Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in Ireland and India, 1914–2004 by Sikata Banerjee (review)

Nationalists seeking liberation from foreign or colonial rule have often depicted their countries as mothers for whom struggle and sacrifice by martial sons would win freedom. Yet in contrast to the idealized images of women that featured prominently in nationalist repertoires, female participation in nationalist movements was often met with ambivalence and sometimes hostility from their male counterparts. This contested terrain is the subject of Sikata Banerjee’s comparative study Muscular Nationalism, which explores the relationship between gender and nationalism in Ireland and India, two nations whose multifaceted connections within the British Empire have been the subject of much recent interest by historians. Banerjee defines “muscular nationalism” as “the intersection of a specific vision of masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism,” which centers “an adult male body poised to sacrifice and kill for the nation” (p. 2). Such movements, she notes, typically “grappled with female actors by denying or erasing the physicality of women’s bodies” (p. 9). Women who wished to participate in nationalist movements in turn “had to contend with and negotiate the expectations of chaste femininity” (p. 12).

In analyzing the Indian experience of “muscular nationalism,” Banerjee focuses primarily though not exclusively on Bengal, a region with a strong tradition of militant anticolonialism, as well as one in which nationalists displayed considerable interest in their counterparts in Ireland. Locating her analysis within the context of British imperial attitudes that “‘racialized’ and ‘effeminized’ both the Irish and the Indians” (p. 15), she is careful to distinguish between as well as to compare the two nations’ experiences of imperial rule and discusses how the (at times ambiguous) status of the Irish as a “white” race complicated cross-colonial relationships. As she notes in an apt phrase, the “interconnections and affinities between the two were troubled by Ireland’s location in the borderlands of empire” (p. 69).

Banerjee’s analysis extends over a broad time frame, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book’s first three chapters consider how Irish and Indian nationalists such as Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, and Saratchandra Chatterjee, a prominent Bengali novelist, conceived of the role of women in physical-force nationalism, and how Irish and Indian women attempted to negotiate this gendered discourse in anticolonial campaigns. The final two chapters examine how “the gendered circulation of power in the muscular nation” (p. 12) has continued to resonate in the postcolonial era. Banerjee here explores a diverse set of case studies including the Naxalite movement in late 1960s Bengal, the “dirty protest” of female republican prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1980, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the issue of sati, or widow immolation, and debates over the bodies of foreign asylum seekers prior to the 2004 citizenship referendum in the Republic of Ireland. Rather than working with a rigid demarcation of binary visions of roles for men and women in nationalist movements, her analysis stresses the fluid nature of gender boundaries within “muscular nationalism.” “Politicized femininity,” Banerjee notes, “continues to claim a space on the borderlands between martial man and chaste woman” (p. 106) and, as she concludes, offers “the possibility of a political vision of women and womanhood that transcends” these binary categories (p. 167).

Banerjee’s wide-ranging approach and diverse case studies are both a strength and a weakness of Muscular Nationalism. Her analysis is insightful, but episodic, and gives little sense of historical change over time. While her idea of “muscular nationalism” is well-developed, some of the examples she discusses do not fit well under this rubric. The Naxalites, for example, are not nationalists in a conventional sense, so their appearance seems rather anomalous in a book generally devoted to anticolonial nationalists and their legacies.

There are also some unusual omissions from her narrative of “muscular nationalism” in Ireland and India, which shifts abruptly from...