Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

2 Regenerating Feminism: Sarojini Naidu’s Eugenic Feminist Renaissance

65 Speaking in London in 1913, Indian nationalist and poet Sarojini Naidu challenges the notion that Indian women are hostages of tradition, patiently awaiting enlightenment from the West. Instead she traces a feminist genealogy to India’s distant past, insisting that “all these new ideas about the essential equality of man and woman and their cooperation in every sphere of life, are not at the least, new to us. Hundred years ago the foundation of Indian civilization was laid on this very basis.”1 Figuring gender equality as the “foundation of [an] Indian civilization” only recently compromised by colonial rule, Naidu rejects an imperial feminist stance that believes Indian women must be rescued from oppressive tradition by colonial modernity. Instead she recasts Indian women as full participants in “the world movement” of global feminism, even going so far as to assert Indian women as the original feminists.2 Feminism might be a “new idea” in the West but it is not, as she puts it, “new to us.” The manner in which the Indian woman became a contested site for imperialists and nationalists alike has long been noted by postcolonial critics, who interpret the nationalist project in India as either interminably postponing gender inequality in the quest for sovereignty or as subordinating the feminine within a masculinist nation and family . Naidu, however, forces us to rethink these postcolonial genealogies . She insists that national regeneration can only happen through a reproductive mechanism whereby India’s illustrious past will be reborn as its future, thereby complicating both a patriarchal national discourse and an imperial feminist one. Naidu’s claims are radical in that she understands women not only as the spiritual repositories of national culture but also as active agents and origins of a nationalist 2 REGENERATING FEMINISM Sarojini Naidu’s Eugenic Feminist Renaissance 66 regenerating feminism and feminist modernity. Her rhetoric thus mirrors a larger nationalist project that uses Indian women as signifiers of Indian nationalism’s particularity and mobilizes the universalizing discourse of global feminism to construct a feminist teleology in which elite Indian women are more advanced than their Western counterparts. By relying on eugenic reproduction as the mode of national regeneration, however, Naidu forwards an exclusive (high-caste and Hindu) view of which women are nationalist and feminist innovators. If Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents us with the paradigmatic example of U.S.-based eugenic feminism, then nationalist feminist poet Sarojini Naidu reveals much about its workings in the Indian context . The two women are roughly contemporaneous (although Gilman is nineteen years Naidu’s senior), and both partake in the powerful reproductive, evolutionary, and nationalist politics of their time. But whereas Gilman’s eugenic utopias are the fullest expressions of her progressivist feminist religion, Naidu mobilizes nostalgic versions of the past that are no less utopic for looking backward as well as forward. Just as Gilman’s utopias depend upon a purified genealogy, Naidu’s nostalgic renderings of the nation rely upon a sanitized (and, I suggest, eugenic) version of the past as a blueprint for a more perfect future. To be sure, Naidu’s politics were far more inclusive than Gilman’s, and in comparing the two women I am not suggesting they are the same. Both may have been nativists, but one needs only to think of the different valences of nativism in its U.S. and anticolonial contexts to discern the point at which Gilman’s and Naidu’s politics part company. Despite their obvious differences, however, I argue that both ground their politics in notions of eugenic reproduction as the means of ensuring nationalist and feminist futures. Naidu may not have been as prominent in the movements for birth control and eugenics in India as women such as Rameshwari Nehru and Rani Laxmibai Rajwade, but her high-profile deployment of reproductive rhetoric nonetheless has far-reaching implications for the relationship between nationalism and feminism in India. Naidu was, moreover, a key figure in the transnational feminist connections between the United States and India, as expressed in her embodiment of “Mother India” during the 1928–29 North American tour she undertook in response to Katherine Mayo’s muckraking polemic, Mother India. In this chapter I trace the ways Naidu’s feminism repeatedly returns to the positive eugenic rhetoric that characterized the eugenics movement in pre-independence India, regenerating feminism 67 and take up the implications of her North American travels in...