Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman" and the "Effeminate" Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (review)

Mrinalini Sinha's Colonial Masculinity, the latest in the "Studies in Imperialism" series from Manchester University Press, is an important contribution to the growing field of European and Asian gender studies. The book is "about the processes and practices through which two differently positioned elites, among the colonisers and the colonised, were constituted respectively as the 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in nineteenth-century India" and how the emerging dynamics between colonial and nationalist politics "is best captured in the logic of colonial masculinity" (p. 1). Sinha's major argument hinges on the constitutive nature of colonialism and the intersection, along multiple axes of conflict and confluence, between metropolitan and colonial histories. In some ways Sinha's approach is unique, yet in others, her work represents a different position on a continuum of recent scholarship, to which she gratefully acknowledges her debt.

In exploring the edifice of colonial dominance, Sinha demonstrates how constructions of "masculine" and "feminine" typologies became central to the political culture of nineteenth-century Britain and India. The primacy of gender in Sinha's analysis stems not simply from an extension of the feminist critique to patriarchal politics and anticolonial nationalisms, but also from her adoption of a "global social analytic" (p. 2) and "a particular mode of inquiry into the entire domain of social relations" (p. 182). It is the application of this approach, inspired primarily by the scholarship of Rosemary Hennessy, that in-forms her readings of major legislative debates that affected Britain and India during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The book traces the impact of colonial masculinity in four specific controversies: the "white mutiny" against the Ilbert Bill in 1883, the official government response to the Native Volunteer Movement in 1885, the recommendations of the Public Service Commission of 1886, and the Indian opposition to the Age of Consent Bill in 1891. It "reframes, from the perspective of the uneven and contradictory intersection of various areas of power, the dynamics between colonialism and nationalism, on the one hand, and between colonial Indian and metropolitan British society, on the other" (p. 1).

The argument of the book proceeds from two basic assumptions held by Sinha. The first is that the categories of colonizer and colonized were not fixed or self-evident but rather evolving. The second is that the contours of colonial masculinity were shaped in the context of an imperial social formation that included both Britain and India. The figures of the "manly Englishman" and the "effeminate Bengali babu," according to Sinha, "were produced by, and helped to shape, the shifts in the political economy of colonialism in the late nineteenth century: the changing imperatives in the strategies of colonial rule as well as the altered conditions for the indigenous elite's collaboration with colonial rule" (p. 3). The colonial cliché of the "effeminate Bengali babu" was thus tied to the entire ensemble of political, economic, and administrative imperatives that underpinned the strategies of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, the indig-enous elite's own investment in, and contestation of, colonial masculinity also reflected the changes in the condition of elite collaboration with colonial rule.

With amazing dexterity Sinha has managed to string together and to arrange, both chronologically and thematically, four chapters that could stand on their own as independent pieces of scholarship. Each chapter examines the implications of colonial masculinity and effeminacy in a separate colonial context. Sinha carefully reconstructs the "public" debate surrounding four major legislative enterprises in both the colony and the metropole through the lens of colonial masculinity, relying on such primary sources as newspapers, petitions, speeches, and meetings. She is thus able to demonstrate how the connections be-tween race and gender discursively spread and acquired new meanings in changed colonial contexts...