“The Twentieth Century: Women Writing the Nation” by Susie Tharu and K.

Lalita

This essay forms an introductory chapter of the work Women Writing in India: From 600

B.C. to the Present Volume II: The Twentieth Century co- edited by K. Lalita and Susie Tharu

and published in 1993. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita's ambitiously-conceived project of

compiling women's writing in India spanning twenty-six centuries has resulted in the path-

breaking two-volume publication entitled Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present.

Volume I of the series (600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century), is an astonishing collection

of 140 selections of poetry and prose by sixty-eight individual authors, as well as folk songs

(whose authorship is unattributable to one individual because of the nature of the genre) and

two anonymous prose pieces: an 1881 speech reprinted in a newspaper, and an 1889

newspaper article. Even a complete awareness of the immensity of the scope of this

anthology, which is perhaps the first-ever attempt to record in two volumes a body of writing

spanning twenty-six hundred years, and which sometimes retrieves an oral subaltern (female)

tradition, probably cannot communicate the ardousness of the archival work involved. And as

Tharu and Lalita suggest in their preface to Volume I, careful, painstaking archival searches

for women's writing had to be supplemented considerably by reports or claims of extant

works which were anecdotal at best.

Tharu and Lalita report how the absence of formal documentation or criticism limited

biographical resources to letters, memoirs, and sometimes, interviews with the women's

families—and so Tharu and Lalita's meticulous biographical headnotes preceding each entry

in this volume represent nothing short of miracles in original research. Tharu and Lalita

briefly problematize the politics of translating various regional languages into English and the

assumptions about audience that precede this choice before elaborating on the difficulties of

translation and the need to preserve the "regional grain of the work". In the general

introduction to Volume I, Tharu and Lalita address why gender is valorized as difference in
the construction of their anthology by presenting the allegory of Bangalore Nagaratnamma's

work as feminist critic and historian, and her attempt to revive the eighteenth-century

classic Radhika Santwanarn (Appeasing Radhika) by the Telegu poet Muddupalani.

According to the editors, much of the literary work collected in this volume engages

in the profound rearticulation of the political world and of imaginative life that took place in

the forties and fifties with the birth of the Indian nation and continues to underwrite culture

and politics into the nineties. Women’s texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries are best read as documents of the writers’ engagements with the reworking of their

worlds that accompanied British rule in India. Gender was intrinsic to these rearticulations of

social and imaginative life in which women writers played an important part. The authors

attempt to trace the political history of India and place women’s writings in that context.

(1947- 1968): The Nehruvian years

Independence for India was both a climactic resolution and a determined beginning.

Speech made by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, on the occasion of

India’s independence included the guarantee of political and economic self- reliance and a

commitment to building a secular, democratic society. According to political theorists, the

promise of secularism and democracy bore a double mark. They could be read either as

endorsing only the political and cultural changes that would support the growth of a self-

confident energetic commercial class or as a commitment also to the egalitarian ideals of

socialism and therefore to the people as a whole. Despite India’s obligation to powerful

business and landed interests, it was able to maintain a commitment to social justice and

equality. The Hindu Code Bill sought to create a uniform law ensuring women some rights to

property and succession and treating them as equal to men in relation to marriage and

divorce. Strong opposition arose against the Bill on clauses relating to property and
inheritance and hence the passage of Bill was delayed for three years. A modified version of

the Bill was passed in 1955. In 1951, the first elections of free India were held becoming also

the first to be based on universal adult suffrage. The Congress party returned to power with

substantial majority. The new government adopted the policy of nonalignment, extended

protection to indigenous industries and was committed to planned economic growth and state

intiatives for social transformation. India was growing, all set to become a world power and

showed tremendous gains in food production, science, technology and business.

(1968- 1975): Widespread Disaffection

By the late sixties, contradictions evaded by the early post- Independence resolutions

and gaps in the Nehruvian mixed economy began to show up. Increasing urban

unemployment and spiralling prices became a concern. Economic growth was slackening.

Peasant revolts broke out in several parts of India. Women who had been relatively quiet on

the political front after Independence, emerged in large numbers and not only took an active

part in these movements but demanded that women’s questions be included on the agendas

and even formed separate women’s organisations. In 1975, a state of emergency was

declared. Elections were postponed, civil liberties guaranteed under the constitution were

suspended and for the first time in free India, censorship was clamped on the press. In 1977,

the Emergency was lifted and elections held. The Congress party was voted out of power.

1977: A Turning Point

The policies of economic liberalization of the late seventies and the eighties mark the

arrival of a new Indian commercial class. Decentralization and the weakening of state

mediation is a logical outcome of the coming in age of Indian capitalism. Caste, communal

conflicts and violence against women increases.

 According to cultural theorists, the realist novel and film, both forms that emerged

historically alongside the nation in India as they did in Europe developed the imaginative

languages (the narrative forms, modes of address, conventions of character etc.) in which the

nation (its imaginative geography, its political and moral legitimacy, its executive authority

and citizen- subjects) was shaped. Nations like traditions and works of art are made, built,

created and imagined. Here the authors are making an attempt to understand the nation and

nationality not as an essence, but as a historically constituted terrain, changing and contested,

and its citizen- subjects as subjects- in- struggle and therefore also always “in process”.

The first major works of writers such as Amrita Preetham, Ismat Chugtai, Rasheed

Jahan, Indira Sant, K. Saraswati Amma, [Link] appeared during the middle decades of

the 20th century. However, these writers grew into adulthood during a distinct phase of nation-

making. Right through the twenties and thirties, a broad range of struggles sharpened the

cutting edge of the nationalist movement and roused public opinion against British

imperialism. Through this entire period, there were peasants’ revolts, food riots, students’

agitations, industrial strikes, tribal revolts and campaigns of various sorts. If the early decades

of the twentieth century authorized the idea of a nation- people and their many struggles for

freedom, the climate of power demanded the setting up of a nation- state and a relationship

between the state and its people that was designed for governance. The nation had to be

restructured and rewritten. Different and contradictory histories and interests were

rearticulated and even suppressed as the new authorities assumed the power to speak for the

people and drew on the language of science and liberal humanism in order to do so. The

interests of the state and the classes it represents will take priority over the marginalized

social groups. When the state collaborates with global frameworks of technological,

economic and strategic growth, development programmes ultimately serve the metropoles.

These development programmes have hidden agendas that worsen existing inequalities and
leave women and other subjugated groups more marginalized than before. The political edge

of women’s movement was always blunted. Even the medical establishments neglected the

health requirements of peasant women, a socially marginalized group.

The 1940s were as difficult for the Indian nation as they were for the imperial

government. Nationalist histories were produced in the euphoria of the immediate post-

independence period. Such histories rewrote the many rebellions that find articulation in the

anti- imperialist struggle into the master narrative of the mainstream. The literary texts

fashion and rehearse this dominant nationalist narrative and there arises a connotative

pressure that links the liberation of the nation with that of the land and the people and in turn

endows the indigenous state and its protocols of government with a natural authority.

Through a series of political and constitutional initiatives that included a commitment to

heavy industry, planned economic development and modernization, the state became the

custodian of the people’s welfare, through its policies and initiatives. Cultural texts of various

kinds played a major role in effecting this orientation and in giving shape and authority to the

new, essentially upper- caste, middle class and male point of view of the agent- state. The

politically energized, heterogeneous articulations of the earlier period were translated into the

quietest languages of social policy and legislative reform.

The disciplinary schemes of anthropology and development economics acquired new

power as they regulated the realignments of the nation- state intra-nationally in relation to the

people and internationally in relation to global systems of power. Anthropology is a

discipline linked to the ideology of colonialism. It is a discipline that emerged in the

nineteenth century as sovereign European observers studied and documented non- European

societies and provided imperial authorities with the knowledge that empowered the

management and exploitation of subject peoples. The newly independent India turned to

anthropology as the language in which it studied its people and devised programmes for their
development. India not only carried with it the baggage of imperialism but also re-

empowered it. This issue is dealt with in the memoirs of Baby Kamble where the rush of

exotic details about the customs and traditions of her community threatens her attempts to

remember their political history and to articulate a self.

The authors draw our attention to the events of 1948 ‘police action’ in Hyderabad.

The Indian army took an active role in unseating the Nizam of Hyderabad who refused to

relinquish his power to the Indian government. The army turned its weapon toward the

peasant movement that had given support to the nationalist struggle. The trauma of partition

is also dealt with here. With the winning of independence in 1947, came the traumatic

experience of the Partition. Large numbers of people died in the riots that erupted as refugees

moved across the new borders to relocate themselves and thousands more were left homeless

and destitute. Some of the most powerful poetry, film and fiction dealt with the horrors of

killings, the vulnerability of women and the trauma of having, overnight, to leave behind

beloved places and people. The 1962 film Subarnarekha by Ritwick Ghatak showcases this

theme. The Partition marked the failure of the ideal of national integrity. Lalithambika

Antharjanam’s translated story “Kodunkattilpetta Orila” tells the story of a young woman

separated from her family and moves through a refugee camp disoriented and crazed by fear

and loneliness. This narrative renders this crucial event in Indian history monstrous, irrational

and intractable. The poems of Amrita Pritam, who is herself a refugee, also voice similar

concerns. She, in her poems, address the politics of the Partition and how Partition is linked

to the politics of gender. Works belonging to such writers stage the powerful alliances

through which the traditional languages of art and the new requirements of the nation- state

rewrite and contain the question of women.

The forties and fifties were a period in which new authorities were fashioned and

consolidated, new ideas of Indianness were circulated and composed and a new imaginative
geography was established. A feminist literary history must be mapped not as an endless

repetition of present- day rebellions but as different attempts to engage with the force and the

conflict of the multiple cross- cutting determinations of the imaginative worlds in which

women wrote. Women’s texts force us to confront the historical texturing that situates and

governs feminist initiatives of our times. The Swadeshi Movement (1905- 1908) played a

definitive role in the shaping of a national culture. The Movement was a cultural as well as

political contest to represent, repossess and inhabit a territory that had been meticulously and

systematically alienated under colonial rule and to enfranchise an “Indian self”. “Constructive

Swadeshi” aimed at supporting Indian industries, active village work and a system of national

education that emphasized regional languages and the importance of acquiring technical

expertise. History was re- interpreted and traditions invented. Existing festivals were charged

with new meanings and new ones were created. Philosophers, artists, political theorists,

historians and scholars in all fields began to search for an essentially Indian genius, an Indian

mode of perception constructed as a counterpoint to Europe. A reformulated Hinduism

became the mark of an ‘authentic Indianness’ or as the ‘Indian tradition’ which was set up as

the ground on which a national identity was to be forged. Past is very selectively drawn upon

and the ambiguities and contradictions of history are smoothed over into well- shaped

traditions. Indian society is projected as essentially religious and Hindu India is set up as a

norm.

A series of narratives promulgated this ideology. Aurobindo’s pamphlet Bhawani

Mandir (1905) envisaged the building of national unity through the “link of a single and

living religious spririt” that could eventually “Aryanize the world” but would “promote

sympathy between the zamindars and the peasants and heal all discords”. In his 1917 treatise

Hindutva [Link] developed the notion of the “Hindu Rashtra” which would not only

fight the colonial rulers to restore Hindu self-confidence and pride but also would embody the
glories of an ancient Hindu civilization and contain what was described as the growing threat

from an Islam that demanded transnational loyalties. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the Bengali

writer idolized by the Swadeshi movement, had referred to Muslims as ‘yavanas’ (foreigners)

and repeatedly asserted that Bengal had lost her independence with the beginning of Muslim

rule in the thirteenth century. He emphasizes the harmful effects of Mughal centralization on

regional life. The periodization of history proposed by James Mill in 1817 was repeatedly

drawn upon to set up a Vedic India, essentially Indian (upper- caste Hindu) contrasted to the

medieval period of Muslim rule when the country had gone into material and spiritual

decline.

The narratives of writers such as Subhadra Kumari, Shivani and Manjul Bhagat are

composed from the point-of- view of upper caste, middle class or upper middle class woman

who is past middle age and often a grandmother and whose defining characteristic is that she

holds on to her “traditional” and essentially Indian way of life. These narratives symbolically

house various marginal groups (Muslims, the lower castes, the poor) in a hegemonic

architecture that appears to extend itself to accommodate them but also marginalizes and

contains them. Women are among the principal agents for these transactions through which

the social imaginary is consolidated. The female subject is required to transmute herself as

she measures up to the subtle politics of this crucial function. However, Hamsa Wadkar’s

autobiography makes an enquiry about how her own self is marginalized by such hegemonic

structures. Her yearning for a relationship in which she is valued as a person remains

unfulfilled. Her aspirations for independence and for some control over the money she earned

leave her, toward the end of her life, lonely and isolated in a world that seems to have no

other way of acknowledging or addressing those desires. The nation fails to realize the

dreams and aspirations of such women.