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What, in terms of gender, has the colonial Indian past to offer?1 Or to put it differently: does gender as an object of inquiry or a tool of analysis in India merely play out a European story with a bit of local color?2 These are some of the provocations for Third World histories posed by a historiographical project aimed at “provincializing Europe”: that is, putting Europe in its parochial place instead of allowing it to masquerade falsely as the universal. Yet to seek out “pure” or “autonomous” non-European alternatives, in the wake of the history of European imperialism, would clearly be disingenuous at best. The categories of European political thought, as Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, are both “indispensable” and, ultimately, also “inadequate” for writing Third World histories.3 How, then, might gender—arguably, a concept that arises out of a particular European context—contribute to the project of such a recasting of Eurocentric historiography? And, in turn, what might a study of the colonial Indian past add to the “usefulness” of gender as a tool of analysis? I will attempt to address these questions by way of locating the genealogy of the concept of liberal citizenship—and, indeed, of the language of individual rights—in the agonistic liberal universalism of early Indian feminism.4 My argument rests on the potential of the discipline of history to contribute both substantively and theoretically to the project of fully grasping the provinciality of Europe. It depends on working through and beyond the erroneous assumption that the history of Europe is exceptional—and exceptional, above all, in its supposed universality. The concept of the individual citizen as we know it—with its decidedly European provenance and its normative constitution as implicitly male— CHAPTER FOUR Historically Speaking Gender and Citizenship in Colonial India MRINALINI SINHA Historically Speaking | 81 might seem an unlikely candidate as the subject for a feminist project of provincializing Europe.5 By now, indeed, several generations of both feminist and postcolonial critiques have amply demonstrated the limitations of the putative universality of the liberal language of individual rights and of citizenship. Feminist scholars, for example, have long demonstrated the implicitly gendered construction that has underpinned the supposedly universal subject of political rights in liberal democracies.6 Even when women acquire formal political rights in the public domain, therefore, their political equality continues to be undermined by women’s subordination in the private sphere. Furthermore, as postcolonial critics have argued, the universal political subject of liberal thought was marked by specific cultural attributes that issued in their own “liberal strategies of exclusion.”7 By this logic, then, the withholding of political rights under colonialism seems not so much exceptional as intrinsic to the universalistic doctrines of liberalism. In the wake of such formidable critiques of the liberal conception of citizenship, any attempt to reclaim the concept via its historical translation in colonial India might seem misguided or foolhardy. The particular history of the liberal conception of civil rights in Europe, whose origins have been traced typically to the challenges to the arbitrary power of an absolutist state, have provided the basis for feminist critiques of universal individual citizenship.8 The concept of the civic “individual” in the emerging new European polities, as various scholars have argued, was underwritten both by an older civic republican tradition of the virtuous male citizen as well as by a newer fraternal politics based on sexual difference.9 By now almost too familiar, the argument as regards the implications of this new civic ideal in the constitution of gendered domains of the “public” and “private” has provided the grist for feminist critiques of its inherent—and not just accidental—exclusion of women.10 The feminist critique of the seeming gender-neutrality of the concept of liberal citizenship has proven enormously productive well beyond Europe as well as, in Alfred W. Crosby’s apt term for European settler-societies, the various “neo-Europes.”11 For example, scholars of South Asia have productively extended feminist critiques of the liberal concept of citizenship to the Indian context in order to illustrate how the generic Indian citizen was, indeed, implicitly constituted not only as male, but also as Hindu, upper-caste, and elite.12 Yet there was nothing necessary or inevitable about this outcome, nothing “inherent” to the gestation of the Indian state: to assume otherwise is to ignore the very particular histories of gender and of citizenship in the subcontinent. It is not, after all, merely a matter...

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