self-sacrifice vs self-interest - ronchona

History of Women's Rights: A Non-Historicist ReadingAuthor(s): Rochona MajumdarSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 38, No. 22 (May 31 - Jun. 6, 2003), pp. 2130-2134Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4413620 .

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Perspectives

History of Women's Rights: A Non-Historicist Reading This essay revisits the history of the rhetoric of women's agency and rights in colonial and postcolonial India in which debates around liberalism were often played out by mobilising the language of self-sacrifice to oppose the language of self-interest. The focus is on the debates around the Hindu Code Bill, 1955-56 which gave Hindu women the right to inherit paternal property and to institute divorce proceedings.

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR

M ost modem emancipatory intellectual endeavours, such as feminism, have had to face the ques-

tion of how to hold on to their universalist perspectives while recognising that which is local and historically specific. Critical scholarship ever since Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak and others' questioning of the Euro-American global leanings of feminism has made serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class and national difference within feminist theory. More recently scholars like Saba Mahmood have raised questions about the relationship between non-liberal forms of women's agency outside of the west and the often-liberal assumptions about the individual that underpin much feminist theory. This paper aims to contribute to this body of scholarship by revisiting the history of the rhetoric of women's agency and rights in colonial and postcolonial India in which debates around liberalism were often played out by mobilising the language of self-sacrifice to oppose the language of self-interest.

To do this, I will focus on the Hindu CodeBill of 1955-1956, which gave Hindu women the right to inherit paternal property even after they got married and to institute divorce proceedings. However, despite being granted the right to unquestioned legal access to their paternal property numerous women, all over India, will- ingly sign away this right after they get married in order to appear in their brother' s eyes as good loving sisters. The act

happens by choice, though there are no doubt cultural pressures that promote this particular decision. As recently pointed out by Srimati Basu in her study of women and property rights, "One of the central tropes that codes Indian women's disentitlement to property on the grounds of customs and ancient loyalties is the spectre of the uncaring and greedy sister who claims family property".1 This is a peculiar anomaly that marks the lives of many women in India - women who in every other way are politically conscious, socially active citizens of the nation. I am talking about educated women, who in- tellectually understand what rights are about. Srimati Basu concludes that women's decisions to give up their property rights implied that they were locked in a patriarchal system where they "maximised their short-term priori- ties at the cost of undermining their long- term material interests, and feelings of love and loyalty toward parents and the natal family were enacted in ways that bolstered male privilege."

Basu's assessment of the situation is valuable and correct. At the same time, I would like to posit that looking at the articulation of rights by Indian women historically, might present a more compli- cated picture than the one emerging from Basu's ethnography. My main objective is to argue that from the turn of the 20th century, as women came to develop democratic and modem senses of self, they did so under the pull and pressure of different and contradictory ideals of personhood. The story of women's rights emerged out

of a seemingly continuous divide between law on the one hand and sentiments and duty on the other in such a way that women in India have often lived out the tension between their idea of rights and sentiments related to duties. I am speaking here of Bengali middle class women. But having looked at legislative debates on the Hindu Code from other regions in India - the Madras and Bombay presidencies and the central provinces - I would argue that the Bengal case is reasonably representative of the rest of India. The woman who relinquishes her claims to property may not be as resigned to that fate as Basu's analysis suggests. This conflict between legal rights and sentiments was not a replay of the modernity vs tradition binary. At issue was a tussle between a modem, liberal idea of the individual as abearer of interest and an equally modem romanticisation of the sentiments of the extended family.

Posters advertising 'Mr And Mrs 55', a popular Hindi film released in 1955, starkly captured contemporary perceptions on the role of women in the years imme- diately following the independence of India.2 1955-56 are memorable years in the annals of an Indian 'modernity' as sections of the famous Hindu Code Bill, which I mentioned before, were codified as law during this time.3 The film was a satirical romantic comedy based on the pitfalls of 'western' liberal reform in India. The film's poster was divided into two parts. On one part the hero (Guru Dutt) was shown buckling the heroine's (Madhubala's) shoes, as she stood attired in western garb. The other half of the poster showed the heroine clad demurely in a sari touching the hero's feet.

Both these images are a good guide to understanding the way in which the question of history was framed in debates on Indian/ Hindu womanhood. One position favoured by legislators and activists, both male and female, advocating women's legal rights was that history - the collec- tive past of Indian society - represented a disadvantage for Indian women. It therefore became incumbent upon all reform- minded men and women to overcome that history in the struggle for women's rights so that women could become the equals of men in both public and private life. The other position put forward in opposition

2130 Economic and Political Weekly May 31, 2003



to this - not, necessarily with any intention to bar women's entry into public life - was that it was indeed Indian history that em- powered women to meet the demands of modem nationhood by providing inspiring examples of women of virtue like Sita, Savitri, Damayanti. These mythical names became iconic and routine in what was written about women's emancipation from about the end of the 19th century. How- ever, debates on womanhood came to be structured around a binary in that individuals opposed to the glorification of the past simply inverted the sign attached to these names of ancient and mythical figures. That is to say, instead of looking on these names as recalling a history of women's agency and respect in Indian society, they saw them as totems of patriarchal oppres- sion and deprivation of women. The past was thus an important item in public debates to do with women's modernity. The central question around which this discourse evolved was whether the past produced the disadvantages that women had to overcome in order to be fully participating citizens, or whether it was a resource that made Indian women specially suited to participation in national life, either as virtuous mothers and wives at home or as dutiful members of the public sphere? This became - and has remained - an enduring question in many public and historiographi- cal debates on 'women's status' in India. But one can also see that by turning history into an either/or proposition, this debate, while often rhetorically powerful, both focused on and at the same time emptied the past of all its details. Women came to be depicted either as ethical agents capable of sacrificing their interests and therefore being virtuous, or as interest-bearing subjects who were disadvantaged precisely through the talk of self-sacrifice.

Women and Property

In order to understand the ideological power of this binary between the pursuit of interests and the ethical sentiment of self-sacrifice through which the question of women's rights has often been framed in India, I will be talking about a debate between two important women intellectuals, who were both public intellectuals in 20th century Bengal- Anurupa Devi (1882- 1958) and Saralabala Sarkar (1875-1961). The debate took place in 1954, on the pages of a leading Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika, when the clauses of the Hindu Code Bill were being debated

in regional and national print media all over the country.4 Both Anurupa Devi and Saralabala Sarkar were renowned writers of their period. Both were prominent in the public sphere. Anurupa Devi argued that since men were the main bearers of a lineage, property should accrue to them. Women moved into a different 'kula' (lineage) after marriage. So property was best safeguarded if it stayed under male control. Moreover, due to various changes in social organisation property was being splintered into many fractions among brothers. Adding women to the equation would render the fractions even more minuscule. The new system in addition, was likely to add a new dimension of brother-sister rivalry to the already exis- tent scenario, rife with rivalry between brothers. Furthermore, given that women received no training in property management, she contended that it might be risky to encumber them with property rights by legal means. Finally, women she felt received their share of paternal property at the time of marriage through gifts and dowry. To give them an even further share would be a gross injustice to their brothers.

Saralabala made a strong case for women's financial independence vis-a-vis men in her reply to Anurupa Devi. She wrote that the absence of any economic or property rights for women had bred a slave mentality among women all through society. She described women without property rights as 'meek', 'dependent' and 'needy' and argued that unless they were given these privileges there would be no scope for women to learn and master the art of property management. There are many women who, she argued, despite having a formal share in the property, did not so much as receive a monthly allow- ance. Only a more heightened awareness of rights would engender a sense of re- sponsibility. There were no congenital shortcomings in women that would dis- able them from being able to manage property. Insofar as the issue of escalating tension that further fragmentation of property would lead to, Saralabala argued that since there were divisions made in order to distribute property among all the brothers, it was hard to logically imagine why the same privilege could not be extended to sisters. To say that to do so would encourage squabbles among brothers and sisters when hitherto there had only been quarrels among the male siblings seemed a weak proposition. Distributing property among men and women she felt could also

be a panacea from the social menace of dowry. Further, if sharing property with sisters resulted in a reduction of the family' s total wealth, the wealth accrued through the daughter-in-law had to be factored in by opponents of women's property rights. Finally to argue that men were the carriers of honour for the lineage was to deny the role played by women in perpetuating that lineage.

Similarly, with regard to divorce, Anurupa Devi had argued that instituting formal means to legally end a marriage might detract from the sacred character of the institution. Saralabala's riposte was, "But why should the burden to uphold sacredness fall on women alone? Men following 'sastric' (scriptural) injunctions uttered the same verses that women did at the time of marriage. But until not so long ago they practised polygamy and still reserve the right to do so... To think that society would be beset with numerous problems if divorce was instituted was a fallacy, and if that does happen it will be the fruit of already existing social mala- dies. If divorce law leads many couples to the break up then we must conclude that our family life was poisoned to begin with and this condition does not bode well for a happy, strong, family unit. So, under certain given conditions to make provision for divorce will actually benefit our social lot."5 She went on to observe that what these arguments against property rights and divorce in effect demonstrated was that women identified themselves as 'male property'. The prolonged habit of depen- dence upon others had instilled feelings of vulnerability and unfreedom among women. As a result even when men wanted to empower them by giving them rights they shuddered at the thought of what they would do with these rights?6

Saralabala stood for a group of women who primarily identified themselves as liberal, citizen subjects, endowed with a certain set of rights. This generation of women co-opted the legacy of male reformist endeavours to further women's cause. Thus, in 1933, in course of the Raja Rammohun Roy centenary celebrations, Sudha Chakravarti, another prominent feminist leader declared,

Raja also admitted women's right to property. From a study of his 'Brief Remarks regarding Moder Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females according to the Hindu Law of Inheritance', it appears that he held that for the healthy expansion of their natural capacities right of

Economic and Political Weekly May 31, 2003 2131



inheritance played a most important part. Rammohun's ideas and endeavours in respect of education of women and the rights of women anticipated even those of John Stuart Mill.7

For Sudha Chakravarti as for Saralabala, there was a clear continuum between the efforts of Rammohun Roy and their own. Both embraced a liberal model of reform where, moved by the plight of masses of women they-sought a remedy in legal intervention by the state. In both cases, these reform-minded individuals empathised with women's suffering in their respective societies and sought to tackle the problem through recourse to rights - obtainable by rational appeals made to the state on behalf of the silent anguished masses.

Anurupa Devi' s stand bewilders readers in its apparent passivity. It seems perverse that someone considered a progressive woman writer in her own time should argue against making certain basic rights general among women. Yet it is important to listen to Anurupa Devi if only because she was an important voice in Kolkata public life. In the Leela Lectures that she was invited to deliver by the University of Calcutta she stated,

Today we boast of women's emancipation and progress in the arenas of knowledge and power, but that we are still far behind the woman of yore in the arena of 'tyaga' (renunciation) is something that often slips our minds because of our altered values. We forget that never has a rootless flower named 'right' bloomed anywhere in the world, nor will it ever do so. The extent to which we are able to demonstrate our magnanimity and good sense, society will reciprocate to the same extent by endowing us with social entitlements. It has always done that and will continue doing so in the future. In the pursuit of pleasure and luxu- ries, women started by copying men and have now surpassed them. Even after they see their fathers made destitute by the pressure of marriage dowry, they are seeking state intervention to divide the remain- ing paternal property with their brothers.8

This debate poses to us an intriguing methodological question about the category of history itself as we think of the question of women's rights in India. For, how do we interpret these radically different viewpoints articulated by two women, both of whom as I have pointed out were prominent in the contemporary public sphere? One option would be to practice some kind ofhistoricism, i e, to see Anurupa Devi - a contemporary of Saralabala Sarkar

- as somehow representing a point of view that belonged to the past. Indeed the temp- tation to do so is strengthened as we turn our attention to the growing influence of a feminist consciousness among India women.

Sarkar may easily be seen as representing a new stage in the history of Indian feminism. With the rise and spread of women's education, the entry of increas- ing numbers of women from all social classes into the labour force, the in- creasing visibility of the plight of innu- merable child widows, large numbers of educated women became more aware and impatient of a literary, humanist critique. As shown in the work of scholars of Antoinette Burton and Mrinalini Sinha, we need to bear in mind the fact that educated Indian women were drawn into global debates on women's suffrage and development in the context of the suffrage and larger women's movement in Great Britain. From the turn of the 20th century, middle class Indian feminists became increasingly aware of certain currents in a more 'global' feminism. In British suffrage periodicals, Burton has shown us, the Indian woman was depicted as lacking in emancipatory consciousness, an 'unrepresented colonial constituency' whose political and social well-being could only be safeguarded by imperial feminists.9

These arguments were in turn co-opted by Indian women to challenge the colonial state 'for ignoring women's demands and forbolstering Indian orthodoxy'. Mrinalini Sinha shows how in the context of the Sarda Bill, which became the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, Indian feminists used the American writer Katherine Mayo's controversial book Mother India to argue that the colonial state had done little to remedy the ills afflicting women's lives. As they struggled for more radical reforms in the 1920s, Sinha argues that, 'organised women's growing impatience with sentimentalised invocations of the past was beginning to be voiced in various forums'. At the in- ternational women's conference organised by the British Commonwealth League in London, for example, an Indian delegate Dhanvanthi Rama Rao argued that, "We are not prepared now to talk of our senti- mental past. We are only looking at what now exists and trying to make the future as glorious as ourpasts."10 These attitudes were reflected in the resolutions that were adopted in the 'Charter of Womanhood's

Vision of a Reformed India' on Decem- ber 29, 1927. The resolutions called for things like "equal pay for equal work, maternity benefits for factory women, 'Equal Standards of Morality', and equal rights to divorce for women."11

The changing nature of Indian feminism was most obvious in times when the women's movement declared its differ- ences with the official nationalist line. For instance, when the British government appointed the Hindu Law Committee to review the diverse body of Hindu family laws under the chairmanship of B N Rau, that eventually led to the framing of the Hindu Code, there was some questions whether women's organisations like the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) would cooperate with the committee or not since the Congress had also launched the civil disobedience movement at the time. In his essay 'The Position of Women' in Young India in 1929, Gandhi argued that women should not spent their time and energy on the question of their legal status, but focus their attention to more pressing matters.12 Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a fol- lowerof Gandhi, however, "disagreed with him and said that the AIWC had worked very hard to get the government to appoint this committee and so women should cooperate with it."13 Many women (like Vilasini Devi Shenai) declared that the battle for women's equality was equally if not more important than the struggle for Indian freedom.14

How everyday these political developments had become is testified to by the fact that The Statesman, one of the largest circulating English dailies in Calcutta, started a column known as 'The Woman's Forum' from the early 1930s. I want to briefly touch upon the content of some of the pieces published under this heading.

Defining 'Woman'

In an article entitled 'The Modem Girl', the writer Krishna Hutheesing argued that while much was being said in contemporary society against such a girl, before making a value judgment on this creature, we need to define who was modern girl was.15 Usually the epithet 'modem' was used to describe young women who "dance, dress, or make-up according to western ideas, who learn not the best the west has to offer but perhaps the worst."16 But these external accoutrements did not make one modem. It was frequently charged that the modern girl was "frivolous, gay,




pleasure seeking and not serious minded". She was therefore regarded as a 'drain on society'.17 But, the writer continued to argue that the modem girl was fully aware of her responsibilities, was 'capable and efficient,' and 'desires to exercise her right to an independent existence'. The modem woman 'demands' equality of treatment in all spheres of life and 'having rebelled against social tyrannies and out of date traditions she is determined to fight for the freedom she has achieved to some extent'. The modern girl's attitude to pleasure was also more complex than before. The author remarked that "pleasures are more con- spicuous than they used to be, and girls who have to work in offices or at other jobs, desire some sort of recreation during the evenings. All young girls cannot be expected to sit at home after a hard day's work and read books, though there are always exceptions...But those young people who like a little gaiety and frivolity should not be condemned unless they make a fetish of it."18

The sentimentalisation of hierarchi- cal family relationships that was ubiq- uitous in all 19th century and early 20th century writing was also gradually being called into question as evidenced by state- ments like, "That the young girls of today resent authority may be true of a few, but not of the many, because there seems to be far more friendship and respect between parents and children nowadays than there has ever been before. This exists because there it is based on a better understanding of each other's spheres and activities."19 The modem girl was keen to exercise choice in matrimony. She refused to be ornamen- tal and wanted to 'share' everything with her husband. "A young girl does not want to be tied down to someone she has never set her eyes on before, whose ideas and tastes may come into constant conflict with hers."20 She now demanded both 'comradeship and affection'.

In the changed social context feminism acquired a richer meaning for many women. As one Manjari put it in a article called 'Feminism', also published in the 'Woman's Forum' of The Statesman, the word 'feminist' has taken on a different meaning.21 "Formerly", she wrote "it meant a suffragette, one advocated women's rights". But, women's fight, she reminded the reader, had not been merely for economic and political emancipation. "It has also been her fight against the tyranny of each individual man, who has been her guardian such as father, brother and

particularly her husband."22 Indian feminism by this period had global visions. This is best captured in the words of a contemporary who wrote,

Incredible changes have been wrought among women of other countries, like Turkey, China, Japan, Egypt, Iran and Persia, etc. It was by no means an easy task for these women to win their emancipation, but they braved all criticisms and threats and forged ahead attaining their goals and after untold hardships. Today these women are far ahead of us - taking part in the reconstruction of their countries and fighting side by side with their men. In a world that is changing so rapidly it is but fit that the modem Indian girl keeps pace with other women of the world and does not lag behind.23

In the light of all these developments how are we now going to interpret someone like Anurupa Devi? Do we regard her as a retrograde figure who belonged to the past of a so-called Indian tradition? But that would amount to what in Fabian's terms is a denial of the coevalness of Devi and Sarkar.24 I would posit instead that Devi embodied a cultural-nationalist con- struction of the self-sacrificing ethical individual, which existed alongside and was as modern, chronologically speaking, as that of Sarkar. Devi's stance on divorce and property reflected the presence of this particular nationalist position. Indeed there are many exemplars of this in present-day India as well. The ethical figure lived alongside the political critique - produc- ing plural 'sources of the self' for women - and found elaboration in novels, films, biographies, and women's own writings about themselves. And it is at the point of intersection of these two critiques - the ethical critique of self-interest and the legal- political defence of the same idea of interest that we may locate the birth of a notion of women's rights in India.

Towards the close of the 19th century, and even in the early decades of the 20th century, a very influential ethic among both men and women was that of self- sacrifice. This is best exemplified if we think of Gandhi. While a certain Hindu tradition was invented and evoked to justify this imagination, what made the nationalist imagination of the 'new woman' fun- damentally democratic was the insistence - utopian to be sure, but heard in all reformist literature - that all acts of sacrifice be absolutely voluntary. This is why 19th century reformism could be both critical of domestic violence - because

such violence extracted sacrifice and sub- mission only by force - and yet fail to find any solutions to women's problems through their participation in public life. At the core of this reformist nationalism was the figure of an ethical individual whose ultimate ethical act consisted in making sacrifice or 'tyag'. In a recent lecture entitled "Nationalism and the Trials of Becom- ing", Ranajit Guha has observed that, "Translated loosely in English as renunciation or sacrifice..., tyag speaks for the ethics of overcoming the resistance of what stands in the way of becoming. It works, in this role, closely with 'sraddha', the respect an individual owes to others as one who is adequate to his own possibility and entitled to his own respect."25

There were many women whose own lives and practices bore marks of this tension between rights and interests and sentiments. Prabhabati Devi Saraswati, a famous novelist and fiction writer of this period can be taken as an example. Manikuntala Sen (1910- ), the well-known Bengali communist activist noted in her reminiscences -Sedinera Katha- the active support Prabhabati extended to the efforts of the organised women's movement to spread awareness about the Hindu Code reforms.26 She was one of the prime spokespersons who addressed numerous rallies organised by the party not only in Calcutta, but also in small towns and districts of Bengal. Together with the nationalist leader Sarojini Naidu, she was the main speaker at a meeting on the code organised by Manikuntala Sen and other feminists at the University Institute Hall. At the same time if we turned our attention to the novels written by Prabhabati, namely Bratacharini (Vow-Keeper), Up to Date or Pratikhaye (In Waiting), all of which were bestsellers in contemporary Bengal we find instances of female protagonists who defy the imagination of the female subject embodied in the Hindu Code reforms. For instance, the main character of Bratacharini was Sita, a young woman who was entrusted with the task of main- taining a huge estate by an aging landlord Biharilal.27 It was not as if Biharilal had no male heirs. His grandson Jyoti had incurred his wrath by converting to the Brahmo faith and marrying a young Brahmo woman. This marriage cost him his inheritance as Biharilal had arranged for Jyoti to get married to Sita. Throughout the novel we see Sita, whose education and empathy are exemplary, expanding and safeguarding the huge estate in her care.

Economic and Political Weekly May 31, 2003 2133



Not only that she refuses to get married even after Jyoti has spurned her, not for any lack of suitors but because as she puts it to Jyoti 'he was her husband and had been in many previous lives.' The novel ends with Sita writing off the entire property to Jyoti and taking up a mis- sionary life of social work. Such a life she tells.Jyoti would bring fulfilment to the love that she felt for him and the entire world.

In this novel and in many others Prabhabati Devi elevated the idea of self- sacrifice to the ultimate ethical act per- formed by a woman. We could argue that the feminism of her protagonists was enacted in these acts. Yet, in her persona as a public intellectual Prabhabati also delivered speeches in favour of women's rights to paternal property and divorce. It is as if we hear both the voices of Devi and Sarkar in Prabhabati Devi herself.

A central question animating my project is, therefore, this: Why do women in India, even educated women who are entirely capable of understanding the idea of 'rights' and 'interests', often act in ways that seemingly sacrifice their own interests? A prevalent tendency in the literature is to understand this through some version of the tradition/modernity dichotomy. In other words, the argument often goes that women would pursue their interests more vigor- ously if they were less under the thrall of conditions that favour the persistence or a new fabrication of 'tradition'. I dispute this understanding by attempting to show that modernity itself in colonial and postcolonial India was/is diverse and had many contradictory sides to it. What often looks like a clash between tradition and modernity is actually a conflict between two or more versions of modernity itself. Elsewhere I have shown the persistence of a historical lack of synchrony between macro-processes by which legal reforms of 'women's conditions' took place in India and the micro-processes through which sentiments relating to modern personhoods were generated for women, even though these processes share the same chronology.28 Using the idea of 'tradition' simply occludes the interesting problem of non-synchronicity of the various aspects of modernity itself as it was played out in colonial and post-colonial India.

Saralabala Sarkar and Anurupa Devi, reproduced in their debates an old binary - self-interest versus self-sacrifice - that has had a long life in modern Indian history. I have not approved of the binary but

read it to underscore the enduring appeal to women of older nationalist construc- tions of self-sacrifice as an ethical act. Anurupa Devi exemplifies that position to me. Saralabala Sarkar, at the same time, shows us the inadequacy of Anurupa Devi's nationalism from the point of view of a feminism devoted to the question of women's rights. Yet this nationalist legacy cannot be simply discarded as useless for women. Then we simply reproduce the binary. Besides, as Saba Mahmood and others have shown, women have often used non-liberal forms of thought to empower themselves.29 The task for feminist thinkers today must be to engage this nationalism and explore its invest- ment in ethics in order to bring the talk of rights and interests and the talk of ethics into a conversation with each other that helps promote the ends of feminist struggles. CI1

Address for correspondence: rochonam @ yahoo.com

Notes 1 Srimati Basu, She Comes To Take Her Rights:

Indian Women, Property, and Propriety, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999, p 5.

2 Mr And Mrs 55, released in 1955 was produced and directed by Guru Dutt. Guru Dutt, Madhubala, Lalita Pawar, and Johnny Walker were the main cast. The film was based on a play by Abrar Alvi.

3 It must be noted here following J D M Derrett that, 'The name Hindu Code Bill is now obsolete, since the projected Code was broken up for ease of treatment and was introduced, bill by bill, into the Indian parliament. But the old name, which originates, sticks, and it is as such that the public know of the project.' J D M Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present, A Mukherjee and Co, Calcutta, 1957, p 55.

4 Saralabala's essay, 'Hindu ein committee r bill sambandhe koyekti katha' (Some reflections on the legislation of the Hindu Law Committee) was originally published in Anandabazar Patrika, 12, Kartik (Octob&r), 1954. Reprinted in Chitra Deb (ed), Saralabala Racanasamgraha, Vol 2, pp 624-26.

5 Ibid, p 626. 6 Ibid. 7 Sudha Chakravarti, 'Rammohun Roy as the

Champion of Women's Rights' in The Father of Modern India: Commemoration Volume of the Raja Ranmmohun Roy Centenary Celebrations, edited by Satis Chandra Chakravarti, Rammohun Roy Centenary Committee, Calcutta, 1935.

8 qnurupa Devi, Sahitye Nari: Srastri 0 Srishti, (Women in Literature: Creators and their Creations) University of Calcutta, Calcutta, 1949, p 7. This text is a compilation of the Lila lectures delivered by Anurupa Devi to the

University of Calcutta in 1944. 9 See Antoinette Burton, 'The Feminist Quest

for Identity: British Imperial Suffragism and 'Global Sisterhood,' 1900-1915' in Journal of Women's History, Fall 1991, pp 46-81. For a more detailed statement about the relationship of the images of Indian women to imperial feminism see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1994.

10 Ibid. 11 Cited in Mrinalini Sinha, 'The Lineage of the

Indian Moder: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act' in Antoinette Burton (ed), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, Routledge, London, New York, 1999, p 217.

12 M K Gandhi, 'The Position of Women', Young India, October 17, 1929.

13 Bharati Ray and Aparna Basu, Women's Struggle: A History of the All India Women's Conference, 1927-1990, pp 49-50.

14 Ibid, p 50. 15 Krishna Hutheesing, 'The Modern Girl', The

Statesman, Sunday January 21, 1940. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Manjari, 'Feminism', The Statesman,

August 18, 1940. 22 Ibid. 23 Krishna Hutheesing, 'The Modern Girl', The

Statesman, Sunday January 21, 1940. 24 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:

How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983. Chapters I and 2 are especially relevant to this theme.

25 Ranajit Guha, 'Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming' in The Oracle, Volume XXIV, August 2002, No 2, pp 18-19.

26 Manikuntala Sen, Sedinera Katha, Nabapatra Prakashan, Calcutta, 1982, p 238.

27 See Prabhabati Debi Saraswati, 'Bratacharini' in Prabhabati Debira Granthavali, Basumati Sahitya Mandira, Calcutta, 1955, pp 175-330.

28 Rochona Majumdar, Marriage, Modernity and Sources of the Self: Bengali Women, c 1870- 1956, Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 2003.

29 See Saba Mahmood, 'Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival', Cultural Anthropology, 16, No 2, 2000, pp 202-36.

Corrigendum

The notice published in EPW on 17 May 2003 for Creative Writers Workshop to be organised by Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group contained an error. The dates of the Workshop will be 6-10 November 2003 and not 6-10 December 2003 as published in EPW.




self-sacrifice vs self-interest - ronchona

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