received a large inheritance), she refused, on the grounds of his “inability to earn an honest livelihood, his immoral lifestyle, his refusal to educate himself and his ill-health.”18 Four years and two legal battles later (including Queen Victoria’s intervention), Rakhmabai was ordered to return to her husband and consummate her marital obligations. She refused and was sent to prison. As Janaki Nair points out, for many Indian women, the Rakhmabai case revealed an alliance between Indian nationalists and colonial authorities: while the nationalists were reluctant to allow colonial law to penetrate and reorganize familial arrangement, especially when it resulted in greater female power, they did not hesitate to invoke colonial law to strengthen patriarchy … Respect for the sanctity of the domestic sphere was not scrupulously observed by colonial authorities. The Rakhmabai case revealed that the colonial regime was only too willing to step into the holy sphere of the family in order to enforce patriarchal arrangements.19

A major public debate followed the 1885 appearance of Rakhmabai’s four articles on child marriage and enforced widowhood in the Times of India, where she recounts her own misery, and that of her friends, due to early marriage. In response, many Maharashtrian women, among them Pandita Ramabai and Krupabai Satthianadhan, as well as British feminists in India and Great Britain, were vocal in calling for state intervention to abolish child marriage, while conservative nationalists blamed Rakhmabai’s obstinancy on her English education. Satthianadhan’s “Female Education,” appearing in the Indian Magazine, a journal of the National Indian Association, linked India’s regeneration with the liberation of her women. Adopting Hindu reformist rhetoric, Satthianadhan invokes the “far more liberal and generous ideas” of the ancient Hindus, who valued women’s conjugal rights (their right to choose their spouse), their higher learning, and their contributions to public discourse.20 She attributes women’s degradation to the “ascendancy of priestly power” and refers in particular to women’s loss of spousal choice, enforced gender inequalities, and a lack of education as particularly egregious.21 The Indian Christian community, within which Satthianadhan was raised, held itself to stricter age of consent

18

  Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 102. She is drawing from Rakhmabai’s reply to her husband in 1887 in The Bombay Gazette. 19   Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996) 74. Tanika Sarkar also explores the complicity between colonial structures and indigenous patriarchy (including upper-caste norms and practices) in the Rakhmabai and Phulmonee cases in “Rhetoric Against the Age of Consent” 1869–78. 20   Krupabai Satthianadhan, “Female Education,” in Miscellaneous Writings 16–17. 21   Ibid. 17–21.

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laws; the Indian Christian Marriage Act of 1864 raised the marriageable age of young men to 16, that of young women to over 13.22 In terms of Indian colonial and national history, the 1891 Age of Consent Act, which followed on the heels of the Rakhmabai controversy, proved significant because it aroused the public ire and won broad popular support for both the nationalist movement and Hindu orthodoxy.23 Opponents who saw women’s reform as at best subordinate or secondary to the struggle for political independence, nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, cast the legislation as an intrusion into the (patriarchal) household, where autonomy and self-rule had to be preserved. According to conservative nationalists, the Act constituted an attack on Indian traditions and the authority of Indian men, both of which stood as a bulwark against imperialism. Many Indians social reformers, however, both men and women, regardless of their position on nationalism and political reform, were advocates of the legislation.24 After years of protest about the poor state of women’s education and articulation of a need for reform of child marriage, Indian women became particularly vocal advocates of the legislation, convening publically to express their support for the Act. Often basing their testimony on lived experience, they charged that child marriage prevented women from attaining the benefits of (higher) education. Until marriage was restructured, they argued, women would lead degraded lives. To counter the massive conservative reaction to the proposed bill, Indian women (in urban areas of Maharashtra) formed committees, sent petitions to Queen Victoria, held meetings, and passed a number of resolutions on aspects of the bill. Members of different secular, caste, and religious-affiliated organizations, they protested together, uniting across caste, race, and religious differences to support women’s rights. Padma Anagol-McGinn reports that the “agitation against the Bill prompted women from differing faiths to unite on an issue that they increasingly saw as a gendered one.”25 In light of what both Uma Chakravarti and Sumit Sarkar identify as the nationalists’ attempt to sideline the “woman question” in favor of an aggressive cultural nationalism in the 1890s, Kamala’s appearance three years after the passage of the Act can be seen as an attempt to keep reformist energies alive and 22

  According to Eliza Kent, in rural areas Indian Christians were much closer to Hindu practices than to those of the British in regard to marriage. Thus, they followed caste laws in arranging their own marriages and accepted a lower age of consent (Converting Women 166, 169). 23   See S. Natarajan, A Century of Social Reform in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1959) 82–3; C.H. Heimsath, “The Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill, 1891,” Journal of Asian Studies 21.4 (1962): 491–504; and Nair, Women and Law 72–9. 24   See Anagol-McGinn for an encapsulated history of women’s actions on behalf of the Age of Consent Bill in “Age of Consent,” 112–18. 25   Ibid. 114.

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to challenge the rhetoric of Hindu marriage promoted by conservatives.26 Echoing Pandita Ramabai’s The High-Caste Hindu Woman and views of other women writers of the time, Kamala rehearses criticism for the first time in fictional form. It vehemently rejects the obsolescence of the woman question and conjugal reform just as the project of nationalism was taking hold in the 1890s and beginning to displace them.27 The novel’s forays into the manifold social spaces of the child-wife allow Satthianadhan to critique discourses of conservative cultural nationalists. Although Kamala draws on some mythic archetypes of a Hindu “golden age” and includes an idealized (child) wife loyal “unto death,” two features shared with conservative discourses, the novel’s rhetorical use of these archetypes differs. Indeed, the narrative stakes out an ideological position in direct conflict with the platform of conservative reform movements of the time.28 While these movements stressed the customs and traditions of the joint family and the “home-like” nature of the zenana, Kamala offers a withering critique of the extended family system. It uncovers a fundamental contradiction within conservative Hindu ideology which, on the one hand, insisted that Hindu wives already possessed a “happy home” and, on the other hand, following certain shastras, called for their harsh discipline. Kamala differentiates three different arenas that constitute the everyday physical spaces of Brahmin Hindu women. The first arena, most familiar to readers of the time, is the domestic one. Here, she depicts two differently organized conjugal/ domestic spaces – the domestic spaces of Kamala’s in-laws, where she lives after her marriage to Ganesh, and those of Kamala’s natal home, where the relations between her parents, Narayan and Lakshmi, and her father’s unconventional attitudes toward rearing his daughter are foregrounded. Satthianadhan criticizes the arrangements deriving from exogamous virilocal marital practices, whereby the young wife leaves her natal family to live with her husband’s family. This setting is explicitly contrasted with the conjugal arrangements of her own father and mother. With its penchant for detailed realism, multiple perspectives, and an empathetic narrative voice, Kamala investigates the institution of child marriage beyond the narrow provisions of the Age of Consent Act, which, strictly speaking, legislated only the biological age of consensual relations. Offering two differently organized conjugal/domestic spaces, the novel directly and indirectly addresses issues such as hierarchized power within the household, the dowry system, women’s material insecurity, especially in old age, as well as pointing to the benefits of companionate marriage. The second arena of representation, most related to psychic fantasy space, are the novel’s natural spaces, regions of uncultivated wilderness and of religious rituals honoring female deities, often   See Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi” 76 and Sarkar, “The Women’s Question” 162. 27   Both Uma Chakravarti and Sumit Sarkar make this claim. See Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” 76 and Sarkar, “The Women’s Question” 162. 28   For an exposition of the conservative position, see Sarkar, “Rhetoric Against Age of Consent” 1869–78. 26

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psychically aligned with the mother–daughter bond. Finally, the novel attends to gender-segregated public spaces where women congregate and commune with one another. This arena is where Satthianadhan most overtly identifies reformist impulses stemming from female solidarity. This chapter will consider how gender and social relations unfold in these three different spaces and how Satthianadhan stakes out her own “symbolic site,” a position within debates (chiefly by men) on Hindu child marriage and conjugality, along with the related issues of women’s education, exogamy, divorce, the treatment of widows, and widow remarriage. A number of customary practices generate the cruelties of Kamala’s existence as Ganesh’s young wife. Although the novel’s opening does not specify Kamala’s age, she is a young girl when she marries (her father-in-law still calls her “little girl,” 37), and it is certainly before Kamala has started to menstruate, in accordance with caste customs. It is later than is customary, however, since the village girls ask her, “How old are you? Why are you not married?” (26). Through the experiences of Kamala and most of her friends (there are a few exceptions), the novel exhibits the undesirable effects of child marriage. Their young age insures that these brides are overly dependent: too emotionally and physically immature to possess specific skills, resist maltreatment, or bear up under the stresses of a new role. Kamala, for example, is given drudge work and made to shoulder the blame whenever things go wrong. Here, Satthianadhan echoes the testimony of many women in newspapers and memoirs during the Age of Consent controversy where hierarchical relationships, a regimented life, and absolute control wielded by in-laws over young wives amounted to a version of slavery.29 Reinforced by religious precept, Kamala’s diminished status within the household increases her submissiveness and passivity: Somehow Kamala became resigned to her lot … There was [a] kind of teaching mingled with it all and that was that whether she was good or bad, whether she enjoyed pleasure or suffered pain, she ought not to grumble but accept it meekly, for it was her fate. This gave her very little consolation. It only made her feeble in purpose and in will. (58)

Kamala’s learned powerlessness renders her oppression acceptable to her (indeed, seem inevitable) as she grows older. The internalization of guilt for whatever goes wrong leads to a pervasive self-incrimination in her interactions with Ganesh. Paradoxically but predictably, this happens especially when he is at fault, because such moments threaten the status quo. Thus, after he is unfaithful, Kamala blames herself: “She made herself miserable the whole day, crying and thinking of all her words, and putting her conduct in the worst possible light. No! she did not deserve

29   Anagol-McGinn cites the accounts of Rakhmabai, Yashodabai Joshi, Champubai Madhavrao Nadkarni, Dhakbai Trimbakram Desai, Ahalyabai Morevale, and Krishnabai and Lanibai Dhurandar in “Age of Consent” 104.

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to have a husband like him … Oh, that somebody would trample her down and show her her own low mean nature” (135). Another damaging consequence of early marriage, according to Kamala, is the increased risk of conjugal incompatibility, something which the Rakhmabai case had also brought vividly to the fore. In Kamala, the educated Bhagirathi’s marriage to an illiterate, abusive man offers a close parallel to the Rakhmabai case. The novel exposes how early marriage can degrade conjugal relations, because spousal choice is not based on character and compatibility, but on property and status; the dowry system effectually reduces marriage to a financial operation, as Rakhmabai had pointed out in one of her letters to the Times of India.30 As the couple performs the marriage rituals “unintelligible to both,” Kamala becomes “henceforth the wife and the property of the man whoever he might be … This was ordered by the shastras [treatises], and the law was never to be broken” (37, underlining mine). Ganesh leaves after the wedding ceremony to continue his education, and Kamala’s memory of him fades to a “faint recollection … [and] she never thought of him or cared to see him again” (44).31 When the couple are eventually united a few years later, after Ganesh has finished his education, his tendency to regard Kamala as his property serves as evidence of his already weak, indulgent character: “Everything was subservient to his pleasure, and it is no wonder that he regarded Kamala as a sort of chattel made to give him pleasure and minister to his wants” (99). According to this narrative’s logic, the material imperative undergirding child marriage (the girl is attractive for the dowry her family gives over to the boy) fixes marital relations psychologically into ones of persistent inequality. Although Kamala has no more material wealth to give to Ganesh once she marries him, she is to give of herself, without desiring anything in return. Conjugal relations are thus inherently asymmetrical, a prolongation of the mother–son relationship, where the woman is reduced to ministering support. Ganesh’s infidelity with the independently wealthy woman Sai can be attributed to his weak character, but Sai’s ability to be his intellectual partner while Kamala cannot certainly contributes to his fascination. Despite Ganesh’s attempt to establish an independent household in Rampur with Kamala, his abusiveness eclipses the development of compatibility: “she soon learned how great injury a capricious and weak, though at times well meaning man, was capable of inflicting on a sensitive wife … [She] … was even less than a servant in her husband’s eyes” (132, 133). Though her own interactions with Ganesh remain painfully unequal and unfulfilling, Kamala intuits early on that the companionate model – where men’s and women’s marital attachment derives from a respect for their spouse as an equal – offers a superior fulfillment. These feelings follow fast from the brief 30

  Rakhmabai, “Infant Marriage,” cited in Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 107.   One woman of the period testified in Arya Bhagini that child wives and their husbands were “too young to know the meaning of love”; Kashibai Kanitkar, a member of the reform group Arya Mahila Samaj, believed almost all marriages were unhappy due to the practice of child marriage. Both are quoted in Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 110, 112–13. 31

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intimacy arising from Ganesh’s efforts to educate his wife, though Kamala has in fact internalized this companionate ideology early on, learned from her parents, as we will see. The knowledge electrifies her imagination: though her feelings towards him had not as yet ripened into love, she had begun to regard him already as a friend and comrade … This friendship had awakened springs of new affection … and … seemed to belong to a new world altogether – a world where it would be possible to live an ideal life, where perfect unity of sentiment would exist, and where each would understand the other’s feelings and each would live for the other. (78)

In many texts of the time, male writers disparaged the insufficiency of illiterate wives to serve as companions, yet attributed desires and needs to the husband only.32 In Kamala, by contrast, Satthianadhan allows her female protagonist to articulate the wife’s powerful desires for equality and emotional intimacy. The expression of similar desires on Rakhmabai’s part, compounded by her public outspokenness, made her extremely controversial. Satthianadhan creates in Kamala a protagonist who, while expressing her desires for mutuality, remains sufficiently feminine to forestall such criticism. Ganesh’s desire to have his wife be more than a sexual or ritual partner leads to his short-lived decision to educate his wife – in many reformers’ eyes, education was the means to compatibility – and Kamala’s instruction, in turn, proves to be the catalyst for her insight into the superiority of companionate marriage. The act of teaching fosters intimacy, mutuality, and intellectual equality.33 As the narrative suggests, however, exogamous marital systems, with the concomitant hierarchical positioning of women within an extended household, make the education of the young wife virtually impossible. In many of the writings of colonialist as well as liberal and conservative Indian reformers (whether male or female), efforts to alter the status quo and to ameliorate the condition of the young child-wife are sabotaged by duplicitous and exploited women within the household.34 Reformers who were women, however, were less convinced than their male counterparts that this orthodoxy would prove insurmountable. Instead, they saw these women as the products of centuries of conditioning that education alone could undo.35 In Kamala, the women in the household direct their energies  Chakravarti, Rewriting History 214.   Allaying conservative fears concerning education, Anandibai Joshi’s biography offered an example of a woman contemporaneous with Satthianadhan whose learning did not lead her to resist religious or patriarchal values. See Chakravarti, Rewriting History 215. 34   Perhaps the most famous example occurs in Ramabai Ranade’s memoirs where she outlines the power struggle between women in a multi-generational family. See Ramabai Ranade, Himself, An Autobiography of a Hindu Lady, trans. Katherine Van Akin Gates (Microproduction, New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1938). 35   Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 106. 32

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toward the formation of close alliances with Kamala’s father-in-law or Ganesh. When Kamala seeks out the company of her father-in-law, a shastri (learned man) like her father, and desires to help him in his studies (and indirectly extend her own, begun by her father), she stirs the ire of the women in the household by going “against all rules of decorum … to be so very familiar with her father-in-law, and to be in such favor with him” (43). Their resistance resurfaces when Ganesh, imbued with the “English idea … of developing Kamala’s mind and so training her to be a real companion to him” (73), takes to educating his young wife. Emboldened by Ganesh’s father’s ridicule of “the new learning” (74), Kamala’s mother- and sisters-in-law express their displeasure at Ganesh’s attempts by criticizing her: Kamala goes against tradition; she has ulterior motives; she upsets gender norms within the husband–wife dyad by trying to be an equal; and she only cares about the men of the household, not the women. Perhaps the most compelling reason they articulate against her education relates to their need for material security within the extended family unit. Their fears of being usurped from the father’s/brother’s/husband’s favor and losing influence stem from their economic dependence on the men of the household, as well as a system of household entitlements already in place. Kamala’s education will interfere with the carefully articulated hierarchical power of women in the household, whereby the young child-wife is typically at the bottom, compelled to do the most menial work and the first from whom food is withheld. With an education and her husband’s favor, Kamala’s workload will fall on the other (and older) women’s shoulders. Further, a young wife with inordinate power, a greater power than the other women in the household, threatens the security of their old age. As Kamala’s mother-in-law says to her husband: “If our son also takes to her as you do, why, she will wean away his heart from us and where shall we be? He won’t take the least notice of us” (44). With the women of the family exerting the full force of their influence upon Ganesh and Kamala’s father-in-law, Ganesh’s efforts to educate his child-wife come to naught. By the time Ganesh relinquishes this project, Satthianadhan has revealed the scope of the difficulties early marriage poses for those who advocated “reform from within” (e.g., those pushing for reform generated within the family itself as opposed to legislative redress). Within Kamala’s depiction of domestic spaces, exogamy attracts the greatest criticism for its ability to thwart the development of conjugal intimacy and young wives’ educational opportunities. The exogamous marital system, in fact, disadvantages both women and men in the household. Women in the extended household lead narrow lives, and their financial and emotional dependence make the stakes of lost power and position within the household tremendous, fostering intense rivalry between the young bride and her female in-laws and creating a situation where, as many reformers attested, “men were battling their relatives to gain full control of their wives.”36 Ganesh finds his loyalties constantly questioned by his natal family, his superstitious 36

  Quoted in Chakravarti, Rewriting History 204.

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fears awakened, and his affections played upon and divided between his sisters, his mother, and his wife. Change is actively resisted by female in-laws, and an inherent conservatism prevails among the women. The young husband’s own dependence on the extended family makes him unable to protect his wife’s efforts to educate herself, a situation recounted in works such as Ramabai Ranade’s autobiography and S.M. Nikambe’s Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife (1895). Consequently, many reformers proposed that the boy’s “age of consent” be raised as well.37 Kamala’s husband proves unable to stand up to the women’s energetic efforts to keep Kamala subordinate within the household, as do the other men in her life.38 Kamala’s father, after he gives her over in marriage, has no more part in her life: “as it was with Kamala, so it usually is in Hindu families. Once given over, the daughter so lovingly brought up, is no more the concern of her parents. It becomes improper for them to interfere in any way with her new life” (75), a rule that her father follows. Similarly, Kamala’s husband and father-in-law give in to their nearest kin whenever the pressure intensifies. Her father-in-law simply advises Kamala to “work to please her mother-in-law,” and Kamala realizes that her father and her father-in-law do not “know and cannot understand what I have to bear” (55). Ganesh fears displeasing his mother, and being without strong principles or character, he submits to her influence. Satthianadhan suggests, then, that the combination of early marriage and the practice of virilocal exogamy (with the extended household system it entails) present unacceptable burdens upon the fragile, emergent relationship between the child-wife and her husband. Unable to defend herself, without allies among her female in-laws or defenders among the men of the household, cut off from access to her natal family, the child-wife’s position within the household devolves into one of increasing isolation, misery, and stigmatization. The space Kamala calls her own within the house is “the darkest corner” of her mother-in-law’s room (57), the physical projection of a psyche taught to accept her wifely burden: there was another kind of teaching … that … she … ought to accept it meekly, for it was her fate. This gave her very little consolation. It only made her feeble in purpose and in will. She lost even her simple interest in life; for life was a poor spiritless affair. (58)

Suicidal impulses in the form of anorexia emerge as a coping mechanism or “solution” to her loss of a desire to live. Kamala’s situation, far from being unique, is presented as common. Kamala “heard story after story of trials and troubles 37

  See Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 108.   Anagol-McGinn notes how Indian women (including Rakhmabai and Ramabai) who desired reform turned to British (imperial) feminists as they lost faith in the imperial government’s and in Indian male reformers’ commitment to real reform (“Age of Consent” 109–10). 38

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undergone by girls her own age; and she often with her own eyes witnessed scenes which shocked her and gave her food for much painful reflection” (59). In a direct address to the reader Satthianadhan concludes: The relations between a husband and a wife in an orthodox Hindu home are, as a general rule, much constrained. The two have not liberty of speech and action … The joint family system is the chief cause of this anomalous state of things. The Hindu wife, unless she lives with her husband in a house of her own, scarcely exchanges a word with him before other members of the family. (62)

Attempts at the realization of companionate marriage outside the joint family system, were, as Uma Chakravarti notes, still very much “an abstraction, in construction” during this period.39 As we will see, Kamala’s parents’ narrative will provide a realized fictional model. In progressive reform movements of the late nineteenth century, widowhood became another avenue for the criticism of exogamy, following the reformer Pandita Ramabai’s denunciation of the joint family system in The High Caste Hindu Woman.40 In Satthianadhan’s novel, Kamala’s friend Rukhma is widowed when her husband dies from cholera: [Rukhma’s] dearest relations would turn their faces from her and say: “Let her suffer, let her bear the sins of former generations, the unfortunate polluted one, who has been the cause of her husband’s death. What sins she must have committed” … And Rukhma … would hide her face and mourn and not a soul would go near her to sympathize with her or say a kind word to her. (130)

When Ganesh too dies, Kamala, who had left him earlier in Rampur and returned to his parents’ home, sees his death as her “meet punishment for having left his house” (153), despite his infidelity with Sai and his baseless accusations of Kamala’s unfaithfulness. Unlike Rukhma, however, Kamala inherits significant wealth from her father upon his death, which protects her from her in-laws’ further ostracism. Yet her internalization of the blame and embrace of the widow’s stigmatized social identity keep her from the happiness that Ramchander’s offer of remarriage promises. Although she has every reason to anticipate happiness with a second marriage to him (he is the husband with whom, the narrative intimates, she would have recreated her parents’ ideal), she chooses instead a life of service 39   Rewriting History 207. This construction of a companionate ideal in India draws on both Western and indigenous discourses. According to Grewal, the “ideal of the Western companionate marriage and the nuclear family, pervasive in missionary discourse as well as discourses of the family in both England and the United States, is also powerful in Ramabai’s opposition to Hindu custom” (Home and Harem 208). 40  In Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words: Selected Works, ed. Meera Kosambi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000) 141–69.

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educating widows and orphans (like Pandita Ramabai), a decision that ultimately confers upon her an exemplary status. Similarly, after her mother Lakshmi’s early death, her father Narayan becomes a sanyasi (a holy man), shunning remarriage and following ancient Hindu ideas about the varnashrama dharma (religious duties appropriate to age and caste), in contrast to common custom where men often remarried after their wives’ deaths (to very young brides). That Kamala and her father, both models of piety, do not choose to remarry does not mean Satthianadhan is against widow remarriage (indeed, Kamala and Ramchander’s genuine love suggests an alternative happy ending) but rather that her reformist priorities lie elsewhere. The present-time of the narrative places Kamala primarily in the home of her in-laws, yet a secondary narrative (arising after Kamala asks her father about her long-dead mother) depicts a model of companionate conjugality that dovetails with nineteenth-century understandings of ancient Hindu practices and beliefs, aspects of which were acceptable to Indian reformers and traditionalists alike. Satthianadhan draws on fairy tale and myth to characterize Kamala’s parent’s love story, beginning with her mother Lakshmi being “immured in the fortress with her old decrepit father” (117). After their secret marriage, she and Narayan run away, Lakshmi “[looking] more like a princess … than one who [is] stealing away from her father’s home” (118). A concern for wealth and power dictate Lakshmi’s father’s choice of spouse for his daughter, not his knowledge of the man. After “having thoughtlessly neglected to find her a husband,” he suddenly promises his daughter (not knowing she has married Narayan without his consent) to a “very powerful neighbouring jaghirdar,” who had asked for her, but whom the father does not really know (117, 118). In contrast to Lakshmi’s father, Narayan’s aunt Droupadai (who is also Kamala’s aunt/foster mother) implicitly believes in ascertaining the compatibility of a couple who desire to marry. Typically, a highcaste husband and wife would not meet and certainly would not have opportunities for talking before their marriage. Yet “quite against all rules, [she, the aunt] allowed [Narayan] to talk to the girl” (118); under her auspices, they meet numerous times. The choice of the name Droupadai can hardly be accidental here; a version of Draupadi, it recalls the heroic figure in the epic The Mahabharata, renowned for choosing her own (five) husbands. In essence, Droupadai extends the right to spousal choice to Lakshmi. Because her choice turns out to be so successful, the narrative’s imagined restructuring of conjugal relations can be said to include the right to spousal choice, an issue that women reformers of her era worked hard to promote.41 Lakshmi and Narayan subsequently attempt to reside at his family’s home, but Lakshmi is reviled by the women of the household. Instead of bowing to family pressures, Narayan leaves with Lakshmi on a pilgrimage, with Narayan’s friend’s son Ramchander accompanying them. These actions overtly allude to Rama and Sita’s voluntary exile from Rama’s own dysfunctional family, as well as their marital bliss during their forest exile, recounted in The Ramayana, a popular 41

  See Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 110.

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Hindu epic. Just like Rama and Sita, Narayan and Lakshmi are victims of familial ineptitude, neglect, and machinations who manage to escape. At the center of the epic stands an ideal of marriage, here recreated by Narayan and Lakshmi: Oh, my Kamala! How can I give you a glimpse of those happy days? It falls not to the lot of mortals to enjoy happiness such as we had. We lived in rude leafy huts, drank of the cool limpid streams; we rose with the birds, roamed through the echoing valleys and over far distant hills. (119–20)

The incorporation of mythic elements legitimizes Narayan’s and Lakshmi’s love, reinscribing an ancient Hindu ideal of marriage within a modern novel.42 Kamala’s parents’ subsequent, lasting happiness as forest pilgrims is based on a number of factors: Narayan’s understanding that a husband’s loyalty is foremost to his wife, not to his natal family; that physical distance from that family is necessary for their happiness; and that Lakshmi pursue an education, with Narayan’s encouragement. As he relates to Kamala, “Your mother read with me, with bewildered eyes, books that are never put into women’s hands, and she was delighted when difficult portions were explained … [As] her understanding unfolded, her love for me increased” (120). Rejecting the standard fare of Hindu women’s education – Puranic texts are called “silly, foolish” books in the novel – Satthianadhan insists that intellectually challenged women become better (because more equal) companions within marriage. As Narayan raises his daughter Kamala after Lakshmi’s death, he continues this same kind of education. The narrative excursus away from Kamala’s unhappy marriage to the representation of her parents’ happy one allows Satthianadhan to propose an alternative model of Hindu marriage, one where the exogamous, extended family gives way to a companionate, nuclear model, where the young woman marries at a later age (Lakshmi is presumably older because her father has neglected to marry her), where she has a right to choose her partner, and where her education continues after her marriage and extends through both parents to their daughter (Kamala). Although this inserted narrative is situated long after the many problems of Kamala’s own marriage have become apparent, it helps the reader understand that her happiest moments with her husband Ganesh occur when her marriage most closely approximates her parents’: when Ganesh is teaching her; when they leave to go on a pilgrimage to Dudhesthal; and when Kamala contemplates married life alone with him in Rampur away from his family. Kamala suggests that the attainment of such an ideal requires both the husband’s and the wife’s resistance to powerfully rooted customs. In creating a companionate conjugal relationship that draws strength from its allusion to religious texts and myths, Kamala contributes to what Uma Chakravarti has called the “construction of a particular kind of past and a particular kind of 42   In “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” Chakravarti describes the frequent use during this time of ancient Vedic myths to legitimize contemporary reforms (79).

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womanhood” by cultural nationalists to further a reformist agenda.43 While it is problematic to pigeonhole Satthianadhan as a cultural nationalist on the basis of her allusions to ancient myth, she follows one nineteenth-century Indian discursive tradition which forges a new identity for high-caste Hindu women in part by rediscovering her high status in the Vedic past. Further, Lakshmi’s and Narayan’s ideal marriage describes a model of “Aryan” (Indo-European) womanhood as constructed by both male and female Indian writers such as R.C. Dutt, Bankim, Dayananda, and Kailashbhashini Devi.44 Characteristics of “Aryan” womanhood included the following (most of which are found within the Narayan/Lakshmi narrative in Kamala): women are educated before their marriage, and their education continues after marriage as well; women choose their partners after getting to know them and, if widowed, can contract second marriages; women are co-equal in spiritual potential and are partners in religious duties; marriages follow the companionate model; and in accordance with Vedic practices, there are no caste divisions, idolatry, or child marriage.45 By making her proposed reforms consistent with The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, texts beloved and familiar, Satthianadhan employs a strategy used by progressive and conservative Hindu reformers who gestured toward a Hindu “golden age,” based on Vedic models of ideal womanhood, such as Maitreyi, Gargi, Sita, Savitri, and Lakshmibai.46 Kamala’s desire to recreate her parents’ relationship with her husband Ganesh is one way the novel conveys the pull of Kamala’s natal home. Her early life in the forest distinguishes itself from that of other girls who live in town in other ways as well. First, her father teaches her to abhor caste prejudice, another allusion to Narayan’s recreation of the Vedic past in the present. Her favored playmate is Yeshi, identified as a Sudra (lowest of the castes, here, peasants), and this crosscaste friendship seems possible only in a remote setting, beyond the strict caste rules characteristic of village life. Secondly, as he has with Lakshmi, Narayan devotes himself to Kamala’s education, fostering her intellectual interests early on: “The greater part of the day … she would nestle by his side and listen to his learned talk” (24). Because Narayan instills in Kamala both the piety and female submissiveness normative for her religion, caste, and gender – Kamala learns to perform puja [worship] and “to fill his chembu [brass vessel] with water, to lay his plantain leaf ready for food, to water the tulsi tree” (24) – the narrative attempts to allay conservative fears that female education is incompatible with feminine modesty. Indeed, its proposed reforms consolidate certain demands of patriarchal power as well as mitigate its abuses. Finally, Narayan also turns out 43

  Ibid. 78.   The exclusionary, racist implications of this ideology of high-caste Hindus as descendents of Aryans (Indo-Europeans) are noted by Chakravarti in ibid. (28–9, 40–1). Satthianadhan follows this racialist mode of thinking by mentioning Kamala’s fairness many times in the text where it becomes an index of her moral superiority. 45   Ibid. 50–61. 46   Ibid. 79. 44

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to be an opponent of child marriage. He defers Kamala’s socio-sexual maturation as long as possible, extending her natural curiosity and love of learning, and her access to parental love and carefree independence that characterize her childhood. Eventually losing what he calls “the great struggle” (31), he complies with an arranged marriage he is unhappy with, facing social and religious ostracism if he defers any longer.47 Kamala suggests that even the most devoted Hindu father is incapable of overriding the weight of customary practices. Yet in its depiction of Kamala’s parents’ familial home, the novel also conveys to readers that certain ancient Hindu traditions – women’s education, women’s right to spousal choice, and a later age-of-consent – can find contemporary articulation. It offers a companionate model seemingly compatible with Indian progressive and conservative conjugal ideas, as well as Western ones: a common ideological base, despite religious and cultural differences. In highlighting the physical and psychic toll associated with patriarchal virilocal exogamy, Satthianadhan reveals herself to be a strong opponent of child marriage. The death of her mother Lakshmi orphans Kamala at an early age, but it is not until she leaves her natal home that her psychological bereavement truly begins. Indeed, the novel stresses the absolute separation of the two homes once Kamala marries and moves from a natal home characterized by strong emotional bonds to her inlaws’ home, where she attempts but fails to transfer her affections to her husband and his family. Virilocal exogamy requires a drastic separation – Kamala is denied access to her parents – and her extreme subordination within her in-laws’ home exacerbates the pain of separation. Although Kamala foregrounds the power of the father–daughter bond, it is the unbroken emotional tie between the dead mother and living daughter that acts as a persistent, significant refrain within the text.48 Associated with uncultivated nature or wilderness, the mother’s “ghostly” presence testifies, simultaneously if paradoxically, to the relative invisibility, as well as the enduring significance, of the mother–daughter relationship. Within Hindu discourses of child marriage, this bond is something overlooked, reflecting a social system that minimizes its significance. Uniquely, Kamala authorizes and permits the mother– daughter passion for each other, and it creates separate spaces – wild or untamed nature – that enfold this particular relationship. Satthianadhan thereby creates a fantasy of permanent mother–daughter connectedness in response to the actuality of   See Chandani Lokugé’s editorial notes to Satthianadhan’s Kamala, 159.   Kamala’s attraction to her parents’ home, and her longing to return there, are expressed also as a desire to be only her father’s daughter, once again. Akin to the largely unconscious, visionary/hallucinatory relationship she retains to her dead mother, these feelings overwhelm Kamala whenever she visits him. Here is an example from a scene by his deathbed: “Eagerly entering the hut she fell on her father’s bed … The suppressed feelings of years gave way … [He] raised her head and kissed her. The sobs were hushed, and a great peacefulness stole over her as if she had found her haven of rest at last … She … laid her head on his bosom while he held her tight… ‘…let her be thus,’ said the old sanyasi, in his feeble voice… ‘In her childhood we were never separated’” (10). 47

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separation. Although the dead mother cannot be brought back physically, the psychic ongoingness of their love triumphs over two kinds of death, the biological one and the “death” of the mother–daughter relationship that early marriage signifies. Kamala’s longing for proximity to her mother is charted along associative pathways wherein the maternal is aligned with nature; the imagery of diffuse elements such as water, wind, and light connotes their psychic reunification.49 The novel renders the maternal as one dominant aspect of the text’s association of wild places with the feminine. Kamala is first represented as a solitary child, perched on a “weird and desolate” hillock topped with a ruined temple dedicated to the goddess of wind, rain, and sunshine, Anjini, whose temple Kamala regards “as her own” (25). Kamala plays on this hill for one last time before her marriage, and “with every gust of wind she felt the happy buoyancy of life which made her forget she was a bride” (36). Swept by Anjini’s animating wind, this wild landscape characterizes her existence as a daughter, before the gravitas of marriage. Lakshmi too, in Kamala’s psyche, is associated with such intangible presences as wind and light, including starlight and moonlight. When the wind on the hill moans a “sad, sad dirge” (23), Kamala remembers mostly her mother’s “sad eyes … their soft sweet light [shining] round her in dreams, and sometimes in the starlit evenings” (23–4). Narayan first meets Lakshmi when the light of the “silver moon” bathes the fortress she lives in, and her “full round face … [catches] the moonbeams” (116). Kamala’s face, carrying the imprint of her mother, is described by Ganesh as “lit by a moonbeam” (56); indeed, Kamala’s unconscious memories of her mother surface into consciousness when she contemplates the moonlight: “‘Do you know, father … that whenever I look over those silent moonlit plains, my thoughts wander far? I seem to see scenes similar to these … and I feel some one near me soothing me … Do you think it is mother; my mother?’” (116). The strength of Lakshmi’s presence is measured both through its dispersal and its ability to temper the landscape’s dark sublimity: “The silver light of the moon fell over all … [The] shimmering light … hid with a soft feathery veil the deep caverns and the dark repulsive ravines. Here and there the moonbeams touched with a tender kiss a solitary bush or a gigantic tree overhanging a precipice” (50). Insofar as the spectral Lakshmi is a projection of Kamala’s own psyche, she articulates Kamala’s fears of the sexual obligations of marriage; in this capacity, she “protects” her daughter from a too-early entry into adult heterosexuality. The episode of the pilgrimage to Dudhesthal, where traumatic experience and a sociosexual geography are inscribed upon another wild landscape, illuminates this maternal function. An erotic mythos governs this place: the name, Dudhesthal, means “milky spot,” due to the effect created when the “masculine” river Ganga (associated with Shiva) shoots down to a cavern and explodes within it, appearing to viewers as a white spray. Another feature of the locale, “Seeta’s bath” (after Sita, the embodiment of the ideal faithful wife 49   My reading here contrasts starkly with Priya Joshi’s, which claims that in Kamala there are “no mothers … only grotesque mothers-in-law” (In Another Country 202).

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and mother) is similarly suggestive. The “bath” is a rocky cave, “overgrown with creepers” where the “drip drip of the water … wells out from the sides of the cave” (69). Even the place of Seeta’s baby’s cradle evokes female genital/ womb imagery: “the rude slab of rock cut in the shape of a cot with moss-grown stones underneath and ferns springing up on all sides is the cradle of her babe” (69). The erotic valence of the site is enhanced by the sexual “call and respond” dialogues initiated between the young peasant men and women surrounding Kamala, as she proceeds to Dudhesthal with her husband and female friends: “He [one young peasant] asks [another] to turn round and taste of his water … [she retorts] ‘my song is locked in a box, thou long-tongued man’” (67–8). In this sacred place overscored with a heterosexual topography, Kamala has a terrifying hallucinatory flashback: of falling into the river and nearly dying. The significance of this memory is revealed later. When very young, she fell into this same river, and her mother pulled her to safety. As a young woman just reaching sexual maturity, Kamala’s flashback to that particular moment dramatizes her fear of immersion (self-annihilation) in masculine, sexually charged waters, coupled with a desire to be pulled back into life by/with the mother (e.g., to a time before sexual maturation). Her “ghostly” reappearance at this spot reintroduces the mother’s protective presence as Kamala reaches her difficult negotiation of sexual maturation as a child-wife. Yet why does the novel symbolically associate the maternal with intangibility or disembodiment, beyond the obvious answer that the dead mother is a lingering spirit? On the one hand, it suggests that, despite the semi-consciousness of Kamala’s memories, the idea of her mother remains pervasive, literally everywhere for her, like wind or light, an element of nature. Further, by casting the mother figure as disembodied, the text can express anxieties about embodied motherhood as a potentially deadly, tragic, or traumatic situation for women, for various reasons. Most obvious is the psychic difficulty for the daughter and mother to “survive” the inevitable loss of their relationship, given exogamous child marriage, the grief that underwrites child marriage. Further, if a wife’s value is measured by her ability to provide a male heir, and if she does not successfully bear a male child, she can suffer a social “death” by expulsion from her husband’s home. Finally, the bearing of children by very young wives represents a premature closure of childhood, itself represented as a joyous period of life whose abrupt loss the novel abundantly mourns. The mother as revenant is a way of staving off this loss that is customarily viewed as a developmental advance. Kamala’s plotting of the daughter’s progression to the social roles of wife and then mother refuses to mask the psychic “death” that it is predicated upon. Indeed, Kamala’s own experience as a mother is foreclosed – her own daughter dies in infancy, and she has no other children. This additional tragedy psychically underscores the exclusivity of Kamala’s affective tie to her mother: Kamala will always remain primarily Lakshmi’s daughter, not a mother. As the adult Kamala returns to her childhood home, the wind and light stir her to a keen awareness of that loss:

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she looked up wondering whether the sunlight was still there and the wind, her old play fellow: and she saw the morning rays struggling with the soft mist under the trees … Then she thought of the long years that had passed … and the change that had come on her … ‘Oh, where are all the old joys? Will they never come back to me any more?’ and she shuddered at the thought. (102)

When the widowed Kamala is finally able to make choices about her life, due to an unexpected inheritance, she creates for herself what one could call nonbiological or asexual motherhood. Although she has the ability to marry (and give birth) again, she chooses to step out of the generational matrix. Instead, she devotes herself to the care of widows and orphans, a service made possible by her mother’s dual legacy: the gift of an education and the jewels she bequeaths to her daughter. Economic independence confers upon Kamala freedom from a procreative paradigm. The natural world, much loved due to her early childhood associations, seems to represent an escape from the misery Kamala experiences as a child-wife. It is a place that transcends the social altogether: So Kamala … wondered why she ever felt happy at all, as she did when she looked on the blue sky, the radiant sunset, or the swollen river – why she felt such longing to be lost in a great, wild wilderness, where she might dream alone in silence and enjoy … the glory and magnificence of earth and sky. (59)

By virtue of the text’s association of Lakshmi with natural phenomenon, and particularly with wild landscapes, however, it is tempting to read Kamala’s pleasure in nature as the recall of the maternal bond she has encrypted there. Thus, nature is less a solution to social alienation than an arena replete with alternative social meanings. The “spectral mother” comes to stand for a diversity of desires that exceed sanctioned ones: the longing for an extension of childhood pleasures; a wish to defer, cancel, or abrogate female sexual reproduction; and a refusal to relinquish the psychological primacy of the mother–daughter affective bond. Here is a place where the “precocious and artificial childhood” of her friends in town need not end by entering into “a premature or forced womanhood”: “Just as the door of a city house leads abruptly into the street where everything is open and glaring, so the threshold of [her friends’] childhood opened suddenly into womanhood” (86). Thus, the text conveys a profound anxiety about heterosexual relations, whether expressed as arranged marriages, as the fragility of the marriage bond, or as the importance of Ganesh’s own strong bond with his mother. As Kamala meditates on alternative possibilities for women, she looks up and sees a mother protecting her child: “where was her own mother? How she would have liked to walk by her side, free and happy, though going to a poor village hut!” (87). The reform of child marriage, Kamala seems to suggest, depends upon a mother’s continued involvement with and ability to protect her daughter. The difference between the status quo and a utopian social vision is figured in the text through

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two oppositions. One is geographical, namely, the contrasting spaces of the town and nature, with their alternative social and familial values. The other is temporal: the contrasting, noncontiguous periods of Kamala’s life. Just as Dutt bridged her culture’s distant past and the present through the memories of a maternal figure, here Satthianadhan also envisions the remembered mother as nodal point between past and present. In both authors, the mother–daughter bond represents the charged nexus where a culture re-defines its values. Over the geographical and temporal oppositions in Kamala presides the mother in the wilderness, a figure testifying to the intense desire for alternative sex-gender arrangements. One radical (and non-maternal) alternative to such arrangements that the novel directly explores, if only to reject it, is represented by a female protagonist Sai, who straddles both wilderness and public spaces. Like her persona, Sai’s home “was … on the brow of a hill commanding a view of two valleys” (122) in a “weird mountain scene” with “rugged ravines” and “precipitous hills” (108). It is a landscape associated with female deities hostile to men, one of whom is the destructive goddess Kali: “Once an uncanny sensation crept over him [Ramchander] as he thought he saw, in a dark grove close by, a hideous image of Kali, and two eyes, bright like living coals, peering at him from behind … It was a scene of great beauty” (108). Sai’s association with Kali brings her into a group of female deities known as “wild goddesses,” characterized as malevolent, impure, sexual (more powerful because unaffiliated with any man), without children, and living outside any established settlements.50 Their wildness underscores their distance from social norms of femininity. Sai is constantly in motion, moving from her home in the hills to towns and cities at their base. Sai is the novel’s sole woman fully integrated into masculine public spaces, and it is with a great deal of ambiguity that the narrative represents her. In the towns, she owns property which is the source of her wealth, conducts business, and carries on sexual liaisons with Ganesh (and others, presumably). She remains a brilliant woman, an artist with words, and her gift for conversation exposes the uneducated Hindu wife’s limits as an companionate conjugal partner. More critically, she exposes unmarried women’s need for money and social standing, and the difficulty of attaining that honorably. Sai has a network of spies, mostly comprised of Bheels or tribals, who supply her with information about criminal wrongdoing and give her a special status with legal and governmental offices: [Sai] was intimately connected with most of the mysterious things, such as robberies and quarrels, that happened in and about the district. She had attendants and trusty servants who kept her informed of all important events that took place in different localities. To outsiders she seemed a woman of great ability and power, and she was often entrusted with work belonging to others, as 50   A. Michaels, C. Vogelsanger and A. Wilke, Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996) 15–34.

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for example, the detection of robbery and the settling of disputes … Government officials, too, consulted her now and then. (80)

Sai’s confident ease in maintaining a powerful public persona make her intimidating both to men, who suspect her of poisoning her husband, and to women such as Kamala, who regard her as loathsome, no better than any other “public woman.” Her education and wealth, her involvement with criminal elements, her openly sexual behavior with men such as Ganesh and Ramchander, her independence and engagement in public affairs stamp her as a unique yet powerfully negative example of gender deviance. An exception that proves the norm, she stands for a feminine anti-ideal in patriarchal Hindu society: sexually active, capable of great anger, adept in managing her own destiny, and rebellious against widows’ oppression. She elicits male fears of and attraction to unattached, educated, independent women, even as she embodies normative femininity’s repressed desires. While the narrative does not condone Sai’s life, in recounting her tragic past – widowed, she has run away from home and family to escape oppression – it appeals to the reader’s sympathies. Instead of awe, the reader is meant to view Sai ultimately as a powerless woman harboring envy and regret for Kamala’s strengths, the modesty and honor Sai has irretrievably lost that Kamala still possesses. Her agential subjectivity is further undercut when she is revealed to be both the pawn of a priest who blackmails her and the pawn of Ganesh’s in-laws who manipulate her. The novel thus simultaneously asserts the value of Kamala’s domesticized femininity, while it diminishes Sai’s uncontrolled power. Yet though Sai’s assertiveness is the opposite of Kamala’s passive femininity, the novel draws important points of commonality between the two women. One can argue that Sai has realized many of Kamala’s own most urgent desires: for an education; for a sexual relationship with a partner who is also an intellectual equal; and for the economic independence that Kamala only later attains. Further, Sai’s emotional existence is “bound up” with the same two men as Kamala’s: Ramchander (to whom Sai has been engaged) and to Ganesh, with whom she falls in love. Like her movements between the dark woods and the brightly exposed public spaces of town, Sai makes visible – indeed she realizes – many of Kamala’s repressed desires. Kamala maps a young wife’s lived social and psychological worlds in a third arena beyond the domestic interiors and wild spaces discussed thus far. These spaces include the banks of rivers, pathways and hedges, wells, and local temples where women perform ritual offerings or participate in festivities together. Most of these spaces are behind the houses themselves, yet they create a feeling of another world: In front, the houses look insignificant and small; but behind each opens out into a court-yard with out-houses and a small garden. The houses communicate with each other by means of paths leading through hedges, and women while at work often keep up a running conversation with their neighbours. The wells

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Partially public, these sex-segregated spaces where men do not convene stand as examples of what Sarah Graham-Brown calls “separate women’s worlds not necessarily confined to the four walls of the home, with their own culture – songs, stories, religious practices” (518). They are, in a sense, proximate spaces to domestic ones: adjacent to the interiors where the young wives live, but where they have a relative freedom from immediate familial demands and expected roles. In Kamala, these places are in the open air, showing the reader a very different kind of female intersubjectivity than that delineated within the in-laws’ home, and they draw together women of all ages. The novel accords them particular significance as gathering points for Kamala’s age-peers, the other child wives of the village with whom she forms close attachments. Here they may come to work, yet these venues offer an important alternative to the disintegrative female interrelations within the joint family system. One function of this communal space is socialization in gender and conjugal roles. Because she is motherless, and because her scholarly, reclusive father is eclectic in his upbringing of her, Kamala is naïve, largely ignorant of gender expectations. A local temple festival has the young village girls gathering around Kamala for the first time, curious about her shy demeanor, observing every detail about her dress and her jewels, “[pouring] questions on her” (24), even teasing and questioning Kamala about the arranged marriage in store for her, of which she knows nothing. They immediately establish themselves as her superiors in knowledge, and one older girl, Kashi, steps in as an older sister or surrogate mother figure. From this point on, the self-conscious Kamala internalizes her peer group’s opinions, measures, and judges herself against their standards: “‘Had she done wrong in dancing and singing? What would others say if they knew it?’ and the mocking, jeering voices of the girls came before her” (36). Six months after her marriage, much of the knowledge Kamala’s new friends impart to her is based on their own experiences within their extended families. They acquaint her with the abuse she can expect from her female in-laws and her husband, their tendency to regard her as an evil influence responsible for any misfortune. Besides terrifying her, however, they also help her adjust to being the youngest, most subordinate female within her husband’s family. They do this by offering safe forms of resistance to – and relief from – the tyranny exerted upon her from within the household. For example, when Kamala’s sisters-inlaw refuse to allow her to accompany them to a festival, and further, take her pearl jewelry to adorn themselves, Kamala’s friend Kashi admonishes her for allowing them to take her sole source of wealth, her jewels, counsels her to be more cautious in the future, and takes her to the festival herself. Later on, the reader (here, an implied Western one) learns the economic significance these trinkets hold for young wives:

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Blame not the poor Indian woman for her love of jewellery … She knows well that they are the only things that will not be taken away from her at her husband’s death or when any trouble or calamity overtakes the family. She sees her future independence in them, or at least has the consolation that she will have something to fall back upon in times of distress. (114)

Besides educating Kamala in the value of her jewelry, Kashi temporarily gets her out of her oppressive situation. Yet she also acknowledges her powerlessness before the inherent injustice of Kamala’s exploitation: “The truth is, nobody loves you, and there is something wrong somewhere, but come” (47). Her actions undo the smaller oppressions, but she admits defeat vis-à-vis the larger systemic ones (“there is something wrong somewhere”). In doing so, she anticipates a situation occurring later when, gathered by the river, Kamala’s close friends try to help another young wife, Harni, cope with a mother-in-law who deprives her of food. Scheming to dress up as witches who bring illness in order to scare and punish her mother-in-law for her maltreatment, they choose cholera for their fantasized revenge, a disease Harni herself is particularly susceptible to, due to her chronic undernourishment. Although they never carry out the prank, their joy in plotting freely against the seemingly limitless power of Harni’s mother-in-law – “she” is reduced to fear and trembling in their skit – constitutes an act of psychic resistance to her domination. The advice and support these young women offer each other does not change the status quo, but it does make its consequences much more bearable. Thus, when Bhagirathi imagines running away from her unfaithful husband to be with another man who genuinely loves her, Kamala pleads in favor of traditional norms of female chastity (thereby reinforcing a sexual double standard), because to reject them comes at too high a price: loss of reputation, social ostracization, and perhaps eventual suicide. In showing friendship among Hindu women, Satthianadhan refutes a popular stereotype of predominantly male traditionalists and reformers alike, who claimed that women’s oppression of other women was too deeply engrained, and therefore conjugality could not be reformed.51 Instead, she delineates spaces where female bonding already prevails. Women within the conjugal household may prove formidable obstacles to reforms in women’s education and conjugality, but a tradition of powerful solidarity between women exists in these shared, extra-familial public spaces. Kamala, in fact, depicts a larger community of women who are angered by the injustices faced by Kamala, Harni, and Bhagirathi, and who do what they can to support them (112). Collective solidarity establishes itself outside the home: hence the significance Satthianadhan affords these places in the novel.52 51

  Anagol-McGinn, “Age of Consent” 106. Reformers who were women, however, were less convinced that these women’s orthodoxy made them unable to change. Instead, they saw them as the products of centuries of conditioning that education alone could undo. 52   In opposition to this view, Joshi claims that this is “a world where female solidarity has been thoroughly ruptured” (In Another Country 201).

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These public, gender-segregated spaces also allow the narrative to represent crucial differences in these friends’ lives. Friends like Harni and Bhagirathi suffer in their marriages; Rukhma and Kashi have happy ones. Although Kamala’s situation is characterized as common – they instruct her in what “her woman’s lot will be” – the presence of these other women allows Satthianadhan to explore in greater depth the conditions that make for successful or unsuccessful conjugal relations within an extended family. Although highly critical of exogamy in general, she does not dismiss the possibility of happiness within such a structure. Harni’s relations with her husband are made miserable through her mother-inlaw’s emotional manipulation: her “home [is] made dark and dismal by the hatred and jealousy of a foolish ignorant woman” (61). She becomes a wedge between husband and wife, and Harni’s husband finds it impossible to reconcile them. Bhagirathi’s unhappy marriage foregrounds a fundamental incompatibility which inaugurates and escalates a series of crises over time. As in the Rakhmabai case outlined earlier, Bhagirathi is educated, and her husband is not: this undermines their compatibility; her husband brings his mistress home with his family’s complicity, provoking Bhagirathi to leave her husband and return to her natal home. Against Bhagirathi’s wishes, her mother, in servile, demeaning fashion, returns her mortified, appalled daughter to her husband’s family, with the result that her husband’s contempt for her resumes in intensified form. Trapped in what she describes as a “living grave” (59), Bhagirathi considers running off with another man to escape the pain of being unloved. Kashi’s and Rukhma’s happy marriages provide a counterpoint to these unhappy ones. Though Kamala does not indicate why these marriages prove to be so “intensely happy” (62), the reader does at least learn that both Rukhma’s and Kashi’s mothers have remained involved in their daughters’ lives. To Kashi’s mother is attributed the success of her daughter’s marriage, for she demonstrated “great wisdom and discretion in choosing a husband for Kashi” (62). Aided by the family’s high social standing, Kashi’s mother insures there are no misunderstandings between them, and the two families serve as a model of interfamilial harmony: “The two families lived near to each other, and the old dames regarded each other as sisters” (62). Kashi’s mother’s protectiveness extends to Kamala, and she harshly criticizes Kamala’s mother-in-law for the weakness of character that allows others to easily manipulate her. Despite the novel’s success stories, however, its detailed accounts of in-laws’ manipulations and insecurities within the home work to reveal Satthianadhan’s own misgivings about the possibility of assimilating a companionate model of marriage, with its relative equality and greater intimacy between husband and wife, into the fraught domestic context of virilocal exogamy. Indeed, the depiction of the Dudhesthal pilgrimage as the happiest event within Kamala’s married life suggests that physical distance from her in-laws, intimacy with her husband, and a strong supportive group of female friends are the optimal conditions for marital felicity. That these public, gender-segregated places offer crucial insights into the text’s reformist agenda is signaled by the narrator’s indication of her own spatial

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location, the place where she claims to first have heard Kamala’s story and where she also writes the novel: It was thus I heard the story of Kamala narrated as I sat by the river banks under a clump of trees. The rude rustic temple of Rohini was at my side. The same old Sivagunga was there, and the same old river rolled on, unmindful of the joys and sorrows of the lives that were lived by its side. Far in front were a shrine and a chuttram (monument) bearing the name of Kamala … Her unseen hands still relieve the poor and protect the unfortunate; for she left her fortune for the sole benefit of widows and orphans. (156)

The authorial space of writing occurs in relation to three specific landmarks: the Shivagunga river, the temple of Rohini, and the shrine to Kamala. As the embodiment of the god Shiva, the river is associated with male heterosexual desire, dangerous due to its potential to flood the village. Beside the river, positioned between it and the town, is the temple of Rohini. Rohini is the name of a star who, in Hindu mythology, is the moon god’s favorite wife, and Rohini’s worship is important to the wedding ritual. On their wedding eve, the bride and bridegroom search the night skies; finding her star is believed to bestow happiness. As a goddess, Rohini stands for virtuous marital relations: she herself is a “good married woman” (97). Thus, when Kamala is distressed at Ganesh’s behavior with another woman, she and her friends perform puja (worship) at Rohini’s temple. Yet it is not the wife’s fidelity that is her sole concern, for Rohini also requires the worship of “clean men with good hearts” (98). Two stories in Kamala reinforce Rohini’s symbolic associations with male chastity. In one, Rohini saves the town from “being washed away when floods came” (97) by setting up a barrier to keep back the raging waters “unmindful of the joys and sorrows of the lives that were lived by its side” (156). The barrier is a metaphor for moral resistance, for a married couple’s virtue working actively to keep a husband’s extramarital desires from dangerously “overrunning” the social order. In another story, Rohini punishes a lascivious priest with death (97). Kamala’s shrine, however, is not within or beside the temple of Rohini but “far in front of it,” suggesting that it stands for something yet to be realized, something for or of the future. Kamala’s story has revealed that however assiduous and good she may be, the chaste wife might not be the sole bulwark capable of channeling her husband’s wayward desires. Kamala’s shrine close beside this same river testifies to the social significance of this spot as a gathering place for the young wives, where they often find support in each other’s company. Protecting young widows and orphans, her memorial is a necessary supplement to Rohini’s traditional one, providing comfort to those for whom marriage does not afford either security or happiness (hence the need for the agency of her “unseen hands,” 156). Kamala comes out of her widow’s seclusion to help fellow widows and orphans, demonstrating that India’s women, through their actions, have a role to play in cultural reform. When the narrator constitutes herself as author in relation to these three places (the

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Rohini temple, the Shivagunga river, and the monument to Kamala), she uses a metaphorics of space to call attention to the larger context for reform: one in which reform of Hindu husbands’ sexuality and obliteration of a sexual double standard is a necessity; and one in which women act on behalf of other women, whether that means cultivating gender solidarity across caste and kinship lines or working to underscore and ameliorate discrimination against widows. The conservative reformist rhetoric of the zenana as “happy home” proves to be an untruth for most, though not all wives, in Kamala. Conditioning substitutes for love, self-surrender derives more from coercion and dependence than selffulfillment, and early integration does not guarantee security (Kamala’s in-laws work assiduously to expel her from the family). The vaunted chastity of Hindu wives, defined by conservatives as never thinking or looking at another man, is challenged by the novel as too naïve, as Kamala and Bhagirathi, each in a miserable marriage with a husband either disloyal or inferior in character, experience strong sexual feelings for another man. The conservative view would deny the naturalness of these women’s sexual desires, thereby negating the value of Bhagirathi’s and Kamala’s choice to remain faithful nonetheless. For Satthianadhan, women must know their own desires in order to be agents capable of controlling them; a chastity based on strict seclusion and control means little, whereas chastity (male or female) based on a freely chosen regulation of acknowledged desires signals a strong, autonomous virtue as well as the consensual nature of the union. To create that consensuality, Kamala imagines the necessity of a reformed masculinity. Whereas conservatives emphasized patriarchal roles for men, the narrative suggests that the strengths of men can be identified through their “feminine” qualities. Kamala’s father becomes a surrogate mother; her husband Ganesh nurses her when she falls ill; and her friend Ramchander is described as both “soft” and “firm” (65, 66). This child-wife wants a mother in her father, husband, and friend. The novel, however, avoids weighing in directly on the issue of colonialist intervention in conjugal matters. Presumably, this would have further limited the possibilities for advancing women’s reform by tying it too closely to the “nationalist question” at a time when nationalism, with its rejection of any colonial intervention into conjugal matters, had broad popular support. Earlier, the slowness of Hindu reform movements had made government intervention an option for indigenous female reformers, yet it was becoming increasingly difficult to advocate women’s reform without seeming to embrace colonialism and reject nationalism simultaneously. This may well be the reason the colonial context all but disappears in the novel, aside from references to Ganesh’s English education (something his father is opposed to) and his desire to educate his wife, supposedly the result of that education. One can speculate that Satthianadhan would likely favor legislative reform, since she focuses on the effects stemming from customary exogamy and child marriage and exposes the difficulty of imagining “reform from within” the home. Yet Kamala does not directly advocate any particular political solution. For Priya Joshi, this is evidence of Satthianadhan’s “singular vision,” someone caught between

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tradition and modernity, espousing reform but seeing the impossibility of any legislative solution that does not arise out of Indian communities themselves.53 What it does do is keep the conversation about the consequences of child marriage going and finds overlapping ground between liberal Hindu reformers, Indian feminists, and zenana missionaries. Female education had long been a colonial and an indigenous reformist project, and both shared a vision of an educated Indian womanhood with transformed social roles, through the alteration of family structures and sexual patterns, including (eventually) the idea of companionate marriage. The uneducated child-wife was, like the burning widow before her, a signifier of a devoted, chaste femininity within both colonial and Hindu fantasies, and these groups also saw her – in differing degrees – as an oppressed victim, one needing “rescue.”54 Satthianadhan retains this potent signifier: Kamala remains devoted to her husband despite the familial and spousal abuse she suffers, and this substantiates the urgency of the need for reform. One significant difference, however, between missionary accounts of the zenana and Kamala is that the novel does not foreground the low status of elite Hindu women in order to demonstrate the moral inferiority of Hindus; indeed, Kamala, Ramchander, Narayan, Lakhshmi, and many others exemplify courage and moral worth. This is not to imply that Kamala’s criticisms of child marriage do not stem from Satthianadhan’s Christian roots. Yet, equally persuasive, she also had a long tradition of indigenous criticism of conjugal relations on which to draw, starting with Ram Mohan Roy.55 Her position, in fact, is compatible with Hindu reformers who insured women’s education would not come at the cost of deculturation or significantly jeopardize male authority. Instead of one-upmanship along religious, cultural, or national lines, then, Satthianadhan carefully avoids designating a single source of oppression. She figuratively cross-dresses as a Hindu child-wife in writing the novel, guaranteeing an “authenticity” as she imaginatively creates the spaces of Kamala’s psychic and social life in great detail, something substantiated by the reviews from all quarters. Kamala encourages its readers to see organized space as susceptible to symbolic reconfiguration, as always in the process of being reinscribed with meanings based on the actions and practices that occur there.56 If, as postcolonial critic Inderpal  Joshi, In Another Country 203.   In relation to the “burning widow,” Ania Loomba discusses the conjunction of chaste femininity and oppressed victim in “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency, and Tradition in Colonial and Post-Colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India,” History Workshop Journal 36.1 (1993): 209–27. 55   One cannot assume a stable set of views held by Indian Christians, as there was no unified or single position. E.M. Jackson has described the Satthianadhan family as oscillating from generation to generation between Westernization and Indianization (“Glimpses” 320, 322). 56   See H.L. Moore, Space, Text and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 74 and 81. 53

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Grewal argues, “home and harem were useful spatial tropes by which female subjects were constructed in both England and India within a colonial context that linked patriarchal practices,” Satthianadhan attempts to undo such constructions, reconfigure such tropes, and thereby limit patriarchal control.57

  Home and Harem 56.

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Chapter 3

Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai’s Famine Essays In the closing scene of Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala, discussed in the previous chapter, the narrator sits beside a memorial to the protagonist whose inheritance has been devoted to caring for her fellow widows and orphans. In portraying the widow as both a social reformer and an object of reformist energies, Satthianadhan identifies the position from which Pandita Ramabai would exercise her political and discursive agency at roughly the same historical moment. While it is impossible to ascertain if this novelistic scene intentionally alludes to Ramabai’s efforts, Satthianadhan’s brief essay “Pandita Ramabai and her Work” reveals that, by the early 1890s, Ramabai was already a well-known figure to her.1 Though they lived in different regions of India, during a journey to India’s west coast, Satthianadhan made an effort to stop at the Sharada Sadan, Ramabai’s home for child widows in Poona. She declares herself “impatient … to see her of whom I had heard so much” and is startled to find, not “an anglicized figure with a great deal of pomp and affectation about her … but … a figure neatly and quietly dressed in white in the regular Brahminic style.”2 Assuming, as did Ramabai’s detractors, that her years abroad and converted status would have overly “anglicise[d]” her, what Satthianadhan sees – to her surprise and pleasure – is a woman whose Indian dress and manners are preserved. Ramabai reveals, as did Dutt and Satthianadhan, a lifelong attachment to certain traditional aspects of Hindu culture. In Ramabai’s case, however, this identification neither deflected strong orthodox Hindu opposition to her work nor did it lessen her own radical commitments to educating widows and socially marginalized women toward a goal of economic self-sufficiency. In reference to conservatives’ attacks on the Sharada Sadan, Ramabai tells Satthianadhan, “‘I do not care what people say. If I had been guided by all that people say my work would have collapsed long ago’.”3 Indeed, after viewing the school rooms and the students’ “force of character and determination to improve themselves,” Satthianadhan is confident that Ramabai will have a revolutionary impact upon women’s place in Indian society:

1   Krupabai Satthianadhan, “Pandita Ramabai and Her Work,” in Miscellaneous Writings 92–5. 2   Ibid. 93. 3   Ibid. 94.

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Pundita Ramabai’s work is national in its effects, for the widows that she is training are sure to take the lead in the emancipation of the women of India. They have no demands on their time, no ties, and if they can make life more useful, more intellectually, innocently happy, the married women would be sure to follow.4

These scenes from Satthianadhan’s essay are instructive, not least because they encourage us to see the points of congruity Satthianadhan traces between her reformist objectives and Ramabai’s: a concern for India’s women that is not regionally circumscribed but national in its aims; and a focus on Hindu girls and widows, especially child widows as a group particularly in need of assistance. Further linking the two (and Dutt before them), education becomes in their writings the best means for advancing the condition of Indian women overall. Satthianadhan’s comments also distinguish the feminism of Indian women such as Ramabai and herself from other groups active in matters pertaining to the social roles of India’s women, including orthodox Hindu reformers, Western missionaries, and British feminists.5 Indian women reformers, whether converted or not, had to negotiate both indigenous and colonial patriarchal practices and institutions. Converted ones, understandably, had to face constant scrutiny at home whether they were using their reformist activities to “Christianize” their fellow Indians; at the same time, they had to learn to use language calculated to appeal to Western Christians in order to maintain financial support for their private reform projects. Both Indian Christians and Hindu feminists, as we saw in the last chapter, had to compete with a nationalism that was rendering the social reforms directed at women secondary to the political goal of independence. Ramabai would never achieve the “national … effects” envisioned by Satthianadhan, though the organization she founded had a remarkable international reach. Her commitment to Indian women’s self-empowerment, however, estranged her at times from Western feminist and missionary groups with their uninformed views of Hindu culture and religion. Ramabai’s critique of Hindu patriarchal systems and her focus on educating upper-caste child widows was transformed during the late 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century, when India suffered a series of devastating famines. Encountering countless female famine victims – many of whom were destitute, physically impaired, orphaned, and/or sexually abused – she expanded her work to include these socially ostracized and homeless women, while her polemical writings criticized the Raj for the failures of its famine relief efforts. This shift, 4

  Ibid. 95.   For Ramabai’s conflicted relationship with Anglican Christianity and Western missionaries in India, see Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India 42–9; Viswanathan, Outside the Fold; and Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 72– 109. 5

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the subject of this chapter, had significant ramifications for her activism. First, by dropping her exclusive focus on upper-caste women, Ramabai became (even if unintentionally) an advocate of education and economic empowerment for a wider swathe of Indian women (“fallen” women; women without surviving family; blind and aged women; orphans; and widows). This, in turn, afforded her a safer distance in her ideological contestations with both moderate and orthodox Hindu social reformers, who were largely invested in the fates of upper-caste women alone. It also gave her a new adversary in the government of India. The Raj’s handling of famine victims and administration of famine relief came under strong criticism from Ramabai, but its response could never endanger the continuation of her work (as orthodox challenges could and did threaten to do).6 Most significantly here, the recurrent nature of the famines during this time afforded Ramabai an opportunity to extend her rhetorical activism into an unprecedented arena: single-handedly, she created a discourse attuned to famine’s unique impact upon Indian women. Because Pandita Ramabai’s writings on famine and famine relief, both private and governmental, occurred relatively late in her public life, after she was already well-known across India, it is worth revisiting her career as an activist and a writer prior to this period. That Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) should have ever taken up the cause of social reform was, in one sense, remarkable. Although male social reformers had been addressing the patriarchal oppression of Indian women in the wake of colonialist and British feminist critiques over the course of the nineteenth century, Ramabai’s public visibility as a Hindu woman and then as a converted Indian Christian was unique (in her time, she was internationally known). And yet, in another sense, it seems almost over-determined due to her upbringing. Ramabai’s father, a deeply religious Brahmin and an exceedingly unconventional man, prepared her to be a public speaker, an expert on Sanskritic texts, and fiercely independent-minded.7 Although Hindu doctrine supposedly excluded women and Shudras (“outcasts”) from an education in Sanskrit (and custom certainly dictated this), Ramabai’s father refused to comply, teaching both his second wife and his two daughters. Incensed by these attitudes and his refusal to arrange an early marriage for Ramabai (after her sister’s early, unhappy one), the village community they resided in ostracized the family. After living in the forest for a time, they took up an itinerant existence, with the entire family reading from the Puranas (Hindu scriptures) and giving lectures to mixed audiences on the need for female education. After her parents’ death in the famines of 1874 (and her sister’s of famine-related cholera in 1875), Ramabai, with her surviving brother, ended up in Calcutta. There she continued her father’s work, gaining renown as 6

  Viswanathan argues that Ramabai’s spiritual struggles with Hinduism and Christianity enabled her to analyze and critique British imperialism (Outside the Fold 121 and 134–5). 7   For accounts of Ramabai’s life, see Meera Kosambi, “Introduction” in Pandita Ramabai 3–13; Chakravarti, Rewriting History, especially chapter 6; and Padmini Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: Her Life and Work (London: Asia Publishing House, 1970).

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a lecturer and debater who used Hindu texts and mythology to make a strong case for women’s education and emancipation. It was there in 1878 that Ramabai earned the title of “Pandita” (learned one) and came into contact with the Brahmo Samaj, an indigenous social and religious reform movement that, among other things, promoted women’s emancipation and the abolishment of caste and dowry systems. After marriage to a Bengali non-Brahmin and then widowhood two years later, Ramabai moved to Poona, near Bombay, where she encountered the much more orthodox Chitpavan Brahmin community. Gender issues – especially child marriage, enforced widowhood, and the preservation of women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers – were the preoccupation of the upper-castes. Conservative reformers used their interpretations of the shastras [religious treatises and texts] to uphold customary practices and argue against upper-caste women’s education and other progressive causes. Although they became increasingly involved in political nationalism and left issues of social reform behind, they continued to represent even moderate reformers as colonialist sympathizers antagonistic to Hindu values. This defensive posture should be seen in tandem with Maharastra’s regional history as a hotbed of missionary conversion efforts and engagement “on behalf of Indian womanhood.” Women there were believed to enjoy a greater relative freedom, a supposed consequence of the lack of Muslim rule that allowed missionaries better access to them.8 Not surprisingly, they were outraged as Ramabai, a widow and an outcast, assumed a visible role as a public speaker and founder of the Arya Mahila Samaj, her own reform group championing the education of upper-caste (child) widows.9 In a move which further inflamed tensions, she testified on upper-caste women’s oppression before a Government of India commission in 1882 (news of which reached Queen Victoria), making impassioned pleas for the teacher training of women, women inspectors of schools for girls, and training for female doctors to serve the needs of Indian women. Ramabai desired to become a doctor herself and traveled to England in 1883 to begin medical studies there. Although she never pursued this seriously, her stay there resulted in her conversion to Christianity.10 It also opened up a new international audience for her reformist efforts. After traveling to the United States for two and a half years (1886–9) and successfully raising funds, she founded a nonsectarian home and school for child widows (the Sharada Sadan). Ramabai was  Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India 23.   Rosalind O’Hanlon has written of how Indian women who deviated from traditional Hindu roles were subject to hostility in A Comparison between Men and Women: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994). 10   The news of Ramabai’s conversion unleashed widely divergent responses: Hindu conservatives were outraged, the moderate M.G. Ranade was tolerant of it, and the more radical Jotirao Phule applauded it; as a tireless advocate for the rights of Shudras, he interpreted orthodox Hindu treatment of outcasts and women as bigotry, well-deserving of rejection. 8 9

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not alone in focusing on the widow to imagine a broader reform of “the condition of Indian womanhood”: so did such well-known reformers as Jyotirao Phule, Gopal Hari Deshmukh, D.K. Karve, and Parvati Athavale.11 Ramabai’s Sharada Sadan was established in Bombay in 1889, the first home/school for upper-caste child widows in Maharastra (the only other one was in Bengal). Initially, this was supported by reformers of all leanings in Bombay. When Ramabai moved the school to nearby Poona, however, conservative reformers felt threatened. They accused her of receiving funds from missionaries and actively converting students; the public outcry against this supposed proselytization eventually led all Hindu reformers to break with her.12 Christianity did appeal to some Indian women who saw it as a doctrine of social equality in terms of caste, race, and gender, whereas Hinduism was identified as a source of oppression. For some widows, there may have been “functional” considerations for their conversion, as well as a desire to participate in practical organizational work.13 Increasingly isolated, Ramabai founded a trust and set up a school and a farm in nearby Kedgaon, the Mukti Sadan, which she intended to make self-supporting with farm revenues (i.e., not dependent on missionary money). The farm, a socialistic women’s world, housed a training school for teachers and an industrial school where girls and women could work in the fields, bakery, weaving studio, or the laundry, learning to garden, press oil, bake, sew, weave, and/or do embroidery. During the famines of 1896 and 1900, several hundred women were rescued and brought to the farm, leading Ramabai to found the Kripa Sadan in 1899, a home for sexually victimized women. Shifting her focus away from upper-caste widows to a broader collective 11   Grewal, Home and Harem 210–12. Numerous legal reforms concerning the highcaste widow had been enacted over the course of the nineteenth century, even though the practices they aimed to prohibit continued. In 1829, sati was outlawed, after decades of protest by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and his followers and after British rule in India became more consolidated. In 1856, the Widow Remarriage Act was passed; in 1874, the Right to Property Act gave widows a “life interest” in some portion of their husbands’ property. See Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India 53–71 and Teresa Hubel, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Ficton and History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) 109. 12   It is difficult to sort out the extent to which the students were proselytized, “encouraged” to convert, or left alone in religious matters; indeed, several commissions were formed to investigate this issue without conclusive results. Many of the teachers in her schools were Hindus (Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati 317). Ramabai claimed that there was no active conversion going on, but it is not hard to imagine that many of these young, dependent child widows or famine victims, grateful for the home and Ramabai’s (and other teachers’) kindnesses, might seek their approval and love through “voluntary” conversion. Further, as Anagol notes, the rates of conversion increased dramatically over a decade and a half, as Ramabai became isolated from Hindu reformers; in 1905 Ramabai dropped “secular teaching” (Anagol, Emergence of Feminism in India 38–40). That said, many of the teachers in her schools were Hindus (Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati 317). 13  Anagol, Emergence of Feminism in India 29 and 39–42.

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of India’s needy women further marginalized Ramabai (D.K. Karve’s home for high-caste widows in nearby Bombay also contributed to this). She negotiated with missionary organizations for funds and other resources, and Ramabai continued to be dependent on them to offset her costs. Despite this reliance on Western support, Ramabai never hesitated to criticize colonialist practices. After 1900, her renown grew to global proportions as she channeled international aid to Indian women. When severe, recurrent famines plagued India between 1896 and 1901, Pandita Ramabai wrote two essays that chronicle and interweave her famine experiences as a very young woman during the devastating famines of 1873–7 with representations of her relief work on behalf of female famine victims in 1896–7 and 1900–1 in the Central Provinces and in Kedgaon, near Poona.14 While governmental reports, most notably the Famine Commission reports (in 1867, 1880, 1898, and 1901), and Western and Anglo-Indian journalistic treatments of the famines were widely available, Pandita Ramabai’s unofficial accounts are unusual, for they depict famine from an indigenous woman’s perspective, from someone who was herself a famine survivor.15 Her two English essays, “Famine Experiences” (1897) and “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission” (1900), in addition to various letters and autobiographical pieces, are remarkable and important documents, for they “gender” famine discourse in late nineteenthcentury India. Rather than portraying famine solely as a biological disaster, these texts contribute to a deeper understanding of famine as a social and political crisis. They do so by foregrounding the manifold failures of British relief projects and policy as they affected primarily Hindu women, dovetailing with Ramabai’s lifelong activism on their behalf. By representing the largely invisible effects of famine and famine relief on girls and women within afflicted communities, these texts “feminize” the experience of famine.16 They make visible at a time of crisis 14

  I will use 1873–7 as the dates for the famine that Ramabai and her family endured, because she identifies the famine as beginning before the government’s official designation of 1876. 15   For Western eyewitness reports of the famine (i.e., “unofficial” reports as opposed to the wealth of government or official documents), see especially, F.H.S. Merewether, A Tour Through the Famine Districts of India (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1898); Sir G.W. Forrest, The Famine in India (London: Horace Cox, 1897); William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India: Madras and Bombay Presidencies and Province of Mysore, 1876–1878, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1878); Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (London: John Murray, 1828); and Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and its Causes (London: Longmans, 1901). For native, contemporary criticisms of British famine policies not written as eyewitness accounts, see particularly Romesh Chunder Dutt, Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1900) and Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule of India (London: Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1901). 16   The idiom “to feminize famine” comes from the title of Margaret Kelleher’s The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham, NC: Duke University

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an often overlooked, albeit incredibly significant, aspect of women’s lives – their access to food and food security. Like her writings on the condition of high-caste Hindu women, especially widows, Ramabai’s pieces on famine contribute to an understanding of how imperial and indigenous patriarchal attitudes and actions both shape and are shaped by gender.17 Locating Indian women’s vulnerabilities as objects of imperial famine relief, these texts forge links to her writings on patriarchal family systems that disadvantaged women’s access to food. Ramabai’s famine essays encourage us to read them as discursive extensions of her better-known, controversial reformist writings on behalf of Hindu widows. Through her depictions of starving and hungry women, the reader is able to recognize the connections between food, power, and gender, both in times of food plenitude and food scarcity. Ramabai’s private famine relief projects, like those for upper-caste widows, were dependent financially on the charitable gifts of Anglo-Indian, British, and American women. The two essays under consideration here were written for Western audiences from whom she sought material and financial support for her work. “Famine Experiences” appeared in two segments in the Bombay Guardian, a Christian weekly newspaper, while “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission” appeared in pamphlet form, distributed to Christian societies in the United States and Great Britain.18 By focusing on Indian women’s distress and reaching across cultural and ethnic lines to appeal to an international female audience, these essays reinscribe familiar Western discourses that with proprietary or paternalistic attitudes feminized India and constructed it as the land of the needy. Where Ramabai critically departs from this mode of address is in her representation of her own famine experiences, as a victim and as an agent of relief empowering Indian women. This two-fold positioning, this chapter argues, enables Ramabai to create a new agential rhetoric of famine for herself and for Indian women. In doing so, she overtly politicizes the sentimental genre of the humanitarian narrative. Further, her essays stand in stark contrast to the “objective,” “scientific” discourses of famine relief articulated in the official Famine Commission reports. Politically reinvigorating the humanitarian narrative, Ramabai relies on her own subjective Press, 1997). Ramabai’s two essays are published in the volume Pandita Ramabai: Through Her Own Words. 17   Grewal traces Ramabai’s construction of an essentialized Hindu woman as a separate category to Ramabai’s early travels through India with her brother, where, apart from women’s identities as wives, mothers, and sisters, she saw them as united through their opposition to oppression (Home and Harem 184). 18   Helen Dyer, Pandita Ramabai: The Story of Her Life (London: Morgan and Scott, 1907) 58 and Pandita Ramabai: Through Her Own Words 261. The issues of the Bombay Guardian in which Ramabai’s writings and famine relief work appeared were January 20, 1897 (“Famine Experiences in India”), pp. 6–9 and May 6, 1897 (“Pandita Ramabai’s Second Famine Tour”), pp. 10–13.

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memories and her accounts of the rescued women’s activities at her farm and school to decolonize Indian and Western women’s activism at home and abroad. When thinking about famine, it is commonplace to focus exclusively on the victims and to think of them as suffering from a biological process – caused by inadequate food intake – that ends in starvation. If we consider famine as a sociopolitical process that exposes the faultlines of a society’s inner weaknesses, that is, where it sets its priorities, apportions its resources, and especially where it withholds them (vis-à-vis food supplies and food access), then death by starvation is the final stage in what amounts to a larger, politically-, economically-, and socially-determined process. Contrary to popular belief, famine is not an unequivocal disaster; even in famine times, political, economic, and social “benefits accrue to one section of the community while losses flow to [another].”19 In other words, famine and famine relief projects, in David Arnold’s words, create both “winners” and “losers.”20 When we look at famines and famine aid in nineteenth-century India, it is clear that all-too-often certain imperial ideologies – and the practices associated with them – were the resounding winners. Famines were not simply a financial or administrative burden for the Raj. They became occasions for Western intervention that expanded imperial arenas of control and contributed to the emergence of powerful stereotypes of First/Third World discourse. Agrarian reforms, for example, initiated by the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, progressed more rapidly during periods of crop failure and famine. Because small landowners were unable to pay taxes or make good on loan/mortgage payments, land was consolidated into larger parcels, securing more reliable land tax revenues for the British and thus further financing the stabilization of empire. Second, although the modernization of Indian agriculture actually appears to have exacerbated famine’s deleterious effects upon local populations,21 famine encouraged the Raj to further this process of modernization. Colonial infrastructure expanded through road-building and railway projects into hitherto remote areas, much of it accomplished through the labor-for-food requirement at famine relief camps. In Commission reports, emphasis was placed on developing large-scale irrigation systems, on rejecting village- and subsistence-based forms of farming, and on moving food grains to internal and external commodity markets via railroad (instead of holding grain reserves for family and local consumption, as was customary). Laissez-faire policies came out ahead as a result of India’s 19   Amrita Rangasami, “Failure of Exchange Entitlements Theory of Famine,” Economic and Political Weekly 20.41, 42 (1985): 1748–9 and David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 20  Arnold, Famine 27. 21   For an analysis of how technological modernization made millions even more vulnerable to famine in India, see Ira Klein, “When the Rains Failed: Famine, Relief, and Mortality in British India,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 21.2 (1984): 194–5 and his essay “Imperialism, Ecology and Disease: Cholera in India, 1850–1950,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 31.4 (1994): 491–518.

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famines, evidenced in the commitment to policies of non-interference with the grain trade, coupled with others that dictated offering the minimum amount of famine relief consistent with political acceptability. Finally, visible public works programs required imperial oversight, made famine relief disciplinary and punitive, and created colonized “subjects” unable to fend for themselves, in need of colonial supervision. In these diverse ways, we can see that although governments can alleviate famine distress, they can also perpetuate and benefit from it.22 This was the case for the Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the number and intensity of famines increased exponentially. All of these existing ideological practices contributed to creating famine’s effects, and famine events did nothing to shatter their hegemony. Despite famine relief becoming a science during this same period, it was political through and through. Though Ramabai’s writings do not address these imperial “successes” consequent upon India’s famines, they do unsettle many commonly held assumptions about famines: that they are crises that disadvantage everyone concerned; that famine relief is a win-win situation; and that famine victims are powerlessness in the same ways. With her depictions of the famine victims she encounters and the relief works she visits, Ramabai feminizes famine’s effects. Her observations are framed in both essays by a broad attack on the Raj’s centralized control over and mismanagement of relief, which simply could not effectively administer the poor houses, gratuitous relief, or famine relief works. Both essays, “Famine Experiences” (1897) and “To the Friends of the Mukti School and Mission” (1901), recount the disastrous conditions and relief measures at these stations, a situation which had not improved despite the experience gained in previous famines and the years between them.23 The conditions of the poor houses, where those too ill or weak to work were sent, are a disaster, according to Ramabai: The first Poor House we saw was no house at all. It was a grove in the outskirts of town. Groups of famished people were seen sitting or lying in ashes on dirty ground. Some had rags to cover their bodies, and some had none. There were old and young men, and women and children, most of them ill, too weak to move about, and many suffering from leprosy and other horrible diseases … The food was nothing but dry flour and some salt. (254–5)

Other poor houses reinforce her impressions that neither adequate food nor medical care are available. In fact, the essays describe how food is all-too-often withheld or stolen, of the lowest quality, and adulterated with dirt by the overseers and 22

  Ultimately, it can also benefit the “losers”; the nationalist “drain theory” emerged during this time and gained momentum, in which attention was drawn to the English confiscation of India’s wealth though excessive land revenue payments. 23   All the passages from these essays by Ramabai refer to the edition Through Her Own Words and will be indicated by page number parenthetically within the text.

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cooks. The people there do not get enough to eat, nor is it nourishing food. Water for washing is non-existent; the people there are filthier than “the pigs that wander round about our villages” (256). The poor houses are too few to accommodate the thousands too weak to work at the relief camps, leading to famine wandering and subsequent death from exposure, starvation, and disease. It is not surprising, she concludes, that such degrading conditions, in the very locations established to lift people out of misery, prove dehumanizing (those barely living, who are facing death, turn against one another as they struggle to survive). Ramabai measures the extent of the humiliation by referring to the treatment of children at the poor houses. The famine victims, many of whom were parents, “seem to have lost all human feeling. They are most unkind toward each other and the little children around them. They do not even care for their own children … Some are even in a dying state and yet their fathers and mothers feel no affection for them” (255). At relief works, where up to six million went for work during the 1901 famines alone, the situation is equally appalling, according to Ramabai. The wages paid for labor are insufficient to buy provisions to sustain health and life. The government’s efforts, modified over time to include gratuitous relief to the most vulnerable populations, are compromised by their inability to oversee effectively the distribution of food or the welfare of the divergent social groups within the camps. The overseers and sepoys put in charge of daily operations, as Ramabai describes them, are often physically and verbally abusive. In this environment, corruption flourishes as “the Mukadams and Clerks are … filling up their own purses” (267). Bribery is often the only way to secure work and food from them. And because the British and native officers are stretched thin, she notes, with one for every few thousand famine sufferers, they fail to comprehend the extent of the corruption. On the one hand, the government demands accountability for the relief funds; yet, as Ramabai describes it, by farming out the implementation of famine relief because of the sheer volume of the crisis, it distances itself from accountability for any disastrous conditions found there. Further, it simply has not set aside enough funds: “the means … make it impossible to meet the demands of the needy ones. Perhaps about eight or ten annas, or at the most, a rupee per month is allowed for each person; and how much and what kind of grain will than sum bring?” (255). During times of food crisis, as Ramabai proves keenly aware, not everyone is reduced to the same misery. Hierarchies, sometimes familiar, sometimes new, of the powerful and the powerless are reinforced or created. In charting how advantages flow to certain famine victims and bypass others, the autobiographical portions of “Famine Experiences” are instructive. Ramabai recounts the distress that she and her sister faced during the famine of 1873–7, when, because of caste prohibitions, they were themselves unable to beg for food to save their mother or to promote their own survival: Brother was too weak to work, and we could not make up our minds to go beg. We too suffered from hunger and weakness, but the sufferings of our mother

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were more than we could bear to see. Yet we had to keep still through sheer helplessness. Now and then, when delirious, mother would ask for different kinds of food. She could eat but little, yet we were unable to give her the little that she wanted. (251)

Further, she and her sister were unable to join government relief works, because they would immediately lose their caste status by housing, eating, and working with other castes. In times of famine, their upper-caste status did not secure them any advantage; in fact, it seems to have militated against their survival. Railing against the oppressiveness of caste they had internalized, Ramabai places the blame on that “the pride of caste and superior learning … [that] prevented our stooping down to acquire some industry whereby we might have saved the precious lives of our parents” (248). Yet the error extends beyond complicity with the caste system. As her 1901 essay reveals, the British fail to understand the social consequences of Hindus of various castes mingling together in relief works or poor houses. For those children from the upper castes who manage to survive the famine at relief works or poor houses, a subsequent social death has to be reckoned with: “the poor children who have been sheltered in Poor Houses and eaten foods from the hands of people of other castes will not be taken back into their caste … [and] caste Hindus will never re-admit them into their community and to all their caste privileges!” (271). Ramabai is sensitized to how British policies overlook the social importance of caste, a cultural ignorance that leads to many thousands of high-caste deaths. Ramabai’s primary focus in these essays is not on caste, however, but on gender. Indeed, women and children, not men, constituted the overwhelming majority of persons at relief works. As T.W. Holderness, deputy secretary of famine to the government of India during the 1890s writes, “The number of women and children … seeking employment is usually much in excess of the efficient male workers.” He goes on to note that there are 31 males to every 100 persons at the relief works in Bombay; in Madras, 27; and, in addition, women and children receive wages insufficient to maintain good health.24 Yet, despite these numbers, women were not considered as a separate category requiring special attention in the Famine Commission reports, as weavers and children were, for example. In contrast, in Ramabai’s texts, written as they are for a largely female, Christian audience, the essays trace and retrace subjects difficult for this particular audience: the consequences of a huge population of women “helpless and hopeless” due to their inability to get food, e.g., the dangers of rape, and of voluntary and coerced prostitution. When Ramabai claims that “wicked men and women are everywhere on the lookout for young women and girls” (256), looking to capitalize on their weakness and need, she takes a risk, knowing that her audience will not be inclined to think compassionately of such women, but to find them irreparably tainted for 24   Narrative of the Famine in India in 1896–97 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1897) 31–2.

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having been raped, lured into, or “chosen” prostitution to survive. In laying out the political landscape in which such desperate acts occur, Ramabai constructs a different framework that mitigates any harsh judgment of these women. First, she blames the British for their slowness to respond: This famine began to be felt since the beginning of last July, but it was not officially admitted … When the poor people and cattle actually began to die of starvation, and their dead bodies [began] to fall down everywhere, the existence of the famine could not be denied any longer and the Government and others commenced to take active measures to help famine sufferers. (268)

Indeed, Ramabai’s account dovetails with other historical accounts that reveal that resources were allocated to famine relief begrudgingly. Secondly, even then they were radically insufficient and primarily earmarked for those “fit to survive” (e.g., those who could work) on physically exhausting projects of highest priority for imperial development, such as road building.25 (During this same period, colossal amounts of money were being funneled into military efforts to secure and gain control in Afghanistan and the northwestern territories, for which the British were busily conscripting Indians to fight.) The government’s tardiness in responding to the famines, followed by insufficient food and wages, as Ramabai notes, leads many young women to prostitution to avoid starvation: “Men and women who are engaged in this traffic in flesh and blood were very busy for months gathering girls before any of the relief works and Poor Houses were started” (271). These essays also draw a connection between the Contagious Diseases Act, instituted in India in 1868 and amended after 1888, and the trafficking in women during famine periods. Also known as the Cantonments Act, it legally codified male sexuality as naturally promiscuous, and prostitution as a “necessary evil.” The government focused not on outlawing prostitution but on regulating commercial sexual activity, whose greatest danger was identified as the threat it posed to men’s health. They did this by monitoring the health of native female sex workers, but not the men who visited them.26 The regulation of prostitution became a global aspect of imperial rule, linking Great Britian and its colonies in the policing and medicalizing of sexuality during the second half of the nineteenth century.27 Indian female prostitutes, like their British counterparts, were held accountable, not their male customers, and compelled to undergo humiliating routine inspections by male doctors. During famine crises, Ramabai 25

  Klein, “When the Rains Failed” 194–5. See also Ramabai 269.   Sections 372 and 374 of the Indian Penal code attempted to prohibit women under 18 from becoming prostitutes and those compelled against their will. See Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India 169–72. 27   See Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). 26

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notes bitterly, the supply of women available for British soldiers increases: “The Contagious Diseases Act, which has again come into force under the name of the Cantonments Act … enables wicked people to carry on their wicked traffic in girls for the ‘benefit’ of the British soldiers” (271). From her Christian vantage point, the Cantonments Act qualifies as state-regulated vice. From her reformist and feminist one, it institutes a pernicious double standard. Young women’s risk of disease, as Ramabai observes, is equally tragic: “The bodies of some of these poor girls are so frightfully diseased that there is no hope for their recovery” (272). In pushing her readers to see how the famine enables prostitution, Ramabai identifies Indian women as degraded objects of exchange, while the “wicked men and women” who become their pimps, and the British soldiers or cantonment officers who need and even benefit from their services, are those to whom famine brings particular financial and/or sexual rewards. The Raj’s measures such as the Cantonments Act hold neither British nor Indian men accountable for their actions. Further, because having an available source of sex for British soldiers is given precedence over other concerns, girls left at the poor houses without their families are particularly vulnerable when sex traffickers come, posing as relatives or as caste affiliated. Within this population, children of high-caste families at poor houses and relief works are especially at risk, because a lost caste status makes them unreclaimable by their own relatives. Ramabai’s relief work on behalf of women famine victims, both young and old, was an extension of her reform work on behalf of high-caste widows. For well over a decade, Ramabai had been protesting the treatment of widows, urging the need for schools to educate young widows for meaningful work, social reintegration, and remarriage. Thus, it is not surprising that her criticisms also call attention to widows as a group rendered either invisible during these food crises, or disadvantaged, caught between conflicting patriarchal political and religious factions: the native states “will not allow kind Christian people to rescue starving widows … [in] defence of the Hindu religion;” they send them instead to neighboring states to be fed, states without the resources to help them; and there, “the poor defenceless widows … are … dead and dying by the thousands” (270). This criticism echoes, in many ways, the one Ramabai had leveled against conservative Brahmins, who, after charging Ramabai with proselytizing in the Sharada Sadan, her school for young high-caste widows, had themselves done nothing to help house and educate widows, some of whom were living in abusive situations. One of the most serious consequences of the famine for Ramabai – informed as she was by a feminist Christian ideology that placed great emphasis on rescuing and reforming fallen women,28 was the danger that young widows were being coerced into, or willingly turned to, prostitution: 28

  Ramabai’s lecture circuits in the United States put her in contact with the early feminist movement, including the Women’s Temperance movement, with its religiously influenced platform advocating abstinence and chastity. Ramabai’s attraction to this movement is documented in: Meera Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

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My sympathies are excited by the needs of young girl widows especially at this time. To let them go to the relief camps and Poor Houses, or allow them to wander in the streets and on the highways, means their eternal destruction … I have seen these girls in the famine districts – some fallen into the hands of wicked people; some ruined for life and turned out to die a miserable death … some in the hospitals only to be taken into the pits of sin there to await a cruel death; some … utterly lost to the sense of shame and humanity … So, regardless of the trying financial state of my school, I went to work in the Central Provinces to get a few of the helpless young widows. (258–9)

With her audience’s religious views in mind, Ramabai foregrounds one of famine’s most significant dangers: it sexualizes women at a time when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent. Prostitution stands in Ramabai’s texts as a succinct image of the disintegrated gender relations under famine. By highlighting widows’ potential to exploit their sexuality as a desperate survival strategy (after others, such as famine wandering, the eating of famine foods, and obtaining work, prove insufficient), as well as the great risk that they will also be exploited sexually by others, Ramabai calls her readers to a renewed protection of chastity. With her emphasis on chastity as an explicit norm of femininity and as the widow’s cardinal virtue, Ramabai’s Christianized position intersects with Hindu constructions of the widow’s ideal femininity, a spiritually dignified state due to its asceticism and renunciation of desire.29 Ramabai expands the norm of chastity by imagining a “chaste” masculinity in her second essay, when she includes the sex trafficking and enslavement of male children during the current crisis: “Many a careless official has allowed children to be taken away by people who will turn the boys and girls into slaves and concubines” (271). By including young boys with young girls and widows, Ramabai eschews an exclusively female perspective on exploitation. Here as elsewhere, the vulnerability of widows is placed on a continuum with other marginalized social groups: In many cases it so happens that the poor are gathered and fed only when some British officer is present, and as soon as he turns to go away – quite satisfied that everything is being done to save their lives – they are turned out of the Poor Houses and camps, driven into jungles to die horrible deaths. The able-bodied 29

  In the debate about widow remarriage (which Ramabai was in favor of), opponents argued that the single life of the Hindu widow upheld traditions whose intention was not oppression but, according to one commentator, “to raise their lives to a lofty pitch of moral training and human refinement based upon mental resignation which alone is the true source of happiness according to oriental notions.” See Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western India,” in Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, ed. Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 86–7.

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men and women who can work in relief camps, and are able to hold their own, will live through this famine, but the poor defenceless widows, deserted wives, orphans and old people are, alas! dead and dying by the thousands. (269–70)

Underscoring these continuities between gendered and generational oppression, Ramabai’s texts point out the ways that food is unequally apportioned during food crises, by examining who does receive food, and how much, and who does not.30 They identify the social Darwinism at work during times of extreme scarcity: “Old people and middle-aged persons, and delicate women, who are unable to break twelve baskets of stone, and carry it to the appointed place, and who cannot get their wages … unless they do so much work every day, need our help” (258). Groups with the least social status or those lacking physical strength – the very young and the elderly, delicate women, widows – are the first to be denied food at the relief works and gratuitous aid stations, and driven away to die. Yet, though these essays include widows with other vulnerable groups, it is widows and young women who remain Ramabai’s dominant concern and who are represented as suffering the worst casualties of bad policies and practices. Gender thus emerges as the overriding lens through which she views famine as a “unnatural” disaster. Ramabai’s earlier writings on widows’ lives during non-famine times prepare the way for a reading of these texts. Read together, they implicitly connect widows’ lives during times of food plenitude to their situation during food crises and illuminate how patriarchal privilege links British and Indian men. In doing so, these essays encourage us to rethink definitions of famine as an exceptional moment, as an “event”: in other words, as the opposite of the familiar and the everyday.31 For some widows, extreme hunger and malnutrition (aspects of famine), were part of the daily crisis of their lives, the norm rather than the exception. Through this perspective, famine becomes less a singular event than a more intensified degree of the norm: or, at least, on a continuum with it. If, during famine periods, food scarcity is an overriding problem – due to limited or prohibited access to food within the family or community, or to resources that would enable one to purchase food – then the situation of the famine victims is as an exaggerated version of what, according to widows’ own accounts, they suffered on a daily basis. As R.H. Tawney writes, albeit in a different context, famine becomes “the last stage of a disease [chronic hunger] which, though not always conspicuous, is always present.”32 Thus, the essays “Famine Experiences” and “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission” afford 30

  In this emphasis, Ramabai anticipates Amartya Sen’s work on poverty and famine. See Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 31   For definitions of famine as the exceptional, as an event, see Arnold, Famine 6–7. 32   Tawney is writing of Chinese peasants in Land and Labour in China (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1932).

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a vantage point from which their readers can identify a deeper, more continuous, and pervasive social distress. In a number of widows’ accounts from this period (not in famine periods per se), food deprivation and insecurity loom largely, as historians of the period have noted.33 An apparently common complaint against the widow – that “‘she [is] a drone, she [wants] to be fed without doing any work’” – finds strong rebuttal in widows’ own testimonies. There, food becomes contigent upon a full exploitation of her labor, which is usually of the hardest and most menial kind. Prescriptions to safeguard a widow’s chastity dovetail with this abuse and include eating less, eating cooled foods, and fasting often. According to the widows themselves, they are “compelled to fast as often as the calendar will dictate.” Many end up internalizing these prohibitions against eating, holding it a “sin to eat two meals a day, or to ask for anything in the world.”34 Under constant scrutiny, the widow’s allotment of food is controlled by the other women and children in the household. In Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife (1894), discussed in Chapter 2, young married women quickly come to understand the connection between access to food and power within the household. Food is represented as leverage to compel women to accept their traditional, hierarchized feminine positioning within the extended family household. Thus, the main protagonist who “has allowed herself” to be educated by her husband, challenging traditional beliefs that an educated woman will bring misfortune upon him, is first ridiculed and then denied food by the other women in the household: One day when she went to the kitchen to take her food … she found none for herself. She stood and waited for some time, but nobody, not even the servant woman, took any notice of her. She was very hungry, but she did not open her mouth … By chance Kamala learned that her food was served in the men’s quarter. The servant … could not bear to see Kamala’s starved face. [Yet] she, too, was indignant with Kamala, and told her that it was her own conduct that brought all this on her.35

In her two most famous essays, The Cry of Indian Women (1883) and The HighCaste Hindu Woman (1887), Ramabai draws attention a number of times to the gradual starvation of widows within their husband’s family’s home. The code of Manu requires that a woman “emaciate her body by living on pure flowers, roots and fruit”; in keeping with this rigor, “widows are allowed but one meal a day. It is considered sinful for a widow to eat oftener than once in a day.” Custom reinforces religion, dictating that the widow “must never take part in family feasts”; “not allowing her to eat more than once a day, and compelling her to abstain from  Chakravarti, Rewriting History, chapter 5.   These firsthand accounts are found in ibid. 268–9. 35  Satthianadhan, Kamala 74–5. 33 34

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food altogether on sacred days, is a part of the discipline by which to mortify her youthful nature and desire.” The result is that “starvation and death stare her in the face” (160, 109, 164, 165, 166). In the essay “A Short History of Kripa Sadan” (1903), Ramabai inserts testimonies of child-wives and widows, as well as women in polygamous arrangements, to further expose the unequal allocation of food. Here are two such accounts: No one loved me in my husband’s home. I had to work hard and keep a herd of buffaloes and do all the household work from early morning till midnight, and I had not enough food given me. They gave me a little piece of bread. I could not stand this suffering and starvation. (284) I was married when 6 years old, and three years after my marriage I became a widow. As there were none to support me, I went out into the town, begging. I did not get much to eat for a time. I carried water for some people, when I fell ill and was not able to work. Still I supported myself by eating sparrows and other small birds. (285)

Ramabai herself recounts that: another little girl … was brought to me some months ago; her … body bore marks of cruel treatment … Her mother-in-law had turned her out of her home after punishing her severely. She is a child widow, her boy-husband died a year ago. His relatives, especially the mother, cursed her and made her work hard and would not give her food. (286)

Without minimizing the differences between famine and chronic hunger, cumulatively these texts by Ramabai, as well as those by other widows, suggest that, in these young girls’ and women’s minds, widowhood was experienced as a kind of gradual starvation. As more recent studies have corroborated, the distribution of food within a group indicates where power, authority, and priorities are vested, as well as ideas about rights and distributive justice.36 In Ramabai’s writings, the widows’ lack of access to food becomes a means by which they re-learn their inferiority within the family, and consequently, within the wider social realm. By virtue of her attention to the dynamics of power that control both the real distribution and the symbolic meanings of food within the home and outside it (during times of food plenitude and scarcity), Ramabai enables the reader to see how certain classes of women receive less food than men, other women, and boys, although they often do the most physically demanding work. For Ramabai, it is an injustice scarcely 36   See Hanna Papanek, “To Each Less than She Needs, From Each More than She Can Do: Allocations, Entitlements, and Value,” Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development, ed. Irene Tinker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 162–81.

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concealed by the culturally sanctioned rhetoric of widowhood that ennobles such deprivation under the names of self-sacrifice and spiritual asceticism. In an appeal to her Christian readers in “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission,” Ramabai figuratively renders famine victims into widows by virtue of a chosen metaphor of sati: We have heard true stories of many cruel people and their devilish acts in the days when Sati burning was allowed. If after inducing the poor unwilling widow to mount the funeral pyre of her husband, her relatives saw that her heart failed her and she began to flee from those destroying flames, they used to force her back into the fire and hold her down with long bamboo sticks until she was suffocated and her body fell into the fire and was burnt to ashes. How you and I have shuddered at these acts of cruelty and said that nothing but heathenism and uncivilized, unrefined minds would have done it. But what civilization and how much humanity and refinement do you find in the acts of certain authorities who shut their eyes and ears and force the fleeing people back into their own villages and States to suffer the unspeakable agonies of starvation? They are held down there not with bamboo sticks but by bayonet points until they are burnt down by the flames of hunger and their lifeless bodies can no longer move away. When the famine set in by the beginning of last July, thousands of poor people from the native States of Rajputana, Gujerat and Kathiawar began to pour into British territory, in hopes of saving their lives from starvation. But an alarm was taken to it. Collectors, magistrates and their subordinates were ordered to drive the people back into their own States. (269)

Ramabai compares famine victims’ flight from native states in their desperate attempts to survive with widows who seek to save their own lives during sati by fleeing from the funeral pyre. Her feminism condemns both Hindu and colonial practices. On the one hand, she rejects the mythical, nationalist discourse of the sati, whose fulfillment is imagined to begin and end with her husband’s (the nation’s) life.37 On the other hand, and surprisingly, given the Christian rhetoric adopted to appeal to her readers, she likens the British, whose bayonets send the famished back home to their native states to a near certain death, to Hindus, specifically, to cruel in-laws whose sticks hold the widow down on the pyre. As the British turn away famine victims because it is judged “too costly,” the government justifies these actions as consistent with their own noninterventionist policies regarding native states and religious customs (269). According to Ramabai, both the imperial government and the native states are 37

  For some of the mythological stereotypes of the feminine in Indian fiction, see: Ujjal Dutta, “Women in Bengali Fiction: An Inquiry,” in Women in Fiction and Fiction by Women, ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah and C.N. Srinatu (Mysore: Dhvanyaloka Publication, 1986) 20–30.

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unable to protect famine victims, especially young girls and widows, yet they forbid (Indian Christian) charitable associations from taking in the afflicted, even orphans or young widows who have been raped, for fear of them becoming Christianized (and therefore outcast). They revile them while simultaneously denying them outside sources of relief. Ramabai lashes out that many are dying by neglect … Thousands are sacrificed on the unholy altar of caste prejudice by sheer force brought to bear upon them by both the British and native States. The Government’s policy of non-interference with religious customs is an admirable and a noble one, but in such cases as these forced deaths of thousands, it is to say the least, inhuman. (270)

She excoriates British hypocrisy for advocating on behalf of Indian women in the controversies surrounding sati, while remaining indifferent to the more widespread crimes against women during the famines, provoked by their “blameworthy” (270) policies: “What difference is there between allowing people to burn their widows alive … and to force women and children and weak people back into the States where they will surely die or be sold to sin to die a dog’s death later on?” (270). In a significant uncoupling of the de facto association of the government of India as a Christian one, the text asserts that the ethical imperative to save women’s lives negates the Raj’s political practice of religious neutrality, no matter how well-intentioned (or generally correct) those policies otherwise might be.38 Polemical as these letters, essays, and famine reports are, Ramabai also lets her readers know that hers will be a deeply personal account: “Some of them [the famine victims] simply stare at you … their poor, lightless eyes … through which their death agonies are expressed haunt you day and night” (268). Subjective accounts of famine are validated, as her representations of famine sufferers summon up and merge with her own memories: I feel deeply for these poor dying people, because I have myself known what it is to suffer from hunger and thirst, and have seen my dearest relatives die of starvation. (247) The memory of the last days of [my parents’] life, full of sorrow, almost breaks my heart. I would never have written this account had not the necessity of my present situation obliged me to do so. None of my friends can ever understand what my feelings are for the famine people unless they know that I have had once to go through the same experience as that of the starving thousands of Central India. (253) 38

  Ramabai’s claims about the Raj’s unwillingness to assist Christian missions during famine times is contradicted in Jeffrey Cox’s work focused on the Punjab. There he recounts how the United Presbyterian mission received land tax free for an industrial school for famine widows and orphans (Imperial Fault Lines 163).

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For Ramabai, the spectacle of famine is capable of “deranging the distinction between self and other.”39 In her reports to the non-sectarian Ramabai Associations around the world, first-hand testimonies of other famine victims are included as well.40 Along with Ramabai, they claim an authority and engagement based on experience that sets their discourse apart from, and acts as a corrective to, the official, impersonal, third-person voice of the Famine Commission reports. By 1898, documents included in the Famine Commission reports comprised several volumes, with sections organized according to different headings, and each heading itself containing numerous divisions and subheadings, based in part on the province, presidency, or native state under consideration, and the relief measures or target population being described. The main sections, for example, of the 1898 Famine Commission report are organized as follows: “narratives of the famines and scarcities which have occurred between the date of the Famine Commission’s report, 1880, and the famine of 1896–97”; “differences in the prescriptions of the provincial famine codes”; “matters in which the prescriptions of the provincial famine codes have been departed from”; “the degree of success that has attended the measures adopted”; “recommendations as to measures and methods of working”; and “other opinions and recommendations” (under which fell such things as famine relief and insurance grant, irrigation, the grain trade and food supply, and subjects of native states). In these reports, readers found a crystallization of a new domain of knowledge about India, the emergence of a fullfledged bureaucracy of famine relief with its own “scientific” discourses. Here, for example, is an account of the mortality in the same Central Provinces as Ramabai visited and described, taken from the Famine Commission report of 1898: In forming an estimate of the degree of success obtained in the saving of life and relief of distress, the mortality returns are of course most important guides … The following table taken from page 19 of Dr. Hutcheson’s memorandum compares the death-rates of the years 1896 and 1897 with the mean annual rate for 1891-95 … The following details of causes of mortality and ratio of deaths per 1,000 from each cause in 1897 are taken from Dr. Hutcheson’s memorandum [chart follows with death by cholera, smallpox, fevers, bowel complaints, injuries, all other causes] … A special inquiry by testing in the villages the returns for selected tracts was made into the causes of the heavy mortality of the monsoon months of 1897.41

In this rhetorical performance of objectivity and detachment, human lives are reduced to averages and statistics (to say nothing of the problem of the objective 39   Maud Ellmann, The Hunger-Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1993) 54. 40   See the Ramabai Association Reports for the years 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1902. 41   Report of the Indian Famine Commission 1898, reprint (New Delhi: Agricole Publishing Academy, 1979) 172–4.

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accuracy of the measurements). Famine is itself re-defined in the ostensibly comprehensive, competent language of state-sponsored humanitarian aid. Sir John Strachey, acting viceroy of India and Lieutenant Governor of the North-Western Provinces, includes a chapter on famines in his account of the Raj’s administration of India.42 Largely quoting from the Famine Commission reports of 1880, 1898, and 1901, he mentions the principles of famine relief and the preventative measures which they articulate. Although the 1880 report, compiled in response to the severe famines of 1876–8, gives a nod to the government’s responsibility for relief (“the Commission … recognised … the obligation … to offer to the necessitous the means of relief in times of famine”), it repeatedly stresses anxiety that assistance will create a profligate, dependent population: “‘this relief should be administered as not to check the growth of thrift and self-reliance among the people … proper care [should] be taken to prevent the abuse … which all experience shows to be the consequence of ill-directed and excessive distribution of charitable relief’.”43 Besides being characterized as overly exploitative of aid, famine sufferers are depersonalized by Strachey’s use of such words as “the necessitous” above. In other passages, they are rendered invisible as human beings. It is not largely people who suffer and lose their lives, but abstractions that stand discursively in their place: “India will still be subject from time to time to widespread and lamentable suffering”; and “we may reasonably hope that we shall not again see … the terrible mortality which attended the famines of former times.”44 Strachey’s descriptions of the government’s preventative measures – “the preparation of elaborate codes of instruction for every province,” the development of communication channels via railways and roads, and the modernization and development of irrigation systems – become an occasion for him to celebrate the Raj’s technological and bureaucratic mastery of famine.45 In stark contrast to Ramabai’s claims that the food arrived too little and too late, the Commission’s report of 1901, cited in Strachey, notes that “in the continent at large there is, for the future, no anxiety as to the ability of private trade to deliver food where it is needed.”46 Further, in Strachey’s view, the population itself is no longer so vulnerable to famine’s depredations: “‘it may be said of India as a whole that of late years, owing to higher prices, there has been a considerable increase in the incomes of the land-holding and cultivating classes … During the recent famine these classes, as a rule, have therefore shown greater power of resisting famine, either by drawing on savings, or by borrowing, or by reduction of expenditure,

42   Sir John Strachey, India: Its Administration and Progress, 4th edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911). The chapters on famine are drawn, with no emendations from the third edition of 1903. 43   Ibid. 246. 44   Ibid. 247 and 247–8, my emphases. 45   Ibid. 247–9. 46   Ibid. 248.

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than in any previous period of scarcity’.”47 In this 1898 report cited by Strachey, it is the affluent, landowning, “productive” classes who represent India’s population. Their survival rates become the measure of the accomplishments of imperial famine policy, while those in remote, undeveloped areas, such as the ones that Ramabai visited, are simply not accounted for. In contrast to Strachey’s distanced assessment, Ramabai recounts famine’s effects on her own family with the vividness of the trauma survivor returning to a wound reopened by the sufferings of others. In some of the most wrenching parts of the essay “Famine Experiences,” she details her family’s bewilderment and terror when faced with the slow agony of starvation; the crisis presented by famine to their familial and caste norms and their decision to cling to them nonetheless; the foraging for so-called famine foods, bark and leaves, in the forests, and the ensuing fever and delirium; her father’s nearly successful injunction to the family to commit collective suicide; the horror and shame exacerbated by having as Brahmins to scavenge, beg, and do “unclean” things; the drawn-out deaths of her father, mother, and sister from famine-induced illness; and her and her brother’s four years of acute destitution, hunger, and exposure to the elements as they wandered, criss-crossing India on foot, in the wake of these deaths. Personalizing the experience of famine, Ramabai gives vent to powerful memories of the past and the present. She rejects the dehumanizing language that turns those afflicted by famine into anonymous victims, reduced to a number or statistic, as the Famine Commission reports and photographic records of the time were wont to do. The responsibility expressed in the Commission reports is not a moral imperative to ameliorate the suffering that government officials have found themselves moved by, but a commitment to making famine relief into a precise science with a set of experts and managers, whose power depends upon the precision of their claims and a reduction in the official numbers of famine mortality – all the while committing the minimum amount of imperial resources to the task.48 In sharp contrast, as author of her famine experiences past and present, Ramabai emerges as a moral agent capable of directing her audience’s emotional attention to the human crisis at hand. Unlike the “eroticized” representations of affected women during the Irish famine, that other imperial disaster, or indeed of Indian women in some of the illustrated newspapers in India and England at this time,49 Ramabai’s texts avoid making a spectacle of women’s emaciated bodies. They do not shy from vividly representing particular hungry bodies, but these depictions tend to be gender non47

  Ibid. 249–50.   Thus, these reports targeted their remarks on what was working and not working with famine relief efforts. To name a few examples, a consensus slowly emerged that village relief was preferable to large and distant relief works projects, that separate kitchens were needed to prepare and distribute food for children, and that specific groups, such as weavers, needed assistance. 49   Kelleher describes this tendency of eroticization in the Irish and Indian famines in her introduction to The Feminization of Famine. 48

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specific and non-sexualized: they note three children, without parents, whose “wrinkled faces and … ghastly death-like expression told the story of the terrible suffering they were in” (254), for example, or that the “older people [were] covered with dirt, and sometimes with filthy rags, their skeleton-like bodies full of frightful sores” (256). Further, they always raise the question of responsibility for the pain and suffering. In other words, she reconnects these bodies’ pain to politics and her representations to protest, instead of to “science,” as the Commission reports did. Her account can thus be considered a “humanitarian narrative,” a genre which, according to Thomas Laqueur, describes or evokes suffering bodies with a wealth of detail, in order to draw a bond of compassion: “[enabling] the imagination to penetrate the life of another” – based on the common bond of the body’s pain.50 Such narratives, according to Laqueur, do so not simply to arouse compassion as an end in itself, but to encourage action on behalf of those suffering. There is a danger, though, in the humanitarian narratives to which Laqueur points. They run the risk of creating a sense of property in the objects of compassion … [appropriating] them to the consciousness of would be benefactors … ‘humanitarians’ do implicitly claim a proprietary interest in those whom they aid. They speak more authoritatively for the sufferings of the wronged than those who suffer can speak for themselves.51

Narratives such as F.H.S. Merewether’s Tour Through the Famine Districts of India (1898) offer a case in point. They present to the reader, as he states in the preface, no “mere collection of the horrors of the Indian Famine.” Merewether provides evidence in the form of a “series of photographs taken upon the spot to bring forcibly before the mind’s eye of [the] readers … the state and condition of the oriental races,” a strategy that pushes his account toward a sensationalistic journalistic record. Gathering a “mass” of information from “various and numerous” sources and desiring to write more than the “dry-as-dust statistics” characteristic of the government’s famine reports, he insists his work will not have failed “should even one heart be touched and one purse-string loosened for the benefit of the naked and starving myriads of Hindustan.”52 Merewether establishes a paternalistic, proprietary relation between his Western readers and these nameless “myriads” of Hindustan. Hoping to win the hearts of Western and Anglo-Indian readers, he assures them that their economic largesse can save these naked and starving “oriental races” from their own failure to save themselves. Charitable giving becomes a way of reaffirming the “white man’s burden.” Unlike Merewether, Ramabai neither amasses a wealth of evidence, nor does she seek to write a cumulative, comprehensive report in order to vouchsafe her 50   Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 176–202. 51   Ibid. 179 and 180. 52   Tour Through the Famine Districts vii and viii.

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reliability. Yet like his humanitarian narrative, Ramabai appeals to her audience’s sympathy. Her personal recollections and connection to others’ extreme physical and psychological distress is her call for Western intervention; it is meant to generate an angry outcry and an activism reinforced by her audience’s ethos of service (253). She invokes the government’s and her readers’ sense of Christian responsibility to Indians, especially women and children, whose humanity gives them a moral claim to just and adequate treatment, especially in times of disaster. In doing so, she reiterates mission discourse which, according to Jeffrey Cox, “in addition to the general Christian obligation to care for the needy … [rhetorically justified] … the care of defenseless or abandoned widows and orphans [as] part and parcel of the parochial work expected of women missionaries.”53 An unquestioned imperative that the strong must help the weak structures her discourse as well as Merewether’s. This appeal to her readers’ engagement positions women as weak, dependent victims, needing colonial and Christian benevolence. Their charity then reinscribes an unequal relationship between unfortunate, passive Indian inferiors, here, the famine sufferers, and powerful, agential Western superiors, the ones with the ability to act and therefore to alleviate suffering, such as her readers, in what amounts to a convergence of imperial state and religious interests.54 Famine sufferers become dependent upon Ramabai, the Indian Christian voice of the needy, to put their misery into words: I have … seen men, women and children dying of hunger on highways and byeways. Their ghastly appearance, their dumb appeal – Oh, those pitiful eyes which speak volumes – haunt me day and night, and the appealing voices, the agonized cries and the hopeless expressions are all so burnt down into my heart that I cannot but speak a few words for them. (271)

Ramabai points to the visages and cries that “speak volumes,” but which, presumably, are incapable of being heard; for that, they need her. They become objects of her and others’ charity. In seeking to direct emotional and economic resources to those devastated by famine, she employs at various points conventional tropes that organize the relationship between East and West around the polarized positions of helpless/ helper, destitute/wealthy, victim/savior, dependent/independent, and child/adult. Most consistently, she employs the trope of the family, representing famine   Imperial Fault Lines 164.   Elizabeth Spelman analyzes how the use of an appeal to compassion risks reinscribing a savior/sufferer stereotype, but is also capable, as in the writings of Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs), of being vehicle of political action (see Fruits of Sorrow (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1997), chapter 4). Jeffrey Cox notes that the actions of Christian missions in India during famine times “provided a powerful incentive for indigenous rivals to the missions to act, not merely in provisions of orphanages but also in the provision of other institutions for women” (Imperial Fault Lines 165). 53

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sufferers as children, while missionaries, Christian aid organizations, and the British government or native states emerge as mothers and parents responsible for their wellbeing: The great motherly heart of missionary ladies is yearning for the dying children and other poor of the Central Provinces. Let benevolent people send generous donations to them for feeding and caring for the Lord’s little ones. (258)

Maternal and paternal stereotypes, replete with their proprietorial overtones, resonated with the Christian idea of a providential God/Father watching over his children and were heavily employed to garner financial support. Ideally, family bonds – being selfless, distinterested, and uncompelled – are different from proprietary ones. Yet this rhetoric of family reinscribes a hierarchical relationship – one between self-determining superiors and their dependent inferiors. This is particularly evident when Ramabai is talking about fiscal responsibility. After asking, “Why do not good Christian people in England and America send money to the missionaries in this country?” (258), she reassures donors that control of the funds will stay in the hands of their missionary representatives. In proprietorial rhetoric, the conquest of famine becomes a paradigm of imperial purpose and a vehicle for Christian improvement, an interpretation which unsurprisingly provoked deep suspicion and resentment, and ultimately fueled anti-Western and anti-missionary sentiment in India.55 Similar criticisms of Ramabai’s general reform work, Meera Kosambi notes, had arisen from religious conservatives in India, who emphasized her betrayal of indigenous reform and reformers in favor of benefitting foreign missionary organizations, an interpretation Kosambi finds insufficient and simplistic.56 Inderpal Grewal notes that there were “no neutral spaces” in which Ramabai could articulate her social critique on behalf of India’s most powerless women. This meant that she adopted, for strategic reasons, Hindu women’s reformist, Western feminist, and Christian humanitarian discourses at times to address Indian women’s oppression and to justify her reform work.57 Further, she was not above appealing to the imperial government for paternalistic intervention on behalf of Indian women, even as she remained critical of the racialist and sexist ideologies of imperialism. She readily adopted Western feminist rhetoric to assess the condition and status of Hindu women. Years prior to her conversion to Christianity, in her pamphlet “The Cry of Indian Women” (1883), she was already addressing her British audience as “brethren” and calling on them as her sisters and brothers, as “children of the Almighty God” (111). Her criticisms of colonialism affiliated her with Indian nationalists, yet nationalists reviled her for her conversion and for a “colonialist” agenda of women’s reform. With(in) the authoritarian and patriarchal institutions with which Ramabai aligned herself,  Arnold, Famine 133–4.   Kosambi, “Introduction” 29. 57   Home and Harem 183 and 201–9. 55 56

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such as the Anglican church, the American Ramabai Association, and orthodox and reformist Brahmin groups, these strategically necessary contradictions and struggles are well documented. They also made her wary of relinquishing control and fostered her critical sensibility.58 In one of many such self-critical moments, the text notes the danger of relying on “family feeling” in times of famine: Some parents eat all the food … and become quite fat, while their children are starved … Parents can be seen taking their girl children … and selling them for a rupee or a few annas. (255) There is a Marathi proverb which says, “The mother will not give food and the father will not allow to beg”; what is the child to do then but to die …? This is exactly what happened to the poor people of many native states … The British government would not allow them to come … and their Mother States did not give them food to eat. So they died of starvation. (269)

What Ramabai describes in the first instance is parental dehumanization consequent upon extreme hunger and a particularly vicious catch-22 in the second. Through an Indian proverb wherein a mother’s and father’s conflicting convictions lead them to sacrifice their children, she critically reassesses the idealizing trope of imperial polity as family. The native states had not been dispensing famine relief, so victims were flooding across the borders into British-administered provinces. In response, the British government was turning them back at the borders. The governments of Great Britain and the native states (father and mother, respectively) fail to feed their children (the victims of the famine) in a horrific traumatic repetition – on a larger scale – of her family’s own demise. “Paternal” caste prescriptions prevented Ramabai and her family as Brahmins from begging or doing any menial work, and her mother’s weakness prevented her sister, her brother, and herself from getting sufficient nourishment, ultimately contributing to her sister’s death. While the bad parenting of the state might be dismissed as an easy target, even decisions to rely on divinities as good parental figures are rendered ambivalent, when famine, in her own early experience, proves all-too-capable of wreaking havoc with the parent-protector relationship between gods and their human children: People were starving all around, and we, like the rest of the poor people, wandered from place to place … Nothing but starvation was before us. My  Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, chapter 4 and Burton, At the Heart of Empire, chapter 2. Burton and Viswanathan both see Ramabai’s early and developing religious sensibility (in the 1880s) as integral to her development of an independent agency. Her critiques of colonialism and Hindu patriarchy were enabled by a religious belief system that itself was grounded upon a critical sensibility. 58

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father, mother, and sister, all died of starvation within a few months of each other. I cannot describe all the sufferings of that terrible time. My brother and I … wandered about, still visiting sacred places, bathing in rivers and worshipping the gods and goddesses … After years of fruitless service, we began to lose our faith in them. (299–300)

Religion, too, becomes fatally compromised in times of crisis. In these texts, famine becomes co-terminous with massive parental failure, political and spiritual. Ramabai, however, suggests that her own work will succeed where biological parents, native and imperial governments, or Hindu gods as surrogate ones fail in their parental roles. Drawing on Biblical allegory at times, she casts her commitment to the hungry as the result of having been a victim/survivor herself, whom Providence rescued: “louder and louder spoke the voice of God from within my heart. ‘Remember the days of old.’ ‘Thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondsman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee’” (253). In this compression of past, present, and future that reads as traumatophobia, e.g., an attempt to master her own trauma, Ramabai conflates and reconstructs her survival as the intervention of the Judeo-Christian God (though her conversion happened years later). Further, she is a survivor who has grown up to redeem those in famine’s bondage. Although famine renders idealizations of motherhood and maternal love difficult, to say the least, because appalling “choices” must be made, often at children’s expense, Ramabai calls on motherly feelings in herself and in her appeals to middle- and upper-class Western women: “Let the thought and love of our daughters move our mother-hearts to come forward and save as many of the perishing young girls as we can” (270). Here, maternal power is commodified as charitable giving, whereby Western audiences can fulfill their deep-seated philanthropic impulses – with Ramabai and her female supporters as additional mothers ready to step in whenever institutionalized political power fails. In doing so, she does not place blame on Indian women for whatever desperate acts they resort to, nor does she expect self-sacrifice at the possible cost of their own survival. She appeals instead to Western Christian women to make sacrifices, and, in doing so, imagines a transnational family of mothers. Yet, in all these instances, political, familial, and spiritual power relates to the famished populace analogously: not as equals, but as parental figures to a population of children. Without minimizing the real vulnerability of children during such times and to whom Ramabai was drawn, we as readers sense the political and ethical dilemmas such family metaphors pose for someone soliciting relief. They presuppose fixed, hierarchichal positions, and they promote infantilization. In effect, these kinship tropes undercut the rhetoric of equality Ramabai is also at pains to establish in the essays, which we will turn to in conclusion. At the same time that these texts exploit the family trope, they acknowledge the limits of shared suffering as a means to alleviate misery. At one point, she points out that “suffering alone is not able to produce sympathy for other sufferers” (253) – indeed, prolonged exposure to suffering, she continues, creates a psychological deadening

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in those witnessing it (or reading about it). Making this assertion, she indirectly questions the humanitarian narrative’s efficacy and its affective foundations. Perhaps this is why the essays primarily work to focus and inform her audience about the (gendered) biases and failings of famine relief. The specific political conditions and the interpretations that she attaches to them, I would argue, limit both the problematically hierarchical and the limiting affective potential of the humanitarian narrative. By politicizing the famine, contextualizing it within her reform efforts, and by representing abuses and distress in such an “ugly” way, direct action becomes an equally appropriate response. The essays thus tap into a tradition of Western women’s political activism being linked to the concerns of colonized women.59 Despite these essays’ reliance on the unegalitarian ethos of charity, in a number of ways they seek to bypass or undo the relationship of inequality between those impacted by famine and those whose power is relied upon for fellow feeling. First, the philanthropic action of Western women, though essential, is minimized: their role is limited to being donors. In contrast, Indian women, including Ramabai, her helpers, and the women survivors at Kedgaon become the primary actors, both the agents of criticism and of relief. Second, pleas for famine relief funds are not aimed at merely coping with the worst excesses of suffering, with insuring the victims’ mere subsistence or survival in its most reduced form. They become an occasion to respond to the famine within the larger context of gender and food security, social justice, and the attempt to imagine and realize, in the present, a particular way of life for women that renders them less at risk for future famines.60 This deep commitment, at the very least, establishes her moral equality with the British government and with her Christian readers, as she judges the limitations of imperial power. Her documentation of the conditions in the poor houses, gratuitous relief projects, and relief works, rather than offering an occasion for tears or voyeuristic spectatorship, constitute a general demand for justice and a call for practical action. Ramabai leads her readers to an enhanced understanding of what can be protested and done. The political dimensions of the texts’ feminist activism, working in the interests of women’s survival and empowerment, thus chafe against the implicitly 59   This was the case earlier in the century, as British evangelical women entered debates about the abolition of slavery and sati through petitions and fund-raising. See Clare Midgley, “Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30,” Women’s History Review 9.1 (2000): 95–121. 60   Jenny Edkins, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, calls attention to and criticizes the way specific kinds of humanitarian aid consider human life only in its most reduced, physiological form – and provide only that which will keep the human being alive and functioning as a biological organism. This view reduces those suffering from famine to needy victims, failing to see them as humans for whom famine represents the loss of an entire political and social life. Ramabai’s relief work would restore, indeed enhance, women’s and widows’ political and social integration. See Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 37–40.

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proprietorial assumptions of humanitarian narratives. While they dramatize women’s vulnerabilities in order to win readers’ sympathy and donations, they also stress how Ramabai’s approach to the crisis differs from governmental solutions. Its focus was primarily on extending food distribution by institutionalizing procedures and increasing the efficiency of famine relief works. It also vigorously promoted agricultural development along the lines of Western models. Ramabai, in contrast, understands the fundamental solution as two-fold: first, since the government’s existing famine relief efforts have not been capable of safeguarding women and other vulnerable groups, private initiatives such as her own should be encouraged and supported. Second, and more importantly, there must be a commitment to develop women’s or widows’ long-term economic self-reliance. Thus, alongside the horrific visions of women suffering from severe hunger and disease, she depicts widows’ and famine survivors’ reintegration into a community in which practical work gives their lives dignity and meaning: My aim is to train all these girls to do some work or other. Over two hundred of the present number … promise to be good school teachers after they receive a few years’ training. Thirty of the larger girls have joined a training for nurses. Some girls have mastered the trade of oil making. Others have learnt to do laundry work and some … dairy work. More than sixty girls have learnt to cook … Fifty or more have had some training in the field … Forty girls have learnt to weave nicely and more than fifty girls have learnt to sew well and make their own garments. The rest … are learning to do some work with the three Rs. (262–3)

With opportunities for employment and wages, Hindu women’s and widows’ vulnerabilities to exploitation within the home, to insufficient nourishment, or, during times of extreme food crisis, susceptibility to severe illness or death by starvation, are radically curtailed. The texts, then, rhetorically work to contain Indian women’s and children’s helplessness and dependency within the immediate disaster. Humanitarian narratives are problematic when they encapsulate or categorize a person based on a crisis situation, when they withhold an “afterlife,” a post-disaster life, for the afflicted. Instead, connecting charity to existing grass-roots programs and politics, Ramabai outlines an already partially realized solution to an entrenched, highly complex set of oppressive conditions for women that pre-exist and postdate the famines. In her earlier writings, she had located women’s subjugation in customary practices, reinforced by misogynistic textual representations of women, as well as in a complicitous colonial British rule. Here in famine times, building upon these insights, she identifies a further congruence of indigenous patriarchal and colonial practices in women’s oppression. As the essays give the reader to understand, famine intensifies women’s powerlessness; by implication, women’s powerlessness deepens famine’s depredations. Instead of seeing Indian women solely as victims, however, and thereby diminishing

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them further, Ramabai represents them also as survivors who need education and work, both of which would diminish their chances of either being vulnerable to famine, or dependent on the kinds of everyday patriarchal arrangements which proved so abusive. Discourses of imperial famine relief expressed concern that charity created or encouraged idleness. In contrast, Ramabai’s texts represent no undeserving poor or hungry. The need they point to is overwhelmingly economic and limited in duration. As charted in this chapter, Ramabai’s famine essays feminize hunger in order to elicit Western financial intervention to support her relief and reform projects. A detrimental consequence of this representational strategy is that it represents India to Western audiences – at times to the exclusion of other viewpoints – as a land whose normal state is one of poverty, illness, and chronic food shortages. Ramabai contributes to these tropes of a feminized India as a land of the perennially hungry and undernourished, with a representational emphasis on the famished widow. This otherwise socially invisible figure steps out of obscurity to prominence in Ramabai’s texts, to epitomize India’s distress. Ramabai chooses a figure culturally defined around multiple absences – around the absence of the husband; around the alienation from her own child-bearing capacity, rendered “sterile” by strong social prohibitions against widow remarriage; and here, particularly, around the persistent absence of food that could sustain life. Yet we would be wrong if we read these widows as requiring a male other to redeem or replace that absence with presence. Unlike stereotypical narratives of Indian widows being saved by European men, a feature of colonialist discourses extending back to the seventeenth century, Ramabai’s essays do not substitute a new patriarchal protector figure, a new husband or the imperial government to fill these multiple absences.61 A widow’s life is not categorically over after her husband’s death in Ramabai’s world. Her own relief work at Kedgaon makes it clear to her readers that it is Indian women, and most often the widows who have survived famine’s trauma, who are the ones saving other women, going out into the provinces to rescue the starving and the diseased, taking in widows who have run away from an abusive domestic situation, and teaching and working at Kedgaon. Her Western supporters are handmaidens whose contributions to these Indian efforts will help rebuild these women’s lives. The education in economic self-sufficiency that they receive rewrites existing social practices: women’s lives are no longer encompassed by their primary roles as wives and mothers, or, for widows, through extreme self-denial and asceticism. Just as her own life was unusual in being defined without reference to a father or husband or kin, as Gauri Viswanathan notes, so here Ramabai is not disturbed by the adoption of heterodox gender roles in the women living at Kedgaon.62 Instead of seeing lack or absence when she looks at women/widows during famines, Ramabai sees future teachers, nurses, weavers, oil-pressers, and tailors, all doing meaningful work.  Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism 153–4.  Viswanathan, Outside the Fold 133.

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This promotion of female industry and oversight, coupled with an erasure of female sexuality, would certainly appeal to her middle-class audience. [Female] consumers of famine relief are thereby converted or transformed into producers, some with money-producing power. Their activities are less degrading than famine relief work and respectful of women’s virtue, that is, they are primarily domestic or service oriented. For her audience, Ramabai replaces the kinds of representations both fearful and gratifying to them – of perennially dependent and sexually vulnerable Indian women – with ones emphasizing their ability to withstand future famines and achieve autonomy. Making her audience more conscious of the political dimensions of the current series of food crises, she prepares them to see the necessity of both short- and long-term reform work. Short-term work entails bringing pressure to bear upon the imperial government to improve its relief policies and administrative practices and to work toward ameliorating inequities in the camps. By soliciting funds not under the purview or control of the government, she attempts to create a more local, flexible response to and control over certain aspects of famine relief. More important to Ramabai, however, is the long-term project of education, or training for a profession – nothing less than the impetus toward a full social integration of women. This project alone is capable of confronting the patriarchal social and economic structures which deny Hindu women, especially widows, access to food and to food security. As for her audience’s role in that larger project, Ramabai’s essays would not only make them believe that immediate relief is possible through collective action, but that change is best achieved by a long-term, cross-cultural commitment to a more egalitarian solidarity with Indian women in their fight against social injustice.

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Chapter 4

The Imperial Family Begins in the Nursery: Cornelia Sorabji’s ‘Baby-fication’ of Empire Given the widespread nature of the famines at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising to find Cornelia Sorabji, like Pandita Ramabai, also turning her attention toward those suffering from famine-related hardship and disease. Instead of criticizing the Raj’s relief efforts, however, Sorabji characteristically extols its forethought and diligence in her story “Pestilence at Noon,” published in her first volume Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901): “The dreadful plague had already begun its ravages, and a wise Government was putting in practice stringent measures.”1 One scene in particular epitomizes the careful, benevolent paternalism of the British, a theme that will run through Sorabji’s works examined in this chapter. Possessing neither food nor money, and in order to shore up the strength of his daughter-in-law Sita and baby grandson already flushed with fever, the Shastri Mukti goes to the planter Henry Symonds to collect on a loan he once made to Symonds. While Symonds callously brushes him off, the commissioner Mr. Caldecott extends a generous gift of 100 rupees to the old man, as Mukti later recounts: See! The commissioner sahib came to me … and he pressed this hundred-rupee note upon me. “You will grant me this boon,” he said, “that you keep it. My wife sends it to your small grandson, from her own little boy in England. You won’t refuse it.” … While I hesitated she brought me the picture of two sweet little children—children like the Baby Krishna sleeping in the cup of the full-blown lotus—and she made her husband tell me about them, and she said kind words in English. (LL 33)

Positioned as it is at the center of Sorabji’s depiction of government relief efforts, many things are striking in this sentimentalized vision of empire. With his offer of 100 rupees, the commissioner attempts, at least partially, to redress the AngloIndian planter Symonds’ irresponsibility. His humility, emphasized repeatedly, is contrasted with the planter’s arrogance: first, he confers upon the Shastri the right of refusal (“you will grant me this boon”); second, it is a gift that conveys solicitude for the wellbeing of a single Indian child; and third, it comes not by 1   Cornelia Sorabji, Love and Life Behind the Purdah, ed. Chandani Lokugé (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003) 25. Citations from this volume will be abbreviated parenthetically as LL and indicate page numbers from this edition.

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way of official prerogative or policy, but through an English father and mother, who themselves are acting on behalf of their son. In other words, what animates this compassionate transaction is not governmental concern, but that of a “little” English boy for a “small” Indian child. Very young children figure centrally in this exchange between the commissioner, who is the local representative and face of the British Raj, and the Shastri, a Hindu native. Photographs are brought forward that soften the Shastri’s heart toward British benevolence – images of two sleeping British children, who recall nothing so much as the “Baby Krishna,” so small as to fit in the bloom of a “lotus cup.” At his wife’s/a mother’s urging, the commissioner tells the Shastri of his own children. The Shastri’s grandfatherly distress convinces him to abandon his pride and accept charity (“And so I took the money”) in the name of his suffering grandchild. Maternal and paternal love establish a ground of emotional commonality and a shared language that transcends the cultural and religious differences that exist between Anglo-Indians and Hindus. For the encounter between East and West, then, Cornelia Sorabji stages a meeting of two families whose love for their children transforms the hierarchical, conflictual dynamics of colonial rule into tenderness. Yet in this fable of the benefits of such an arrangement, some disturbing facts remain, resistant to good feeling: Mukti has been robbed by the Anglo-Indian planter; he goes from being an Indian who once had money to lend to Anglo-Indians, to someone who must now beg for that which is owed him, and finally, to being a someone dependent on Anglo-Indian charity; and hardest of all, his grandchild dies, the money arriving too late to save him. I highlight this scene because it works to differentiate the rhetorical strategies and intentions of Pandita Ramabai and Cornelia Sorabji, as they write of the Raj’s response to famine. Ramabai keeps her focus on the detrimental effects of British relief efforts, especially on those most vulnerable, while Sorabji creates a tableau of Anglo-Indian assistance, directed primarily at the weakest. Indeed, the greatest obstacle to eradicating famine in her story is native superstition, which prevents Indians from using hospital facilities for fear of caste violations. Whereas Ramabai foregrounds British ignorance of how their own governmental policies disproportionately affect the young, the aged, and women, Sorabji stresses the compassion and personal engagement of Anglo-Indian administrators, directed toward one single child. Ramabai’s emphasis on argument and a rhetoric of urgency contrasts with Sorabji’s exploration of the possibilities of sentimentality and pathos in bridging cultural difference. In keeping with her reform work, Ramabai demonstrates the impact of famine on high-caste women/widows, whereas Sorabji’s writings, as we shall see, make India’s children integral to almost all of her creative work. Finally, Ramabai illuminates the disintegration of family ties during famine times and exposes the faultlines of familial rhetoric to describe imperial concern, whereas Sorabji embraces the language of mothers, fathers, and children to bridge any immediate or long-term crises. Yet despite these differences, the vital importance of a cross-cultural “maternalism” links both writers’ works. Both establish the vulnerability of India’s daughters (and sons,

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in Sorabji) that necessitates nothing less than a mother’s love. And while all the writers in this book draw on figures of mothers and daughters to promote women’s solidarity, it is Ramabai and Sorabji who most fully imagine a close, international alliance of Indian and Western women as mothers to their Indian “children.” That Sorabji should conceive of imperial relations along these lines is not surprising, given her personal and her professional life. As a lawyer for the Raj, Sorabji furthered British intervention and control in Indian family matters. Her legal work involved protecting both the property rights of minors and (oftentimes child) widows and, under the provisions of the Guardian and Wards Act of 1890, caring for the wards of state. It is not surprising, then, that India’s children have a prominent place in her two memoirs, India Calling (1934) and India Recalled (1936). Other works of hers also make Indian children a primary concern.2 Most predominant are the two Sun Babies volumes, the first published in 1904 and the second in 1920. Each is a collection of portraits of individual Indian children told by a narrator whose age, social position, and profession bear a strong likeness to Sorabji’s own.3 Sorabji dedicates a volume of Indian folktales, Indian Tales of the Great Ones (1916), to “my Baby-Friends in all Worlds.”4 Even her works on the purdahnashin (high-caste women living in seclusion), which include Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901), Between the Twilights (1908), The Purdahnashin (1917), and Shubala: A Child Mother (1920), feature many young wives, mothers, and widows, whose ages identify them as children.5 Yet it is not only children as subject matter or her narratorial adoption of a paternalistic stance toward her subjects that prove strikingly central to her work. For Sorabji, the reinforcement of colonial relations is best achieved via India’s children, via a reinscription of childhood per se, and via a British parental commitment to her Indian children. Further, Sorabji’s “dual-” and “double address” – the practice of simultaneously addressing an audience of adults and children – direct these works 2   Cornelia Sorabji, India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s First Woman Barrister, ed. Chandani Lokugé (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001) and India Recalled (London: Nisbet & Co., 1936). Future references to India Calling refer to this edition and will be indicated with the abbreviation IC. Page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3   Cornelia Sorabji, Sun Babies: Studies in the Child Life of India (London: John Murray, 1904) and Sun Babies: Studies in Colour (London: Blackie, 1920). Future references to these volumes will be indicated with the abbreviation SB I or II for the earlier and later volumes, respectively, and page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4   Cornelia Sorabji, Indian Tales of the Great Ones (Bombay: Blackie, 1916). Future references to this volume will be indicated by the abbreviation IT and page numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 5   Cornelia Sorabji, Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by One of Themselves (London: Harper, 1908); The Purdahnashin (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1917); and Shubala: A Child Mother (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1920). Future references to these texts will be indicated by the abbreviations BT, P, and SCM, respectively, and page numbers will be cited parenthetically within the text.

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about and for children to British adult readers as well. In effect, she creates a community of older readers bound together in a complicity of imperial mothering around the subject of India’s children.6 Put in a position of “moral spectatorship,” Sorabji’s readers “feel themselves into” those they can imagine not as themselves but as theirs … as their responsibility. Moreover, they may imagine themselves as part of a “we” that shares that responsibility. This kind of empathy is at the core of sociality.7

To mediate India textually for Great Britain requires her – and her readers – to adopt a maternalistic attitude toward her native child subjects.8 Unlike Ramabai, however, for whom the inequality of maternalism was tolerable only in the short term, for Sorabji, it identifies an emotional bond necessary for just imperial relating. Sorabji has no reservations about the dependency or infantilization of India. Correspondingly, she makes no efforts to imagine or realize India’s maturation and independence. 6   My use of the terms “dual address” and “double address” stem from Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). “Double address” and “dual address” refer to the narratorial practice of speaking to an audience of both adults and children. The difference between the two is that with “dual address” it is impossible to say whether the text is for adults or children (this is also referred to as “crossover” voicing). With “double address” the narrator, under the guise of directly speaking to/for children, is really “winking” at or addressing the adult audience (22, 40–1). See also Sandra L. Beckett, Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009). 7   Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) 4. 8   Maternalism, like paternalism, reinforces inequality in the guise of benevolent, protective care. As a concept, maternalism stems from historians who would better describe the spheres of influence and politicized activities of white, middle-class women within moral and spiritual reform movements that targeted the poor and the working-class in the early twentieth-century United States. Here, I use the concept of maternalism to characterize an aspect of women’s participation in imperial reform projects. The desire to exert greater emotional and moral influence and control over the colonized facilitated the adoption of a “motherly” role (as opposed and in addition to paternalism, the adoption of a fatherly role). The concept of maternalism has been developed by the historians Lynn Y. Weiner and Linda Gordon, as a parallel to the more familiar concept of paternalism. In her work on early twentieth-century US women reformers, Gordon uses the term maternalism to describe the mostly middle-class women reformers who acted in a motherly fashion toward the poor because the poor were particularly in need of moral and spiritual, as well as economic help (“Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S. History As Women’s History, ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 65. See also Lynn Y. Weiner, “Maternalism as a Paradigm: Defining the Issues,” Journal of Women’s History 5.2 (Fall 1993): 96–8).

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In writing about Cornelia Sorabji’s representations of children, this chapter proceeds from the assumption that her depictions of children are not “innocent”; in Jacqueline Rose’s words, the child within literature does not speak for himor herself but is a surrogate for desires that the dominant adult culture cannot acknowledge.9 In an act of “colonization,” the child in represented form becomes the screen onto which adult writers/cultures project their unfulfilled fantasies and anxieties, whether they be psychological, economic, political, or sociocultural ones. A literature about children and childhood becomes “impossible,” in Rose’s view, given the absence of child authors and the projective burden these represented child figures carry, as adults use them to make good on their own desires and/or failings. It is in this light that I approach these texts’ depictions of children, with an eye to the role they play within Sorabji’s colonialist discursive worlds. First, they constitute difference: her children are “sun babies,” e.g., Indian children, differentiated from England’s “moon babies.” They come from a diversity of backgrounds, of class and caste (Brahmins and servants), of ethnicity and religion (Parsi and Hindu), and of geography (Kashmir and Punjab). Representing figuratively a cross-section of India’s population, they can be said to stand for “India” and a universalized childhood, enabling an imagined humanistic transcendence of “superficial” cultural and racial differences. Further, though large parts of India were relatively remote from any contact with the British Raj, Sorabji’s narrator takes Great Britain with her wherever she goes. For the child subjects of her stories and portraits, she is not an Indian woman; she is a “Miss Sahib,” a “Presence,” both British and Indian simultaneously, and her work/travel makes her unlike any Indian woman with whom they are familiar. She brings exposure to the English language, customs, and culture. Her connection to them, and theirs with her (and her readers), can be read – in part, though not exclusively – as a “miniaturization” of colonial relating. To minimize the differences that her brand of colonialist intervention imposes and inscribes, Sorabji’s writings and letters repeatedly use tropes of family, kinship, and adoption. The Imperial Family Before turning to an analysis of Sorabji’s rewriting of empire as a family matter, it is useful to look briefly at the employment of this discourse over the course of the nineteenth century. In a speech entitled “Conservative Principles” (1872), Benjamin Disraeli demonstrated how family, far from referring to the private domestic economy alone, was best understood as the public, mutually-held obligations between citizens and their national government, a relationship best understood as familial: 9   The Case of Peter Pan: or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984).

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England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family – the Royal Family; and if the family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sense of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation.10

The family analogy also frequently characterized the monarchy’s relation to its peoples overseas. Conservative discourse about empire drew on kinship relations to simplify, idealize, and render coherent what was in reality a complex network of competing and conflicting interests that by the end of the nineteenth century encompassed one-quarter of the globe and countless ethnic and cultural groups. Further, in ideological terms, kinship tropes suggested that individuals in England had a familial responsibility to their fellow “Greater Britons” abroad. Here is how J.A. Froude puts it in Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (1886): We ourselves – the forty-five millions of British subjects, those at home and those already settled upon it – are a realized family which desires not to be divided. If there have been family differences, they have not [yet] … risen into discord.11

The interweaving of family metaphors within the rhetoric of British imperial expansion and control reached a full flowering from the 1870s onward. And though the discursive ideal of the domestic family as an emblem of security and benevolence was somewhat tarnished in Great Britain, challenged by writers as diverse as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, that did not prevent imperial apologists from drawing on its reserves to make their case. Tropes of family continued to operate within national discussions and debates about England’s imperial future.12 The illustration of “John Bull’s Christmas Family Party” in Punch (December 27, 1884) depicts the “father” John Bull and the “mother” Britannia welcoming all overseas children to their home-grown family, in order of closeness of kinship; thus, Canada and Australia take the lead, followed by their “darker-skinned” children (Figure 4.1). The audience for this ceremony is a crowd of English children, looking on from the background and demonstrating how such rhetoric attempted to create ties between metropolitan Britons and their far-flung imperial subjects. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria” (1889), exhorts the “patient Children of Albion,/ You, Canadian, Indian,/ Australasian, African,/ All your hearts be in harmony,/ All your voices in unison.”13 By conjuring up a sense of unity located in an idealized domestic   Cited in Elizabeth Thiel, The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2008) 4. 11   J.A. Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888) 15. 12   Ansgar Nünning, “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie,” in Intercultural Studies: Fictions of Empire, ed. Vera and Ansgar Nünning (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996) 93. 13   Alfred Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 162. Also, see the lines in the ode by 10

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“John Bull’s Christmas Family Party” (from Punch December 27, 1884), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.

realm, kinship tropes sought to legitimize England’s imperial commitments as an obligation or service, the “necessary burden of a civilized and essentially benevolent nation.”14 As the early twentieth-century historian Edward A. Hughes puts it, “If unadulterated selfishness is seldom met with in the outside world, it is almost nonexistent in family life … Now it is no mere figure of speech to call Great Britain and her colonies a family circle.”15 Sir Lewis Morris on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee in reference to Victoria as global mother only seeking to liberate her children: “Mother of freemen! Over all the Earth/ Thy Empire-children come to birth,” quoted in Zohreh Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 3. 14   Hanne Birk and Birgit Neumann, “The Tree and the Family: Metaphors as Discursive Supports of British Imperial Culture in Froude’s Oceana,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 31.1 (2006): 76. 15   Edward A. Hughes, Britain and Greater Britain in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919) 281–2.

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Insofar as this metaphorical field reaffirmed an already powerful norm – the middle-class ideal of the patriarchal family – it promoted a hierarchical understanding of the roles between a family’s members: The … parent metaphors stressed age, experience, roots, tradition … They implied the same distinctions as those existing between metropolis and frontier: parents are more experienced, more important, more substantial, less brash than their offspring. Above all they are the origin and therefore claim the final authority in questions of taste and value.16

If the colonies on the peripheries are the children to the parental metropolitan center, then any attempt to disengage from one’s imperial obligations would be “unhuman” to consider, since it would be tantamount to abandoning one’s children.17 Further, these metaphors work to conceal the origins of imperialism’s appropriative desires, transforming the will to power of the colonizer into an appeal for help by the needy, dependent colonial child that the benevolent mother or parent simply cannot refuse to answer.18 A cartoon in Punch from April 21, 1894, perfectly illustrates this ideological sleight of hand, whereby ambition is disguised as unselfish obligation. John Bull steps out onto his doorstep to find an orphaned black baby, Uganda (Figure 4.2). The caption reads: “What, another! – Well, I suppose I must take it in!” As the historian John Seeley puts it in 1883, “The word Empire seems too military and despotic to suit the relation of a mother-country to her colonies.”19 In an attempt to soften the implications of England’s powerful control, Rudyard Kipling also gives the Raj a mother’s voice in his poem “England’s Answer”: “Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;/ …/ Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether.”20 Poems like “England’s Answer” supported views such as Charles Eliot Norton’s, who saw Kipling’s verse as “[holding] as one all parts of [England’s] wide-stretched empire, and [binding] them close in the indissoluble bond of common motherhood.”21 Further, the view of Indians and other colonized peoples as children could be used to call for postponing colonial self-determination. Here, again, an illustration from Punch is telling (Figure 4.3). In “Nurse Gladstone” from August 25, 1883,   Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989) 16. 17   See Froude, Oceana 96–8 and Birk and Neumann, “The Tree and the Family” 75–6. 18   David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) 28. 19   John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1906) 44. 20   “The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling,” Atlantic Monthly LXXIX (January 1897): 11–15. 21   Kipling. The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger L. Green (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971) 187. 16

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“Baby Uganda” (from Punch April 21, 1894), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.

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Figure 4.3

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“Nurse Gladstone” (from Punch August 25, 1883), reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.

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the prime minister appears as nursemaid to the infant Egypt (though given the stiff embrace, the maternal love is far from convincing!). Similarly unpersuasive perhaps is also the promise in the text below the illustration. The text reads: “Oh, the little ducky-wucky: never will its nana leave it till it can run quite alone: -- Never!!” Overtly the relation between nana England and baby Egypt is temporary, until Egypt reaches maturity. Yet the concluding, exclamatory “Never!!” suggests that maturation might never be achieved, because Egypt might never be able to “run quite alone.” Even if the cartoonist is being tonguein-cheek, and the overemphatic “Never!” implicitly expresses a criticism of England’s cloying, stifling care, the cartoon depends upon the parent–child trope to convey its meaning. Instead of seeking independence, then, the proper role for each colony as a minor is to learn those sentiments that properly characterize a child’s family-feeling, namely “attachment … [and] reverence for those who can teach [him], guide [him], and elevate [him],” as Frederic Harrison describes the child’s role within family life in 1893.22 Because these tropes work conceptually to transfer authority to the parent England, they also justified harshly punitive measures taken against “childish” subject populations. In defense of the Amritsar massacre in 1919, for example, General Dyer rationalized his actions by describing the Indians in Jallianwalla Bagh as “naughty” children in need of harsh punishment by a “stern but watchful father.”23 In considering how the trope of “empire as family” functioned ideologically, it is important to note that a hierarchical notion of family was inevitably used to characterize the relations between England and her “darker-skinned” colonies, while egalitarian language of kinship was used for Commonwealth colonies. Such a use is evident in Joseph Chamberlain’s “The True Conception of Empire”: As regards the self-governing colonies [Canada, Australia, New Zealand] we no longer talk of them as dependencies. The sense of possession has given place to the sentiment of kinship. We think and speak of them as part of ourselves, as part of the British Empire, united to us, although they may be dispersed throughout the world, by ties of kindred, of religion, of history, and of language.24 22   Frederic Harrison, “Lecture II: Family Life,” in F. Harrison, On Society, reprint (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1971) 33. 23   Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 229. 24   Joseph Chamberlain, “The True Conception of Empire,” in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918, ed. Elleke Boehmer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 212–13. The historian Edward A. Hughes in the early twentieth century uses family tropes to describe the self-governing colonies in ways which suggest an endurance of hierarchical and patriarchal dynamics there: “The relations between Great Britain and the self-govening colonies have often been translated into terms of family life … Great Britain may be compared to a warm-hearted but crusty old squire, whose high spirited sons feel that they are old enough to be their own masters and to go into the world to seek their fortures” (178). Instead of restraining them by force, as he had done in the past

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In contrast, evocations of kinship ties within the Indian imperial context are laden with the inequities of paternalism. The equation of “India” with “child” was a cliché by Cornelia Sorabji’s time. Ashis Nandy’s explorations of British colonial practices in India have called attention not only to the homology between childhood and the colonized state, but also to how the ideologies of modernity and colonialism are inextricable from emerging evolutionary theories of childhood.25 Just as the individual child “naturally” develops into an adult, “immature” or “childish” cultures are also represented as advancing to maturity, albeit slowly. Evolutionary views of childhood excuse certain forms of child exploitation in the modern period, preparing them via education and labor to become normative, productive adults as quickly as possible. This paradigm’s explanatory reach also justifies the colonial project of education and “uplift” by constructing natives as “childlike” or “childish,” in need of England’s guiding, firm, and modernizing hand. Numerous statements of the homology native/child litter the writings about India. The early nineteenth-century “Romantics” in India (Thomas Munro, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Charles Metcalf) saw the Indian peasantry as children in need of a paternal government, without the native, landed aristocracy as an intermediary force. The collector, a British officer, would instead serve as the ma-bap (kindly father-mother) to the peasantry, until they were ready to assume land ownership themselves.26 (Queen Victoria presented herself as India’s ma-bap, in an attempt to deflect the negative connotations of military power inherent in her title of “Empress of India”; the ma-bap’s associations with revenue collection may, however, have been perceived as equally negative). Thomas Macaulay argued in the 1830s for institutionalizing English education in India by referring to Indians’ uneducated state: “We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue.”27 In her domestic guide for Anglo-Indian women, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1889), Flora Annie Steel asserted that

to disastrous effect (United States), he has been determined to avoid violent quarrels, so he has “yield[ed] with a readiness which his sons interpret as indifference.” Yet that course is about to change, and destiny is bringing “fathers and sons together once more” (178). 25   Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism in Exiled at Home (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005) 11 and “Reconstructing Childhood” 57. Much as Nandy does, Jo-ann Wallace argues that “an idea of ‘the child’ is a necessary precondition of imperialism … the West had to invent for itself ‘the child’ before it could think a specifically colonialist imperialism” (“De-scribing The Water Babies: ‘The Child’ in Post-colonial Theory,” in De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994) 176). 26   Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 25. 27   Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education” in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) 241.

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“the Indian servant is a child in everything save age, and should be treated as a child; that is to say kindly, but with the greatest firmness.”28 My intention here is not to catalog the instances of parent/child tropes as they apply either to empire in general or to the Indian context specifically. It is important, however, to recognize the highly durable, naturalized quality of this particular tropology by the time Cornelia Sorabji represents her Indian children. Within this discursive context, most directly relevant for Sorabji’s writings are Kipling’s literary texts. In “White Man’s Burden,” he refers to natives as “sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half child”;29 in The Jungle Books, read as colonial allegory, Mowgli leaves his animal/native childhood behind to become fully “human” (e.g., British); and similarly in Kim, the protagonist’s identity and allegiance shifts from a profound love and enmeshment in native culture to a dedication to the espionage work he carries out as imperial agent on the Northwest frontier. How extensive Sorabji’s reading of Kipling was remains unclear; in April 1903, however, she wrote a long review essay of Flora Annie Steel’s and Kipling’s writings on India published in the Church Quarterly Review.30 Entitled “Western Stories of the East: An Eastern Criticism,” Sorabji stakes out an Indian “literary territory” for herself by identifying the flaws and strengths of these two writers. To Steel, she grants verisimilitude in her representations of Punjabi farmers; to Kipling, the people of the bazaars and roads. Yet both fail utterly, according to Sorabji, because they do not depict the “real India,” namely the purdahnashin (high-caste women living in seclusion) who, in her writings, comprise households of women and children. Further, in maternalistic fashion, it is the matter of Indian women’s and children’s vulnerability – here, to Western misrepresentation – that calls for her intervention and discursive redress. In contradictory fashion, India is for Sorabji a land that both can and cannot accommodate all three writers. On the one hand, no single writer can encompass India’s infinite variability: “Beware of generalizing from either Kipling or Mrs. Steel about that complex part of the Empire which lies beyond the seas … No man or woman can know everything of a continent, especially when the type of human who dwells therein differs almost as the unit.”31 On the other hand, only she can access the “true” East. Steel and Kipling fail because, despite India’s tremendous diversity, they do not know “the innermost soul of the reserved East,” which “neither of them really touches.”32 The purdahnashin are India in its distilled essence, rendering other accounts superfluous: “But of the real India, the reserved India, the India behind closed doors, the mystic, subtleminded, courteous, dignified … India … of this they [Kipling or Steel] know little   Boehmer, Empire Writing 127.   Ibid. 273. 30   The manuscript papers of Cornelia Sorabji are part of the India Office records collection housed at the British Library in London (MSS Eur.F.165/1-235). This reference for this essay is F165/196. 31   F165/196, 218. 32   Ibid. 207. 28 29

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or nothing.”33 Sorabji holds the key to this India, which she has revealed through the young widows, wives, mothers, and children who populate her own Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901). In her next volume, Sun Babies I (1904), published just a year after this review, India’s babies and children take center stage. A focus on child-life from this point on remains the predominant feature of Sorabji’s writing, a critical component of her attempts to engage her British readers in England and to reshape their relations with India along family lines. A second, more private discourse, which we will turn at next, shows Cornelia Sorabji very effectively appropriating and being appropriated by that rhetoric as she describes her own relationships with British people and within the Raj. After tracing the early gains she achieves in consequence, the chapter will investigate how she uses that trope in her subsequent writings (Sun Babies I and II, and in her writings on the purdahnashin) to envision individual children (subjects of empire) as part of a universalized family that is one with Great Britain and its global “family.” Becoming an Imperial Child: Sorabji’s Oxford Years Cornelia Sorabji’s own life gave her ample grounds for conceptualizing empire in terms of transcultural adoption and kinship ties that literally and figuratively place Indian children in British families. The private origins of this discourse for Sorabji began with her parents, both of whom were separated from their birth families and adopted by Anglo-Indian families, and it continued during her own studies at Somerville College in Oxford with her “adoption” by a number of English families and figures who took a parental concern for her wellbeing.34 While studying at a Christian high school, Cornelia’s father Sorabji Kharsedji, a member of the Parsi community,35 moved in with the school’s principal, Mr. Valentine, to escape the Parsi community and familial opprobrium that resulted from his attraction to Christianity. According to Cornelia, Mr. Valentine was the formative influence on her father’s thinking. Because of Sorabji Kharsedji’s conversion, his estrangement from his natal family was prolonged, lasting almost his entire life.36 Instead, he found an alternate family (and professional life, as a minister), first with Mr. Valentine, and later, within the English missionary community in 33

  Ibid. 218.   There was no formal, legal adoption in England until 1926, though de facto adoption had existed for “time out of mind.” See George Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 272. 35   Parsis are a minority ethnic group living in South Asia. Their religion is Zoroastrianism, and they trace their ancestors back to a group who came to India in the eighth century ad to escape religious persecution in Iran. 36   Suparna Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneer Woman Lawyer (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) 14–15. 34

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Bombay and Poona. Cornelia’s mother Francina, originally from a tribal group in Western India, was adopted by Lord and Lady Ford when she was 12 years old. (Christian missions in India welcomed abandoned, ill, or orphaned Indian children and placed them in mission orphanages or with Christian families, to be raised as Christians. Not surprisingly, this de facto adoption generated controversy).37 The Ford’s household, “a typical middle-class Victorian household,” marked the beginning of a multi-generational Anglicization of the Sorabji family.38 Francina re-created a Victorian home for her own children modeled on that of her own childhood with the Fords. As Cornelia relates, this meant being “‘brought up English’ … on English nursery tales with English discipline; on the English language, used with my Father and Mother, in a home furnished like an English home[;] … [eating] in the English manner, off English plates, and with English adjuncts” (IC 15, 16). Francina’s relationship with her children evoked “the bond between a middle-class Victorian mother and her children. She tried to manage her household efficiently, and sanctify the house by her loving tenderness and chaste discipline.”39 According to Cornelia, Francina embraced the Victorian “Gospels” of Christianity, education, health, and sanitation (IC 19). Just as middle-class English women were encouraged to see themselves participating in imperial responsibilities, Francina was taught to do so as well.40 Her signature achievement was the founding of the co-educational Victoria High School in Poona, dedicated to fostering improved relations between the Indians and the British. She envisioned all her children going to work for India (IC 18). For Francina, and later for Cornelia, the Raj offered a political framework through which Indian society could be renovated. Francina’s adoption by the Ford family would give Cornelia English grandparents and, when she went to England to study, a family connection cemented by a shared vision of service to the Raj. As Cornelia writes in her biography of her parents: “Marriage between Francina and Sorab assured that when the Fords left India there would still be between the families the intimacy of that common interest in the work which they had together watched grow to maturity.”41 It was Lady Ford who introduced Cornelia to Lord and Lady Hobhouse, who were instrumental in helping Cornelia professionally. In fact, her study at Somerville College, Oxford, was made possible through their intervention, after a scholarship she had won to study in England was nullified because it was meant for men, not women. The Hobhouses were the first of many select English friends that Cornelia made over the course of her studies,   Cox, Imperial Fault Lines 163–4.   Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 18. 39   Ibid. 21. 40   Sukanya Banerjee, “Empire, Nation, and the Professional Citizen: Reading Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 28.3 (December 2006): 298. 41   Cornelia Sorabji, Therefore: An Impression of Sorabji Kharsedji Langrana and His Wife Franscina (London: Humphrey Milford, 1924) 46. 37 38

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relationships that continued long after her studies were over. These relationships were with “old India hands” and with British men and women who had never been to India. Acting as surrogate parents and “[grooming] her to serve the Empire,” they were preparing a familiar mantle for Cornelia, originally taken up and worn by her mother.42 Sorabji signals an acceptance of her future colonialist role in her letters by drawing on the rhetoric of family to foster and cement ties across racial, cultural, and geographical divides. This kinning with British figures began in Cornelia’s life in earnest during her studies at Somerville College, Oxford. When Cornelia resided there from 1889 to 1892, Somerville was one of two colleges for women (the other was Lady Margaret Hall). The college prospectus advertised itself as a home away from home: “The life of the students will be modeled on that of a Christian family; the non-denominational hall proposed as its model ‘the life of an English family’.”43 The residence halls offered women students a domestic environment, from drawing rooms to dining rooms; an article in the Ladies Pictorial (January 2, 1892) on “English Girls and Their Colleges” adopts this domestic vocabulary to describe Somerville: it offers a “bright, home-like dwelling”; “the halls for women at Oxford are not colleges … they are halls, or homes”; “the drawing rooms are particularly cheerful, cosy, and home-like.”44 By the end of her first year, Cornelia wrote her parents that “next to home, there is no place like Somerville.”45 In what amounts to a process of kinning with the British, she writes in 1902 to a close friend that she remembers herself as a “baby” during this time: “I write to you from my very own old room … and I try to imagine myself back again at the days of ‘infancy’.”46 By the end of her studies, in a kind of professional limbo and anxious about her future, she resists leaving this place of her second “childhood.” She writes: “on Monday I turn my face for ever on the happiest time life can have for [me]” and vows that should “I live to be an old lady I mean to buy a house in Oxford, that my bones may rest there.”47 Sorabji’s attachment to Oxford and subsequent depiction of it as a home-like environment and developmental proving ground were enabled by a number of adult guardian and mentor figures. They stepped into a parental role with Cornelia during this time, and some remained there long afterwards. Miss Adelaide Manning emerges in Cornelia’s letters home as a surrogate mother figure – hosting her over holidays and giving advice, treating her “like a child going back to school – kind soul.”48 Mrs. Augustus Darling, sister-in-law to Lady Ford (Cornelia’s   Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 52.   Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 13. 44   This magazine was found in a file in the library of Somerville College. 45   F165/3, letter of July 2, 1890. 46   F165/22, letter of June 4, 1902. 47   F165/6, letters of June 23 and 29, 1892. 48   F165/4, letter of January 6, 1891. 42

43

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grandmother), also hosts Cornelia, most generously on a series of spring trips to the Continent during her academic vacations. In Cornelia’s letters to her later in the decade (there are none surviving from Somerville days), Cornelia takes delight in emphasizing the motherly role Mrs. Darling plays in her life: Dearest little E.M. [English Mother], Your dear letter of May 4 is such a comfort. It … soothes … and calms the fears – and oh! My little E.M. I love having it … I knew you would be feeling the pain of it all for me … How I wish you were somewhere near … darling little E.M … I bless you for all your love … And just when I am feeling this most, my little E.M. comes to me with more blessings in her hands! Dearest of E. M.’s -- … for ever your loving child.49

In one of her performative acts of kinship with Mrs. Darling, Sorabji imagines Mrs. Darling adopting her just as she adopts Mrs. Darling: “God has been very good to your little Indian child … Ever my own little E.M. Your loving child.”50 Lord and Lady Hobhouse also offer her “special and beloved care [after her] arrival in England” (IC 33). During the course of a stay with the Hobhouses, in a letter home she paints a domestic tableau where Lady Hobhouse becomes a kind “mother” to “daughter” Cornelia: “Scene. Lady Hobhouse’s Drawing Room … soft gentle light. Brussels pile underfoot, wonderfully comfortable chairs … Lady Hobhouse sitting before it [a ‘bright warm’ fire] reading the Times … I sit close by … looking up occasionially to talk. Sweet dear creature.”51 According to Lady Hobhouse, their intimacy is cemented on this visit: “I feel I know you now that we have taken up our candles to bed together.”52 Later, when she passes her exam with a “third” and not the “first” she wanted, Cornelia feels “like a child in disgrace” and fears the Hobhouses’ disapproval: “write and tell me that you are not very ashamed of or disappointed in me though if you are it will be only what I deserve.”53 At one point in their relationship, Cornelia seeks an explicit “kinship” relation with the Hobhouses. In two letters, one dated November 24, 1900 and one dated December 6, 1900, Cornelia addresses Lady Hobhouse as “Aunt Mary,” instead of “Lady Hobhouse.” In the first letter, she reveals how intensely she desires this affiliation: “dear – Aunt Mary, [Please may I—I now long to – when I heard your nephews and nieces and their third generation: and in the very most secret coating of my heart, I always dare to call you that].”54 According to Suparna Gooptu, Oxford “maintained a many-sided involvement with the sustenance of the Empire.”55 Not only did it provide an ideological 49

    51   52   53   54   55   50

F165/20, letter of May 25, 1899. F165/20, letter of November 22, 1899. F165/2, letter of January 16, 1890. F165/2, letter of January 20, 1890. F165/16, letter of March 14, 1890 and F165/16, letter of June 22, 1892. F165/17. Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 49.

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rationale to underpin the British presence in India, it also trained an administrative elite from the ranks of its students and encouraged Indian students to matriculate from Oxford.56 The Hobhouses’ relationship with Cornelia – as well as hers with other Oxford men, including Benjamin Jowett, Lord Markby, and Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff – cannot be separated from their allegiance to the imperial cause, something particularly nurtured at Oxford. These adults were, in essence, her patrons, mentors, and surrogate parents; their influence reinforced expectations that her Oxford training would culminate in her service to the Raj. Lord Hobhouse used his social connections to get Cornelia into Somerville College, while Lady Hobhouse circulated an appeal for donations (a Cornelia Sorabji fund) to help defray her expenses. Later, Lord Hobhouse used his legal associations to obtain a year-long position with the law offices of Lee and Pemberton for Cornelia the year after she graduated, valuable professional training before returning to India to become a legal advisor and roving practioner of law.57 Duff encouraged Cornelia to do “beneficial,” “useful” service in India, proposing she address the India Office for appointment as a legal advisor.58 When Cornelia was seeking support for her plan to set up an official legal office and personnel to counsel the purdahnashin, Duff wrote an article in The Times supporting her work.59 The Oxford don William Markby was instrumental in supporting Cornelia’s desire to study law (though he wanted her to pursue the law course that male Indian students were taking at Oxford before joining the civil service, not the more challenging Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) course). Once she was enrolled in the BCL program, however, he offered her private lectures to catch up on material she had missed.60 But more significant than any other mentor at Oxford was Benjamin Jowett, Master of Bailliol College and vice chancellor, who Cornelia lovingly referred to as “the Master.” He helped Cornelia gain entry into the BCL program, the highest legal degree conferred; in fact, she became the first woman ever to enter and complete the BCL program at Oxford. When Cornelia was a freshman, he came to 56

  Ibid. 51–3.   Sorabji’s efforts to gain recognition and secure permission to plead before the high courts proved a long, involved process. Gooptu has the best account. Briefly, Sorabji passed the BCL exam but was not conferred a degree because she was a woman. When she returned to India, she did chamber counselling in Bombay and appeared in court only with special permission. While she should have been able to practice with her BCL degree, she was encouraged to get an LLB degree, which she did. She passed the vakil’s (pleader’s) exam, but as a woman, was refused enrollment as a vakil. In 1904 she secured a position as lady legal advisor to the Court of Wards in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Assam. It was not until 1921 that women in India could plead before the courts of law, and Sorabji was finally added to the rolls of Allahabad High Court. In 1923 she received her formal BCL degree and was called to the bar. In 1924, she became an advocate of the Calcutta High Court. 58   Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 45. 59   F165/118; no date. 60   Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 43. 57

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call on her, initiating a relationship wherein he emerged as the pre-eminent figure guiding her future direction. Indeed, he seems to have been revered by her with a kind of religiosity. Leaving Oxford at the end of her studies, she wrote her parents that “the things he said will always remain with me – nothing put in his quaint terse way could fail … I said a Farewell – and the dear courtly old gentleman kissed my hand as he gave me his benediction … I had felt the nearness of the Unseen.”61 After his death in August 1903, her memorial essay “Benjamin Jowett – Master of Balliol College,” appeared in the journal Nineteenth Century and After. It begins with his “adopt[ing] me” and goes on to describe his formative influence through tropes of birthing, origination, and generation: “the dear Master gave you yourself, but a better self, a new-made self: a best self – which in truth had hardly existed but that he compelled it.”62 He emerges as the source of her idealistic commitment to the imperial cause: “All one’s ambitions and hopes and aspirations found utterance somehow in the presence of the Master.”63 Jowett sought to redirect her from missionary work to work in the civil service. According to Jowett, “[Sorabji] has a mission – but to this country.”64 He never ceased to “call her” to what he saw as her purpose: promoting the self-determination of Indian women, a cause which, for him, further justified Britain’s presence in India.65 It is no stretch to see these unequal relationships within the ideological matrix of imperial paternalism (and maternalism). As Mary Jackman has argued in The Velvet Glove, paternalism is best understood as a larger strategy employed by a dominant group to defuse actual or potential hostility from the subordinate group, averting conflict and assuaging the dominant group’s guilt.66 A more effective and softer form of social control than force, it extends a “velvet hand” of friendship to a group even as it continues discrimination, subordination, or exploitation of that same group, hoping thereby to bind up inequality with affection.67 Donald VandeVeer expands on this definition by characterizing the paternalist as one who portrays himself acting with generous, benevolent, and disinterested intentions, coupled with a tacit assumption of “greater moral competence.”68 Most important for the chapter here, within the colonial context, as we have seen, it was common 61

  F165/6, letter of June 6, 1892.   F165/194. 63   Ibid. 64   Ibid. 65   Jowett’s investment in Cornelia was not unique. Under Jowett’s “empire-minded mastership,” Balliol became the “college-of-choice for proconsuls” in the Indian civil service: “Between 1874 and 1914 no fewer than 27 per cent of Balliol graduates were employed in the Empire” (Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2003) 186). 66   Mary Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 67   Ibid. 2. 68   Ibid. 12. 62

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for the British to style themselves as parental figures whose authority was based on their intellectual and moral superiority, giving them greater insight into Indian “children’s” needs and aspirations. Because paternalism promotes inequality, it is a position inconsistent with genuine altruism.69 By accepting the “father’s” or “mother’s” definitions of what their needs and aspirations are, “children” legitimize paternal authority by deferring to those definitions. In Oxford, as her letters demonstrate, Cornelia was comfortable in the role of adoptive Indian child or daughter. It was a position familiar to her, given her mother’s childhood in the Fords’ Victorian home and her father’s adoption by the Christian community. She let her own aspirations and future direction – her plans changed from studying medicine to literature to law – be determined by her Oxford mentors (and surrogate parent figures). That the outcome would be service to the Raj was never really doubted, especially given the fact that as an Indian woman studying law, she was an utterly unique and fascinating phenomenon within that Oxford milieu: absolutely fluent in English, highly intelligent, Christian, and Anglophilic. Her epistolary references to her mentors reveal a daughter earnest to win parental approval, and the elite Oxonian and London circles in which she circulated matched her enthusiasm with a correspondent energy to foster her. Yet it is important to recognize a transposition of Sorabji’s own role within that paternalistic dynamic, once she returns to India to do legal work.70 Indeed, as she constructs her persona in her literary writings, she reverses her earlier position and now represents herself as a father/mother to her Indian “children,” as a legal advisor to Indian women living in seclusion, usually widows or wards of the state. It is not the dynamic that alters: the paternalism of Oxford resembles the colonialist paternalism of Bengal or Orissa, though Cornelia is no longer the Indian child but a representative of the Raj. Nor does the language of cross-cultural kinship and adoption to bridge cultural differences and foster connection change in her subsequent writings.71 Her imperial family, however, is re-imagined in terms that the British and Anglo-Indians would have found unique. As a writer, her strategy will reach beyond the discursive limits of the familial metaphors of imperial ideology, which, as we have seen, figure empire 69

  Ibid. 14.   Even as Sorabji obtained a position within the Indian civil service, something very few Indian men were able to accomplish, she fought for recognition and support for her professional work her entire life, having to prove herself both as an Indian and as a woman, a situation Gooptu charts throughout her biography of Sorabji. In relation to the paternalism of the Raj, Sorabji always remained an inferior, a “daughter,” though to the Indian women she advised and represented she occupied the role of superior “mother” figure. 71   It would not be right to suggest that Cornelia lost or gave up her Indian family – as her parents did – for an English one. For one thing, religious conversion was not an issue, and there was no cultural divide between them: both parents and children were Anglicized Christians. Indeed, Cornelia remained very close to her family all her life, writing frequent letters to her “beloved no 80” (the address of the family home in Poona’s Civil Lines). 70

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abstractly as a transnational political family. Through her energetic cultivation of her readers’ sentimental responses to Indian babies, Sorabji asks her readers imaginatively to adopt Indian children into the innermost spaces of their hearts and hearths. The reconstructed families of her writings represent a symbolic return to the appropriative missionary practice of placing Indian children in Anglo-Indian (“British”) homes, though here it is in strictly secular fashion. Literal adoption becomes metaphoric, adoption; family belonging is no longer restricted to one’s own private, racially- and culturally-identical kinship group. Instead, it becomes a kind of “reverse colonization”: the British family construct re-imagined along lines that include the deeply affective recognition and inclusion of native customs, language, and bodies. Invitation to the Nursery: Sun Babies I (1904) Cornelia Sorabji’s first volume with an exclusive emphasis on Indian children, Sun Babies I, was published by John Murray in 1904. Written primarily for a middle-class British audience, these brief portraits of individual Indian children are accompanied by a few photographs and a glossary of common Indian words appended at the book’s close. The narrative’s dual voicing, its address to adult and child audiences both, made it marketable to child and adult readers. Intriguingly, in her letters that chart the book’s genesis, Sorabji speaks in a kind of dual voice herself, e.g., as both child and adult, to Allahabad judge Harrison Falkner Blair, her closest friend (and secret love).72 Cornelia’s adoption of adult and child voices in her letters to Blair anticipates some key features of the Sun Babies I, namely, the constitution of things Indian as child-like, the crosscultural and cross-racial kinning, and the creation of alternative families. They also further reveal the extent to which Sorabji was striving to realize this ideal in her own private life. As the following examples illustrate, she calls or refers to Harrison Falkner Blair as “Dads” and to herself as his “Babes” and the “Baby” (in abbreviated form, D—s, B—s, and the B—y).73 At times, she lapses into a kind of baby-talk: you need to make almost daily epigrams for a certain Baby …74 72   Blair appears to have been Cornelia’s most important love during her lifetime; their relationship lasted from 1901 until 1907 when he died (in her arms). Some 20 years her senior and married, Harrison Falkner Blair was a judge on the Allahabad High Court, and he was Cornelia’s professional mentor and ally, a friend of her brother Richard and hers, and eventually someone with whom she was deeply in love. 73   Richard Sorabji explains that Cornelia called Blair “Dad” (Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women’s Rights in India (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) 97). 74   F165/22, letter of January 9, 1902.

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Bless you D—s [Dads]. I wonder if anyone in all the wide world gives so much pleasure as you do with your budgets [letters] to your little B –s [Babes]. Were you knowing in some silent inward way as you steamed along to Port Said how on Monday morning the Marseilles packet gladdened a Baby heart?75 Always of yore did you occur to the B—s like some knight or a B—y tale of chivalry standing almost unmoveable and reaching all over the Courts? ‘Member?76 ..And – that commission, D—s [Dads]. How exciting! The B—s feels like a child over it. Was it a “really and truly story”?77

Cornelia casts herself as the Indian girl-child (his “littlest Con” in the letter of January 7, 1902) to an Anglo-Indian man who is senior enough to be her father and who, in a role that must have felt comfortable to her after Oxford, promoted and fostered her future direction, like those university dons.78 (Blair, for example, worked to get Cornelia’s legal position on behalf of the purdahnashin fully funded and operative.) The paternalistic elements of their relationship, evident at such moments as “And are you really ‘proud’ of the B—y? She’ll gird up her loins and work extra hard for that little word of praise,”79 expand to a fantasy of shared authorship of the Sun Babies I volume. The slippage between Cornelia depicting herself, on the one hand, as a child hoping for parental approval of her achievement alternates, on the other, with one where she and Harrison emerge as parents or mother-father, birthing this “brood”: I think you will like my nursery. I had you in my mind, and your approval all the time I read thro’ them [during proofreading].80 It seems an omen of success to be including you … in my preparations! [he’s sending photographs for the book] Twill make my next book ours too.81 Wd you like me to dedicate the Baby-book to you D—s? No one will guess, but you and me.82

75

  F165/23, letter of October 23, 1903.   F165/24, letter of April 15, 1904. 77   F165/24. letter of April 17, 1904. 78   Richard Sorabji indicates that Blair was 28 years older than Cornelia (Opening Doors 90). 79   F165/22. letter of April 17, 1902. 80   F165/24. letter of May 24, 1904. 81   F165/22, letter of April 17, 1902. 82   F165/23, letter of April 27, 1903. 76

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For Dedication. I think of “To – who knows why.” What do you think of that – for a book of Spring-Babies.83

Although Blair would finally reject a public dedication, what is remarkable in these letters is how talk of littleness, of nurseries, of babies and toddlers literal and metaphorical, creeps in everywhere, beyond talk of the book per se.84 Weaving itself around the couple, this discourse imaginatively confers upon them the status of fertile parents (“the week here held its due mead. More babies”). In doing so, she not only seeks to legitimize their relationship (Blair was married), but to promote a new intimacy capable of overcoming the alienating effects of cultural difference.85 After the failed attempt to get Blair to adopt the family (their collection of “sun babies”) by being named in the dedication, Sun Babies’ dedication ended up as follows: “To Her of the West because She Understands. ‘For the Melodies of the Dawn Star and the Evening Star are one’.” (The “Her” refers to Princess Mary, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a friend of Sorabji’s.) Heterosexual intimacy gives way to a more abstract, feminized ideological kinship, exemplified by the book’s dedication to a member of the royal family. Further, the volume reiterates a universal baby nature that transcends cultural differences. The dawn star in the east (Cornelia) that heralds India’s sun babies is “one” with the western evening star (Princess Mary) that illuminates the rising of England’s “moon babies,” as she will later call them. A brown Indian woman who portrays herself as a mother to brown babies, the narrator is not alone but in league with white English women who also become these children’s symbolic mothers, forming an extended female family. Maternity now takes primacy over conjugality in defining the family. To minimize the appropriative gesture of white women taking brown children as their own (even if only symbolically), the text posits the inherent sameness of Indian and English babies. The decision to represent India’s “child life” for her second book is interesting in another context as well, namely, the reviews of her first book Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901), a set of tales focusing on the lives of Indian women in seclusion, most of whom Sorabji knew from her legal work on their behalf. Although reviews of the book were generally favorable, and its adoption by Mudie’s circulating library ensured robust sales, most reviews commented on how “sad” or “melancholy” the stories were.86 One reviewer noted that the female protagonists within each story “[struggle] blindly for something,” caught within the forces of modernization and social change that they do not survive.87 Indeed, each 83

  F165/23, letter of May 6, 1903.   For Cornelia’s mention of Blair’s rejection of a dedication, see F165/23 (letter of June 12, 1903). 85   F165/23, letter of April 3, 1903. 86   F165/22, letter of July 17, 1902. 87   See especially the reviews of The Guardian 1-1-1908; The Spectator 12-21-1901 and The Daily Chronicle 2-16-1902 (F165/197). 84

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story ends with their death. In discussing with Blair her progress on Sun Babies I, she alludes to John Milton to describe it as tonally opposite from Love and Life: “But my big piece of news is that I have finished my new book – and you’ll like it better than my last. That was my Il Penseroso this is my L’Allegro.”88 Whether this assessment was directly provoked by the criticisms of Love and Life’s excessive gloominess or not, for her second depiction of India Sorabji chooses comedy over tragedy and a preference for children over wives and mothers. This shifts the content decidedly away from politics; the stories of Love and Life are positioned within the highly charged context of reform: female education, the situation of young wives within the extended family, sati, child marriage, widowhood, the resistance of rural India to modernization, and the famine efforts of the British are all discussed. In contrast, the protagonists of Sun Babies I range from five to eight years of age; none are married, allowing the contentious issue of child marriage largely to be bypassed. Resourceful and endearing children, they ask nothing more of the narrator and the reader than affection and friendship. Rejecting the trope of India as a “problem child” needing immediate assistance – part of the white man’s burden – Sorabji instead represents it as a loveable child engaged with the world in play. She thereby avoids taxing her British readers’ “compassion fatigue” vis-à-vis the material and emotional costs of maintaining empire. The adoptive relationship between British readers and her Indian babies that she is cultivating is a “made” relationship that feels like a “natural” one, because it is so freely given.89 Sun Babies I stands out within the canon of children’s literature in the early twentieth century, and especially children’s literature about empire; there is nothing comparable to her literary portraiture of colonized child subjects for a British adult and child readership. Generically speaking, too, it is unlike the dominant juvenile literature of empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. For boy readers, the highly patriotic adventure story reigned supreme. This genre celebrated adventure in exotic places abroad, high spirits, and military prowess, dovetailing with the public school ethos of athleticism and chauvinism. A powerful means of popularizing imperialism, adventure tales “legitimated [violence] as part of the moral force of a superior race.”90 Girls’ tales focused primarily on domestic tasks and child-rearing, until the Girl Guide movement at the beginning of the twentieth century introduced values of militarism directly to the domestic sphere. In adventure tales for girl readers, these domestic skills enabled the tales’ protagonists to dominate a wider world of adventure. The extremely popular Bessie Marchant, for example, made the domestic virtues of “forethought, thrift, and motherly love” compatible, even essential, components 88

  F165/23, letter of May 6, 1903.   Judith S. Modell speaks of adoption as a “made relationship” that is like a “natural relationship” in Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 2. 90   John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (New York: Manchester University Press, 1985) 199. 89

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of courage and successful action.91 Sun Babies I does not resemble this literature for either girls or boys. Indeed, its Indian baby subjects make its audience very young girls and boys and the British mothers (or mother surrogates) who would be reading the volume aloud to them. Its focus on Indian babies differentiates it from Mrs. Sherwood’s early nineteenth-century novels where British infants are devotedly nursed and raised by their Indian ayahs or caretakers – an overt attempt to characterize colonial ties as animated by deep gratitude and loyalty, voluntarily expressed by a feminized Indian population there to serve.92 In Sorabji, the roles are reversed. British maternal love is directed at Indian children, and this maternalism epitomizes the Raj’s relations with its subject population. If children’s literature of empire is a project whereby child readers may be colonized, fashioned into colonial subjects or future colonizers, then Sun Babies I rejects the chauvinism of the adventure tale. It embraces instead the tender, playful attitude of the mother in the nursery as the best model for imperial engagement, a way of relating to distant colonial populations distinct from political conquest and moral improvement. Readers can sense this gentle nursery attitude even in “Son-of-the-Wind,” the most political tale in the volume. I begin with it because it offers important insights into key features of Sorabji’s imperialist ideology. The second to last story, “Sonof-the Wind” is the only allegorical tale in the book; its fanciful tale operates as an explanatory myth of how segregation must fail as a solution to racialized aggression. Set in a far distant past, the antagonisms between the “grey and brown races” seem directly relevant to the English and Indians under the aegis of empire. In conflict, in a time long ago, are “two kinds of Monkey People … the Greys and the Browns … Grey Monkeys scratched Brown ones, and Brown Monkeys pulled Grey Tails, and no one could ever determine who did what, and when it was time to stop” (SB I, 123). Although they share a common geographical and cultural ancestry, the only plan to halt the conflict is a strict geographical separatism along racial lines: Let us divide, they [the Wise Ones] said, the Greys to the Grey, and the Browns to the Brown. So shall we live many years, and be at peace … My children, the Browns go to the East, and the Greys to the West. Teach the treaty to your children, and to your children’s children: and let each monkey keep it. (SB I, 130)

This ancient solution of the “Wise Ones” will be re-evaluated within the story itself.

91

  J.S. Bratton, “British Imperialism and the Reproduction of Femininity in Girls’ Fiction, 1900–1930,” in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, ed. Jeffrey Richards (New York: Manchester University Press, 1989) 200–5. 92   Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 231.

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Central to Sorabji’s reconsideration is the commentary provided by the eponymous protagonist, Son-of-the-Wind. He is a monkey of indeterminate race and age: on the one hand, he possesses a “withered old face” (SB I, 124); on the other hand, he is notable for his child-like presence: he is described as a “boy” (SB I, 124) with “little arm[s],” a “little head” and “little elbows” (SB I, 126). He takes delight in serving as drummer boy and trumpeter and summoning everyone to council to hear the governing elders’ decisions. His main love, however, is not being an agent of those who govern, but in playing with both the grey and brown monkey babies, who use his tail to ascend and descend among the treetops in search of ripe figs. As such, he stands as a thinly-veiled double for the narrator/ author, who is similarly smitten by babies: she, after all, is writing tales that strive to carry the weight of brown and white (sun and moon) babies as lightly as Son-ofthe-Wind does his charges. And it is Son-of-the-Wind who provides commentary on the proposed solution as all the monkeys gather: “Only the very little ones, the Babies who climb up my tail, and the very old ones, who sent me on this errand, have understanding and wisdom; all the rest are fools. Life is going to rob them of half their hills. The Wise Ones will suffer too … but the Wise Ones are made wise by their sufferings; so the fools are made use of after all!” And that thought made him so happy, that he pulled out his drums with a flourish. (SB I, 126–7)

He plays his drums so joyfully and scratches himself so “merrily” that instead of solemnity, a laughter infects both the councilors and the people: “without knowing it … all the Council, and the Brown and the Grey Monkey Folk, chattered and rocked with joy” (SB I, 128). Though the elders deem separation necessary because the adult monkeys do not understand why they continue to fight, the adults feel remorse looking at the “good land” which they are about to lose and which might have been “all theirs and ‘both’ theirs, and they were sad” (SB I, 129). In contrast to this adult foolishness, the babies and Son-of-the-Wind possess an innate wisdom grounded in an emotional bond easily capable of transcending race. The babies “knew they would never again climb up that dear tail together, so happily, so happily” (SB I, 130, my emphasis), and Son-of-the-Wind “knew that he could not bear the fig-trees without them both together, Greys and Browns, a-scramble, a-scramble up his tail” (SB I, 131, my emphasis). Embedded in this fable are numerous features that help the reader identify Sorabji’s political stance. First and foremost is the message of racial unity characterized by the unselfconscious play of babies “brown” and “grey.” Their naïveté is a higher form of wisdom, as is Son-of-the-Wind’s comic deflation of the adult origins of conflict and their pretense of solemnity. Racial difference and strife, it turns out, can easily be dissolved by the laughter initiated by children’s gambols or by a jester figure like Son-of-the-Wind. While such a solution would strike an adult reader as credulous, as would the use of a simplistic fable to tackle the racial complexities of Indian–British relations, the tale asserts that

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the proposed solution, geographical and racial separation, though seemingly necessary, is neither beneficial nor durable. The radicalism of racial separatism is at best an occasion for garnering wisdom from suffering. The price of racial division is inevitably paid for by all, but it is the younger generations, the narrator intimates, who disproportionately bear the loss, ceding a portion of their happiness and a portion of their inheritance (their land). Better yet the unwritten, intimated solution, one in which “brown” and “grey” discover their sameness, learning to share resources and territory. In essence, through her affiliation and identification with the babies and Son-of-the-Wind, the narrator asks her readers to accept the territory of India as one essentially belonging to both parties, to their mutual benefit. A further insight the story offers is that the grey ones (the British) are family, not foreigners or enemy invaders dispossessing India of its wealth or land. Of course, such a solution simultaneously mocks adult political discourse. Sorabji can only counter-write the powerful myths of racial difference and division upon which the Raj is legitimized by returning to the nursery. Thus, for Sorabji, imperial relations become re-imagined as the kinship of brown (sun) and white (moon) babies, with the Raj’s representatives as surrogate parents. To highlight this dependence in Sun Babies I, Indian children are separated from imaginatively realized, engaged Indian families, or even other adults. Three of the tales feature orphans; in the remaining, the children still possess parents, yet they are “social orphans,” e.g., the family does not play any role in the narrator’s framing of their lives or her stories (“Mera – The Study of a Parsee Child” is an exception). The parents are shadowy figures in the background, either never mentioned or only once. The ramifications of this literal and symbolic orphanhood reverberate throughout the volume. In general, orphan figures by their very presence signan an inadequacy in the larger society, demonstrating the need for a new kind of family.93 In representations of empire as domestic idyll such as Sorabji’s, the introduction of the Indian orphan reveals a “dysfunction” within Indian society and the necessity of a new assimilation to British family norms. To this end, the text works to devalue Indian adults. In a volume that restricts individuality to children, Sorabji never imagines Indian adults as competent individuals. The effect is enhanced in the volume by a few plucky Indian child tricksters who outsmart dim-witted Indian adults. In other stories, like the “Feast of Lights,” the parent figure is uncaring. The children sing “for a woman who called herself their mother,” who sends them out to perform (SB I, 136); she is shown taking no other interest in the children beyond this exploitative one. In “My Master’s Slave,” the adult crowd who waits every morning for an audience with the Sahib is undifferentiated, except by caste: The “sons of sloth,” waiting for audience with the “Fount of Wisdom” were many and various … oddments of humanity with petitions; stray “box-wallahs” 93   See Laura Peters, Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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Like the Presence, the narrator skirts past the adults, the “sons of sloth” with their endless, insignificant demands as quickly as possible. In contrast, the Indian children she depicts ask for nothing; they are a perfected imperial fantasy of the colonized, not requiring or demanding anything. In “Chota Chaudikar” [nightwatchman, diminuitive], this tendency to see Indian adults as generic types continues; here they are defined by a proclivity to thievery. The gardeners sell the Sahib’s mangoes without permission, while the zemindars (landlords) from the country attempt to pass themselves off falsely to the Sahib as desititute peasants. The pilfering of the Sahib’s mangoes or the evasion of tax revenues owed to the Raj form a continuum of adult thievery that extends to the real dacoits (robbers) who trespass at night on the Sahib’s grounds later in the story. Even the Chaukidar, the nightwatchmen, who are there to protect the Sahib’s property, are descended from “a race of thieves” and are untrustworthy, protecting only “as a rule” (SB I, 39). In “Fleetfoot,” the clerks who work for the “ballister-sahibs” calculate the extent to which they can take advantage of their masters: “‘If your master is a fool, move him to pity by your poverty; if a wise man, move him to admiration by your attainments’” (SB I, 48) – and those “attainments” prove to be nothing more than recycled recommendations, with no reference to the bearer.94 Finally, the denigration of Indian adults is sharpened by the lightly mocking tone the narrator adopts when characterizing them, as if she were sharing an in-joke with her adult readers about those pesky, calculating, pilfering, yet ineffectual Indians. Her engagement, affection, and respect are reserved solely for Indian children. The absence, or backgrounding, of any responsible Indian parental figures clears the way for the narrator – and the implied British adult reader – to assume a protective, tender attitude toward the volume’s children. Depicting each Indian child through a set of anecdotes that capture his or her actions, character, and voice, the narrator’s attention focuses on the child’s qualities rather than on her own response, judgment, or even relation to the child. She is primarily there as one who records the child’s being. At those times when the narrator’s presence does become obvious, through direct involvement or commentary, she acts and 94   The Khansamah (master of stores) in “Fleetfoot” is the exception to the rule of Indian petty thievery; he trains the narrator how to avoid being swindled by those who shop for her. He is a type nonetheless, for he is “irresistibly picturesque” (SB I, 50). Further, his child-like qualities signify his exemption from adult corruptibility, for despite a back “bent with the weight of eighty years, he [is] as sprightly as the veriest infant among them” (SB I, 51).

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speaks much as a close family friend, an aunt, or a surrogate mother might. In “Fleetfoot,” which focuses on two young children who belong to a street gang and share a household together, the narrator cannot stop noticing their skinny, dirty faces: “It was famine-time, and they looked such a pinced and dirty little crowd” (SB I, 55). She does not express disgust at their appearance, nor does she take a morally condemnatory tone. Yet it is clear she is disturbed by the neglect legible in their dirty faces, so she offers them money if they will go to the pump to wash, in effect turning it into a game: “See here,” I said, “your way-shower [guide] will I take today [to escort her around the market], even as you wish. But for the rest of you, go wash at that pump, and there will be coppers for clean faces, when I return” … “Thalaama-Thalamma-a, Huzoor-a, Huzoor-a,” came from them, as in a twinkling they were half-way to the pump. (SB I, 55)

She continues to go to market because she is “attracted” to these children, her “little knot of babies” (SB I, 63) and later, her “little gang of babies” (SB I, 68). With another orphan “sun-baby” named Pagal, her concerns whether he is hungry lead the narrator to approach the gardener, who is of Pagal’s caste, to ask him to cook for Pagal (SB I, 7). Her parental, protective attitude is again visible when she would prolong the service of her “chota chaukidar” (little nightwatchman) to stave off his development into a familiar type of “tyrant” (SB I, 46), e.g., a husband. In a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia for his lost childhood, she tries to impede his maturation. Reciprocally, he too adopts her, the “orphaned” narrator and runs errands in her service: “‘It is a pity … that she should not belong to somebody, should be just a Miss Sahib … but we cannot leave the Presence’s little elderling all by herself; so she will have to be my Miss Sahib.’ And thereafter a proud little Chaukidar was he to be allowed to run errands in the service of his adoption” (SB I, 42).95 The child performer of the volume’s last story dies young, but the narrator’s fondness leads her to offer a light in his memory each year during the Festival of Lights, the child’s favorite holiday (SB I, 146). Finally, in her friendship with another child, Piyari, known for her ability to care for “one-things” (SB I, 78) – things that are without father and mother or anyone to love them – the narrator evades her own loneliness: “You would almost choose to be a ‘one-thing’ yourself, an you knew the extra niceness of little sensitive Piyari” (SB I, 78). While the narrator’s interest in these Indian children may speak of her own longing for a lost Indian childhood,96 the relationships she forms with them 95

  It is very likely that the “Presence” referred to in this story is her brother, the judge Richard Sorabji, with whom she was sharing a house in Allahabad. 96   I am reminded here of Ashis Nandy’s characterization of a dominant strain in Rudyard Kipling’s work, where the reader glimpses a longing to recapture his own Indian childhood (The Intimate Enemy 64–70). Here, in a moment of self-identification, the narrator desires to run in the rain with her Chota Chaudikar (SB I, 36).

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constitutes an alternative form of kinship to the “natural family,” defined in the 1871 census of Great Britain as “founded by marriage and [consisting], in its complete state, of husband, wife, and children.”97 Despite the supposed naturalness of the nuclear family, large numbers of “transnormative” families existed both in fact and fiction: single-parent families, families headed by aunts or uncles, step-parents, grandparents, siblings, or the state.98 Here, the presence of orphans precipitates a rethinking of the imperial family. Without figures such as the Sun Babies’ narrator – or the British women readers who identify with her emotionally – an imperial familial idyll is unimaginable. Thus, the narrator’s own motherlike response, and the similar ones she would elicit, can be seen as examples of imperial maternalism at work. Yet even this seems an insufficient reading. To say empire is a kind of family is very different from making it into immediate family, especially to the extent that Sorabji does. Whether kinning these children to herself or imagining herself adopted by them, the Anglicized Indian narrator (the “Miss Sahib”) is either incorporated into an existing Indian family, in the case of those children who are not orphans, or positions herself as the symbolic head of a new kind of family – bi-cultural at the very least, ethnically mixed, diverse in religious beliefs. It is a family very different from the normative idea of the Indian or British family that privileges biological, racial, or blood ties in defining the limits of kinship. Here, she stages the most intimate form of kinship with strangers. To accept this new model of family – one that disengages familial affection from any foundation in “biology” – is the invitation she extends to her readers. In essence, she promotes transcultural adoption long before it was legally a possibility. Unlike missionary adoptions of Indian children, open to stigma and fostering conflict, her symbolic ones carefully remain free of any mention of or association with cultural or religious conversion. Directed to the children she knows and depicts, the narrator’s gentle tone models the response she seeks from her adult English readers. This tone was not atypical of narrators in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature, who, as Barbara Wall has shown, often presented themselves as surrogate parents alternating “between friendly companionship and uncompromising authoritarianism in addressing children,” even as they spoke to adults.99 Through a double address, then, an adult complicity is also created in Sun Babies I. The narrator puts the adult reader in the same position she occupies, namely, that of a fond, doting mother or aunt-like figure, enchanted by these children. She claims, for example, that one hot morning she made friends with a “firm-limbed gnome,” a little nightwatchman, and that this diminutive creature offered himself as “[her] bodyguard” (SB I, 23): “Very amusing was it to hear the pitter-patter of his small feet, and the feeble thud of his little stick … and when a tiny fist tried the bolts, you turned in your snug bed with a sense of blame, that your security should be in   Thiel, The Fantasy of Family 8.   Ibid. 8–9. 99   Wall, The Narrator’s Voice 40–2. 97 98

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nursery keeping” (SB I, 40). For comic effect, she contrasts his small stature with his exaggerated pride in his capabilities as security guard: He loved to tell me about his nightly duties. “I’ve heard of a robbery at No. 8, Miss Sahib, and we only two doors off! What might have happened had I not been awake and taking care of you – God alone, He knows!” Or it was something more circumstantial. “The gang came, and I gave them chase with my father’s big stick, and they lay prone – yes! all of them, their heads in Alliston Sahib’s holding, their feet in ours. With one blow split I all their heads in twain.” (SB I, 40)

In another story, inviting the readers’ humorous response, the seven-year-old Pagal insists that he needs no one to cook for him, since he has “been these many years [his] own provider … ‘Besides [he continues], a man gets settled in his ways. I can cook for myself’” (SB I, 7). Later, teaching other children the customs of the household, he refers to them as “little brothers,” as “child[ren],” whom he symbolically carries: “Art hoisted well on my shoulders now?” (SB I, 13), he asks. In one extended episode, Pagal’s cleverness, exhibited as knowledge of the law, is used to protect the Sahib’s interests: “We have brought the Sahib our quarrels,” they said meekly. “Humph!” said Pagal. “So have said others – worthy men. What is the cause? Is it a civil or a criminal matter?” They told him. “That would be civil,” he decided. “What is the value of the land in dispute?” They told him again, obedient. He laughed. “That! Go, there be vakils [advocates] many to suit your purpose. My Presence deals in bigger things.” (SB I, 18–19)

After stringing them along further and taking them for water and a smoke, Pagal gets them to relax. “Crossquestion[ing]” them, he leads them to artlessly betray themselves (SB I, 20). Indian adults are duped by a child, and the narrator invites her reader to find this joke neither disturbing nor grotesque but adorable, because Pagal’s duplicity is, by virtue of his being a child, “innocent”; further, it is loyalty on behalf of the Sahib. Scenes such as this one come close to narrative fantasies of empire as a game, much like Kipling’s Kim. What distinguishes it from them is the nursery setting: it is a game without high stakes; a game that makes the performance of empire into a child’s rehearsal; and finally, the participants (including the audience) in the game constitute a kind of transnormative family, composed of a maternal circle of women, British and one Indian woman, knitted together by laughter, affection, and protectiveness for their “sunbabies.” The maternalism and paternalism in the volume largely belong to the narrator, who in the second story becomes the “father and mother” (the ma-bap) of the household (SB I, 62). Yet figureheads of male imperial authority also express affection for these children within the tales. In the volume’s leading story, “The Master’s Slave,” Pagal’s fidelity and cheekiness are rewarded with the Sahib’s

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fondness. Denominated the “Presence” and petitioned by Indian adults as “protector of the poor” and “protector of the homeless,” the Sahib maintains an aloof bearing before them, reinforcing the narrator’s claim that he is “autocratic” like an “Eastern potentate” (SB I, 2). Yet Pagal elicits the Sahib’s fondness, transmuting unsentimental autocracy into benign paternalism: in return for being “a dog in devotion and loyalty” (SB I, 9), Pagal twice states that he is held “very close” in the Sahib’s affections (SB I, 10, 13). He likens himself to a sparrow within the Sahib’s house: “‘And I – could I be of less value to my Sahib than that little sparrow thing? Surely not!’” (SB I, 15). Comparing himself to a sparrow in the Sahib’s care, Pagal tropes the Sahib as a Christian God who cares for the smallest things.100 Part of the transnormative family Sorabji constructs in Sun Babies I includes the implied British child readers whom the volume also addresses as part of its dual voicing. Many of the embedded stories are clearly directed at a child audience: stories of the Sun god in his chariot (SB I, 83–4); of a cat-girl who becomes a queen (SB I, 71–2); of the origin of the squirrel’s markings (SB I, 30); and of the monsoon storm described as an epic battle of giants (SB I, 35–6). Some interpolated tales are narrated by children, making them doubly interesting to a child audience. While these inserted stories educate Western children in certain myths of Hindu culture, ones that would especially appeal to children, they also work to create and foster a feeling of cross-cultural kinship between British and Indian children. These stories bind the British child-reader to their impish Indian tellers, akin to a favorite cousin or sibling. Reversing imperial propaganda to a degree, s/he is taught to see India as a familiar place and the Indian child as a potential playmate and equal. One reason the cross-cultural kinship Sorabji constructs may seem so unproblematic for her audience is that certain features of her Indian children conform to a very familiar nineteenth-century British discursive construction of childhood. Judith Plotz has named this representational paradigm the “Quintessential Child.”101 Produced by the Romantics, the quintessential child was a kind of fetish within nineteenth-century British literature about children. This adult projection defined childhood universally as the possession of an awakened spiritual and intuitive consciousness, close to nature, and the quintessential child expressed him- or herself with elemental vitality and unselfconsciousness. These features also recur throughout Sun Babies I. For example, the universality of childhood is underscored when the narrator presents the children as seemingly unaware of social differences, such as race, caste, religion, or class, markers that would complicate their “child-nature.” Instead, their buoyant spirits, and their love of gardens and animals point to an affinity for the natural realm; so, too, their 100

  “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet without your Father’s knowledge not one of them can fall to the ground” (Matt 10:29); The Oxford Study Bible, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 101   Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

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innate spirituality. The unnamed Hindu boy in the last story tells the narrator the origins of the Festival of Lights (Diwali), a day of the dead which he particularly reveres; the little nightwatchman, who fasts “like any devotee,” is, according to his own description, a “religious” (SB I, 37), for whom the winged ants are “emancipated earth slaves, souls of penitents to whom, their task completed, were given wings” (SB I, 37); and upon her initiation into Zoroastrianism, the Parsi child Mera “[thinks] on all those things which had been done in the temple, and … [ponders] them in her mind” (SB I, 116). Her piety is so zealous that she appeals “to God in every simplest duty” (SB I, 117). But it is Piyari, whose epithet is “the loving one” and whose compassion is for the “‘one things’” (SB I, 78) that most embodies the quintessential child’s connection to unseen or unapprehended worlds. Piyari’s questions, such as “how many sunrises have I known?” (SB I, 78), have a strangeness that suggests profundity. Indeed, they draw the “mysticeyed potter” to her. Her existence has, according to the narrator, a grace that is spiritually redemptive not only for the narrator but all who know her: A year of grace – Piyari spent it in her own particular aloofness. She played with her dolls, and with the partridge; she had long talks with the old mad priest, sitting in the sunlight, and she loved and gladdened everything and everybody in her little world, – happiness made flesh. (SB I, 81)

Calling her God’s “sun child” (SB I, 85), the priest tells Piyari she belongs to the “shining ones,” the gods who are loved, not feared, because she is a being compounded of love (SB I, 82). Her love makes her uncomplainingly the scapegoat for other childrens’ misdeeds, content to validate their lies because to do otherwise would disturb their happiness. Similarly, during the Doll Festival, where dolls function as an externalization of evil spirits that threaten a child’s spiritual wellbeing, Piyari’s tender-heartedness renders her incapable of performing the ritual action of beating her doll to drive out evil spirits, for fear of harming her doll. While the other children break “their sticks over their patient doll things” (SB I, 90) – a figure for Piyari’s own scapegoating in school – she sets her doll afloat down the river in a gesture of safekeeping within a divinely animated natural world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Plotz suggests that this discourse of the quintessential child serves as a kind of buffer for coping with social change and uncertainty.102 Similarly, Sorabji’s invocation of this child in Indian guise works to mask the difficulties and complexities of imperial rule for its British audience, offering a familiar, stable, and endearing image of childhood that subtly interpellates the reader within the text’s colonialist ideology. Nancy Ellen Batty argues about the identificatory function that representations of children can assume: “The child is a child, any child, our child, the child within ourselves whom we have irrevocably, regrettably left behind through the passage of years – we are the 102

  Ibid. 39.

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children.”103 Sorabji elaborates this vision with her formation of a cross-cultural family, providing an escape from politics and social conflict in favor of sentimental attachments and a recaptured domestic idealism. It counteracts the threatening demands of Indian nationalism for her British adult readers by materializing India as child, one doggedly faithful to the Sahibs and Presences who represent the Raj, and whose energy and intelligence are directed at protecting their property and interests. These children possess the traits of ideal subordinates: affection, obedience, deference, and loyalty. It is not surprising, then, that the little Chota Chaudikar fasts on behalf of Queen Victoria during her last illness, “in the same faithful way” (SB I, 38) as to his other deities, and who simply refuses to believe in her death, so fully has he already become an imperial subject. Embodying the colony as child means that the identificatory function of children naturalizes both dependency and affection. The Family Matter of the Purdahnashin It is often presumed that Sorabji gave legal advice primarily to adult women living in purdah. In fact, while a large number were mature women, an equally significant number were children. Many were either child widows or orphans who required the care of the state, under the Court of Wards Act of 1901. In a chart where Sorabji documents the doubling in the number of estates and zenanas under her supervision between 1914 and 1920, she also breaks down the number of women, boys, and girls, respectively. The proportionate number of children to adults remains relatively stable, roughly equal on average. To give a few examples: in 1914, women made up 201 of her wards, while boys and girls together made up 187; in 1915, women accounted for 278 of her wards, children 373; in 1919, women numbered 329, children 293.104 This means that when Sorabji writes of the purdahnashin, she is including minors under her charge, although they are not explicitly identified as such: “My official family numbered over 600, and varied in age from a 100 to the ‘littlest one’ of a few days old, born in some Rajbari” (IC 181, my emphasis). As her letters reveal, Sorabji is also not averse to using the word “ladies” to describe children: “And my latest ‘job’ is to arrange a marriage for one of the ladies – in a Maharani’s house – a child of 10”; “I was met by The Wind Lady a child of 14.”105 At other times, she allows us to see the purdahnashin as the children they were:

103

  “‘We are the World, We are the Children’: The Semiotics of Seduction in International Children’s Relief Efforts,” in Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context, ed. Roderick McGillis (New York: Garland, 1999) 24. 104   F165/131-4; this data is taken from Sorabji’s annual reports to the Court of Wards. 105   F165/17, letter of March 30, 1905, to Lady Hobhouse and F165/31, letter to Elena Rathbone.

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A new Estate wants to come in … The boy of 21 has died and left a widow of 16 and an infant daughter and a baby en route. You shd [should] have seen the little 16 year old. – a wisp of a child … Her mother was widowed at 14 when this same child was at the stage on its journey (5 months) at which her own baby now is … Who is there to manage the estate and care for the children? If we refuse …106

Nor does she resist representing the adult purdahnashin themselves as children, in The Purdahnashin and other works. They are frequently characterized through diminutives: they are “little,” “small,” or they are her “little ladies.” In her short story “Love and Life Behind the Purdah,” she depicts the teenage wife Piari as an “apt, eager little pupil” with “little bare toes” (LL 45), whose inability to bear her husband a male heir vexes her “poor little brain” (LL 47) and “[frets] her baby heart to pieces” (LL 48). When she does finally give birth to a child, the “poor child” dies as a result: mother and child both children, both babies in Sorabji’s representation. In a letter to Lady Hobhouse, Sorabji describes “these little women” as “children, whom one would undertake to protect against all the world.”107 This maternal attitude is apparently encouraged or reinforced by the purdahnashin themselves. One of them, for example, wittily likens her to Queen Victoria by calling Sorabji “Her Kindness Miss Cornelia Sorabji.”108 In a 1905 letter to Lady Hobhouse, she confesses that she is known in the districts where she works as the Shastri Devi, that is “by the name of the Goddess who protects children and the defenseless.”109 When she tells some of them that she is retiring from her position as advisor to the court of wards, “her ladies” consider it tantamount to maternal neglect: I sd [said] something of retirement. You shd [should] have heard them. I might have been a mother abandoning her children to Jackalls [sic] at the cross-roads (you know that practice w’ baby girls). Leave them! It was unthinkable. I must see each of them thro’ her death ceremonies! And given there … are children, how cd [could] they die in peace if I had not answered them that I wd [would] do the like for these and those who would come after.110

Just as her retirement constitutes abandonment of her charges, the death of her wards is felt by her as that “of a flesh and blood relation.”111 Sorabji’s relations with the girls and women in purdah were built up over years. In her early visits, Sorabji connects with the children in order to forge a 106

    108   109   110   111   107

F165/33, letter of May 6, 1920 to Elena Rathbone. F165/17; sometime in the fall of 1904 (date not legible). Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 104. F165/17, letter of May 1, 1905. F165/32, letter to Elena Rathbone of December 3, 1919. F165/32, letter of July 21, 1920.

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relationship with their mothers. Since she is openly seen as “coming for British India,” she must ingratiate herself with the family.112 In a letter to Lady Hobhouse, she very explicitly describes how she gains the trust of one Maharani, a woman of approximately 30, by playing with the babies and by taking snapshots of them. When she is introduced to the future Maharani – a girl of 10 – she meets a Bride “who must not lift her head, or raise her eyes … till she becomes a Mother.”113 The mother and other women want her photographed, so Sorabji tickles her under her chin, making her involuntarily look up; “When the waiting women and the Maharani thought this a great joke I knew we were friends,” she concludes. On a first visit to a five-year-old ward in the remote state of Churamaon, Sorabji again establishes a rapport with the purdahnashin through child intermediaries: The ward is a boy of five, he has a dear little sister abt [about] a year older, a widowed mother and grandmother. The Babies came first to my tents. They had heavy clothes and ornaments loaded upon their poor little persons, and they looked solemn. So, I turned … the folk out of my tent, and we made friends. The little ward sang me songs and drew me pictures … You should have seen the children crowding about me … watching the little things I was trying to draw them … breathlessly they watched – and would shout with joy … Next time I will carry toys with me.114

By the end of this first visit, she jokes that she will have to grow two more hands, as the ward and his sister hold one each, and the mother and grandmother “at the same time!! … clutching my hand tightly all the time, for fear I should slip away.” Even at the end of her career, in 1920, Sorabji conveys how children were instrumental in developing ties with their mothers, and in ways that serve both the mother’s and Great Britain’s interests: “I … gave all my mind to my work – charming Rani and two darkey babies – I had taken the girl a doll, saw the boy aged 6 – ‘Give to me also an idol like thee!’ It was an English doll, and he was sure that it must be a god.”115 It is not only the children represented in Sun Babies I who are symbolically placed within a larger British family. Intended to mobilize British women on behalf of the purdahnashin, in the wake of increasing governmental reluctance to take on more wards, The Purdahnashin (1916) emphasizes the familial feeling these Indian women have for the Raj.116 Conscious of her audience’s preoccupation and absorption in Britain’s “Great War,” Sorabji rhetorically stresses the individual purdahnashin’s own solidarity with the British war effort: “As much as the most strenuous war-worker has she cared, and perhaps with more poignancy of emotion 112

    114   115   116   113

F165/20, letter to Mrs. Darling of August 15, 1899. F165/17, no date, but sometime in the fall of 1904. F165/17, letter of January 17, 1905 to Lady Hobhouse. F165/3, letter to Elena Rathbone of April 20, 1920. For this reluctance, see Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji 108.

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than any of us, has she prayed for the sorrows and needs of war-time, and for the victory of our King-Emperor in the great struggle” (P xi). These women liken the British to descendents of the Pandavas, a legendary family of mythic warriors celebrated in the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata: “she talks of our Maharajah now as the common property of Empire: and of British fighting men as of direct descendents from the five great Pandava Brothers” (P xiv). For these loyal patriots, George V’s visit to India is a return to “his home in Hindustan” (P xv). Knitting the British–Indian family together in the wake of a European war that directs British attention away from India, Sorabji reiterates the familial tie throughout the work; at one point, it becomes the ideological solution to all the problems India faces: And I am full of hope for the foundation for some sort of Purdahnashin Institute situated in a Purdahnashin Park, where we can tempt our friends to … learn some of the beautiful results which follow upon the interdependence of the human family. “The interdependence of the human family” – is that not what we need to grasp in every direction of life in India? Would not that fact, when mastered, help to break down the barriers of caste? of race? of religion? (P 54)

The recognition of familial interdependence becomes a panacea for Indian–British cultural differences, indeed for all social divisions that generate conflict. That a British love for Indian children could lead to an Indian love for the British was a deeply held fantasy of Sorabji’s going back to her childhood and young adult years. In The Purdahnashin, she recounts the story of a British nurse brought into a zenana to care for a sick baby heir; being a Christian woman the nurse is an “outcast,” and her hands are considered polluting to the child and all who touch him afterwards. To avert this, the baby is always washed in the Ganges before the mother touches him again. One day, however, the mother takes the baby directly out of the nurse’s hands. When quizzed, the Rani states, “‘No need now for purification … Nurse Mem loves our baby. There is no caste in love.’” (P 20). Sorabji comments that there is “no better watchword” than child-love for British intervention in the zenana. Concerns about Indian children’s welfare became a powerful means for Sorabji to promote imperialist policies that address Indian women’s welfare. Despite the descriptions of her fond relations with the purdahnashin, her representation of seclusion in The Purdahnashin largely reinforces stereotypes of Indian girls’ and women’s ignorance, illiteracy, naïveté, and dependency. Sorabji’s proposed Purdahnashin Study Group, modeled on the work of Lady Dufferin, is intended to bring British women to India.117 Sorabji outlines a curriculum whereby these women, first trained in Indian languages and culture, impart their domestic knowledge to their Indian sisters in purdah, enabling them to become more 117   Lady Dufferin, wife of the viceroy in India, set up a fund in 1885 to bring British women doctors, midwives, and nurses to India to care for Indian women who were pregnant or were ill. Many clinics and hospitals were founded in her name.

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independent within the confines of home. The purdahnashin will be taught about sanitation, how to care for others during severe illness, keep household accounts, learn to sew, develop a more global point of view through a study of history and geography, and successfully meet motherhood’s challenges (P 76–80); in essence, everything a middle-class mother in Great Britain might be expected to teach her daughter.118 While literacy is a goal, Sorabji is wary of conservative Hindu reaction to her scheme. She therefore stresses that imitation of any other Western practices will be discouraged (P 79) and that the work of these British women will not lead to Indian women’s neglect of their domestic roles. Yet such an education qualifies as the long-term reform that, for Sorabji, justifies long-term “professional” interference by the British in elite Hindu homes. The Purdahnashin, a brief guide addressed to British women, suggests what their voluntary “service of love” (P 80) in India would look like. Their maternal counsel would be called to “help bridge the gap” between the modernization project of empire, as Sorabji sees it, and the accumulated weight of priestly law that has kept Indian women uneducated (P 35), the end result being a stronger bond between “mother” England and “still-a-child” India. Clearly, there is a contradiction within her portrayal of Indian women as devoted “mother hearts,” given their supposed inability to mother. The context in which she views Indian women is a Western one, one that finds them grossly deficient in household matters and in need of a hefty dose of British practicality, hygiene, and good sense. The tendency to see Indian women as failed mothers is particularly egregious in her pamphlet, Shubala: A Child-Mother, published in 1920 in support of the work of Lady Chelmsford’s League for Maternal and Child Welfare in India. Here, a heavy-handed maternalism seeks to disguise its workings by insisting it will only go where invited and will respect “religious prejudice” (S 27). The title, however, troublingly indexes the symbolic equivalence of Indian mother with child, beyond chronology, that has run through much of Sorabji’s work. Shubala is a child the narrator has known since Shubala was a baby; Sorabji describes herself as an “Aunt-Mother” (S 5), calls her “my Baby Shubala” (S 6), and desires above all to give this Indian girl a Western baby’s childhood (S 1). While managing to forestall Shubala’s marriage until she is 10, this short-lived victory of “love” over “custom” cannot finally protect her: her body too small to bear children, she almost dies giving birth to her first child; her labor cries are not those of “‘a woman in travail,’ but of a child in torture and in preventable agony” (S 6). By age 18, six children later, her health is “absolutely ruined” (S 10). 118   Organizations and legislation both concerned themselves with child welfare and domestic hygiene. As Anna Davin has shown in her essay “Imperialism and Motherhood,” beginning in the late nineteenth century in England, British children were seen as essential to maintaining empire. To that end, a whole range of programs were inaugurated to give dignity to motherhood and to improve deficient “mothercraft” and thus ensure infant survival. See “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5 (Spring 1978): 9–65.

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The intent of the pamphlet is to call attention to the child mortality rate in India. Yet what is most striking in the narrative is the horror story that supposedly characterizes Indian mothering, despite there being, as Sorabji says, no lack of “mother love” (S 11; reiterated on 9 and 13). This pamphlet provides an extensive catalog of the way orthodox Indian mothers, old and young, are singularly incapable of being adequate mothers (defined as raising children in a hygienic environment, who survive illness). The text does this by focusing on Indian mothers’ superstitious practices (such as putting lampblack under children’s eyes to deter evil spirits’ attraction to them), on examples of their gross neglect during illnesses (done to “trick” evil spirits into thinking the child is not valuable), and on the non-existence of prenatal care. Not only is it impossible for her readers to evaluate how widespread such practices are, or how the mortality rates compare to Great Britain’s relative to its population, but the text makes no attempt to depict the strengths of Indian mothers at infant care and childrearing. Instead, they come across as uniformly incompetent; in essence, deadly to their children. For all their vaunted “mother instinct and intelligence” (S 9), there is little difference in the text between them and the Indian cows that do not provide safe milk to drink: “As little do they [mothers] know about … a clean milk and butter supply, though the cow is sacred and ‘our mother’” (S 17). The solution to this, according to Sorabji, is to bring in British “mothers” who will take up their imperial burden: “our responsibility widens, does it not, with every tale that is told” (S 17), for it is “Englishwomen – Mothers and wives who love your homes and your children, who are able to give them [Indian women and children] all that modern knowledge and skill and science can devise” (S 20). So the narrator calls on British mothers and Westernized Indian women (not orthodox women) to adopt Indian children and child mothers and to enfold them in their capable “mother arms” (S 25). In contrast to the Indian cow that gives only dirty milk, they will provide abundant milk, “free of charge” (S 26) and be “Teachers of Mothercraft” to Indian childmothers and mothers (S 25). To vouch for the initiative’s potential success, the narrator offers three examples where she herself brings sick Indian children back to life (S 12, 14, 16). Sun Babies II (1920) When Sorabji created a second volume of Sun Babies in 1919, it proved to be within a context very different from the first volume. She was already contemplating her retirement, although she would not retire until 1922. Her divergent views with the policies of the “G. of I.” (the Government of India) emerge frequently in her letters, as she struggles to come to terms with the increasing vehemence of nationalism and the swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement headed by Gandhi. Unlike the letters to Harrison Falkner Blair in the early 1900s, in which talk of Indian babies is seamlessly integrated into, or emerges out of, the passion she feels for him, in effect creating an interracial, Anglocentric nuclear family, the letters

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of this period – long letters to her friend Elena Rathbone – are full of political talk. Baby talk and polemic apparently do not fit together well; and unlike the letters to Blair, these contain few references either to the writing of this second volume or to its reception. Increasingly concerned about plots to overthrow the Raj, possible strikes, racial animosity, the furor surrounding General Dyer’s behavior at Jallianwalabagh, and resisting all talk of Home Rule, Sorabji aligns herself with a hard-line group of pro-imperialists in Britain, among them Elena.119 Sorabji provides updates on what is happening in India – how opinion is shaping up, how the country and the urban areas differ in their attitudes toward the Raj, how she believes the government can best weather the attacks – and works hard in concert with Elena and various political groups in England to facilitate reform without supporting Home Rule. British–Indian relations are at a point of crisis. Given the widening rift between Anglo-Indian conservatism and Indian nationalist fervor, the figure of the child as mediator between cultures looks increasingly like a necessity or an impossible fantasy, perhaps both. Despite the book’s marketing as a volume about and for children, these stories are clearly targeted more for adults than Sun Babies I, having fewer child trickster figures and no inserted fables or myths intended for child readers and told by child narrators. When Sun Babies II begins its Foreword, it features an Acchawallah, a five-year-old child rower on a Kashmiri lake, dedicated to his (adult) passengers’ transport. Affirming the need for a British presence in India, he will carry British readers – as will the other Indian children in the volume – on a voyage with multiple destinations: to an unfamiliar geographical place, India; to their own child-years or child-like sensibility; and to a nostalgic vision of colonial relations that erases it as a sphere of adult concerns. This boy-child who ferries British visitors in Kashmir tropes the narrator’s role as a translator of things Indian for her British reader: “I pre-empted him as my own special aide-de-camp and knight of the ceremonies, to introduce to my friends across the seas some of the Sun-babies who live on the Indian bank of the river of Life” (SB II, 9). Along with the narrator, this child – a “true brother” to any “child of the Sun or of the Moon” (SB II, 9) – is able to bridge the distance between East and West through the kinship of childhood. Erasing his existence as an ill-paid child laborer for tourists and locals, the text instead presents him as a courtier who invites his fares on a delightful passage: “Of ceremonial and the dignity due to great occasions, he brought remembrance with him, surely, from a past existence … He made a Court function of the mere lifting of cushions into a paddle-boat” (SB II, 9). Reminiscent of imperialism’s fondness for ceremonial relating, his courtly mimicry and his lack of ties, familial or communal, position him as available for new relations. He quickly becomes assimilated to Englishness, a composite of East and West, “a Chenar wood-nymph” and a “Puck,” a “sylvan elf” and a “Robin Goodfellow” (SB II, 9). This latter name, the reader learns, is the rough translation of “Acchawallah,” the nickname bestowed upon him by a British visitor and eagerly adopted by both the 119   Cornelia defends Dyer and accuses the G. of I. of weakness and inconsistency in their assessment of his conduct in her letter of May 27, 1920 to Elena Rathbone (F165/33).

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Figure 4.4

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Watercolor portrait from the cover of Sun Babies (1920), courtesy of Richard Sorabji

narrator and the boy himself: “Acchawallah,” one who is “compounded of all that which is desirable” – a good fellow (SB II, 9), i.e., not troublesome. Lacking any other proper name, his identity is defined by the bicultural work he does, being “our common goodfellow … crossing to the English bank of the river in the paddleboat built for us by the publisher” (SB II, 9). His translation of things Indian into English diminishes his own Indianness, making him a Kim-like figure, a “friend of all the world,” even as he enlarges British readers’ sensibilities beyond their own limited sphere. With this boy’s and the narrator’s assistance, the reader is directly invited to undergo the multiple “translations” being suggested: from one shore to another; from one identity to many others; from an older age to a younger. In their mode of engaging, she and he “realize” imperial citizenship as a universalizing kinship relation: “You will let him help you to realize – will you not?—that Acchawallahs are of one family, the world over” (9).

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What the reader of Sun Babies II should not overlook is the urgency of grafting an adoptive relationship onto British–Indian relations. While literal or social orphans are far fewer in this volume, the narrator emerges as surrogate mother in six of the eight stories. Further, one adoptive mother is not enough; in fact, sometimes a whole nation of mothers is the answer. In contrast to Sun Babies I and Shubala: A Child-Mother (1920), where Indian mothers are absent, exploitative, or incompetent, in Sun Babies II Indian mothers occupy a more central, and loving, place. Nonetheless, they still are deemed incapable of protecting their own children. The cover illustration reveals a highly sentimentalized watercolor portrait of an unidentified child – perhaps one named in the book, perhaps not – a sad child whose face calls upon the reader to care for him (Figure 4.4). The child’s soulfully appealing eyes are at the center of the portrait’s power to draw in the viewer; yet the eyes look off to the side – neither confronting, nor impinging, nor coercing the viewer’s gaze directly and suggesting the child’s lack of agency. He is not an active viewer but a passive, heart-rending object of the reader’s gaze. Further, the child’s undemanding nature, so different from India’s rebellious political subjects at this moment in time, is clear. The eyes do not consciously ask for pity or help but arouse it unwittingly (in true sentimental mode). The strategy of having only the face floating in ether unmoors it from cultural contexts or discourses, easing the process of the viewer’s empathy with this quintessential child. Implied is that his own home cannot give him adequate care, and the visual portrait seeks to redress that lack by gathering a collective of public parents who will. This expanded maternalism appears throughout Sun Babies II, in a fantasized congruity of interests and common-ground between orthodox Hindu mothers with the Anglicized narrator or other British “mothers.” These include nurses, the government of India (represented by the narrator in her official capacity), and finally, even the British royal family. In a story called “The Adoption,” for example, the narrator promises “help and advice” to a Rani who would adopt a son after her husband’s death, to serve as her husband’s “spiritual” son, insuring his soul’s salvation (SB II, 31). The adopted boy, whose birth parents consent to the adoption, confides in the narrator that he no longer belongs to “his very own mother” – “I am a ‘Son given’, and my mother cannot love me” (SB II, 34). And though this voluntary and conscious shift in kinship reveals a great burden placed upon the child, the boy articulates the real symbolic gain of this expansion of kinship. As he says, his entire family is better off in “all now [belonging] to Rajpeople,” which may narrowly refer to the royal family that has adopted him, or the British Raj, of whom he is now a ward (SB II, 34). The story’s old temple, of which the narrator says, “nothing there was, to outward seeing, which kept it from being the temple of all the world” becomes an iconic image of the larger family of “Raj people,” a diverse and far-flung group (SB II, 33). In characterizing an Indian child becoming one of the “Raj people,” the text proclaims the Indian child’s racial mutability. This ability to cast off one’s racial identity in order to be incorporated into the Raj community recurs throughout the text. In “Kamala Rangan,” Kamala’s kin widen until, by the story’s end, his

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Figure 4.5

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“Let the Child Come” from Sun Babies (1920), courtesy of Richard Sorabji

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mother and grandmother proudly claim, “Was there ever such a child? … He brings all the wide world inside these walls” (SB II, 21). At the beginning, his “frail little life” is encompassed by the hands of his mother and grandmother; the narrator persuades them that as a ward, the child’s health and safety “[belong] to us [the British government].” A British nurse and “entire English nursery” are added to safeguard his health, with the permission of the grandmother. The story’s illustration explicitly depicts the rewards of cross-cultural attachment while staving off fears of homogenization. With a caption reading “‘Let the child come’, said Rani Ma” (his mother), the drawing shows Kamala moving from the British nurse’s lap and arms back to his Indian mother’s (Figure 4.5). The nurse does not threaten Indian family ties but renders the bond between Indian mother and child more durable; paradoxically the mother’s willingness to attach the child freely to a wider imperial family gives her child more fully to her in return, a metaphor for what Western reform can do for Indian families. Later, upon the visit of George V and Queen Mary to the Delhi Durbar, the young, now healthy Kamala announces that as the “man” of the family, he will defend the queen’s life from his own distant home: “‘How can these women guard her? … I am taking care of her,’ he said” (SB II, 21). Testimony to his broadened notion of familial piety and kinship, he inherits that “feeling of nearness which is independent of vision” (SB II, 21), an inheritance not bound by physical laws or biological relationship. In yet another story, entitled “The Gift Princess,” the girl Rose kins herself to the British royal family when her own mothering capacity proves inadequate to protect herself or her charges from the dangers of life in India. Survivor of a plague that has taken her parents, leaving her in the care of an aunt, she possesses a “loving little mother heart” (SB II, 11) that leads her to assume care for a group of younger babies (who may or may not be her siblings or cousins). One day, leaving the younger children to enjoy kite-flying, a pastime she is so passionate about that “she would even have left a baby-bundle crying on a doorstep” (SB II, 12), she is told by a mischievous older neighbor that her neglect of her maternal duties means that she will “die of the plague” (SB II, 12). The only antidote, her neighbor claims, is for Rose to see the British king, who is visiting nearby. Rose goes to see (and bless) the “Emperor of India,” and believes that “the Badshah Bahadur’s [emperor’s] face-seeing … won [her] forgiveness” (SB II, 13) and life. Her name changes from Golab Koer (the Rose Princess) to Dan Koer (The King’s Gift), a symbolic baptism into the British royal family, an adoption ratified by the story’s title, “The Gift Princess.” The story reinforces the overarching theme of imperial adoption that the narrator has already set up in the preface, as she transverses the physical and cultural distances of Great Britain’s empire and creates home and family in far-flung corners. In the volume’s foreword, Sorabji recounts having been adopted by the book’s dedicatee, the British youth Geoffrey, who, as a very young child, gave her a lock of his hair to take to India as a token of remembrance. In her narrative, this lock of hair is a way for Geoffrey to stave off separation. It is also an insistance that “India” (our narrator) not forget him, that it hold on to him forever: “there was the fairy silken curl of my moon-baby friend, lying in the palm of his hand. ‘Oh Geoffrey,’ I said, ‘I will take it

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to India, and keep it always and always.’ ‘And will there,’ said Geoffrey, ‘be thinkings of Geoffrey in the Ce-orl?’” (SB II, 6). In contrast to Sun Babies I, where the narrator was almost always in the background, here she steps into the foreground, and her personal relationships with Indian children become an important subject of the text. In the two “Bhola” stories, the narrator is adopted by the serving boy Bhola, who “makes himself [her] special province,” and who sees them as a unit of two: “‘Our ways are our ways. Who else should know them?’,” he asserts (SB II, 37). In another story, Kinga, a paragon of devotion who will only listen to the narrator and not to any other Indians in the household (“Kinga listens to no one of us-people,” a servant complains, 18), adopts the narrator’s family as his own, saluting her mother’s picture every morning (SB II, 16). The narrator encourages this close bond by teaching him reading and writing, how to pray, and tending to his moral education. Though the narrator hopes to place him “in … his-people’s school in the hills,” Kinga resists, insisting he wants to continue as her servant, “because there is sadness in my heart in any other place” (SB II, 18), a flattering colonialist fantasy of the “Miss Sahib’s” indispensability to his future well-being. In “Kamala Rangan,” discussed earlier, the narrator’s increasing visibility in Sun Babies II is again underscored when she secures for the sickly child an “English nurse” and notes with pleasure that he “waxe[s] strong and prosper[s]” (SB II, 19); similarly, for Kalidas, a dear “wee boy” with “pathetic eyes” (SB II, 23), the narrator undoes a curse put upon him by his grandmother, who wants another grandchild to inherit the estate, and, as a result of her efforts, “the wizened face los[es] … its plaintiveness of ill-health” (SB II, 25). In yet another tale, she encourages Nagan, who is in the hospital, to play with toys, luring him back from a suicidal neurosis to a happy childhood. Toys further cement the bond between narrator and child in “Shubala” (the eponymous child of the pamphlet, depicted at a younger age). There is an implicit suggestion that bereft of the toys that British children possess, Shubala and her brother Madan are deprived of an imaginatively sustaining childhood; their only toys are clay figurines which represent divinities, the Juggernaut and his brother and sister. With a pencil and slate and a drawing of a horse, the narrator – a mother-figure – opens another world to them beyond that of their religion, “a world of wonder and beauty” (SB II, 42), the “spiritual” world of childhood: “This was the beginning of the childrens’ acquaintance with many of the joys of childhood; and toy-people, and flesh and blood animal-people, soon took the place of the Juggernauts reserved for worship” (SB II, 42). By the story’s end, the narrator’s lessons have shaped the boy Madan into a figure familiar to her British readers: he is “very like an English schoolboy,” a “wise Bengali convert to the British gospel of play” (SB II, 44). If the play that the narrator teaches provides one means of imperial interpellation and kinning, so too do the patriotic games she records Indian children playing. A few years earlier, Sorabji’s volume entitled Tales of the Great Ones (1916) distanced itself from current events by referring back to the mythic time of Sanskrit epic; Sun Babies II references an enduring British Raj. Tales features Indian myths and episodes centered on great Indian heroes and acts of heroism, re-contextualized for British children. In educating them about Indian culture

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in this way, Sorabji taps into a tradition of martial grandeur that had particular resonance at that historical moment, as Indian imperial troops fought side-byside with young British soldiers in the trenches of northern Europe. This message of military solidarity is fully embraced in Sun Babies II. Here, militarism is not distanced from empire, but rather from its violent history of domination, by being made a timeless form of play. These children demonstrate their high standard of character by an ethic of soldierly service, duty, and selflessness to the Raj. Kinga sings “Tipperary,” proudly carries the coat of a wounded soldier (SB II, 15), and plays at being a soldier (SB II, 17); he cuts out war pictures, enacts mock drills, and works himself into a “spirit of daring … over the thought of the war” (SB II, 18). Kamala Rangan, the youngest zamindar subject of the king and queen who, as already mentioned, is ready to defend them, leaves his tin toy sword in the state “Toshakhana” (Treasury) for safekeeping after their visit. He apprehends the king as a “God,” because he does not need to see him “to feel Him just here” (SB II, 21). In a coincidence with symbolic resonance, the proximity of imperial power that he feels is ratified spatially in the tale: his property “adjoin[s] the battlefield of Plassey” (SB II, 21), a key battle won by the East India Company that inaugurated Great Britain’s de facto colonial rule in India.120 Kamala’s desire to defend the Raj continues as a British friend teaches him Boy Scout drills, and he reiterates those “words of command” throughout the zenana – an experience the narrator savors as being “really quite absolutely delicious” (SB II, 21). Bhola, another boy in Sun Babies II, is interested in photographs of young soldiers (whether Indian or AngloIndian is not clear) gone to fight in World War I. In a tacit acknowledgement of kinship, he expresses a desire to shield the British from harm: “‘Are our friends in danger in England? Why not ask all peoples of them, to come and stay with us? So shall everything be right’” (SB II, 39). These children’s patriotism takes on added significance given the narrator’s dedication of the book to her “moon baby” Geoffrey: “To Geoffrey, Killed in action in France, 26th March, 1918.” Great as the personal tragedy of Geoffrey’s death is for her, she implicitly suggests that his “sacrifice” – “he gave all that he had to give” (SB II, 6) – must be seen within the larger context of empire. When she writes that “Geoffrey’s gifts to his friends, and his sacrifices for his friends, did not end with nursery days,” she is also referring back to that lock of Geoffrey’s hair which the narrator took to India when he was a child, a sacrificial cord of connection that symbolized an affectionate, voluntary attachment. That talisman was meant to ensure that India and her sun babies did not forget “Great Britain” and its moon babies, and that British youth would continue to give up a part of themselves out of love for India. When the narrator “lay[s] a sprig of rosemary” – a substitute for the lock of hair – on the textual tomb that the prefatory note represents, she is re-enacting that promise made many years earlier to Geoffrey, but with an added

120   It is seen as a key moment because after Plassy, the East India company was able to appropriate the Bengal treasury and tax revenues.

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fantasy: that her readers participate in memorializing the Geoffrey who lost his life in a war to secure Great Britain’s imperial power against German threats. Indeed, World War I depended on the massive presence of Indian soldiers. About 1.3 million Indian soldiers and laborers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the Indian government and the princes sent large supplies of food, money, and ammunition. In all, 140,000 Indians served on the Western Front and nearly 700,000 in the Middle East. In terms of deaths, 47,746 Indian soldiers were killed and 65,126 wounded during World War I.121 From the stories in Sun Babies II, her readers will understand that a new generation of Indian children ratifies the solemnity of this sacrifice by their own desire to serve as soldiers and defend the empire. Yet because representing the future of Sun Babies’ young children as possible cannon-fodder is too horrifying to imply, the narrative diminishes the reality of future sacrifice: these babies’ drills and songs and idolization of the king and queen are safely confined in the nursery, and adults’ military engagements are transformed into funny childish mimicry. Unlike the ideological vehemence with which adults tend their political commitments, children, the text suggests, create a conflict-free zone – both by virtue of their facility with playing at multiple identities and by their liminal social status. Such playful beginnings remind us, however, that “the game is work” (SB II, 44). Great Britain’s “maternal” labors in India, so lovingly depicted in Sun Babies II, nurse the empire’s youngest family members, who one day will be prepared to die for her. An ideological tension runs throughout Cornelia Sorabji’s writings on children: between an iconoclastic tendency, on the one hand, and a social conservatism on the other. Sorabji’s cross-racial and cross-cultural kinship model is an alternative to race-based and blood-based notions of family. Family is socially constructed, not biologically based; the possibility of kinship with strangers creates a similitude between British and Indian children that diminishes forms of difference based on racial separation and exclusion. Sorabji imagines a community of feeling binding narrator, Indian, and British mothers in a universal, maternal sentimentality. This desire “to create a desire” for relatedness with an Other has been characterized as potentially transformative. According to bell hooks, it can “act … [to challenge] racist domination … [It] is an unrealized political possibility.”122 Sorabji does not simply depict the daily lives of British and Indians as entwined. She works to have British minds and hearts possessed by Indian children in what amounts to a transgression of colonization’s creation of difference. The native customs, language, habits, and bodies that adhere to her “sun babies” become constituitive parts of a re-imagined British family. Unlike the fictions of Flora Annie Steel, Sorabji’s works reject fears that closer contact with Indians might “contaminate” British children.123 Fantasizing imperial society as grounded in family units that 121

  See www.mgtrust.org.   Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 22. 123   Nupur Chaudhuri, “Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India,” Victorian Studies 31 (Summer 1988): 529–31. 122

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themselves encompass cultural pluralities, Sorabji dismantles naturalized versions of racial belonging. Given her real and deeply felt affection for her wards (and for her mentors), reading Sorabji’s texts problematizes notions of maternalistic imperial discourse as self-deludedly exploitative. Though very much a part of a system that perpetuated “babyfication,” her interactions, friendships, and often valuable assistance to disenfranchised women and children make any simple assessment difficult. Unquestionably, though, this revisionist impulse is undercut by Sorabji’s conservative investment in preserving the Raj in India. While an antidote to empire’s masculinism, her maternalism stands nonetheless as a complement to paternalism. The “Raj family” is expanded, because childhood itself is colonized by an imperially-committed adulthood. By choosing the metaphor of adoption – and by having that adoption be primarily a one-way symbolic transfer of Indian children of color into white British families – Sorabji cannot escape adoption’s meaning of “to take as one’s own.” The assimilative, homogenizing, and appropriative connotations are clear, and the texts’ backgrounding of responsible Indian adults in parental roles heightens this tendency. Further, hierarchical difference is promoted, as British adult readers sympathize with Indian children who need and solicit their concern. Unequal by virtue of their age, race, and culture, these children are too young to challenge colonialism.124 By making this affective mothering a central aspect of the maintenance of empire, Sorabji’s figurative strategy downplays – indeed, it is a form of dissociation from – its own historical moment, especially the corrupt and conflicted colonial context. This sentimental mode decontextualizes, erasing Sorabji’s own imperial investments in Indian politics, economics, and certain kinds of reform; it neither works to alter the existing distribution of resources, nor to minimize social and political inequalities. All these challenges are to be postponed indefinitely, until slowly, over time, the reform of Indian women’s “mothercraft” will create “sunbabies” ready for independence. Seen in this light, Sorabji’s transcultural adoptive family as a model of racial harmony and manageable biculturality sits squarely within the dynamic of paternalism, enabling the British to feel a fondness for those they subordinate.125 The Indian children she lovingly describes stand for a desirable, “possible future.” Their ignorance of the stakes of difference is not simply an erasure of history. Given the critical state of affairs in India by 1920, this fantasized future feels more like nostalgia for a (non-existent) “unfallen” world, a colonial world that, in going back to infants, goes back to its beginnings to restart the development of empire all over again.

124   Abdul JanMohammed, “The Economy of the Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 68. 125   For the dynamics of paternalism, see Jackman, The Velvet Glove 10.

Chapter 5

The Voice of India: Sarojini Naidu’s Nationalist Poetics In Chapter 4, we saw how the imperial relations between Great Britain and India were reconfigured as family relations, both in Cornelia Sorabji’s life and in her writings. If the Raj (represented by Queen Victoria – and her successor George V) was the original kindly ma-bap (mother-father) of the Indian subcontinent’s children, Sorabji (and her British readers) were ready to see the Indian populace as adorable “sun babies” in need of imperial care, affection, and intervention into their nursery. In the writings of Sarojini Naidu, the last figure in my study, kinship tropes also assume centrality. Naidu’s family unit, however, is radically different than the one envisioned by Sorabji. The imperial parent figure is gone; in its place is an Indian mother. In one exchange with a journalist, Naidu was asked what should be done with the statues of Queen Victoria once India gained independence. She replied pertly, “‘Cut off their heads, of course … and put mine in their place’” – an image of a symbolic royal beheading, and within the metaphorical field of empire as family, a matricide.1 This exchange succinctly measures the divide between Naidu and Sorabji – as well as one similarity. Just as Sorabji adopts a maternal role toward other Indians, so does Naidu, who jokingly puts herself in the place of Victoria. Naidu’s head replaces Victoria’s, as she becomes a rhetorical motherpoet of the nation, speaking for and as the people of India. Yet, as we will see from her poems, this is not a strategy for reinforcing maternalism or paternalism, as it is in Sorabji’s work, but instead a way of saying that the Indian populace must now give birth to or mother itself. Her verse, which this chapter reads as the forging of the idea of nation, taps into existing discourses of that reified figure of the nation, “Mother India,” whose body holds all her children. More significantly, in her poems, family refers not to Great Britain’s global, imperial family, but more narrowly to the diverse populations of India, whose kinship or brotherhood with one another is not an a priori fact but something that must be constituted politically, culturally, linguistically, and socially. Naidu’s lyrics represent a binding of these different parts into one imagined whole. Indeed, the kinship relations between Indians created in Naidu’s poetry are able to encompass so many differences (of region, caste, religion) that a national “indifference” characterizes India and becomes at times symbolic of universal humanity. This imperially vast scope –

1   Vishwanath S. Naravane, Sarojini Naidu: An Introduction to her Life, Work, and Poetry (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1980) 150–1.

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her lyric reach is nothing short of a globalized one – is a gesture that indeed puts Naidu’s head where Victoria’s once was. Of all the writers in this monograph, Sarojini Naidu, along with Pandita Ramabai, is the least remembered for her literary achievements. In Naidu’s case, this is because she is renowned in India and England as a prominent political figure in India’s independence movement. An activist and celebrated public speaker on behalf of feminist and nationalist causes, she was a key figure in the swadeshi movement (national self-sufficiency, begun with the economic boycotting of English goods) and the swaraj (self-governance) movement, and a close friend of G.K. Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. She actively joined women’s rights to national self-rule and encouraged Indian women to join political protests. She went on to become the first Indian woman president of the Indian National Congress in 1925, and the first woman governor of an Indian state, after independence, in Uttar Pradesh from 1947 to 1949.2 Yet her beginnings are remarkably like many others in this study. She traveled to England in 1895 at the age of 16 and studied at King’s College, University of London, and Girton College, Cambridge University, until late in 1898 when she returned to India after falling ill. Having learned English at an early age and already writing poems in English before she left for England, it was there that she formed an acquaintance with Edmund Gosse, Arthur Symons, and the Rhymer’s Club and began to think of herself as a poet.3 Upon her return to India, she quickly became absorbed in politics, even as she published three volumes of verse to favorable reviews: The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917).4 Though she wrote verse infrequently after 1917 – her political activism and speaking tours in India and England completely absorbing her energies – she continued to identify herself as a poet on her public lecture tour. In India, she was widely known as “The Nightingale of India” (Bulbul-e-Hind and Bharat Kokila). Despite a chronological overlap of her poetry and politics – Naidu delivered her first political speech in 1901, when she was beginning to fashion herself a poet – literary critics of Naidu’s work, whether they use feminist and/or postcolonial interpretive frames, have frequently stressed the supposed division between the private, apolitical nature of much of Naidu’s poetry and the public nature of her political activism and speeches. For Malashri Lal, a critic of “women’s writing” in India, this division falls largely along a chronological continuum: “there was, in [Naidu’s] life, a sharp divide between the phase of poetry-making and the 2

  Annie Besant, an Englishwoman and one of the founders of the Home Rule movement in India, was the first woman president of the INC, elected in 1917. 3   Gosse wrote the introductions to the first and second volumes of verse of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, respectively: to Dutt’s A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Naidu’s The Bird of Time. 4   A fourth volume of verse, The Sceptred Flute (1937), was published during her lifetime, but it consists of poems from the earlier volumes.

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phase of dedicated public service.”5 Ranjana Ash’s concerns with the feminist dynamics of early twentieth-century women writers lead her to foreground the normative gender expectations on Naidu, the “impossible choice” she had to make between “her private world of poetry and domestic concerns, and an allconsuming political life which took her away from her home and family.”6 In a more psychological vein, Meena Alexander addresses the inner fragmentation she sees in Naidu’s work. She contrasts the poems’ “images of private, pained women suffering emotional deprivation, even psychic imprisonment” with “the public life she so fearlessly took to: travelling countless miles often in hardship, courting arrest, campaigning in her strong orator’s voice all over India … in the cause of National Freedom.”7 Alexander then goes on to speculate that the hopeless mentality of these female figures may have ultimately compelled Naidu to give up poetry in 1917 in order to devote herself fully to political causes: “Did the poems with their … female figures trapped in an unredeemed sexuality, force her to leave them behind, the writer consumed more and more by the political struggle so that … she effectively stopped writing?”8 Unable to see continuity or coherence between these two shaping imperatives in Naidu’s life – her lyrical, aestheticizing sensibility, evidenced in her poetry, and the public, engaged impulses of politics, expressed through her speeches – feminist critics such as Alexander have generally emphasized the opposition of art and life in their readings of Naidu’s career. Naidu’s abandonment in 1917 of poetry (and the desires encased within) becomes the necessary condition for her full embrace of a political vocation. Critics more interested in questions of postcoloniality than gender have subjected Naidu to a similar framing. They point to inauthenticity in her poetry, a catering to Western poetic tastes located in her orientalizing representations of India. Contrasted with her poems are the authenticity of her political speeches, in which Naidu’s resistance to colonialism is apparent.9 Susie Tharu asserts that Naidu’s lyric forms are an imitation of British fin-de-siècle poets, with India 5   “The Golden Threshold of Sarojini Naidu,” in The Law of the Threshold: Women’s Writings in Indian English (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000) 58. 6   Ranjana Sidhanta Ash, “Two Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers: Cornelia Sorabji and Sarojini Naidu,” A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 133. 7   Meena Alexander, “Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance,” in Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India, ed. Verinder Grover and Ranjana Arora (New Delhi: Deep and Deep, 1993) 381. 8   Ibid. 381. 9   Malashri Lal argues that when Naidu adopts personas that are not her own, she is complying with Edmund Gosse’s definition of Indian poetry and not following her own voice (“The Golden Threshold” 66). Padmini Sengupta asserts that Naidu “revealed just the kind of world to the West which they fancied. A world of exotic Eastern Romance” (Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Sahetya Akademi, 1974) 17).

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merely providing subject matter in the form of “local colour.”10 Naidu’s India is that of the common Western imagination, with its colourful bangle sellers, graceful palanquin bearers, and princely Rajput lovers. The definitive taste is British, although the subjects, ostensibly at least, are Indian. (261)

Whether Naidu’s lyrics of India are indeed authentic or not has been a matter of dispute among critics throughout the twentieth century. Shahla Anand claims that experience and knowledge of India are required to appreciate her poems.11 M.K. Naik finds both “a weak echo of the feeble voice of decadent romanticism” and “an authentic … utterance exquisitely tuned to the composite Indian ethos.”12 After quoting two critics contemporaneous with Naidu, one of whom characterizes her lyrics as possessing “the same poise that pervades the Hindu classics” and another who asserts that “there was nothing specially Hindoo in the book now published; it is European in structure, and even in tradition it is European,” Edward Marx reads this critical contradiction as evidence of Naidu’s “hybridity.” He goes on to chart Naidu’s aesthetic development as a story of decolonization. According to Marx, she begins as an English-language poet of colonial mimicry and exoticism catering to Western tastes, before budding into a political poet who transforms English “into a means of linking together the disparate linguistic populations of India.” In her final stage as a writer, her political speeches represent her liberation from colonial interpellation.13 Elleke Boehmer’s brief discussion of Naidu reiterates the derivative qualities that both Tharu and Marx point to, describing her verse as native material in a “Western makeover” – as an “Orientalist pastiche” that caters to a European craving for “tropical, primitive emotions,” quoting the words of Edmund Gosse, Naidu’s mentor. Unable to reconcile these views with Naidu’s “career as a nationalist activist, her involvement in Gandhi’s passive resistance campaigns, and her rhetoric urging a ‘battle’ for India,” Boehmer issues a call for further study of Naidu’s complex colonial positioning.14 These feminist and postcolonial critical assessments all purport to identify a fundamental binarism in Naidu: the opposition of a private, self-absorbed lyricism, replete with Orientalist sensibilities, and an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal public activism. In doing so, however, they overlook the significant ways that Naidu’s 10

  Susie Tharu, “Tracing Savitri’s Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image of Women in Indo-Anglian Literature,” Recasting Women 261. 11   Shahla Anand, “Poems and Rhetoric of Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949),” South Asian Review 17.14 (1993): 30. 12   M.K. Naik, Perspectives on Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984) 215. 13   Edward Marx, “The Nightingale as Nationalist,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 45–62 (quotes above on 45–6 and 53). 14   “East is East and South is South,” Women: A Cultural Review 11.1/2 (2000): 62–3.

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verse calls out for a different kind of reading. This chapter will argue that her lyrics both create an imaginary collective voice that we can provisionally name “India,” and they participate in the project of nationalism from the beginning of her career as a poet. Her poems therefore can be said to “[forge] and [test] … particular kinds of affiliation to a national community” as do all national stories.15 In Naidu’s efforts to move beyond speaking as an autonomous, individuated self, the poetic voicing of her volumes veers toward impersonality, a position necessary if her speakers are to speak as and for the collective identity of an emerging nation. Critics who charge Naidu with vagueness, with having “no voice of her own,” or who call attention to the absence of “any local actualization” or “concrete realization of experience,” finding instead only “impressions unaccommodated to any landscape,” miss the import of this generality. Naidu’s disposition toward impersonality, her poetic strategy of de-individuation, sutures her lyrics to her nationalist politics (a disposition found even in her most interiorized, erotic poems).16 It reveals a rich anti-colonialist significance if we contextualize it within a century of imperial efforts to catalog and order (in pseudo-scientific fashion) India’s populations, efforts which created untold discursive divisions within the subcontinent’s social orders. Given the Raj’s ideological efforts to stress the myriad differences of India’s peoples, which made the political idea of a unified nation incomprehensible, and given Naidu’s countervailing investments in nationalism’s efforts to imagine a collective, her lyrical swerve away from the individual and toward the abstract and general is surprisingly continuous with the nationalist rhetoric found in her overtly political poems as well as her speeches. In Naidu, not only is the individual self with his or her desires and ambitions rejected as the fundamental social unit, but distinctions between self and other(s) are effaced. Naidu’s verse casts off the solipsistic “I” in favor of larger groupings, from dyads to ever larger units of identity up to the nation, constituting pluralities through the generic or representative nature of speaker(s) and figures within the poems and minimizing distinctions that would confer specificity upon them. Instead of reclaiming or renegotiating the discourses of difference coopted by the British, Naidu’s poetry becomes political not through difference but via “indifference.” A powerful counter-discourse to imperial Britain’s “divide and conquer” strategy, which in particular exploited differences among Hindus and Muslims in order to prolong the Raj’s hegemony in India, Naidu’s poems reconsider the world, not as one populated with antagonistic factions or discrete individuals driven by uniquely private desires, but rather inhabited by collectives possessing the common sensibilities necessary for a democratic India.

  Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005) 11. 16   James Cousins, “The Poetry of Sarojini Naidu: A Critical Approach,” in Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India 406. See also K. Venkatachari, “The Cleft Lute: A Study of Sarojini Naidu’s Poetry,” Journal of Literature and Aesthetics 4.4 (1994): 22 and 23. 15

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The chapter will begin with an overview of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonialist marshaling of difference – external and internal – as a discursive, administrative, and political practice on the subcontinent. From there it will address features of Naidu’s poems that promote the “horizontal comradeship” of national belonging and a discourse of identity instead of difference, a foundational attitude for her project of nation-building.17 Naidu’s impersonal speakers, her creation of oral textualities, and her use of both unity in diversity and kinship tropes expand her gestures of de-individuation, enabling her speakers to ventriloquize the experiences and aims of an imagined national community. At times Naidu even defines the collective via negation – that is to say, as something beyond existing nameable social groupings or discursive understandings. Finally, in a wide range of poems, Naidu’s identifications with Muslim culture and Sufi spiritualism performatively undo imperialism’s selfinterested, narrowly sectarian definitions of nationalism as Hindu. Instead, she leads her readers to the recognition of India’s intercommunal history and future. Naidu’s poetics and politics thus seek to win her Indian audiences’ allegiance to more clearly defined and larger unities constitutive of her “India,” such as the one based on earlier Sufi or Hindu and Muslim cultural syntheses. These are not positions, as this chapter will stress, that she came to over time in her career as a poet. Rather, these impulses and strategies directed at national unity are in her poetry from the start. The South Asian subcontinent comprising enormous and diverse populations, it was the task of anti-colonial movements to find – or create – meaningful unities in order to foster a sense of national identity. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, the Raj’s ideological and administrative work had depended on defining differences – external and internal – to enable, justify, and extend colonial rule.18 Conceptualizing external differences between India and the West, a product of racial theorizing, was utilized in order to show the necessity of Britain’s rule. In 1875, for example, Henry Sumner Maine argued that both India and Europe were descended from the same Aryan stock but found themselves at differing stages of development. Indians had not developed as rapidly as Europeans had; their ancient institutions were still vigorous and intact, but they had not progressed. As a result, although India “[contained] a great part of our own civilization,” overall its various features were “inseparate and not yet unfolded.” Additionally, it was a continent without a history, “stalled at an early stage of development” due to its geographical isolation and the minimal effects of later invasions.19 Other nineteenth-century racialist writers such as Herbert Risley and George Campbell argued that India’s difference from Europe was not the result of an arrested development, but of racial mixing of a higher (Aryan) race with lower 17   The concept of “horizontal comradeship” stems from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 7. 18   The seminal work that explores this in detail is Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj. 19   Quoted in ibid. 66–9.

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(Dravidian, Turanian) races, which in turn precipitated India’s supposed cultural decline.20 Revelations of common racial origins shared by the British and the Indians, therefore, were not intended to imply equality. The Aryans, common ancestors of both India and Europe, had developed differently as a result of their migrations and relations with indigenous peoples. Those who wound up in India, after “intermingling with the aboriginal races” known as the Dravidians or Turanians, as well as suffering from the horrible climate, “lost the purity of their race.”21 In racialist thought, the imperial British represented a return of the Aryans to the subcontinent, long-separated brothers whose return would transform India, bringing it into the modern age.22 These discourses of racial decline were mirrored by cultural ones. As Joan Leopold notes, “arguments [about cultural decline] … generally claimed that native or foreign non-Aryan institutions had historically impinged upon IndoAryan culture … arresting its growth or causing its recession.”23 India’s culture and arts had supposedly reached their high point during the era of Buddhist pre-eminence (200 bce to 200 ce) and during the time when the Greeks under Alexander the Great extended their influence to India’s northwest regions (326 bce). The waning of Buddhism, coupled with Aryan miscegenation with the Turanians, completed the cultural degradation. A brief infusion of renewed cultural vibrancy came with the Mughal Dynasty, yet its subsequent corruption seemed to confirm Herbert Risley’s views, shared by others, that each wave of conquerors[,] … Greek, Scythian, Arab, Moghul, that entered the country [India] by land became more or less absorbed in the indigenous population, their physique degenerated, their individuality vanished, their energy was sapped, and dominion passed from their hands into those of more vigorous successors.24

20   Herbert Risley, The People of India (London, 1915; reprinted, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1969) 55–61; and George Campbell, Memoirs of an Indian Career (London: Macmillan, 1893). Some proponents of the theory that Europeans and Indians were descended from the same racial ancestors, such as E.B. Cowell, Monier Williams, and Frederic W. Farrer, used the theory to argue for greater respect for and fairer treatment of Indians. See Joan Leopold, “British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–1870,” English Historical Review 89 (July 1974): 583–5. 21   George Campbell, cited in Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 83. 22   “The genius of empire in India has come to her from the West, and can be maintained only by constant infusions of fresh blood from the same source” (Risley, The People of India 53). Ironically, the West’s contemporary return would restore the spiritually and culturally pure patrimony of the past; it would also require intermarriage, of course, something the Raj was categorically opposed to. 23   Leopold, “British Applications” 595–6. 24   The People of India 53. See also Leopold, “British Applications” 599–600.

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This erasure of India’s history, and its rewriting as a chronicle of decline, belongs to colonialist discourses that, as we shall see, Naidu’s poetry confronts head-on. That chronicle posits an impurity arising from the effects of cultural mergings and miscegenation. Rejecting the racialist abhorrence of dilution and mixing as signs of inferiority or decay, Naidu will instead celebrate such integrations as a source of Indic historical strength, as a universalizing principle necessary for India’s future. Theories of India’s difference from Europe inscribed East versus West as a homogenizing set of oppositional essences. They were increasingly supplemented and indeed overtaken by discourses emphasizing India’s vast internal array of types. These social and political groupings were relational identities whose definition was dependent on context.25 The Raj’s ethnographic efforts to demarcate the boundaries between diverse Indian populations and to fix their essences have been well-traced by scholars.26 The search for and subsequent publication of extensive information about the physical, cultural, and social natures of every district in India reached its culmination with the publication of the 1901 census and the Imperial and Provincial Gazetteers in the early twentieth century, as well as anthropological studies.27 By Naidu’s time, a plethora of categories such as caste, community, and tribe, as well as “races” – martial, feminine, and criminal, to name a few – were believed to best describe the subcontinent.28 Other categories would emerge in a classifying mania that frustrated anthropologists’ and historians’ efforts to achieve both coherence and comprehensiveness. No longer was it possible, as it was in eighteenth-century Europe, to view India and Indians as “undifferentiated.”29 Instead, imperial Britain emphasized India’s unmanageable heterogeneity. According to the late nineteenth-century imperial apologist John Strachey: 25

  See Norbert Peabody’s theorizing of the dual aspects of Orientalism’s creation of otherness in his essay “Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in NineteenthCentury India,” Modern Asian Studies 30.1 (1996): 185–90. 26   See Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” Folk 26 (1984): 25–49 and Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 27   This anthropological search for difference in India is reflected in titles such as William Johnson’s The Oriental Races and Tribes, Residents and Visitors of Bombay (1863 and 1866, two volumes); Charles John Canning’s eight-volume The People of India (1868– 75), published by the Government of India; Edward Tuite Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872); W.E. Marshall’s A Phrenologist Amongst the Todas (1873); William Crooke’s The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1896); and Edgar Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909). 28   Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 102. 29   Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Moutora and Co., 1963) 26.

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this is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was, an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social, or religious; no Indian nation, no “people of India,” of which we hear so much.30

Similarly, the historian Alfred Lyall found it challenging to organize his Indian experiences using the clear distinctions among governments, races, or religions as he desired; for him, India was a collection of “various … tribes, clans, septs, castes, and sub-castes, religious orders, and devotional brotherhoods.”31 Because British projects to classify India’s abundant difference were part of a strategy to comprehend and order Indian society, they were never, according to Thomas Metcalf, “simply intellectual exercises.” Rather, through them, “India was ‘known’ in ways that would sustain a system of colonial authority.”32 Arguing for the need for a comprehensive ethnographic survey in 1901, the Government of India indicated that it was required “for purposes of legislation, of judicial procedure, of famine relief, of sanitation and dealings with epidemic disease, and almost every form of executive action.”33 Renewed efforts to decipher India’s socius followed hard upon Britain’s post-Mutiny need to govern without interfering too blatantly with India’s social institutions. The Raj sought to enlist “pliable constituencies” in its efforts at governance, groups from whom dedicated public servants could be drawn. The cataloguing of India’s populations was meant to inform Great Britain of the fundamental units comprising India’s social order and also to identify factions who would remain loyal to an imperial presence.34 Caste, for example, long understood as ancient and unchanging, was considered one of the pre-eminent foundations of Indian society. As Bernard Cohn notes, though it provided an illusion of knowing a people, as a category it was notoriously slippery.35 The more one attempted to define it, the more unwieldy it proved to be.   Strachey, India 5.   Alfred Lyall, Asiatic Studies (London: John Murray, 1899) 152. 32   Ideologies of the Raj 113. 33   Quoted in Bernard Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” in Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. Milton Singer and Bernard Cohn (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1968) 17. 34   According to Cohn, the British created rituals such as durbars and awarded titles and honors to suture local leaders to colonial rule (“Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 165–209). 35   Was caste best defined as occupational groupings? If so, what could one do about the bewildering amount of data (Risley attempted to reduce the approximately 2,000 castes to seven), and the often contradictory information on caste and occupational categories? Was there a physical basis for caste, measurable by the size of the skull, “nasal index,” or “orbitonasal index”? Should one instead denominate caste in terms of the social precedence 30 31

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Other important social identities based on kinship, tribal, and religious affiliations were similarly incoherent. India had come to be defined as a predominantly Hindu land. Just as difficult as defining caste, however, was establishing the essential nature of Hinduism. For the overwhelmed Lyall, Hinduism was a “religious chaos,” reflected in his meandering list of its components: it was a “tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, ghosts, and demons, demi-gods, and deified saints, household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal gods, with their countless shrines and temples.”36 Not only was there a plethora of popular, devotional sects and practices, but indigenous animistic practices and cults survived alongside these various “Hinduisms” and, in many instances, were adopted into or merged with them. Further complicating who belonged to the Hindu community, census takers reported that anyone whose religion was not easily defined was held to be a Hindu.37 In an effort to make categorical coherence out of this “noise” and to define authentic Hindu beliefs, Lyall declared that popular, devotional Hinduism was a late degradation of Brahminism, which he defined as Hindu’s original core faith.38 Just as Lyall tried to establish the authenticity of his version of Hinduism, other colonialist writers were collectively engaged in unifying Hinduism from a loose assortment of sects into a “religion.”39 Discursive attempts to characterize Hindus based on their religious beliefs were perhaps more “successful” than those defining Hinduism per se. Common stereotypes inculcated views of Hindus as superstitious, credulous, vulnerable to priestly influence, irrational, spiritually inclined, and imaginative, and they dominated much of the writings from the eighteenth into the twentieth century. The discourses of Hindu character conformed to one set of Orientalist stereotypes, applicable more largely to a distant Asia as seen by Europe, in contrast to those used to limn the Indian “Muslim,” which were derived from the need to differentiate a Christianized Europe from an Islamic East, centered at first on the Levant, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire.40 Unlike Hinduism, for the British, Islam was a much more legible as a religion and a concomitant social identity, perhaps due to centuries of cultural contact (as well as its monotheism). W.W. Hunter, in The Indian Musselmans (1871), divided Muslims it conferred? Should caste be arranged with existing nomenclature, or should more coherent language be developed? See Bernard Cohn, “Notes” 15–18; his essay “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” 25–49; and Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 120–1. 36   Asiatic Studies 2. 37   Kenneth Jones, “Religious Identity and the Indian Census,” in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. N. Gerald Barrier (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981) 73–101. 38   Asiatic Studies 136. 39  Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 134. 40   Ronald Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986): 404–8.

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into the hardy and fierce “fanatical masses” of the Northern frontier and the more cosmopolitan “landed and clerical” elites of the subcontinent.41 Although conventional orientalist discourses attributed despotism, religious zealotry, a war-like temperament, and self-indulgence to Indian Muslims, there also existed a tendency to idealize and romanticize Islam.42 Hunter, for example, attributed especial bravery to the frontier Muslims; their religion was seen as austere and pure. The Mughals, for example, were considered “mild and humane” rulers.43 Lyall credited Islam with possessing a “dignity and a courageous unreasoning certitude, which in Western Christianity have been … melted down.”44 He deemed them “worthy opponents,” while Richard Temple claimed that Islam lacked the “many absurdities” of Hinduism and therefore commanded respect.45 Seen overall as more manly, self-reliant, and loyal than Hindus, Muslims were believed to share political interests in common with the British and to prefer British dominion to that by Hindus. As a result, they were often identified by the British as allies whom they could harness effectively to their rule. Given Sarojini Naidu’s deep interest in minimizing or even erasing the differences between a Hindu and a Muslim India (which we will turn to later), it is significant that by the end of the nineteenth century, a discourse of India as divided by two separate religious communities had emerged and was used not only by the British, but by many Indians as well.46 The idea that most Indians could be divided into either those who believed in Hindu deities or an Islamic god was not new. What was unique was that the British insisted that religious belief “defined membership more generally in a larger community.”47 Lord Morley asserted without uncertainty in the House of Lords in February 1909 that “the difference between Muhammadism and Hinduism is not a mere difference of articles of religious faith … It is a difference in life, in tradition, in history, in all the social things as well as articles of belief, that constitute a community.”48 The term communalism describes the belief that because Hindus or Muslims follow a particular religion, they de facto share common social, political, and economic interests. Religion becomes the basis of the social order, and one’s identity or character is shaped by that communal belonging.49   W.W. Hunter, The India Musalmans (London, 1871; reprint Lahore: Premier Book House, 1968). 42  Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 144–8. 43   Ibid. 139. 44   Asiatic Studies 289. 45   Ibid. 289 and Richard Temple, Oriental Experience (London: J. Murray, 1883) 147 and 315. 46  Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 148. 47   Ibid. 133. 48   Strachey, India 339. 49   Current communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India are, in part, a legacy of colonialist policies. See Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (New Delhi: Vani Books, 1984). 41

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Conveniently, at least in a political sense, the British found it difficult to ascertain anything unifying within India’s “heterogeneous agglomeration of distinct peoples,” despite their efforts.50 Given these deeply entrenched colonialist discourses of difference, the claims of Indian nationalists to represent the people of India were, unsurprisingly, rejected outright. Seeley infamously claimed that “India had no jealousy of the foreigner, because there was no India, and therefore, properly speaking, no foreigner.”51 Contemporary with Naidu, the journalist Valentine Chirol argued in 1910 that a movement confined to a mere fraction of the population of India has no title to be called a “national” movement … [This] would scarcely need to be argued, even if the variegated jumble of races and peoples, castes and creeds that make up … India were not in itself an antithesis to all that the word “national” implies.52

According to imperialist advocates, Indians were incapable of overcoming the depth of their own divisions – to rise above their communities’ factional and local interests – in order to represent a “whole,” making the firm, guiding hand of British governance necessary. Their colonial rule alone could “overcome particular ties to create a rationalized whole concerned with ‘general’ interests,” even as Indian “self-appointed leaders, or self-defined communities” lacked the requisite representativeness to lend their actions legitimacy.53 As the Raj’s classificatory system gradually morphed into a political system, the British claimed that the more important communities needed to be brought into the colonial governance structure. What constituted a community’s importance and who their leaders were, however, was left to the British to decide. They would select the “natural leaders” – shorthand for those holding “traditional status” as opposed to “upstarts or self-made men.”54 As late as the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, which expanded Indian representation within colonial governance, Minto himself declared that representative government was antithetical to “the instincts of the many races composing the population of the Indian Empire.” Defining India as a society composed of competing and distinct communities, Minto elevated Muslim constituencies into the imperial governance structure, arguing that their minority rights needed protection against nationalism which he defined as Hindu.55 His designation of specific Muslim electorates politicized religious identities within India and created competing blocks of interests. In fact, existing hostilities between Hindus and Muslims were considered by Strachey to be “one of the   Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual 102.   John Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883) 206. 52   Valentine Chirol, Village Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910) 6. 53  Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 188. 54   Ibid. 186. 55   Ibid. 223 and 226. 50 51

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strong points in [the Raj’s] political position in India,” since a coherent, selfidentifying community of Indians was a potential threat to their governance.56 On the one hand, Minto and others chastised Indians for narrow, local perspectives, while on the other hand British actions undercut “loyalties to public and nation by building in incentives to identify with religion and caste.”57 These policies intensified the perception among Indian nationalists that the British were pursuing a “divide and rule” approach. It is against this imperial politicizing of difference that we can read Naidu’s efforts to unify Indians’ self-understanding in her politics and poetry. Because critical accounts of Naidu’s poetry of India so often stress its reinscription of Western stereotypes, it is important to note that Naidu herself, soon after she returned from England, linked her poetry to Indian politics. She not only implied that an Indian audience for her poetry existed, but that it was a readership invested in a national poetry. In a 1905 letter to the English poet and critic Edmund Gosse, Naidu spoke explicitly of the cultural pressures that drew her, indeed “anyone,” away from the pursuit of “art for art’s sake” and toward politics at that historical moment: I wonder if you can realize how difficult it is for anyone to keep “merely” to the “primrose path” of Art – in India … There is a tacit understanding that all talents and enthusiasms should concentrate themselves on some practical end for the immediate and obvious good of the nation. There are innumerable strong foes who would lure you or force you into their own special task. The leader of “religious reform,” the prophet of “social progress,” … the worker in the cause of “female education,” the president of a “Home for Hindu Widows,” … a whole paradox of admirable and incongruous movements to be pressed on to me – to me of all people….!58

Though Gosse may have urged against a politicized aesthetic (Naidu’s query whether he “can realize how difficult it is” suggests as much), her participation in the national project was not something to which she ever appears to have been opposed, despite her doubts as to her abilities or her resistance to being conscripted   Strachey, India 338–9. Politically motivated by a desire to separate Muslims from agitating Hindus, Minto’s policies signaled “nothing less than the pulling back of sixty-two millions of people from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition” (Mary, Countess of Minto, India Minto and Morley, 1905–1910 (London, 1934) 29–30). Malcolm Hailey, governor of the Punjab and the United Provinces in the 1920s, expressed his antagonism toward the Indian National Congress by playing Hindus and Muslims off one another (Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj 227). 57   Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual 106. 58  Naidu, Selected Letters 47–8. It is tempting to read the phrases “worker in the cause of ‘female education’” and “the president of a ‘Home for Hindu widows’” as allusions to Satthianadhan and Ramabai, respectively. 56

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to a “special task” not her own. Ranjana Ash asserts that Naidu “frequently said she was no different from other Indian poets – Tagore, Iqbal, Nazrul – caught up in the national movement.”59 Naidu had spoken glowingly to Gosse a year earlier of a watershed moment in her poetic career. After speaking at the 1904 National Congress in Bombay and treated not as an “insignificant little provincial” but “almost as a national possession,” she deemed the experience a “great awakening … changing in a moment all my sense of proportion – of responsibility.” Here is a passage from that letter in which she recounts her rebirth as a national poet: I realized fully for the first time that “no man liveth unto himself” … It was not a moment of pride so much as of humiliation … My public was waiting for me – no, not for me, so much as for a poet, a national poet, and it was ready to accept me if I would only let it – if I would be a little truer to my own powers.60

She goes on to add that this “undeserved tribute from the great Indian public” at the 1904 Bombay conference “finally decided me to say ‘Yes’ to your suggestion [to prepare The Golden Threshold for publication] … I do honestly hope and believe that someday … I shall produce something worthy to be offered to my nation as a gift.”61 As this letter implies, her still unpublished Golden Threshold’s depiction of India is neither intended for a Western audience nor inconsistent with nationalist yearnings. In fact, many of Naidu’s lyrics explicitly link poetry to a political vocation. In The Bird of Time, the speaker rejects escapist lyricism for a heroic, public calling in “The Faery Isle of Janjira”: “Into the strife of the throng and the tumult,/ The war of sweet Love against folly and wrong;/ Where brave hearts carry the sword of battle,/ ‘Tis mine to carry the banner of song” (BT 80).62 In this self-construction as poet, Naidu’s song is a “banner” heading the “strife,” forging a link between poetry and politics and defining the nature of each as a kind of public conflict. The poem’s setting is also richly symbolic. Janjira’s fort was known to be “unconquered,” located on an island and therefore isolated and sheltered. Equally remote from any participation in contemporary political struggles was the Nawab of Janjira during the first decades of the twentieth century (the time in which “The Faery Isle of Janjira” was surely written).63 He was known as a “good subject,” knighted a few times and a visitor to both the King and Morley (of the Morley-Minto reforms) in 59

  Ash, “Two Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers” 134.  See Selected Letters, letter of 1-12-1905, 45. 61   Ibid. 45. 62   Sarojini Naidu, The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death, & the Spring, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse (London: William Heinemann, 1916) 80. The first edition appeared in 1912. All future references to poems in the volume will be indicated parenthetically by page number, following the abbreviation BT. 63   My thanks to Aparna Gollapudi for pointing out the contemporary political valence of this setting. 60

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Great Britain. For the speaker of Naidu’s poem to leave Janjira for the public fight is not only to escape lyricism but also to eschew the beautiful, cultured haven that is a proven ally of the British Raj. It is a fairy land of “benign” foreign rule that she consciously rejects in order to enter the brewing conflicts of Indian nationalism. In her last volume as well, The Broken Wing, the title poem references the poetspeaker’s embrace of a public role, despite her feelings of inadequacy (her “broken wing”): “Shall spring that wakes mine ancient land again/ Call to my wild and suffering heart in vain?/…/Behold! I rise to meet the destined spring/ And scale the stars upon my broken wing” (BW 15–16).64 For Naidu to assume that public role meant that she had to create a poetic voice or identity that could ventriloquize the nation. What Naidu identified very early on within herself as an “ever-strengthening tendency and yearning to merge myself and become a portion of the Abstract Universal Essence” (39) was a facility that she re-channeled as poet of “India.” How else does the idea of nation function, if not as something abstract and universalizing – uniting people unknown to one another across time and space?65 Naidu’s desire to merge with a spiritually transcendent “Essence” is sustained yet transformed when she raises the “banner of song” into the secularized “essence” of national identity. Esoteric spiritual belief is translated into the project of nation-building, to be pursued with the fervency of religious longing. In all her writings, Naidu would come to reference her own identity – and to push her audience to think of their own – as evacuated of specific characteristics, in order to become national subjects. As early as 1903, for example, Naidu would declaim from the abstract positionality she associated with being “national”: I have no prejudice of race, creed, caste, or color. Though, as is supposed, every Brahmin is an aristocrat by instinct, I am a real democrat, because to me there is no difference between a king on his throne and a beggar in the street. And until, you … have acquired and mastered that spirit … do not believe it possible … that you will ever be national … I was born in Bengal. I belong to the Madras Presidency. In a Mahomedan city I was brought up and married and there I lived; still I am neither a Bengalee, nor Madrassee, nor Hyderabadee but I am an Indian, not a Hindu, not a Brahmin, but an Indian.66

As the multiple negatives imply, to be “Indian” is defined formally via negation, as the rejection of any existing identity category. 64   Sarojini Naidu, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death & Destiny 1915–1916 (London: Heinemann, 1917) 15–16. All future references to poems in the volume will be indicated parenthetically by page number, preceded by the abbreviation BW. 65   Anderson, Imagined Communities 26. 66   Sarojini Naidu: Great Woman of Modern India 178–9 (Speech at Pachaiyappa College in 1903). The first half of this volume is a reprint of Naidu’s speeches; the second half is a series of critical essays on her poetry and political activism. Future references to Naidu’s political speeches refer to this volume unless otherwise noted.

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In a letter to her publisher William Heinemann, she does not describe herself as an individual but as someone who channels India’s traditions through ancestral voices: “Your western civilization has not been an unmixed blessing to us at all, to us of this generation; but me … it has not been able to rob of my spiritual and poetic heritage: if my hands and feet and lips and eyes do not follow the observances of my ancestors literally, my head, my heart, joins its auroral invocation to Surya the Infinite Light with my grandfather and worships the Tulsi with my grandmother.”67 The poetic voice Naidu forges here resonates with a multiplicity of past echoes rather than with the distinctness of an individual note. At other times, she speaks for and as India’s women, imagined collectively: “I venture … to speak in the name of many millions of my sisters of India, not only Hindu, but my Mussalman, Parsi and other sisters, for the sake of self-government.”68 Questioning “[h]ow am I different from my people?” she concludes that there is no difference, that “I am essentially one of them,” emphasizing their identical nature.69 Thus, again and again, Naidu collapses her individual voice into that of the collective. Yet Naidu cannot always sustain the illusion of India’s unity. In a letter to Gokhale, Naidu complains that she needs the gifts of a seer/angel, if she is to promote national feeling when faced with the strong resistance stemming from her audiences’ investment in their particular social identities: “We want men who love this country … how I hate all sectarian narrowness, all provincial limitations of vision and purpose, all the arrogant sophistries of man-made divisions and differences … One needs a Seer’s Vision and an Angel’s voice to be of any avail.”70 It is relevant to both her politics and her poetry that some of the “man-made divisions” which she detested were actively nurtured by the British colonizers whom she fought against. In another speech, she paints a picture for her audience in which the realization of the liberating condition of nation depends upon the divestment of difference: “all the impulses have been submerged and have at last come together to a point of unity and somehow will burst their bonds and flow into their predestined ocean of liberation.”71 Such wording almost exactly parallels the yearning (as a poet, as an individual) that Naidu expressed earlier to “merge [her]self” in an abstract, universal essence: clear proof that for her the political and aesthetic patterns were identical. Naidu’s creation of an undifferentiated voice is integral to her poetics, aimed as it is at the fabrication of an Indian national identity for her readers. Speaking from a general, non-contextualized position effectively works to sideline her speakers’ “sectarian narrowness,” their investments in social markers of identity such as gender, ethnicity, religion, or class, that might set limits on, or too narrowly define, the subjective place in which “Indianness” is understood and articulated. To write 67

    69   70   71   68

Selected Letters, letter of 7-27-1911 to her publisher William Heinemann, 58. Speech at the Bombay Congress, December 1915, 36–7. Selected Letters, letter of 9-7-1911 to William Heinemann, 65. Selected Letters, letter of 12-24-1914 to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 101. Speech of March 1919, 94.

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Indian poetry, for Naidu, requires that she speak from the place of the collective and the generic, the place where speakers have no proper names, as it were. While poets within the English Romantic lyric tradition that Naidu emerged out of actively created lyric personae whose intimacy of voice or identifiable perspective worked to unite a set of poems or indeed a volume, Naidu’s speaker(s) are plural and remarkable for their lack of concrete features, their non-individuation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a unique or specific biography for the speakers of her poems, through richly explored subjective experiences or through memories, which, taken together, would create a continuity of “voice” – an individuated identity as it were – over any given volume.72 The critic Sharon Cameron’s concept of impersonality in literary works is suggestive in this context. The qualities of impersonality as defined by Cameron that are particularly salient for Naidu’s poetry include: the adoption of an abstract voice or a voice reduced to a particular manifestation, without being personal; the representation of particular experiences understood as an undifferentiated common denominator of all experience; the effacement of distinctions and affirmation of likenesses; the presentation of speech that is unsituated; and a generality of style.73 These stylistic features, in Naidu’s poems, as we will see, work to construct a collective “Indian” sensibility that can serve as the basis of national belonging. Naidu’s speakers’ non-individuation invites her Indian readers to see experiences as shareable ones, something outside and above the discrete individuals to whom they belong. “The Bird of Time” serves as a good example of Naidu’s adoption of an impersonal voice. In this poem, we find the creation of a minimally identified, impersonal speaker who speaks for a larger totality: O Bird of Time on your fruitful bough What are the songs you sing? … Songs of the glory and gladness of life, Of poignant sorrow and passionate strife, And the lilting joy of the spring; Of hope that sows for the years unborn, And faith that dreams of a tarrying morn, The fragrant peace of the twilight’s breath, And the mystic silence that men call death. O Bird of Time, say where did you learn The changing measures you sing? … In blowing forests and breaking tides, In the happy laughter of new-made brides,   Her long poem “The Temple: A Pilgrimage of Love” in The Broken Wing is an exception to this general principle. 73   I am indebted here to Sharon Cameron’s work on the impersonal voice in an array of (primarily) nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American writers. See Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 72

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Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 And the nests of the new-born spring; In the dawn that thrills to a mother’s prayer, And the night that shelters a heart’s despair, In the sigh of pity, the sob of hate, And the pride of a soul that has conquered fate. (BT 11–12)

Two questions – each in prominent stationing at stanza’s beginning – along with the subsequent answers serve as the poem’s formal organizing principle. To whom the speaker’s and respondent’s voices belong, however, remains remarkably vague. Are the answers, for example, spoken by a second speaker, or is it the questioner who is answering his or her own questions? Who or what does the bird of time refer to? The conceit of a non-human animal – a “bird” – speaking on behalf of a reified concept, “Time,” distances the reader from an easily identifiable referent. Is “the bird of time” a universalized, transhistorical consciousness or memory? A cultural tradition? An externalization of the poet’s psyche or muse? Does the bird exist independently of the speakers, or is it a transcendental awareness channeled by them? Unable to answer these questions with any certainty, the reader is left with the evacuated identity of the voices speaking the poem. The questions themselves, however, the first asking the bird to recount the subject matter of its song, the second for the events that have shaped the bird’s singing, however, gesture toward biography. The questions’ underlying assumption is that the events of a life directly influence the content of one’s song. If the nod to experience comes in the form of questions, the answers speak of generalities, moving the content away from any singular individual’s biography: the songs are of “the glory and gladness of life,” “hope,” “faith,” and “death.” Their origins include “the laughter of new-made brides,” a “mother’s prayer,” a “heart’s despair,” and a soul’s conquering of fate. In other words, the bird answers for and as generic human experience, embodying another feature of lyric impersonality and undercutting the primacy of uniquely personal experiences. The use of the indefinite article “a” reinforces this disengagement of experience from any specific human referent. Instead, the bird of time offers a seemingly universalized recitation of generalized human experiences from birth to death, originating from a diversity of human and non-human sources. As the volume’s titular poem, its queries and answers, its questioner and answerer, are unmoored from specificity and set the stage for the undefined positionality of the poetic speaker(s) in other poems. The speaker(s) of “The Bird of Time,” like so many others in Naidu’s poems, articulate from some radically unsituated place, another feature of literary impersonality; the reader does not know their age, their gender, the place they call home, the century they were born in. Yet this absence of characterization is less a sign of alienation than a presumption of their familiarity to the Indian reader. Neither narrative nor context is necessary to render this speech comprehensible. The decontextualized place of their utterance is matched by the supposedly universal nature of their content. This impersonality is further intensified when Naidu’s speakers voice together, in the plural “we,” as they do in many poems.

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If the British had a difficult time making sense of the many distinctions of caste and occupational category within India, Naidu did not. In a poem such as “Indian Weavers,” spoken in the first-person plural, their collective voices are less a sign of difference than an occasion to stress how their labors span social differences, and in doing so, reconcile them. In the poem, the weavers could be from any era, region, or ethnic group. When the speaker asks them at dawn, dusk, and in the night what they are weaving, they respond in general terms: “We weave the robes of a new-born child … We weave the marriage-veils of a queen … We weave a dead man’s funeral shroud” (GT 30). Their answers do not provide any concrete information about themselves or about the individual child, the queen, or the dead man (reinforced again by the indefinite article) for whom they weave. The weavers’ products are metonyms for the general stages of human existence, measured from dawn to night, birth to death, and from newborn to young adult to aged stages of life. The effacement of distinctions, the affirmation of likeness, and the stress on the common denominators of experience place the reader in the realm of the impersonal. Benedict Anderson’s notion that national belonging requires an act of imagination, the establishment of a “horizontal comradeship,” an ability to identify with others whom one will never actually see or meet, is useful here.74 In terms of the weavers’ poem, their Indianness is asserted in the title, but it is the lack of individual characterization in favor of the transmission of wider human experiences that make their song legible to all who read or hear it. This is a recurrent gesture of Naidu’s poetry, whether she is ventriloquizing lovers’ talk, voices in the streets, rituals of different social groups, prayers of different faiths, or singing of India’s natural beauty.75 The absence of proper names or personal narratives, the projection of familiar experiences or emotional landscapes, allow her to forge a collective Indian unity out of relatively anonymous groups – the “horizontal comradeship” inherent in the idea of nationality. To create horizontal comradeship is to bring different groups together by affirming their similarities. A speaker without marked characteristics, it has been argued, constitutes the persona best able to do so, one broad enough to speak for/ as the nation. A further burden of cultural nationalists such as Naidu is to define a nation’s culture so that it seems to be the “collective or democratic [expression] of the people as a whole.”76 To that end, oral traditions, song, and the spoken word have often assumed tremendous significance. Naidu’s lyrics often promote their own derivation from such traditions; as such, they embody an “oral textuality.” The Golden Threshold and The Bird of Time both contain sections entitled “Folk   Imagined Communities 6.   Some of these include “A Song in Spring,” “Bells,” “June Sunset,” the series of poems entitled “The Temple,” “To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus,” and “To India.” 76   C.L. Innes, “‘Forging the Consciousness of Their Race’: Nationalist Writers,” New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 122. 74 75

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Songs” and “Indian Folk-Songs to Indian Tunes,” respectively.77 In addition to the many clearly named “folk songs,” other poems give indications that they are to be sung according to an existing tune, underscoring the poems’ desired proximity to indigenous oral culture.78 Countless others contain “song” in their title (it is the most frequently used word in her poem titles) or point indirectly toward an oral provenance: The Broken Wing, for example, contains a section “The PeacockLute: Songs for Music.” Some poems present themselves as incorporating actual refrains, or cries, or prayers of their speaker(s), lending an authenticity to the poems as records of the people’s voices. The poem “The Old Woman” for example, quotes her prayer to Allah, whereas “The Call to Evening Prayer,” “The Prayer of Islam,” and “Kali the Mother” include the various chanted names of the divinities by the followers of each faith (BT 84–5; BT 95–6; BW 42–3 and BW 52–4). “Street Cries” and “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad” incorporate the “quoted” speech of the street and bazaar hawkers. They create a populist effect, as the volumes appear to be voiced, in part, by India’s diverse peoples, whose speech is channeled through the speaker’s voice, who “translates” and “homogenizes” what would otherwise be incomprehensible linguistically to a wider audience, given the subcontinent’s vast array of spoken languages and dialects. (There is, of course, Naidu’s presumption, which dovetailed with the nationalists’, that English was the language most suited for unifying Indians linguistically at this historical moment.) The question to ask, however, is who comprises India’s peoples in her poems? Whose voices is Naidu ventriloquizing? Here is where Naidu most seems to participate in the mythic romanticizing and exoticism of Western Orientalist verse, by poets such as Edwin Arnold (Naidu, after all, has a poem about a snakecharmer!). While it is valid to read it as Orientalist mimicry, I would also like to argue that it is more than that. Naidu’s apparent Orientalism uses the linguistic exoticism for quite different purposes. Naidu’s Indians are mostly peasants, laborers, and craftsmen; itinerant peoples, including beggars and singers, whose “home” comprises a large, undefined geographical area; familiar figures from Hindu and Muslim cultural and religious traditions, primarily feudal and Vedic; the devout, including those participating in religious ceremonies and rituals; young lovers and females grieving over unfulfilled or lost love; heroes whose greatness is defined by self-sacrifice; and mothers. Whereas British readers might find this image of a rural, pre-modern, feminized India gratifying, for nostalgic reasons of their own, such representations can also be read as a tactical decentering of Orientalist conventions. In a poetry aimed at 77   The Golden Threshold, with an introduction by Arthur Symons (London: Heinemann, 1905). Future references to this volume will be cited by page number parenthetically within the text, following the abbreviation GT. 78   Here are some examples: “An Indian Love Song” is “written to an Indian tune” (BT 15); the lullaby “Slumber Song for Sunalini” is “in a Bengalee meter” (BT 59); “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad” is written “to a tune of the Bazaars” (BT 62–3); and the subtitle to “Medley” indicates it is “A Kashmeri Song” (BT 99–100).

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Indian audiences, as Naidu herself indicates about her own work, the inclusion of the above-named groups can be seen to serve multiple purposes. First, critics such as Uma Chakravarti and Rosinka Chaudhuri have mapped out how Indian cultural and political nationalists in their literary and polemical writings reappropriated pastoral Vedic and feudal Indian material from Western Orientalists in order to promote a different view of Indian history and culture. In doing so, these nationalists were offering models of heroic action and insisting on the enduring values of the past as a measure of cultural – and eventually – political strength.79 Naidu’s reading of the past contributes to this project. Second, her poems confer visibility and value upon rural, largely invisible “subjects” – a sense of the very breadth of the peoples who define the nation culturally, yet whose participation – and leadership – in politics, including the nationalist movement, had been minimal. Since these are volumes, I argue, that affirm the “nation project,” the contiguity of nationalism to these “folk” can be read as an (albeit patronizing) attempt to redress symbolically that obvious gap, by an elite figure of a supposedly democratic movement. Third, in presenting these subjects’ psyches as “universally legible,” as Orientalist verse did, that is, concerned with the most basic matters of life, death, love, devotion to god, etc., Naidu denies them individual specificity. Yet that universal essentialism enables both cultural nationalists to speak for them and these poems’ Indian readers to identify with them, since their common emotions and concerns render them inherently or essentially alike. Able to reach beyond the elite circles in which they lived and worked, nationalists such as Naidu could claim, contrary to imperialists such as Strachey, that there was a “people” of India and that she could legitimately speak of them. Fourth, these texts reinforce the identity of India’s traditions and history as Vedic and feudal (with a strong Muslim cultural component, to be explored in greater detail later). This version of India does not aim at realism: no one in this world is murderous, petty, covetous, deceitful, vindictive, or in great physical pain or illness; children do not die; social injustice is non-existent; and perhaps most importantly, there is no British empire. It is in many ways a pre-colonial world, conforming to what Elleke Boehmer has called “retrospect as aspiration,”80 whereby the urban, mechanistic aspects of the colonizers’ civilization are negated (here, through their noticeable absence). In accordance with key aspects of cultural nationalism, Naidu’s India idealizes some of the same characteristics that confirmed its inferiority in colonialists’ eyes, especially the supposed primitivism, evidenced in her lyrics’ emotionality and rural pastoralism. Finally, for Naidu, the continuity and cohesiveness of widely divergent cultural traditions – Vedic, feudal, Mughal, and contemporary – is a political strength, as India’s culture is 79   See Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” and Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets. 80   Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 116.

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unified around the endurance of various democratizing traditions over time, as she defines them. This working out of the unity in diversity so central to Naidu’s poetry and politics is affirmed in apolitical and political poems both. In “Golden Cassia,” the speaker weighs a whole series of figurative equivalents for the Cassia flower that would convey its meaning: “I sometimes think that perchance you are/ Fragments of some new-fallen star;/ Or golden lamps for a fairy shrine” (BT 48). Other comparisons are tested over the course of the poem – “golden pitchers for fairy wine,” “bright ankle-bells from the wild spring’s feet,” “gleaming tears that some fair bride shed,” or the “glimmering ghosts of a bygone dream” (BT 48–9) – without resting in any single one. It is the sheer accumulation of diverse metaphors, rather than synthesis or transcendence, which encompasses the flower’s meaning. This poem about a cassia flower operates according to the identical process by which Naidu comprises India: through yoking disparate elements into a unity. In a flower poem entitled “Nasturtiums,” this is further made explicit. The bloom is compared to different legendary women of Sanskrit verse, including the figures of Savitri, Sita, Draupadi, Damayanti, and Sakuntala. Essentially a list poem, the unifying signifier “nasturtium” is the vehicle for an abundance of cultural signifieds: “Your leaves interwoven of fragrance and fire/ Are Savitri’s sorrow and Sita’s desire,/ Draupadi’s longing, Damayanti’s fears/ And sweetest Sakutala’s magical tears” (BT 47). In this proliferation of reference, unforeseeable from the signifier alone, the reader is given an image of the ultimate unity of Sanskrit tradition. Naidu’s unity in diversity trope finds at times a potent motif in that of kinship. “The Gift of India,” an overtly political poem, relies like the flower poems on an accumulative gathering of difference to forge union: here, the purpose is to collect the war dead of India into a “family” via their memorialization. After cataloguing the economic drain of colonialism (the “gifts” of cloth, precious stones, and grain), “Mother India,” the poem’s speaker, points to the most exorbitant cost borne by her “stricken womb” (BW 17) – the loss of young Indian men in World War I, fighting for England’s empire: Gathered like pearls in their alien graves Silent they sleep by the Persian waves, Scattered like shells on the Egyptian sands, They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands, They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France. (BW 17)

This poem attempts to manage the trauma of loss through its similes. India’s sons have become “pearls,” scattered “shells,” and cut “blossoms” (BW 17). The pain of their unspecified, generalized location – “by the Persian waves,” “on the Egyptian sands,” “the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France” – is compounded for the reader by the very alteration of the boys’ substance in death, the loss of nameable individuals. Through these metaphorical exchanges (bodies

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become pearls undersea, beach shells on the sands, cut blossoms withering in the meadows), however, India’s “sons” who have died unrecognized by the Raj become a part of a collective family. Otherwise unrelated, these young men become affliated in the poem. This is depicted as a kinship relation that is both Indian and imperial. More importantly, it is in stark contrast to colonialist taxonomies of irreducible differences. India’s sons ought to be counted as Great Britain’s sons, since they die side-by-side. Great Britain’s discursive reliance on kinship tropes of family to suture the metropolitan center to the peripheries of its far-flung empire has been discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Although Naidu adopts this discourse in the poem above to encourage England to acknowledge that the sacrifice of India’s sons is equal to that of her own (they are both grieving mothers), it goes beyond this rhetorical use. Naidu uses kinship tropes here to describe an intrafilial – in essence, a national – relationship symbolized as one between a mother and her children, a family for whom the loss is irreparable. The “Indian” adoption of familial language to trope the otherwise unrelated collective of a nation began in 1882 with the creation of the Bharatmata (Mother India) in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandmath. It was the partitioning of Bengal, however, that led to the nationalists’ large-scale use of Mother India as a figure for the longing for national independence. At the same time, Bande Mataram (“Hail O Mother”) became the nationalists’ anthem.81 In Naidu’s efforts to imagine an India held together by the emotional and spiritual ties that characterize family, she adopts the gendered language of India as mother: “One heart are we to love thee, O our Mother,/ One undivided, indivisible soul,/ Bound by one hope, one purpose, one devotion/ Towards a great, divinely-destined goal” (“An Anthem of Love,” BT 89). In all but one of the poems about India as mother or as parent, however, the trope of sleeping is also present. In “To India” and “Awake!” the mother is unresponsive to her children’s cries: “Mother, O Mother, wherefore dost thou sleep?/ Arise and answer for thy children’s sake” (“To India,” GT 94); “Waken, O mother! Thy children implore thee/…/Why still dost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow?” (“Awake!” BW 55). In two other poems (“In the Night” and “Dawn”), the children, India’s future generations, are sleeping while the parent-speakers work for their freedom. Both forms of unconsciousness suggest a common origin and kinship relationship not yet embraced, an absence of the reciprocity needed in order for the national idea to take hold. India’s peoples have not awakened to their responsibility to give birth to and mother themselves. This is especially clear in “Awake!” in which the speakers of the last lines are a collective of the Hindus, Parsis, Muslims, and Christians who have chanted separately in earlier stanzas: “All Creeds: Shall not our dauntless devotion avail thee?/ Hearken! O queen and O goddess, we hail thee!” (BW 56). Imploring

81   Stephanie Tawa Lama, “The Hindu Goddess and Women’s Political Representation in South Asia,” XVIII World Congress – July 31, 2000. Available at: http://www.csh-delhi. com/team/downloads/publiperso/STLR-RIS.pdf..

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their collective mother to awaken, these speakers conjure up a potentially unifying national relationship of a plurality of faiths, still unrealized. With its dedication to Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim political leader who supported Indian self-government, the poem “Awake!” points to the significance for Naidu of Muslims within India’s “family” unit. In speaking as and for India, Naidu’s speakers are particularly invested in constituting an India where religious factionalism between Hindus and Muslims, seen as one of the prime obstacles to national unity, is either non-existent or overcome. This interest stems in part from Naidu’s own cultural identifications with the Muslim world as a lifelong resident of Hyderabad, “the premier Musselman city in India,” in her words.82 Her family had deep connections to Muslim culture. Despite being born a Bengali Brahmin (her family name was Chattopadhyaya), Naidu was “brought up in the midst of Muslim families in Hyderabad.”83 At the Nizam of Hyderabad’s request, Naidu’s father founded and became the principal of the New Hyderabad College (later the Nizam’s College); adopting typical Hyderabadi dress, with a beard and Nizam turban, he looked, according to her, “a perfect Muslim gentleman.”84 The Muslim cultural influences on Naidu were profound: indeed, she claimed that “[t]he first accents I heard were in the tongue of Amir of Kusru [thirteenth-century Sufi poet from Delhi]. All my early associations were formed with the Mussalman men and Mussalman women of my city. My first playmates were Mussalman children.”85 Naidu’s “persianised Urdu” came easier to her than Hindi all her life, and although her father insisted that she learn English, she resisted it powerfully.86 One of Naidu’s earliest literary works was in fact a Persian play, Meher Muneer, which her father printed in a local journal.87 In a letter to Gokhale in 1914, Naidu describes a typical morning in order to emphasize the peaceful communal coexistence that defines Hyderabad: Between 9 and 12 … I hold my morning durbar to which everyone in Hyderabad comes without distinction of class. Nawabs and officials, fashionable England  “Ideals of Islam,” Great Women of India: Sarojini Naidu 51.   H.B. Mathur, “Sarojini Naidu: Poet and Patriot,” in Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India 378. 84   Tara Ali Baig, Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1974) 29. 85   “Ideals of Islam,” 51. 86   A friend of Naidu’s, Amar Nath Jha, recounts how uncomfortable it was for Naidu to speak in Hindi: “At the Bihari Students’ Conference … in October 1917, she said, ‘Gandhiji does not want English to be spoken. I don’t know how I am going to speak in Hindustani. I tell you what. When I get up, ask the students to shout “English, English”.’ But actually she spoke in high-flown Persianised Urdu” (Quoted in Santana Ganguly, “Prophetic Visions: Negotiating Islam in the Works of Sarojini Naidu,” Journal of the Department of English 31.1–2 (2004): 34). For her resistance to learning English, see Naidu’s letter to Symons, quoted in his introduction to The Golden Threshold 11. 87   Baig, Sarojini Naidu 16. 82

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returned men and poor students without shoes on their feet but full of fire in their hearts, Maulvis with long beards, pundits with bare bodies and shawls, poets changing Persian and Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu verses … I sit … and talk to each after his kind, and learn … from this medieval habit of mine of holding morning receptions … [M]ine … is a home which is the centre of the Hindu-Mohammedan Unity in its fullest sense.88

As someone who can “talk to each after his kind,” Naidu is someone capable of subsuming specific individual voices into her own. Naidu holds court – “morning durbar” – in her home, a practice she dubs “medieval” without hesitation. This allusion to feudal India is significant, however, for it will resonate with her poetic representations of the anti-sectarian reigns of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, as we will see. Naidu’s promotion of Hindu–Muslim unity was her signature political issue as a nationalist (even more so than her considerable efforts on behalf of Indian women’s political advancement). To work toward that end was to resist to the Raj’s politics and policies since, from the nationalists’ perspective, the British government was actively exploiting tensions between Hindus and Muslims in order to thwart the consolidation of the nationalist movement and Indian political unification.89 At this particular moment in time, over the course of 10 to 15 years, a number of key events were shaping nationalist politics into communal molds, and it was against this tendency that Naidu fought relentlessly. In 1905, for example, working to streamline administrative efficiency, Viceroy Curzon partitioned the large province of Bengal. His actions were extremely controversial, since they led to a widening of the social gaps in emergent Indian unity. East Bengal and Assam, with their Muslim majorities, were split off from western Bengal, whose Hindu majority was joined together with Bihar and Orissa, two regions with non-Bengali majorities (in effect, diluting the strength of Bengali (Hindu) nationalism). Bengalis immediately claimed this was a mutilation of their homeland and an attack on their power. Along with moderate nationalists, Surendranath Banerjea responded with boycotts and protests of the “divide and rule” tactics of the British. Yet instead of building upon widespread Muslim resistance to the partition, Banerjea’s and the moderates’ actions revealed that the de facto existing political leadership class of Bengal was comprised of the Hindu bhadralok (elite class, widely English educated).90 Further, as mentioned earlier, “Bande Mataram” was adopted informally as the national anthem (in this hymn, India is an oppressed mother who will be freed by a militant Hindu insurgency). Coupled with rioting by Hindus and the pressure exerted upon the populace to buy expensive local cloth   Selected Letters, letter of 11-16-1914, 97.   See Chandra, Communalism in Modern India and Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 156–66. 90   See Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 156. 88 89

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(e.g., to participate in a boycott of cheaper British imported goods, including cotton), these divisive actions by Bengali nationalists led Muslims (largely from the peasant class) to welcome Curzon’s partitioning. (Although the partition of Bengal was revoked in 1912, quieting nationalist agitation, relations between Hindus and Muslims remained tense.) In 1906, partly in response to the crisis of partitioning, the All-India Muslim League was formed with the explicit purpose of advancing “Muslim” interests. Politicized Indians were splitting into rival communal camps, with the British advocating on behalf of the Muslim League against the largely Hindu Indian National Congress in Bengal.91 Furthering the divisions between religious communities, in 1909 the Morley-Minto reforms mentioned earlier reserved special seats on councils for Muslims and established separate electorates in which Muslims only could vote. Claiming that they were protecting the rights of religious minorities from a Hindu nationalist movement characterized as antagonistic to Muslim interests, the Raj was effectively shaping Muslims into a separate political community based on religion instead of nationality, and thus minimizing Indian unification. Yet the political divisions between these two communities were not so deep that cooperation and unity were inconceivable. The Pan-Islam movement, formed after the British decided not to defend the Ottoman Empire against the Russians (the Ottoman sultan was seen as the ruler of all Muslims), allied itself with the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League in calling for self-government.92 In 1915 and 1916, the INC and the Muslim League met and embraced the Lucknow Pact, which served the political interests of both communities by widening the franchise, creating special electorates for Muslims, electing majorities on all councils, and giving “weightage” in minority provinces. This is the charged imperial and sectarian context in which Naidu’s poetry was largely written and published. In all three volumes, her verse combats perceptions of communal differences. At the same time that her speeches promoted Hindu– Muslim unity, her poetry advances Muslim poetic, cultural, and religious traditions as central to Indian culture; indeed, the possibility of an Indian democracy in the future depends upon this acknowledgment.93 This investment in Muslim culture begins with Naidu’s lyrics on her home, Hyderabad, a city known to give “the lie to the oft-repeated assertion of a traditional enmity between the peoples of two religions.”94 As Naidu claimed in a 1915 speech, Hyderabad  Chandra, Communalism in Modern India 255.   Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 162. 93   See the following speeches: “The Soul of India,” “Self-Government for India,” “Ideals of Islam,” “True Brotherhood,” “Hindu Muslim Unity,” and “The Vision of Patriotism.” Two other speeches published in a different volume are relevant here: “The Khilafat Question” and “Address to Ceylon Muslims” (in Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 1925)). 94   Harriet Ronken Lynton and Mohini Rajan, The Days of the Beloved (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) viii. 91 92

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is so awake that already it has solved[,] without any consciousness that it has done so, the greatest problem that all our political reformers are trying to solve, i.e., the question of Hindu-Muslim unity, and that is the greatest contribution to the future of India.95

As “the true center of Hindu-Muslim unity and brotherhood,” the city is notably described as “so awake,” a word choice particularly resonant with political implications (as we saw in her poems discussed earlier). Hyderabad is the setting, and sometimes the subject, of a number of her poems, including her two-part “Songs of my City,” “Ode to the Nizam of Hyderabad,” “Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad,” “The Hussain Saagar” (the lake, and water source, for the city), and “The Royal Tombs of Golconda.”96 This last poem explores the enduring artistic legacy of the sixteenth-century Muslim Qutb kings (originally from Turkey), embodied in the magnificent architecture and gardens of Golconda. Historically renowned for their learning and architectural accomplishments, the Qutb kings patronized the local Deccan culture, encouraging the learning and writing of Telugu, alongside Persian and Arabic. The fourth king, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, an accomplished poet in Telugu whose court drew poets from all over the Deccan, is remembered for founding the city of Hyderabad. In “The Royal Tombs of Golconda,” wandering the grounds of the ruined fort, the speaker’s “dreaming spirit hears” the call of this world and channels its provenance for her contemporary audience (GT 95). This Muslim past emerges as a historical inheritance that is very much alive: “In vain … doth time aspire/ To make your names oblivion’s sport” (GT 95). The monuments built by them still stand, “embodied memories of your line,/ Incarnate legends of your reign” (GT 96). The pun on “line” suggests that their love of art still survives in the speaker’s lyricized lines memorializing their accomplishments. (That these tombs’ architectural “lines” could serve as inspiration for lyric lines has a precedent in Naidu’s early poetic career: at the age of nine, she “graffiteed” a poem of her own at Golconda, on one of the tombs’ walls.)97 Though her poem does not explicitly present the Qutb kings’ nonsectarian outlook, the allusion to their dynasty is as replete with significance as Naidu’s lyric setting in Janjira, discussed earlier. Naidu’s poetic embrace of the Mughal period contested British attempts to appropriate that tradition for their own ruling style. The British had shifted the imperial capital away from Calcutta (in Bengal) to Delhi (historically, the Mughal capital of India); in the 1911 Durbar of King George V, they adopted Mughal ceremonial manners in an effort to cultivate loyalist Muslim elements and factionalize Hindus and Muslims.98 When Naidu writes to Gosse in 1903 that she wants her lyrics “to rebuild the antique glory of Hyderabad, Aurangabad, Gulbarga,   “Ideal of Civic Life,” in Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India 166.   Selected Letters, letter of 3-6-1915, 106; see also the letter of 11-16-1914, 97–8. 97  Naravane, Sarojini Naidu 84. 98   Cohn, “Representing Authority” 208. 95 96

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and Warangal,” she is speaking of a time when, under the Muslim Sultanate of Delhi and under Mughal leadership, an extraordinary fusion of Hindu–Muslim culture took place.99 Other poems assert the continuity of Hyderabad’s grandeur and celebrate its beauty. The current Nizam’s court conjures up the “sumptuous fables of Baghdad” and the “torches of a Thousand Nights” (GT 60), whereas the synaesthetic feast in “Nightfall” overwhelms the reader who imaginatively takes in the city, from its “speckled sky [burning] like a pigeon’s egg,” to the “white river … curved like a tusk from the mouth of the city gates” (GT 90). Instead of dismissing Naidu’s depiction of Hyderabad as mere Orientalism, it is well to remember that the magical quality of its aestheticized beauty is, for her, an index of Hyderabad’s higher social and moral development historically.100 According to Thomas Metcalf, “the Sultanate period [set the pattern for] … the enduring ethnic and linguistic pluralism of both the ruling elites and those ruled.”101 Naidu’s “Ode to the Nizam of Hyderabad” is a panegyric in the style of a Mughal royal ode, addressed to Hyderabad’s poet and living ruler: “round your jeweled sceptre [are bound]/ The lilies of a poet’s fame;/ Beneath [your] sway concordant dwell/ The peoples whom your laws embrace,/ In brotherhood of diverse creeds,/ And harmony of diverse race” (GT 59). The Nizam’s success is conveyed through terms rich with aesthetic connotations (the jewels and the lilies bound round the ruler’s scepter, the “concordance” and “harmony” of his reign). By the poem’s end, his ability to cultivate the centuries-old tradition of religious “brotherhood” and artistic beauty lead the speaker to depict the Nizam’s rulership as exemplary for the nation as a whole. The speaker rhetorically wills the extension of his sphere of influence, by having his name invoked “within a nation’s prayer,/ his music on a nation’s tongue” (GT 61, my emphasis). The desirability of fusing Muslim and Hindu culture is elaborated in one poem through the trope of cross-communal eros. “An Indian Love Song,” sung by two speakers, a Muslim man (the “he” of the poem) and a Hindu woman (the poem’s “she”), is staged as a wooing dialogue. He pleads with her to give some sign of her love for him (by lifting her veils, or giving a thread from her garment), while she doubts whether she can “profane the law of my father’s creed for a foe of my father’s race” (BT 16). The history of grievances between the two communities – “[his] kinsman have broken our sacred altars and slaughtered our sacred kine,” she remembers – leads her to conclude that the “feud of old faiths and the blood of old battles” make erotic reciprocation impossible (BT 16). In the concluding stanza, the man distances himself from his community’s actions in “a bygone age.” Not   Selected Letters, letter of 12-23-1903, 42.   See her letter of September 11, 1907, just after the Nizam’s death, where she claims that “in all history I know of nothing more poignantly lovely than the devotion he aroused and still arouses in the hearts of his people … rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, Hindu, Mohammendan, Parsi, Sikh, Jain, Christian – I wish you could have come to my city of the Arabian Nights in the life-time of my Haroun-al-Rashid!” (Selected Letters 64). 101   Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History 5. 99

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only is erotic desire indifferent to sectarian strife (“Love recks not of feuds … of stranger, comrade or kin” (BT 17)), but it is capable of transcending it: “Love shall cancel the ancient wrong and conquer the ancient rage” (BT 17). Along with the rhetorical weight given to his words as the poem’s concluding ones, the poem is described as “written to an Indian tune” (my emphasis). The “melody” of the three stanzas, “sung” alternately by the two speakers, aurally bridges the lovers’ religious and cultural divide, while the imagined harmonies of their different voice-registers presents a sound image of erotic reciprocity and communal accord in keeping with the Muslim man’s plea. Naidu’s thematic stress on Muslim culture evidenced in the poem above also functions as an important corrective to the predominantly Hindu character of the nationalist movement.102 Naidu herself was widely known as a (Hindu) nationalist whom Muslims could trust.103 Two poems in The Broken Wing – “The Prayer of Islam,” in which the poet chants eight of the 99 “beautiful Arabic names of God as used by the followers of Islam” (BW 43) and “Kali the Mother,” in which various personages (maidens, mothers, priests, scholars, artisans) recite some of Kali’s many names (BW 52–4) – stand as complementary pairings. Not antagonistic, they reflect the equality conferred upon the different religious traditions. Naidu’s many allusions to Muslim culture and poetic/literary traditions, while too broad to be explored in detail here, extend through all three volumes of her verse.104 In her desire to invert hierarchical assumptions that equate India with Hindu culture and religion, however, Naidu presents Muslim culture as the aesthetic gateway to a spectrum of India’s religious cultures. The religious differences among India’s peoples are not figuratively left at the door but brought inside. In “The Call to Evening Prayer,” for example, the muezzins’ cries of “Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!” (BT 95) at sunset inaugurate the speaker’s recitation of the cries of India’s other faiths: the “Ave Maria! Ave Maria!” of its Christians, the “Ahura Mazda! Ahura Mazda!” of its Zoroastrians, and the “Naray’yana! Naray’yana!” of its 102   This affiliation of Naidu’s could be used against her by those in the nationalist movement who identified India with Hinduism. See her letter to Syed Mahmud: “Have you seen Hassan Nizami’s new book with its beautiful and pointed dedication to me— it constitutes another link in the long, long chain of ‘evidence against me’ as a lover of the Muslim community and culture—such heavy evidence, such long-standing and fastaccumulating evidence all of which counts in the indictment. Well—che sera, sera … One lives only once and cannot afford to deviate from the principles and devotion of a life-time” ( in Selected Letters, letter of 8-29-1917, 133). 103   Yusuf Meherally, “Sarojini Naidu,” Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India 442. 104   Some of the most obvious allusions to Muslim culture appear in the following poems: “The Queen’s Rival,” “Humanyun to Zubeida,” “The Song of Princess Zeb-unmissa (From the Persian),” “The Purdahnashin,” and “Leili” in The Golden Threshold; “In a Latticed Balcony,” “An Indian Love Song,” and “The Old Woman” in The Bird of Time; and “Wandering Beggars,” “Song from Shiraz,” “Prayer of Islam,” and “The Imam Bara” in The Broken Wing.

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Hindus (BT 95–6). Instead of drawing and confining the speaker within a religious experience in a mosque, the twilight call to worship figuratively calls forth the speaker (and the readers) to a sense of Indian religious inclusiveness, conveyed in the generic experience of evening prayer, as the title suggests. Similarly, “The Imam Bara” situates the speaker inside Lucknow’s Shia chapel dedicated to the martyrs Ali, Mohammed’s son, and his grandsons Hassan and Hussain. Yet the interpretive (and indeed physical) movement of the poem’s speaker – and consequently the reader’s – is directed beyond the Islamic history memorialized within the shrine itself. Traversing from the dark “tragic shrine/ That throbs with … deathless sorrow” into the “living sunlight,” the speaker reads these martyrs’ legacy as expressive of a universalized “spirit that never dies” (BW 26), relevant to those engaged in any great task, regardless of their religion. The aspirations of the present generation, it is intimated, can find there the “hope of new ages” and of “steadfast triumph” (BW 26) that result from self-sacrifice. A specifically Islamic place of worship serves as the departure point for India’s future. In a speech delivered in Hyderabad, she claims that “the tradition of Islam has truly been carried out for two hundred years, that tradition of democracy that knows how out of its legislation to give equal rights and privileges to all the communities whose destiny it controls.” In another speech, she notes that Islam gave “to the world in its ultimate form the most perfect definition of brotherhood, of the Republic, of the equality of all men, of all classes, of all ranks.”105 Her insistence that democracy represents a uniquely Islamic contribution to Indian culture dovetails with her poetic iterations linking Islam with cultural inclusiveness. This kind of foregrounding of Muslim cultural history enables Naidu to present India’s religious and cultural traditions as grounded in earlier fusions, not the confusing heterogeneity the British found so puzzling. Of signal importance in this regard are her many references to the Sufi tradition of Indic Muslim culture (along with the feudal period already mentioned). These historical allusions become anticipatory moments of an inclusive future national culture. Thus, readings of Naidu’s allusions to Sufi culture should not reduce them to exoticism or prettiness.106 Instead, the Sufi element in her poetry functions as a nodal point for many things: the ability to identify with the other; the renunciation of self; the notion of spirituality as something unencumbered by trivial sectarian differences (which the British seemed particularly concerned with); the highlighting of Muslim contributions to Indian traditions, including their similarity to the bhakti poets – all these features read as constitutive elements of a core aesthetic and political agenda centered on Hindu–Muslim parity. The Sufi saints, a cultural presence from the early twelfth century, wandered all over the subcontinent, bringing the people into   Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu 51 and 313.   D. Anjaneyulu describes some of Naidu’s poems as “replete with the mystical ecstasy of medieval saint-poets and the well-turned conceits of Persian poetry, with all its polished conventions”; later, he notes that Naidu was “neat and pretty like a Moghul miniature” (Sarojini Naidu: Great Women of Modern India 373–4). 105 106

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contact with an Islam that both rejected forced conversion and emphasized the ultimate unity of all religions.107 In their travels, the Sufis made contact with Hindu traditions, and a fertile exchange was the result. Evidence of their egalitarianism, flexibility, and openness to cultural mixing, Sufi poets composed not only in Persian but also in the vernaculars of North India, and, later, of the Deccan. They drew on the rich vocabulary and resonances of Indic philosophic and religious thought, as well as on a range of poetic conventions characteristic of bhakti poetry. Bhakti poets, in turn, were influenced by the new genres derived from Persian.108

The Sufis, and especially their poets, were non-sectarian intermediaries between Hindu and Muslim cultures.109 Although Naidu’s letters and speeches identify Persian and Urdu poetic traditions as central to her aesthetic, citing them more frequently than other traditions, the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz are particularly singled out for the beauty of their verse.110 Their spiritual values of self-sacrifice and universal humanism find secular affirmation in Naidu’s nationalism, where those same ideals predominate. It is hardly surprising, then, that Naidu, for whom the political unity of Hindus and Muslims became a quasi-religious quest, should allude to the relevance of this tradition and these poets: this sense of fundamental oneness found its beautiful expression in the spiritual Sufism which is blood-kin to Vedantism [branch of Hindu philosophy]. What is the teaching of the Sufi doctrine except the Vedanta which we Hindus inherited—   Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, “Sufi Cults and the Making of a Pluralist Society,” in Sufi Cults and the Evolution of Medieval Indian Culture, ed. Anup Taneja (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 2003) 36–40 and 47. 108   Metcalf and Metcalf, Concise History, 13 and 14. See also Neeta Sadarangani, Bhakti Poetry in Medieval India: Its Inception, Cultural Encounter and Impact (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2004) 55–89. 109   Their revered status is suggested by the Mughal rulers’ deference to them. The first Mughul ruler Babur, when he initially entered Delhi, is said to have first offered a prayer at the Sufi shrine beloved by Hindus and Muslims. His descendent Akbar, who expanded his kingdom into the Deccan, is famous for embracing all religions and asserting that the sovereign should not identify with any one of them. His grandson Darashikoh became a Sufi, but one who also translated Sanskrit holy works, claimed to have been embraced by Rama in a dream, and argued that Hindus and Muslims were twins, hairs of the same head. He wrote a book, The Meeting Place of the Two Oceans, to express their essential agreement. 110   In a letter to her daughter, Naidu mentions “Ghalib the marvelous, Amir Khusru, the bird voiced, Zauk, Abas, Mir … among Muslim poets, including Zeb-un-Nisa, the Mogul princess … and the greatest living Indian poet … Iqbal of Lahore” (Selected Letters, letter of 6-2-1922, 165–6). The Persian poet Omar Khayyam is the subject of her 1906 speech “The Personal Element in Spiritual Life” (175–7), although she quotes his verse elsewhere in other speeches (105, 142, and 176). 107

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the love of mankind, the service to the world, ecstasy in which self is annihilated into the universal life of humanity? Go to the poetry of Islam. What is there so beautiful in all the wide and manifold realms of literature as that immortal lyric of Hafiz, Rumi….? (53)

Whether Naidu came in contact with this tradition through her own reading, her immersion in the Persianized poetic traditions of Hyderabad, or even their imitations in late Victorian verse – is less important than the ends to which this textual allusiveness leads. In “Indian Dancers,” for example, it is irrelevant to distinguish the ecstatic dancers as Muslim or Hindu, so thoroughly shared was this practice among Sufi and bhakti followers: as the title indicates, they are “Indian” dancers. The text echoes the conflation of the sensual, the erotic, and the spiritual common to Sufi and bhakti religious movements: “Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting,/ what passionate bosoms aflaming with fire/…/ O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music/ that cleaveth the stars like a wail of desire” (GT 71). Creating an indeterminacy of cultural location, the speaker enfolds Hindu and Muslim cultures: these faces are “houri-like” [resemble the beautiful women of the Islamic paradisiacal afterlife] (GT 71), yet they are clad not in Sufi white, but in the decidedly Hindu “glittering garments of purple” with “jewel-girt arms” (GT 72). In Naidu’s “The Time of Roses,” the beautifully sensuous qualities of roses – their “voluptuous crimson showers/ And untrammeled tides of gold” the “rich mellifluous rapture/ Of their magical perfume” (BW 68) – become a metonym for the self-annihilating love in which the speaker desires to dissolve herself: “Hide me in a shrine of roses,/ Drown me in a wine of roses/ Drawn from every fragrant grove!/ Bind me on a pyre of roses,/ Burn me in a fire of roses,/ Crown me with the rose of Love!” (BW 69). The sati metaphor concluding the stanza works to fuse Hindu and Sufi traditions. In Sufi and Hindu mystical poetry, carnal imagery particularly – here, burning – is used to express spiritual yearning; roses are important in Sufi poetry as the incarnation of God’s beauty.111 In addition, union with the divine or “the beloved” is figured as a kind of death.112 With their incorporation of this kind of allusive imagery, “Indian Dancers” and “The Time of Roses” are not simply imitations of earlier traditions. They are actively engaged in a re-synthesis of these cultures at a time of growing sectarian divisiveness.   Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 112   See J. Christoph Bürgel, “‘Speech is a Ship and Meaning the Sea’: Some Formal Aspects of the Ghazal Poetry of Rumi,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi, ed. Amin Banani, Richard Houannisian, and Georges Sabagh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 59–60. The aspect of the Beloved associated with the killing of the ego is called by Rumi “the burning”: “It is the burn of the heart I want. This burn is everything … because this is what calls God secretly in the night” (Rumi, A Garden Beyond Paradise: The Mystical Poetry of Rumi, trans. and ed. Jonathan Star and Shahram Shiva (New York: Bantam Books, 1992) 61). 111

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Many of Naidu’s spiritually-inflected love poems allude to Rumi, contributing another strand to the poetry of de-individuation discussed earlier, whereby the unique individual is jettisoned in favor of a larger collective identity. For Rumi and Naidu, eros repeatedly emerges as a force that disrupts boundaries that separate individuals from one another, or the individual from the divine. Eros destroys the self, rendered above in “The Time of Roses” as an embrace of death; further, the lover’s desire is equated with suffering, pain, and longing, while the beloved is represented as indifferent or cruel.113 The borderline masochism and carnality of Rumi’s depiction of spiritual love, intensified in later Persian traditions, has been noted by Annemarie Schimmel.114 The cruelty of the beloved (whether s/he is divine or human is unclear) is also evident in poems like Naidu’s “Guerdon,” where she begins by asking her Love to Take my flesh to feed your dogs if you choose, Water your garden-trees with my blood if you will, Turn my heart into ashes, my dreams into dust – Am I not yours, O Love, to cherish or kill? Strangle my soul and fling it into the fire! Why should my true love falter or fear or rebel? Love, I am yours to lie in your breast like a flower, Or burn like a weed for your sake in the flame of hell. (BW 120)

Such representations of love have understandably disturbed feminist critics who have pointed to the regressive stereotypes of female masochism in Naidu’s love poems. Yet why do we assume a female speaker, given that such diction within Sufi verse is non-gender specific? Naidu’s depiction of eros here – and the lack of specificity regarding the gender of her lyric speaker – represents an aesthetic embrace of an Islamic poetic tradition within which the speaker may be male or female, the sexuality hetero- or homoerotic, and the object ultimately genderless.115 For her Indian readers, these texts carry an implicit political charge insofar as they reauthorize Indic-Muslim culture. 113   Some examples in Naidu’s works include “The Snake Charmer, “Humayun to Zobeida,” “The Song of Princess Zeb-un-Nissa,” and “Suttee” in The Golden Threshold; “Dirge,” “Love and Death,” “A Persian Love Song,” “Song of Radha the Milkmaid,” and “Guerdon” in The Bird of Time; and “Caprice,” “Welcome,” “The Offering,” “Ecstasy,” “The Desire of Love,” “The Sorrow of Love,” and “The Silence of Love” in The Broken Wing. The third and fourth sections of the volume The Broken Wing almost entirely represent the pain and suffering of erotic separation from the beloved as well as the desire for a union that would shatter or destroy the ego. 114  See The Triumph of the Sun 347. 115   James Cousins recognized the centrality of the “desire to be lost in the flame of the Divine” in Naidu, although he does not mention the tradition Naidu is working out of (“The Poetry of Sarojini Naidu,” 397).

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The recurring trope of the wandering singer in Naidu speaks to a Sufi tradition whereby local boundaries are dissolved in the construction of a larger whole. This goes beyond the dissolution of the individual self: what is created is a commonly inhabited spiritual and literal geography. Wandering singers were a tradition shared by Sufi and bhakti cultures in India, and some of these traveling poets, like Jayadeva and Rumi, stand as saints within their respective religious traditions.116 Naidu’s poem, “Wandering Singers,” rather than specifying the group or time period to which the speaker-singers belong, stresses instead the blanket kinship they effect through their sharing of simple songs, a kind of nation-building realized through the shared oral culture discussed earlier: “With lutes in our hands ever-singing we roam,/ All men are our kindred, the world is our home” (GT 28). The direction of their travels is not determined by economic need, custom, or traditions specific to a language, culture, or religion, but rather by an impersonal force of destiny: “Where the wind calls our wandering footsteps we go./…/ The voice of the wind is the voice of our fate” (GT 29). In her speeches, many times Naidu called herself a “wandering singer” or a “wandering poet” as she traveled on her own politically unifying vocation: The function of the wandering singer has been … to bear across the frontiers that divide … one message of human kinship that binds province to province, race to race, creed to creed … I came in your midst as a stranger, as I said, a wandering singer, a wandering singer that had brought to you that message of unity which is the only message today that may be uttered.117

Superceding their individual will, traveling poets identify themselves as the bearers of a unifying message spoken through them. In her memorial speech after Gokhale’s death, Naidu channels his words to convey a similar task enjoined upon her: “‘Consecrate your life and your talent, your song and your speech, your thought and your dream to the Motherland. O Poet, see the visions from the hilltops and spread abroad the message of hope to the toilers in the valleys’.”118 Naidu’s 116

  Jayadeva was a son of a Brahmin who renounced worldly wealth and traveled as a beggar poet. He is known – and signs himself – as author of the Gitagovinda, a poem depicting the relationship between Krishna and the gopis, the women who tend his cows (and especially Radha). His name (Jayadeva) is also used for Krishna in the poem, further conflating poetry and the sacred. There is also some evidence of wandering female singers in the bhakti tradition, embodied in the figure of Mahadevi. Figures such as Jayadeva and Mahadevi were tremendously important in the development of the bhakti religious practices in India. 117   These quotes are from Naidu’s 1918 speech to the Madras Provincial Conference in May 1918 (77 and 83). See also her 1918 speech “A Vision of India’s Future Women,” 66. 118   “Reminiscences of Mr. Gokhale,” 24.

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self-identifications as a wandering singer position her in a long line of India’s Hindu and Muslim poets who speak to and for the people as a collective. Unlike the Raj, whose style of rule divided India’s peoples not only religiously, racially, occupationally, but also geographically, as the Partition of Bengal in 1905 made clear, Naidu’s Sufi trope of the wandering singer affirms nationalism’s efforts to construct geographical unification. Both the concept and the practice of nationalism have come under close scrutiny, indeed under fire, by a range of postcolonial scholars, among them Etienne Balibar, Paul Gilroy, Partha Chatterjee, and Simon Gikandi.119 Balibar, for example, notes how nationalism, in seeking to establish a myth of unity among diverse peoples, has often identified one “race” as the true or authentic one. He distinguishes between nationalism’s employment of external racism (discrimination directed at those outside the nation’s borders) and internal racism (oppression directed at groups within the geographic borders of the nation).120 In either case, nation is grounded upon exclusivity. Gilroy’s work has stressed that the homogeneous nation is a historical falsification of what in reality are contingent, transnational communities and forms of belonging.121 Simon Gikandi, along with Partha Chatterjee, chides those who have uncritically celebrated anticolonial nationalisms by calling attention to the fact that “the nation” is essentially a Western bourgeois liberal concept. Thus, “the age of empire was the period in which the rest of the world came to be written into the dominant European narrative, a narrative that defined itself in categories – modernity and a bourgeois identity – which even the colonized came to admire and emulate.”122 In the appeals of anticolonial nationalists to precolonial histories, concurrent with an embrace of the national citizen-subject (conceptually, the product of Enlightenment modernity), Gikandi sees a deep “discursive dissociation” (17). Naidu’s nationalist poetics are vulnerable to these criticisms. One of the greatest ironies implicit in her political/poetic project of the dissolution of specificity or difference is that it is in the service of creating the nation “India” as a separate entity. At times, Naidu attempts to define India’s unity via negation: as the absence of concrete identity markers in her subjects, as the transcendence of the specific individual. Asserting Indian unity in a purely formal (and empty)   Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991); Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity, and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin Press, 2000); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 120   Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism” 38–40. 121   See also Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso Books, 1993). 122   Maps of Englishness 32. 119

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fashion is, nonetheless, a kind of homogenization. Elsewhere, she fills in this unity with the supposedly common denominators of human experience and universalized emotional states. Although championing cultural pluralism, her assertions of a common humanity work to erase the cultural diversity of humanity, constituting what A.P. Taguieff has called “differentialist racism.”123 Yet this is not the whole picture. Importantly, Naidu’s nationalism is above all a civic one, where birth or residence within a geographical territory confers belonging, not ancestry or blood, as is the case with Balibar’s ethnic nationalism.124 India’s unity – the social and political possibility of its existence as a nation – is not rendered problematic for Naidu, as it was for British imperialists, by ideas of racial, ethnic, or religious differences. Instead, for her, the vision of a common humanity shared by Indians was a way out of the damaging colonialist identity politics that promoted communalism and the hierarchical othering and aggression fostered by “the narcissism of small differences.” Further, Naidu’s was not an empty idealism but one clearly tethered to a specific agent (herself) and connected to a particular agenda of cultural democracy.125 She does not privilege any one cultural tradition over the others as being the most “authentic.” Even though her poetry testifies to a deep affinity for the Indic-Muslim culture, it co-exists easily alongside others, sustaining multiple ethnic affiliations. This chapter has argued that these efforts served to counteract internal and external attempts to define Indian nationalism as promoting the interests of Hindus alone. Further, by referencing a history of interwoven, interdependent cultural and religious traditions, Naidu rejects the exclusionary and homogenizing logic of “us” versus “them” characteristic of imperialist (and some nationalist) ideologies.126 India’s cultural unity is created in Naidu’s poetry not only through an accumulation of differences – but through an acknowledgment of the overlaps and syncretisms, the “impurity,” the heterogeneous and even cosmopolitan nature, of its traditions. Her celebration of communal harmony, evidenced in her depictions of contemporary Hyderabad, the Sufi and bhakti traditions in India, and the Sultanate and Mughal reigns, becomes a symbol of cultural liminality and the condition of possibility for a democratic nation. That the feudal, aristocratic cultures mentioned above depended upon a hierarchized and stratified socius, far removed from a democratic polity, is an internal contradiction Naidu never addresses. Her promotion of 123   See A.P. Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 27 and 200–8. 124   For the difference between ethnic and civic nationalism, see Graham Day and Andrew Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2004) 132. 125   As Bruce Robbins notes, there can never be a “clean” or “pure” universalism, and Naidu does not disguise her own role in shaping India’s unity. See Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 75. 126   Her important efforts on behalf of Indian women’s political empowerment – to grant them the franchise and to conscript them within the nationalist project – also seek to opt out of nationalism defined exclusively as a masculinist project.

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communal tolerance, diversity, and “horizontal comradeship” does not fully mask these deep social inequalities. Naidu’s work does not exhibit the kind of self-consciousness that recognizes the contradictions and internal inconsistencies mentioned above. In addition to these, we could include her construction of a national cultural community in English, the replication of certain Western Orientalist poetic conventions, and her championing of nationhood. The extent to which we can overlook this kind of “discursive dissociation,” to use Gikandi’s words, may depend upon our overall assessment of Naidu’s anti-colonial nationalism. Aijaz Ahmad has made the case that nationalism is far from unitary, that particular configurations of forces determine its “initiatives and outcomes.”127 Naidu was as much a subject, an active agent attempting conceptually to create a cultural nation where there had not been one before, a nation that strongly resisted ethnic nationalism – as she was subject to the aesthetic and politicized discourses of nation within which she waged her struggles. She never questioned her own view of “India” as a viable cultural community, one that had to be separated from an oppressive imperial power. To bring about this necessary severance, however, she conscripted Western discourses of the nation to effect that alienation and create that community. This borrowing, instead of a liability, can be read as a powerful means of collective affirmation. For her Indian and English readers, she transmits a sense of India as a coherent nation, not as one impossibly divided, as the British liked to project. Naidu identified traditional cultural patterns (oral ones, Indic-Muslim traditions of art and democracy, and a discourse of collective impersonality) as strategies through which this distancing and differentiation from the colonizing culture could be envisioned. The antithesis of divisive communalism, nationalist discourse afforded her a structure or container for future belonging, enabling her to reclaim India from imperialist definition.

  Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992) 11.

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Epilogue The Indian women authors of my study successfully developed their own “new formulas” – distinctly literary ones – for representing India to the West. These endeavors enabled them to initiate wide-ranging conversations over contemporary concerns that had previously been the domain of either Indian men or British writers: the nature of India’s past and identity, the path to reforming Indian women’s lives, and the current state – and future – of Indian–British relations under colonialism. Their high-caste or high-class status, their progressive upbringings, their access to English-language education, their exposure to mentors at home and in Great Britain, all positioned them as confident women uniquely qualified to inaugurate such a venture in cultural translation. They began this conversation in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, and it has continued into the present, in the works of contemporary writers such as Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Manju Kapu. Their works were verse translations, novels, essays, short stories, and lyric poetry, consciously based upon existing Western forms, but also altering and adapting these genres to represent their Indian context as it had never been done before. If we think, then, of their works as bridges between cultures, there is no doubt that these bridges were of their own devising. A few of them had Western readers primarily in mind as they wrote – Pandita Ramabai’s essays soliciting Western women’s aid and Cornelia Sorabji’s rhetorical efforts in her short stories to bind British adult and child readers to Indian babies as adopted kin – but all of them reached Indian and Western audiences with their works. Crosscultural translation in the widest sense was not necessarily their primary intention, but it certainly was a result of their literary efforts. In doing so, they widened the relationship of colonized women to both indigenous and metropolitan literary cultures. While many Indian writers at the end of the nineteenth century eschewed English in order to develop vernacular languages as vehicles for literary representation, the writers of this study joined others (up to that time, only men) in developing a parallel Anglophone tradition. In their hands, English was more than a sign of colonial subjection and alienation or a means for the elite classes to advance their professional and social status within the Raj. It now became a vehicle for imaginatively extending and negotiating Indian identities. Occupying a middle ground between the foreign and domestic, they reiterated the authority of English as a literary language but were not simply subjected to its cultural values. As my study has shown, English did not prevent these women writers from articulating a deep resistance to Western hegemony. Through a shared language, they revealed the different beliefs of their own cultures and affirmed the significance of other worldviews to their Western readers. Their

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works amply demonstrate that using English as a vehicle of representation did not close off opportunities for waging anti-colonial critique or for espousing versions of cultural nationalism. Further, they established the authority of Indian women to mediate an Indian past and present for their readers. Toru Dutt claimed a place as translator and “gatekeeper” of the Sanskrit tradition, appropriating what had been the purview of Western Orientalists and redefining its value and ongoing relevance on Indian terms. In her novel Kamala, Krupabai Satthianadhan employed a Western literary genre, the social realist novel, to represent the daily lives of young Hindu wives in purdah. Previously, such representational spaces had largely been the domain of missionary accounts intent on “improving” Indian forms of conjugality. To an extent far greater than they had been able to do, Satthianadhan’s nuanced account of purdah and child marriage revealed just how culturally blind Western ideas of high-caste women’s lives (and their reformist agenda) had been. Pandita Ramabai’s essays also sought to correct Western understandings of India’s famine and British relief efforts by focusing on famine’s effects on Indian women and girls, a state of affairs that imperial famine commission reports had rendered invisible. Her critiques of the Raj’s relief efforts undercut their claims to competence and compassion. Cornelia Sorabji, an ardent advocate of the Raj’s continued presence in India, adopted the well-established trope of family to reinvigorate the emotional bonds between colonizer and colonized at a period of rising nationalism. A tired metaphor by the end of the century, Sorabji worked to infuse new life into it over the course of her writing career, primarily through her character portraits of young Indian children. She depicted India as its children, literally and figuratively orphaned “sun babies” who did not solicit but rather elicited the reader’s voluntarily love. In doing so, she effectually re-imagined Great Britain as a home whose nursery included adopted children of various races, all at play, and securely housed by virtue of the strength of the affective ties that bound them. On her part, Sarojini Naidu allied the legacy of Western romantic verse to her own nationalist politics. The diversity of her poetic speakers, the musicality suggesting ties to an indigenous oral tradition, and her allusiveness to both Hindu and Muslim cultures collectively unified India’s peoples as her literary contribution to cultural nationalism. The publishing successes and reviews of these women writers reveal how timely their subjects and their literary treatments were felt to be by their divergent audiences. As this study has also sought to make clear, not every writer wrote equally for Indian and Western audiences. Satthianadhan, Ramabai, and Naidu, whose writings reflected aspects of a lifelong commitment to advancing women’s rights and/or decolonization in India, addressed audiences at home and abroad. They imagined their writings as strategic missives that would enhance Indian and British women’s joint efforts in nationalist and reformist struggles. (Conversely, Sorabji imagines collaboration between Indian and British women to re-dedicate themselves to the imperial project.) Satthianadhan calls her Western readers’ attention to the reservoir of reformist energies already possessed by indigenous

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women, even as she would correct these readers’ limited understandings of the Indian subjects they claimed to be able to “uplift.” In an internationalist spirit, Ramabai would energize the joint efforts of Indian and Western women toward advancing Indian women’s social advancement and economic self-determination, whose absence during times of social crises, such as famine, made them uniquely at risk for exploitation, illness, and death. Naidu’s poetry invites her Western readers to see India as unified in feeling and in its cultural heritage, already implicitly a nation despite the Raj’s determination to portray India’s peoples as fragmented and incapable of self-government. These efforts to cultivate solidarity based on their reformist and political aspirations do not, however, do justice to the ways in which these writers conceived of a necessary separation of ties between Great Britain and India to accomplish these same goals. Ramabai’s writings soliciting support from both feminist and Christian organizations for her relief projects were a pragmatic concession to the realities of the present, to her need for a broad network of alliances; her long-term goal of emancipating Indian women would be most durably realized through the efforts of Indian women alone. It was to that place of Indian women’s self-sufficiency that she directed her social reformist and literary endeavors. Satthianadhan’s novel Kamala similarly suggests that the clearest path to reform can best be achieved through Indian women’s solidarity, whether that takes the shape of local women’s efforts on behalf of one another, or, on a much larger scale, as a re-conceptualization of the psychic toll of child marriage, given the practices of virilocal exogamy. Naidu most of all divorces the assistance of Western women from her feminist and nationalist efforts. Unlike Ramabai, she does not require their financial support; her writings primarily invite her Western readers to reconsider the potential for unity among India’s peoples. For very specific reasons, this study has consciously resisted uncovering and asserting unities of positionality, theme, and approach among the writers explored here. Following Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s call for postcolonial readings that are geographically and historically specific, I have avoided foregrounding the kinds of limiting generalizations that might hold true for all of them.1 Between them – their lives and their writings – exist differences too great to coerce them into conceptual homogeneity. These writers came from widely separate regions of a vast subcontinent; their life experiences were incomparable; they lived and wrote in different decades over a period of 50 years, an era characterized by radically changing attitudes toward empire, reformist movements, and cultural nationalism; and, as this book has tried to show, their familial, cultural, and even religious backgrounds, as well as their exposure to imperialism, shaped responses that were remarkably individual. An emphasis on the diversity of their contexts and representational strategies, explored through close readings of their works, has seemed to me to be the best way to avoid the distortion and simplification that 1   Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 148–62.

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would result from homogenization. Only by rigorously guarding their differences, I believe, can sustainable insights be garnered into their negotiations of identity and the possibilities of rewriting colonial discourses. Dovetailing with their diverse creative output and particularity of their concerns, these writers found themselves engaged with the significance and place of cultural difference. In part, this results from their early internalization of heterogeneous cultures and languages, something most Indians do by and large as a matter of course. Most of them lived in different regions of India over the course of their lives, so they were immersed in varying linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences of the subcontinent. Sorabji stands out here, for her work had her traveling all over the subcontinent for decades, including back and forth between Allahabad and London. With the exception of Satthianadhan, all of them traveled to the West and studied there, a life-changing event and just one of the factors that made their lives unrepresentative of the majority of Indian women. All were fluent in multiple languages. Dutt traveled in France and England as a young adult, translated and wrote verse in each of these languages, and her family spoke Bengali and English at home. Pandita Ramabai spoke Hindi and Marathi fluently; she learned English late, as an adult, but mastered it, as her writings attest. She gave speeches in England and in the United States on behalf of her reform efforts for Indian women. Sarojini Naidu mastered Urdu before she was compelled to learn English; Telegu was her native language. Satthianadhan spoke Tamil, Marathi, and English and lived in the Madras and the Bombay presidencies. Further, while their parents’ conversion to Christianity (Naidu excepted) exposed these writers to English and an English-language education early in life, they maintained deep ties to Indian cultures – to relatives who were not converted, or to the Hindu, Muslim, or Parsi communities from which they stemmed and whose customs and world views they continued to gravitate toward. Bi-cultural is radically insufficient a term to describe them; they were truly all multicultural by birth and life experience. Unsurprisingly, then, an understanding of cultural difference runs deeply through their works. In the face of a variety of Western discourses that worked to construct essentialist distinctions between British and Indian subjects, these writers injected differentiating views of race and culture into English-language literature. This is not to suggest that their works are always oppositional. At times their writings reiterate colonialist stereotypes of difference, and it would strain credulity to read these aspects otherwise. Sorabji comes to mind, with her depictions of lazy, undifferentiated Indian men and incompetent, if loving, Indian mothers. Some of Satthianadhan’s depictions of the Hindu child-wife’s and widow’s life within the extended family home veer close to the missionary discourses she rejects overall. Naidu’s verse can and has been read as a tired Orientalism. It is the argument of this book, however, that without exception these works also understand and promote the value of otherness within a hierarchical colonial context. Their writings disrupt British ways of knowing India and Indians, which means that they combat British insularity and the supposedly universal, normative nature of British experiences.

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This hybridity constitutes a subversion of British authority, in Homi Bhabha’s sense of destabilizing racial origins and authenticity and of reconstructing cultural identities.2 As writers who wielded English with the fluency of native speakers, who were readily published and reviewed positively in the West and in India, they proved that Indian women were radically unlike the Western stereotypes that represented them as illiterate, childlike in nature, oppressed by Indian men, and in need of rescue by the West. It is no accident, I think, that these Indian women writers chose to depict India’s indigenous cultures and peoples – both in great detail and with great affection – as opposed to Anglicized Indian or Western ones. Quite simply, they validated the Indian context, past and present, and they sought to advance their Western readers’ understandings of the subcontinent, often in unfamiliar Indian discourses. They depicted Indian men, and more importantly, Indian women, as capable of being the agents of their own lives. When they wrote about the present, they did not characterize themselves or other Indians as conflicted, alienated subjects due to the imposition of Western culture. Tellingly, they dramatically limited or erased the presence of British or Anglo-Indians in their works and the racialized and cultural divisions between their worlds. One can speculate on the reasons for this: was it repression? Collusion? A saavy effort to attune one’s writings to the tastes of a Western reading public? I like to think that by doing so, their literary works carved out a space of imagined de-colonization. As an aspect of their cultural nationalism, they presented India as a place where British absence was quite thinkable. Within the context of an increasingly vilified colonialism, their works constitute an unambiguous validation of cultural difference and autonomy.

  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 156.

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Index

Note: Figures are denoted by italics activism, see also reform of Indian women, 2–14, 172, 210–11, 213 of Naidu, 12, 172–4, 183–5 of Western women, 118, 211 Age of Consent Act (1891), 3, 8, 64–5, 66–7 agrarian reforms, 98–9 agriculture, colonial intervention in, 98–9 Ahmad, Aijaz, 207 Alexander, Meena, 173 Amritsar, violence in, 8, 133, 162 Anagol-McGinn, Padma, 16, 67 Anand, Shahla, 174 Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, 28, 40–50, 51–3, see also Dutt, Toru Anderson, Benedict, 189 Arnold, Edwin, 37, 190 “Aryan” model of womanhood, 77 Aryan racial concepts, 176–7 Ash, Ranjana, 173, 184 Bagchi, Jasodhara, 38, 46 Balibar, Etienne, 205 Bande Mataram (“Hail O Mother”), 193, 195 Batty, Nancy Ellen, 155–6 Baugmaree garden (“Sonnet.— Baugmaree”), 55–7 Bengal bhadralok class in, 26, 27, 34–5, 46, 50, 52, 195 Dutt, Toru, in, 26, 27 languages in, 46 Mutiny (1857) and, 29 nationalism in, 19, 195–6 partition of, 7–8, 195–6

reform movement in, 29–30, 38–9, 50, 52 Bengali language, 46–7 Bery, Ashok, 22–3, 47–8 “betweenness” (hybridity), 12–13, 16, 22–3, 212–13 Dutt and, 27–9, 53–5 Naidu and, 174 Satthianadhan and, 61, 88–9 Bhabha, Homi, 213 bhadralok class, 26, 27, 34–5, 46, 50, 52, 195 bhakti poets, 200–4, 206 The Bird of Time (Naidu), 21, 172, 184–5, 187–9, 190 Blair, Harrison Falkner, 143–5, 146, 161 Boehmer, Elleke, 174, 191 Bose, Anand Mohan, 34 Bose, Rajnarayan, 38–9 British women, contributions in colonial times, 3 The Broken Wing (Naidu), 21, 172, 185, 199 Buddhism, 177 Burde, Archana S., 11 Cameron, Sharon, 187 Cantonments Act, 102–3 caste, 9, 179 Christianity and, 15 education and, Hindu doctrine on, 93 famine and, 100–1, 103, 112, 116, 124 upper-caste widows, education for, 92 Vedas, no caste divisions in, 77 Chakravarti, Uma, 67, 74, 76–7, 191 Chamberlain, Joseph, 133 Chandra, Bankim, 26 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 48–9, 193 Chatterjee, Partha, 205 Chaudhuri, Rosinka, 46, 48, 191

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child/children as audience for Sorabji’s works, 125–6 famine and, 100, 115, 116–17 “India as child” metaphor, 18, 21, 127, 134, 143, 156, 160 orphans, 149–51, 164 Shubala: A Child Mother (Sorabji), 125, 160–1 in Sorabji’s writings, 124–7, 136, 143–56, 161–70 as trope for empire and imperialism, 21, 123, 127–36 universal/quintessential child, 127, 148–9, 154–6, 169 child marriage, 8, 18, 20, 59–90, see also Satthianadhan, Krupabai Age of Consent debates, 3, 8, 64–5, 66–7 alternate models of marriage, 70–1, 74, 75–7 colonial policies and, 64 Dutt’s opinion on, 33–4 family system and, 69–70 female education and, 67 in Kamala (Satthianadhan), 59–90 Rakhmabai case and, 65–6 Ratanbai (Nikambe), 73 reforms proposed for, 61, 64–7 undesirable effects of, 69–70 widows from, 91–2 education for, 94–5, 103 Christianity, 10, 14–17, see also missionaries age of consent laws and, 66–7 conversion, “outcast” status due to, 15 Dutt and, 14, 16, 28, 39 English language and, 10 Indian women authors and, 13, 14–17, 212 Ramabai and, 14, 16, 93, 94 Satthianadhan and, 14, 16, 61, 62 schools and, 15, 16 civil service, exams and appointment for, 30, 33 colonialism, see also Raj ambivalence about, 34–5

benevolent paternalism and family metaphors, 21, 123–4, 127–36, 141–2, 146–7, 149, 166–70 British policies and laws in India, see laws cross-cultural and shifting relationships in, 1–2, 18–19, 48 diverse attitudes toward, 2–3 divide and rule strategy, 174, 183, 195, 211 divisions of society and inequality under, 29, 133–4, 142 Dutt’s writings and, 26, 28, 31–36, 40, 51–2 economic motivation/exploitation of, 30, 32–3 famine as occasion for intervention, 98–9, 102 Indian women authors on (overview), 14, 18–19, 21–3 Indian women, position and accounts of, 64 language use/translations and, 46–9, 51–2 racial attitudes and, 29, 31–2, 35, 48 reform, as partner in, 88 “reverse colonialism,” 143 in Sorabji’s writings, 21, 123–4, 146 tax policies under, 33 Contagious Diseases Act (1868, 1888), 102–3 Cronin, Michael, 48 cross-cultural relationships under, 1–2, 18–19, 48, 50, 209 The Cry of Indian Women (Ramabai), 106, 115 Das, Radhakrishna, 35–6 Das, Samantak, 47 Deb, Maheshchandra, 65 Derozio, Henry, 38 Dey, Lal Bahari, 46, 47 Dharwadker, V., 48 disappeared, Indian women as, 2, 4, 63–4 Disraeli, Benjamin, 127–8 Draupadi, 75 Dravidians, 176 Duff, Mountstuart Grant, 140

Index Dutt, Hur Chunder, 39 Dutt, Michael Madhusudhan, 38 Dutt, Shoshee Chunder, 32–3 Dutt, Toru, 19, 25–57 Audience, her conception of, 50 background of, 26 Bengali/bhadralok context for, 26, 27, 34–5, 46, 50, 52 caste and class in works of, 44 child marriage, opinion on, 33–4 Christianity of, 14, 16, 28, 39 colonialism, ambivalence about, 34–5 colonialism, influence and theme of, 26, 28, 31–6, 40, 51–2 “counter-history” in translations of, 38 cross-cultural rapprochement in writings of, 50, 53–4 cultural sources, influence on translations of, 39–40, 41, 49–50, 53–4, 57 death of, 26 development as a writer, 26–8, 34, 52–4 education of, 16–17 English language, decision to translate into, 45–9 family of, 26–7, 35, 46 garden metaphor of, 54–7, 55–7 “inbetweenness” of, 27–9, 53–5 “interrogative” translation of, 40–1, 43–5 karmic doctrine and, 42–3 Keats, comparison with, 56–7 letters to Mary Martin, 28–34, 39–40, 54 multiple linguistic and cultural traditions of, 27–8, 35, 46, 53–4, 57 nationalism and, 26, 28, 34 poetry of, 50–1, 55–7, 59 political commentary of, 30–4 pride in Indian life and customs, 34, 35–7, 40, 49, 52, 210 proto-nationalist identity and, 26, 34, 35–7, 53 publishing media/venues, 25–6, 29 reform and, 9, 19, 29, 33–4, 43–5

233

reinterpretation/revisioning in translations of, 40–5, 51–2, 210 Satthianadhan compared with, 59 themes in writing of (Sanskrit translations), 17, 18, 19 translation, sonnet on, 51 translations from French, 53, 57 translations from Sanskrit/Vedic texts, 19, 28, 38, 39–57 travels of, 2, 17, 26 voice in translations of, 40–5, 49–51 women, images/roles in translations of, 41, 44–5 works of Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, 28, 40–50, 51–3 “Buttoo” (Eklavya), 40, 44 “Dhruva,” 42–3, 44 “Jogadhya Uma,” 40–1, 44 letters to Mary Martin, 28–34, 39–40, 54 “Prehlad,” 43–4 “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind,” 41–2 “Savitri,” 43 A Sheaf Gleaned in Sanskrit Fields, 53–4 “Sindhu,” 43 “Sita,” 41, 44–5 “Sonnet.—Baugmaree,” 55–7 “Sonnet. À Mon Père,” 51 Dutt Family Album, 26 economic exploitation, under British rule, 30, 32–3 economic opportunity civil service, exams and appointment procedures, 30, 33 education and, 11, 15 English language and, 10–12, 15 education economic opportunity and, 11, 15 Hindu College, 36 Hindu doctrine and, 93 “Minute on Indian Education” (Macaulay), 10, 36 modernization and English-language in, 10–12, 15–17, 36

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education for women, 9–10, 16, 33, 67, 77 fears regarding, 64 Hindu doctrine and, 93 in Ramabai’s writings, 92, 93–5, 120–1 in Satthianadhan’s writings, 71–2, 83, 88, 89 school of Satthianadhan, 61 schools of Ramabai, 16, 91, 94–6, 120–1 Vedic examples for, 36, 77 widows/child widows, 91–2, 94–5, 103 empire, see colonialism; Raj employment, English-fluency and, 11 English language authors’ decision to write in, 10–12, 17, 19, 45–9, 209–10 education in, 10–12, 15–17, 36, 59 elites and, 12 Indian women’s fluency in, 1, 10, 16–17, 212 modernization and economic opportunity and, 10–12, 15 as sign of colonialized status, 46 ethnographic studies, 178–80 extended family (exogamous) system, 68, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 78, 85 family, see also marriage; maternalism; paternalism child marriage and, 69–70 extended (exogamous) family system, 68, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 78, 85 Naidu’s writings and, 171 Raj, family metaphor for, 21, 123–4, 127–36, 141–2, 158–9, 166–70 transcultural adoption, kinship, and transnormative family, 136–40, 152–4, 169–70 as trope for nation, 193–4 famine assumptions about, 98, 99 caste and, 100–1, 103, 112, 116, 124 children and parents in, 100, 115, 116–17 essays of Ramabai, 96, 99–121, see also Ramabai, Pandita

“Famine Experiences,” 96, 99, 100–1, 105, 112 “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission,” 96, 99, 105, 108 Famine Commission reports, 20, 96, 97, 110–12 female experience of and perspective on, 96–8, 99, 101–10 food and power in, 99, 105–7 humanitarian narratives of, 97–8, 113–14, 118–20 metaphors for and relationships in, 17, 20, 108, 114–16 non-sexualized depictions of, 112–13 as occasions for Western intervention, 98–9 policies, 7, 20 poor houses and, 99–100, 118 prostitution and, 101–4 rape and, 101, 109 relief works, consequences of, 100–1, 118 Sorabji’s writings on, 123–4 Tour Through the Famine Districts of India (Merewether), 113 widows and, 105–9 “winners” and “losers” in, 98–9 famine relief efforts Christian morals, appeal to, 114–17 dependency concerns, 22, 111–12 government relief efforts, Ramabai’s criticism of, 92–3, 99–109, 210 government relief efforts, Sorabji’s benevolent depiction of, 123–4 missionary funding for, 95–6, 97 of Ramabai, 96–7, 103–4, 115, 120–1 women as agents in, 97 Fanon, Frantz, 52 farming, agrarian reforms, 98–9 female deities, 68–9 food, power and, 99, 105–7 Forster, E.M., 1 free press, 30 friendship, cross-cultural, 1–2, 28 Froude, J. A., 128 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 8, 161, 172, 174

Index gendered spaces, 59–60, see also Satthianadhan, Krupabai Ghosh, Kasiprasad, 38, 46 Gikandi, Simon, 205, 207 Gilroy, Paul, 205 Gokhale, G.K., 172, 186, 194, 204 The Golden Threshold (Naidu), 21, 172, 190 Gooptu, Suparna, 139–40 Gosse, Edmund, 52–3, 172, 174, 183, 184, 197 Graham-Brown, Sarah, 83 Grewal, Inderpal, 3, 89–90, 115 Guardian and Wards Act (1890), 125 Hare, David, 36 Harishchandra, Bharatendu, 30 Hayman, Horace, 37 Heinemann, William, 186 Hindu College (in Calcutta), 36 Hindu Patriot (newspaper), 32 Hindus/Hinduism, see also caste; Dutt, Toru; Satthianadhan, Krupabai Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, 28, 40–50, 51–3 caste status, loss of, 101, 103 child marriage and, 7, 60 Christianity and, 15 education for women and, 93 The High-Caste Hindu Woman (Ramabai), 68, 74, 106 Hindu heroic, 38–9 Hindu model of marriage, 75–6, 88 India equated with, 37, 180 Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (Satthianadhan), 19–20, 59–90 Lyall’s concepts of, 180 Muslims and, 175, 181, 195–200, 206 unity theme of Naidu, 195–200 nationalism and, 7 patriarchal practices, Ramabai’s critique of, 92 reforms and, 9, 38–9 stereotypes of, 180 women, famine experience and, 96–7 history, Indian, see also past British accounts of, 35, 176–9

235

revisioning/reinventing by Indians, 35–8, 50, 51–2, 191, 210 Hobhouse, Lord and Lady, 139, 157, 158 Holderness, T. W., 101 Home Rule leagues, 8 humanitarian narratives, 97–8, 113–14, 118–20 Hunter, W.W., 180–1 hybridity, see “betweenness” (hybridity) Hyderabad, 190, 194–5, 196–8, 206 imperialism, see colonialism; Raj inbetweenness, see “betweenness” (hybridity) India, see also nationalism collective/impersonal voice of, in Naidu’s work, 21–2, 175, 185–91 differences from Europe emphasized by Raj, 176–9 equation with Hinduism (by Europeans), 37, 180 garden metaphor of Dutt, 54–7 Hindu-Muslim dynamic and interactions in, 175, 181 “India as child” metaphor of Sorabji, 18, 21, 127, 134, 143, 156, 160 maternalism and “Mother India,” 41, 171, 192–4 multiple language use in, 46–7, 212 Orientalist views on, 36–8 proto-nationalist identity and culture in, 26, 34, 35–7, 48, 52–3 racialist theories on, 176–9 Western view as feminine and needy, 37–8, 97, 120 India Calling and India Recalled (Sorabji), 125 Indian Christian Marriage Act (1864), 67 The Indian Musselmans (Hunter), 180–1 Indian National Congress Naidu as first Indian woman president of, 172 Naidu’s 1904 speech to, 184 Indian women activism and agency of, 2–14, 209–13 English fluency of, 1, 16–17 as erased and disappeared, 2, 4, 63–4

236

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

Indian women authors, see also Dutt, Toru; Naidu, Sarojini; Ramabai, Pandita; Satthianadhan, Krupabai; Sorabji, Cornelia as activists, 2, 8–14, 210–11, 213 audiences of, 210–11 “betweenness” (hybridity) of, 12–13, 16, 22–3, 27 bridges (literary) in works of, 22–3 Christianity and, 13, 14–17, 59, 212 cultural and social context of, 2–19, 209–13 diversity in writings of, 211–12 education of, 16–17, 59 English, decision to write in, 10–12, 17, 19, 45–9, 209–10 English fluency of, 16–17, 212 faith/religion and, 14–17 likenesses among, 13–17, 212 overview of work of, 19–23, 209–13 publishing market and, 16–18, 210 reform and, 8–14, 210–11 travel abroad by, 12, 17, 212 writerly choices and concerns of, 17–23 invisibleness, Indian women and, 2, 4, 63–4 Islam, see Muslims Iyengar, K.R. Shrinivasa, 53 Jackman, Mary, 141 Jha, Amarantha, 53 Jinnah, Mohamed Ali, 194 John Bull, cartoons of, 128, 129, 130, 131 Jones, William, 37 Joshi, Priya, 88–9 Jowett, Benjamin, 140–1 The Jungle Books (Kipling), 135 Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, 19–20, 59–90, see also Satthianadhan, Krupabai Keats, John, 56–7 Keshab, Romesh Chunder Dutt, 35 Kim (Kipling), 18, 135, 153 Kipling, Rudyard, 18, 130, 135 Kosambi, Meera, 115 Krishnaswamy, N., 11

Lala, Malashri, 172–3 Lalita, K., 1–2 language, see also English language; Sanskrit English as literary language in India, 47 multiple languages used in India, 46–7, 212 Laqueur, Thomas, 113 laws, 7–8 Age of Consent, 3, 8, 64–5, 66–7 Contagious Diseases (Cantonments) Act, 102–3 Guardian and Wards Act (1890), 125 Indian Christian Marriage Act (1864), 67 Native Marriage Act (1872), 65 LeFevere, André, 50 Leopold, Joan, 177 letters, Dutt’s letters to Mary Martin, 28–34, 39–40, 54 Loomba, Ania, 3, 63–4 Love and Life Behind the Purdah (Sorabji), 123, 125, 136, 145, 146, 157 Lucknow Pact, 196 Lyall, Alfred, 179, 180, 181 ma-bap (kindly father-mother), 134, 153, 171 Macaulay, Thomas, 10, 36, 134 McClintock, Anne, 3 Mahabharata, 75, 77, 159 Dutt’s translations of, 38, 40, 43–4 other translations of, 35, 37 Maine, Henry Sumner, 176 marriage, see also child marriage; Satthianadhan, Krupabai; widows Age of Consent, debates on, 3, 8, 64–5, 66–7 child marriage, see child marriage companionate model of, 70–1, 74, 75–7 equality in, 70–1, 77, 83 exogamous (extended family) system, 68, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 78, 85 family role in, 68 Hindu model of, 75–6, 78

Index Indian Christian Marriage Act (1864), 67 inequality in, 70, 71 mythic character models for, 75–6 Native Marriage Act (1872), 65 powerlessness of women in, 69–70, 73–4, 83 Rakhmabai case and, 65–6, 71 reform of, 59–60, 64–7 sexual relations in, 70, 79–80, 82 woman regarded as property in, 70 Martin, Mary, Dutt’s letters to, 28–34, 39–40, 54 Marx, Edward, 174 maternalism, see also family; mother/ maternal images; paternalism concept of, inequality at basis of, 126, 141–2 family analogy for empire/colonialism (Sorabji), 123, 126–36, 141–2, 147, 169–70 famine appeals and (Ramabai), 96–7, 101, 114–15, 117 ma-bap (kindly father-mother), 134, 153, 171 in Naidu’s writings, 171 in Satthianadhan’s writings, 68–9, 78–82 in Sorabji’s writings, 21, 124–5, 126, 135, 145, 147, 152–4, 157, 159–61, 164, 166–70 stereotypes of, British and Christian, 115, 117, 126 Merewether, F. H. S., 113 Metcalf, Thomas, 179, 198 Milton, John, 146 missionaries, 10, 14–15, 16 funding for Ramabai’s schools, 95–6 racism in attitudes of, 16 reforming attitudes of, 3–4 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 211 Morley, Lord, 181, 184 Morley-Minto reforms (1909), 182–3, 196 mother/maternal images, 41, see also maternalism association with wild/natural places, 79–80 colonialism/Raj and, 124, 126–7

237

ma-bap (kindly father-mother), 134, 153, 171 “Mother India,” 171, 192–4 in Satthianadhan’s writings, 69, 78–82 in Sorabji’s writings, 124–5, 126, 145, 157, 159–61, 164, 170 Mughal Dynasty/period, 177, 181, 197, 206 Muslims, 180–1, 194–200 All-India Muslim League, 196 Bengal partition and, 7–8, 195–6 culture and unity themes of Naidu, 194–200, 206 European concepts of, 180–1 Hindus and, 175, 181, 194–200, 206 Minto’s definition as minority in need of “protection,” 182–3, 196 Morley-Minto reforms and, 182–3 Mughal period, 177, 181, 197, 206 Pan-Islam movement, 196 Qutb kings, 197 Mutiny (1857), causes of, 29 Naidu, Sarojini, 21–2, 171–207 abandonment of poetry by (1917), 173 activism and reform and, 12, 172–4, 183–5 authenticity and originality issues in writings of, 173–5 concerns in writing of, 17, 18, 21–2 bhakti poets, 200–4, 206 collective/impersonal voice for India, 21–2, 175, 185–91 embrace of public role, 184–5 Hindu-Muslim unity, 195–200 historical themes and re‑envisioning, 191, 192 horizontal comradeship, 176, 189–90, 207 Hyderabad, 190, 194–5, 196–8, 206 “indifference”/minimizing differences of India’s peoples, 175–6, 181 Mother India, 171, 192–4 Muslim culture, and unity theme, 176, 194–200, 206

238

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

nationalism, 172, 185–92, 205–7, 211 Sufi culture/poets, 22, 194, 200–2, 204, 206 unity and universality, 175–6, 185–202, 205–7, 211 wandering singer, 204–5 war/World War I, Indian men in, 192–3 education of, 16–17 Gosse, Edmund, and, 172, 174, 183, 184, 197 hybridity of, 174 Indian National Congress, speech to (1904), 184 literary criticism of writings, 172–5 Orientalist aspects/images, 173, 174, 190–1, 207 nationalism and, 172, 185–92, 211 historical context of, 176–9, 195–7 as “The Nightingale of India,” 172 political activism of as divided from poetry of, 172–5 as tied to the poetry of, 183–5, 189–97 political career of, 172–3, 174 travel abroad by, 17, 172 works of “Awake!,” 193–4 The Bird of Time (1912), 21, 172, 184–5, 187–9, 190 The Broken Wing (1917), 21, 172, 185, 199 “The Faery Isle of Janjira,” 184–5 “Folk Songs,” 190 “Golden Cassia” and “Nasturtiums,” 192 The Golden Threshold (1905), 21, 172, 190 “Ode to the Nizam of Hyderabad,” 197, 198 “The Royal Tombs of Golconda,” 197 Naik, M.K., 174 Nair, Janaki, 66 Nandy, Ashis, 134 nationalism (Indian), see also Naidu, Sarojini

Age of Consent Act and, 66, 67 Aryan and European racial concepts and, 175–6 collective/impersonal voice, in Naidu’s writings and, 21–2, 175, 185–91 defined as Hindu by Minto, 182 Dutt and, 26, 28, 34 family language and metaphors in, 193–4 Hindu-Muslim dynamic and, 175, 181, 182–3, 195–6 Hindu-Muslim unity theme of Naidu, 195–200, 206 “Mother India” concept, 171, 192–4 Naidu’s writings and, 171–207, 211 national identity, formation of, 176–9, 185–6, 189 postcolonial scholars on, 205 proto-nationalist identity, 26, 34, 35–7, 52–3 self-rule and, 29, 172, 196 unity theme of Naidu and, 175–6, 185–202, 205–7, 211 women’s issues and, 66–8, 172 nationalist movement (Indian), 6–8, 10, 38–9, 176–9 Bande Mataram (“Hail O Mother”) as anthem of, 193, 195 history of, 176–79 Naidu’s involvement in, 172, 174 partition of Bengal and, 193, 195–6 swadeshi (national self-sufficiency) movement, 172 swaraj (self-governance) movement, 172 women’s needs placed secondary to, 92 women’s role in, 5–8, 19 Native Marriage Act (1872), 65 New Woman novel, 59, 61 Nikambe, S.M., 73 Norton, Charles Eliot, 130 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 4–5 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats), 56–7 Orientalists, 4, 36–7, 45–6, 47–9 audience for writings of, 50

Index equation of India and Hinduism, 37 Hindu stereotypes and, 180 India, ideas on and attitudes toward, 37–8, 52, 57 racialist/colonial assumptions of, 48–9 Sanskrit translations of, 28, 36–9, 45–6, 48 women’s stereotypes and, 44–5 orphans, 149–51, 164 Oxford, England, Sorabji’s years in, 136–43 A Passage to India (Forster), 1 past (history) “primitive magnificence” idea, 37–8, 191 revision/redefining of, 35–8, 50, 51–2, 210 by Dutt, 35–8, 50, 51–2, 210 by Naidu, 191 by Satthianadhan, 76–7, 210 paternalism, see also family; maternalism; patriarchal practices “benevolent paternalism” of the British, 21, 123–4, 141–2, 170 concept of, inequality at basis of, 134, 141–2 family analogy for empire/colonialism, 21, 123–4, 127–36, 141–2, 149, 158–9, 166–70 ma-bap (kindly father-mother), 134, 153, 171 paternalistic attitudes, 97, 113, 115, 125 in Sorabji’s writings, 123–4, 142–3, 149, 153–4, 170 stereotypes of, British and Christian, 115, 117 patriarchal practices, 3–4, 7, 51, 92 famine and, 97 as ideal of colonial government, 130 Ramabai’s critique of, 92, 119–20 Plotz, Judith, 154, 155 poor houses, 99–100, 118 Pratt, Mary Louise, 3 Prince of Wales visit to Calcutta, 30–1 visit to zenana, 34

239

prostitution, 101–4 Cantonments Act and, 102–3 famine and, 101–4 publishers/publishing market, 16–18 Punch cartoons, 128, 129, 130–3, 131, 132 purdah, 20, 60, see also zenana Love and Life Behind the Purdah (Sorabji), 123, 125, 136, 145, 146, 157 purdahnashin, 125, 135, 156–61 The Purdahnashin (Sorabji), 125, 158–60 racial attitudes, 29, 31–2, 35 Aryan and European racialist concepts, 175–9 “differentialist racism,” 206 of missionaries, 16 of Orientalist translators, 48 Raj, 127–36, see also colonialism Aryan and European racialist concepts, 175–9 benevolent paternalism of, in Sorabji’s writings, 21, 123–4, 141–2, 149, 166–70 British policies and laws in India, 7–8 capital shifted from Calcutta to Delhi, 197 categorization of India’s populations by, 178–82 differences of India’s people highlighted by, 175, 176–83, 207, 211 divide and rule strategy, 175, 183, 195, 211 economic exploitation, under British rule, 30, 32–3 ethnographic studies by, 178–80 family metaphor for, 21, 123–4, 127–36, 141–2, 158–9, 166–70 Famine Commission reports of, 20, 96, 97, 110–12 famine response of, 92–3, 99–112 Hindus and Muslims Bengal partition and, 195–6 concepts of, 179–81 emphasis on differences between, 175, 181–3, 195–6

240

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

justification (self-justification) of rule by, 7, 98–9, 126, 176, 182–3 non-intervention policy of, 64, 108, 109 portrayal of India as incapable of selfgovernment, 175, 183 prostitution and, 102–3 Punch cartoons and, 128, 129, 130–3, 131, 132 taxes under, 33 Rakhmabai case, 65–6, 71 Ramabai, Pandita, 20–1, 91–121, see also famine; famine relief efforts activism and reforms, 8, 9, 12, 20, 91–6 background and context of, 93–6, 120 Christianity of, 14, 16, 93, 94 concerns in writing of, 17, 18, 20–1 education for women, 92, 93–5, 120–1 famine, 17, 18, 20–1, 92–3, 210 widows, 91–2, 94–5, 105–9, 119, 120 education of, 16–17, 93 famine essays, 96, 99–121 agency and call to action in, 117–21 children and parents in, 100, 115, 116–18 female experience and perspective on, 96–98, 99, 101–10 as humanitarian narratives, 97–8, 113–14, 118–20 widows and, 105–9, 119, 120 famine relief efforts of government, criticism of, 92–3, 99–109 famine relief work of, 97–8, 103–4, 115, 120–1 Rakhmabai case and child marriage issue, 66 Satthianadhan, meeting with, 91 Satthianadhan’s essay on, 91–2 schools of, 16, 91, 94–6, 120–1 Kripa Sadan (home for sexually victimized women), 95–6 missionary funding of, 95–6, 97, 121

Mukti Sadan (Kedgaon farm and school), 95, 120 Sharada Sadan (home and school for child widows), 91, 94–5, 103 travel to England by, 17, 94 as widow, 91 works of The Cry of Indian Women (1883), 106, 115 “Famine Experiences” (1879), 96, 99, 100–1, 105, 112 The High-Caste Hindu Woman, 68, 74, 106 “A Short History of Kripa Sadan,” 107 “To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission” (1900), 96, 99, 105, 108 Ramacandran Nair, K. R., 50 Ramayana, 35, 75–6, 77 Dutt’s translations of, 38, 41, 44–5 Ranade, Ramabai, 73 Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife (Nikambe), 73 Rathbone, Elena, 162 reform, 38–39, see also Age of Consent Act; nationalism; reform movement agrarian reforms, 98–9 attitudes of reformers, 3–4, 8–9 Christianity and, 92 Dutt’s writing and, 9, 19, 29, 33–4, 43–5 Indian-British relations and, 3–4, 8–9 Indian women authors and, 8–14, 210–11 indigenous (Indian) reformers, 4, 8–14 marriage/child-marriage and, 61, 64–5 Morley-Minto reforms, 182–3, 196 nationalism movement, eclipse of, 10 Ramabai’s schools and, 91–2 Ramabai’s work and, 8, 9, 12, 20, 91–6 Ramabai’s writings and, 92 Satthianadhan’s writing and, 59–68, 77, 86–90

Index “the “woman question and, 9–10, 67–8 reform movements Arya Mahila Samaj, 94 in Bengal, 29–30, 38–9, 50 Brahmo Samaj, 94 diversity in, 12 women’s needs placed second to nationalism/independence, 92 women’s roles in, 5–14, 92, 94 religion, 14–17, see also Christianity; Hindus/Hinduism; Muslims; and individual authors child marriage and, 7 Indian women authors and, 13, 14–17 missionaries, 10, 14–15, 16 unity theme of Naidu, 195–203, 206 Risley, Herbert, 176, 177 Rohini, 87–8 Rose, Jacqueline, 127 Roy, Parama, 18–19 Roy, Ram Mohan, 9, 10–11, 29–30, 35–6, 89 Rumi, 201, 202, 203 Sanskrit, see also Dutt, Toru “counter-history” through Dutt’s translations of, 38 Dutt’s translations from, 19, 28, 38, 39–57 education in, Hindu doctrine on, 93 legends, in Indian cultural sources and versions, 39–40, 41 oral tradition and, 41 Orientalist translations of, 28, 36–9, 45–6, 52 other Indian translations of, 35–6, 48–9 Sarkar, Sumit, 67 sati and sati metaphor, 3, 4, 9, 108 Satthianadhan, Krupabai, 19–20, 59–90 activism and reforms, 8, 12 Age of Consent debates and, 64–5, 66–7 background of, 59 “betweenness” of, 61, 88–9 Christianity of, 14, 16, 61, 62 colonial context of writings, 65–6, 88, 89

241 concerns in writing of, 17–18, 19–20, 61 child marriage, 67–8, 69–70, 81–2, 89 companionate model of marriage, 70–1, 74, 75–7 conjugal (sexual) relations, 70, 79–80, 81, 88 education for women, 64, 66, 71–2, 83, 88, 89 extended family (exogamous) system, 68, 69–70, 72–3, 74, 78, 85 gendered spaces, 61, 68–9 marriage reform, 67–8, 70–1, 75–6 mother-daughter relationship, 69, 78–82 natal home, 68, 77–8, 80–1 oppression of women, 59–60, 69–70, 72–4, 83, 85 reform, 59–64, 67–8, 77, 86–90 widowhood, 74–5, 80–1, 87–8 women’s socialization in public spaces, 83–8 death of, 61 Dutt compared with, 59 education of, 16–17, 59, 61 gendered spaces, 61, 68–9 conception of space, 62–3 domestic realm, 68–79 female deities and natural spaces, 68–9, 81, 87–8 gender-segregated public spaces, 69, 83–8 wild/natural spaces, 68–69, 79–80, 81 happy vs. unhappy marriages, contrast of, 86 husband of, 61 New Woman Novel and, 59, 61 Rakhmabai case and, 65–6 Ramabai, meeting with, 91 school of, 61 travel prevented by health of, 17 women of past/Vedas as models, 75–7, 78–9 works of “Female Education,” 66

242

Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, 19–20, 59–90, 210 “Pandita Ramabai and her Work” (essay), 91–2 Saguna, 61 writing style of, 59 Schimmel, Annemarie, 203 self-government nationalist movement and, 172, 196 under Raj, 7–8, 29 Sengupta, Mahasweta, 49 Sharada Sadan, 91, 94–5, 103 Sharma, Alpana, 53 Sharpe, Jenny, 3 Sita, 75–6, 77, 79–80, 192 Dutt’s revision of, 41, 44–5 Somerville College, Oxford, 137–8 Sorabji, Cornelia, 21, 123–70 activism of, 9, 12 “adoption” by English families, 136–40 Blair, Harrison Falkner, and, 143–5, 146, 161 children as audience for writings of, 125–6, 143, 154, 167–9 Christianity of, 14, 16 concerns in writing of benevolence of Raj/colonialism, 21, 123–4, 141–2, 147, 149, 166–70 children, 124–5, 127, 143–56, 161–70 famine, 123–4 India as child, 18, 21, 126, 143, 156, 160 maternalism/family, 18, 21, 124–5, 126, 135, 145, 147, 152–4, 157, 159–61, 164, 166–70 orphans, 149–51, 164 purdahnashin, 125, 135, 156–61 transnormative families, 152–4, 169–70 universal/quintessential child, 148–9, 154–6, 169 dedication of Sun Babies, 144–5, 145, 168 dual- and double address technique of, 125–6, 143, 152

education of, 16–17 family (mother and father) of, 136–7 legal study and work of, 125, 140–1, 142, 145 Oxford years of, 136–43 personal investment/alignment with empire/Raj, 21, 142, 162, 170, 210 travel and years in England, 17, 136–43, 212 voice in writings of, 125–6, 143, 152–4 works of Between the Twilights (1908), 125 India Calling and India Recalled (1934, 1936), 125 Indian Tales of the Great Ones (1916), 125 Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901), 123, 125, 136, 145, 146, 157 “Pestilence at Noon,” 123 The Purdahnashin (1917), 125, 158–60 Shubala: A Child Mother (1920), 125, 160–1 Sun Babies, 21, 125, 143–56, 161–70 Sun Babies I (1904), 136, 143–56 Sun Babies II (1920), 161–70, 163, 165 Tales of the Great Ones (1916), 167 “Western Stories of the East: An Eastern Criticism,” 135 Steel, Flora Annie, 134–5, 169 Strachey, John, 11–12, 178–9, 182 Sufi culture/poets, 22, 194, 200–2, 204, 206 Sun Babies (Sorabji), 21, 125, 136, 143–56, 161–70, see also Sorabji, Cornelia Symons, Arthur, 172 Taguieff, A.P., 206 Tawney, R. H., 105 taxes/taxation, under the Raj, 33 Temple, Richard, 181 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 128

Index Tharu, Susie, 1–2, 173–4 Tour Through the Famine Districts of India (Merewether), 113 translation, see also Dutt, Toru; English language; Sanskrit colonial identity and, 46–8, 51–2 Dutt’s sonnet on, 51 Orientalist, 36–7, 45–6, 47 Turanians, 176 unity theme of Naidu, 175–6, 185–202, 205–7, 211 universalism, in Naidu’s writings, 185–6, 191 VandeVeer, Donald, 141 Vedic past heroic images from, 38–9, 191 as Hindu “golden age,” 77 legends, cultural sources for, 39–40 secularity of, 38–9 traditions of, 35–6 women’s education and, 36 women’s images and status in, 44–5, 75–7, 79–80, 192 Vedic texts, see also Dutt, Toru Dutt’s translations of, 19, 28, 38, 39–57 oral transmission of, 41 other translations of, 35–6, 52 The Velvet Glove (Jackman), 141 Victoria (Queen of England), 66, 67, 94 as ma-bap (kindly father-mother), 134, 171 Naidu’s recommendation for statues of, 171 Vishnu Purana, Dutt’s translations from, 41–3 Wall, Barbara, 152 war/World War I Indian soldiers in, 169, 192–3 Indian women’s feeling about, 158–9 patriotic/military games in Sun Babies, 167–9 “White Man’s Burden” (Kipling), 135 widows/widowhood, 9, 20, 74–5, 119

243

chastity of, emphasis on, 104, 106 education for widows, 91–2, 94–5 enforced widowhood (ban on remarriage), 65, 66 famine and, 105–9, 120 food insecurity as norm for, 105–7 in Kamala (Satthianadhan), 74–5, 80–1, 87–8 Ramabai’s school for (Sharada Sadan), 91, 94–5, 103 in Ramabai’s writings, 91–2, 94–5, 105–9, 119, 120 sati and sati metaphor, 3, 4, 9, 108 women see also education; marriage “Aryan” model of womanhood, 77 British, see British women code of Manu for, 106 education for, 9–10, 16, 33, 71, 77 in Vedic times, 36 widows and, 91–2, 94–5 famine and, 96–121 female deities, 68–9 gender roles, 9–10 in gender-segregated public spaces, 69, 83–8 Indian, see Indian women oppression of, 19, 119–20 social roles of, 92 stereotypes of, 44–5, 64 as theme of authors’ writings, 17–23 Vedic images and status of, 44–5, 75–7, 79–80, 192 the “woman question,” 9–10, 67–8 Women Writing in India (Tharu and Lalita), 1–2 women’s quarters, see zenana zenana (women’s quarters), 18, 19–20, 45, see also purdah children in, 156–8, 159 colonialist accounts of, 60, 89 Crown Prince’s visit to, 34 as metaphor, 60–1 number of, 156 Satthianadhan’s account of (in Kamala), 60–1, 89