Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (review)

The remarkable success of this ambitious book depends as much on its sharp and sustained theoretical orientation as it does on its creative and detailed empirical research. Sinha’s subject may at first seem modest; hers is a study of the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India and the international controversy that ensued.¹ The controversy emerged in response to Mayo’s argument in 1927 that Indian society was unfit for political autonomy within the British Empire. In less capable hands, this would prove a hackneyed subject. Sinha, however, reinterprets this controversy, presenting us with a sweeping argument about the years 1927–1935, a critical period for the history of Indian nationalism, British colonial power, and the emerging imperial power of the United States. At least as significantly, Sinha demonstrates, as she did in Colonial Masculinity, the importance of bringing race and gender together in an analytical frame, providing historians with a way to approach the growing agency of Indian women and the unfulfilled possibilities it offered an emerging Indian nation.² Sinha ‘rescues’ the controversy surrounding Mother India both from the presumed inevitability of colonial and nationalist power, thereby exposing their precarious dominance.

The book is comprised of a dense, but rich, introduction, five comprehensive chapters, and an epilogue, which purposefully echoes Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory.³ At the outset, Sinha positions herself and her subject on the edges of both imperial studies and nationalist historiography, noting that neither of these familiar frameworks can adequately contain the range or significance of effects produced by the controversy, Sinha proposes alternatively that we consider the controversy in a global context. The first two chapters deftly accomplish this task; Sinha discusses the range of Mayo’s contacts in the US business community, notably through the Rockefeller Foundation, in the US Government, the British Government’s Foreign Office, and the Government of India, as well as in religious and women’s organizations on both sides of the Atlantic and in India. She also devotes significant attention to those in India, most notably Cornelia Sorabji and Indian social reformers, who provided Mayo with the infamous ‘facts’ upon which her argument rested. Carefully detailing the ways in which Mayo’s previously successfully attack against Filipino autonomy appealed her allies, Sinha provides a nuanced reading of Mayo’s contacts that never flattens the interests or intentions of these groups, but instead painstakingly illuminates their common ground and, sometimes, their competing interests. Sinha’s ability to draw together this disparate and intertwined history, which involved her digging in many archives, is among her greatest strengths.

The transnational positioning of Sinha’s subject, which grows out of the range of archival sources upon which the study rests, allows her to identify and then to highlight how the controversy led to a transformation in the way the relationship between the state and society was understood in late colonial India. Mayo’s characterization of India as inert, helpless, lacking in initiative and originality, staying power and sustained loyalty, sterile of enthusiasm, and weak of life-vigor, was the basis of her conclusion that India was unworthy of greater political autonomy.⁴ Mayo sustained these claims by providing evidence of the sexual depravity of India in chapters focused specifically on Indian women, which drew the ire of Indian nationalists, but more significantly for Sinha’s argument, of Indian women themselves. While a range of government officials, reformers, politicians, business leaders, and nationalists in India, Britain, and the United States debated the veracity of Mayo’s claims about whether the condition of India’s women were inherent social deficiencies particular to Indian culture, a new analytical frame emerged. Critics of Mother India and its author arrived at the conclusion that India’s social backwardness should be attributed to the political culture of British imperialism; Indian social reformers and Indian women’s leaders pointed out Mayo’s omission of the road-blocks to improving women’s condition that had been engineered by the...