Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (review)

In this stimulating study, Malhotra explores the shaping of a new middle-class identity among Hindus and Sikhs in late nineteenth-century India. Central to this enterprise, she argues, as higher caste Indians sought to present themselves as "modern," was the reconfiguring of the roles of women. The reformers' ideal was that of the pativrata, or respectable wife, living in a companionate marriage. The general outlines of this transformation are, by now, well known, and its implications have been explored, especially for Bengal, by a number of writers. Malhotra's volume is, however, the first to extend this analysis to the Punjab, and it does so, refreshingly, by eschewing English sources in favor of ephemeral tracts and pamphlet literature in Punjabi and Hindi. In so doing, she imaginatively shows how new genres of folklore and verse helped spread the reformers' message throughout society using newly established printing presses.

Malhotra's chapters explore classic themes in the study of Indian women: infanticide, dowry, sexuality, dress and seclusion, the joint family, widowhood, and so on. In this litany, patriarchy looms behind a host of evils. Malhotra nevertheless demonstrates convincingly how ambivalent reformers were as they confronted the task of creating the modern pativrata. Women's sexuality, for instance, had to be contained within early marriage, though, to be viewed as modern, women had to be educated. Hence, reluctantly, girls' schools were established. For the modern male, caste was an embarrassment, but the gifting of women in marriage to appropriate partners sustained the status of the aspiring professional elites. Indeed, women were meant to embody high-caste norms. Widow marriage, though desirable to create an appearance of being "progressive," involved "making a mockery" of the pativrata ideal of a woman's lifelong faithfulness to one husband (92, 105).

Malhotra does not accept a view of women as wholly passive. Confronted with the often coercive demands of the new colonial order, women, she argues, found ways to assert their "agency" (110). Some embraced modernity by founding schools; others defiantly continued to participate in the old women's culture of visits to holy men and eclectic devotionalism; yet others used mourning rituals and other public ceremonies as ways to "subvert power at home" (188).

Malhotra insists throughout that the process of class formation "resituated women within caste," as it also entailed a concurrent "renewed interest in establishing caste hierarchies" (3, 203). Although this position is not inconsistent with her evidence, neither is it rigorously demonstrated. Similarly, although Malhotra implies, even in her title, that the reformers' activities reinforced "gendered sectarian identities" (204), Malhotra never discusses the growth of community identities even among Hindus and Sikhs, and she wholly ignores the similar processes of reform taking place among the province's majority Muslim population. The focus on universal categories, such as class and gender, with her questioning of the meaning of the "modern" in the colonial setting make Malhotra's study of interest to comparative sociologists and theorists of postcolonialism.