Bodies That Remember: Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Cosmopolitanism in South Asian Poetry

Epilogue: Visionary Activism: Religion, Metaphor, and Feminist History

202 Epilogue Visionary Activism: Religion, Metaphor, and Feminist History If in our traveling theory, we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities—migrant or metropolitan—then we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people is never simply horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of “doubleness” in writing, a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centered causal logic (Bhabha 1994, 202). We began this journey of women’s poetic expression in South Asia within defined parameters of language—poets writing in Hindi or Urdu—bounded by political geographies of place and space (in India or Pakistan). Through this comparative study of women’s poetry in Hindi and Urdu in the twentieth century, some possible theoretical suggestions toward a feminist theory of nationalism have emerged. Too often within interdisciplinary scholarship there is emphasis on the erasure of borders and boundaries. Furthermore, hybridizations of language and ideologies seem to gloss over too dismissively specific, historicized forms of feminist resistance. This study of women’s poetry reveals that, far from being erased, boundaries remain essential to the expression of feminist politics. Subjective experiences are contained within these literary, linguistic , and spatial boundaries even while a host of local/global, village/urban I borrow the phrase “visionary activism” from Caroline Casey’s radio program, which I listen to regularly on Pacifica Radio. Her show is titled “Visionary Activist,” and in it she uses language borrowed from astrology to awake and provoke compassionate social activism. See Casey (2008). E PI L OGU E | 203 vocabulary and aesthetics, experiences, and politics are allowed to permeate through its borders. Each poet makes a choice to write in either Hindi or Urdu, further illustrating that although the boundaries of language may be stretched to meet particular political ends, they do not dissolve altogether. Boundaries speak to linguistic and literary as well as spatial and political demarcations; they are both real and imagined. They have the power to legitimate and condemn people and institutions, liberate and imprison thoughts and ideas, protect and eradicate subjects and citizens. More than just for the sake of political expediency, boundaries exist to protect women (as much as they can confine and restrict them). This is especially true of moments of religious revitalizations, when radical critiques of the state apparatus cannot be voiced without detrimental consequences. In Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s book Feminism Without Borders, she argues that one of the greatest challenges to a global feminist solidarity is the “task of recognizing and undoing the ways in which we colonize and objectify our different histories and cultures, thus colluding with hegemonic processes of domination and rule” (Mohanty 2003, 125). Without a “just and ethical basis for such a dialogue,” she maintains that feminists are bound to reproduce those very structures of domination that feminism seeks to deconstruct (Mohanty 2003, 125).1 The only way to escape these methodological biases is to “become fluent in each other’s histories,” form “unlikely coalitions ,” and be precise about the power (biases, privileges, etc.) of one’s own location so that any ensuing dialogue will be ethical and critically engaged (Mohanty 2003, 125).2 Fluency in each other’s histories can be achieved more equitably by reaffirming those sites of struggles (literary, communal, and philosophical) that 1. See also two other essays in the same book, titled “Under Western Eyes” and “Cartographies of Struggle.” 2. Mohanty quotes both Angela Davis and M. Jacqui Alexander. Mohanty differentiates between two kinds of global sisterhood in her analysis of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s use of coalition “as the basis to talk about the cross-cultural commonality of struggles, identifying survival, rather than shared oppression, as the grounds for coalition” (117) as opposed to Robin Morgan’s global sisterhood paradigm, which stresses “transcendence rather than engagement [as] the model for future social change” (111). 204 | BODI E S T H AT R E M E M BE R inform the experiences for those women whose history feminists seek to reclaim. Coalitions with religious rhetorical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism , and Islam—the three traditions at stake in my project—interpolate new imaginative possibilities for transnational feminism. A sustained engagement with these religious traditions of India and Pakistan should contribute to diminishing the growing antagonism between the urban, cosmopolitan feminist and her parochial, sanctimonious step-sister. If we take up the task that Joan Scott insists we...