Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India

Chapter 2 Resistant Convergences: Anticolonial Feminist Nationalism

2 Resistant Convergences:Anticolonial Feminist Nationalism With the emergence of the struggle for Indian independance, various coalitions challenged the logic of both paternalist and fraternalist approaches to Britain’s rule in India. While the previous chapter explored several of the alliances that were crucial to the generation and maintenance of colonial rule, this chapter investigates some of the coalitions that contributed to its displacement. Key among these were nationalist and feminist groups that worked together to address questions of women’s legal and political subordination in a manner that both exposed the hollowness of British paternalist claims to “protect” Indian women, minority groups, and lower castes and rejected the compensatory rewards of fraternalist control over those groups. If the politics of compensatory domination consolidates power within and between groups in patterned ways, a key aspect of the fight against subordination of the whole group is a struggle to reject the ways that the most powerful members of the group are enticed from above to dominate others within the group. Indeed, an important corollary to the work of identifying and analyzing intragroup hierarchies is highlighting points at which different struggles come together to challenge such lines of power. I call a point at which movements link to contest inequitable power relations within a subordinated group a “resistant convergence” of struggles. There were a number of moments of resistant convergence in the struggle for Indian independence—moments, for example, when men joined with women to resist gender domination, when upper-caste Hindus joined with lowercaste Hindus and members of minority religious groups to resist caste and communal domination, and when Britons and other Westerners joined with Indians to resist colonial domination.1 38 decolonizing democracy Although many stories of resistant convergence could be told, this chapter focuses primarily on the relationship between the nationalist and women’s movements in their concerted efforts to enfranchise women and to enact legal reform. I argue that because colonial authorities contained dissent in part by pursuing policies and generating rhetoric that enhanced upper-caste Hindu men’s gender, communal, and caste dominance, both movements’ opposition to such inter- and intragroup dominance deeply undercut the legitimacy of the colonial state and destabilized conservative alliances crucial to British rule. I also look at points in the struggle for women’s legal and political emancipation where efforts to resist the consolidation of intragroup hierarchies faltered—for example, in efforts to reform Hindu personal law and to increase women’s voting rights and parliamentary representation. I suggest that this wavering had to do both with the Indian National Congress’s efforts to “become the state, even as it was contesting the state,”2 and with the gender, caste, and communal investments of dominant groups in the nationalist and feminist movements. While there were certainly limits to the alliance between nationalists and feminists in the struggle for Indian independence, these groups were also able to coalesce in significant ways to challenge the consolidation of dominance and privilege. This alliance not only was significant and efficacious at the time but suggests possibilities for coalitional democratic solidarity in our own era. As partial, thwarted, and fleeting as these moments of resistant convergence sometimes were, their legacy points to the possibility and efficacy of struggles that widen and deepen a democratic transformation of relations within and between groups. resistant convergence Early cultural nationalists in India firmly rejected the politics of colonial paternalism, in particular its disparagement of indigenous civilization and culture, its emphasis on civilizational tutelage and assimilation, and its critique of indigenous masculinist authority. Indeed, in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee suggests that a key moment in the struggle against British rule in India occurred in the late nineteenth century, when early nationalists silenced debate on “the woman question.” Chatterjee argues that the nationalist silence on the woman question is deceptive: It did not mean that the colonizers and the colonized had reached agreement on the “woman question” but reflected the nationalists’ refusal to make that issue a subject of debate with the British. Chatterjee suggests that resistant convergences 39 by shutting down debate over the position of Indian women, nationalists mounted an important challenge to imperial authority: Faced with domination in the material “outer” realm (comprising such worldly matters as statecraft and economic planning), nationalists asserted their superiority in the spiritual or “inner” realm. Chatterjee explains women’s symbolic association with this inner sphere: “Applying the inner/outer...