Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 by Ellen Brinks (review)

Ellen Brinks’s Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 is a respectful and knowledgeable study of selected works by five Indian women intellectuals, writers, and reformers: Toru Dutt (1856–77), Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862–1894), Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949). Four of the five women were Christian, and all were of high social standing. Collectively, though, they contributed from a range of different positions and in diverse media (poetry, novels, sketches, essays, and pamphlets) to late nineteenth-century gender reform and other movements of self-determination in India.

Building on the work of scholars such as Rosinka Chaudhuri, Inderpal Grewal, Ania Loomba, Lata Mani, Parama Roy, and Jenny Sharpe, Brinks is concerned to recuperate the agency and, to an extent, the subjectivity of these path-breaking women writers and of the many women they represented in their campaigning works. Her five chapters, each exploring one or two literary works and their reworking of colonialist discourses, demonstrate by and large persuasively (if not perhaps for the first time) how the writers emerge “as highly visible and engaged wielders of discourse themselves” (5). Her close readings contribute to the existing scholarship a careful attention to the writers’ own intertextual responses to current literature (for example, Ramabai’s awareness of 1890s Famine Commission reports), and a persuasive analysis of the cross-references in their writing (such as the psychic fantasy spaces relating to the heroine’s mother in Satthianadhan’s Kamala (1894), or Naidu’s understanding from-the-inside of the conniving subtleties of orientalism).

Throughout, the status of India as a more or less homogeneously constituted “colony” of Britain is taken as a given, and movements of social and cultural reform are generally assumed to unfold along smooth, unbroken historical trajectories. The often fraught and fissiparous history of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, for example, and its interaction with reform movements both moderate and radical elsewhere in India and in Britain is barely covered, and is not referenced in the index. Similarly, the important emergence of the Indian National Congress in India, and its cognate groups in Britain, such as the National Indian Association, are also not covered. However, although the book’s claim that its subjects reconfigured relations between India and Great Britain could have benefitted from a clearer explication of the complex workings of Indian cultural nationalism, the literary critical focus on the fine textures of these women’s writing does make a convincing case for Dutt, Satthianadhan, Ramabai, and the other reformers’ role “in reorienting the Indian and imperial cultures’ moral compass” (19).

The claims in Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920 that postcolonial theory tends to consider the colonized woman as passive, and the English language as an instrument of cultural domination, are evidently rhetorical exaggerations, space-clearing exercises for the purposes of advancing the particular contributions of the book. The claims certainly do not stand up in relation to the extensive scholarship on gender, nation, education, and Empire in India and elsewhere that already exists, and to which Brinks’s own critical historiography repeatedly has recourse. This tendency to overreach notwithstanding, Brinks’s close readings of these authors’ complex negotiations of intercultural contact and exchange do offer fresh perspectives on how they forged new pathways of self-articulation and asserted cultural difference. The discussion of Toru Dutt’s translations from Sanskrit in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1885) as a subtle yet powerful mode of gender critique is a particularly fine reading, as is the account of Naidu’s efforts to subsume the individuality of her only superficially saccharine lyric voice in the projection of a non-sectarian collective Indian sensibility meant to “serve as the basis of national belonging” (187). The chapter on Sorabji, perhaps the book’s most well-known and widely-researched subject, presents the most noticeably partial reading, one based only on her writings about children, or “sun-babies”; yet it too mounts an interesting and...