En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (review)

En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. By Sangeeta Ray. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. viii + 198 pp.

Over the last decade various disciplines have explored the idea that colonial oppression, nationalisms, and postcolonial societies are profoundly gendered and sexualized. Yet some of the most influential discussions about the nature of "Third World" literatures, as well as that of the relationship between nation building and novel writing, have been remarkably silent about gender. Sangeeta Ray's En-Gendering India attempts to address this gap by considering writings about and from the Indian subcontinent that deal with the events between the famous 1857 "Mutiny" or Sepoy Rebellion and the 1947 partition of India on the eve of its independence from British rule. Ray's book examines the novels and other writings of two prominent Bengali men of letters, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore; three Victorian texts about India—Harriet Martineau's British Rule in India, Meadows Taylor's novel Seeta, and Flora Annie Steele's novel On the Face of the Waters—and two postcolonial novels that deal with the partition, Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day. By bringing together writings by these men and women from both sides of the colonial divide, Ray seeks to explore "the manipulation of gender politics in the exercise of national rule" (5). Such manipulation, she reminds us, drives the resurgence in India of right-wing Hindu nationalism, in which the politics of the Indian communities resident in the United States are also implicated.

This last dimension is both timely and important; the violent response of self-appointed champions of Indian femininity to Deepa Mehta's film Fire and to her shooting of another, Water, is only one instance of the right-wing aggression spreading in the name of Hinduism. Nor have women been simply silent victims of communal violence or "sites" for national mythmaking. As recent feminist work on contemporary as well as partition politics in India shows, women themselves have helped perpetuate such ideologies and violence. The Indian communities in the United States are necessarily bound up with the politics of the "nation" and of gender in both India and the United States. Ray gestures toward how her book might be situated in such politics, although she does not develop detailed connections between the politics of the Indian community in the United States and the developments in India. Not only do many Indians in the United States finance and support communal as well as Hindu nationalist movements at "home," and attempt to replicate those politics in their communities and families here, but their "nationalism" (as well as that of many at "home") is perfectly compatible with, and often even inspired by, forms of nationalism in the United States. On the other hand, Hindu nationalism in India is perfectly compatible with the "global" world order; the novelist Arundhati Roy has suggested that the aggressive chauvinism of the Hindu Right is a tactic meant to deflect attention from economic policies that have opened the door to multinationals and global capital.

Such political and economic connections are often obscured by the "anti-Western" rhetoric of Hindu nationalists or by the cultural chauvinism of many Western champions of globalization. The rhetoric of Hindu India is anti-Western, but its real targets are frequently minorities at home: Ray's opening chapter rightly endorses the insights of Sudipto Kaviraj, Tanika Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, and others who have pointed out that Bankim's influential notion of a Hindu culture and identity did not arise from opposition to British colonialism but was constructed by invoking past Muslim invasions of India. That is why the Hindu Right in India values Bankim so highly today, but Ray does not explore this issue at all. Nor does she examine Tagore's place in contemporary Indian culture, although she does...