Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism 9781442678002

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OF PROPERTY AND PROPRIETY: THE ROLE OF GENDER AND CLASS IN IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM Edited by Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead

Unique in its approach, this collection of essays examines property relations, moral regulations pertaining to gender, and nationalism in India, Kurdistan, Ireland, and Finland. Structured around six case studies, the contributors combine an analysis of gender with a dialectical examination of class and patriarchy to reveal how these relations have become constructed in recent nationalist movements. Offering an alternative to post-colonial and post-structuralist formulations of gender and nationalism, the volume highlights the connections and convergences in matters of property, propriety, and gender among ideologically similar nationalist movements, and shows how ideological similarities and differences need to be understood prior to analysing the gender symbolism and patriarchal relations of nationalist histories. (Anthropological Horizons) HIMANI BANNERJI is a member of the Department of Sociology, York University. SHAHRZAD MOJAB is a member of the Department of Adult Education, Community Development, and Counselling Psychology, OISE/ University of Toronto. JUDITH WHITEHEAD is a member of the Department of Anthropology, University of Lethbridge, Alberta.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethnographic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in several other academic disciplines: women's studies, history, philosophy, psychology, political science, and sociology. See page 245 for a list of publications in the series.

Of Property and Propriety The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism EDITED BY

Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4380-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8192-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Of property and propriety : the role of gender and class in imperialism and nationalism (Anthropological horizons) ISBN 0-8020-4380-1 (bound)

ISBN 0-8020-8192-4 (pbk.)

1. Nationalism and feminism - History. 2. Sex roles - Political aspects. I. Bannerji, Himani. II. Mojab, Shahrzad. III. Whitehead, Judith. IV. Series. HQ1236.O32 2001

305.42'09

COO-933161-1

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memoriam, Shiv Verma, Indian revolutionary and comrade, with a promise to continue the struggle.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors xi

ix

Introduction Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab 3 Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies and the 'Resolution of the Women's Question' Himani Bannerji 34 Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in PreIndependence Ireland Dana Hearne 85 Conflicting Loyalties: Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan Shahrzad Mojab 116 Measuring Women's Value: Continuity and Change in the Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency, 1860-1947 Judith Whitehead 153 Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala Kaarina Kailo 182 Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Female Sexuality, Surveillance, and the State in Eighteenth-Century Maharastra Uma Chakravarti 223

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Acknowledgments

Himani Banner)!, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead join together in a gesture of acknowledgment to those who helped and sustained us in various ways through the process of producing this book and our own essays. Himani wishes to thank Dorothy Smith, Jasodhara Bagchi, Ratnabali Chatterji, and Sumit Sarkar for their interested reading and searching comments on her essay. Shahrzad thanks Amir Hassanpour for his input in sharpening her argument and being there for her through the process of putting the book together. Judith would like to thank Shiv Verma, deceased freedom fighter of India, for providing some of the inspiration for the genesis of this volume, Connie Donoghue for her early editorial work, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the research on which her chapter was based, and Sharit Bhowmik for comments on an early version of the introduction. The authors all thank Stephan Dobson and Michael Kuttner for their invaluable and sustained help in the editorial process, their critical insights, and for other forms of labour involved in the physical production of texts. Though these are the only people named in our acknowledgments, there were others, too many to name, with whom we had discussions regarding politics, theories, and details of this book. We wish to thank them as well and, of course, each other for an involved and interesting writing and editing process which was marked by solidarity, warmth, and forbearance.

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Contributors

Himani Bannerji is an associate professor of sociology at York University, Canada, whose current research interests are nationalism, humanism, gender, anti-racism, and multiculturalism from the perspective of historical sociology. Her latest publications are The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (2000), and Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (forthcoming). Uma Chakravarti is a professor at the Miranda House College for Women, Department of History, Delhi University. Professor Chakravarti is a historian who combines cultural studies with historical research to shady nationalism, gender, and religious fundamentalism. Her most recent publication is Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (1998). Dana Hearne is a professor who teaches women's studies and Irish studies at John Abbott College, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, and at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, Montreal. She has written a number of articles related to the Irish context on topics such as nationalism and feminism and feminism and militarism. She has also edited an important historical manuscript relating to the Land War in Ireland in the 1880s written by Anna Parnell called The Tale of the Great Sham. Currently she is working on a book form of a study she did on the development of Irish feminist thought from 1912-1920 and, in addition, is conducting research on the production of sexuality in Ireland from 1960 to the present.

xii

Contributors

Kaarina Kailo is professor of women's studies and multiculturalism at Oulu University, Finland. Her current areas of research cover circumpolar women's healing and mythological knowledge and traditions, with a particular focus on Finno-Ugric and indigenous women such as the Sami of Northern Europe. She has pioneered post-colonial and gender-sensitive research with the Sami scholar Elina Helander focused on Sami cultural practices in a book entitled No Beginning, No End - The Sami Speak Up (1998) and Ei alkua, ei loppua, .saamelaisten puheenvuoro (1999). Formerly acting principal and associate professor of women's studies at Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, Montreal, Kailo has spent 24 years studying and doing research out of her native Finland and has now returned home to teach and research Nordic perspectives on issues of gender, ethnicity, violence, ecofeminism, and traditional healing practices linked with the sauna and the sweatlodge. In 1997 she edited Healing Politics: Culture, Violence and Alternative Health (Simone de Beauvoir Institute Review) and has also published on Jungian, Freudian, and feminist views on multicultural transformative pedagogy. Shahrzad Mojab is assistant professor at the Department of Adult Education, Community Development, and Counselling Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She is the author of several articles on Kurdish women which have appeared in Canadian Women's Studies, Simone de Beauvoir Institute Bulletin, Convergence, and the Women in International Development publication series of Michigan State University. Shahrzad is one of the founding members of the International Kurdish Women's Studies Network and the editor of Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds. (2001). Judith Whitehead is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She is currently studying the impact of globalization and 'development' on gender relations of Bhil adivasis, or 'tribal peoples,' in western India, especially the impact of resettlement due to large dam projects on the Bhils of Gujarat and the relation between gender and landscape in wildlife sanctuaries in western India. Her perspectives on gender and the independence movement in South Asia were largely influenced by talks with Shiv Varma, the U.P. freedom fighter and poet, who was a comrade to Bhagat Singh in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the 1920s.

OF PROPERTY AND PROPRIETY: THE ROLE OF GENDER AND CLASS IN IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM

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Introduction JUDITH WHITEHEAD, HIMANIBANNERJI, AND SHAHRZAD MOJAB

The abundant literature on nationalism and gender prompts us to contemplate how national identities and dominant forms of moral regulation associated with national cultures have been mediated by gender identities.1 In our view, the relationships between gender, nationalism, and moral regulation have been inadequately analysed. Much of the existing literature on gender and nationalism has been written from a post-structural and post-colonial perspective in which all social relations are erased and nationalism is viewed solely as a cultural contest between Self and Other, colonizing and colonized cultures (Whitehead 1999:128-42). This literature has therefore failed to consider a matrix of underlying yet important social relationships that influenced the political character of anti-colonial nationalist movements. The lack of examination of the social relations underlying the various projects of decolonization has especially ignored relations of property and the differing ways in which diverse national independence movements imagined future rights of women and lower classes to equal subjecthood and property. Whether women and lower classes would be full property-owning citizens or the objects of continuing inequality in both economic and political realms was an important arena of ideological difference in the various movements for national independence examined in this volume. Hence, this book is intended as an implicit and often explicit - critique of post-structural and post-colonial approaches to Third World nationalism, most of which tend to erase all forms of social inequality except for an overarching divide between colonizer and colonized. These gaps in post-structural and post-colonial approaches are especially apparent in the way that culturally mediated

4 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab class and status relations have been ignored in the constitution of gender relations in the domestic sphere. Hence, the linkages between gender, class, and status, and the ways that gender and caste are linked in the Indian case, are a special focus of this volume. We define class as constituted by culturally specific relations of production, with relations of production defined as the culturally mediated ways that major forms of property are possessed and/or owned in specific societies. In relation to gender, then, important relations of production include those associated with land ownership and ownership of capital, as well as relations of inheritance, marriage, and divorce. In relation to gender, some have also argued that control of reproductive rights is an important relation of property in classdivided societies, since the ownership of the 'body' is an important axis of power differentiation between men and women. Hence, the first relationships to be considered when analysing the linkages between gender and nationalism are those which exist between the concept of the nation and relations of property. In what ways did the modern nation-state itself constitute the imagined community of citizens as property-possessing subjects? If all individuals were to become, at least formally, equal political citizens of emerging nations, then at least relations of property-ownership in persons, as in slavery and serfdom, would have to be made illegal. Indeed, some national independence movements envisaged even more radical forms of equality in property. A second set of relations which is important to unravel are the connections between underlying forms of property and culturally specific notions of propriety and respectability that are reflected in idealized gender identities and in the socialization of both men and women. Notions of propriety and respectability are, in turn, linked to the nationalist construction of ideal gender identities, often, but not always, constructed as a middle-class project. Close interrelationships between the social relations of property and gender, and the cultural forms of sexuality and nation, produce forms of moral regulation which connect the propriety of women and men to underlying property relations. Thus, gendered identities of both women and men become legally and ideologically articulated with the identities of individuals as a sense of entitlement to citizenship in the nation. Yet because gendered identities define and socialize individuals into unconscious moral senses of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and 'a feel for the game/ they often become tied to ideals concerning propriety. The notion that nationalist movements evoke an imaginary

Introduction

5

set of ideal male and female citizens has been much commented upon lately.2 Yet almost entirely absent from this discussion is an awareness of how these forms of gendered propriety have been symbolically mapped onto the social body as a series of class identities as well. Post-colonial, Post-structural Approaches and a Dialectical, Practical Critique The neglect of social relations in general and class relations in particular has given rise to a number of overgeneralized concepts in the recent literature on gender and nationalism. Since these over-generalizations arise from some of the premises associated with a post-colonial and post-structuralist framework, it is useful first to summarize that paradigm. Many post-colonial and post-structuralist writers, following Said, have interpreted the past four hundred years of European and Third World interaction through a basic cultural opposition between Self and Other, colonizer and colonized.3 The binary logic ushering in the postcolonial paradigm shift is condensed in Said's second and most influential definition of 'Orientalism' as a cultural phenomenon imposed by European colonialism on the East. It reads as follows: Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident'... A very large mass of writers... have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, social descriptions and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind/ destiny, etc. (Said 1978:12)

Subsequent post-colonial writers have applied this basic opposition, pertaining originally to literary representations of Asia by European writers, to a vast range of cultural, political, and historical themes and topics. It has also been extended from Asian and European relations to subsume the geographical range of literary, cultural, and political relations between Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, and Europe in the past four hundred years. As a measure of the success of this view, the scope of post-colonial history has expanded so greatly as to now include almost everyone, not only the peoples of formerly colonized nations, but also each and every diaspora which has existed throughout history.4 While this perspective has undoubtedly opened

6 Judith Whitehead, Himani Banner)!, and Shahrzad Mojab up new vistas of thought and perception, it has also closed off perceptions of other divisions and distinctions, that is, those of gender and class. Hence, colonized and ex-colonized peoples often appear to be constituted by the single identity of cultural colonialism rather than by the multiple identities which realistically frame their lives and choices. Identifying with anti-racist and anti-ethnocentric sentiments, feminist writers have been a major part of this shift in focus. This began with anti-racist literary and visual critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Rana Kabbani, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha,5 and with philosophical critics such as I.M. Young, Elizabeth Spelman, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.6 It has now extended throughout almost the entire range of the feminist academic canon in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. Such writers specifically criticized the representation of Third World women in feminist forums, written texts, and visual media. The post-colonial feminists mentioned above have analysed ways in which Third World women have been 'homogenized as a single unit' (Mohanty 1992), stereotyped as 'backward/ 'passive/ or 'traditional' (Spivak 1987), or sexualized as the 'available erotic other' for European male desires and projections in European and North American representations (for example, Kabbani 1986)7 Very often, post-colonial feminists located the origins of early feminist ethnocentrism in the latter's uncritical and unconscious adoption of evolutionary models of progress in 'women in development' paradigms. The lineages of this developmentalist thought, and its opposition between modernity and tradition, were then traced to the rhetoric of progress associated with the culture of colonialism. Subsequently, a number of writers have broadened the scope of origins to include all modernist discourses, since modernist science and philosophy themselves are seen as creating and reproducing pejorative distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional' societies.8 Yet the overriding theme of post-colonial studies, based on an opposition between Self and Other, through which subsequent cultural 'gender' differences are analysed, is premised on a purely linguistic opposition. Hence post-colonial critiques, even those purporting to be about 'real' history, remain confined to the realm of rhetorical and symbolic analyses. As social relations have been subsumed under linguistic signs, the academic focus of feminist studies has shifted from concerns with gender inequality and racism as these are culturally mediated to the current celebration of locally determined gender differences. An overriding respect for cultural relativism and sensitivity

Introduction 7 to cultural 'differences' - often exhibiting themselves as 'cultural nationalisms' - currently dominate many research agendas in gender studies. Since social relations have been subsumed under linguistic signs, it seems increasingly difficult for feminist academics to take a stand on even the most basic of political and economic questions. Such issues as domestic violence which is culturally mediated worldwide, increasing poverty, out-migration, female-headed households as a result of globalization, the revival of sail (widow-immolation) in parts of India, the unequal impact of structural adjustment policies on women, or the abrogation of women's civil liberties in Pakistan and Afghanistan are now rarely heard in academic forums. Each of the chapters in this volume takes up one, several, or many critical points in the shady of gender, colonialism, and nationalism in the past century. Each chapter directly or indirectly originates in points of criticism of post-colonial/post-structuralist perspectives that arose from the author's primary research. It seems timely therefore to interrogate just where this linguistic and cultural turn in women's and gender studies has deposited its current adherents. A historical investigation of the relationships between feminism, colonialism, and nationalism shows us that similar themes and debates echoed throughout the world in the past century. Each of the positions that we document in case studies from Ireland, India, Kurdistan, and Finland was mapped onto a specific tendency of nationalist thought. All were associated with anti-colonial struggles, but exhibited great diversity between the positions taken on gender and class issues, as well as on the question of strategies of decolonization. The direction and outcome of these debates may at least warn us against 'history repeating itself, first as tragedy, secondly as farce' (Marx 1869: 3). It will also help us recover the rich tapestry of the history of colonized women and contextualize it within the social, political, and economic relations which framed their lives and struggles. One of the main consequences of treating the entire history of colonialism and nationalism as a symbolic opposition between the West and the Rest is to erase any differences that might exist between various streams of national independence movements that have emerged from ex-colonies (Ahmed 1992). Hence, national-liberation movements, which are different from nationalist movements which lack class and gender consciousness, have been absorbed into an all-encompassing and imprecise concept of nationalism in general. This is due in part to the linguistic turn of post-colonial/post-structuralist studies which has absorbed the various practical and social histories of anti-

8 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab colonial movements into a solipsistic linguistic model, owing more to the binary oppositions of Saussere than to in-depth appreciations of the shifting currents of anti-colonial historiography. Paradoxically, reading the specific histories of anti-colonial movements through the symbolic lens of Self and Other has rendered all differences and notions of identity more or less the same (Ebert 1996). By assuming that all hegemonic power emanates from the West, such a reading has also ignored the pre-colonial gender and class hierarchies and practices of many colonized regions, especially those in Asia, from which this volume draws many of its examples. In Nationalisms and Sexualities (Parker 1992), diverse nationalist movements and moments have been reduced to their signifying generality in projecting respectable national identities as a gendered construct. In this text, the interconnections between bourgeois nationalism and the propriety of women as expressed in legal codes and literary texts have been teased out. However, the specific connections between various nationalist movements and the question of property and production relations as extended into class and imperialism have been ignored. In addition, various types of nationalist movements have been subsumed under the authors' overly general definition of nationalism^), while different gender projects are also conflated under a single, all-embracing rubric. Feminist Nationalisms, another recent volume (West 1997), equates not only all nationalist projects with each other, but also conflates the politics of feminism with the concept of gender. Since all social phenomena in the world arguably are gendered, those movements which promote a reinvention of traditionalist roles for women have been equated with those that promote egalitarian social change (previously termed 'feminist'). For example, Palestinian women's organizations have been lumped together with the South African Inkatha movement because both conceive of nationalism as a gendered project. These essentializing reductions obscure the specific political directions of various nationalist and identity movements, and divorce such movements from their wider social and economic contexts. Hence the differences between nationalist and national-liberation projects in relation to gender roles and class relations have been erased. Indeed, so have most of the specificities of economic, class, cultural, and gender phenomena of various Third World countries covered in this book (Sangari 1987). Both the concepts of nationalism and of feminism have expanded so greatly as to allow for the interpretation of almost any

Introduction

9

movement which expresses both cultural identity and gender difference as feminist and nationalist. In a recent, more sophisticated variation of post-colonial themes, women, the peasantry, and the working class have been envisioned as 'the other' of 'the other/ as fragments of the post-colonial nation. Partha Chatterjee, in Nationalism and Its Fragments, argues that 'the most powerful, as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on identity, but on difference with the modular forms of national society promulgated by the West.' Hence, 'the most powerful and historically significant project of all anti-colonial nationalisms becomes the act of fashioning a modern, national culture that is not Western/ a point which apparently has been missed in previous histories of independence movements. Partha Chatterjee's basic framework that structures the rest of his work is defined as Self versus Other, which is linked by analogy, a la Said, with the opposition between colonizer and colonized. All his major concepts, including 'derivative discourse/ 'indigenous community/ and 'fragments of the nation' derive from this binary opposition. Since this opposition is so overwhelming, the colonized subject is totally constituted by it, robbed of any agency, and held to be capable only of 'derivative discourses' of the West. Himani Bannerji's chapter, Tygmalian Nation/ critically situates Chatterjee's work, which can be considered a basic post-colonial corpus on gender and Third World nationalism, in current trends toward illiberal and authoritarian nationalisms, especially in India. She shows how this illiberal, culturally revivalist nationalism is caused by the current conjuncture of globalized capitalism and the dismantled power of national states in the world economic arena. As secular, liberal, or even socialist nationalisms, with their prior economic policies of 'import substitution/ have given way to 'free trade/ nationalist rhetoric increasingly has taken the form of defending 'traditional cultural politics/ which include anti-feminist and inegalitarian religious and moral injunctions. Bannerji begins from the premise that the question of nationalism and gender in formerly colonized countries must start from the recognition that there were three distinct types of nationalism that characterized the process of decolonization. Two of these currents did not critique existing notions and practices of private property. These forms, which she terms 'revivalist' or liberal nationalist/ had their major social bases in the petty bourgeoisie and the upper classes. The former

10 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab gave rise to illiberal authoritarian states which valorized past traditions, while the latter gave rise to liberal democracies. The third form of anti-colonial nationalism was national-liberation movements, which are now in disarray. Indeed, Bannerji uses this typology to critique the current erasure of social relations in post-colonial studies. She illustrates how the erasure of social relations in Partha Chatterjee's work on Third World nationalism functions to valorize a revivalist nationalism which is concerned only with reinventing past cultural traditions, no matter how patriarchal or inegalitarian they might be. Not only that, but such a narrow nationalism has become the model for all anticolonial nationalisms, most explicitly in Chatterjee's work, but also implicitly in others inspired by him. Thus, liberal-nationalist and national-liberation streams are viewed by Chatterjee as 'derivative' and 'Western-inspired'; for writers following him, they simply do not exist. For many of the same reasons, Bannerji criticizes Dipesh Chakrabarty's analysis of the women's question in Bengali colonialism, particularly his prioritizing of the colonial/anti-colonial division over all others. This theoretical move allows him to romanticize pre-colonial gender relations. This revisionist history, its mythical cast, its romanticization of pre-colonial caste, class, and gender relations, and the negative implications this possesses for women and lower castes and classes have been clearly spelled out in Bannerji's chapter. Another recent example of post-colonialism's overgeneralizations is found in Ashish Nandy's discussion of sati, or widow immolation, in Deorala, Rajasthan, India, in 1987. Nandy defends its recent revival as the expression of a 'marginal' and 'traditional' Rajput community resisting the encroachments of the urban middle class's 'colonizing' culture of modernity. Here, Nandy equates notions of indigenous tradition with upper-caste patriarchal practices, discounting the question of what type of politics such 'resistance' is promoting (Nandy 1996).9 By such logic, any patriarchal and/or feudal institution may be characterized as 'resistance' to a modernist culture, and all modernist cultures and their social reform projects become equated with colonialism. Uma Chakravarty's 'Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery' warns us against romanticizing all pre-colonial gender roles and identities in the way that Nandy, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty do. Her chapter outlines the consolidation of ritual, landed, and political power by Chitpavan Brahmans in the pre-colonial state of seventeenth-century Maharashtra (present-day western India). The privileging of Brahmans through laws and policies of the Peshwa state was based on the sup-

Introduction 11 pression of other castes, particularly Mahars. Subjugation of other castes was crucially dependent on valorizing Brahmanical norms regulating women's chastity and fidelity such that ultimately the degree to which the sexuality of women was controlled was the degree to which a caste group was regarded as maintaining purity of blood and hence its status. During this period, early marriages for girls were both enforced and monitored by the state, upper-caste adulterous women were imprisoned, some unchaste widows were sentenced to penal servitude and hard labour, and all upper-caste widows were required by both the state and the community to be tonsured. In documening these cases, Chakravarti also explicitly refutes post-colonial approaches to Indian kingship, such as those of Nicholas Dirks and Ronald Inden, which favour a textual, Brahmanical interpretation of kingship and ignore how pre-colonial rulers actually administered their territories. Because national-liberation movements, as compared to nationalist movements per se, have laid claims to supposedly Western concepts of justice, equality, and progress, they have frequently been ignored by recent post-structuralist/post-colonial writers. The latter view abstract notions of rationality, equity, and equality not as universal concepts, but as products (or 'metanarratives') of European 'enlightenment,' and as one of the root causes of colonialism. Here, not only nationalism but also Enlightenment 'culture' are often conceived in an overgeneralized and essentialist manner, as simply a reflection of an expansionary, European cultural identity. This is projected as the ultimate cause of colonialism, rather than the need for cheap raw materials and markets associated with an expansionary capitalism. Concepts such as 'modernity/ 'enlightenment,' 'reason/ and 'Europe' become conflated as a series of equated metaphors, such that each is often surreptitiously substituted for the other. Yet, as Jasodara Bagchi has recently pointed out, the 'Enlightenment period' often critically referred to in post-structuralist texts should really be divided into at least two eras. The first corresponded to the period immediately prior to and including the French Revolution, while the second encompassed early nineteenth-century reactions against it. According to Bagchi, the ethnic exclusiveness of Europe was not a product of the first period. Rather, the withdrawal from rationalism in romantic arguments of blood and kinship in the second period consolidated and reflected increasing European racism. This intellectual withdrawal from rationalism also constituted a conservative reac-

12 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab tion against the potentially transformative politics of the earlier period within Europe itself (Bagchi 1996: 4; Bannerji 1997: 222-42). In criticizing a post-structuralist and post-colonial approach to gender and nationalism, we are not denying that common-sense racism was connected to the colonizing project or that ethnocentric notions pervaded European and North American culture. We are stating that by itself, a colonial discourse perspective which ignores internal forms of class and gender stratification inside colonized societies is inadequate and often mystifying. To be sure, the political project of colonialism involved the attempt to spread the culture of liberal forms of European 'modernity' throughout much of the world, coupled hypocritically with the economics of dependent capitalism. Yet analyses of the diverse anti-colonial movements for national independence and the role of the women's question therein surely require a defter analytical framework than oversimplified notions of totalizing European cultural imperialism versus the Rest. Women in various colonized societies occupied 'multiple subject positions' which were structured by historical layers of gender inequality, class, and indigenous social stratification systems, as well as by colonialism. All these forms of inequality were structured around relations toward, and conceptions of, property and propriety. By unpacking the concept of nationalism-in-general, we hope in this volume to illuminate the multi-layered positioning and political agency of class, gender, and nationalism, as these concepts were deployed in relation to practices of property and propriety. We analyse the relations between gender, nationalism, and class in a dialectical way, focusing on the interaction between the general social and economic relations which characterized the encounters between imperialism, colonialism, and gender, and the specific histories of each anti-colonial movement. In seeking to understand the relation between gender and nationalism in a socially grounded manner, both the differences which separated women on either side of the colonial divide and the inequalities they shared as objects of class and patriarchal practices can be brought into view. Dialectical Similarities and Differences between 'Occident' and 'Orient' Local cultural differences have currently been emphasized by poststructuralist feminists as a methodological prerequisite to understanding diverse gender identities of different societies. Yet, while elevating

Introduction 13 linguistic 'difference' to the status of an overarching a priori principle, important aspects of European colonial history in Asia have been obscured. The first attribute to be erased is the similar social forms of gender, class, and status stratification systems that pervaded Europe and Asia in the pre-colonial period. Relations of property, inheritance, marriage, and divorce possessed many general convergences throughout these regions that dated from the respective feudal formations of each continent. These broad similarities later parted company with the development of capitalism in western Europe, with its construction of middle-class nuclear family forms which stressed the private nature of the domestic sphere (Zaretsky 1976), and juxtaposed this to the newly atomized public world of work and politics. It is because Europe and Asia shared many gender structures associated with patrilineal inheritance, class, and status that we have chosen our case studies from this wide region, but excluded Africa and North America, where in some cases gender and class hierarchies were introduced through colonial practices.10 In both Asia and Europe, men and women possessed different rights to property through inheritance and marriage laws. However, elite families attempted to preserve the class status of daughters, as well as sons, through a range of social practices and institutions. These included patrilineal inheritance patterns, the devolution of a portion of family property as dowry, hypergamy or isogamous marriages, control over marriage choices for both men and women, and the physical or symbolic seclusion of women in some form (Goody 1976). Symbolic values of honour and shame were linked to the moral regulation of sexuality through equating a family's reputation with the chastity of women in many Eurasian societies (Bannerji 1995). These patterns were codified in various written laws and oral traditions, a part of the inheritance of culture which became selectively reinvented in some forms of antiimperialist nationalisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, in the cases under consideration in this volume, there were pre-colonial class projects, in which practices of property and gender inequality - although not always conceived in terms of possessive individualism - were already normalized prior to colonial contact. Although all Eurasian societies possessed social structures that maintained class status for daughters as well as sons, the nature of such relationships differed for men and women.11 While a man's class relations were defined by relations to property, women's property relations were mediated by their sexual relationships to men who were

14 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab either propertied or propertyless. Distinctions between honourable mothers and wives, as opposed to concubines, mistresses, and prostitutes, designated both practical and symbolic relations of status and servitude. These relations possessed a specifically familial and sexual character which defined women's rights to wealth and inheritance. Thus women's rights to property throughout Eurasia were mediated by conscious and unconscious norms and practices of respectability and familial propriety. Judith Whitehead's 'Measuring Women's Value: Continuity and Change in the Moral Regulation of Prostitution in Madras, 1860-1947' outlines the similarities as well as differences between British and Indian elites in their social attitudes towards non-marital sexuality and prostitution in southern India. She uses the concept of habitus, which can be defined as unconscious bodily practices of gender and class differentiation inscribed through practice, to show how Brahmanical codes of honour and shame possessed similarities to the middle class's eugenicist notion of normalcy and deviance in relation to prostitution. In terms of body politics, if upper-caste women were the symbolic gatekeepers of a family's and caste's purity, they also became reconstituted as medically hygienic. This contrasted with the potentially diseaseridden and sexually deviant prostitute for emerging nationalist discourse and practice. Since this period was one of transition between colonial and post-colonial India, Whitehead also criticizes post-colonial perspectives on the Devadasi question, which idealized the institution of temple dedication by ignoring indigenous social norms and forms of property and propriety. There was a marginal yet auspicious social space accorded a minority of women prior to the eighteenth century who were trained in classical dance as temple servants married to deities. However, the immediate pre-colonial period, as well as the early and later colonial periods, witnessed a decline in their status, a loss of their property and autonomy, and their eventual criminalization. She charts the convergence between Victorian missionaries and administrators, liberal modernist nationalists, and social reformers during this period. Despite their other differences, the similarities in the attitudes of each group represented a reworking of underlying notions of honour and shame, such that the new ideal of feminine citizenship was defined by more strictly patrilineal inheritance patterns and strong maternalist imagery. Thus, the specific form of patriarchy in India was reconstituted in a new, modernist form while retaining its underlying structures based on honour and shame, property and propriety.

Introduction 15 At the level of legal practice, many colonial administrators, such as Maine and Lyall, recognized that broad similarities existed in European and Asian civil and domestic law for familial matters. However, at a rhetorical level, other writers emphasized the supposed traditionalism of Asia.12 Asian traditionalism was 'normalized' in Europe by stressing such 'different' patriarchal practices as foot-binding in North China, sati in India, veiling in the Middle East, and the seclusion of women in much of Asia. Such traditionalist imagery justified a continuing colonial presence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by symbolically pushing Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian societies 'backwards' to an evolutionary space somewhere between 'barbarism' and 'civilization.' The colonial project was therefore portrayed, in paternalistic fashion, as that of raising the offspring of colonialism to the level of civilization which Europe (and European women) had achieved. At various points in colonial history too, colonial administrators and nationalists debated various gender norms and familial practices. In these competing claims to cultural and moral superiority, differences between Asia and Europe were highlighted, while their similarities in matters of inheritance, marriage, divorce, and property were obscured.13 These debates, in fact, functioned to maintain the patriarchal relations of both subcontinents, as nationalist elites and colonial administrators focused public attention upon capturing the moral high ground in relation to the women's question. Yet it is important to differentiate between colonial rhetoric, on the one hand, and colonial practices, on the other. In terms of legal practice, both colonial administrators and elites from colonized countries shared many gender assumptions concerning the propriety of women. In addition, colonial legal practice often combined both European and indigenous forms of social control over sexuality and reproduction. In fact, European writers such as Schopenhauer and Herder possessed ideas on Asian womanhood remarkably similar to those of Asian revivalists such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Dayanand Saraswati. For all these writers, the woman's place was squarely in the domestic sphere. Yet these commonalities between conservative nineteenth-century writers on both continents have almost never been the object of investigation in post-colonial studies.14 Another aspect of colonialism erased through the linguistic bias of current post-colonial studies is its economic effects on gender relations, and the similarities and differences in the expansionary tendencies of

16 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab European capitalism throughout Asian regions. In the nineteenth century, colonialism was not a matter of rhetoric alone. Colonies existed as sites from which to buy handicrafts and primary materials cheaply, and later as sources of cheap labour power and markets to dispose of European products. These one-way economic functions, and the international division of labour which accompanied them, were spread through the mechanisms of merchant capital (Kay 1975). By the late nineteenth century, even after much of western Europe had industrialized, merchant capital remained the dominant form of economic activity in the colonies. It usually consisted of European export houses at the apex of a trade network, retaining monopolistic control over rural and international markets through a complex of protectionist policies, links with local power holders, and economic connections between monopoly houses, local traders, and pre-capitalist forms of production in the countryside. Because merchant capital does not transform the sphere of production, it was articulated with a range of pre-colonial and patriarchal forms of servitude, land tenures, and peasant production. Its predominance in many colonies ensured that different forms of pre-capitalist, patriarchal social relations, and modes of ruling would be maintained - albeit in a distorted form - far longer than in Europe or North America. In addition, the monopolistic tariff policies levied on colonial governments by mercantile houses inhibited industrialization in Asian colonies. These policies impoverished local production systems while maintaining and sometimes intensifying those pre-capitalist relations which could be harnessed to the logic of accumulation abroad (Ray and Ray 1973; Ray 1975). Such practices often intensified the patriarchal regulation of gender identities, especially within rural households. There, the unpaid labour of poorer women often became linked to the increased demands of mercantile accumulation, and was read back into the household as domestic work. Alongside the drain of wealth, there were general social-economic forms of ruling that characterized colonialism in Asia. These included the maintenance of feudal land tenures and social norms through indirect rule and the intensification of unfree labour and forms of servitude through strategic alliances with landed elites in the countryside. In fact, the 'racial' regulation of colonial bodies, the colonial opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the mind/body dualism of 'racialist' theories are connected to the super-exploitation of labour power in the colonies, which included practices such as slavery, indentured labour, and debt servitude. The denial of citizenship rights

Introduction 17 mediated these worlds of production and consciousness, both mirroring and producing the legal status of colonial peoples as unfree, noncontractual subjects. In the case of European presence in Asia, the historical break between pre-colonial and colonial forms of moral regulation was complex, with a continuation of numerous forms of pre-colonial stratification and patriarchal systems into the colonial and post-colonial periods. Subjects were constituted not solely by a colonial rupture, but also by social divisions such as gender, class, caste, and ethnicity that pre-dated colonial rule. There were also differences between Asian countries in terms of the periods during which they came under European economic and political influence. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore, which came under direct political control from the early eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, were both economically and politically tied to their metropolises through the medium of mercantile capitalism. However, the logic of imperialism changed during the first decades of the twentieth century. Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria were not directly conquered, but were economically controlled through the export of finance capital and a political pattern of dual mandates. China, too, was not directly conquered in toto. Rather, the creation of treaty ports controlled by European countries after the Opium Wars (Pye 1984) enabled the access of mercantile capitalism to the interior and the spread of Western education through missionary activity. Hence, the forms of colonial economic practices and relations of ruling varied throughout the Asian continent, but this variation was both allowed for and limited by the internal tendencies of mercantile capitalism itself. Drawing from her extensive scholarship of and experience in the Kurdish women's movement, Shahrzad Mojab argues that Kurdish nationalism has ultimately proved a barrier to the democratization of gender relations. Kurdish anti-colonial nationalism was and is perhaps unique in terms of the number of hegemonic states it has had to confront, including in the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. After World War I, the United States can be included in this list. Perhaps, due to the lack of any open political space, Kurdish nationalists had to confront religion, Turkish nationalism, and the Ottoman state simultaneously. Kurdish nationalist campaigns of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made many concessions to feudal tribalism, a historical legacy which even today poses tremendous problems for Kurdish women's organizations. Using

18 Judith Whitehead, Himani Banner)!, and Shahrzad Mojab primary sources that were often difficult to obtain, Mojab charts the often tortuous relations Kurdish nationalist groups have forged with women, tribals, and the peasantry in their homelands. Mojab also documents the emotional appeal that the purity of women and of the homeland possessed for Kurdish nationalists. When the Kurdish Democratic Party called for the education of women, it did so as a sacrifice to their 'brothers/ The unusual suppression of the Kurdish nationalist movement may partly account for the lack of a strong feminist-socialist voice. For example, even in 1992, when a proposal was submitted to the Kurdish parliament demanding the abolition of polygamy and equal rights of inheritance and divorce for women, it was overwhelmingly rejected. As Mojab writes, 'six years of the rule of the regional government of Kurdistan have confirmed the status of women as the property of the nation.' This has been shown in the imposition of the veil and sexual segregation, a new phenomenon in Kurdistan. As Mojab notes, the future will tell if Kurdish feminists will allow the nationalist movement to remain the 'watchdog of patriarchy/ Property and Nationalism as Social Practice Despite the different power bases of imperial and anti-colonial nationalisms, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois nationalist movements in both Europe and its colonies utilized the ideology of respectability and propriety to recast gender behaviour, family life, and sexual norms into a model of national citizenship (Mosse 1985; Parker et al. 1992). The 'modern' nation-state - both colonial and imperial - was imbued with underlying notions of private property, partly because one of the functions of this state was to regulate the terms and conditions of trade, and hence the form of commodity relations which dominated the public sphere (MacPherson 1971). The nation-state that arose with capitalism represented a break with the past by constituting the territory of the nation as a flat, even landscape, in which every square centimetre of space ideally was governed by laws of contract, measurement, and commodity-form, from the most peripheral to the most central (Anderson 1983). It differed from feudal, dynastic realms by virtue of the fact that these had porous boundaries which were legitimated through conquest and sexual politics while the new nation-states possessed rigid boundaries consisting of realms wherein market, property, and commodity exchanges could legally occur.

Introduction 19 If the 'imagined community' of nationhood empowered 'peoples' to claim home territories as their own property, then laws and notions of property were intimately embedded in these territorial claims.15 The concept of the nation included, then, a precise, bounded space and all the resources and people inside that territory. At the level of everyday thought, notions of possessive individualism linked claims of property to the imagined idea of a national territory. In addition, nationalism was related to commodified notions of territory through its claims to state power. The state specified the areas to be defended and the contract relations under which transfers of property might legally occur. In turn, notions of property were connected to discourses of gender through the legal/moral regulation of property, citizenship, marriage, the family, and inheritance. Whether women would acquire formal and/or real rights to property, inheritance, and citizenship was the subject of ongoing debates in many regions in the period of their decolonization. In addition, in many colonized countries such as India, modern technologies of power, such as statistical enumerations of the population by caste, tribe, religion, and occupation, were incorporated into regimes which were both autocratic and in negotiation with precapitalist relations of ruling in the countryside. Commodity relations associated with private property and contract had been reinforced, introduced, and/or modified in colonized territories from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries through the intensification of privatized land tenures, agricultural commercialization, and monetary taxation. In regions where laws of contract, property, and commercialization already existed, these were utilized by the colonial administration to construct a ruling apparatus which included both agrarian-feudal and capitalist forms of legal and moral regulation. National Liberation Movements, Liberal Anti-colonial Nationalisms, and Revivalist Nationalisms There were and are a number of nationalist responses to colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism throughout the colonized world. Movements for national independence differed both in terms of how they constructed the pre-colonial past and how they envisioned the shape of the future nation. Those anti-imperialist movements which incorporated demands of the peasantry, working classes, and women were quite different from those which sought to restore pre-colonial aristocracies or pre-colonial modes of moral regulation. When examin-

20 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab ing the history of independence movements from a historical perspective, an obvious division presents itself between bourgeois anticolonial nationalisms and national-liberation movements. In terms of property and propriety, national-liberation movements tried to incorporate critiques of relations of property, both inside the nation and in terms of economic ties between the colony and the metropole. Bourgeois anti-colonial nationalisms, however, accepted notions of private and/or feudal property, and envisioned their continuation in the postcolonial period. While drawing a major distinction between national-liberation movements and bourgeois anti-colonial nationalisms, one can also identify two distinct tendencies in the latter category. One maybe termed 'liberal nationalism/ in that it included so e concern with improving the position of women, while accepting the basic pre-supposition and ideals of a capitalist state: universal suffrage, private property, rule of contract law, and the goal of economic progress. The second may be termed 'revivalist nationalism/ in that it rejected the ideals of modernity and capitalism and reinvented pre-colonial (and often feudal) traditions in an attempt to assert the cultural value of authentic, 'indigenous' traditions. The latter form of nationalism also tended to reject any projects for improving the position of women that failed to fit an idealized and ideological construction of 'ancient' practices.16 Revivalist nationalist movements which reinvented pre-existing traditions and histories as part of a politics of self-assertion also tended to envision an essentially proper and honourable role for 'their' female citizens. In fact, in some revivalist streams, such as that of Bengali and Marathi revivalist nationalism in late-nineteenth-century India, the nation was itself conceived of as a mother. In fact, many liberal nationalist movements also accepted maternalist aspects of the revivalists' program, while rejecting its historical claims to mythological or religious certainty. The prevalence of motherhood imagery in cultural or revivalist nationalist movements throughout the world during this period bears evidence of this tendency. Women in such nationalist movements often were represented as icons of the nation. The ideal feminine figure, then, encapsulated key aesthetic values of linguistic and ethnic groups, signalling both desire and repression: desire as equated with the independence of the nation, and repression of the feminized colonial culture. Women thus tended to become equated with the nation's patrimony, as were children, architecture, music, science, and mythology. In this role, they often became glorified objects of

Introduction

21

nationalist movements, while also occupying roles as active subjects in anti-colonial movements. Yet because of the imagery of motherhood promoted during independence struggles, they could be, and often were, pushed back into the domestic sphere once independence was achieved. In relation to notions and practices of property, male nationalist elites in colonized countries occupied a dual role. As colonized subjects, they lacked claims to full citizenship, but as upper- and middleclass individuals, they were often men of wealth and property in their own societies. As propertied persons within a colonial society, they retained a great deal of formal power within the family. They were pushed from behind, as it were, by ongoing anti-landlord and tribal struggles in their home bases, while simultaneously confronting their working worlds as places of subservience and domination. Due to systemic discrimination in colonial administration, in many colonized societies even those men born into an aristocratic or semi-aristocratic status were limited to the lower rungs of the colonial administration.17 Women in anti-colonial nationalist movements also occupied subject positions that were multiply determined by notions and practices of gender, class, racism, and ethnicization. As potential citizens of emerging nations, they possessed plausible claims to political, legal, and social equality with men. As women in patriarchal and class-based societies, however, they were often legally defined as the property of husbands and fathers. In all such societies, the legal possession of a child was the inalienable right of the man, and the common custodial definition of woman was as a nurturer of children. Since nationalism was and is linked to territory and notions of property related to citizenship, women were often subsumed within nationalist movements through pre-existing notions of property and propriety. In addition, all the societies under consideration in this volume maintained relations of servitude for lower-class women and men. Due to different political responses to imperialism and colonialism, the pre-independence periods of many emerging countries were characterized not by a monolithic anti-colonial response, but by critical ferment and contesting positions in which nationalist identities were linked in both explicit and implicit ways to a variety of class, caste, and gender subjectivities. In terms of national-liberation movements, the claims to equality entailed in decolonization were extended to an internal critique of the emerging national state. How the nation would be constituted, who would be included and how, were integral questions

22 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab in these projects of nation-building. Unlike bourgeois nationalist movements, which adopted existing notions of property and propriety without question, national-liberation movements recognized multiple forms of inequality in colonized societies: between men and women, landlord and tenant, employer and worker, colonized and colonizer, upper and lower castes. Many national-liberation movements envisaged new social relations that transcended and transformed existing property relations and social identities in all these fields in the postcolonial period. Dana Hearne's 'Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland' charts the diversity of debates on the status of women from 1908 to 1922. This was not only a key period in the formation of Irish nationalist thought; it also marked the beginnings of Irish decolonization. Drawing mainly from primary sources, Hearne shows how the varieties of Irish feminist-nationalist thought, including a socialist-feminist-internationalist nationalism, were eclipsed during the latter part of this period by an increasingly conservative nationalism aligned with the Catholic Church. De Valera's 1937 Second Constitution, then, can be interpreted as the eclipse of socialist feminism and national-liberationist thought. Nationalism under De Valera became identified with the hegemony of a conservative form of national identity closely aligned with the Catholic Church. This nationalism was posited partly on the control of Irish women's sexuality as national citizens. A key plank in the ascendancy of this conservative nationalism was the abortion debate, which firmly placed the issue of control over women's sexuality within the confines of a patriarchal state. Yet it remained a dormant issue, one that has continued to haunt 'post-colonial' Irish politics to the present day. Conclusions and Future Debates As has been stressed, once post-colonial/post-structuralist writers located the entire source of hegemonic power in a European colonialism, any differences in nationalist responses to colonialism were levelled, and all anti-colonial statements were made to appear uniform by default (T. Sarkar 1993). Hence, the distinctions between nationalliberation, liberal-nationalist, and revivalist-nationalist philosophies have been suppressed in post-structuralist/post-colonial studies. Nationalist thinkers as diverse as Mao Zedong, Mohandas Gandhi, E.G. Tilak, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Kalpana Dutt, Sukarno, and

Introduction

23

Frantz Fanon have been conflated, despite the different views they possessed on issues other than that of cultural nationalism, and particularly in relation to class (Ahmed 1992: 204) and gender. The fact that Fanon, a national-liberationist writer par excellence, devoted a substantial portion of Wretched of the Earth to analysing 'the pitfalls of national consciousness/ warning of potential forms and processes of class repression inside the emerging Algerian state, has been neglected, perhaps tellingly, in recent post-colonial writing.18 In fact, Fanon himself noted the dangers inherent in generalizing his conclusions regarding colonial relationships to areas other than the Antilles, his natal homeland, and Algeria, his chosen country. Since I was born in the Antilles, my observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles - at least concerning the black man at home. Another book could be dedicated to explaining the differences that separate the Negro of the Antilles from the Negro of Africa (Fanon 1976:14).19

When national-liberationist thinkers such as Bhagat Singh of India declared at his 1929 conspiracy trial that 'independence for India did not mean just replacing a white sahib with a brown one, but also the ending of exploitation of man by man [sic]/ he saw this secular and socialist ideal as integral to nation-building per se and not just a product of European cultural hegemony. The fact that a Nehruvian concept of the Indian nation became dominant in 1947, or that Maoism was victorious over the Koumintang in 1949, or that Sukarno's vision was hegemonic in Indonesia in 1950, was not just a product of linguistic signifiers of identity and exclusion between colonial administrators, nationalist elites, and the rest of the population. Rather, it was a process of social struggle between competing political visions of how various national subjects would be related to one another within the nation-state. These internal debates and struggles over visions of the post-independence state characterized the national independence projects of these regions. Such political contestations and their lineages of power have shaped emerging nation-states in profound ways, continuing to influence gender relations in the post-colonial period. For example, feminist debates in post-colonial countries have often revolved around the extent to which national-liberation and socialist projects realized their potential in transforming family and domestic relations. Hence a major question for feminists in post-colonial countries has not been whether national liberation and/or independence

24 Judith Whitehead, Himani Banner)!, and Shahrzad Mojab was a desired goal, but the extent to which women's organizations should be linked to socialist and/or communist parties or whether autonomous women's organizations would be better vehicles for promoting equality and equity for women (Whitehead 1990). To a greater extent than in western Europe and North America, women's organizations in Asia, emerging from the contested history of anti-colonial movements, recognized multiple interlinkages between gender, class, and national liberation.20 A recognition of the role that social practice plays in shaping and constructing nationalisms has profound implications for understanding the logic of cultural nationalism. Even consciousness of identity and difference is not the product of timeless metaphoric oppositions translated endlessly into one another. It is a profoundly social, practical affair: Awareness of identity is often formed through similarly positioned subjects communicating with one another in some form (Anderson 1983), and, through this social interaction, coming to awareness that there is shared oppression and/or exploitation. Oppression, whether it be through class, gender, racialization, casteism, or ethnicization, is therefore a social category and not merely a linguistic binary opposition. We hope that this volume will initiate a debate concerning the different forms that identity and nationalist politics may take in the present and immediate future. We believe that a re-territorialization of identity and history is necessary for groups of women who have been previously marginalized by or negatively stereotyped in dominant historical and social scientific paradigms. The way women of colonized nations were unnamed or misnamed is not the same way elite European males remained unnamed in humanist texts. Relying on their centrality in actual relations of ruling, their status as universal representatives of all humans projected in their appropriation of the term 'mankind,' elite Euro-American male writers were not aware that their deployment of a singular 'human' identity was a device of control, erasing their own particularities and conditions of knowledge production (Bannerji 1995: 20). Hence, the renaming of identities in the terms 'black,' 'women of colour,' or 'women of the colonies' has recast history from the standpoint of the margins, remapping what had previously been excluded and/or stereotypically represented. However, the history of the role played by gender and class in colonialism and nationalism shows us that simply renaming identities while accepting notions of property and propriety has not necessarily

Introduction

25

led to more egalitarian gender outcomes. The history of policies for women in various anti-colonial-nationalist and national-liberation movements illustrates that gender and national identities can be connected in many different ways with nationalist and other political movements following the achievement of independence. These differences depend on the specific political articulation between nationalism and other political projects, such as feminism, liberalism, and socialism. Hence, the consciousness of national identities was and is, by definition, linked in crucial ways to civil society and the state. In addition, the character of the state and its relation to civil society also influenced the position of women and gender relations within national or ethnic communities. Hence, gender, 'difference/ 'nation/ and family are not essentialist entities, but coexist as social practices in a continuous process of interaction and potential transformation. Just as three different streams of nationalist anti-colonial movements can be identified, so too are there a number of streams of current cultural nationalisms. Within a liberal-democratic framework, this politics of identity of minority groups can lead to the recognition of 'formal' rights of equality, centred now on the community, rather than on the individual. In this type of polity, where state and civil society are ideologically separated, minority group nationalism can lead to interestgroup pluralism and not to the reorganization of gender and 'race' relations inside each 'cultural' community. In addition, the recasting of political/cultural relations between communities cannot proceed much beyond formal equality.21 However, where nationalist or identity movements also recognize the influence of state and property on gender, class, and identity, a more liberatory project for women and lower classes can emerge. From this perspective, which might be termed 'socialist-feminist identity politics/ the transformation of gender identities becomes as important as the recognition of gendered cultural identities. By definition, this transformative process requires a concern with the relations between state and civil society just as much as it requires a concern for the recognition of cultural identities per se. Within a liberal-pluralist framework, where formerly marginalized populations remain numerically and/or economically subordinate, a defensive collective identity has sometimes been constructed to resist practices of 'ethnicization' or 'racism/ Minority communities refused an equal identity within the liberal nation-state, having to find some other base on which to stand, may impose patriarchal controls within their own community as a defence against external threats. They then

26 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab often demand community-based rights from within a liberal state framework. Although they share much in common with the history of revivalist nationalisms within an anti-colonial struggle, such movements nonetheless are more limited in scope due to their minority character. On the negative side of nationalism, revivalist forms of cultural nationalism have also been known to lead to forms of fascism. However, identity and nationalist politics have only eventuated in fascism given certain social and political conditions. First, fascism implied the subsumption of ideological notions of difference within a romantic idealization of pre-capitalist, patriarchal ethnic communities and a conjoining of ethnicity and culture in a racialized way. It also required the existence of a majoritarian, revivalist cultural nationalism. Finally, the ascendance of fascism depended on an authoritarian state, the development of corporatist institutions subsuming labour and business, and a close relationship between the state and monopoly capital. The different historical outcomes of national and identity movements show us the importance of distinguishing analytically between their ideological articulations in relation to property and propriety, gender, and class. An analysis of various anti-colonial, nationalist movements in Eurasia from a critical standpoint of women and the lower classes must take account of the multiple layers of class, patriarchy, and colonialism which structured daily lives and the horizons of possible responses. Women's subject positions are 'the concentration of multiple determinations/ as are those of the colonizing 'man,' although the latter has had his subject position constructed in official histories as the invisible and universal observer and actor. Kaarina Kailo's chapter, 'Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala/ highlights the similarities among bourgeois nationalisms with regard to the question of patriarchy between Asian and European regions. It shows how the construction of the major Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, depended on a series of cultural exclusions of others. Unlike the homogenized mainstream version of the Kalevala, these variants were rooted in the lives and livelihoods of other ways of life. Kailo focuses on the Sami in particular, a society in which 'women possessed equal rights to property, inheritance and economic activities based on reindeer hunting/ As a result of the consolidation of bourgeois Finnish and Norwegian nationalism in the early twentieth century, 'Sami women have lost many equality-based rights/ a process mirrored in the patriarchal and exclusionist tendencies of the construe-

Introduction 27 tion of the Kalevala itself. Kailo's paper, the most explicitly cultural of the book's chapters, nevertheless connects the homogenizing tendencies of national myth-making to the middle-class, patriarchal, and urban character of Finnish nationalism. To pay attention to these multiple-subject positions brings the lives of women in both colonized and colonizing locations into the same universe of discourse without reducing the specific geopolitical positions of, and hence the different power relations between, them. In addition, by recognizing that multiple social relations of gender, class, and 'race' enter into the constitution of anti-colonial-nationalist movements, we hope that national-liberation movements which incorporate emancipatory ideals, at least, for the lower classes and women will be restored to their rightful claim to historical relevance. If the recognition of cultural identity is considered dialectically and historically, then we can see that symbolic constructs of the 'nation' and 'identity' are continually being formed and re-formed through their articulation with changing social practices of property, propriety, gender, and class (Mouffe 1992). We hope that the recognition of different political projects within the politics of identity might clarify significant future lines of research. On a more practical level, we also wish that socialist, feminist, and democratic trends within identity movements, which recognize the influence of multiple social relations upon the political trajectories of cultural nationalism, will be strengthened in the future. Notes 1 Some of this recent literature includes A. McLintock (1995), V. Moghadam, ed. (1994), A. Parker et al., eds. (1992), L. West, ed. (1997). 2 The notable early work in this regard is G. Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality (1985). 3 This is not to ignore the fact that subsequent writers have provided 'nuances' and 'shadings' to Said's binary opposition, e.g., H. Babha's notion of 'hybridity' (Babha 1986; 1990). 4 A point made by K. Sangari (1987). 5 See G. Spivak (1987); R. Kabbani (1986: Ch. 1-3); T.T. Minh-Ha (1989; 1991). 6 See I.M. Young (1990); E. Spelman (1988); C. Mohanty (1992). 7 There is now a body of literature on this topic. One of the earliest and clearest exponents of the relation between cultural relations of power and stereotypes of 'available and lascivious' other women is found in R. Kabbani (1986: Ch. 1-3).

28 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab 8 An example of this conflation of concepts is found in the work of some Subaltern Histories volumes; see R. Guha, ed. (1985-1998). 9 In fact, subsequent judicial investigations showed that Roop Kanwar, whom Nandy ingeniously refers to simply as Roop, was drugged and coerced into her supposedly voluntary immolation. For an in-depth discussion of this case and of the history of political mobilization by the Bhartiya Janata Party which lead to increases in sati in the 1980s, see K. Sangari and S. Vaid (1996: 240-99). Vaid and Sangari's account also counters the factual errors in Nandy's interpretation, e.g., his claim that feminist organizations in South Asia were unconcerned with issues of violence against women and sati until a traditional, rural community started practising them. 10 In carving out Eurasia as a social block, we are following in the work of various authors who have focused on the relation between property and gender as important to understanding the historical development of gender inequality in this region. Most recently, the work of Jack Goody in anthropology, who analyses the similarities in Eurasian forms of class, status, inheritance, and dowry, has been an inspiration. See J. Goody (1976); J. Goody and S. Tambiah (1973); J. Goody (1990). F. Engels's early work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) also makes similar connections, as does G. Lerner's (1986) feminist refinement of his position. 11 See J. Goody (1976); L. Davidoff and C. Hall (1987). 12 Indeed, this traditionalism often was consciously maintained through colonial policies of indirect rule. 13 An apt example of how colonial and nationalist contestations obscured gender convergences between Asia and Europe is to be found in the muchdiscussed 'age of consent' debate in India, as well as the debates on the abolition of sati (see Mani 1990). The age of consent debate in colonial India in 1891 and the age of marriage debate in 1929 also witnessed similar kinds of contestation (see Sarkar 1993; Whitehead 1996a; 1996b). 14 An exception is the early work by R. Schwab (1959); see also F. Conlon (1993). 15 This introduction is too brief to discuss the large literature on whether private property existed in pre-colonial Asia, and to address the critiques of the concept of Asiatic mode of production (Marx), or patrimonial bureaucracies of the Middle East (Weber). However, it is clear that forms of capitalism had begun to emerge in the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Southeast Asia by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is also important to note that Marx was highly influenced in the development of his concept of the 'Asiatic mode of production' and his views on the lack of private property in India - which were wrong - by his reading of James Mill's

Introduction 29 History of British India (1817). James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, was also the Chief Examiner of India House, and the object of his book was to promote British rule in India. 16 For an excellent discussion of this reinvented construction of the 'ancient' ideal of womanhood, see U. Chakravarti (1990). 17 Indeed, this was the issue surrounding the Ilbert Bill controversy in India in 1881, when the Calcutta English community reacted strongly against attempts to allow Indian-born and British-trained barristers to become judges empowered to try English defendants. The dual role of Indian-born male elites, being both oppressor and oppressed, was starkly revealed in this controversy, which some historians have credited with sparking the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. 18 This neglect is perhaps a luxury that only anti-racist discourses inside North America can afford, where the equation between Fanon, Gandhi, Malcolm X, and C.L.R. James carries much less political weight and repercussion than it does inside the post-colonial country. 19 We owe this insight to Stephan Dobson, our copy editor. 20 Autonomous women's organizations have been in a better tactical position to foreground women's concerns, but they suffer from a greater lack of society-wide organizational support and hence are more easily suppressed. Women's organizations linked to left parties often found their feminist issues neglected while nationalist or class issues took precedence, but nevertheless appear to be longer-lasting, especially when faced with state repression. 21 For an example of a discussion of legal pluralism and community identity, see I.M. Young (1991).

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30 Judith Whitehead, Himani Banner]!, and Shahrzad Mojab Bannerji, Himani. 1995a. Thinking Through: Marxism, Feminism, Anti-Racism. Toronto: Women's Press. - 1995b. 'Attired in Virtue: The Discourse of Shame (lajja) and Clothing of the Bhadramahila in Colonial Bengal.' In Bharati Ray, ed., From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women. Delhi: Oxford University Press. - 1997. 'Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminism and Humanism: A Spectrum of Reading.' In E.J. Yeo, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, 222-42. London: Rivers Oram. Basu, Amrita. 1992. Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women's Activism in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakravarti, Uma. 1990. 'Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?' In K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, 27-87. New Delhi: Kali. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed. - 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conlon, F. 1993. 'Deep Orientalism.' In C. Breckenridge and P. Van Der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Croll, Elisabeth. 1978. Feminism and Socialism in China. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. London: Routledge. Ebert, Teresa. 1996. Ludic Feminism: Postmodernism, Desire and Labour in Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Engels, Friedrich. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove. - 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove. Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - 1990. The Oriental, The Ancient and the Primitive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack, and Stanley Tambiah. 1973. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guha, Ranajit, ed. 1985-1998. Subaltern Histories. Vols. 3-9. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Kay Ann. 1983. Women, The Family and Peasant Revolution in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction

31

Kabbani, Rana. 1986. Europe's Myths of the Orient. London: Virago. Kay, Geoffrey. 1975. Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis. London: Macmillan. Kruks, Sonia, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn Young, eds. 1989. Promissory Notes: Women and the Transition to Socialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macpherson, C.B. 1971. Theories of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mani, Lata. 1990. 'Contested Terrains: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.' In K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in India's Colonial History, 88-126. New Delhi: Kali. Marx, Karl. 1869. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte. New York: International, 1963. McLintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mies, Maria. 1978. The Lacemakers ofNarsapur. London: Zed. Mill, James. 1817. History of British India. New York: Chelsea House, 1968. Minh-ha, Trin T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red. London: Routledge. Moghadam, Valentine, ed. 1994a. Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. - 1994b. Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991. 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses .' In C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 51-80. Bloomington: Indian University Press. Mosse, George. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1992. 'Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics.' In J. Butler and J. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political, 369-84. New York: Routledge. Nandy, Ashis. 1996. The Savage Freud and Other Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ortner, Sherry. 1995. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. New York: State University of New York Press. Parker, Andrew, M. Sommer, A. Russo, and P. Yaegar, eds. 1992. Nationalisms and Sexualities. London: Routledge. Pye, Lucian. 1984. China: An Introduction. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

32 Judith Whitehead, Himani Bannerji, and Shahrzad Mojab Randall, Margaret. 1974. 'Cuban Women Now: Afterword 1974.' Toronto: Women's Press. - 1981. Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies ofNicaraguan Women in Struggle. Vancouver: New Star. Ray, Rajat. 1975. 'Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal.' Modern Asian Studies 9 (1): 81-102. Ray, Rajat, and Ratna Ray. 1973. The Dynamics of Continuity in Rural Bengal under the British Imperium: A Study of Quasi-Stable Equilibrium in Underdeveloped Societies.' Indian Economic and Social History Review 10 (2): 103-28. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Penguin. Sangari, Kumkum. 1987. The Politics of the Possible.' Cultural Critique 7: 14-36. Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid. 1996. 'Institution, Beliefs, and Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan.' In K. Jayawardene and M. de Alwis, eds., Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia, 240-96. London: Zed. Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, Tanika. 1993. 'Rhetoric against Age of Consent and Death of a ChildBride.' Economic and Political Weekly of India, 4 Sept. (WS): 1869-80. Schwab, Raymond. 1959. The Oriental Renaissance. Paris: Fayard. Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly' Englishman and the 'Effeminate' Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. The Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. The Postcolonial Critic. Ed. S. Harayan. London: Routledge. - 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge. West, Lois, ed. 1997. Feminist Nationalism. London: Routledge. Whitehead, Judy. 1990. Text and Context: Feminist Organization in South Asia.' In J. Lele, ed., Boeings and Bullock Carts: State and Society in South Asia. Delhi: Chanakya. - 1996a. 'Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule: The Ilbert Bill, Revivalism and Age of Consent in North India.' Sociological Bulletin 6 (1): 29-61. - 1996b. 'Reinventing the Motherhood Archetype: Social Reform, Nationalism and the Age of Marriage (Sarda) Act of 1929.' In P. Uberoi, The State, Sexuality and Social Reform in India. Delhi and Newberry Park: Sage. - 1999. 'Fragmenting the Nation: Erasing the Social in Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Imaginary.' In R. Tremblay, C. Farber, S. Inglis, J. Lele, and O.P.

Introduction 33 Dwiwedi, eds., Interfacing Nations: Indo/Pakistani/Canadian Relations Fifty Years after Independence, 128-42. New Delhi: B.R. Publishing. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zaretsky, Eli. 1976. Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. New York: Harper and Row.

Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies and the 'Resolution of the Women's Question7 HIMANIBANNERJI Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1972: 437)

It is in consciousness, let us remember, that people make sense of the world in which they live; it is in consciousness again that they make their judgements on how to change it. Partha Chatterjee, 'Caste and Subaltern Consciousness' (1989b: 178)

Introduction Any discussion of nationalism in countries that were colonized by European powers must begin with the problem of decolonization and how it has been politically addressed.1 In this regard we may speak broadly of three major ways in which the politics of decolonization has been undertaken, all of which have an element of nationalism, insofar as they seek to achieve a sovereign state within some social and cultural definition of a nation. But in spite of these common elements, we can still speak of multiple nationalisms, as does Aijaz Ahmad in his

Pygmalion Nation 35 Lineages of the Present. Refusing a single ideological articulation for all nationalisms, or their outright rejection, Ahmad reminds us of nationalism's 'diverse histories' and its 'pluralities' in terms of 'typologies.'2 Speaking 'typologically' then, I would like to point out that of these three types of nationalism, two consist of anti-colonial ideological articulations and politics which accept private property and class society both nationally and internationally, while differing in polity towards cultural/social forms of power and moral regulations that emanate from such proprietal social organizations. Thus practices and ideologies of caste, patriarchy, or gender and 'race' are viewed differently by them, and this difference gives rise to governments which are either liberal democracies or illiberal authoritarian national states. The third type of nationalism, whose primary class base, unlike the first two, extends beyond the petty bourgeoisie into the working class and/ or the peasantry, is anti-imperialist in the marxist sense. It views colonialism as an integral aspect of international, specifically European, capitalism. Its reading of 'the nation' is marked by a critique of private property, of capital and class. Its politics, therefore, is based on a more complex social analysis and ideological formulation than demanded by a univocal anti-colonialism. We may call this type of nationalism 'national liberation.'3 Beginning with a premise of socio-economic equality, it can logically include struggles against patriarchy/gender, caste, 'race/ and other sociocultural inequalities. These different national projects imply different ideological and epistemological premises which entail their own particular organizational processes and political consequences. Currently, as national liberation projects are in a state of disarray, and even liberal democracies of the Third World are being dismantled, an illiberal or authoritarian nationalism is increasingly gaining ground.4 As noted above, its polity obliterates liberal democratic provisions for constitutionally enshrined formal equality manifested in individual rights as entailed by secular citizenship. It accepts the economic dictates of local and global capitalism, while seeking to dismantle existing left and secular progressive organizations. It speaks in the name of a singular national tradition or culture, and of an authentic national identity based on this cultural essence. By reducing national culture to religion and fixed traditions it naturalizes inegalitarian or hierarchical socio-moral injunctions.5 Thus this illiberal nationalism manipulates the project of anti-colonialism by promising an identification with a pre- or an anti-modernist and antihumanist national identity which confuses simple inversions of mod-

36 Himani Bannerji ernist cultural forms with anti-colonialism. This gives rise to a rightwing cultural nationalism which is constructed with a content of reworked colonial discourse, including orientalism.6 The epistemology of this cultural nationalism relies upon anti-marxist, anti-democratic, and generally anti-egalitarian (including anti-feminist) conceptual frameworks. Sumit Sarkar, in Writing Social History (1997b), while discussing the dependence of current historiography on non-materialist cultural theories and its political implications, remarks on this phenomenon in the Indian context. Commenting on the historiography of the subaltern studies group, Sarkar notices in their writings a theoretically engineered separation between class and culture, history and social organization, leading to a cultural overdetermination. This amounts to dehistoricization or a mythicization of history.7 Sarkar's observations on subaltern studies are coherent with critics who have spoken to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in social sciences and history. They have noted the use of interpretive philosophies, anti-materialist cultural theories, and relativist cultural anthropology in accomplishing the task of dehistoricization and culturalization of politics.8 This theoretical practice has reduced power to a discursive phenomenon, and anti-colonialism to cultural nationalism. An exploration of post-colonial studies provides us with examples of this type of theorization.9 Sarkar refers to this when he critiques the theoretical 'stimulation' provided by Edward Said and Michel Foucault in South Asian historiography (1997b: 4). He points to the swing from economic reductionism to cultural reductionism through a process that starts with a critique. Speaking of the historiography of subaltern studies, he says: What had started as an understandable dissatisfaction with the economistic reductionism of much 'official' marxism is now contributing to another kind of narrowing of horizons, one that conflates colonial exploitation with western cultural domination. Colonial discourse analysis abstracts itself, except in the most general terms, from histories of production and social relationships. A 'culturalism' now further attenuated into readings of isolable texts has become, after the presumed demise of marxism, extremely nervous of all 'material' histories: the spectre of economic reductionism looms everywhere. (Sarkar 1997a: 4)

What Sarkar says of subaltern studies' theoretical manoeuvres is consistent with the simple cultural critique of post-colonial studies.

Pygmalion Nation 37 From this epistemological position, social organization, relations, and institutions are either erased or deeply subordinated, while the culture of the colonized is periodized as pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial in a parody of history.10 This cultural interpretation relies on the paradigm of tradition and modernity, attributing tradition or premodernity as a cultural characteristic to the colonized. Anti-colonial politics, therefore, becomes one of recovery of the premodern or the traditional. It is the necessary step for 'imagining' the nation. In the case of India, this premodern traditional culture translates into one of brahmanical hinduism, thus presenting us with the proprieties implied in a patriarchal, casteist national identity securely resting on practices of private property and class. The curious thing about subaltern studies is that this is done in the guise of radical politics by implanting the Gramscian language of subalternity within the nationalist project of hindu Bengali middle classes.11 My critique of Chatter] ee will focus on his culturalist presentation of both colonial hegemony and the counter-hegemonic task of nationalism. I will concentrate primarily on his formulation of culture or moral propriety as divorced from relations of property by focusing on certain topics which are persistently present in his theorization. This should enable us to get a clearer view of his (and the subaltern studies group's) version of subalternity and its politics. As such I will explore the topics of subjectivity and agency of Bengali hindu middle-class women as reflected in Chatterjee's mirror of nineteenth-century Bengali nationalist thought.12 Chatterjee (1990) has phrased these themes in an essay in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Sangari and Vaid 1990) in terms of what he has called 'the nationalist resolution of the women's question (the title of his essay). This so-called women's question, current in the language of various types of male social reformers, including the reforming colonial state in search of legitimacy and hegemony, refers to the socio-economic and cultural status of women and the issue of substantiveness of women's legal and political personhood. Even though this question signalled different understandings of social mores and politics coming from different standpoints, Chatterjee makes no distinction between colonial and indigenous social reformers. The notion of 'resolution' refers, according to Chatterjee, to a successful solution found by the nationalist thinkers of his choice, thereafter rendering the social content relating to 'the question' unimportant. That Chatterjee introduces the question of women in a study of

38 Himani Bannerji hegemony is quite pertinent. Students of social reform, culture, and nationalism in Bengal have long known of its importance.13 Its status in Chatterjee's work becomes an entry point for a general assessment of the social and political theorization of subaltern studies. This issue of women, of cultural projections or moral constructions and regulations pertaining to them, is just as important for assessing these present-day theorists of nationalism and decolonization as it is for understanding the character of social and nationalist thought of the nineteenth-century Bengali male elite. Chatterjee needs the help of a constellation of topics associated with women - such as family, motherhood, conjugality, and sexuality - to provide a theory of hegemony regarding Bengali/Indian nationalism. Thus his interest in women is not in any way incidental and descriptive, but rather provides a vehicle for developing a theory of hegemony, and for assessing the successes and failures of Bengali/Indian nationalist thought. His assumptions regarding this matter are shared by the theoretical collective to which he belongs.14 My proposed mode of entry into the historiography of subaltern studies is rather uncommon. Though various criticisms of the group's epistemological and political positions have appeared over time (for example, Alam 1983; Sumit Sarkar 1997c), the importance of 'the women's question' for a fuller assessment of their historiography and politics has not been sufficiently emphasized. Other than an essay by Kamala Viswesaran (1996), itself a critical extension of the subaltern theoretical framework, no sustained exploration of their general framework has been made through their treatment of these themes. The treatment of women and patriarchy has featured also in some episodic critical rejoinders by Roslin O'Hanlan and other feminists.15 But Chatterjee's views on women have generally had a wide and positive reception among feminists, historians, and cultural theorists themselves, perhaps because he came into the discussion of gender and nationalism early and was included in Recasting Women (Sangari and Vaid 1990), an early and highly influential Indian feminist anthology. There are frequent citations of his essay in articles on women in India, whose writers, even when feminist, have glossed over his essentially conservative cultural nationalist stance on women. This relative lack of interest in critiquing Chatterjee's or the subaltern approach to women and patriarchy may also be a consequence of these issues being seen as topics of special interest, as special material for feminist critique. As a result, the general theoretical or political critique of Chatterjee's works,

Pygmalion Nation 39 almost wholly done by men, has not been properly subjected to a gender analysis, even when critiqued from a marxist standpoint. Kumkum Sangari's essay (1995), 'Politics of Diversity - Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies/ which is a response to Chatterjee's article (1994) on 'Secularism and Toleration/ is the only substantial attempt to integrate a marxist critique of subaltern studies with a feminist one. The intention of this paper is precisely to do so, and thus to situate Chatterjee's acclaimed 'resolution of the women's question' in a discussion on property and propriety within a historical materialist reading of hegemony. In view of the growing transnational popularity of subaltern studies among feminists and post-colonialists, it is important to explore this problematic 'resolution' and to offer an integrative critique from a feminist-marxist standpoint. This method helps us to understand basic aspects of cultural nationalism, both new and old, not only in India, but elsewhere as well. It is well known that the consciousness of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie, colonial or otherwise, has expressed itself everywhere through class-inflected patriarchal constructions and practices, and also that the nation-state in the colonial context has often reinvented itself in the same mould, though in the name of anti-colonial national culture.16 Moral constructions and regulations, especially regarding middle-class women's conduct, mark these aspirations to a 'national' gender morality. Such nationalist cultural patriarchal exercises, speaking in the language of identity, collectivity, and community, have helped to deflect critical attention from structural relations of property and class. These enunciated nationalist moralities encapsulate both a particularizing and an essentialist move. The current hindu right in India has further developed the patriarchal cultural configurations evolved by the hindu revivalists of the nineteenth century as a national imaginary. The consequences of this move in terms of secularism, individual rights, and democratic citizenship, especially with regard to the disenfranchisement of women and minorities, make it imperative that we understand this type of cultural nationalist theorization. For it not only describes but prescribes anti-modernist conservative cultural collectivities with inherently repressive subjectivities and agencies. This patriarchal and upper class/caste imaginary of the hindu revivalists, claimed to be a successful attempt at nationalist hegemony by their present-day supporters, brings to mind the well-known GraecoRoman myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. It involves Pygmalion, an artist, who falls in love with one of his own sculptures. It is an idealized

40 Himani Bannerji feminine form that he names 'Galatea' and courts. In his delusion, his own aesthetic and moral construct becomes an actual woman, a living being who is supposedly endowed with a substantive subjectivity and agency, though in reality she is wholly encompassed within his vision and has no existence apart from it. This myth crystallizes for us what Chatterjee means when he calls a construct of feminine morality resulting from a hindu brahmanical and upper-class patriarchy a 'resolution' of 'the women's question/ We also see the same process of mythmaking at work in the creation of this Bengali Galatea who is a moral and aesthetic projection of the patriarchal and narcissistic Bengali hindu male elite imagination current in the late nineteenth century and which has continued to the present. As we shall see, Chatterjee, though aware of possibilities of critical response towards this patriarchal imaginary, discovers a way to vindicate this female construction and find a present-day relevance for it. He cannot but do so, since he is caught within his own post-colonial, cultural nationalist theoretical framework, and, therefore, must eschew any gesture of criticality. To do so would amount to an admission of patriarchal and class oppression, and a legitimation of a modernist demand for women's substantive individuality and political agency. A post-colonial commitment to classlessness, cultural overdetermination, and anti-modernity brings in its wake an automatic legitimation of patriarchy. In the next section I will explore the theoretical trajectory which brings Partha Chatterjee and the subaltern studies historiography to this stance. Mapping the Subaltern Discursive Territory I have one central objection to Anderson's argument in his [Imagined Communities]. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized. I object to this argument not for any sentimental reason. I object because I cannot reconcile it with the evidence on anticolonial nationalism. The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nation-

Pygmalion Nation 41 alist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the 'modular' forms of the national society propagated by the modern West. How can we ignore this without reducing the experience of anticolonial nationalism to a caricature of itself? Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (1993a: 5) A more fundamental methodological problem is the abandonment in practice of any quest for immanent critique through the elision of possibilities of mutually conflicting groups taking over and using in diverse, partially-autonomous ways, elements from dominant structures and discourses. What is ignored, in other words, is precisely that which had been central to Marxist analysis: the dialectical search for contradictions within structures. If modern power is total and irresistible within its own domain, autonomy or resistance can be located only in grounds outside its reach: in a 'community-consciousness' that is pre-colonial or somehow untainted by post-Enlightenment power-knowledge, or in fleeting, random moments of fragmentary resistance. These become the only valid counterpoints against the ultimate repository of that power-knowledge the colonial or postcolonial 'nation state.' We have moved, then, from perspectives in which relationships between capitalist imperialism and multiple strands within anti-colonial movements had constituted the basic framework, to one where the post-Enlightenment modern state is counterposed to community. Questions of exploitation and power have been collapsed into a unitary vision of the modern bureaucratic state as the sole source of oppression. Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (1997a: 5)

A feminist historical materialist critique of 'subaltern thought' requires that we map out the overall discursive trajectory of its theorists. For this reason we need to explore Partha Chatterjee's approach to patriarchal political culture encoded as the nationalist 'resolution of the women's question' in his books, Nationalist Thought (1986) and The Nation and Its Fragments (1993a), as well as his essays in Subaltern Studies. But his treatment of patriarchy and women needs to be put into context by Ranajit Cuba's introduction to the first volume of Subaltern Studies, which provided the theoretical and political manifesto for the project of this group.17 Chatterjee's theoretical journey has to be measured in relation to this declarative document. Ranajit Guha's introduction, among other things, criticized Indian nationalism (seen as a single ideological formulation) for its comprador character, its compromise with colonial, that is, modernist, discourse.

42 Himani Bannerji This view is also reflected in Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought (1986), but there is here, as in his other texts, a difference of tone from that introduction. The earlier unqualified critique of Indian nationalism is now modified by an ambivalence regarding its overall character and achievement. Though strengthening Guha's emphasis on politics as primarily a phenomenon of consciousness, Chatterjee is no longer categorical in his condemnation of nationalist thought's inability to imagine the nation in a substantive manner. Taking issue with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983), he presents moments of both success and failure in nationalist thought's hegemonic venture for decolonization of India (Chatterjee 1993a). Presenting the Indian/Bengali case as a template for nationalism everywhere in the colonized world, Chatterjee locates the moment of success in the hindu Bengali elite's ability to evolve a cultural nationalism based on pre- and anti-modernist collective identities encoding the difference between a colonial and a national culture. These identities rely on traditional/religious moral regulations pertaining especially to the domestic life of the colonized, thus making the 'private' lives of the hindu Bengali elite an uncontaminated aspect of an otherwise colonially inflected civil society. Another area in that inner domain of national culture was the family. The assertion here of autonomy and difference was perhaps the most dramatic. The European criticism of Indian 'tradition' as barbaric has focused to a large extent on religious beliefs and practices, especially those relating to the treatment of women. The early phase of 'social reform' through the agency of the colonial power had also concentrated on the same issues ... [UJnlike the early reformers, nationalists were not prepared to allow the colonial state to legislate the reform of 'traditional' society. They asserted that only the nation itself could have the right to intervene in such an essential aspect of its cultural identity. (Chatterjeel993a: 9)

The hegemonic failure of nationalist thought, however, is detected in the 'public' aspect of the same civil society, where it cannot develop a proposal for a truly national state and polity. In The Nation and Its Fragments (1993a), Chatterjee discusses how the Indian elite cannot create authentically national public institutions for education, for example, or for publishing, based on identities of difference.18 Seen thus, the alleged 'resolution of the women's question' by nationalist thought rescues this flawed hegemonic venture and expresses what Chatterjee considers to be their subaltern consciousness and political agency. To

Pygmalion Nation 43 understand this shift of emphasis in Chatterjee's writings, and also those of other collective members, from an unqualified rejection of colonial elite politics to its partial redemption, we need a deeper discussion of subaltern theorization. The current theoretical approach of subaltern studies was not born as was Athena, fully armed from Jove's brow. It began by asking some basic questions regarding both bourgeois and communist revolutionary politics in India, especially with regard to agency and forms of consciousness. Asked in the light of the perceived failure of communist parties in India and the debacles of Indian liberal democracy in bringing about a real social and economic transformation, these questions were quite crucial. They drew Ranajit Guha and others to the political theories of Antonio Gramsci and the use of his concept of subalternity to name their own politico-epistemological enterprise. Though the concept 'subaltern' is not indexed in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, the preface by Ranajit Guha refers both to the Concise Oxford Dictionary and to Antonio Gramsci's six-point program for subaltern politics and history in 'Notes on Italian History' (Gramsci 1971). Guha outlines the collective's politico-theoretical critique in the following way: 'It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeoisdemocratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a "new democracy" - it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India' (Guha 1982: 7). This critique regarding questions of class agency and hegemonic failure gradually changed into critiques solely about culture and consciousness. This process also converted Gramsci into a cultural politician. This theoretical position, as outlined in Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought, was consolidated by drawing on Anwar Abdel Malek and Edward Said, and to some extent on Michel Foucault, insofar as political power came to be seen as a discursive phenomenon.20 This change accompanied Chatterjee's (and others') deepening criticism of marxist theorization and ultimately resulted in the anti-marxism referred to earlier. Concepts such as subalternity or hegemony, designed by Gramsci in his prison years to speak of class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle in an Aesopian language, were voided of their content of historical and social relations. A marxian structural analysis of power and critique of

44 Himani Banner)! ideology, replaced by a Foucaudian notion of domination, marked the moment of post-colonialism in subaltern studies. It was then that political and symbolic economies fully parted company. Thus, the theoretical picture at the very beginning of subaltern studies is unclear, since it straddles premises of cultural overdetermination and the class basis of popular political agency. Its language at this stage is a mixture of class and populism and a power/knowledge type of discourse analysis. This is evident in Ranajit Guha's use of the concept of 'the people' in both a cultural and a class sense when he indicates their absence from India's revolutionary projects.21 'The people' are variously termed by him. Sometimes they feature as 'subalterns/ presented in Weberian terms of stratification, as lower layers of deprived social groups, and sometimes they evoke a marxian concept of class, especially when Guha refers to the weak development of capitalism and social differentiation in India, and relates the inarticulate nature of elite and popular political consciousness to these structural facts. But the cultural thrust of the group's query is noticeable from the beginning. They speak of politics and history extensively in terms of values - of cultural norms and forms - and thus of power as coded and deployed in symbolic terms. They also read transformative politics in terms of insurrections of rural underclasses, later expanded to include small town and urban riots. These rural insurrections are studied for clues to both the success and failure of revolutionary enterprises. They are valorized as authentic for being non- and anti-modernist expressions of power as consciousness, as opposed to the organized movements of peasants and the proletariat led by the communist party or the trade unions. Revolutionary history, it appears, has to be written solely in 'annals of blood and fire' to be true to the essence of Indian polity.22 Ranajit Guha's criticism of modernism and organized politics of the national elite, though mainly directed at the Nehruvian strand of the Congress Party and its elite historians and ideologues, has a comprehensive quality to it. But it is this rejection of elite nationalism which is qualified and partially rehabilitated by Chatterjee due to his detection and validation of a non-Nehruvian, non-modernist strand within the Bengali/Indian nationalist tradition. The historiography and textual productions of this type of nationalism, even though elite enterprises, are considered as containing genuinely anti-colonial elements. An interest in politics of consciousness, present from the beginning, now in combination with a heavy reliance on cultural texts and an elimination of class analysis, creates a full-fledged culturalism, considering

Pygmalion Nation 45 power in terms of cultural or ideological primordialities. While Chatterjee conducts this theoretical operation in the context of Bengali elite nationalism, Ranajit Guha (1983), in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, does the same with regard to 'tribes' and other rural 'subalterns.' Chatterjee (1982, 1983) ends up in a wholly non-marxist theoretical apparatus, but not without an initial marxist aura. Until he builds enough theoretical stepping stones away from marxism to disarticulate politics and culture from class and other social relations of property, he is reliant on a marxist language and body of theoretical literature. These theoretical manoeuvres of Chatterjee deserve closer examination because they both necessitate and elaborate the schema through which the 'resolutionary' reading of nineteenth-century Bengali revivalists' writings on women comes about. He begins (Chatterjee 1983) from the debates on transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism and also from debates on modes of production then current (in the 1960s and 1970s) in marxist social and political theories. He recapitulates in his essay the debate between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezey regarding the causes and modalities of the emergence of capitalism. Dubbing the class formulations of these two economists as 'techno-economic,' Chatterjee seeks to create a specifically political theory which can address issues of power and domination without reference to 'technoeconomic' entities such as class. For this theoretical necessity he turns not to Foucault or Said initially, but to Robert Brenner, another marxist who intervened in the Dobb-Sweezey debate from a non-economistic perspective and raised 'the political question of the transition problem.' Chatterjee says: 'But what Brenner's contribution brings out above all is the theoretical importance of locating the element of 'indeterminacy' in the transition problem in the political form of the class struggle. Brenner has been able to demonstrate convincingly that the path of transition is not uniquely determined by the techno-economic terms of evolution of a certain mode of production. The problem now is to define the theoretical terms in which this political question of the transition problem can be attacked' (1983: 315, author's emphasis). Though for Brenner 'the political question' entailed the question of class politics, with class understood as a sociological category arising from but going beyond the productive forces, and thereby not reduced to, but of the economy as well, Chatterjee reads his emphasis on politics differently. For him, the 'political form of the class struggle' involved in the transition, entailing, as Ernesto Laclau (1979) would say, the specificity of the political, takes a cultural character. Thereby,

46 Himani Bannerji political ideologies are to be articulated 'indeterminately' and generally independently of class understood as a techno-economic or structural category. To create, then, a theory of politics which could jettison class and yet retain the notion of power (the core of politics), Chatterjee turned to other marxists whom he also adapted to his need (though less so than Brenner), namely, Etienne Balibar and Louis Althusser, the latter at the peak of his popularity in the 1970s. Chatterjee, making his move to Althusser using a derivative position provided by Etienne Balibar (1970), whom he footnotes, gives as his point of departure the following: 'The task [of defining theoretical terms for questions of power] requires new theoretical categories. It is now widely accepted that the political structures of society ... are not mere reflections of its "economic" structures built around the activities of social production' (Chatterjee 1983: 315). His move to Althusser (1971) - though nowhere does he mention Althusser outright - is in the following terms: 'There are institutions, and instituted processes, of power and of ideology, which intervene and give the political structures a certain relative autonomy. But merely to state this is to stop short of posing a crucial problematic: What precisely constitutes "relative autonomy"? Where is it located? How are we to identify and describe it in the domain of our theoretical concept? Put in other words, what are the theoretical concepts and analytical relations which are specific to the world of the political?' (Chatterjee 1983: 315-16). Althusser's concept of the relative autonomy of the superstructure, his view of ideology as ubiquitous and 'material,' provided Chatterjee with the theoretical angle he needed to establish the rule of ideas in politics. He erased in totality determinations exerted by social class and economy on politics, which for Althusser himself lay in the limbo of the deferred 'last instance/ This move enabled Chatterjee to establish the primacy of consciousness as the 'specific' feature of politics, and he searched further for particular 'concepts and analytical relations' for a political theory of 'peasant struggles, feudal domination and the contribution of the absolutist state' (1983: 316). In short, he wanted to create a theory of politics as well as a political theory which would be adequate for understanding India as a particular political entity with a specific character resulting from a mixture of communitarian and feudal-absolutist forms. He also included in the purview of feudal absolutism the mode of governance practised by the British colonial state as bourgeois absolutism.

Pygmalion Nation 47 It is with this Althusserian, and only subordinately Balibarian, mediation that Chatterjee separated 'modes of production' from 'modes of power' and turned to the appropriation of Gramsci for the validation of his theoretical enterprise. This also allowed him to be hospitable to Foucault's discursive theories of power and his equation of enlightenment or modernity with domination, and to do so with the help of Edward Said's theory of representation in the context of colonial discourse as a cultural apparatus for domination. Seemingly responsive to the then-prevailing marxist belief that politics is connected to property relations, Chatterjee, in 'More on Modes of Power,' conceded to use the notion of property, but read it in non-economic or discursive terms. For him, property was not a fact of the mode of production, but rather of political power in which class is not an essential element, and as such has to be understood as involving 'the question of rights or entitlements in society, of the resultant power relationships, of law and politics, of the process of legitimation of power relations' (1983: 316). Thus Chatterjee conflated property with legal and cultural propriety, and, freed of the burden of class and economy, depicted consciousness as a self-originating and self-reproductive force and as the key source and site of politics. Particularly for societies imbued with strong nonbourgeois elements, culture was to be the basic ground of politics and category of theorization. Althusser's help notwithstanding, Chatterjee's theoretical perspective would not have been possible without Weberian sociology and colonial anthropology.23 Through them he reinterpreted Marx's Precapitalist Economic Formations (Marx 1964) by reading Marx's views on political organization of three social stages as shorn of all economically and socially proprietorial relations. Instead, Chatterjee adopted a Weberian paradigm of tradition and modernity in order to substitute the marxian notion of 'mode of production.' According to this schema, he placed India at the traditional end of the spectrum, and this helped him to consider class as an unimportant factor in Indian politics. He characterized India in the Weberian style as primarily a communalfeudal or traditional society with a defined singular non-urban tradition, where political power resides in the collectivity of the community consciousness and is experienced politically as a relationship of hierarchy with features of domination expressed in physical force, rather than through a legal machinery of state power and administration (Chatterjee 1983: 318). Only in the fully developed bourgeois mode, found in the West, could Chatterjee conceive of power as having an

48 Himani Bannerji element of class relations. Class would not be a politically material factor unless complete social control were secured over the labour process by establishing rights of property in the means of production and in the product by the impersonal operations of the market. Politics in this bourgeois stage broke the ideological unity and form of the two other modes of power, namely those of the communal and the feudal stage. The precondition to this bourgeois politics was the emergence of a clearly articulated civil society, with its division into public and private spheres, and the emergence of individual and legal rights of citizenship. Representative government of the modern state was nothing other than 'the fundamental institution for wielding power' (1983). This type of politics and mode of governance, however, could not apply to India, since Chatterjee saw India as an essentially pre-bourgeois society. Thus, according to Chatterjee's Weberian sociology, any claim of modernity and bourgeois social relations was inauthentic to the Indian ethos. Any exploration of Indian polity and society in terms of class relations and/or secular-rationalist thought, therefore, was tantamount to adopting an inappropriate colonial or modernist discourse. Legitimate sources and practices of authority and power relations in India had to lie in the traditions of the community and feudalism, and thus an authentic politics would always entail a predetermination by consciousness, of spontaneity, physical force, and moral injunctions. For an analogue to clarify Indian politics, Chatterjee refers to what Marshall Sahlins (1968) has to say about 'tribal' forms of power in Africa, where the superstructure itself is to be seen as 'a political arrangement' and 'the economic [i.e., property relations or class] is only a side factor. The issue is instituted authority' (1968: 322). For India, as well as Africa, this 'political arrangement' encompasses everything else, including the economy. In order to put Chatterjee's characterization of India in its proper perspective we should also remember the social or non-academic context of the emergence of subaltern studies. This refers to the maoist politics common in India from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, towards the end of which period the journal Subaltern Studies emerged. Maoist politics in India at this time characterized Indian society and history as being semi-feudal and semi-colonial. This resonates with the subsequent 'subaltern' formulation of India by Chatterjee, Guha, and others as described above. But there is an important difference in that the maoist emphasis on class and class struggle and, in particular, on the

Pygmalion Nation 49 peasantry as a revolutionary class disappears, binding the notion of subalternity only to a pre-modernist content and form of community or feudal politics with an extra-parliamentary, extra-party, and insurrectionary bent. It is to this type of politics that Partha Chatterjee signals when he speaks of 'the subordinate forces' which battle ... to assert (perhaps to reassert) an alternative mode of power and authority based on the notion of the community' (1983: 334). In his essay, 'Caste and Subaltern Consciousness/ he speaks further in favour of caste politics over politics of class or individual rights (Chatterjee 1989b). It is clear that, for the subaltern theorists, Indian decolonization can be brought about neither by nationalist liberal democratic politics nor by national liberationist politics of class against capital and imperialism. This legitimation of a classless politics of nationalism, articulated by a section of the colonial Bengali elite in premodern, feudal-communitarian, or traditional terms, cannot but project hindu revivalists of Bengal as 'subaltern' agents of nationalism, while excluding their social critics. Since the notion of the 'subaltern/ though emptied of its class content, had retained its nuance of forced subordination (since it denoted persons of 'inferior rank'), it was now expanded to fit the hindu elite, who held an inferior rank in the colonial hierarchy and aspired to a higher one of control. This fitted Guha's definition of subalternity as a 'general attribute of subordination' (Guha 1982: vii), and Sumit Sarkar's description of it as an 'omnibus term' which, presumably, could include 'the exploiters and the exploited' (Sarkar 1984: 273). Sarkar included all Indian classes in this subalternity except the urban gentry and intellectuals, while Chatterjee also included them, since he considered them agents of decolonization, both 'false' and 'true.' Neither Chatterjee nor Sarkar, at this stage, saw any need for a class analysis, or the relevance of property relations, for exploring politics or power relations in 'largely pre-industrial societies' (1984; 1989b). Equating class with industrial societies and class consciousness, Sarkar spoke of the difficulty of asserting class as a relevant category and opted for subalternity (1984; 1989b). Ranajit Guha saw this 'subaltern' consciousness disarticulated from social relations as autonomous, not originating from elite politics, nor dependent upon it (Guha 1982: 4). It is traditional, as its 'roots can be traced to the precolonial times/ and still relevant, as it is 'by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded' for the purpose of current politics (1982: 4). Though this 'subaltern' consciousness is not to be found in the same degree of purity among the colonial elite as among the 'tribals' and poor peasantry,

50 Himani Banner)! since their 'traditional' politics has often been 'rendered ineffective by the intrusion of colonialism' (1982: 4), they have not lost all connection to the pre-colonial, traditional culture. As such, they may also be accorded with a certain degree of this 'subaltern autonomy' of consciousness. Chatterjee's definition of nationalist thought relies on what Sarkar calls the 'relatively autonomous political domain ... with [its] specific features and collective mentality' (Sarkar 1984: 273). The source for partial rehabilitation of the colonized elite, or ruling classes, lies in their subalternity to the colonial power, which results in a Janus-like double-headed consciousness24 'characterized by an amalgam of loyalty and opposition to foreign rule.'25 It is this, their stratified middle condition of being a 'middle term' between the foreign elite and local lower classes, which gives content to their ontology of 'subalternity.' This is the epistemological standpoint of their ideological efforts of mediation, through which they link or order pre-colonial religious and modernist secular forms of consciousness. This, claims Chatterjee, sets up a tension and revolutionary moments in their ideological enterprise, and he considers a nineteenth-century Bengali holy man, Ramakrishna, in light of this partial subaltern or 'national' consciousness, which is constructed with continued or reinvented tradition or religion. As religion is seen by Chatterjee as 'a constitutive force in a subaltern consciousness' (Chatterjee 1989b: 169), the closer the elite to religion - through what Sumit Sarkar considers to be Ramakrishna's petty bourgeois brahmanical hinduism (Sarkar 1997d: 283, 288) - the more 'subaltern' they are. The elite, with both an autonomous and a borrowed part to their consciousness, embody for Chatterjee 'the struggle by the subordinated to resist the dominating implications [of] a universalist code [meant] for society as a whole' (Chatterjee 1989b: 174). The resistance consists of defying universal codes of justice and relying on the culture and authority of a religious-ideological commu nity in order to have differential forms of conduct (1989b: 176). This assertion of the local elite's difference from the European colonizers extends to other local 'foreigners,' such as muslims, who are considered foreign since islam originated outside India, even though the converts were indigenous. In his essay, 'Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society/ Chatterjee (1984) asserts Gandhi's success as a 'subaltern' leader to the extent that he pursued a religious or traditional form of conduct which was integral to his social thought. Gandhi's rejection of the very idea of a civil society, his communitarianism emanating from his religiosity, and his equation of values of tradition with truth,

Pygmalion Nation 51 are all held up by Chatterjee as the 'subaltern' path to a true decolonization. Gandhi's failure as a genuine 'subaltern' leader is considered to lie in his inability to escape modernity's constructional and ideological imperatives in terms of political parties, state formation, and modes of governance. This modernist failure of the Indian National Congress is embodied by the politics and social thought of Jawaharlal Nehru. Thus, for Chatterjee, the Gandhian project of an authentic subaltern decolonization is hijacked by the annexation of his traditionalist ideology and politics by the Indian industrial bourgeoisie and secular intelligentsia. As he sees it: 'It still remains a principal task of modern Indian historiography to explain the specific historical process by which these political possibilities that were inherent in the Gandhian ideology became the ideological weapons in the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie in its attempt to create a viable state structure within a process of class struggle in which its dominance was constantly under challenge and its moral leadership constantly fragmented' (Chatterjee 1984: 194). The uncompromised 'subaltern' sentiment for an authentic decolonization is best expressed in Chatterjee's own words: 'For countries like India the concepts of bourgeois equality and freedom, owing to their externality to the immanent forms of social consciousness, cannot even claim the same degree of effectiveness as expression of the unity of society, despite their formal enshrinement in the political constitution' (Chatterjee 1989b: 178, emphasis added). This statement makes it obvious that subaltern historiography espouses an epistemology and politics that assume what Sumit Sarkar now sees as a 'total rupture' in (Indian) history and social organization, promulgating two watertight phases, the pre-colonial and the colonial. This artificial separation, he says, can result in a 'temptation' which makes 'the former a world of attractive ur-traditions of innocence confronting Western powerknowledge/ thereby removing the past and tradition from critical purview (Sarkar 1997b: 5). It is not surprising that such a traditionallybased and essentialist nationalist ideology of a unifying yet hierarchical nature would render not only issues of class but of patriarchy or gender irrelevant for both the colonial and pre-colonial times. Along the axis of this historical rupture there proliferates a series of binary cultural essences which obey the tradition-modernity paradigm of Weberian sociology and cultural anthropology. The pre-colonial and the colonial cultural essences are thus paired in two opposing columns, marking the community in opposition to the individual, home to the world, and tradition to modernity. A nation imagined within this dual-

52 Himani Bannerji 1st framework needs a gesture of transcendence in order to function as a unifying form. This transcendence or unity of hierarchy is supplied by the religious-traditional mode which can both overcome the dualities as well as encompass or annex whatever modernity that comes in its way. All local social relations of difference and their cultures are erased, while those between essentialized and unified versions of stages of the premodern, and the modern, and between the colonial and nationalist discourse are retained. The traditional/religious national community is projected as benign and protective, while the colonial or modern state becomes the main source of oppression (Sarkar 1997b: 6). This ideological stance converts the issue of class patriarchy or the question of social reform for women, for example, into a colonial imperative or imposition, thus disallowing any critique of women's oppression conducted by the national community. This makes any legal reform or notions of citizenship based on individual rights or personhood of women into colonial gestures, even after India became independent. All regimes of domination are thus seen as derivatives of European enlightenment, and rationalism is considered the instrument and ethics of domination.26 The codes for this domination are textual, and they wear the mask of knowledge. Accordingly, science is 'the instrument of colonization/ part and parcel of the discourse of power which underpins Western culture, which establishes its colonizing hegemony through the concept of universality (Chatterjee 1986:14-16). Obviously, within this framework there is no room for integrating decolonization as a specific historical project of a particular society with a universal project of social justice. Decolonization as a culture and discourse of (counter-) power aims to replace the modernist/universalist/scientific/secular and rationalist colonial discourse with its opposite representational and narrative forms. This, it is presumed, would end the epistemic and moral domination by an alien culture. Based on the principles of difference and inversion of modernity, the nationalist or decolonizing discourse would aim at the construction of non-colonial subjectivities or identities. Chatterjee tries, therefore, to separate out the discursive elaborations of nineteenth-century Bengal into three cultural-ideological strands - one of a partially authentic nationalism, another which is a Western and colonial derivative, and a third which is fragmentary, local, and inarticulate. The last is identified with local marginal groups, for example with low-caste groups or women 'fallen' from their middle-class social positions into a demimondaine world, about whom

Pygmalion Nation 53 Chatterjee writes in The Nation and Its Fragments.27 Nationalist thought is then by definition a pre- and anti-modernist, univocal and particularist enterprise. As Chatterjee puts it, if we miss out on seeing this, then we 'miss out on the fascinating story of the encounter between a world conquering western thought and the intellectual modes of nonwestern cultures ... It also results in a crucial misunderstanding of the true historical effectivity of nationalism itself (Chatterjee 1986: 41). Nationalist thought thus 'demarcates itself relentlessly from colonial discourse/ and 'its politics impels it to open up that frame-work of knowledge which presumes to dominate it, to dispel the frame-work, to subvert its authority, to challenge its morality' (1986: 42). But, as already noted, as the discourse of a colonially contaminated elite, nationalist thought cannot free itself wholly from the liberal rationalist dilemma. Though the national imaginary produced by the hindu elite communitarians is much more substantive than Western theorists of nationalism, such as Kedourie or Anderson, would have us believe, it still falls prey to modernism. This, Chatterjee noted, supporting Kedourie, happens in the public sphere, in the very conception of its national project as one of modern state formation and its political apparatus - 'it remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashion' (1986:10-11). As European 'intellectual fashion' in politics rests on the division between state and civil society, nationalist thought, in order to be authentically hegemonic, must negate or suppress this separation and a politics of a secular civil society. Chatterjee counterposes the notion of 'community/ an appropriate Indian social form, to that of the colonial imposition of a discourse of 'civil society.' When suppression becomes impossible, then nationalist thought has to adapt this discourse of civil society to its own communitarian needs. As Chatterjee sees it: 'The trouble was that the moral-intellectual leadership of the nationalist elite operated in a field constituted by a very different set of distinctions - those between the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, the essential and the inessential. That contested field over which nationalism had proclaimed its sovereignty and where it had its true community was neither coextensive with nor coincidental to the field constituted by the public/private distinction' (Chatterjee 1993a: 10). But the nationalist elite of Bengal have not been successful in constituting this 'true community.' Instead, according to Chatterjee, they have partially accepted civil society and modernist modes of politics and state formation, and thus engaged in what Gramsci called

54 Himani Banner)! 'transformism/ leading to 'a passive revolution/28 But they still have a partial achievement to their credit - that of the creation of a hegemonic moral and cultural discourse which constructs and regulates their private life and can, therefore, assert itself against their public life of colonial submission to modernity. It is here, in their homes, that the Bengali hindu elite proclaim their limited but still effective cultural hegemony, turning the private/public divide to their own benefit. And the crux of this enterprise lies in fashioning a subjectivity and agency for women and a general domestic conduct which are commensurable with this religious-traditional ideological stance. That in this process they have drawn upon and reinforced brahmanical patriarchy is considered a minor detail and a negligible problem. What Chatterjee applauds in his chosen nationalist thinkers is their success in partially subordinating modernity through the imperatives of tradition or religious communitarianism, the crucial factor for an anti-colonialism of 'subalternity.' Woman: The Sign of the Nation Colonial critics invariably repeated a long list of atrocities perpetrated on Indian women, not so much by men or certain classes of men, as by an entire body of scriptural canons and ritual practices which, they said, by rationalizing such atrocities within a complex framework of religious doctrine, made them appear to perpetrators and sufferers alike as the necessary marks of right conduct. By assuming a position of sympathy with the unfree and oppressed womanhood of India, the colonial mind was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman to the sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of the country. Partha Chatterjee, 'Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India' (1989a: 622 To be sure, the project of bourgeois individuality was a strong factor in ... modernity, the idea of the autonomous individual existing for her own ends was something that animated this modern. But Kula, Grihalakshmi etc., for all their undeniable phallocentrism, were also ways of talking about formations and pleasure, emotions and ideas of good life that associated themselves with models of non-autonomous, non-bourgeois and non-secular personhood. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal' (1998: 84)

Pygmalion Nation 55 These two passages contain key 'subaltern' positions regarding the issue of women's status in India with respect to their personhood, social subjectivity, and agency. Beneath the seeming distinctness of these two statements there is an underlying commonality of approach regarding the placement of women in the project of nationalist hegemony. Let us examine them closely In Chatterjee's statement, the reader's attention is quickly shifted from 'atrocities' perpetrated on Indian women to the 'colonial critics' of these atrocities. They have a single 'colonial mind' and a 'long list' of ills of women. We are not invited to discuss whether their list is true or false, but rather to question who they are and what their critical motivation might be. They complain about 'Indian culture' itself, against the 'complex religious doctrines' of hindus, with their 'scriptural canons and ritual practices' for 'rationalizing such atrocities.' But these 'necessary marks of right [hindu] conduct,' presumed to be inegalitarian by the critics, are not queried by Chatterjee. Instead, we are directed to be suspicious of any 'position of sympathy with ... this figure of the Indian woman.' It is as though there were no actual patriarchal oppression of women in India, but rather only a colonial fiction of such oppression, a tendentious critique of the culture of the colonized with a view to legitimate colonization. The question of Indian women's oppression is, at best, bracketed in favour of criticizing colonial discourse, by implication vindicating nationalist thought. From this standpoint, to adopt a critical posture towards Indian society and a sympathetic one towards Indian women would be tantamount to taking the side of the colonizer.29 The issue of brahmanical patriarchy, therefore, becomes unimportant, or even non-existent, because colonizers draw our attention to it. Instead of finding other criteria than the European civilizational one for querying Indian patriarchy, the reader is drawn into a fight between the colonizer and the implied nationalist position. Patriarchies on both sides are ignored, as they convert women of colonized societies into their ideological signs of hegemony. Under such circumstances, any social criticism or demand for reform for Indian women would spell submission to colonial discourse. Chatterjee's own decolonization proposal does not permit any critique of Indian patriarchy. Dipesh Chakrabarty's position is similar to that of Chatterjee and reliant upon the same premises. He also criticizes the modernist or colonial perspective which is necessary for a critique of patriarchy and for demands of social reform (Chakrabarty 1993; 1995). On the same

56 Himani Bannerji ground of authentic anti-colonialism, it would be wrong for him to demand that women should be autonomous individuals. Therefore, the patriarchal mores that would be seen as oppressive by feminist and modernist critics are defended by Chakrabarty. For him the hindu constructions of Grihalakshmi, the goddess of the home, and Kulalakshmi, the preserver of the purity of lineage and traditions, though 'undeniably phallocentric/ are considered less problematic than the advocacy of individual rights or personhood for women. Thus, the 'idea of the autonomous individual existing for her own ends' (emphasis added) would be a colonial design, though the same autonomy for males would be no such thing. Possibilities for women's autonomy as social subjects and agents are subordinated to the guardianship privileges of the male elite of the community, however patriarchal. Women are thus advised or presumed to be contented with their status of 'non-autonomous, non-bourgeois, non-secular personhood.' This is the nationally permitted social space within which women must look for their social 'formations and pleasure, emotions and ideas of good life.' To disagree with this goal of a happy subordination to brahmanical patriarchy would be construed as joining up with those 'colonial minds' criticized by Chatterjee.30 Chatterjee and Chakrabarty's statements, which are coherent with the general 'subaltern' theorization, provide the backdrop for understanding the claimed 'resolution of the women's question' accomplished by nationalist thought. Both authors depend on 'subaltern' characterization of India as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, and thus support cultural markers that would be authentic to this definition. Both authors signal to the colonial 'mode of power' and its anticolonial/nationalist response, and thus cannot accommodate a critique of a class-based gender/patriarchy. To do otherwise would transgress their view of what constitutes politics in an essentially pre- and nonmodern social space. Dipesh Chakrabarty's two versions of the woman subject, the colonial/modern and the national/pre-modern, are examples of required political identities, seen as a part of the creation of a non-secular nationalist discourse. In his essay on Ramakrishna and the middle class of Calcutta, Chatterjee speaks to such a creation of 'the dominant forms of nationalist culture and social institutions.' They are 'new forms of public discourse/ 'new forms of public criteria of social respectability, new aesthetic moral standards ... suffused with the spirit of nationalism.' They provide the bases for 'new forms of political mobilization' (Chatterjee

Pygmalion Nation 57 1993b: 41). Thus the hindu revivalist faction of the Bengali middle class becomes the voice of anti-colonialism, and the teachings of their sage Ramakrishna reflect the ethics of nationalism. Making no distinction between what Sumit Sarkar has shown to be a petty bourgeois form of religious consciousness and nationalism as such, Chatterjee treats his teachings in the kathamrta as a 'text that reveals to us the subalternity of the elite' (1993b: 42). This 'subalternity' of the elite, a necessary subject position for the creation of nationalist thought, with its domination-subordination dialectic, is presented as textured with (masculine) fears and anxieties. It fixes upon upper class/caste women as symbolic signs and sites of hegemonic content and contest.31 These male fears and anxieties are presumed by Chatterjee to be unrelated to and unexpressed in actual situations of domestic violence, but are imbricated as symptoms of colonial subordination, and thus constitute a legitimate part of nationalist thought. It is a part of the process of inversion of values through which the colonial sign of oppressed Indian women now becomes the positive sign of the difference of the nation. As such, brahmanical patriarchy itself could serve as a sign of 'our' freedom, making social organization through caste, class, and gender an indicator of 'our' culture. The masculinist nature of this discourse and the 'subaltern' theorists' uncritical acceptance of it have been noted by Kamala Viswesaran.32 For her, it 'would not be unfair to say that while the praxis of subaltern studies has originated in the central assumption of subaltern agency, it has been less successful in demonstrating how such agency is constituted by gender.' She also notes that the 'occasional subaltern theorist when he has ventured to comment on the role gender has played in nationalist ideology, has been strangely content to point to the absence from nationalist registers' (1996: 85). She concludes by asking: 'Is then the silence on the subject of women within the parameter of subaltern studies somehow related to the simultaneous creation of nation and (counter) narration?' (1996: 85). Viswesaran's criticism supports mine, though ultimately we diverge. She mainly expands and corrects rather than rejects the 'subaltern' historiography, and notes less the nature of their utterances than their 'silence on the subject of women.' I, however, find both their omissions and commissions problematic. Overall, however, she corroborates my stance that their particular historiographical slant on women is integral to how they themselves, and not just the nineteenthcentury nationalists, 'narrate' the nation. As things stand, we are left

58 Himani Bannerji with the problematic conversion of Indian/Bengali women into a figure of speech for both nationalism's and 'subaltern' theorists' declarative discourse of anti-colonialism. After all, from their standpoint, fashioning women into a sign of the nation or a representative metaphor of colonial oppression features as the success story of nationalist hegemony.33 Chatterjee outlines this premise thus: "The world was where the European power had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue of its superior material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed to colonize the inner, essential identity of the East which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture' (Chatterjee 1990: 239). As this 'inner' realm was spatially translated into 'home' the family life of the colonized - women become the sign of an autonomy and are subjected to a commensurate moral construction (1990: 242, 245). Chatterjee speaks at length about this woman sign in his essay, 'A Religion of Urban Domesticity': 'We know that the figure of woman often acts as a sign in discursive formations, standing for concepts or entities, that have little to do with women in actuality. Each signification of this kind also implies a corresponding sign in which the figure of man is made to stand for other concepts or entities, opposed to and contrasted with the first. However, we also know that signs can be operated upon - connected to, transposed with, differentiated from other signs in a semantic field where new meanings are produced' (Chatterjee 1993b: 60). Viswesaran points out astutely that 'it is the failure of the subaltern studies historian to break from the discourse he analyses, which results in an inability to adequately theorize a gendered subaltern subject' (Viswesaran 1996: 86). This failure is all the more glaring since the patriarchal obsession of nineteenth-century hindu revivalists and cultural nationalists has been much discussed. Advocates of social reform at the time or the later proponents of 'Bengal Renaissance'34 as well as feminist historians and cultural theorists in the last decades, have all spoken to it.35 As the editors of Embodied Violence say in their introduction: 'The ideological base of identity politics and exclusionism is not new, it goes back a hundred years or so to a period of nationalist upsurge ... During colonialism, religious revivalism was a powerful opposition movement ... This revivalism involved an assertion of a national identity and a cultural linguistic consciousness that was constructed in opposition to the identity and culture imposed on colonized peoples by their European rulers. The revivalism of the majority communities had adverse effects on minorities and women' (Jayawardena 1996: ix-x). Uma Chakravarty's

Pygmalion Nation 59 book on Pandita Ramabai, Rewriting History, for example, or her other writings on the brahmanical oppression of hindu widows, articulate a thorough-going criticism of religious revivalism (Chakravarty 1998; 1995). They take us well beyond the facile equation of hindu revivalism with nationalism, and social reformism with colonial complicity. Sumit Sarkar (1997'a: 260-81) also articulates a critique of this stance and shows the difference between the anti-reformist woman-blaming of the hindu revivalists and nationalists and Vidyasagar's perception of women as victims of brahmanical hinduism. The asymmetry between hindu revivalism and nationalism that Sarkar exposes makes the question of anti-colonialism much more complicated than the simple post-colonial theorization of Chatterjee. Partha Chatterjee and his fellow 'subalterns' cannot part company with the hindu cultural nationalists due to their own theoretical constraints. The anti-modernism of their post-colonial stance, along with their cultural interpretation of politics which disconnects property from propriety and forbids them to discuss women as properties of the nation, direct them otherwise. They cannot avoid seeing the hindu revivalist elite as the political agent of decolonization, since decolonization for a society such as India implies for them a communitarian moral construction and regulation. They also cannot include women among nationalist agents because the simplicity of their anti-colonial identities, the rupture of Bengal's (or Indian) history into premodern and modern phases, along with an essentialized and demonized view of modernity which complements their Weberian reading of Indian society, all make it impossible for them to do so. In order for women to be seen as 'subaltern' political subjects and agents rather than the property of the nation, these theorists would have to embrace an egalitarian view of gender relations, which would be unacceptably modernist.36 It would amount to seeing women as 'subalterns' of the 'male' subalterns, and calling for an autonomous subjecthood based on universal notions of social justice. But as this could not be done, they settled for what they considered to be the best option for women. This consisted of seeing a regulated female identity in which certain external features of modernity were instrumentalized at the behest of the male elite of the community as a 'resolution of the women's question.' Chatterjee's dualist moral characterization of the nineteenth-century Bengali elite was given a historical facelift in a schematic division of their cultural and political consciousness into two time periods (Chatterjee 1990,1993a: 116-34). This binary moral schema is produced and

60 Himani Banner)! serialized by reducing the multiple and competing ideological strands prevalent among them into a single essentialized form of consciousness. This reduced consciousness is solely constructed in its relationship to colonial discourse or modernism. The first stage, exemplified by social reformers such as Rammohan Roy or Vidyasagar, represents a total capitulation to colonialism or modernity which is opposed by fully traditionalist anti-reformers such as Radhakanto Deb. This latter strand of hindu opposition is seen by Chatterjee as evolving into a representational nationalist discourse and thus assumes a political legitimacy during the later part of the nineteenth century. This new ideological stance instrumentalizes modernity and contains it within the requirements of hindu religious tradition, seeking to prevent social reforms. This approach is exemplified by the resistance to the Age of Consent Act in 1891 and by the reasons for their opposition.37 The annexation of modernity to augment tradition or the community mode of power has been seen as an excellent political move, not only by Chatterjee and other subaltern theorists, but by some feminists as well. Shahnaz Rouse (1996), for example, in an otherwise feminist essay, praises Chatterjee for what she considers his overcoming a tradition-modernity dichotomy for women by showing the mechanism of a 'resolution' of their opposition. She states: 'For unlike the commonly held separation between "tradition" and "modernism," this [Chatterjee's formulation of "the resolution"] suggests the maintenance of a balance - constantly shifting and reformulated - between the two, where "modernization" occurs in the spiritual/inner/private/home' (1996: 44). For Rouse this 'manner of understanding nationalist constructions is enormously useful not only for the context in which Chatterjee evokes it - that of Bengali social reformism - but, as significantly in the context of Muslim nationalism leading eventually to the creation of Pakistan' (1996: 44). There is, however, a contradiction in Rouse's reading of Chatterjee. If there were truly any 'modernization' of the 'inner' sphere, a qualitative overcoming of the binary rather than an annexation of the 'modern' by 'tradition' and as such the traditionalization of the public sphere itself, then one could not have the threat of theocracy which has dogged Pakistan. Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty are both aware of the quandary they face by the project of constructing 'national' identities, which must on the one hand forge a unifying discourse of nationality and authenticity, while on the other cope with modernity and internal differences. As Chakrabarty puts it, nationalist thought must 'subsume

Pygmalion Nation 61 the question of difference within a search for essences, origins, authenticities which, however, have to be amenable to global European construction of modernity so that the quintessentially nationalist claims of being "different but modern" can be validated' (Chakrabarty 1998: 51). This is a large part of the 'resolutionary' process of identity construction for women spoken of by Chatterjee. He notes in these constructions the gesture of recuperation of Orientalism, of 'classicization of tradition/ whereby anti-modernist moral regulations appeal to antique lineages and ethnicize difference, while tactically responding to modernizing pressures (Chatterjee 1990: 244). Meredith Borthwick's work on Bengali women's education (Borthwick 1984) supplies him with examples of this process, as does the struggle over women's education described by her and Dagmar Engels (1996).38 Chatterjee sees in Bengali nationalist women figures a 'resolved,' ideological synthesis. But the authors that he cites upon closer reading tell us a different story. Their texts are replete with stories of struggles and unresolved attempts at compromise regarding formal schooling of women or the content of their education. Chatterjee, however, can create a fiction of nationalist resolution from them because he has erased debates and differences that are etched in Bengali society by seeing it strictly in terms of a colonial/ derivative and nationalist discourse. His stance postulates a single and synthesized traditionalist consciousness for the middle classes as a whole by the later part of the nineteenth century. We are invited to forget the outpouring of complexities and contradictions to be found in the social consciousness of the time, especially in the role played by gender in class formation. The introduction to Recasting Women, for example, discusses the asymmetrical and changing relations between class formation and patriarchy in the emerging social organization and culture during the colonial period (Sangari & Vaid 1990: 1-26). As Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid put it, the 'relation between classes and patriarchies is complex and variable. Not only are patriarchal systems class differentiated, open to constant and consistent reformulation, but defining gender seems to be crucial to the formation of classes and dominant ideologies' (1990: 5). The fact that many hindu girls went to school without their families giving up hinduism, or that intermittent compromises were struck between academic and domestic education for women, cannot obliterate the struggles that underpinned women's education both at home and in the public world (see Bannerji 1997). Issues of women's eco-

62 Himani Banner)! nomic status and legal and political personhood which continue to this day were forged at that time. It is an unresolved state of affairs, or a state of ideological disharmonies, rather than one of a resolutionary synthesis (Bagchi 1985). The same conflicts and daily life of patriarchal oppression in the cause of class are also depicted by Bengali writers, both male and female (such as Ashapurna Devi or Manik Bandyopadhyay) well into our present time. These dimensions of 'the women's question/ however, are sacrificed by Chatterjee in order to attribute successful accommodational strategies to hindu cultural nationalism. The Galatea-like persona of a good hindu wife-mother eclipses the realities of social formation and the frictions between domesticity and profession for women. In spite of all the talk of resolution and accommodation, the discourse of hindu bhadramahila (an educated modernist 'lady' persona) and grihalakshmi (figure of the goddess of home/hearth, not primarily signified by modernity) did not come to any happy fusion. But this situation is neither noted nor regretted by Partha Chatterjee or Dipesh Chakrabarty, and their sentiment of approval for the claimed 'resolution' is captured by Chakrabarty when he says: The highest form of personhood [for women] was one constituted by the idea of self-sacrifice, the idea of living for others, not in the spirit of civic virtue that Rousseau would have applauded, but in a spirit of subordination to non-secular and parochial principle of dharma. The idea ... was not at all innocent of power, domination and even cruelty but, whatever else it may have been, it was never merely a ruse for staging the secular-historicist project of the citizen-subject' (Chakrabarty 1998: 85). This indifference to women as political agents or social subjects is directly related to their theoretical anti-modernist rejection of 'the secular-historicist project of the citizen-subject.' Even an awareness of 'power/ 'domination/ and 'cruelty' towards women in this nationalist discourse cannot overcome their dislike for modernity. This explains Chatterjee's 'strange contentment' with the nationalist figure of the 'new woman' achieved through a 'new' patriarchy, which manages to retain much of the brahmanical nature of the 'old patriarchy/ though now modified and elevated to the level of both nationalist conduct and a general spirituality. This religiosity which is attributed to domesticity, embodied in the woman as a central signifier of the nationalist imaginary, serves as a major political icon in both literature and art.39 It presents us with the paradox of the private serving as a public sign, as nationalism's bid to subvert the 'civil society' by annexing the dis-

Pygmalion Nation 63 course of modernity. This 'new woman' construct exemplifies the basis of the polity for a proposal of the new nation-state. Here a traditionally inscribed civil society was to solve the problem of social order. The 'new woman' figure is thus meant to disrupt and subvert the main enemy, modernity, though it would have to be continually readjusted to resist modernist pressures. The logistics of creating this non-modernist woman figure lay, as Chatterjee noted, in adapting the discourse of civil society and state, the public and the private, by introducing a retreat of one part of the civil society, 'the world,' into the other, the 'home.'40 The public or outer sphere, however, does not refer to the 'techno-economic' reality of class, but rather to the realm of public cultural institutions. As such, the world of writing and publishing are seen by Chatterjee, following Benedict Anderson, as examples of the public sphere, and as unconnected to home and domesticity. The latter were to be protected from the modernity of not just the state, but of public culture, and from the encroaching influences of modernist morality of social reform. The conceptual fortification of the domestic space and its primary denizens, women, entailed the definition and inversion of essential characteristics of Europe and India in civilizational terms. As Chatterjee notes, European civilization was morally signified for the nationalists by its modernist traits of materialism, individualism, legalism, and representative government. Indian civilization was contrasted with it through a premodernist attribution of religiosity/spirituality, communal or collective social conduct, and political power. A liberal democratic discourse of rights-bearing individual-citizens and legislative social reforms was antithetical to its ethos. Since Europe and India were two essentially different civilizations, colonialism meant the imposition of an alien culture through the successful creation of a secular, rationalist culture in India. But, as Chatterjee points out, in this same cultural difference, otherness, or alienness lay the nationalist escape route. Since only like can really influence like, and materialism and spiritualism are qualitatively antithetical, modernist colonial discourse could be seen as external to the essence of India and incapable of influencing its spiritual inner self. Since the colonial conquest of the superstructure was thus external and non-essential, though Indian/Bengali economy, public institutions, and governing forms became susceptible to it, Indian/Bengali morality and home life remained relatively free. This freedom was articulated in its pure form in the ideology of feminine conduct, through typologies for an ideal national womanhood.

64 Himani Banner)! Nationalists claimed, and 'subaltern' theorists saw, this cultural logistics to be an effective strategy for decolonization. The home was considered a base from which to attempt sovereignty in the national space as a whole. The home, the spiritual-moral domain guarded by the grihalakshmi woman, thus became a highly politically charged environment. It was presented as the only free zone, with a continuation of indigenous sovereignty that antedated colonial rule. Under these circumstances legislation for social reform, or any public attempt to influence the private, amounted to home invasions by an alien force. As such these public reform enterprises had to be defeated outright, or at least silenced and contained. It is no surprise, therefore, that references to women's oppression, by either the colonial government or indigenous social reformers, were treated as colonial lies and treachery. The situation for local reformers, as Uma Chakravarty (1996, 1998) notes, was precarious, and expressed in the language of 'patriots and traitors.' Both male reformers, such as Vidyasagar with his crusade for widow remarriage, and women engaged in social reform, such as Pandita Ramabai or Krishna Bhabini Das, became victims of more than verbal violence.41 Dissolving rather than 'resolving' the women's question, one should say, became imperative for this type of nationalist thought and its construction of the 'new woman' trope. What is obvious to any careful reader is that 'subaltern' theorists, including Chatterjee, cannot disentangle their own thesis of successful decolonization from that of hindu revivalist nationalism, and are thus forced to '(counter) narrate' their own position on the nation through a patriarchal imaginary. For Viswesaran, this neo-orientalist Said- and Foucault-influenced post-colonial theorization, with a leftover trace of Althusser's notion of ideological overdetermination, displays the same blindness to 'difference' of which they accuse modernist universalists. In the end they create a more essentialist, though sophisticated, version of hindu revivalism. As we noted, this cultural essentialism and anti-modernism, postulated on a separation between class and politics, is theorized by Chatterjee (1983) very early in his career. It is an ideological gesture which averts our attention from women's oppression, as well as their debates regarding their own subjectivities and agencies when they entered the arena of public discourse in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In fact, 'the women's question' is considered 'resolved' by Chatterjee when men lose the status of guardians and sole representatives of women. Male and female critics who still continue to call for social

Pygmalion Nation 65 reforms for women are dubbed Westernized and unrepresentative. Others, who are called the 'fragments' of the nation by Chatterjee (1993a), fall below nationalist agency since they have little power of articulation and nothing substantive to say in terms of promulgating a full discourse. The utterances of 'fallen' women, such as the actress Binodini, are marked by a sense of loss of belonging rather than by criticism.42 As reform and rights-seeking women voice their demands for economic and social independence and their aspirations for full citizenship, they emerge as the enemy of the nation. We note that the persona of this 'new woman/ created by a male subaltern elite in a mode of seeming deification, is doubly subjected. She is subjected both to the patriarchal colonial state and to the patriarchal nation.43 This means personal subjection to the patriarchal brahmanism of male family authorities as guardians of the national community and their anticipated national government. Thus, women are treated as political and economic social minors, as dependents of their male kin. This subjection, which continues from the home to the community and the nation, is the actual lived content of the proposed 'non-secular, non-autonomous personhood' that Chakrabarty applauds. It is through this mode that women are to imagine and live an emotionally satisfying and nationally contributing life. Such a proposal holds a profound double standard for men and women, and demands for men the modernity of a legal individual personhood, the modern status of citizenship and state power, while leaving women without agency in a minoritized subjecthood. Within the scope of this type of proprietorial cultural nationalism, men are members of the (hindu) community without compromise to their economic, legal and individual rights, and political power, while women are not. Even in the colonial period, hindu elite men proved their nationalism by demanding their rights from the colonial state, as for example, by agitating in support of the Ilbert Bill for equal participation in the colonial administration,44 or by demanding 'home rule.'45 While male social and political identity can straddle both communitarian and modernist lines and advance to the stage of national freedom, it becomes primarily women's responsibility to remain faithful to the discourse of cultural nationalism, and thus to remain as an immanent existence in antimodernist terms. To maintain their status as vessels of national and family honour, they must be removed not only from the juridical outreach of the colonial state, but also from the deliberative sphere and influence of indigenous female and male reformers. In other words,

66 Himani Bannerji even before the nation becomes the state, they are the true and first subjects of the emerging nation. This construction of female proprieties and their legal and political implications provides us with a model for understanding what it might mean to hold a minority status within a nation-state which correlates citizenship with gendered ethnicity. We cannot complete this discussion without some comment regarding the male nationalist sense of danger and anxiety mentioned by Chatterjee. It needs to be asked why it is that only some men who are constituted as agents within a cultural nationalist discourse experience these feelings, while other males, 'reformers' for example, find women's social and political personhood and political agency uplifting. We should also point out that this discourse of threatened masculinity is in no real way different from other colonial or master discourses regarding populations who are sought to be ruled. The fear and anxiety of Bengali elite males regarding women, resulting even in cruelty and violence towards them, derive partially from the fact that anti-colonial difference is displaced, through the subjection of women rather than through direct confrontation with the actual rulers. The fear of the possibility of women's resistance to this fixed role of both subordination and mythicization or idealization obviously can intensify this male anxiety and invest it with a violent intent which rulers often project upon the ruled. This mirrors the actual violence they themselves perpetrate. As with any ruling discourse, this discourse is structured through moral purity and moral panic. A steady stream of this type of discourse regarding the social and moral anarchy of women and other 'natural subordinates' marks much of the cultural production of hindu revivalists and nationalists. Sumit Sarkar, in his essay, 'Renaissance and Kali Yuga/ speaks to this phenomenon (Sarkar 1997f). Chatterjee himself, however, describes this misogyny of hindu nationalism quite complacently, while speaking sympathetically of male anxiety in his essay on middle-class domesticity and spirituality as well as in his other writings. Nowhere does he question the use of colonial subjection as an alibi for violence against women, and instead presents us Ramakrishna's description of women at its face value: The female body is here a representation of the prison of worldly interests, in which the family man is trapped, only to lead to a daily existence of subordination, anxiety, pain and humiliation, whose only culmination is decay and destruction' (Chatterjee 1993b: 55). Or we get this quotation from Ramakrishna's Kathamrta: 'Master: What is there in the body of a woman? Blood, flesh, fat, gut, worms, urine, salt, shit, all this. Why

Pygmalion Nation 67 do you feel attached to a body like this?' (1993b: 55). Chatterjee sees no reason to look further than the elite male's subjection by colonialism to discover and criticize the sources and influences of such statements. Instead, he normalizes this violence against women as an ordinary colonial syndrome. Males who do not experience this misogyny when subjected to colonialism, and in fact feel sympathy or empathy for socially subjected women, are dubbed anti-nationalists. Chatterjee also leaves unquestioned Ramakrishna's attempts to appropriate physical and psychic femininity despite his hatred for actual women, especially as sexual beings. Lastly, he fails to note that by making women's sexuality (as kamini), seeking artha (wealth) and kama (sexual pleasure), the root cause of man's destruction and travail, thus converting woman into incarnate promiscuity and lust for gold, the nationalist male in fact could achieve a degree of peace with colonialism (1993b: 60). This nationalist spirituality, marking its difference from modernity, has neither an ethic of compassion nor of social justice, but operates on a highly particularized hindu/brahmanical communitarian discourse. The heart of moral purity in this context is the sacrifice of the woman for the family, the (religious) community, and the nation. For a woman to be otherwise is to be the alakshmi, the bad or Westernized woman, who is the wicked spirit or the demoness, rather than grihalakshmi, the goddess of the home/hearth. Thus, to quote Chatterjee, signs are 'operated upon - connected to, transposed with, differentiated from other signs in a semantic field where new meanings are produced' (1993b: 55). The hatred for female sexuality depends on the recognition that, in the search for pleasure, women (or people in general) can become self-oriented. Even more than their search for knowledge and formal education, this sexual impulse or desire can propel them to break the boundaries of the religious communitarian prescription, to find a safer space in the realm of modernity. Thus, patriarchal nationalism brings with it, as does patriarchy in general, more than an epistemic violence. It equates women's sexuality with promiscuity and prostitution, and its hatred for women's sexuality and for prostitutes encourages many forms of violence. Women of the nation are thus permitted to be sexed beings only as property, as owned beings to serve their husbands and patriarchal lineage by being mothers of the nation and national heroes. The hindu notion of patidevata, the husband god, equates serving god with serving the husband in bed or elsewhere, making it a woman's primary religious or spiritual conduct and asserting that there is no other scripture that she needs to

68 Himani Bannerji know. The critical or modernist woman, by contrast, is seen as an incarnate inversion of this ideal conduct, and is subjected to much violent visual and verbal satire. Hindu revivalist dystopia has her as a central sign of a 'fallen' age, expressed through these images of inversion. This dystopic woman sign includes not only the sexual woman, but also other aspects of the 'modern woman' in her other incarnations, 'allegedly ill-treating her mother-in-law, enslaving the husband, neglecting household duties, to read novels, and wasting money on luxuries for herself (Sarkar 1997f: 205). Though the Western-educated 'modern women/ as distinguished from the 'new woman/ were the main targets, their unlettered sisters were not spared from criticisms of immorality either. Such women could also embody unrestrained lust and wilfulness, as could their educated and sophisticated counterparts. But it is for the Westernized women that the strongest condemnations were reserved because they were considered 'arrogant, immodest, defiant of authority and neglected domestic duties' (Chakrabarty 1998: 61). The educational initiatives of nationalism, both in home and formal schooling, tried to devise an educational curriculum to counteract modernist influences. A vast number of tracts and pamphlets were written to instil this new traditional hindu morality, and girls' schools were created to dispense it. Thus there were competing ideological strains and curricula regarding women's education which went far beyond the issues of literacy, information, and skills. Chatterjee devalues or erases these competing ideological strands or differences by a selective reading of men's writings in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as well as of women's autobiographies and reflections. His reading and presentation have the advantage of manufacturing consent by attempting to show women's active role in their interpellated subjectivity. He claims that women saw this surrender as their contribution to the national cause and as 'the honour of a new social responsibility/ and the 'new patriarchy' as 'a new and entirely legitimate sign of subordination' (Chatterjee 1990:244). The moral lineage of mythic Aryan womanhood, critically discussed by Uma Chakravarty (1990), or that of the epic women figures of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, such as Sita, Sati, and Savitri, were offered as positive options for their obedience to patriarchy rather than for their moments of excess and transgression. This version is different from how Sarala Debi Choudhurani put tradition to assertive use by drawing upon the hindu pantheon and myths through the notion of Shakti (deified female power) for direct personal agency in nationalist armed struggle.46

Pygmalion Nation 69 Conclusion We should return now to the question of decolonization with which this essay began. Throughout I have tried to show how what I have called an illiberal form of nationalism is in essence a right-wing cultural nationalism which arrogates to itself the ideology and agency for a genuine decolonization, despite its demonstrably anti-emancipatory politics. By separating culture and discourse from economy and social organization, and constructing a national community upon a unifying cultural essence, this type of nationalism erases history, social relations and ideologies of radical difference, such as class, caste, 'race/ and patriarchy. This creates a condition of domination and subalternity for large numbers of people who live within the space of such a national imaginary and its actual manifestation as the state. The epistemologies involved in such an anti-liberatory ideological and political operation consist of a profound repudiation of historical materialism and critical sociology. As this essay shows, a major political consequence of such a theorization of hegemony and subalternity is manifested in the derivative character of social subjectivity and agency for women. Their subalternity is rendered invisible or unimportant. The domination of women implicit in hindu, or any other, cultural nationalism is not simply described by theorists such as Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, but given a prescriptive status. But large numbers of Indian/Bengali women since the nineteenth century do not agree with their secondary and objectified status as subjects rather than citizens of the nation. Their house has been divided for over a century. As people who have actually suffered the tyranny of this patriarchal nationalism, their understanding of and relationship to modernity is not only more complex than the 'subaltern' theorists would have us believe, but ultimately positive. Current struggles by and for women in India against patriarchy, regarding sati, dowry, female infanticide, and the bill for muslim women's personal law, all indicate this attitude of critical modernity. Women's awareness of the imperfections of the modern nation-state has not prompted most of them to fetishize cultural nationalism and Indian tradition in the name of anti- or post-colonialism. Much of Bengali literature, by writers of both sexes, speaks simultaneously to colonial and familial oppression. Even in the nineteenth-century literature, words such as paradhin (under the control of someone else) and swadhin (free or self-owning) are loaded with meanings which encompass

70 Himani Banner)! colonization and the oppressive character of the indigenous societies.47 As books such as The History of Doing show, when women became actors in the anti-colonial struggle they were dynamically active in many directions regarding social justice. Their writings brought together the trope of freedom from the gilded cages of their family homes and the freedom of their country from colonial domination. Women's difference from men in their approach to nation-building ranges from demands for property or economic self-sufficiency to entitlement of political agency and citizenship. These demands often are connected to a resistance to patriarchal proprieties of women's sexuality and motherhood. Tanika Sarkar (1993) shows us how women's autobiographies reflect a desire for much more than the roles of chaste wives, good mothers, or good daughters. Chatterjee or Chakrabarty do not seem to register this, for if they did they could not continue to valorize the 'new patriarchy' of nationalism despite women's problems connected with early and arranged marriages, marital rapes, early and numerous childbirths, and high mortality and morbidity. After all, what they consider as women's acquiescence to nationalist patriarchy may also be seen as women's desexualization. Their religiosity or espousal of celibacy upon widowhood may be seen as rational responses to the forced and onerous role of hindu wife and mother, which also entails unwelcome pregnancy. Thus, the choice of women to become maiden educationists may contain elements of resistance to their subordination. Even a cursory reading of women's writings will show that they displayed a much stronger passion for reason, education, and politics than for romantic love. It is not the home, the passion of nationalist thought, but the public sphere, resonating with a discourse of reason, which attracted women inexorably. Considered in this light, the typological barriers in consciousness erected by the nineteenth-century hindu elite are not secure ones, and for reasons not found in Partha Chatterjee. We often see 'Westernized' and 'nationalist' constructs coming close to each other for reasons far different from Chatterjee's thesis of 'resolution.' Here modernity is not simply instrumentalized, stripped of its criticality, and annexed by tradition. More often tradition recedes, leaving grounds for a nonpatriarchal subjecthood and agency for women. Nor are the female 'fragments' of the nation such pathetic typecasts in the fringe of Bengali middle-class respectability. Reading between the lines of middleclass male editing and representation of actresses such as Binodini as pathetic creatures, we find traces of strident women who are satirized

Pygmalion Nation 71 by farces of the nineteenth century. These women show a distinct propensity to flout both 'new' and 'old' patriarchy. This 'subaltern' agency for resistance among middle-class women, their counter-discourse, is invisible in subaltern studies' schema of 'resolution.' This claim to 'resolution/ incidentally, was not made by nineteenth-century nationalists themselves, but rather by theorists such as Chatterjee. The nationalists themselves recognized the unresolved nature of 'the women's question,' which prompted them to maintain a vigilance over the discursive field regarding women and moral education.48 It is Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty and their fellow post-colonialists who- project such a seamless image of social hegemony of cultural nationalism. What is more, by doing so they contribute to the legitimation of violence against women. When they legitimate a traditional social discourse in the name of anti-colonialism, they validate a masculinist discourse of community. They are trapped in this stance by their ideological, that is, socially occlusive, theoretical formulation. Indeed, decolonization, in the sense of a broader view of social justice, is not conceivable within this schema. This occlusion of the social and over-valorization of the premodern cultural in its most benevolent form allows for a false empowerment of women - the creation of the myth of the Devi, woman as a goddess figure. The violence against women latent in this figure shows in the actualities of repression in women's lives. In conclusion, we need to remember that the monolithic character of Indian/Bengali nationalist thought as projected by Partha Chatterjee and others of the subaltern group is his/their own ideological construction within the epistemology and politics of post-structuralist post-colonialism. It is primarily Chatterjee who creates this synthetic ideological entity and invents the 'resolutionary' claim in its support. No history of nationalism or of women in India would support either his monolithic construction or this claim. Through a discursive organization of a slippage between life and ideological constructions, Chatterjee reduces all forms of consciousness during the colonial era to the status of nationalism and anti-nationalism or colonial discourse. This gesture restricts his readers to a small set of selected anti-modernist texts and a binary politics. His selection obeys his theoretical schema and forces all ideas or cultural forms to be absorbed or arrayed in two columns of cultural essences - the colonial/modern and the anticolonial/pre- and anti-modern. It is through this ideological strategy that the story of women's containment and betrayal by property-

72 Himani Bannerji owning cultural nationalism becomes the story of their contentment and valorization. This is the fusion of patriarchal brahmanical de-scription with pre-scription which upholds Chatterjee's slim claim to the hegemony of nationalist thought. But it should be obvious that any project of decolonization which separates property and power from moral proprieties, avoids the issue of social justice, and subsumes differences within an essentialist rhetoric of cultural nationalism, can only lead to new and internal forms of colonization. Notes 1 Any discussion of decolonization and nationalism must remember Frantz Fanon (1968), who alerted us to both its liberatory and dominating potentials. Though he introduced us to the notion of 'false decolonization/ part of the 'pitfalls of national consciousness' of the colonial petty bourgeoisie, he did not consider this to be the fate of all nationalisms or decolonization efforts. See also Ato Sekyi-Otu (1996). 2 See Aijaz Ahmad (1996), especially the essays 'Class, Nation and State: Intermediate Classes in Peripheral Societies' and 'Culture, Nationalism, Intellectuals.' As he puts it: The word "nationalism" refers to such diverse histories and practices that it might be better to speak of it in the plural, or to speak at least in terms of typologies of nationalism' (1996: 403). See also Aijaz Ahmad's 'Introduction: Literature among Signs of Our Time?' (1992). 3 See Ahmad (1996) where he writes: 'I don't think that there is a particular ideology to which all nationalisms are invariably articulated. A famous Stalinist definition has it that all nationalisms are bourgeois. I don't think so. There are also nationalisms of the poor, the defeated, the beleaguered. Cuban nationalism or Sandinista nationalism is manifestly not bourgeois. I would even say that virtually all revolutions that took place in the Third World had a strong component of anti-imperialist nationalism in them, sometimes under bourgeois hegemony, sometimes not' (1996:403). It is this last type of nationalism, one not under bourgeois hegemony, that I mean when I speak of 'national liberation' movements. See also the essay on 'Nation and Class in Communist Aesthetics and the Theatre of Utpal Dutt' in Bannerji (1998b). This notion of pluralities of nationalism contrasts with the view of Edward Said (Eagleton 1990), for example, who in his 'Yeats and Decolonization' says: 'Instead of liberation after decolonization one simply gets the old colonial structures replicated in new national terms. That is one problem with nationalism. Its results are written across the formerly colonized world, usually in the fabrics of newly independent states

Pygmalion Nation 73 whose pathologies of power, as Eqbal Ahmad has called them, bedevil political life even as we speak. The other problem is that the cultural horizons of nationalism are fatally limited by the common history of colonizer and colonized assumed by the nationalist movement itself. Imperialism after all is a cooperative venture' (1990: 75). 4 For a discussion of 'illiberal nationalism' and its citizenship projects, see Tapan Basu et al (1993) and Jayant Lele (1995). 5 See, for example, Butalia and Sarkar (1995). 6 This political phenomenon is not only to be found in the 'fundamentalist' regimes in Iran, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, but has become a prominent force in India as well. With the destruction of a fifteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, followed by pogroms against muslims, Christians, and dalits, a hindu cultural nationalism, in the making since the nineteenth century, has overtaken the Indian political stage. For details on the politics of demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya, see D. Mandal (1993). 'Dalit' is the term adopted by people formerly known as 'untouchables' in the caste system. 7 For Sarkar's view on dehistoricization and mythicization of history, resulting from seeing colonialism, for example, as 'abstracted from histories of production and social relationships,' see Sarkar (1997b: 4). Regarding this anti-materialist and ahistorical stance of subaltern studies, see Javed Alam (1983). 8 Many scholars and critics have written on the effects of post-structuralism and post-modernism on social sciences and history. For history, see Sumit Sarkar (1997a); for social sciences see David Harvey (1989) and Christopher Norris (1993). As Norris puts it, the aim of these is 'to undermine every last category of socialist thought while claiming to offer a new kind of "strategy," a politics of multiple, decentred "discourses" which allows no appeal to such old-fashioned notions as experience, class-interest, ideology, forces and relations of production, etc., replacing them with talk of "subjectpositions," constructed in and through the play of various (often conflicting) discursive alignments' (1993: 290). See also, on the ideological practices of postmodernism, Dorothy E. Smith (1998), especially the essay 'Telling the Truth after Postmodernism.' 9 It has so overwhelmed the world of current theory that many marxists have recanted or adopted an embarrassed vigilance regarding marxism as a form of 'orthodoxy' and 'economic reductionism.' On retreat from marxist theorization and politics, see Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986). For an example of what this new non- or anti-marxist social thought and politics might look like, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). For an Indian

74 Himani Banner)! version of this radicalism, see Gail Omvedt (1993). For a more nuanced, non-polemicist view from a historian's standpoint, see Sumit Sarkar (1990). As Sarkar puts it: 'I remain more convinced than ever about the relevance of many ideas flowing from Marxian modes of historical analysis, indeed their superiority over other approaches to history and society. At the same time, the history and historiography of Indian nationalism bear ample witness to the stultifying effects of other aspects of what was considered to be true or orthodox marxism' (1990: 6). 10 For an extended presentation of both colonialism and nationalism as cultural enterprise, as discursive forms of domination, see Partha Chatterjee (1986). 11 See Chatterjee (1986) chapter 2, section III. In this context, it needs to be noted that since women had not been included in the category 'subaltern/ there was not a great deal of writing about them. Nor were they initially members of the collective of Subaltern Studies. In the last issues of the journal more women joined the group, Gayatri Spivak, Susie Tharu, and Tejaswini Niranjana among them. More writing has also appeared on women and gender. Among the original members who are the theoretical directors of this group, Partha Chatterjee has shown an extensive interest. But Dipesh Chakrabarty has also been influential, especially through the article, The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British India' (Chakrabarty 1993), reprinted in Subaltern Studies in 1998. Ranajit Guha's main contribution in this direction is 'Chandra's Death' (Guha 1985). Sudipta Kaviraj comments on women in nationalism in his book (Kaviraj 1995). Though not a member of the group, Julie Stephens (1989) wrote an anti-feminist piece, 'Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category of "Non-Western Woman" in Feminist Writings in India,' in volume 6 of the journal. 12 See Partha Chatterjee (1990). This essay was published in an edition of the same name in 1989 by Kali for Women in New Delhi, as well as in American Ethnologist, with a modified introduction. It also is incorporated with slight modifications as chapter 6 of Chatterjee (1993a). 13 Some students of social reform and nationalism interested in women: Tanika Sarkar, Uma Chakravarty, Jasodhara Bagchi, Himani Bannerji, Kumari Jayawardena, Gulam Murshid, Indira Raychoudhury. One of the earliest discussions pertaining to women in nationalist discourse and the absence of reform for women in the later part of nineteenth century Bengal, is in Sumit Sarkar (1985). 14 See for example, Sudipto Kaviraj (1995) or Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992, 1993).

Pygmalion Nation 75 15 For feminist or women's criticism of Subaltern Studies see Rosalind O'Hanlon (1988) and Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook (1992). In the writings of Uma Chakravarty and Jasodhara Bagchi, for example, there are critical references to the subaltern claim of 'resolution of the women's question/ but not a critique per se. 16 Thus mini-nationalisms flourish in the West in new multicultural modes (Bannerji 1998a), while European ethnic nationalism or Eurocentrism has always masqueraded as 'national' culture (Hall 1992). 17 See Guha (1982). This journal to date has published nine volumes. Editorship has been shared by Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey and Gautam Bhadra, but the majority of the volumes have been edited by Ranajit Guha, who served in a directive capacity in a theoretico-political sense. As Sumit Sarkar (1997c) puts it: 'Subaltern Studies emerged in the early 1980s in a dissident-Left milieu, where sharp criticism of orthodox Marxist practice and theory was still combined with the retention of a broad socialist and Marxian horizon' (83). But 'things have changed much since then, and today a transformed Subaltern Studies owes much of its prestige to the acclaim it is receiving from that part of the Western academic postmodernistic counter-establishment which is interested in colonial and postcolonial matters' (84). To date, Sarkar's essay is the best, fairest critique of Subaltern Studies historiography. 18 For Chatterjee, submission to modernity, which compromises the nationalist project as outlined in Nationalist Thought, is most prominent in state formation and the creation of public institutions, such as schools. As he puts it: Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, accompanied by the spread of the institutions of capitalist production and exchange, these legal and administrative institutions of the modern state penetrated deeper and deeper into colonial society and touched upon the lives of greater and greater sections of the people. In this aspect of the political domain, therefore, the project of nationalist hegemony was, and in its postcolonial phase, continues to be, to institute and ramify the characteristically modern forms of disciplinary power' (1986: 74). 19 See also Sumit Sarkar (1984). 20 See Chatterjee (1986), but also Chatterjee (1995: 8), which speaks to the 'connections between colonial power and colonial knowledge.' 21 Ranajit Guha's notion of 'the people' and its alternation with 'the subaltern' needs to be noted with regard to the 'autonomy' of their consciousness, its detachment from class. See Guha (1982: 4). 22 For a general picture of the topics of interest to Subaltern Studies, see Sumit Sarkar (1997c). This overview shows a decline of interest in the rural subal-

76 Himani Bannerji

23

24

25

26

27

terns and a growth of interest in the urban elite, their ideological inventions and politics, and displays a defence of their anti-colonial nationalism. Though Sarkar wants to rescue the earlier 'history from below' impetus of Subaltern Studies, we trace a romanticization in their view of historymaking, since their primary interest lies in insurrections and normative positions. See, for example, an exposition along these lines by Gautam Bhadra (1989). For Chatterjee's debt to Weberian sociology and cultural anthropology and their general influence on Indian, especially 'subaltern,' historiography, see Romila Thapar (1993a), and especially the essays (Thapar 1993b and 1993c). Chatterjee (1983: 316-23) serves as a precise example of this Weberian and colonial cultural anthropological reading, as does the entire theoretical framework for Ranajit Guha (1983). On the Janus-headed nature of the middle class, see Chatterjee (1993b). This paper also appeared as chapter 3 of Chatterjee's book (1993a) under the title, 'The Nationalist Elite/ with two introductory paragraphs added. Asok Sen (1987: 207) ultimately holds a more negative view of the elite and their politics than Chatterjee. For Sen, what obtained was 'the experience of a historical process where the dominant classes, foreign and indigenous, had neither will nor initiative to bring about any coherent social transformation' (206), and that 'their scramble for power and privilege prevailed over national consideration' (207). For Chatterjee, modernity is undifferentiated and a unified essence, and serves as an ethics of domination. This domination is accomplished by technology, the idea of progress, and rationalist and scientific thought. The heart and vitality of colonization is provided for Chatterjee by modernist thought, whose actual political modality is 'an epistemic foundation of universality' (Chatterjee 1986: 7-11,14-17). Chatterjee moves the episteme of domination (by science, rationality, etc.) from conquest of nature to conquest of people. In the context of 'social stratification/ domination is 'by man of man' [sic]. 'Rational conceptions of society ... subtly transfer' this domination (14). Chatterjee (1995) further develops these notions. The same theoretico-political stance is to be found in diasporic South Asian postcolonialists and subalternists, for example, in the writings of Arjun Appadurai, Cyan Prakash, and others. On the idea of 'fragments' of the nation, see Chatterjee (1993a). In the section entitled The Women Left Out' (151-5), based on the autobiography of Binodini, a nineteenth-century actress, Chatterjee outlines what he means by 'fragment.' Speaking about 'narrative of the nationalist transition/ he mentions those whom the nation 'betrays' or leaves out, for 'it could define

Pygmalion Nation 77 a cultural identity for the nation only by excluding many from its fold' (155). But this fragment status is blamed on modernist compromise more than anything else, which includes 'the political history of the postcolonial state seeking to replicate the modular forms of the modern nation-state' (156). 28 For Chatterjee's use of Gramsci's concepts, including those of 'transformism' and 'passive revolution,' see Chatterjee 1986: chapter 2. 29 A very similar argument seems to be at work in Lata Mani (1990; 1998), but there is a difference here: Mani's commitment is to women and feminism, and not to cultural nationalism in any shape or form. 30 See, in this context, Tanika Sarkar (1992) for a very different discussion of women's subjectivity, agency, and their representation. 31 On male anxieties in the colonial context, see Mrinalini Sinha (1995). 32 Viswesaran (1996). In her project Viswesaran agrees with Gayatri Spivak that 'all representation is overdetermined by a structure of interests,' but she has to know how it is so. So she asks, 'What are the places subaltern speech is denied; the ways in which it is contained; the moments when an act of speech might puncture, even rupture, official discourse?' (Viswesaran, 1996: 84). Her subalterns are, obviously, women, and women of lower classes. 33 On this issue of women as 'signs' of the nation, see Jasodhara Bagchi (1985, 1990). 34 On 'Bengal Renaissance' and social reform, see Susobhan Sarkar (1985). Sarkar characterizes the 'Bengal Renaissance' in the following way: 'The impact of British rule, bourgeois economy and modern Western culture was felt first in Bengal and produced an awakening known usually as the Bengal Renaissance. For about a century, Bengal's conscious awareness of the changing modern world was more developed than and ahead of that of the rest of India. The role played by Bengal in the modern awakening of India is thus compatible to the position occupied by Italy in the story of the European Renaissance' (13). A main feature of this modernist thought was an insistence on social reform, especially for women. For Sarkar this renaissance is seen as a positive phenomenon and the basis for a modernist nationalism and society for India. 35 This dangerous phenomenon of religious and communalist revivalism underpinning a certain type of nationalism, especially the hinduization of upper class/caste women's conduct, has been written about by Uma Chakravarty, Tanika Sarkar, and Jasodhara Bagchi, among others. 36 On the theme of Indian women's agency in the context of nationalism, see Viswesaran (1996), but also Janiki Nair (1994) and Suruchi Thapar (1993).

78 Himani Bannerji 37 For the Age of Consent Act, see Bannerji (1998c). For details of the debate surrounding it, see Meera Kosambi (1991). 38 Dagmar Engels (1996). She writes: 'After 1900 many Hindu girls were sent to school for the first time. The idea of social progress had become acceptable and was no longer identified with giving up Hindu religion and becoming a Brahmo. In the second half of the nineteenth century the debate over the curriculum had become increasingly critical of "male" education for women. Gradually a compromise was struck between "male" and "female" curricula, between an academic education for boys and a domestic education for girls' (167). 39 See Bagchi (1985). 40 On 'home and the world/ see Chatterjee (1990: 239-43): 'But the crucial requirement was to retain the inner spirituality of indigenous social life. The home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality' (243). These same ideas are discussed in Chatterjee (1993a). In this context see also Dirks (1993) and Nandy (1983). 41 For documented evidence of violence against Vidyasagar, see Sarkar (1997e). 42 See Chatterjee (1993a: chapter 7), which relies largely on Binodini's memoir Amar Katha [My Story]. This was recently translated into English and published by Kali for Women, translated by Rimli Bhattacharya. 43 On the topic of women's double subjection by the male patriarchal community and the colonial state, see Uma Chakravarty (1996). She speaks of 'dual structures of authority' of local caste patriarchy and the 'new statutory laws' of the colonial state: 'Both structures upheld the authority of the patriarchal family, and its property forms even though they were apparently dissimilar and at times in conflict with each other' (1996: 206). Also on the issue of control of women, see ibid. For Balgangadhar Tilak, the famous nationalist leader of Maharashtra, and many others, 'it was the husband and the traditional hindu community who were to decide how to manage the sexuality of the wife; neither the state, nor the liberal reformers, nor even the women themselves, had the right to do so' (213). 44 On Ilbert Bill details, see Mrinalini Sinha (1995). 45 On 'home rule/ see Sumit Sarkar (1983). 46 On Sarala Debi Choudhurani, see Radha Kumar (1993). 47 On swadhin and paradhin, and the general implication of women's language of freedom and domination, see Susie Tharu and K. Lalata (1993). 48 These issues, particularly regarding morality, are discussed at length in Tapan Ray Choudhury (1988).

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Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland DANA HEARNE

Introduction The history of Ireland since the Norman invasion of 1169 is a history of colonization culminating in the Act of Union in 1800 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. From the late eighteenth century until Partition in 1921, and the creation of two autonomous parliaments - one in Dublin and one in Belfast - nationalist struggles were waged.1 Initially these struggles were spearheaded by Protestant leaders but, following the Act of Union, nationalism in Ireland became increasingly identified with Catholics. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century the major constitutional struggle of the Irish Parliamentary Party was the struggle for Home Rule. With the founding of Sinn Fein in 1905, separatist politics began to compete with the more conservative aims of the Parliamentary Party. It is within the context of the struggle for Irish Independence and the loyalist resistance to that struggle that the feminist movement in Ireland began. Initially the movement in Ireland was closely allied to the British movement, but in 1908, with the founding of the Irish Women's Franchise League, the movement began to develop in specifically Irish ways. The period from 1908 to 1922 - the pre-Independence period - is the specific focus of this chapter. I will examine how a socialist/feminist/internationalist/nationalist perspective, which viewed women's and workers' emancipation as integral to the project of nation-building, was gradually eclipsed by a conservative nationalism aligned with the Catholic Church. A central aspect of this conservative nationalist ideology was the equation of the patriarchal family with the nation. This cultural politics aligned southern Irish cultural identity with the control of

86 Dana Hearne women's sexuality, specifically in relation to reproductive issues and rights through the abortion debate. As with pre-Independence movements elsewhere, the pre-Independence period in Ireland was characterized not by a monolithic anticolonial response but by critical ferment and contesting positions. There were Unionists and Unionist/suffragists who opposed the idea of a United Ireland and whose own form of nationalism/imperialism dictated that they support the 1914-1918 War, while Republican nationalists and suffragists saw the war as an opportunity to make a bid for Irish freedom. There were also Unionist and Nationalist suffragists who were pacifists and internationalists and who opposed militarism in any form, whether in the European War or in the War of Independence, and condemned the sexism of the nationalist movements both in the North and in the South.2 For Nationalists who gave their primary allegiance to Irish Independence the challenge was against the oppression or suppression of social, cultural, and race identity. Gender oppression was a secondary concern, and one which nationalist suffragists seemed confident could be resolved without conflict in the new state.3 The radical-thinking feminists of the Irish Women's Franchise League, although themselves committed nationalists, rejected a nationalism that was not informed by feminism and socialism. They challenged nationalists, especially women nationalists, who subordinated the needs and vision of women to the allegedly greater needs of the 'nation.' Their challenge was not successful in material terms, but their feminist-socialist analyses did provide a potentially transformative vision of national liberation. England's First Colony The process of colonization dating back to the Norman Invasion in 1169 has been the key factor in the shaping of modern Irish history. It was not until the reign of Henry VIII, however, that intense efforts were made to 'settle' Ireland with English and Scottish settlers in a bid to replace the Irish Catholic population. These settlements continued right up to the end of the seventeenth century with the Cromwellian settlements and the plantation of Ulster. By 1680,80 per cent of the land had been expropriated. The northeast province of Ulster was the most intensely settled with colonists because resistance to English rule had been strongest in that area (R.F. Foster 1998: Chs. 3-5). Most settlers were Protestants, while the native population was Catholic. In addition, most of those

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 87 who worked the land were Irish peasant labourers, so the conflicts which arose between the native Irish and the settlers were both class conflicts and religious conflicts. Ireland became an 'agricultural province' of England, and English interests took precedence over Irish interests whenever those interests were in conflict. Following the victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1691,4 a system of Penal Laws was enacted which aimed to suppress the rights of Catholics. These laws limited the right of Catholics to inherit and acquire property, as well as allowing for the confiscation of property for petty offences (Wall 1994: 217-1). In addition, Catholics were disbarred from Parliament, from holding any government office, from entering the legal profession, and from holding commissions in the army and the navy. Thus, Catholics were shut out of public life and though they were free, to a great extent, to amass wealth in trade and industry, the amount of land owned by Catholics, who represented 75 per cent of the population, fell from 14 per cent in 1691 to 5 per cent in 1778. The majority of the Catholic population, the Catholic peasantry, lived in a condition of poverty and wretchedness. Not surprisingly the Penal Laws had the effect of strengthening the hold of the Catholic Church. The two professions open to better-off Catholic men were commerce and the priesthood. The number of priests increased and they became the main authority figures, especially in rural communities, as well as a major force in struggles against English domination.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, in the movements for Catholic Emancipation and Home Rule, anti-colonialism became increasingly identified with Catholicism. The Condition of the People in Nineteenth-Century Ireland By the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland was one of the most highly developed economies in Europe, with the most advanced development being in the northeast. The condition of the majority Catholic population at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, was to say the least one of profound deprivation. The population of Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century was approximately 8.2 million, an increase of over six million since 1685. The majority, 68 per cent of families in rural Ireland and 36.4 per cent of urban families, were poor and were described as 'heads of families who had no capital in either money, land, or acquired knowledge.' They included labourers, unskilled workers, and possibly small farmers with five acres of land or less. The two dominant distinctions were between those who owned the land, a

88 Dana Hearne numerically small class, and those who worked it. The catastrophe of the Great Famine of 1845-7 decimated the population. The one million who died and the one million who emigrated were concentrated in the ranks of the rural poor - the entire cottier class, those who rented small plots of land and paid the rent with their labour, was virtually eliminated. By 1851 the population had fallen to five million. Farmers became the dominant class and even though there was tremendous variation within the farmer class, they united in the land agitation (1879-82), which aimed to convert tenants into landlords. This tenantfarmer class was a bulwark of social conservatism.6 In the last two decades of the century, for poor families in the west, emigration was the best defence against poverty. In the post-famine period the peasantry had stopped subdividing their land, and the position of women, especially daughters, declined, and a demographic pattern emerged of late marriage age, high levels of bachelorhood, and emigration. The puritanism and authoritarianism of the Irish Catholic Church can be traced to the post-famine social structure, when celibacy was rigidly enforced as a means of survival. Work for women declined in all areas and they emigrated at a much higher rate than men. Rita Rhodes comments that by the end of the century, 'the daughters of Ireland had become a peripheral class.' Married women, however, had considerable power. They controlled the budget, made important family decisions, especially in relation to education, inherited farms when their husbands died, and were the emotional centre of the family. Girls did, however, get more education as a direct result of their position they were being educated for emigration - and the primary schools (95 per cent of them were free), of which there were 9,000 by 1900, provided employment for women, both lay and religious.7 The Politics of Nationalism By the end of the seventeenth century the Irish Parliament was entirely Protestant, and throughout the eighteenth century it was a colonialtype parliament subordinate to the government in London. Towards the end of the 1760s there was a growing opposition in the Irish Parliament to British interference in Irish affairs. This resistance was an assertion of Protestant nationalism. It won some legislative independence, and freedom from most restrictions on Irish industry and trade. This fuelled demands for political independence. Some sections of the Protestant commercial and professional classes (mainly Presbyterians

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 89 who had suffered disabilities under the Penal Laws), influenced by the Enlightenment and the French and American Revolutions, found common cause with Catholics. The result was a movement known as the United Irishmen, founded by Theobald Wolfe Tone, who attempted to unite Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter in support of Irish Independence. While this movement was at its height, another movement, the Orange Order, was developing along very different lines. Founded in 1795, it supported Protestant supremacy and the British connection, and organized anti-Catholic movements among the peasantry. Opposition to the United Irishmen also came from sections of the industrial working classes. The United Irish Rising of 1798 was ruthlessly crushed, and the Irish Parliament was forced to accept an Act of Union in 1800, which created legislative and economic union with Britain in the new political entity known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Irish MPs now sat in the British House of Commons. The Union increased, rather than crushed, nationalist sentiment, and nationalism became increasingly identified with Catholics. The democratic current in Protestantism manifested in the United Irish movement was defeated. Orangeism became politically dominant and religious sectarianism increased. Some Protestants continued to support the nationalist cause throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and women were active in both the United Irish movement and in the Young Ireland movement, though not as full and equal partners. The Union widened material as well as political differences between North and South to the benefit of the former. It was a crucial turning point in Irish political development.8 Major Nationalist Struggles of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century The major nationalist struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century revolved around the issues of Catholic Emancipation (under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell), the repeal of the Act of Union, land ownership, and Home Rule. The Home Rule movement was initiated by Isaac Butt in 1870, and for him meant a developed Parliament in Dublin 'for Irish affairs emphatically within the Empire' (Foster 1988: 397).9 By the late 1870s, a mass movement, led by Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, for land ownership for the people of Ireland had begun. This period also saw the development of expatriate nationalism and the emergence of a disciplined nationalist Parliamen-

90 Dana Hearne tary Party. As land reform continued into the twentieth century, the Irish Parliamentary Party focused its attention on the Home Rule debate. By 1905 it had to contend with a new movement, 'Sinn Fein' ('We Ourselves/ or 'Ourselves Alone'), under the leadership of Arthur Griffith, whose objective was defined as 'the re-establishment of the Independence of Ireland/ or 'autonomy under the crown in contrast to their own demand for a local Parliament within the British Commonwealth' (Foster 1988: 424-5; 456-7). Sinn Fein initially attracted a mixture of radical and conservative support, and in the early years it promoted cultural and economic nationalism as well as feminism and pacifism. After the Rising of 1916 it called for an independent republic and continued to represent advanced nationalism in many spheres, including the women's movement. By the 1918 general election it had become a national party, wiping out the Irish Parliamentary Party and setting up its own provisional government - Dail Eireann. Its membership was overwhelmingly young, Catholic, and generally lower middle class. In the new state, nationalist politics short-circuited Sinn Fein's former radicalism, and the social and economic issues of the labour movement and the women's movement were ignored, as were the tenets of the 1916 Proclamation (Foster 1988: 488-90; 513-15).10 A turning point in nationalist politics in the early twentieth century in Ireland was the introduction of a Home Rule Bill in 1912. The response to this by the Conservative (Unionist) Party was to adopt extra-parliamentary (and unconstitutional) tactics to oppose the adoption of this bill. By 1913, a 'disciplined, trained and armed force of Ulster Volunteers' was in place. By 1914 they constituted a formidable military challenge. The response in the South was the formation of the National Volunteers in April 1913. The labour crisis of 1913 precipitated the formation of yet another armed force - James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. The Home Rule Bill as passed in 1914 allowed options out on a county basis. Talk of partition was in the air. Before the provisions of the bill could be implemented, the First World War broke out. Ireland contributed about 200,000 recruits to the war. Sinn Fein took the view that it was a British war, and the Irish Parliamentary Party under the leadership of John Redmond took the view that Home Rule was fully compatible with loyalty to Crown and Empire. Redmond even pledged Irish volunteers 'to support the war whenever needed/ This caused a split in the National Volunteer Movement, with a large majority supporting Redmond (about 150,000) and the minority (between 3,000 and 10,000)

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 91 opposing him and forming the Irish Volunteers - radical, militant nationalists who became closely identified with Sinn Fein in the antirecruitment campaign in 1918. This gathering of militant nationalists in the South was waiting for the right moment to strike a blow for Irish independence - that moment came at Easter in 1916.11 Social Conditions for Women in Ireland in the First Two Decades of the Twentieth Century The political, social, and economic events outlined above are crucial to an understanding of the difficulties women faced in their efforts to establish an agenda geared to their own needs. In the second half of the nineteenth century, women in Britain and Ireland were involved in a variety of movements that aimed to improve the social, economic, and political status of mainly middle class women. Campaigns were undertaken for better educational and employment opportunities, to improve property rights for married women, to achieve the right to representation on public boards and local government bodies and, of course, the right to vote. By the end of the century some gains had been made in some of these areas. For example, Irish women with certain property qualifications could serve as poor-law guardians, and were granted the local government franchise. They could also sit on district councils if elected, but not on county councils. Some gains had also been made in the areas of education and work (R. Cullen Owens 1984). Education In addition to improved access to the political domain, significant gains were also made in the area of educational facilities. Women's colleges were established in Dublin and Belfast in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and in 1887 medical degrees were open to women. The Intermediate Education Act of 1878 and the Royal University Act of 1879 caused a revolution in female education, allowing boys and girls to compete on equal terms in the intermediate examinations and the degree examinations for the Royal University. The general goal of these reforms was to raise the standard of teachers, and the academic standard for girls, de-emphasizing 'accomplishments' in favour of a broader academic curriculum. In Catholic schools the religious and domestic aspects of girls' education were emphasized at the expense of the secular. By 1909, all universities were open to women.

92 Dana Hearne However, these reforms only benefited a small portion of the population. Secondary education was largely limited to the children of prosperous farmers and business and professional families. In 1905, only one child in a thousand attended secondary school. By 1911,40,000 students - one-third of whom were girls - were attending superior schools, and Catholics accounted for three-quarters of all students by 1911. In terms of curriculum, Mary E. Daly notes that most schools 'consciously or otherwise imitated the British public schools/ and by 1914, she notes, 'the Irish people strongly resembled their English contemporaries' (Daly 1981:119). Work

In terms of work for women in pre-Independence Ireland, although the range of employment opportunities expanded to include employment in railways, banks, the public service, and the professions, the largest source of female employment was domestic service, employing approximately 255,000 in 1891. This figure did not include the 139,000 unmarried women who took care of brothers and parents. Most domestic servants came from rural Ireland and were the most overworked and underpaid members of the community, earning ten pounds per year. Industrial work for women was almost non-existent, except in Ulster, where 70 per cent of the linen workers were women and children working in appalling conditions. Many Ulster families had two incomes, however, and thus were better off materially than families elsewhere who had to rely on one income. From the mid-nineteenth century, employment opened up for girls and women as shop assistants in the retail trade. In this trade, the hours were long and the wages poor, and the work was largely done by women from rural Ireland. Other employment for women included jobs as washerwomen, charwomen, dressmakers, and boarding-house keepers. Trade union organization was negligible until the beginning of the twentieth century, when James Connolly and James Larkin took it in hand. A separate union for women workers was established in 1911, and two suffragist activists, Louie Bennett and Helen Chenevix, took over the organization of this union after 1916. The position of middle-class women in the early twentieth century with regard to work was much better. There had been a dramatic expansion in employment prospects at all levels in areas such as clerical work, the civil service, and the medical and teaching professions. Mary E. Daly suggests that it is not likely that many married

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 93 women were working in these sectors. In her view, because the ideal of the full-time homemaker had gained ground, an income-earning wife 'was probably only acceptable in the lower reaches of the working classes and among farm labourers.'12 Independent Women's Organizations The early 1870s marked a new departure in terms of the public presence of women in Irish political life. Anna Parnell, the sister of the famed Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell, took over the leadership of an organization called the Ladies Land League, established in 1880 to replace the male leadership in the event of the men being jailed. The women ran this land war along revolutionary lines at a time when Parnell and his fellow parliamentarians had moved away from their earlier radicalism. The men's contemptible treatment of the women on their release from prison left Anna Parnell and the Ladies of the Land League with a deep scepticism about the ability of Irish men to work alongside women in the independence movement. The women who became politically active in the following decades carried the memory of that experience with them. In the wake of the disbanding of the Ladies Land League, the national Land League was established. Women were explicitly excluded from that organization. The men clearly considered women to be 'unmanageable revolutionaries.'13 At the beginning of the twentieth century, women whose first priority was the nationalist movement found themselves excluded from all of the nationalist organizations with the exception of the Gaelic League, one of the major organizations of the Cultural Revival. This exclusion spurred them to organize their own movements. The most notable of these was Inginidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Erin), founded by Maud Gonne in 1900. The primary aim of this movement was 'the re-establishment of the complete independence of Ireland.' In addition, it planned to develop a sense of national pride in Irish children and to 'combat in every way English influence, which is doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people.' By 1911, under the direction of Helena Moloney, Inginidhe na hEireann established its own newspaper - Bean na hEireann (Woman of Ireland). Such well-known members of Inginidhe as Constance Markievicz and Sydney Gifford were major contributors to this publication. Its orientation was nationalist, socialist, and feminist also, in that it called for 'the complete removal of all disabilities to our sex.' Their

94 Dana Hearne sympathies lay with the physical force tradition of Irish Republicanism. They rejected parliamentary politics and they also rejected the suffragist position of giving priority to women's demands over nationalist demands (Ward 1997: 69-70). The paper lasted until 1911. Eventually Inginidhe was absorbed either into Sinn Fein, Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen's Council), or into the Labour movement, especially the Irish Women Workers Union. Cumann na mBan was formed in April 1914 as a direct result of the Volunteers' refusal to accept women into their movement, although the men assured the women there would be work for them to do. Their position would be one of subordination to the men's movement, and they accepted one Volunteer's suggestion that fund-raising would be one of their major tasks. As Ward puts it, 'the political arena was to be reserved for men, while the women's role was to "put Ireland first," by helping to arm the men' (Ward 1983). Nationalism or Feminism? Interest in the women's movement, as distinct from the nationalist movement, was not widespread in Ireland until 1908 when a new suffrage society, the Irish Women's Franchise League (IWFL), was formed by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, two women who described themselves as feminists, socialists, pacifists, and nationalists. The founding of the IWFL was important strategically because, among other things, it aimed to make the movement in Ireland more distinctly Irish and, as Cousins remembers, they had no desire to work under English women leaders. The formation of the militant IWFL (inspired by the militant approach of the Women's Social and Political Union in Britain) was met with hostility by such prominent nationalist women as Constance Markievicz, both because of their connection with the English movement and because they insisted on giving priority to the suffrage cause over the nationalist one of Home Rule. Margaret Cousins explained this stand, arguing: 'We were as keen as men on the freedom of Ireland/ but those men showed 'no recognition of the existence of women as fellow citizens/ This tension between the suffrage cause and the nationalist cause was ever-present. The leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was hostile to the suffrage movement. The policy of Sinn Fein, the militant nationalist movement, in refusing to acknowledge the right of Britain to govern Ireland, had serious repercussions for the suffrage movement. As Hanna Sheehy Skeffington observed, the tension caused 'such good rebels as Constance Mark-

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 95 ievicz and Helena Moloney and many other women 'whose natural sympathies should have been with us/ to adopt a position of opposition in terms of "priorities and strategies"' (Cousins and Cousins 1950; Sheehy Skeffington 1975). The primary goal of the IWFL was to have votes for women incorporated into the Home Rule Bill for which Ireland was then struggling. When it became clear in April 1912 that the Irish Party had not included this demand in their Home Rule Bill, the IWFL requested permission to present its case to the National Convention to be held in Dublin that same month, in order to 'allow the delegates to give a direct mandate to the Irish members.' Permission was refused. The League declared that, having been denied the right by Irish men to express their opinion, they would concentrate their energies 'on getting a large and vigorous mandate from the women of Ireland on the urgent necessity for the inclusion of women in the Home Rule Bill as co-electors of any future Irish Parliament.' A mass meeting of Irish women was held in Dublin for this purpose in June 1912, with suffrage societies from all over the country represented - twenty-nine in total, including eight from Ulster. Labour was represented by the Irish Women Workers Union and the Ladies' Committee of the Irish Drapers Assistants Associations. Nationalist women included Constance Markievicz and Jennie Wyse Power, the vice-president of Sinn Fein. Even though the issue of Home Rule was fraught with difficulty for Ulster Unionist women, the general consensus at this meeting was that women must be accorded the same rights as men, that they had too often subordinated their own demands to the interests of party politics, and they would do so no longer. A resolution to this effect was sent to every cabinet member and to all Irish MPs. The resolution was totally ignored. This was the signal for the Irish Women's Franchise League to initiate militancy in Ireland (Cousins 1984: 52-62). Between 1908 and 1912 new suffrage societies were formed, and by 1912 there were five major societies in existence. The membership of these societies is an important indicator of how representative of the whole of Ireland they were. The oldest society, and the one affiliated with the United Kingdom's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, was the Irish Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association with a membership, overwhelmingly non-Catholic and middleclass, of about 750. This society was non-party and non-militant.14 The Irish Women's Franchise League (IWFL) had a membership of about 900, was militant, non-party, and not affiliated with any other society,

96 Dana Hearne Irish or English. Margaret Cousins described the membership as 'a cross-section of all the classes, political parties, religious groups and avocations open to women in those days' (Cousins 1984: 52-62; Irish Citizen, May 1912). We can deduce from later reports in The Irish Citizen that a substantial number of IWFL members, perhaps even a majority, were Catholics, though not necessarily practising Catholics, and if there were any working-class members, the number would have been very small. The Irishwomen's Suffrage Society, Belfast had a membership of several hundred and was most likely mainly, if not entirely, Protestant. The Irishwomen's Suffrage Federation was non-party, nonmilitant, mainly Protestant, and had a membership of 200-300. The Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (a branch of the English non-militant organization) had a membership of approximately 700 in 1912, was entirely Protestant, and supported the Conservative Unionist Party. The number of societies grew in the next couple of years, but it was not until 1915 that a Catholic Suffrage Society was formed - the Irish Catholic Women's Suffrage Association. The founding members (one of whom was Mary Hayden) hoped that this society would draw in Catholic women who had so far stood aloof from the movement because the existing non-militant societies were 'almost entirely led by Protestants.' This society reached its high point in 1917 with a membership of 167. Thus, in 1912, the proportion of Catholic to non-Catholic suffragists in Ireland could be estimated at roughly onethird to two-thirds - very significant figures in view of the fact that Catholics accounted for approximately 75 per cent of the total population of Ireland at that time. This proportion did not change greatly over the movement's remaining years. What we see, therefore, is a mainly middle-class movement with a relatively small presence of Irish Catholic women. Irish Catholic women who did participate in the public life of the nation at this time for the most part did so, most energetically, within the nationalist movement. For example, the greater part of the support of Catholic women went to Cumann na mBan, which started with sixty-three branches around the country in 1914, and reached a peak of seven hundred and fifty branches - about nine thousand committed, activist members - by 1921.15 The Irish Citizen: The Movement Newspaper The year 1912 marked an important year in the history of Irish feminism, for in this year a suffrage newspaper - The Irish Citizen - was

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 97 established. Two men were responsible for the editorial content of the paper, while two women, though frequent contributors to the paper on a range of issues, were for the most part engaged in feminist activism. Most of the contributors to the paper were women. This paper was open to debate from feminists of every perspective, but it was run by the husbands of two of the most radical-thinking feminists in the movement: Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Gretta Cousins, who had founded the militant Irish suffrage society, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in 1908. All four described themselves as feminists, socialists, pacifists, and nationalists. Their first allegiance was to feminism, and their organization, more than any other group, attempted a radical critique of all axes of discrimination, and proposed a role for Irish women in an independent country which would allow for their active participation at every level of state and society. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins were both university graduates, and both had been members of the IWSLGA. Sheehy Skeffington was born in 1877 and brought up in a strongly Catholic and nationalist family. After she graduated, with distinction, from university she took up a teaching career. With the formation of the IWFL in 1908, she devoted as much of her time as possible to feminist activism, serving as one of the founders and key contributors to the suffrage newspaper, The Irish Citizen (1912-20). Margaret Cousins was born into a Protestant Unionist family in 1878 and was the first in a family of twelve children, six girls and six boys. Her perception growing up was that the boy children were more valued than the girls, that constant childbearing was an enormous burden on women, and that the economic dependence of married women was an additional cause of their suffering. Her own life proved to be much different. She was able to pursue her own education through high school and the Royal Irish Academy of music. She lived in Dublin, away from her family, from the age of nineteen, and experienced a freedom and expansion of the mind which were not available to many young women of the time (Cousins and Cousins 1950; Ward 1997). James Cousins was born into a Protestant family in Belfast in 1874. Finding the narrow world and sectarian prejudice of his parents repulsive, he moved to Dublin in 1897, where, in the illustrious company of Yeats, Joyce, George Russell, and others, he made his mark in the Irish cultural revival. He was a poet, dramatist, and teacher, as well as a feminist, pacifist, socialist, and nationalist. Francis Sheehy Skeffington was born in 1878 in County Cavan to parents who were devoted Catholics

98 Dana Hearne and nationalists. He was regarded as one of the most brilliant and radical young men of his day and became a champion of the major radical causes of the time - feminism, socialism, and pacifism. When he married Hanna Sheehy, the two joined their surnames to indicate their belief in equal status for women. Always a strong nationalist, he saw the need to inform nationalism with the spirit of feminism and socialism. By 1909, both he and Hanna had abandoned Catholicism in favour of rationalism and humanism. His murder without cause or trial at the hands of a British army captain in Portobello barracks on Easter Wednesday morning sent shock waves throughout Ireland and throughout the suffrage movement in Ireland and Britain. After Skeffington's murder, Hanna and Louie Bennett shared the editorship of The Irish Citizen until the demise of the paper in 1920 when its press was smashed by a member of the British forces during the war of Independence (Cousins and Cousins 1950; Levenson 1983; Sheehy Skeffington 1968). Key Debates in the Suffrage Movement In the pre-Treaty period the Irish suffrage movement generated debate within the pages of The Irish Citizen around a wide range of issues from the nature of the work that women do, to questions of sexuality, to analyses of the concept of equality, to questions about male-female differences and the implications of those differences for the nation as a whole, to the role of mothers in the formation of citizens, to critiques of war and the problems inherent in a male-run state. Although the great majority of people in the pre-Treaty period made no distinction between the state and the nation, feminists, especially those who had a strong class analysis and state critique, were certainly aware of the distinction, given their own total exclusion from the state. In the course of debates about the issue of male-female equality there was a distinct divide between suffragists who were primarily nationalists and those who were primarily feminists. Those who described themselves primarily as nationalists had a view of nation in which nation and state are one, whereas those who viewed themselves primarily as feminists or, more specifically, as pacifist, socialist, internationalist, nationalist feminists, viewed the state with suspicion and saw the nation as 'the people.'16 Those suffragists who gave their first allegiance to nationalism, drawing from a variety of sources, developed an extensive discussion of the crucial role of mothers in furthering the well-being of the state.

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 99 Civic Motherhood The civic motherhood debate, which was elaborated by a number of Irish suffragists, including the Reverend Savell-Hicks, James Stephens, Maud Joynt, and Mary Hay den, was certainly not original to the Irish movement. The debate was an exploration of women's function as reproducers and moulders of future citizens. In Irish history we can go back to a major rebellion in 1798 - the Rebellion of the United Irishmen - to see how marginalized women were within a similar representation of civic motherhood. The society of the United Irishmen was based on the Republican principles of the French and American Revolutions, which themselves were based on earlier classical traditions. The society was impressively inclusive in terms of its concept of citizenship, and yet women were excluded from full participation. Women were called on, however, to exhibit a proper sense of civic virtue and patriotism by being prepared to sacrifice their sons, husbands, and brothers to the public good, and to breed and nurture good citizens for the Republican cause. This whole debate which had been carried forward from the classical republican tradition was once again used in pre-Independence Ireland as a strategy to encourage nationalist sentiment in women who might imagine that their lives in the private sphere bore no relationship to the public world of politics.17 Within this discussion the weight attached to women's influence was striking. The Reverend Savell-Hicks, a Unitarian minister and suffragist, argued that since it was 'a commonplace of history' that women's moral influence had tended to "brace nations and make them great' or 'had weakened them to their fall,' every effort should be made to equip women to use their influence 'to brace the nation and make it great.' We might note that Savell-Hicks is not referring to the Irish nation here but to the British nation (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) and to the British Empire. He spoke about the necessity of fitting women, especially mothers, to take their part in the life of the state. In his view 'inspiration and power in national life' depended on the mother who was the main moulder of the child's expanding mind. Thus, the future of the British Empire and its level of excellence, as well as the mental and moral quality of all future citizens, according to Savell-Hicks, was dependent on mothers. James Stephens, a major figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance and a nationalist and suffragist, developed a similar line of argument, observing

100 Dana Hearne that women, because of their central task of rearing children, had a critical role to play in shaping the perfect state. Thus, in his view, they should, if anything, be better educated than men 'for with women rests the molding of the entire human race - male and female.' Two other suffragists and nationalists, Maud Joynt, a Gaelic scholar, and Mary Hayden, one of the founding members of the Irish Catholic Women's Suffrage Association, contributed extensively to the debate. Joynt focused on the problematic nature of a womanly ideal which confined women to the sphere of the home, designating the home as a private or personal sphere of activity in no way related to the state. Hayden looked at the relationship between the state and the family in order to outline the kind of education girls would require to fit them for their futures as citizen-mothers. Both espoused the view that the home was not a sphere apart but was inextricably bound up with the larger community. In Hayden's words the home was a training ground 'for men [emphasis added] who, in future years will sway the destinies of village, town, county and country and to a great extent will be, for bad or good, what their mothers make them.' Joynt was concerned that the prevalent 'womanly ideal' encouraged a personal, privatized version of the family which was a threat to the state in that it could lead 'to the deepest tragedy which a woman can work in a man's life - to render him unfaithful to his highest convictions.' This womanly ideal could lead, in Joynt's view, to 'domestic selfishness' - an inability to recognize that country or community have claims on women which override their own interests and which, in turn, could lead to a failure on their part to encourage self-sacrifice in members of their family. Because, in Joynt's view, only women could 'in any vital way make the family the basis of the State/ it is necessary to instil in them a sense of their moral power, and a spirit of patriotism and civic virtue, so that they can encourage this spirit in each member of the family. This was an ideal of absolute civic unity, in which the civic-minded woman was one who could see that civic needs were of a higher order than personal needs or desires (which Joynt characterized as 'a lower level of interests' so long as they were disconnected from the needs of society at large). Joynt saw this civic virtue on the part of women as a demonstration that they had entered into the spirit of the world of men, sharing 'their ideals and their sacrifices' (emphasis added). Similarly, Mary Hayden looked on mother work as crucial to the formation of men who would sway the destinies of village, town, county, and country. The ideal of civic unity promoted by these suffragists certainly

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 101 serves the cause of nationalism, whether British or Irish, but it does not necessarily serve the cause of women. On the positive side, the work of mothers was given a new status in these debates - the status of civic work; and the analyses were an important antidote to what George Russell described as 'that individualism frantically centering itself on its family and family interests.' Yet these suffragists hover on the brink of representing the state as the source of all rights and goods in a way that Russell does not. On the negative side, women's primary responsibility in the home, although redefined, is not challenged here, and the implications for women's emancipation are not addressed. Mothers carry a remarkably heavy burden in that they are charged with responsibility for the outcome of their mothering to the extent that the unity or disunity of the state is seen to rest entirely on their shoulders.18 A Radical Alternative to Civic Unity On the issue of the rights and duties of citizens, and specifically in relation to the foregoing discussion of civic motherhood, The Irish Citizen carried articles from every spectrum of opinion. The editors also made known their own strongly pacifist position and their deep suspicions of any state which did not include women in its decision-making process. In its editorials, the editors undertook an examination of this issue, and in doing so highlighted the dangers of the concept of civic unity inherent in nationalist discussions about the role of women as citizen-mothers producing 'good' citizens for the state. The editors drew from a number of sources in the development of their analysis on this issue, including James Connolly, the key socialist thinker and activist in Ireland at the time; George Russell, noted Irish philosopher and champion of the cooperative movement; John Stuart Mill; and the Fabian socialists. The collective self-government of the community as a whole, organized on a democratic basis, was the key to this socialist vision of society. For James Connolly the ultimate goal was a socialist republic; but the development of civic consciousness and class consciousness through the parliamentary franchise, local government franchise, and the trade union movement were essential first steps. He was a strong supporter of the feminist movement, and rightly saw the most progressive sections of that movement as the friends of labour. While Connolly's focus was on urban workers, Russell's was on the 'countryman,' on the grounds that in Ireland 'agriculture was of more importance than industry.' Unlike Connolly, he had little faith in

102 Dana Hearne strike action or political action, and saw the state simply as an instrument of class rule, interested only in maintaining the existing social order. His ideal state would be a corporate state embodying the national will and the national soul. It would eschew economic individualism and narrow sectarian nationalism based on race hatred. There would be an organic unity between the home (the centre of the citizen's life) and the state (the circumference), but unlike the organic unity envisaged in the ideal of republican motherhood in which women would serve the state by producing and socializing 'good' citizens, here the state would 'truly embody the will of the people.' There would be a traditional division of labour in the world of countrymen, and countrywomen, and the associations which men and women might form outside the home would reflect that traditional division. Editorials in The Irish Citizen drew from these thinkers and developed their own thinking along similar lines. For these activists, the collective self-government of the community as a whole, organized on a democratic basis, must replace the individual control over other people's lives 'which the unrestrained private ownership of land and industrial capital inevitably involves.' An editorial in the paper declared that the purpose of government was to supervise and regulate the physical, mental, and moral necessities of the community, and those necessities would be determined by the people - men and women - themselves. The government's function was to answer those needs, not to determine what they were. The whole tenor of this debate was a challenge to mainstream nationalist debates, which tended to subordinate the needs of the people to what were seen as the prior needs of the state.19 War, the State, and Women As Europe came closer to war, it was the progressive feminists of the Irish Women's Franchise League - those who gave their first priority to feminist struggles - who, faced with the realities of state power, challenged the whole basis of a theory of the state that assumed an organic unity between the family and the state. They also challenged the absence of any female point of view at the level of the state. Such a pacifist-feminist analysis pointed out that the state (government bureaucracy) and the nation (the people) did not necessarily coincide, and argued that when the state did not represent the will of the people, it was the first priority of pacifist feminists to challenge its authority.

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 103 Three tendencies emerged on this issue: a nationalist, anti-imperialist tendency which involved the struggle for an independent Irish state and the encouragement of armed civic virtue; a Unionist pro-Empire position; and a pacifist-feminist tendency, which challenged state power on the basis of its militarism and its exploitation and exclusion of women. Pacifist feminists were greatly outnumbered by women who supported the nationalist agenda. Political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain observes that in the context of war such was always the case when the discourse of armed civic virtue channelled popular sentiment 'into collective enthusiasm for the "state ideal" as the self-identity and definition of "a people.'" In the Irish case, nationalist suffragists such as Maud Joynt and Mary Hayden encouraged that identification and clearly represented the majority position. Pacifist feminists, both Unionist and Nationalist, who challenged that position, while not being sufficiently numerous to put real pressure on the system, nonetheless made an important contribution to feminist thought by exposing the illegitimacy of state power which excluded women from the decisionmaking process while, at the same time, using and exploiting their services. Those who put the nation before the issue of women's equality were responding to very strong emotional and political ties. What the pacifist feminists attempted to do was to analyse the fault lines within nationalism and militarism, and thus provide a warning to women, as Francis Sheehy Skeffington phrased it, that 'the struggle must be clothed in new forms/20 A Warning to 'Slavish' Camp Followers Pacifist, socialist, nationalist suffragists were critical of the unequal relationship between the Volunteer movement and the nationalist women auxiliaries to the Volunteer movement, Cumann na mBan. They pointed out, for example, that when the Volunteer executive was challenged to state their commitment to women's equality in its manifesto, they refused. When Agnes Farrelly, a founding member of the women's auxiliary movement, Cumann na mBan, continued to offer 'homage to the men' and 'complete allegiance and support,' even after this repudiation of gender equality, pacifist, nationalist suffragists scorned this 'slavish' mentality. A similarly subordinate position was given to the Ulster Women's Council - the women's auxiliary to the Ulster Volunteers - and both groups had been encouraged to 'put their hearts and souls into fund-raising for the men.' An editorial in the The

104 Dana Hearne Irish Citizen reminded Cumann na mBan that the women auxiliaries to the Ulster Volunteers had recently been engaged in making 100,000 pairs of pyjamas for the men, and that this was the kind of futile project that women were led into when they consented to act 'as mere subordinates to men's organizations instead of acting by themselves and on their own behalf.' The editor argued that there was an element in the Volunteer movement, perhaps a large element, which despised suffragists, and would only tolerate women who obeyed instruction. He reprinted the statement of one nationalist who had suggested, as a way of dealing with Irish suffragettes (militant suffragists), 'Why not use whips on the shoulders of those unsexed [emphasis added] viragoes? Slender, springy, stinging riding whips would serve the purpose admirably, and if freely used would teach them a lesson they are badly in need of.' This hostility reveals that there was a clearly understood sense, within mainstream nationalist ranks, of which women were 'proper' women and which were not. Just as nationalist pacifist feminists attacked the servility of militant nationalist women's relation to the Volunteers, so also did unionist pacifist feminists attack militant unionist women's servility in 'serving men in a political world solely controlled by men.' Unionist pacifist feminist L.A.M. Priestley urged women to establish their own social and political agenda. Transcending Nationalist Limitations, or The Difficulty of Uniting across the Nationalist-Unionist Divide The political aim of the revolutionary nationalists was a thirty-two county republic, and for Cumann na mBan women this aim made it undesirable, even detrimental, to have nationalist women working with unionist women on the suffrage question. Unionist women, whose political priority was to maintain the union with Britain, held a similar view. Pacifist feminists argued that, with the looming threat of partition, women might have more power in effecting a satisfactory outcome if they refused to get caught up in male-directed unionist or nationalist politics. It was an idealistic position, and as one pacifist feminist, Helen Chenevix, put it in an article in The Irish Citizen, it was a position which sought to transcend considerations of 'race, colour, religion, political affiliation or geographical location.' She felt that suffragists worthy of the name would realize that 'placing a permanent principle of human justice before the transitory interests of a particular

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 105 country, these women had caught hold of something real in the midst of a world that was grasping at shadows.' Irish pacifist feminists had indeed caught hold of something real, but the circumstances in Ireland called for a more complex approach. Ulster suffragist Dora Mellone of the Irishwomen's Suffrage Federation, revealed perhaps unwittingly, the inherent weakness in this approach to unity when she spoke proudly of the Federation's role in holding North and South together. As women of all shades of political opinion met and worked together on the suffrage question, she said, 'no-one ever asked another about her politics.' Transcending divisions is one thing, ignoring them is quite another. What pacifist feminists needed to do in the circumstances of the time was to tackle not only the inherent weaknesses in the main currents of Irish nationalism, but also the racism and domination of imperialism, since partition would be the outcome of deep divisions between Northern Unionists and Irish Nationalists, not the cause of those divisions. The tensions between the varying aspirations in Irish society were revealed once again by Dora Mellone when she spoke, some weeks after war had been declared, of her suffrage organization 'serving suffrage in a new way.' She explained that this new departure was necessary because 'the Nation was in dire peril.' The nation referred to here was not the Irish nation but rather the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Another Unionist voice, Lillian Suffern, supporting this view, exclaimed that 'the rights of citizenship are due to her, and her alone who can today say let me lose my rights in it forever, but save the nation, my children's heritage.' It was this strong and vocal attachment to Britain and the Empire that indicated to militant nationalists, such as Mary MacSwiney and Rosamund Jacob, the ludicrousness of unionist and nationalist women attempting to work together for the suffrage cause. Rosamund Jacob was enraged by unionist women who spoke 'as though Ireland were a part of England, and the women's suffrage agitation in the two countries, one undivided organization with its headquarters in London.' She found it even more inexplicable to see nationalist women advocating solidarity with their unionist sisters on the grounds that the women's movement was non-party and had nothing to do with ordinary politics, 'forgetting that the issue between Ireland and England is not a Party one, not a question of ordinary politics, but a question that concerns the very life or death of our Nation.' Pacifist feminists North and South rejected the idea of giving their primary allegiance to 'the nation' as long as women had no political power. Some warned against

106 Dana Hearne helping the government on the grounds that such help was tantamount to re-enacting women's 'fateful role of subserviency'; or 'merging our reason for existing in the natural impulse of women to help distress/ Hanna Sheehy Skeffington urged women to resist the pressure to 'be good/ and instead, struggle for decision-making power. Implicit in these arguments was a recognition that women, in response to a system whose values are not determined by them, have generally opted for inauthenticity and the 'good' of others. Sarah Ruddick, in her essay, 'Maternal Thinking/ argues that in the context of war, this implies a willingness to support the military system, 'to accept the uses to which others put one's children, and ... to remain blind to the implications of those uses for the actual lives of women and children/ It is a subordinate's reaction to a social reality essentially characterized by the domination and subordination of persons. Irish pacifist feminists wished to challenge this tendency of powerless groups towards inauthentic obedience to the values of the dominant culture both socially and politically. Many pacifist feminists, Louie Bennett for example, urged that in a crisis such as this, whatever the role of the state, the needs of the people must come first and, though anti-war in principle, wanted to make a distinction between helping the government and helping the 'nation' - that is, 'the people/ Pacifist feminist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, in response to this position, challenged the use of force by a state which used the rhetoric of protecting the nation to achieve its goal. He argued that it was 'the Government bureaucracy which tries to identify itself with the Nation' which was in danger. In his view, as noted earlier, if the state did not represent the will of the people, the first priority of the suffragists was to challenge its authority. Women in the New State In January 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to Irish and British women of thirty years of age and over (with a property qualification). The Irish Free State was established in 1921, and it may have seemed like a triumph that in the 1922 Free State Constitution, which appeared to uphold the gender equality provisions in the 1916 Proclamation, all Irish women over the age of 21 were accorded the right to vote - six years before their sisters in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, the new state showed itself to be patriarchal and church-dominated. That this would be so

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 107 was already evident in the years leading up to its formation. In her study of the period, Smashing Times, Rosemary Cullen Owens indicates that women had to struggle for even minimal representation at nationalist conventions. To combat such discrimination, a new society was formed - Cumann na dTeactaire (The Delegates Council) - to consist of women delegates to all conferences held by Irish Republicans. Its mandate was 'to watch the political movements in Ireland in the interests of Irish women/ and it promoted consultation with other Irish women's societies on matters of common interest. Despite this noteworthy effort, issues of feminist concern were increasingly submerged after 1916, as the nationalist cause drew more and more suffragists into its ranks (Cullen Owens 1984:113-35). In the 1920s and 1930s a number of pieces of repressive legislation gave cause for alarm to women activists campaigning for equality. In 1925 a motion was passed in the Dail (the Free State Parliament) prohibiting divorce. That same year another bill attempted to restrict women to the lower grades of the civil service, solely on the grounds of sex. It was defeated, but clearly the very contemplation of such a bill was an ominous sign of the government's willingness to restrict women's attempts to achieve equal access to the job market. Further restrictive legislation followed and, with the drawing up of the second constitution in 1937 - commonly called De Valera's Constitution - women's primary function as homemaker was legally entrenched. De Valera's Constitution recognized 'the special position' of the Catholic Church and 'the primacy' of women's role as mother and homemaker. It also prohibited divorce, instituted a criminal code which prohibited 'artificial' methods of contraception, and outlawed abortion. The restrictive clauses in the new constitution did not go unchallenged by women's groups, but those challenges met with no success, not only because the protest groups were small, but also because, as Yvonne Scannell points out, De Valera's views on women's rights 'reflected those of most people [in the Irish Free State] at that time.' It is important to emphasize here that with partition the Free State became a much more homogeneous society than any state would have been had it encompassed the whole island. With partition then, the impetus to accommodate Irish diversity was gone and, as Irish historian Terence Brown remarks, 'In the twenty-six counties the field lay open for the nationalist majority to express its social and cultural will unimpeded by significant opposition from powerful minorities.' Thus, the influence of the Catholic majority - fully 95 per cent of the 26 coun-

108 Dana Hearne ties - who had remained almost totally outside the suffrage movement, was fully exerted on social-policy issues. As Northern writer Edna Longley notes, 'Straitjackets tend to remain in place after the Revolution unless their removal has been intrinsic to the Revolution' (Cullen Owens 1984:113-35; Scannell 1988; Brown 1981; Longley 1994). Partition had a negative impact not only for women and for feminism, but for other radical groups as well. The loss of revolutionary socialist leader James Connolly and the revolutionary pacifist, socialist, feminist leader Francis Sheehy Skeffington in the aftermath of the Easter Rising in 1916 was a severe blow to the labour and feminist movements. But, unlike the fortunes of feminism, the fortunes of labour grew between 1916 and 1920, and the trade union movements increased its membership from 5,000 in 1916 to between approximately 100,000 to 120,000 in 1920. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921 partitioning the country, two-thirds of the fighting men (the Vo unteers) and the majority of Cumann na mBan, and of course all republican socialists and feminists, opposed it. Against this divided opposition the Irish bourgeoisie - non-socialist Unionists, Home Rulers, the Old Sinn capitalists, and the Catholic hierarchy united behind it. When the Irish Free State was established, all traces of socialism were dropped, and although women's organizations continued the struggle for equal treatment in the state their efforts met with little success. In 1927, the largest Republican Party - Fianna Fail (anti-Treaty) - recognized the Saorstat Dail (The Irish Free State), and took office in 1932. made a number of reforms, including reform of the welfare system, abolishing the oath of allegiance to the king, and producing a constitution and legislation that was thoroughly anti-feminist. It formed strong cross-class alliances and a strong alliance with the Catholic Church. Historian D.R. O'Connor Lysaght wonders what might have happened if Labour had been prepared to occupy the place left for it by Connolly in the leadership of the Irish national revolution. Ireland might have had a workers' republic, but there is nothing to suggest that such a republic would have included Connolly's feminist vision. Indeed, the struggles by women's groups against Fianna Fail's anti-feminist legislation got little support from Labour. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington's courageous struggle to maintain the revolutionary path right up to her death in 1946 is ample testimony to the deeply entrenched conservatism and anti-feminism of the state that finally came into being and that is only in recent years showing signs of becoming the nation she had dreamed of (O'Connor Lysaght 1991; Ward 1997).

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 109 Can Feminism and Nationalism Coexist? One of the most prominent suffragists of the time, Louie Bennett, pacifist, socialist, and founder of the Irish Women Workers Union, lamented the fact that the suffrage movement 'hardly ruffled the surface of Irish life' and that feminism, instead, 'awoke to the call of militarism' (Fitzgerald 1924). She accused Cumann na mBan of using emancipation to follow on the heels of men, of being 'purely a fighting force with no constructive ideals for nation or class.' Helena Moloney, a socialist nationalist feminist who gave her primary allegiance to the nationalist struggle, defended the wisdom of putting national independence first, saying, 'It is surely sound citizenship to put the welfare of the whole Nation before any section of it,' and yet ten years after the founding of the Irish Free State she admitted that the status of women was 'a sorry travesty of emancipation' (Cullen Owens 1983). How could it have been otherwise when the male power elite for the most part were hostile even to the minimum feminist demand of the franchise, and when the majority of women who supported the nationalist cause did not appear to be making many demands on their own behalf? Thus, even though many of these women were also involved in the suffrage movement, they were not necessarily involved in a sexual revolution (namely, the overthrow of patriarchal institutions, ideology, and socialization processes), and clearly they did not make any distinction between the nation (the people) and the state (government apparatus). Eric Hobsbawm, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, makes the point that 'All versions of nationalism before 1914 had in common... a rejection of the new proletarian socialist movements ... because they were proletarian and internationalist, or, at the very least, non-nationalist.' He goes on to say that 'nothing seems more logical than to see the appeals of nationalism and socialism as mutually exclusive, and the advance of one as equivalent to the retreat of the other. But/ he argues: 'Men and women had, and still have, several attachments and loyalties simultaneously including nationality. It was only when one of these loyalties conflicted directly with another that a problem of choosing between them arose' (Hobsbawm 1990). Hobsbawm goes on to talk about alliances between nationalism and religion; alliances between national and social discontent; working-class parties which simultaneously supported nationalist and socialist demands. 'It is clear now/ Hobsbawm observes, 'that there were socialist parties which were, or became, the main vehicles of their people's national movements/ Indeed, as he correctly remarks,

110 Dana Hearne 'the unity of socialist and nationalist liberation of which Connolly dreamed in Ireland - and which he failed to lead - was actually achieved elsewhere.' Hobsbawm's focus here is on class and nationalism, but the unity of socialism and nationalism alone would not and has not achieved the liberation of women. What Hobsbawm does not allude to here is James Connolly's feminism. In fact, Connolly was most closely allied with the pacifist socialist internationalist feminists in the preIndependence period. This was a minority position, though many aspects of it were shared by a wide range of political activists. It seems clear that, philosophically, it was the only perspective which had the power to remove the strait] ackets of the multiple patriarchies of unionism, Protestantism, nationalism, and Catholicism (Hobsbawm 1990; Longley 1994). Conclusion What we have seen in this exploration is that 'the social question' and the 'woman question' were both marginalized by the nationalist struggle, and this marginalization profoundly affected the kinds of states that were formed in Ireland, North (1920) and South (1921). The centrality of the churches both North and South insured that an already conservative state apparatus would be buttressed by the churches' ultra-conservative views on gender issues and the proper roles of women and men. In the South, where the population was now 95 per cent Catholic, the Catholic Church played a major role in the evolution of a state which was sexually repressive and which promoted a separate sphere ideology for women and men. In the North, where the population was one-third Catholic and two-thirds Protestant, a 'Protestant State for a Protestant people' was established and, as Rosemary Sales observes, 'sectarianism is a powerful force in maintaining women's subordination.' The most telling factor in the failure to achieve an equal place for a feminist agenda in pre-Independence Ireland is a deeply entrenched gender ideology in which, as Sales notes, women are given 'a symbolically central and materially peripheral place' in nationalist discourse. Although independent-minded nationalist women countered images of Ireland as a suffering mother, or as a potential victim of rape and sexual conquest defended to the death by her brave sons, with images of strong Gaelic heroines and potentially influential mothers, the longstanding tradition of seeing feminism as anti-nationalist and a foreign import was not dislodged. The radical feminist thinkers of the Irish Women's Franchise League insisted, in vain, that if nationalism were to

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 111 be truly liberationist it would have to be informed by feminist and socialist perspectives. There are signs in the most progressive sections of the Republican movement in Northern Ireland today that this tradition of antagonism towards feminism is being rejected and the term 'Republican feminism' is being used to describe a feminist-socialist nationalism. Nationalism, in the words of Republican feminist Clare Hackett, is 'the daily struggle against the injustice of British and Unionist Rule and the fight for equality and control over our lives.' Another telling factor which emerges in this discussion of pre-Independence Ireland is the problem which Sales refers to as 'the politics of avoidance/ whereby unity among women on feminist questions was achieved by avoiding rather than confronting the political issues that divided them. To engage rather than avoid these issues would have meant confronting the politics of imperialism both as it was manifested at the parliamentary level and indeed, within the relationship of feminists North and South and in the relationship between Irish and British feminists. Gisela Kaplan argues that in periods of the most intense nationalism, as in pre-Independence Ireland, women's issues and 'national' issues have most often been mutually exclusive, except in countries where the 'woman's question' was seen as a national question, as it was in Italy and Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish Women's Franchise League saw the 'woman's question' in exactly this light but were overwhelmed by the majority position, a bourgeois nationalism in which feminist issues, as well as class issues, were viewed as antithetical to the real struggle: independence in a united Ireland (Sales 1997; Kaplan 1997). Notes 1 By this time the two political entities were the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Irish Free State had a population of 3.5 million and was 95 per cent Catholic; and the Northern Ireland State had a population of 1.5 million - two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic. 2 See M. Ward's biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1997) for a discussion of Hanna's ambiguous position in relation to pacifism. 3 This optimism was frequently based on the presupposition that once Ireland was free, the people would revert to a pre-colonial position, where, it was asserted, women had not only lived on an equal plane with men, but also had been warriors and queens of fame and prestige. 4 This was the battle which gave the Protestant William of Orange suprem-

112 Dana Hearne

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14

15 16

acy over the Catholic James II and which continues to be celebrated to this day in Northern Ireland on the 12th of July by the Orange Order and its supporters. In 1840 there was one priest for every 3,500 lay people, and one nun for every 7,000; in 1960 the figures were one priest for every 600 lay people and one nun for every 400 (see Lee 1987; Clear 1987; Magray 1998). By 1917 almost all land in Ireland was owner-occupied, mainly in five- to ten-acre holdings. For an excellent study of this period and its impact on women, see R. Rhodes (1991). The pace of change in Ireland in the post-famine period was remarkable. By 1914 Ireland had one of the densest networks of railway in the world (3,000 miles of track); the population had decreased to 4 million people; the Irish language was gradually confined to the west of Ireland - only 16,873 people were monoglot Irish speakers by 1911. The illiteracy rate decreased spectacularly until, in 1911, it was 9 per cent (7 per cent in Leinster - the east; and 15 per cent in the west - for children 9 years and over). For a complete overview of the period, see R. Rhodes (1991). For thorough overviews of this period, see R.F. Foster (1988), R. Sales (1997); D. Keogh and N. Furlong, eds. (1998). See R.F. Foster (1988:305-6) for details of the provisions of Home Rule up to 1912. See also M. Ward (1997) for an account of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington's disillusionment with Sinn Fein. See Foster (1988:467-73) for an account of the complexities of this period. It should be noted that Connolly's army had approximately 200 volunteers, including a small number of women. For full accounts of these issues, see M.E. Daly (1981); M. Hearn (1988). An additional point of interest, Daly notes, is that in Ireland the First World War did not bring women into non-traditional jobs as happened in other countries where the rupture in the old norms was thus accelerated. The term 'unmanageable revolutionaries' was used by Eamonn de Valera to express his view of women and was used by Margaret Ward as the title for her book (1983) on women and Irish nationalism. For the story of Anna Parnell, see D. Hearne, ed. (1984) and J. Cote and D. Hearne, eds. (1995). The Irish Suffrage and Local Government Association was founded in 1876 by Anna Haslam as the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association, and changed its name to the IWSLGA in 1901. The Irish Citizen, February 1915. The information about Cumann na mBan comes from A. Sheehan (1990). I read this to mean the idea of popular sovereignty. The idea of nation and

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 113 the idea of state frequently are used interchangeably. It is clear that these radical thinkers were making an important distinction between the two. For a valuable discussion on the problematic nature of the two concepts, see W. Connor (1994). 17 For an interesting discussion of women's role in the Irish Republican movement, see N.J. Curtin (1991). 18 These discussions ran in The Irish Citizen over a period of four or five weeks from 8 lune to 6 July 1912. They form part of a tradition of thinking about civic virtue and the role of mothers in the state. We hear echoes of lean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Oilman, as well as a range of other late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thinkers such as historian Louis Aime-Martin and French Catholic thinker Joseph de Maistre (see S. Groag-Bell and K. Offen (1983: Ch. 5). See also the very influential Irish thinker George Russell (1937). Also, for an extremely interesting discussion of the connection between civic motherhood and militarism, see J. Elshtain (1987). 19 See James Connolly (1910); George Russell (1937). That Connolly should have given his life to a bourgeois revolution is still a puzzle to historians. According to R. F. Foster, tradition has it that as Connolly walked into the General Post Office in 1916 he warned his Citizen Army, 'If we should win hold on to your rifles, because the Volunteers may have a different goal' (Foster 1998:478). 20 See Elshtain (1987). It is important to note that these progressive feminists were deeply committed to Irish independence, but the nation that would emerge would have to be a nation for all its citizens. Thus feminist, socialist, and internationalist principles had to be fundamental to the vision of that nation. 21 These discussions took place in the pages of The Irish Citizen from August 1914, when War was declared, to August 1915. Francis Sheehy Skeffington also wrote an important essay in the paper on 12 September 1914 called 'War and Feminism' in which he explained why, in his view, feminism is necessarily bound up with the destruction of militarism. See also S. Ruddick (1982) for a discussion of maternal thinking. References Brown, Terence. 1981. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History: 1922-1979. London: Fontana. Clear, Caitriona. 1987. Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

114 Dana Hearne Connolly, James. 1910. Labour in Irish History. Dublin: Maunsel. Connor, Walker. 1994. 'A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a ...' In John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Cote, Jane, and Dana Hearne. 1995. 'Anna Parnell.' In Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy, eds., Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th Century Ireland. Dublin: Attic. Cullen Owens, Rosemary. 1983. 'Votes for Ladies, Votes for Women: Organized Labour and the Suffrage Movement, 1876-1922.' Saothar 9, p. 45. Cullen Owens, Rosemary. 1984. Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women's Suffrage Movement 1889-1922. Dublin: Feminist Information Publications. Curtin, N.J. 1991. 'Women in Eighteenth Century Irish Republicanism.' In Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O'Dowd, eds., Women in Early Modern Ireland. Edinborough: Edinborough University Press. Daly, Mary E. 1981. Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800. Dublin: Educational Co. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. New York: Basic. Fitzgerald, William, ed., 1924. The Voice of Ireland. Dublin. Foster, Robert Fitzroy. 1998. Modern Ireland 1600-1792. London: Allen Lane. Groag-Bell, Susan, and Karen M. Offen. 1983. Women, The Family and Freedom. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hearn, Mona. 1988. 'Life for Domestic Servants in Dublin, 1880-1920.' In Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy, eds., Women Surviving: Studies in Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Dublin: Poolbeg. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, Sean, and Paul Stewart. 1991. 'Labour in the Post Independence Irish State: An Overview.' In Sean Hutton and Paul Stewart, eds., Ireland's Histories: Aspects of State Society and Ideology. London and New York: Routledge. Kaplan, Gisela. 1997. 'Feminism and Nationalism: The European Case.' In Lois A. West, ed., Feminist Nationalism. New York and London: Routledge. Keogh, Daire, and Nicholas Furlong, eds. 1998. The Women of 1798. Dublin: Portland. Lee, Joseph. 1987. 'Women and the Church since the Famine.' In Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha O'Corrain, eds., Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimensions. Dublin: Arlen House, The Women's Press. Levenson, Leah. 1983. With Wooden Sword: A Portrait of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Militant Pacifist. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Longley, Edna. 1994. 'From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands.' In A Dozen Lips. Dublin: Attic Press.

Nationalist Ideologies in Pre-Independence Ireland 115 Magray, Mary Peckham. 1998. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O'Connor Lysaght, D.R. 1991. 'A Saorstat Is Born: How the Irish Free State Came into Being.' In Sean Hutton and Paul Stewart, edsv Ireland's Histories: Aspects of State Society and Ideology. London: Routledge. Parnell, Anna. 1984. The Tale of a Great Sham. Ed. Dana Hearne. Dublin: Arlen House. Rhodes, Rita. 1991. Women and the Family in Post-Famine Ireland: Status and Opportunity in a Patriarchal Society. New York: Garland. Ruddick, Sarah. 1982. 'Maternal Thinking.' In Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family. New York: Longman. Russell, George. 1937. The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. New York: Macmillan. Sales, Rosemary. 1997. Gender, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland. London and New York: Routledge. Scannell, Yvonne. 1988. The Constitution and the Role of Women.' In Brian Farrell, ed., De Valera's Constitution and Ours. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Sheehan, Aideen. 1990. 'Cumann na mBan.' In David Fitzpatrick, ed., Revolution? Ireland, 1917-1923. Dublin: Trinity History Workshop. Sheehy Skeffington, Francis. 1914. 'War and Feminism.' The Irish Citizen. 12 September. Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna. 1975. 'Reminiscences.' In Owen Sheehy Skeffington and H. Sheehy Skeffington, eds., Votes for Women. Dublin. Sheehy Skeffington, Owen. 1968. 'Francis Sheehy Skeffington.' In Owen Dudley Edwards and Fergus Pyle, eds., 1916: The Easter Rising. London: MacGibbon and Kee.. Wall, Maureen. 1995. The Age of the Penal Laws.' In T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History, 217-31. Cork: Cork Mercier.. Ward, Margaret. 1983. Unmanageable Revolutionaries. London and Kerry: Pluto. - 1997. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: A Life. Dublin: Attic.

Conflicting Loyalties: Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan SHAHRZAD MOJAB

Introduction This chapter examines the conflict and coexistence between nationalism and feminism, and critiques theoretical positions that reduce this complex relationship to one of harmony. While the trend of conflict is growing worldwide, some theorists try to resolve it by feminizing nationalism and constructing 'feminist nationalisms' (West 1997). I will argue that these theorizations overlook both the political limitations of nationalism and the serious constraints that class and social and economic formations impose on the emancipatory projects of feminism. The chapter begins with a survey of the relationship between feminism and nationalism in Kurdistan, the homeland of one of the most persistent nationalist movements of the twentieth century. Placing this case within the socio-economic and historical context of feminist struggles, I will argue that nationalism, despite of its diverse forms and projects, works as an obstacle to the broad democratization of gender relations. Stating the Problem Nationalism and feminism, as ideological and political formations, emerged with the rise of capitalism and its modern politics and culture. Although products of the same social and economic system, their relations were conflictual from the very beginning. Nationalism in power, in its most celebrated seats in France and the United States, excluded the majority of the nation - women in general, poor men, slaves, aboriginal peoples, and immigrants - from the promised 'universal' citizenship rights (Nelson 1998). Its practice of building the

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 117 nation-state in these countries allowed no illusions about the class and gender bases of nationalism - democracy, popular sovereignty, or the rule of the nation were the same as the rule of the male members of the bourgeoisie (Lister 1997; Pettman 1996; and Yuval-Davis 1997). The 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen/ the most important product of France's bourgeois democratic revolution of 1789, denied women the status of citizens. Equally significant was early feminist reaction to this exclusion, such as Olympe de Gouges's 1791 'Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of Citizenesses' (Greenspan 1994). It is no accident of history, however, that women in France were among the last in the West to gain suffrage rights, in 1944. The challenge to the patriarchy of nationalism came first from women within the bourgeoisie, those in a position to access literacy, education, and political action. This form of feminist consciousness, aptly labelled 'liberal feminism/ did not challenge the economic relations which sustained inequality. This feminism is distinguished by its agenda for reforming gender relations within the limits set by class relations, and without challenging the project of nation-building. One may argue that liberal feminism has already achieved its goals of formal gender equality. Although this feminism's relations with nationalism were more conflictual than harmonious in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reverse is true today. In other words, the union of nationalism and liberal feminism preceded the current theorizations of feminizing the nationalist agenda into 'feminist nationalism.' Long before formal equality was achieved (the extension of citizenship rights to women), late-nineteenth-century Marxism pointed to the limitations of legalism (equality through legal reform only) by emphasizing the powerful ties that bind gender relations to economic and class interests. Today, a host of radical positions, ranging from socialist feminisms to critical legal theory to democratic theory, see a very complex relationship between the formality of equality and the reality of inequality. Feminist legal theorists of a critical orientation reject the neutrality of law and its autonomy from class relations (MacKinnon 1993; Ward 1997; Weisberg 1993). They question treating law as an 'autonomous, self-contained system' uninvolved in the production and reproduction of power relations, and argue, instead, that 'liberalism's ideology of rights' is 'a vehicle for the legal system's maintenance of the status quo' (Weisberg 1993: 403,404). Two centuries of nation-building in the West, under pressure from feminist movements, has failed to produce equitable gender relations.

118 Shahrzad Mojab This failure poses a challenge to feminist theory and practice everywhere. Is the record of non-Western nationalisms different (Jayawardena 1986; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Waylen 1996)? Can nationalism be feminized? Can patriarchal power be seriously challenged without changing the class structure of the nation? The case examined in this chapter reveals that, compared with the West, some of the contemporary nationalist movements are in a much weaker position to allow even formal, legal equality between women and men. The Particularity of the Kurdish Case Several features distinguish the Kurdish nationalist movement from other cases examined in this book. First, the Kurds are a non-state nation. Second, their 'national homeland,' Kurdistan, is divided among four neighbouring countries (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria) with islands of Kurdish population in Armenia, Azerbaijan, northeast Iran, and a sizeable presence in Germany and other European countries. Turkey, Iran, and Syria have denied the Kurds a distinct national identity, and strongly oppose any degree of Kurdish autonomy. Third, the Kurdish nationalist movements did not emerge as anti-colonial 'national liberation' struggles. They have, rather, been at war primarily with Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Still, parts of Kurdistan came under the direct rule of colonial powers - Britain in Iraq (1918-32), France in Syria (1918^6), and Russia in Caucasia (since the nineteenth century). Also, since Turkey is a NATO member and a major U.S. ally, Western powers strongly support Turkey's repression of Kurdish demands for self-rule. In this sense, Kurdish nationalism is in conflict with both Western powers and Middle Eastern states. Another important feature is the persistence of feudalism, which was, until the early 1960s, the dominant mode of production in the rural areas of Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan, and still survives in parts of the countryside. The demand for self-determination has been raised by diverse social forces, ranging from the urban (petty) bourgeoisie to feudal and tribal leaders. Equally significant is the brutal suppression of various nationalist movements, which has driven political activism underground or into the safety of the mountains. And finally, Kurdish nationalism has been predominantly secular. Although Kurdish nationalism can be readily distinguished from other cases, the state of research on the topic is equally distinct. Research is paralysed by the dearth of sources, especially written and

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 119 print literature, and of archival material. The harsh policy of 'linguicide' in Turkey (since 1923), Iran (since the 1920s), and Syria (since the early 1960s) treated writing and even (in Turkey) speaking in Kurdish as crimes against the 'territorial integrity' of the state. In the absence of any open political space, let alone a 'public sphere' or civil society, political activists were not able to publicly express their views and engage in debate about self-determination. Under these conditions, most of the clandestinely published journals, pamphlets, and leaflets were not widely distributed, and have either disappeared or are difficult to access. Oral historical research is equally impractical since few people dare to share their memories of events, even when they were not directly involved in them. Another distinct feature of the literature is its neglect of theory. In the West, there is a tradition of research on the Kurds dating back to the eighteenth century. Missionaries, travellers, diplomats, philologists, and army officers loom large in this literature. Research is growing at a faster pace in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the failure of Turkey to suppress the Kurdish nationalist movement. During this century, social scientists, especially a number of anthropologists (e.g., Henry Field, Edmund Leach, William Masters, Frederick Earth, Henny Harald Hansen, Wolfgang Rudolph, Wolf-Dieter Hiitteroth, Martin van Bruinessen, and Leszek Dziegiel) conducted important fieldwork, mostly in Iraqi Kurdistan. No one has yet attempted a serious critique of the diverse Western literature on the Kurds. It is not difficult, however, to discern, impressionistically at least, that colonial interest shaped much of the earlier literature. The social science literature, especially the anthropological fieldwork, has received very little critical attention. Again, it would be safe to claim that this research was shaped by its historical and intellectual context. Despite references to women, the theory and methodology of these works lack a gender component. And when gender is present it is mostly in relation to marriage and kinship structures. The limited framework of marriage and kinship was further constrained by lack of a class perspective informed by property relations and modes of production. Only the work in the late 1950s of Henny Hansen, the Danish anthropologist, was entirely devoted to the women of Kurdistan. Hansen's Kurdish Woman's Life is certainly a landmark in the study of Kurdish women. However, even Hansen's work is not informed by a gendered theoretical position. It is obvious that, at the time, anthropology or other social sciences were not yet touched by feminist theory

120 Shahrzad Mojab and methodology. Gender was being studied, but a gendered theoretical and methodological framework was not yet present. Political scientists who have studied Kurdish nationalism lack a gender perspective and, until quite recently, were atheoretical and ahistorical in their approach. The Soviet literature on the topic was equally a-theoretical and descriptive; it failed to apply, creatively, the controversies within Marxist and Leninist theories of nationalism. The Western theoretical debates of the mid-1990s remained within the framework of the liberal-democratic theories rooted in the inadequate distinction between 'civil' and 'ethnic' nationalisms.1 Although these debates contribute to a better understanding of Kurdish nationalism, a gendered research trend is now taking shape. The recently established International Kurdish Women's Studies Network has provided much needed space for engendering Kurdish studies (Mojab 1997; 2000). From 'Ethnic' Awareness to 'National' Identity The Kurds have lived in their present territory for at least two millennia. Long before the rise of nationalism, they developed a strong sense of distinctness from the neighbouring peoples, especially Turks, Persians, and Arabs who, at various times, ruled over them. The first clear statement of literary and linguistic awareness dates back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the literati of the time, the mullahs and their students, began to write poetry in their native tongue. By the end of the sixteenth century, a Kurdish prince wrote the first history of the Kurds, Shamf-Nameh (1597), which he called the 'story of the rulers of Kurdistan.' The book began with rulers who were independent and claimed royalty, and ended with those who were heads of semi-independent principalities. At the time of writing, most of Kurdistan was under the direct rule of the mini-states which had to pay taxes and provide military support to either the Ottomans or the Persians. The prince's goal was to prove that the Kurds had a tradition of governing. A century later, the poet Ahmad-e Khani criticized the principalities for failing to unite under a Kurdish king and put an end to the 'subjugation' of the Kurds by the Ottomans and Persians. However, the principalities failed to unite, and the last six powerful mini-states were overthrown by the Turks and Persians in the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, ideas of modernity, nation, and nationalism began to be articulated by the emigre and exiled Kurdish

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 121 community in Istanbul. The most vocal intellectual was a poet, Haji Qadiri Koyi (18157-97), who was a mullah by training. Members of an uprooted princely family published the first Kurdish newspaper in 1898. This literate elite was clearly influenced by the nationalist movements of the Balkans, East Europe, Asia, and Africa. They were also inspired by the emerging Turkish nationalism, which demanded the transformation of the absolutist Ottoman regime into a constitutional monarchy. They cooperated with the Committee of Union and Progress, a group of liberal reformers who sought a constitutionalist regime. The first Kurdish political organization was established in 1908, when the ruling sultan had to declare his respect for a constitutional order. The early nationalist thinkers, Koyi and the landed nobility, advocated either independence or self-rule within the Ottoman empire. They were impressed by the progress of Europe and Japan, and inspired by the national liberation movements of the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Sudanese, and other subject peoples of the empire. Koyi strongly denounced religious superstition, illiteracy, and the indifference of the clergy to reading and writing in their native tongue, Kurdish. He encouraged the Kurds to learn modern, Western sciences and technology, and to write and compile scientific and literary works in their native language. On the Road to Bourgeois Democracy Although the nationalist circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were of mixed social backgrounds - including uprooted princely families and exiled feudal lords, religious leaders (sheikhs), urban nobility, and petty bourgeoisie - their demands were clearly inspired by the achievements of west European democracies and the national liberation movements of the time. Their problematization of the state of the Kurdish nation was centred on the question of sovereignty. The main problem was political subordination, and the panacea was independence from Istanbul or self-rule within the empire. Other problems - domination of feudalism-tribalism in rural areas, undeveloped capitalist relations in urban areas, cultural underdevelopment (illiteracy, religious superstition, the inferior status of the Kurdish language), and the subjugation of women - were all subordinated to the project of self-rule. The most important obstacle to democratization, that is, feudal dom-

122 Shahrzad Mojab ination over the majority of the nation who were peasants, were ignored in the platform of various nationalist parties. Women appeared, however, in early nationalist journalism as important tools for building the Kurdish nation. The external enemy, the Ottoman state, was the target of nationalists, but the system of serfdom which chained the whole nation was ignored. Indeed, nationalist concession to feudalism and tribalism was profound. Instead of calling for land reform and rallying the support of the peasants, nationalist activists almost always have taken refuge in the safety of the villages, where feudal and tribal leaders, more than the central government, exercised power (Hassanpour 1999). Women in the Nationalist Project The 'Kurdish nationalist movement/ called Kurdayeti in Kurdish, does not imply a single or undifferentiated movement. Given the conditions of Kurdistan, briefly outlined above, it seems obvious that it consists of diverse movements and uprisings in different historical contexts. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I do not examine nationalist approaches to women chronologically or country by country. Instead, I construct the story by citing evidence from various movements and periods. Despite of the diversity of movements and contexts, however, there is remarkable consistency in nationalist theories and practices in Kurdistan as well as in other cases examined in this book. The earliest articulations of Kurdish nationalist position on women is found in the emigre and exilic communities of Istanbul, recorded in their poetry and press from the late nineteenth century to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The journals published during this period were banned and largely destroyed during and after the suppression of a revolt in Turkey in 1925, although some of the material has been reprinted in Europe and Kurdistan since the 1970s. The earliest expression of the idea of equality of men and women came in the late nineteenth century in the poetry of Haji Qadiri Koyi, the apostle of modern Kurdish nationalism mentioned briefly above. He wrote in one of his poems, 'Why has the prophet said, "Seek knowledge even if [you have to go to] China?" There is no difference between males and females in this saying. If the mullah forbids it, he has no religion' (Koyi 1986: 187). However, Koyi's idea of equal access to education, apparently inspired by his knowledge of the West, was supported by the authority of religion rather than by an interest in a regime of

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 123 rights and citizenship. Indeed, women had not been granted full citizenship status in any country when Koyi passed away in 1897. After the Turkish nationalists, Young Turks, succeeded in imposing a second constitution on the Sultan in 1908, the anti-Ottoman national liberation movements in Europe began a new offensive for independence. The Kurdish nationalist elite, too, actively engaged in asserting that the Kurds constituted a nation distinct from the Turks, and worthy of the right to self-determination. Journalism was a major means for constructing this identity. The press tried to establish the Kurds as a nation with their own history, language, literary tradition, and culture. This war of identity was difficult to wage in so far as Ottoman Turks emphasized that Albanians, Kurds, Turks, and other Muslims belonged to. the same community of religion (milla), that is, Islam, and were, therefore, required by their religion to be loyal to the Ottoman, Islamic, rule. Indeed, Ottoman sultans, who conquered much of the Muslim world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, claimed that their empire was the continuation of the Islamic caliphate. Thus, the construction of Kurdish identity entailed confrontations with religion, Turkish nationalism, and the Ottoman state. As far as the Kurds themselves were concerned, nationalists did not have to convince them that they were different from the Turks. Indeed, Ottoman oppression was harsh, and few of those who suffered would have tolerated it if they had had a choice. Still, minimizing the common bond of religion was high on the agenda. The nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century readily rejected the common bond of religion by ceaselessly referring to the authority of the seventeenthcentury poet and mullah, Ahmad-e Khani, who ethnicized the religious term milla, generally used to designate non-Muslim peoples such as Armenians. Khani identified Muslim peoples such as Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Persians as millel (plural of milla), that is, ethnically rather than religiously distinct peoples. Koyi, himself a mullah, wrote about the Ottoman rulers: 'It is a requirement of the climate and soil of the Ottoman land... [that its] magistrate is the bandit of the city, judge is the thief at large, ministers and deputies are wolves, the subjects (re'iye) are a herd ... Their oppression of the public is [so] ubiquitous, the subjects have perished' (1986: 140).2 This corruption/oppression occurred, according to Koyi, because the Ottomans were 'strangers to Islam, and were friends of the West (fereng)' (1986: 140). Thus, religion could readily be rejected as a bond eternally tying the Kurds to Ottoman rule. Still, nationalists had to convince others, especially the Ottomans and

124 Shahrzad Mojab Western powers, that the Kurds were different from the Turks because they had a distinct language, an authentic literature, their own homeland, and a history of self-rule. Although ethnic distinction, usually inscribed in language, culture, and (later in the post-World War I period) race, could distinguish Kurds from most non-Kurdish peoples, it is significant that nationalists decided to ethnicize women in order to win the war of identity. Women became the property of the nation and the locus of national honour and purity, and the only means of its physical and cultural reproduction. At the same time, they continued to be the property of their husbands. Thus, women formed an inseparable tie between the male individual and the nation. The female property was more inviolable than other material properties; the 'honour' of the husband was unequivocally tied to the 'chastity' (namus) of his wife and other female members of the family. The husband and all members of the family or even of a tribe had the duty to protect their namus. Even before the rise of modern nationalism, the seventeenth-century poet Ahmad-e Khani used the word namus in a political sense. In his strong indictment of the princes for failing to unite under a Kurdish king to form an independent Kurdish state and to liberate the Kurds from Turkish and Iranian domination, he reminded them that 'the protection of namus [of the Kurds] is the duty of rulers and princes, what is the fault of poets and the poor?' The Emergence of the 'Women's Question' The identification of a 'women's question' came first in 1913 in the nationalist magazine Roji Kurd, 'Kurdish Sun.' Ergeni Madenli, a male writer, wrote about the 'successful and illustrious women's movement' in northern and western Europe, and noted that some thinkers called 'our century, the "woman's century."'3 He complained about the way the family had 'become the source of all [kinds] of individual and societal moral corruption and convulsion.' The writer was impressed with the achievements of 'womankind' in northern Europe, and believed that women in western and central Europe and the United States were 'emulating and following their Northern sisters/ Their aim was to 'acquire their rights in life and their survival, and to obtain their political and social rights.' The link between women and nation-building was clearly stated: 'Nations' and peoples' degree of progress is always proportional to the position of [their] women. This rule must always be taken into consideration all the time, at every moment.' Conscious of the 'despicable' situation of 'women's position vis-a-vis men/ the

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 125 writer believed that this 'sickness' could be cured through the provision of modern education. Women as Reproducers of the Nation The magazine Roji Kurd soon stopped publishing as a result of the onset of World War I, which brought extensive destruction, famine, and loss of life to most parts of Kurdistan. The Russian army conducted massacres and abducted hundreds of women for abuse. The Ottoman regime, after committing the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915, forcibly transferred several hundred thousand Kurds to Turkish areas in the west in 1917. While many perished during the operation, this forced migration increased the Kurdish population of Istanbul. The first women's organization, the Society for the Advancement of Kurdish Women, was established there in 1919. Writers who contributed to the magazine Jin (Life) and were associated with the Society envisioned women as mothers of the nation and educators of children who sustain the nation. Congratulating the formation of the organization, Aziz Yamulki wrote that women could instil 'religious and national manners and national traditions in children/ and by doing so they would 'nourish' both 'the seeds for their later attachment to their race and nation/ and 'their loyal devotion to their sixthousand-year historical nation' (cited in Klein 2001: 28). A similar political line was stated in a poem composed by Ebdurrehim Rehmi: The present century was asked: 'Your science and progress is thanks to whom?' It replied, 'It is because of women.' Thus, they never stop, working night and day So they can raise children; the very existence of the country depends on them Humanity, since the origin of its creation, neither good nor bad One's goodness or badness depends on motherly nurture. It is the Command of the Prophet: 'Heaven is under the feet of the mothers ...' (A. Yamulki, cited in Klein 2001: 29).

One of the few women who wrote to the Kurdish press was a teacher whose discourse on women and the nation was to some extent different from the male writers. Emphasizing her pride in being a Kurd, Mollazade wanted to be a strong woman. Feeling 'sick with the unluckiness of not being able to be a strong woman teacher as I had longed for/ she

126 Shahrzad Mojab wrote: 'I want, with a bright outlook, to see our future generation possess all human and individual rights' (Klein 2001). Women as Source of Linguistic and Moral Purity Education in a nation aspiring to self-rule had to be conducted in the native tongue. In the late nineteenth century, Koyi had emphasized knowledge of the language as a defining feature of Kurdishness: If a Kurd does not know his/her language, Undoubtedly, his/her mother is infidel and father adulterous ... If a Kurd does not like his/her language, do not ask, 'Why' or, 'How?' Ask his/her mother where she got this bastard.

Koyi castigated the clergy who did not teach and write in Kurdish. He encouraged the literati to collect Kurdish ballads and use them for creating literary works which would elevate the status of the language and bring it on par with Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. The nationalists in the post-war period were equally preoccupied with cultivating the language through teaching, journals, and books, compiling dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks, reforming the alphabet, and collecting and publishing oral and manuscript literatures. While Koyi located Kurdishness in oral literature, the post-war nationalists located linguistic purity in rural women and illiterates. One intellectual interested in language reform referred to a universal rule: The nation's pure language is the language spoken by the non-intellectual masses, and especially the elderly women' (Khalil Khayali, cited in Klein 2001: 31). The rural-urban distinction is significant. Urban women were seen by nationalists as less purely Kurdish, since living in the city, where the Ottoman state was present, had Turkified their language and way of life. According to one nationalist writer, the 'seriousness and strength, the activity and freedom, or, more correctly, the moral qualities, which distinguish the village women are features that can rarely be found among city women/ It is significant that this early literature emphasizes the linguistic purity of peasants, too, but ignores oppressive feudal relations in the countryside. One of the contributors to Roji Kurd wrote about the need to mechanize agriculture in Kurdish villages, but did not mention the feudal relations of production, which, based on

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 127 cheap and forced labour, would have made this project almost impossible to carry out. Women also helped distinguish the Kurds in terms of their moral and political purity. Nationalists, like many Western observers of the Kurds, claimed that Kurdish women enjoyed more freedom than Turkish or Arab and Persian women. This distinctness was visible, they claimed, in the way they combined loyalty to the husband with the freedom to associate with other men, in the absence of veiling, in mixed dances, and even in a tradition of acting as rulers of tribes. The claim of relative freedom of Kurdish women has been questioned, however (Mojab 1987). The Redivision of Kurdistan in 1918 I have written so far about the beginnings of Kurdish nationalist struggle in the Ottoman empire. In eastern Kurdistan, which was under the rule of Iran, there was no comparable nationalist activism. However, the defeat of the Ottoman empire in the war led to the redivision of the western parts of Kurdistan between the newly created states of Iraq under the British, Syria under the French, and Turkey. In 1920, the victors of the war imposed on the sultan the Treaty of Sevres, which stipulated the creation of the League of Nations and the creation of two states, Armenia and Kurdistan, in the present territory of eastern Turkey. This plan never materialized, however, because the geopolitics of the region changed. Turkish nationalist forces, led by Kemal Ataturk, reorganized, drove out the Greek forces occupying parts of western Turkey, seized state power, and declared it a republic in 1923. Moreover, Soviet power was established in the Caucasian region by 1921, and Western powers were interested in strong, centralized, military states on the borders of the Soviet Union in order to prevent the spread of Bolshevism. Thus, they signed a new treaty with Turkey in 1923 which ignored the creation of Armenian and Kurdish states. The Republican Turks were no less repressive than the Ottomans. A Kurdish revolt led by a combination of nationalist and religious leaders in 1925 was brutally suppressed. This was followed by a series of nationalist uprisings in the 1930s and the early 1940s, all of which involved extensive military operations. The suppression of the 1936-7 revolt constituted, according to some historians, genocide. The Kemalists pursued a harsh policy of linguicide and ethnocide after 1925. The redivision of Kurdistan brought the Kurds under diverse politi-

128 Shahrzad Mojab cal systems. While the small Kurdish population of the USSR (about 60,000 in the 1920s) experienced socialist transformation in their autonomous region in Nagorno-Karabagh, a Kurdish religious and feudal leader, Sheikh Mahmoud, declared himself 'King of Kurdistan' in Iraqi Kurdistan, then under the British mandate. In Iran, a centralist military dictatorship, the Pahlavi monarchy, came to power in 1925 and pursued repressive policies similar to those of Turkey. However, the policy of linguicide and ethnocide practised from 1925 to 1941 created a strong nationalist response among the Kurds and Azerbaijani Turks. When the USSR and Britain occupied Iran in 1941 to prevent German domination of the country, the Iranian army in Kurdistan disintegrated. The Kurds and Azeri Turks celebrated the fall of Reza Shah's dictatorship and its replacement by his son's rule, which was less effective owing to Soviet presence. There was a flourishing of Kurdish and Azeri nationalist activism. The USSR did not encourage this nationalism, since one goal of the occupation was to use Iran as a transit site for Western logistic support of the Soviet resistance to the German invasion of the USSR. Women between the Two Wars After the overthrow of the principalities by Ottoman Turkey and Iran in the mid-nineteenth century, the first autonomous Kurdish regime was established in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1919-23. This autonomous government, dominated by feudal and tribal leaders, had no room for women or even discussion of women's role in Kurdish society. Its active journalists celebrated the power of the printing press and education, but was death silent on women. Although the British Mandate officials pursued a policy of restraining Kurdish nationalism, they allowed limited freedoms in the use of the Kurdish language in primary education (on a very limited scale) and in the media. The Arab Iraqi state formed under the British Mandate grudgingly tolerated this freedom while implementing an Arabization policy. Although these freedoms did not amount to a 'public sphere' or a 'civil society,' there was a limited opening for journalism and debates about many political issues that did not 'threaten the security of the Iraqi state' and its neighbours, which had their own Kurdish 'problem.' Still, women and their status did not loom large on the agenda of Kurdish nationalists. Larger political issues, that is, those associated with self-rule, were the main concerns.

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 129 The most important development in Kurdish nationalism happened in the early 1940s. In Iranian Kurdistan, a new organization, 'Society for the Revival of Kurdistan/ was established in 1942. After the end of World War II, Soviet forces refused to evacuate Iran as had been agreed. With their support, the Azerbaijani nationalists declared an autonomous government, and the Kurds declared their own autonomous republic under the leadership of the Kurdish Democratic Party. Women in the Kurdish Republic of 1946 Despite of the short life of the Kurdish Republic, this experience is considered by nationalists as the most significant turning point in that it was the first experiment in self-rule led by a political party, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDP).4 It was formed in August 1945 out of the dissolved nationalist organization, the 'Society for the Revival of Kurdistan/ known in Kurdish as 'Komeley J.K.' This organization was clandestine, and propagated the formation of a Kurdish state comprising all parts of greater Kurdistan. It issued numerous leaflets explaining its position on political issues, and engaged in extensive clandestine publishing, including leaflets, poetry, Kurdish calendars, and a very popular magazine, Ni§tman (Homeland). It is viewed as the first Kurdish party with a modernist, nationalist outlook. The founders were male members of the urban petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie; the organization considered tribalism and feudalism or, to be more exact, non-nationalist tribal and feudal lords, as obstacles to the development of the Kurdish nation and its political movement. Although the party did not call for land reform, it was the first organization to stress the need for ameliorating the conditions of peasant life. Komele's main external enemies were the four nation-states of Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, which ruled over Kurdistan and denied the national rights of the Kurds. The main internal enemies were tribalism, illiteracy, and economic and industrial underdevelopment. Within this framework, women occasionally were called upon to join men and participate in the liberation of the motherland. In one poem, 'The Conversation of Sisters and Brothers/ published in Ni§tman, a sister tells her brother that he should not tolerate subjugation because all other peoples have gained freedom, and that he must sacrifice his life and property for the cause of the motherland. The brother answers:

130 Shahrzad Mojab Dear dede [sister], O sensible and beautiful Kurdish girl, May your chastity never be stained. Lenin rose up and the oppression of the veil was eliminated; You are, however, still confined under the full veil. Girls among all peoples are free now, It is only the Kurdish girls whose rights are trampled upon. Break the fetters and chains on your feet, My dear dede, with the help of your brother! For the sake of the motherland, God helping, Let's work together like sisters and brothers. Like Joan of Arc, rise up like men, Root out the enemy from the Kurdish land! (1944a: 23-4)

This theme is repeated in much Kurdish nationalist poetry throughout this century. The Kurdish female is chaste and beautiful, but like the men, is oppressed by the enemy. Helped by men, she can, like Joan of Arc, liberate the motherland. The same issue of the magazine carries a brief article on a 'Kurdish woman poet, Heyran Xanimi Dunbuli/ who composed in Persian, and apparently is mentioned only to demonstrate Kurdish women's intellectual development (Ni§tman 1944a: 29-30). The last issue of Ni§tman carries a photograph of two Kurdish women executed in Turkey. The verses under the photograph provide a typical depiction of women by many nationalists: Whoever swears at another person will say, 'Go, Your cowardice (bexireti) be like women, your pants be like women's!' Where in the world is there a boy like these two women, To be a symbol, in politics, for the cause of the motherland? These two saplings were sacrificed for the Kurdish motherland, How happy is the boy who can be like these two girls! (1944b: 10)

This poem glorifies only those women who fight the enemy, but at the same time subjects all women to patriarchal symbolic violence renouncing them and, even their clothing, as 'cowards/ Women and men can achieve equality only in their struggle for the liberation of the nation; in the case of women, however, sexuality is inseparable from the project of nation-building. The purity of the nation and its strength are inseparable from the chastity (dawenpaki, be namusi) of its women. If the motherland should be clear from foreign domination, women, too, should be virgin and legally owned. Komeley J.K. aimed at the building of a single Kurdish nation through

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 131 the formation of a state ruling over greater Kurdistan. The nature of this state was not clearly explained, although the organization declared 'democracy' as one of the articles of its constitution (maramname).5 However, Komele was preoccupied with only one tenet of democracy - independence from foreign rule. The organization paid lip service to other requirements of democratic life, such as women's emancipation, and did not even consider the abolition of feudal relations as a goal. Women were the property and the chaste mother of the nation. In addition to propaganda through the medium of print and poetry, Komele successfully used theatre to promote the nationalist cause. The first theatrical performance in the northern parts of Iranian Kurdistan, scripted and staged by Komele, was Dayk-i Ni§tman, or The Mother of the Homeland.' In this drama, the Motherland - chained, dressed in black, and with white hair - implores her 'sons' to liberate her from the yoke of Iranian, Turkish, and Iraqi rule (bringing tears to the eyes of the audience). In the next act, the sons of the Motherland answer her call, take up arms, put the occupiers to run, and liberate their 'Mother.' The final act depicts the coming to power of the Motherland - the formation of the Kurdish state. The five acts of the play and the intermissions were interspersed with the poetry of Haji Qadiri Koyi and several nationalist songs. Repeatedly performed to full houses in Mahabad and other towns, the impact of the play was profound. It survives as a moment of glory in the folk memory of the region. Not surprisingly, the entire cast was male. Komele, the producer of the play, was unable or unwilling to find a female to play the role of the Motherland. Even some of the young male actors and performers met disapproval from their well-to-do fathers who looked down at entertainment and performing as lowerclass occupations incompatible with their honour and reputation.6 The Politics of Nation-Building in the Kurdish Republic The Republic, the first Kurdish experiment in forming a modern-type autonomous government, was in practice independent of the Iranian state. The founder of this mini-state was not a tribal or feudal leader, but rather a political party created by the middle strata of the urban population. The main change in the organization was the omission of the demand for creating a greater Kurdistan. This was largely due to Soviet presence in the region, which supported Azerbaijan and Kurdistan autonomous governments but was committed to protect the 'territorial integrity' of the Iranian state.

132 Shahrzad Mojab Demographically, the capital city of Mahabad was dwarfed by the countryside, which was under the rule of tribal leaders and feudal landowners. The Kurdish Democratic Party did not act to reform, let alone abolish, feudal land relations, leaving the peasantry under conditions of serfdom. This proved disastrous. Politically, the majority of the population remained under the direct control of feudal and tribal leaders; the peasants were not, therefore, citizens of the republic enjoying equal rights with the people of the capital city. Moreover, tribal and feudal lords were given important positions in the military and civil administration. Although they had experienced considerable repression under Reza Shah's government (1925^1), many joined the republic unwillingly, and were waiting for its fall and the return of the central government. They feared Soviet presence, the threat of communism, the growing power of urban Kurdish politics, and their eventual submission to the authority of the city. Although urban nationalists did not call for the abolition of feudalism and tribalism, they were critical of the oppressive conditions in the countryside and resented the betrayal of the nationalist movement by tribal chiefs. The republic inherited the administrative system created in the city of Mahabad and the region by the Iranian state. The party Kurdicized the civil bureaucracy, while a 'national army/ led mostly by Kurdish officers who had deserted the Iraqi and Iranian armed forces, replaced the army and gendarmerie. A cabinet and a council were formed, and a number of cultural institutions, such as libraries, a radio station, cinema, printing presses, and journalism, were established. The party expanded its activities by forming a youth section and a women's organization. Measures were taken to improve the position of small and poor shopkeepers. However, feudal land relations in the village remained intact, in spite of the promise of intervention in the interests of both the peasants and the landlords (Farshi 1995: 31). Women as Mothers of the Nation The territory of the republic was limited to the northern parts of Iranian Kurdistan. The capital was the city of Mahabad with a population of about 16,000, and the most important towns had an average population of about 2,500. According to government records, the population of Mahabad was, at the end of 1948, about 16,455, of which 8,189 were women and 8,266 were men.7 In the absence of census data from the period, it is difficult to pro-

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 133 vide accurate information on the life of women. The first national census of Iran, taken in 1956, provides vital statistics figures for the city and the entire county (Mahabad Census District). Despite the lapse of ten years, the city had not changed visibly. According to these data, ten years after the republic, only 10 per cent of the female population 10 years and over was able to read and write. Only 6.4 per cent of the females (85 out of 1,321 persons) of the age group 25 to 34 (who were 15 to 24 years old in 1946) was literate in 1956. The literacy rate drops sharply to 3.7 per cent for the age group 35-44 and to 0.8 per cent for the age group 45-54 (Mojab 2001). In its constitution published in December 1945, less than two months before the establishment of the Republic, the Kurdish Democratic Party declared that in Kurdistan as well as in all provinces of Iran where Kurds had lived 'the interests of the masses of the people should be safeguarded on the basis of democracy' (Kurdish Democratic Party: Chapter 2, Article 4). The document also declared, in the same language used in Komele's constitution, that the 'goal of the Party is to extend democracy and, on that basis, struggle for the prosperity of human beings' (Article 5). The equality of men and women is stated unambiguously: Tn all political, economic and social affairs women should enjoy equal rights with men' (Chapter 4, Article 21: 30-1). During its turbulent life, the Party was not able to hold a congress as promised in its constitution. Neither did it create the mechanisms for elections and parliamentary democracy. The party, headed by the president of the republic, was the legislator, executive, and judiciary power. Its gender policy was conditioned by the nationalist outlook of the male leadership, and by the way the leaders and women tried to change the status quo within the social, cultural, and political context of the time. Formation of the Women's Party Although the leadership of the republic denied the peasants - the majority of the population - democratic rights, women were given considerable prominence in the life of the capital city. During the celebrations of the 'independence [serbexoyi] of Kurdistan' on 18 January 1946, which was reported in several issues of the newspaper Kurdistan, twenty-three major figures of the republic addressed the audience. Two of the sixteen were women, and the girl's school was one of the four schools who sang patriotic songs.8 The women speakers, both pri-

134 Shahrzad Mojab mary school teachers, celebrated the independence of Kurdistan, and emphasized the need for women's active participation in the struggle. Khajijey Sadiqi, one of the teachers, said: 'Now, dear sisters, let's look at our dear brothers and extend our hands to one another, because I see that the motherland is expecting her daughters to begin action and education so that we also catch up with our dear brothers; today's world needs girls and boys to join each other like sisters and brothers for the liberation of the motherland/9 This political line, already articulated in Komele's publications, was repeatedly expressed in both women's and men's speeches, the press, and poetry. The children's magazine, 'Girugali Mindalam Kurd' ('Kurdish Children's Prattle'), for instance, published this poem: TO GIRLS Kurdish girl! You, too, get educated like your older brother. Never retreat from education, my dear. Your brother needs your help, He is quite in need of your beautiful thought. Do not fail me, get educated, Because whoever is illiterate is an animal. (1946: 7)

About two weeks later, the teachers of the girls' school organized a rally at the hall of the Education Office in order to celebrate 'independence and introduce the Leader of Kurdistan.'10 According to the newspaper's report (which was published after the formation of the women's party), the 'Lady of the Leader of Kurdistan' (yay Pe§eway Kurdistan), the wife of the president, many of the women members of the KDP, and people from all walks of life participated in the event. The [first] Lady gave a speech on 'the advancement and guidance of women.' She then presented a pair of gold earrings to the principal of the girl's school, Wilma Sayadiyan. In her talk, the Lady reminded everyone of the need for women to learn from the women abroad who 'were a great help to their husbands in the Great War/ She said: 'We should not always expect our husbands [to give us] money, clothes and gold. Dear ladies, do not make your children miserable (bedbext kirdin) by [keeping them] within the four walls at home; send them to school so that they won't be like illiterate men and women and so that they can defend their national rights and especially so that Kurdish women will be able to be on the same footing with the civilized women abroad/ The next speaker, the principal of the girls' school, empha-

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 135 sized the education of women and their unity with men in order to enable their nation to make progress. The third speaker, 'Ismat Qazi, 'the daughter of the Leader of Kurdistan/ said that we, women, should have made several celebrations of our freedom so that 'all the world knows that Kurdish women love freedom much more than men do.' The fourth speaker, Kobra 'Azimi, a teacher, strongly criticized the women of Mahabad: Since we are more retarded (le pa$iri), our task is tougher and our load will be heavier. We should know how to take this heavy load off our backs. Of course, it will be taken off with the power of reason and science. But, unfortunately, the people of Mahabad do not see it that way. For example, they make their young daughters miserable (bedbext) and illiterate and tell them to weave a pair of socks or sow a head-dress or else they say: 'I do not send my daughter to school because she will be ill-mannered.' Dear ladies, what is our ill-manners? Those who think this way are very far from the truth and have not understood the question. For instance, I myself have heard in many gatherings whenever they see us, they say: 'Here are the teachers/ and they look down at us. If we look at the writings and books by foreigners, we will be very sad and ask, 'God, are we human beings just like them? Why should we not have in a city like Mahabad a woman surgeon, physician, dentist, or even a certified midwife?

The speaker then called on women to enjoy the downfall of Reza Shah's dictatorship and 'not to hesitate in sending their daughters to school/ where they would be taught in their mother tongue. Later, the participants donated money to the KDP. The newspaper carries a list of 41 women who donated money and gold to the party.11 Interestingly, all the women are identified by the names of their husbands, for example, Mrs. [of] Mr. Salih Shatri. One week later, Kurdistan reported the convention of a ladies' conference in Mahabad: The Ladies Conference at the Kurdish-Soviet Cultural Society On Friday March 8, 1946, a conference was convened at the KurdishSoviet Cultural Society by the Lady of the Leader [i.e., Presidentl of Kurdistan for enlightening the minds of the women's community of Kurdistan; invited to this conference were a large number of the ladies [wives] of the members of the central committee [of the Kurdish Democratic Party], teachers and students of the girls' school, employees of the Democratic

136 Shahrzad Mojab Party, and government offices, merchants and shopkeepers (kesebe). First, the Lady of the Leader of Kurdistan talked about the importance of education for women and girls and the progress of the Union of Soviet Women, and the need for becoming acquainted with them. Next, a large number of teachers and students and other ladies made speeches. The conference which had begun at 2:00 p.m. was over by 5:00.12

No mention is made of March 8, International Women's Day, which was always celebrated in the Soviet Union. A week later, a women's organization was established. There was a brief report in Kurdistan: 'Formation of the Democratic Party (by the women of Kurdistan) On Friday March 15,1946, a large number of thoughtful women of Kurdistan had been invited by the Lady of the Leader of Kurdistan, and they gathered at 3:00 p.m. in the Cultural Society, and established, under the directorship of the Lady of the Leader of Kurdistan (Lady Mina ...), the Democratic Party of the Women of Kurdistan; a large number of the women registered and undertook to pay membership fees from one to ten toomans/13 The name of the organization varies in different issues of the newspaper; for example, Union of Democratic Women of Kurdistan (Yeketi Jinani Demokrati Kurdistan),14 Ladies' Party (Hizbi Yayan)15 (1946 1: 1). The organization was, therefore, the KDP's women's wing. Far from being the outcome of a feminist movement, the women's party was created by a totally male-dominated political organization. The leading figure was Yay Mina, the wife of the president of the republic. The women's party apparently had a loose organization. Next to Yay Mina, who led the organization, were the heads (serok) of the ten neighbourhoods of Mahabad. In a report about the revenues and expenditures of the Women's Party in the third month of the spring, the names of the heads and the revenues (membership fees) of each neighbourhood are given.16 Expenditure consisted of rent, changing furniture and tablecloth, two months salary for one woman employee, three months salary for another employee, moving and charcoal, and town crier (cargi). A brief note asks interested 'literate ladies' to apply for the following positions: accountant, treasurer, secretary, and teller.18 The primary aim of the women's party was to mobilize adult women in support of the republic and the nation. Since the majority of these women were illiterate, the party organized literacy-training classes as well as informal gatherings. Other activities included fundraising for the national army, participation in marches, demonstra-

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 137 tions, and writing in the newspaper. Assistance to the national army included weaving clothing and socks for the pemerges, 'soldiers.' The women's organization conferred on the republic the image of a modern state interested in the advancement of women. Although nationalists had, since the latter part of the nineteenth century, emphasized education as a main condition for national liberation, some parents, including mothers in Mahabad, offered resistance to schooling for their daughters. Kobra 'Azimi's criticism of the parents who refused to send their daughters to school, cited above, reveals a conflict between a strong nationalist interest in incorporating women into the nation and the traditional approach, which would reproduce the pre-capitalist social order without reforming gender relations. It is interesting that the all-male leadership of the republic, especially the president himself, was more interested than many women in promoting female education. In the small town of Shino, for example, the head of the KDP inaugurated the first girls' school in the town. The report about the school written by the principal argued that 'it is necessary that all the people [of the town] thank [the KDP head] for this important service and send their daughters to this school with enthusiasm and willingness .../19 It is emphasized that a liberated Kurdistan needs educated women. Liberation, freedom, and education are inseparable. The highest achievement is to be like men. The uneducated woman is a burden on the nation and on the educated man. One man, in his article on 'educating women,' wrote: One day I was going home from the Education office ... I saw a woman who was standing in front of the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Party. She turned her face toward me and asked, in a language that is characteristic of our illiterate and simple women, 'Brother, what is this?' I thought that if I answer that this is the headquarters of the KDP, she would understand neither the 'headquarter' nor 'party' nor 'democratic.' Helplessly, I thought for a moment and said: 'Here, some of the important Kurds get together and deal with the affairs of the country ...'

The writer then argues that Kurds should not think that they have taken a big step on the road to freedom and civilization until women are educated and know about their own political and social rights (Mika'ili 1946: 4). The members of the party supported the government through financial donations and collecting money from non-members. The president once told Yay Mina that 'the queen of France had

138 Shahrzad Mojab donated her ring to the French people. Why don't you follow suit and I'm sure that this will encourage other women to financially support the republic/ The Female Property: The Urban Romanticization of Feudal Gender Relations The formation of the Women's Party was the most prominent step taken by the leadership of the KDP for mobilizing women in the nation-building process. Other actions show interest in intervening in traditional gender relations. One was a policy of outlawing and punishing certain types of elopement. The following decision taken by the National Council was regularly reprinted in several issues of the newspaper: (NOTICE) The Elopement of Girls and Women Is Prohibited The Kurdistan National Council rules that any man who forcibly elopes a married woman or [a married woman who] has not moved into [the husband's home] will be sentenced to death; if a girl is eloped the man must be killed; but if a man asks for a girl's hand and he is refused and there is no ser'i barrier [to their marriage], and [the girl] is unmarried and consenting, there is no punishment, otherwise there will be three months to three years of jail. February 13,1946, Head of the National Council of Kurdistan, Haji Baba Sheikh.20

Although this decision demonstrated the independence of the republic from the legal system of the Iranian state, it was directed mainly at the tribal and rural areas where abduction/elopement (jin helgirtin/redukewtin) was practised. Issued by a leadership organ of the republic in the capital, it was the extension of the power of the centre/ city over non-urban areas which remained under the rule of the tribalfeudal leaders. Signed on behalf of the National Council by a religious authority, it was the imposition of Islamic principles on a system of gender relations which had resisted the rules of religion. The text, both its ruling and language, is patriarchal and non-secular. The title of the notice omits both the male and his act - abduction. The decision confirms the right of a married man to the total control or ownership of his wife by sentencing to death the abductor. Its religious import is

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 139 inscribed in promulgating the sentence to death of the abductor of any unmarried girl. The decision does, however, give two concessions to women. First, in contrast to the unwritten tribal-feudal rules, in all cases mentioned in the decision, only the male is punished (see below). Second, an unmarried girl's consenting to marry a potential abductor suspends his punishment. However, if the abductor accepts the risk of imprisonment from three months to three years, he can abduct an unmarried woman (girl) in spite of her unwillingness and in spite of sar' (marriage) barriers. Information on this decision or on any other reforms of the republic is minimal. However, one rare source, Mihammad-Amin Manguri, a participant in the military administration of the republic, noted that the ruling on abduction/elopement was in conflict with the traditions of the Bilbas tribal confederacy occupying the territory to the west of Mahabad. According to this well-informed source, the people in the region considered it an 'oppressive and unpleasant' ruling because it did not allow 'freedom of loving, flirtation, falling in love, mixed dancing, and abduction ... [and] it would turn the youth into hermits (wi§kesofi), and would hide from them the world of love.' In the tribal region, there was much criticism of the ruling because, according to Manguri, elopement was considered an honour. If a woman had not eloped she would not have been respected. The same was true for men; 'if a man had not abducted a woman, he would have been told, "You are not a man, had you been a man you would have abducted a woman."' Manguri claimed that the Kurds were ahead of the Europeans in the freedom of 'loving and sexual desire/ He also mentions that the practice had an economic function. The adventure of elopement is always risky, sometimes ending in the murder of the couple, but all sides are familiar with how to resolve the conflict. The man and the woman seek sanctuary (with a tribal chief or landlord, a religious authority, or any respected and neutral person) where they will be safe until a settlement is negotiated; the father of the girl is usually given a 'bride-price' or 'milk-price' (§irbayi), and others, too, may gain materially.21 Edmonds, a British political officer assigned to Kurdistan during the British Mandate over Iraq, linked elopement/abduction to the 'incurably romantic' women of the Bilbas tribal confederacy. Among the Bilbas, 'many spirited girls would never dream of getting married' without eloping (Edmonds 1957: 225-6). However, elopement 'may violate the prior right to the girl's hand of her paternal first cousin or blast the father's hopes of a good bride-price.' While the eloping cou-

140 Shahrzad Mojab pie risked their lives, all sides involved would benefit from a settlement. The father of the woman would receive a bride-price, while the mediating person, usually the agha ('landlord or tribal chief) or a religious leader (e.g., a sheikh), would collect fines (cerime) and/or 'marriage fee' (surane)22 Similar to elopement, cousin marriages (father's brother's daughter marriage) and sister exchange (jin-be-jine), practised especially in tribal and feudal contexts, indicate clearly that unmarried women were properties of their father. Generally, the woman has little freedom to choose the buyer or to change the terms of trade.23 Elopement does, however, allow the woman to choose her lover/buyer, albeit at the risk of losing her life. The 'romanticism' of the Bilbas women is thus buried in the brutality of the patriarchal order. The urban nationalist intervention in tribal-feudal gender relations was not based on ideas of the rights of women or gender equality. The city often looks at elopement and sister-exchange as signs of backwardness. This does not mean that women in the city enjoyed total freedom to choose their spouses. It seems that the ban on elopement was, for some urban nationalists, motivated by interest in modernizing the nation. This vision apparently converged with Islamic interest in regulating women's sexuality based on patriarchal considerations. Significantly, the leadership of the republic did not attempt a similar intervention in land relations in the countryside, which in feudally organized villages was exploitative and denied women the right to own land. In fact, denying women the right to own and inherit agrarian land was a violation of Islamic shari'a (revealed or canonical law) which assigns a female inheritor half of a male's share. Among the reforms initiated by the leadership was a presidential decree to conduct the Friday prayer sermon, for the first time, in Kurdish. A number of highlighted topics were to be covered in these sermons, one of which was 'How should women behave in society?' Other topics were: combatting superstition, respect for religious law, sanitation and the building of hospitals, the influence of security on the progress of the homeland, and the old civilization of Kurdistan.24 For the first time in Iran, women were granted suffrage rights in the neighbouring Azerbaijan autonomous government. In the Kurdish Republic, although voting was not raised as an issue, the president was sympathetic to universal suffrage. In a press interview with Qazi Mohammad, he was asked, 'The Azerbaijan Democratic Party has granted women voting rights in the elections; have you done the

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 141 same?' The answer was, 'Although I consider positive the action of Azerbaijan, I should inform you that we have not been able to achieve such success' (Mohammed 1946: 4). The Absence of Feminist Consciousness It is obvious from the evidence presented so far that the few 'professional' or activist women in the republic did not envision gender relations differently from the male leaders. No doubt the educated women did believe in female education and formal equality with men, but they did not seriously challenge patriarchal relations. The most radical critique was offered by 'Azimi, whose words were resented by many women. The absence of even a liberal-feminist consciousness is documented in the pages of Kurdistan. One of the teachers wrote an 'advice for women,' which included: • Every day before the husband leaves for the bazaar, the wife should ask him, 'Do you have any orders?' • The good and truthful woman is the crown on her husband's head. • If your husband does not like a certain behaviour, you should not like it either and do not do it ... • Do not favourably talk about a stranger man, else your husband will be suspicious. • Even if you are very sad, do not be sour when he comes home.25

Most males and females who wrote about women's participation in the life of the nation presented the women in 'foreign countries' (both Europe and the USSR) as a model to be emulated. The foreign woman was educated in science, technology, and the arts; she was equal to men and, like men, contributed to nation-building. Occasionally, prophet Muhammad's recommendation of education for both men and women was mentioned. Also, one speaker emphasized the support of the president for female education, noting that he had sent his daughters to school.26 Another theme was women's ability to be good fighters. In an article on women in Soviet Azerbaijan (adapted from Soviet sources), the high standards of education of women as well as their military contribution to the anti-fascist patriotic war are emphasized.27 In another edited article about 'freedom of religion in socialist Russia,' the freedom of Soviet women to work outside their homes and in all domains

142 Shahrzad Mojab is emphasized. It is noted that Russian women worked side by side with the men. Much like the nationalists of the pre-World War I period, Kurdistan reminded its readers that in tribal Kurdistan women and men were equal: 'Look at the situation of the tribes in Kurdistan and you will see that men and women work together (in harvesting, sowing, and threshing) and help each other and, in addition to this, women take care of home and children. However, what the Russian women do is very valuable because they are knowledgeable and educated; our women are very ignorant/28 The republic thus encouraged women to take part in non-domestic activities but placed numerous limitations on their public presence: Women counted only if they could assist men in the nationalist cause. The republic was the first Kurdish state with a claim to being democratic and modern. The formation of a women's party enhanced this image: Women were present in public spaces from the beginning of the autonomous regime. The existence of a woman's party formalized women's presence in the political life of the republic but, at the same time, justified their exclusion from the decision-making ranks of the KDR As the women's organization of the KDP, it also formalized the segregation of the rank-and-file along gender lines, each having its own organization. Clearly, the two were not on the same footing. The newspaper, published every other day, together with several magazines and later a radio station, gave the semblance of a public sphere in the making. However, only the elite and the wealthy had access to radio sets, while the rest of the population in the capital could listen to loudspeakers installed at the major intersection of the city. It is important, however, to note that all the presses and the radio station were owned or run by the KDP, a situation which did not resemble a public sphere with diverse speakers/listeners. Still, the press provided a space for covering women's activities and the official gender policy After the suppression of the republic in December 1946, a series of peasant revolts clearly directed against feudal exploitation occurred in Kurdistan in both Iraq and Iran (see Hassanpour 1988). In Iraq, several villages were affected, including the property of the son of one of the major nationalist leaders, Sheikh Mahmud. One 'of the revolts, in which the Iraqi Communist Party had a direct role, constituted the first uprising of its kind in the Iraqi countryside - an uprising against the landed sheikh instead of those under his leadership - and in this sense set the tone to the fervid, if intermittent, agrarian unrest of the fifties' (Batatu 1978:614). The revolt in Iranian Kurdistan was even more

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 143 extensive; it was virtually spontaneous, encouraged by the liberal Iranian prime minister's introduction of a bill to the parliament which abolished feudal dues and called for the return to the peasants of 20 per cent of the landlord's share of the produce. While the Iranian government's objective was to not allow 'Communists to win over the peasants/29 neither the 'communists' (i.e., the Tudeh Party) nor the Kurdish nationalists, organized in the clandestine Kurdish Democratic Party, offered any help to the movement (Hassanpour 1988). The nationalist parties, operating clandestinely in the post-1946 years, ignored both the peasant and women's movements. By 1961, Kurds were forced into armed resistance against the Iraqi government; they demanded self-rule within the framework of the republican regime that had come to power in a coup d'etat in 1958. Led by the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iraq, the movement soon created 'liberated areas' in the mountain villages. Although the left-leaning leadership of the party advocated limited reforms in the villages, the conservative leader of the organization, himself a tribal chief, opposed any radical intervention in the status quo. The party created a women's organization, primarily to improve its own image. By the early 1980s, Kurdistan was visibly transformed through the intervention of the state, by the nationalist movements, and through the internal developments of Kurdish society. The land reforms of Iran and Iraq in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to considerable migration to the cities. The spread of education both in the cities and some rural areas allowed women more opportunities to work outside the confines of their households. While a new round of armed resistance began in Iraqi Kurdistan after the violent suppression of the 1961-75 autonomist movement, similar conflicts began in Iran in the wake of the antimonarchical revolution of 1978-79, and in Turkey in 1984 in the aftermath of the military coup of 1980. The political map of Kurdish nationalism changed dramatically in the 1980s. Already in the 1960s, the split in the Kurdish Democratic Parties of Iraq and Iran showed a trend toward differentiation in the political and ideological make-up of the movement. The division was along Teft' and 'right' and, to some extent, rural and urban lines. By this time both factions were emphasizing autonomy, and relegating women's rights and land reform to the future, after gaining self-rule. The differentiation of the nationalist movement continued in the 1980s. The Revolutionary Society of the Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan, known as Komele, formed clandestinely in the late 1970s, came into the

144 Shahrzad Mojab open after the fall of the monarchy in 1979. Although radical land reform was on its agenda, this organization did not act to engage women in active struggle until its merger with a communist group in 1983. Komele, now known as the 'Kurdistan Organization of the Communist Party of Iran/ opened its doors to women, and actively engaged in mobilizing urban and rural women into political and military activism. Although no woman has reached the top leadership ranks, many have engaged in traditionally male activities such as military training, combat, political education, clandestine broadcasting, and party journalism, while men have been required to do traditionally female chores such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. Another development was the armed resistance movement in Turkey led since 1984 by the Kurdistan Workers Party, better known by its Kurdish acronym PKK. This organization is engaged in a rural guerrilla movement against Turkey, which has NATO's second most powerful army. PKK, too, recruited women into military operations; however, unlike Komele, it segregated the guerrilla camps along gender lines. The struggle for an independent or autonomous Kurdistan clearly overshadows women's liberation, especially in the case of PKK. A century of intensive nationalist struggles and their violent suppression has taken a heavy toll, with the loss of life and dislocation of millions of people, destruction and depopulation of several thousand villages by the Iraqi and Turkish states, genocide in Iraq and ethnic cleansing in Turkey, destruction of the traditional economy, poverty, and escalating oppression of women. If the repression of the Middle Eastern states is colossal, the failure of the nationalist parties to engage in struggles against the internal system of oppression, that is, patriarchy and feudalism, is tragic. One party to the left of the nationalist centre, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, went to the extreme of despatching its peshmargas (guerrillas) to search for and kill a couple involved in elopement in the 1980s. The nationalist promise of respect for women's rights and land reform was put to the test when nationalism achieved state power in Iraqi Kurdistan in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. In the 'safe haven' protected from Saddam Hussein by the United States and its allies, two nationalist political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party, together with other minor groups, participated in parliamentary elections and formed the 'Regional Gov-

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 145 ernment of Kurdistan.' Although a few women were elected to the parliament, the two parties became the major obstacle to the florescence of women's struggle. They argued that Kurdish society was Islamic, and that women should respect the traditional way of life. However, in 1992, women, both individuals and those affiliated with different political parties, submitted a petition to the parliament of the Kurdistan Regional Government, demanding the reform of the Iraqi civil code which the parliament had adopted. The petition, signed by some 15,000 women, asked for the abolition of polygamy and the granting of equal rights to inheritance and divorce. The parliament, with only seven women representatives favouring these demands, rejected the proposals (Begikhani 1996: 51). The Iraqi civil codes of 1990 allow a man to kill a female member of his family (wife, sister, daughter, mother) on charges of violating namus, 'honour' or 'chastity,' the Islamic and feudal patriarchal codes of female sexual conduct. The justice system of the Regional Government of Kurdistan has adopted this law and, bowing to Islamism and tribalism, has taken a step further, refusing to interfere in cases of honour killing. Men are thus allowed to judge and kill any female violator of 'honour.' Even if the murderer of a woman is taken to court, the murdered is charged with adultery, and the murderer is freed according to the Iraqi civil code. This practice violates even Islamic rules, which require the verdict of four witnesses in order to prove a case of adultery. Medical examination of the murdered women has shown that a large number of the victims were between thirteen and twenty years old and had not engaged in sexual intercourse (Begikhani 1998). Six years of the rule of the Regional Government of Kurdistan has confirmed the status of women as the property of the male and the nation. Any violation of the codes of propriety, inscribed in the concept of namus, is brutally punished by death or etik kirdin, 'defacing.' The misogynist policies of the Regional Government of Kurdistan are in conflict with current trends in Kurdish society. About half the population lived in urban centres in the 1990s. While the majority of women are tied to domestic work and, in rural areas, activities related to agriculture, the formation of a stratum of intellectual and professional women in urban areas is reshaping the political and social life of Kurdistan. The presence of several thousand Kurdish female guerrillas, a growing population of writers, poets, painters, journalists, teachers, physicians, and several parliamentarians (in Iraq and Turkey)

146 Shahrzad Mojab creates a complex and dynamic environment for the transformation of gender relations. The democratization of gender relations is complicated by the patriarchal policies of Kurdish nationalist parties, the misogyny of Islamic groups, the political repression of central governments, continuing war, and a largely disintegrated economy and society. While this situation attracts many women to political and military activism, a growing tension between feminist awareness and patriarchal nationalism is apparent. The potential political power of Kurdish women is, however, constrained or, rather, drained by the violent war the nation-states have imposed on the Kurds. Living in the ruins of an embryonic civil society, women are nevertheless resisting the status quo individually and on an organized basis.30 This resistance is increasingly visible in the formation of women's groups, the publication of journals, and protest campaigns such as marches, vigils, and demonstrations, especially in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Predictably, the budding feminist movement in Kurdistan lags behind the nationalist movement in both organization and power. Brutal national oppression has overshadowed gender and class oppression. Under these conditions, some women activists accept the status quo as the natural order of gender relations.31 Many nationalist political parties claim that Kurdish society is Islamic and traditional, and women, therefore, should abandon the struggle for liberation. In emphasizing the backwardness of Kurdish society, the nationalists in power say more about their own devotion to patriarchy and traditionalism. Compared with their predecessors in the early twentieth century, the majority of the nationalist parties of the late twentieth century have taken many steps backward. Whereas Haji Qadiri Koyi castigated religious superstition in the latter part of the nineteenth century and advocated enlightened vision, the two major nationalist parties sharing political power in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, endorse the superstition and misogyny of Islamic groups which are funded mostly by Iran and other Islamic regimes of the region (Begikhani 1998). While the nationalists, old and new, prided themselves on the freedom of Kurdish women, a handful of Islamic groups have used money and influence in impoverished Iraqi Kurdistan to impose the veil and sexual segregation, especially in certain areas bordering Iran. Some of the women who were abducted for abuse by the Iraqi army during the genocide campaign known as Anfal and then returned to Kurdistan experienced

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 147 repression; some reportedly were killed.32 The two major secular parties were in fact participants in this internal war against women.33 Conclusions The Kurdish nationalist movement emerged during the twentieth century as a thoroughly male project. However, the first Kurdish women's organization was established by male nationalists in 1919. Nationalists in Kurdistan viewed women as the locus of the purity, honour, and distinctness of the nation. Some seventy years later, when nationalists achieved self-rule in Iraqi Kurdistan, they endorsed the patriarchal status quo, and turned the nation's homeland into a sanctuary for fundamentalist groups and feudal leaders to legitimize oppression and sexual segregation as norms of national tradition. Whereas nationalism in the West succeeded in achieving political power and consolidating capitalist relations of production, the nationalists of Iraqi Kurdistan failed to challenge the lingering pre-capitalist gender and class structures. Instead of democratizing religion and secularizing politics, as suggested by the ideologist of Kurdish nationalism, Haji Qadiri Koyi, they sanctioned oppressive gender relations, supported fundamentalist politics, and suppressed radical and leftist political activism. Although brutal national oppression continues to secure support for the nationalist cause, women have already begun resisting 'their own' oppressors. Feminist consciousness is emerging in all parts of Kurdistan as a force that challenges rather than accommodates nationalism. It remains to be seen whether Kurdish feminists will allow the nationalist movement to remain the watchdog of patriarchy. However, it would be simplistic to assume that nationalism is the only obstacle to women's liberation. As a conscious movement for abolishing patriarchy, feminism is being subdued from within by theoretical perspectives that issue prescriptions for compromise. The call in the West for 'indigenous feminisms' and 'feminist nationalism' encourages compromises with ethnic, nationalist, and religious patriarchy. No doubt, the road to 'indigenous knowledge' is paved with good intentions. It is, in part, an agenda for redressing the ethnocentrism of Western knowledge systems. However, much of this agenda consists in challenging Western ethnocentrism with non-Western counterparts. While nationalism has succeeded in being the watchdog of patriarchy, theories of 'indigenous feminism' or 'feminist nationalism' have tended to turn feminism into the lapdog of nationalism.

148 Shahrzad Mojab Notes 1 See, as an example of this, Ignatieff (1993). The first use of this theory was by Coyle 1993. For recent debates about the civic/ethnic dichotomy, see, among others, Couture, Nielsen, and Seymour (1998). 2 Unless otherwise specified, all English translations from Kurdish language materials are my own. 3 Much of the information about the period between 1908 and 1920 in the following paragraphs is based on Klein (2001) as well as on my own research on the journalism of the period. 4 The more accurate translation of the name of the party is the 'Democratic Party of Kurdistan' (DPK). However, the 'Kurdish Democratic Party' (KDP) is widely used in the English language literature and is retained here. 5 The doctrine of Komele is democracy and it strives for the happiness of the life of human beings' (article 8 of the platform published in Ni§tman 61942: 6; only three articles of the longer document are published). 6 The text of the play has not survived. The most detailed description is provided by Farshi (1995). A brief account is given in Eagleton (1963). 7 Ketab-e Asami-ye Dehat-e Keshvar [The Registry of the Country's Villages]; Vezarat-e Keshvar, Edare-ye Koll-eAmar va Sabt-e Ahval 1950: 26. 8 Kurdistan 10 (4 February) 1946:1; 4. 9 Kurdistan 13 (11 February) 1946:1. 10 Kurdistan 27 (25 March) 1946: 2-3. 11 Kurdistan 29 (30 March) 1946:4. 12 Kurdistan 24 (13 March) 1946: 7. 13 Kurdistan 24 (13 March): 1946: 3. 14 Kurdistan 79 (22 August [should be 20 August = 29 Gelawej]): 4. 15 Kurdistan 85 (5 September [should be September 12 = 21 Xermanan]) 1946:1. 16 Kurdistan 77 (15 August): 1946:4. 17 Ibid. 18 Kurdistan 85 (5 September [should be 12] = 21 Xermanan 1325): 1. 19 Kurdistan 24 (13 March) 1946:5. 20 Kurdistan 16 (18 February): 1946:4. 21 See the manuscript written by Mihamad-Amin Manguri (1958:176-7). The author was himself from the Mangur tribe of the Bilbas confederacy, and enquired about the impact of the ruling on the people of the region while he was in hiding there soon after the fall of the republic. I would like to thank Mr. Mahmud Mela 'Ezzat for making the manuscript available to me. 22 Cerime is 'fines for misbehaviour or, less objectionable, a fee for settling a dispute.' Surane, is a 'marriage fee taken from the parties or their parents, varying from a few shillings to ten pounds or more according to their

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 149 wealth.' (In abduction cases an additional cerime is taken for services as honest broker in composing the feud.) (Edmonds 1957: 224). 23 On these forms of marriage see, among others, Barth (1953:24-9). Workman's study (1973), based on the literature on the subject as well as her own experience of living in Kurdistan, notes that, in all of the mentioned forms of marriage, women are owned by the father and function as either economic or political commodity. 24 Kurdistan 10 (4 February): 1946:3. 25 Kurdistan 27 (25 March 1946: 3. 26 Kurdistan 72 (30 July) 1946: 4. 27 Kurdistan 73 (15 August) 1946: 2. 28 Kurdistan 72 (30 July) 1946: 4. 29 Quoted from an Iranian official in Meiselas (1997: 213). 30 See a collection of articles on the 'crushing of Kurdish civil society' in War Report 1996: 21-54. 31 In response to a question about her position on elopement, one of the activists of the Union of the Women of Kurdistan visiting Europe in 1993 noted that her organization supported the right of women to choose their spouses. She declared, however, that this was not the same as supporting elopement because, in her words, 'if we talk about the rights of women within a very broad boundary, society itself will be against us. We should walk along society step by step. Islamic and Kurdish cultures have evolved as social laws. If we violate this boundary, we will not succeed' (Changiyani 1993:124). 32 For well-documented reports on this genocide, see Middle East Watch (1993). The story of the murder of these women by Islamic zealots and traditionalists has yet to be written. The opposition press in Iraqi Kurdistan and some human rights organizations have documented some of the evidence. For a brief documentation of violence against women under the Regional Government of Kurdistan, see Muhamadi and Raouf (1998). 33 The internal war between the two parties (1994-7) led to the fall of the Regional Government of Kurdistan. Seeking military intervention from Baghdad, the KDP of Iraq drove the PUK out of the capital city of Hewler and the entire western part of Iraqi Kurdistan. By 1999 both parties formed their own governments, one in the west, the other in the east of the region. There was a noticeable difference between the two regions: PUK's policies regarding women were more enlightened than the KDP's. References Barth, Fredrik. 1953. Principles of Social Organization in Southern Kurdistan. Oslo: Bradrene Jorgensen Als. Boktrykkeri.

150 Shahrzad Mojab Batatu, Hanna. 1978. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba'thists, and Free Officers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Begikhani, Nezend. 1998. 'Jini Kurd u Islamizm/ Gzing, 21:19-23. Changiyani, Jaza. 1993. '(^awpekewtinek le gel c,war Afreti Kurdi Ser Be Yeketi Afretani Kurdistan' [An Interview with Four Kurdish Women of the Union of Women of Kurdistan]. Xermane 9-10:119-26. Couture, Jocelyne, Kari Nielsen, and Michel Seymour, eds. 1998. Rethinking Nationalism. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Coyle, James John. 1993. Nationalism in Iranian Kurdistan. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. George Washington University. Eagleton Jr., William. 1963. The Kurdish Republic of 1946. London: Oxford University Press. Edmonds, CJ. 1957. Kurds, Turks, and Arabs. London: Oxford University Press. Farshi, Brayim. 1995. 'Kurteyek le ser §anoy Dayki Nistman' [A Brief (Note) on the Play, The Motherland']. Gzing: 7: 23-8. Feminist Review^. 1997. Special Issue, 'Citizenship: Pushing the Boundaries.' 57. GirugaliMindalani Kurd [Kurdish Children's Prattle]. 1946.1 (1). Government of Iran, Ministry of Interior, Public Statistics, Census District 1961. Statistics of the First National Census of Iran, Aban 1335 (November 1956). Mahabad Census District 47:14-15. Greenspan, Karen. 1994. The Timetable of Women's History. New York: Simon & Schuster. Grewal, I., and C. Kaplan, eds. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hassanpour, Amir. 1988. The Peasant Revolt of Mukri Kurdistan, 1952-53.' Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Toronto. - 1999. 'Berengari Bari Baw Bun: Awifek le Jiyan u Beserhati 'Ebdulrehmani Zebihi' [Resisting the Status Quo: A Look at the Life of Abdulrahman Zebihi]. In Ali Karimi, Le Mer Jiyan u Beserhati 'Ebdulrehmani Zebihi [On the Life of Abdulrahman Zabihi]. Goteborg, Sweden: Zagros Media. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. 1997. Special issue on 'Citizenship in Feminism: Identity, Action, and Locale.' 12 (4) (Fall). Ignatieff, Michael. 1993. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Toronto: Penguin. Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed. Jiyanewe. 1999. Zincireyek le Trajidiyay Tawanekani dij be Jinan [A Series from the Tragedy of Crimes against Women]. Silemani, Iraqi Kurdistan: Jiyanewe.

Nationalism and Gender Relations in Kurdistan 151 Ket~ab-e Asami-ye Dehat-e Keshvar [The Registry of the Country's Villages} 1950. 1: Provinces 1,2,3, and 4. Tehran. Vezarat-e Keshvar, Edare-ye Koll-eAmar va Sabt-e Ahval, Farvardin 1329. Klein, Janet. 2001. 'En-Gendering Nationalism: The "Woman Question" in Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Late Ottoman Period.' In Shahrzad Mojab, Women of A Non-State Nation: The Kurds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda. Koyi, Haji Qadir. 1986. Diwani Had Qadin Koyi [Collected Poems of Haji Qadir Koyi]. Arbil, Iraq: Emindareti Gisti Rosinbiri w Lawani Nawcey Kurdistan. Kurdish Democratic Party. 1970. 'Maramname-ye Hezb-e Demokrat-e Kordestan.' Tudeh, 19, Tir 1349 (=1970). Lister, Ruth. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. New York: New York University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1993. 'Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination.' In D. Kelly Weisberg, ed., Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations, 276-87. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Manguri, Mihamad-Amin. 1958. Beserhati Siyasi Kurd le 1914-ewe heta 12-ey Temuzi 1958 [The Political Story of the Kurds from 1914 to the 12th of Tamuz 1958]. Manuscript. Vol. 1. Meiselas, Susan. 1997. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. New York: Random House. Middle East Watch. 1993. Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds. New York: Human Rights Watch/Middle East. Mika'ili, Rasul. 1946. The Education of Women.' Kurdistan 75 (August 11): 4. Mohammed, Qazi. 1946. Kurdistan 2 (January 13): 4. Mojab, Shahrzad. 1987. 'Women in Politics and War: The Case of Kurdistan.' Women in International Development Publication Series, 145. Michigan State University. - 1997. 'Crossing Boundaries of Nationalism, Patriarchy, and Eurocentricism: The Struggle for a Kurdish Women's Studies Network.' Canadian Women's Studies 17 (2): 68-72. - 2000. The Feminist Project in Cyberspace and Civil Society.' Convergence 33 (1-2): 106-19. Mojab, Shahrzad, ed. 2001. Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda. Muhamadi, Muzafar, and Rega Raouf. 1998. Hawarek le Kurdistanewe [A Voice from Kurdistan]. N.p,: N.p.. Ni§tman. 1944a. 3-4: 23-4. - 1944b.7-8-9:10. Pettman, Jan Jindy. 1996. Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics. New York: Routledge.

152 Shahrzad Mojab War Report. 1996. Bulletin of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. 47: 21-54. Ward, Cynthia V. 1997. 'On Difference and Equality.' Legal Theory 1: 65-99. Waylen, Georgina. 1996. Gender in Third World Politics. Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner. Weisberg, D. Kelly. 1993. 'Introduction.' In D. Kelly Weisberg, ed., Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations, 309-411. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. West, L.A., ed. 1996. Feminist Nationalism. London: Routledge. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender & Nation. London: Sage.

Measuring Women's Value: Continuity and Change in the Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency, 1860-1947 JUDITH WHITEHEAD Devadiyars, or devadasis, were female dancers who were symbolically married to deities in South India and served at the temples. Recent post-colonial studies of the devadasi tradition have explained its demise in the last century as the result of Victorian repression emanating from the colonial state and missionary education. Kay Jordan has explained the criminalization of the devadasis in Madras Presidency as due to a growing sense of shame imparted by Western colonial education and missionary activities towards indigenous traditions among middleclass Indians. Despite the fact that the laws criminalizing the devadasi institution were proposed by Indian social reformers in the early twentieth century, a number of writers have seen colonial education and missionary activity not only as the initial, but also as the complete cause of nationalist repression of the institution (K. Jordan 1989).* Yet such a perspective assumes that all possibilities for cultural leadership and impetus for social change emanate only from a dominant colonial culture. In addition, internal forms of gender, caste, and/or class stratification become invisible categories, and the ideologies of distinction which accompany such divisions are often ignored or masked. However, if the decline of the devadasis is analysed through a framework which focuses on the relationship between colonial Indian and Victorian English modes of moral regulation, then a more complex picture emerges. This picture is one in which the reform and extinction of the institution reflected the increasing forms of stratification inside the devadasi institution as well as external political forces. In addition, these external forces included not only colonial discursive structures, but also nationalist-reformist and dravidian nationalist movements. All promoted the suppression and extinction of the institution. Increas-

154 Judith Whitehead ing economic and social polarization of the devadasi community was, in turn, caused by growing pressure on land in South India during the late nineteenth century, the pauperization of many rural households, and subsequent pressures to dedicate daughters. Increasingly, there emerged a group of dedicated women whose differences from cornmodified prostitutes were difficult to draw. Victorian education and missionary activity undoubtedly played a role in reshaping attitudes of the urban South Indian middle class towards the devadasi system in the late nineteenth century. Yet a framework which only analyses the impact of colonialism as a one-way process cannot adequately deal with the changing modes of production and moral regulation which were a part of shifting attitudes and discourses concerning colonialism, class, caste, gender, and power. For example, since both Victorian England and colonial India were stratified societies, there were similarities, as well as differences, between Victorian and Brahmanical ways of regulating sexuality and gender. Both Brahmanical and Victorian moral and legal discourses differentiated between respectable and unrespectable female sexuality, defining respectable female sexuality as that contained within a conjugal family unit. Upper-caste Hinduism, which provided the socialization for most social reformers, maintained its own sense of shame and danger concerning unregulated female sexuality as did Victorian medical and moral discourse. Hence, those institutions relating to the control of middle-class female sexual choices, because of their material association with patriiineal succession, became the major objects of repression through the conflictual and accommodating relations between colonialism arid nationalism. In Tamil Nadu, the devadasi system threatened the dominant patriiineal inheritance patterns of an emerging middle-class domestic space which combined an amalgam of bourgeois notions of monogamous unions with the honour and shame dichotomies of a feudal moral economy. I argue that unconscious cultural oppositions between 'good' and 'bad' women constituted a kind of sieve which separated those elements of Victorian moral regulation that were compatible with underlying distinctions of honour and shame from those that were Incompatible. Rather than contradicting honour and shame patterns, the criminalizatiorv of devadasis reinforced these distinctions and the patriiineal inheritance patterns which such values supported. Hence the temperance, social purity, and hygiene campaigns which spawned the demise of the devadasi system, were social issues that were readily

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency

155

accepted by the urban middle-classes and later espoused by the majority of liberal nationalists. As Ballhatchet ex-plains: 'Ideas of ... social purity were acceptable to many politically-minded Indians (in the late nineteenth century). First, such ideas were advocated by Nonconformists whom they respected for their disposition to criticize British policies in India. Second, such ideas accorded with an ascetic tendency in (upper-caste) Hinduism whereby self-denial, vegetarianism and continence were highly esteemed as facilitating spiritual development' (Ballhatchet 1980:157). The devadasi tradition represented a matrilineal and non-monogamous anomaly to Victorian morality and the more rigorous patrilineal forms of property and norms of propriety which emerged during the colonial period. Yet it also represented a marginalized and 'outsider' form of gendered property and propriety to Brahmanical Hinduism. Hence, in India's independence movement, the mother figure, buttressing dominant forms of patrilineal property and inheritance, became the icon of the nation and the embodiment of national traditions (Chakravarti 1990). Through the interaction between colonialism and nationalism, the matrilineal, non-monogamous devadasi figure became reconceived as a commercialized sex worker, a figure to be expunged from the imagined (and idealized) family of nationhood. This construction, however, was not a merely a symbolic one, but reflected the polarization of land, livelihoods, and wealth accompanying dependent forms of cornmodification associated with the colonial experience. Historical Departures The devadasi institution emerged from the south Indian bardic tradition, comprising groups of dancers and/or singers who became attached to specific temples throughout southern and eastern India. It became a distinct institution after the appearance of feudalism following the decline of the Gupta empire in the sixth century C.E. During this period, urban trade and commerce declined and regional courts began to award large land grants to religious and military functionaries, and especially to temples.2 Temples increasingly became the focus of religious life, and also the hub of social and economic transactions and networks (Prasad 1991: 42-3). At the core of the temple network was a principal deity or deities surrounded by divine associates and a human retinue. The devadasis awakened the god from sleep with morning dancing and participated in many daily rituals; officiating for the

156 Judith Whitehead deity or group of deities of the temple were important members of the god or godesses' retinue. The first scriptural mention of devadasis is found in a seventh-century collection of Saivite hymns written by the bhakti poet Sambandar, although evidence from temple inscriptions goes back to the fifth and sixth centuries. In both inscriptions and textual evidence from the thirteenth century onwards, the devadasis were referred to as 'ever-auspicious' females who were to deal with the dangerous divine, especially in its feminine aspect of shakti. The status of devadasis varied throughout the districts of southern India, being most closely connected to the courts and of highest status in Tamil Nadu, Mysore, and Orissa (Marglin 1985). Yet even here, their status varied within each temple, particularly in Tamil Nadu where the system was most elaborated. Since the devadasis of Orissa were quite isolated from major reform movements and managed to maintain their privileges throughout the colonial period, I will discuss only the devadasis of Tamil Nadu in this chapter. In ritual terms, the words devadasi and devidayar referred to a class of women who were dedicated at puberty to temples through ceremonies of marriage or to particular gods. During the Vijayanagar period (1346-1565 C.E.), the term was also applied to women who donated money to temples as offerings to the temple deities and became of central importance in establishing status (Mines 1984: 28). However, devadasis were best known as temple dancers, and were the major exponents of sadir, the major classical dance form in Tamil Nadu. In religious or ritual terms, devadasis were considered nityasamungali, or ever-auspicious, because they had been symbolically married to deities and could never be widowed. Despite possessing ritual auspiciousness, the actual status of particular devadasis varied a great deal by the later Chola period, and most certainly during the Vijayanagara era. These distinctions embraced six groups of devadasis, including the patiyilar (the oldest and most prestigious class of devadasis), the isana pattiniyar (wives of Isana), the Tevaratiyar (slaves of god), the Tattai (gifted ones), the alankara dasi (ornamental dasi), and the Rudraganikas (courtesan of Rudra/Siva). Within the temples, these terms correlated loosely with functional divisions: Rudraganikas danced in daily ritual, swadasis performed on special religious occasions, and alankaradasis performed at social functions such as weddings (Kersenboon-Story 1987: 24). A further general division emerged during the Tanjore period between raja dasis, who were devadasis attached to the court, and the natanadasis, dancing dasis of the temples.

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 157 In addition, there were women dedicated to temples who were not prestigious enough to be awarded inam grants (Madras Weekly Mail 1926: January 25: 10). Thurston mentions that, by the end of the nineteenth century, there were three major classes of devadasis in Madras Presidency, including raja dasi, who danced before flagstaffs in the temples, devadasis who danced in Siva temples, and swadasis, who danced only on special occasions (Thurston 1909:101). In addition, he mentions the institution of basavis in Bellary District, a system which involved the dedication of a daughter to the god of a temple, after which she could inherit from her parents and perform the funeral rites to them as if she were a son. With the decline in available land in the colonial period due to the increased commodification of land, such 'landless' devadasis appear to have increased in number and proportions.4 No single devadasi caste existed, although all devadasis were drawn from non-Brahman castes, which included numerous occupational statuses and economic strata. These groups were rituaHy ranked as of Shudra status. In Tanjore, the communities most often associated with the devadasi tradition included the Melakkarar, the Nayanakar, and the Dasi, which merged into a politicized non-Brahman caste association, termed Issaz Vallalam, during and as a result of the reform movement (Srinivasen 1985: 1870). In other districts, the castes most often associated with temple dedication of daughters included the Kaikkolars5 and Vellalars, and in some areas, the Mudailyars and Pillais (Mines 1984:17). In the nineteenth century, there existed a rather loose occupational system in which those communities linked with the devadasi system often acquired semi-hereditary occupational statuses. However, they were not completely hereditary groups because the profession did not confer the right to work without qualification (Srinivasen 1985: 179). Necessary qualifications included five to ten years' education and training in sadir with a dance guru, or teacher (Anandhi 1991: 23). Following the dedication ceremony, the devadasi usually acquired a Brahman patron who sponsored her dance performances and contributed to the economic maintenance of her household and orchestra. The devadasi was permitted to have sexual relations with her patron. However, she could not marry or have sexual relations with anyone from her own community. The matricentric features of devadasi households and communities have been much remarked upon in scholarly literature. They also kindled missionaries' disapproval in the late nineteenth century. Many, although not all, devadasis were awarded land grants and heritable

158 Judith Whitehead rights in revenue from temple lands, called inam grants, which enabled them to become financially independent. Daughters inherited the bulk of maternal estates. Devadasis were also the only women under Hindu customary law allowed to adopt children. Those who attained some renown as dancers had their choice of patrons and also performed in the Vijayanagar courts and at important domestic ceremonies of elite families (Srinivasen 1985:183). Gender Codes and Modes of Moral Regulation The economic autonomy of devadasis due to their landed property placed them in an unusual position in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century south India. So did their lifestyle. Usually, only moveable property, in the form of dowry, was inherited by daughters. According to most schools of Hinduism, women's sexuality, although potentially auspicious and activating, had to be controlled through arranged or semi-arranged marriages (Mukherjee 1978; Joshi and Liddle 1986; D. Engels 1987, 1996). This was because the female principle was considered closer to nature, while the masculine principle represented ascetic transcendance and self-control. In addition, intimate social contact between upper and lower classes and castes, especially sexual relations, was highly regulated, with upper castes equating caste endogamy with high status. Hence, the relative status of a family was judged partly by the fidelity of wives and their conduct as mothers, since upper-class women were viewed as symbolic gatekeepers of their family's status or honour (Engels 1987: 32-3). These dominant or hegemonic views have been seen as ideologically buttressing various practices of familial control over female sexual choices in nineteenthcentury South India, including early marriages and arranged or semiarranged marriages with a matrilateral cross-cousin. The values of fidelity, chastity, and purity were especially marked among Brahmans, for whom even remarriages of widows were disallowed. Although maintaining a symbolically impure lifestyle, devadasis, as ever-auspicious women married to deities, were structurally opposed to widows. Widows were considered exemplars of female inauspiciousness: The death of their husbands was part of their karmic burden, and they were required to live a life of varying degrees of penance following their husbands' death. Since both forms of moral regulation, Brahmanical and Victorian, emerged from class-stratified and patriarchal societies, their symbolic

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 159 parallels in matters of gender, family, and propriety are quite striking. The less obvious fact is that both possessed similar yet distinct discourses of bodily regulation. These embodied discourses connected the habitus - the lived-in experiences of class and gender existing below consciousness in daily practices of decorum, hygiene, dress, and sexuality (Bourdieu, 1990:120) - to dominant philosophies of respectability, property, and mind/body imagery. Both cultural traditions equated purity with mental labour, masculinity, and specific regimes of bodily control, and both drew sharp symbolic divisions between pure and impure practices. The increasing uniformity in applying Brahmanical legal codes to marriage, inheritance, and divorce practices throughout South Asia was due not only to the homogenizing procedures of the colonial state, although these were an important, centralizing factor in the nineteenth century. In part, these legal codes also corresponded to the habitus of the emerging urban middle class. Most schools of Hinduism, and particularly those followed by the upper castes from which the majority of civil servants for the colonial administration were recruited, regarded menses and afterbirth, along with other bodily wastes, as polluting. Hence, their disposal was embedded in rituals of separation and purification that were often accompanied by bathing. Purity was a relative condition that could be achieved only by refraining from manual labour and contact with lower castes. All polluting substances, such as decaying animal and vegetal matter, menses, and afterbirth, were also to be avoided. Dominant forms of Hinduism also defined caste status through symbols of relative purity and pollution.6 In a pervasive creation myth, purusa, the divine spirit, created the four castes through his body, with Brahmans (the highest varna, or class), issuing from his head, the purest part of his body, while Shudras, or servile classes, were born from his feet, the most impure. Social contact, especially its more intimate forms such as interdining and marriage, was highly regulated between upperand lower-castes, and the relative purity and honour of a family was judged by the fidelity of wives and chastity of daughters. Mere rumours of infidelity or unchastity could bring shame both to the woman and to her extended family, making upper-caste women symbolic gatekeepers of their family's status. In addition, among many Brahman groups in Tamil Nadu, marriage with the matrilateral cross-cousin, or her classificatory equivalent, was the preferred form of matrimony, thus ensuring that marriages would remain endogamous to Brahman castes. For the Victorian middle class who provided the bulk of the British

160 Judith Whitehead administration in India, sanitary practices were associated with evangelical values of thrift, sobriety, and respectability (Hamlin 1985). In addition, the sanitary environment of the English middle classes, with wide streets, adequate housing, clean clothing, and safe drinking water, was a moral ideal. Only a better-off minority, with servants, could aspire to such an ideal in British cities marked by continuing poverty and industrial pollution throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, an evangelical association between cleanliness and godliness versus dirt and sin conflated unsanitary living conditions with various forms of immorality (1985: 385). Victorian social commentators often symbolically equated the nation with a body in which adult, middle-class males were the heads of both the social system and the family, manual workers of lower status were 'hands/ and middle-class wives and mothers were associated with 'the heart' (Davidofff 1983: 17-23). The unrespectable poor, including casual workers, criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and many workingclass women employed as servants, occupied the unmentionable regions of society, in a milieu in which decorum was marked by suppressing references to any 'lower' bodily functions. In the sanitary policies of the Victorian period, these 'outcastes' were equated symbolically with sexuality, contagion, filth, and excrement, much as untouchables in Brahmanical Hinduism were equated with dead animal products and bodily wastes. Victorian middle classes often projected female sexuality outside their own domestic spheres. Women of the working classes, and especially prostitutes, were viewed as potential agents of contagion to the middle-class body politic. Uncontrolled sexuality was also attributed to all the 'baser races' inhabiting colonial possessions, who were thought to occupy a lower evolutionary stage and hence to be closer to nature and the animal world. These differences in bodily regulation preoccupied many nationalists and British administrators in the late nineteenth century, as both sought to defend the moral superiority of their way of life through the greater virtue of 'their' womenfolk. In both countries, the unrespectable figure of the prostitute was gradually proletarianized and criminalized. Brahmanical Hindu norms were buttressed by religious precepts codified in shastric texts, while Victorian models of respectability were primarily supported by medical authority, despite their similarities to the values of Evangelical puritanism. Both discourses morally regulated the habitus of the two forms of social distinction, imparting a symbolic legitimation to gender, class, and status differences.

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 161 Victorian Morality and the Colonial Impact Madras was one of the first cities to experience direct colonial rule, dating from the British defeat of the French at Wandiwash in 1760, and it was therefore a focal point for missionary activities and colonial legislation. One of the first social policies to have an indirect, long-term influence on the devadasi institution was the creation of Lock Hospitals in the Presidency. The Lock Hospital system was established intermittently between 1800-68 in order to counteract the relatively high incidence of venereal disease among British troops. The first Lock Hospitals, in which venereal patients, invariably women, were inspected and treated, were established after 1805. At this stage, however, British administrators differentiated between the devadasis and those women who provided sexual services for either Indian civilians or British troops. William Bentinck, the Governor of Madras who sanctioned the Lock Hospitals, wrote: 'The system should be applied only to those persons only who may be liable from their general habits to occasion the diffusion of the fatal complaint which it is important to counteract, as from the nature of the local usages of India much confusion might be produced by any measure tending to create an interference with the establishments attached to many of the principal places of Hindoo worship' (Ballhatchet 1980:12). The attitude of authorities during this period towards Madras prostitutes was ambivalent. On the one hand, they were seen as playing a positive role in maintaining the manliness of a bachelor army; but they were also seen as a potentially disease-bearing impediment to imperial control. The merits and demerits of the Lock Hospital system were debated between military and civilian authorities throughout the early nineteenth century. The hospitals were formally maintained in Madras until their closure in 1835, and then gradually reinstated under the pressure of military officials in the 1850s. However, the major British legislation that constructed a more punitive regime for prostitution was the Contagious Diseases Act (CD Act), passed in India in 1868, two years after its enactment in England. The CD Act operated in association with the various Cantonment Regulations (1864,1880,1889,1893,1897). In India, unlike England, the Contagious Diseases Act applied not only to seaports but also to major towns throughout the Indian subcontinent. The Act was initially defended in both England and India as an exceptional law designed to control the spread of venereal disease among soldiers.7 In the post-

162 Judith Whitehead Rebellion period, the numbers of British-born troops increased to a high of 80,000, stationed in about 75 cantonments, while the number of women involved in commercial prostitution also increased. The locations of major cantonments in Madras Presidency included Bellary, Madras, St. Thomas, Trichinopoly, Wellington, Pallaveram, Poonamalli, and Bangalore (Ballhatchet 1980: 120). Venereal disease afflicted between 18 and 40 per cent of British troops in India throughout the late nineteenth century, and British military officers periodically expressed concern that the rate among unmarried British troops was regularly higher than that among their married Indian counterparts.8 The Contagious Diseases Act XIII required the registration of all women suspected of prostitution, compulsory fortnightly examinations of prostitutes under a system of sanitary police, the segregation of prostitutes to particular streets of each city, and the establishment of Lock Hospitals for the treatment of women diagnosed as suffering from venereal disease. If upon medical examination a woman was found to have VD, she was legally considered a prostitute and could be involuntarily detained in a Lock Hospital until she was declared free of disease. If she refused treatment, she could be ejected from hospital to military camps, and fined and/or imprisoned for up to one month. Police could identify women as prostitutes on the basis of suspicion alone, and failure to register or to produce certificates of registration exposed a woman and a brothel owner to one month's imprisonment for first offences and three months' for subsequent offences.9 In addition, police were given special powers to force a woman suspected of having venereal disease to enter the Lock Hospital. Women caught absconding from Lock Hospitals before they were declared cured could be imprisoned for up to one month for first offences and up to three months for subsequent ones. A sustained campaign in England by the Ladies National Association, headed by Josephine Butler, and joined by Nonconformist church leaders, led to the repeal of the English CD Act by the British Parliament in 1886. The Indian CD Act was then repealed, over the objections of British Indian military authorities, in 1888. However, further investigations by Alfred Dyer, the reformist editor of The Sentinel, as well as by Dr. K. Bushnell and Mrs. E.W. Andrews, visiting India in 1891-92 and 1899-1900 on behalf of the British Committee for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice in India and Throughout British Dominions, reported the continuation of Lock Hospitals and mandatory examinations. These were possible due to articles in the Canton-

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 163 ment Regulations which provided for municipal control over the sanitary conditions prevailing in European parts of colonial Indian cities, including the military barracks. There is little evidence that the CD Act in Madras linked the devadasis with regulated prostitution, as happened to courtesans in Lucknow, a number of whom were transferred to military brothels (Whitehead 1995: 410-30). Indeed, many Indian nationalists of the period objected strongly to the operation of the CD Act and Cantonment Regulations, and the abolition of the Cantonment Regulations was one of the resolutions of the first Indian National Congress held in 1885.10 The earliest court cases involving devadasis appeared in the 1860s and consisted mostly of petty grievances with temple management over the devadasis' land grants and their adoption rights regarding new devadasis. A statement by Bombay's Chief Justice Holloway in 1864 typifies the colonial legal policy of avoiding, in the post-1858 decades, legislation that might impinge on Hindu religious traditions and become controversial. He wrote: 'This [devadasi] custom is not at variance with Hindu law; our courts are therefore bound to administer to them that law, uninfluenced by a fastidiousness founded upon Western views of morality/ In fact, the colonial administration was reluctant to interfere in domestic matters in the late nineteenth century (Sarkar 1993: 1169), opting to coexist with a policy of indirect rule with landed elites in the countryside. Following the Rebellion of 1857-8, agrarian elites throughout south Asia were consciously targeted as the group most able to maintain law and order in the countryside. However, the Social Purity, Temperance, and Social Hygiene campaigns which were spawned in both England and India by the anti-CD agitation (and led by the same people) began to discursively construct a connection between the devadasi institution and commercial prostitution. While the anti-CD campaigners rejected state-regulated prostitution, they did so by adopting many of the repressive sexual and gender attitudes of Victorian society, particularly the equation between sexual purity and social hygiene (Weeks 1988). In the early twentieth century, these social reform movements became closely allied with eugenics ideas and associations. The eugenics associations, such as the British Social Hygiene Council, articulated a strong connection between sexual purity, social hygiene, and national progress. The influential advocates of eugenics, including many in the medical profession, strongly believed in the importance of the patriarchal family and especially the role of the mother, because improving the 'racial' stock was partly a

164 Judith Whitehead question of breeding and partly of rearing, and in both her health and her role were essential (Davin 1979). Social purity and temperance were among the matters discussed at the National Social Conference, founded in 1887, and held just following the National Congress meetings each year. From the 1890s onwards, in Madras as well as other presidencies, social reformers, missionaries involved in the Temperance Movement, and even theosophists began to question the role of devadasis. This took the form of an anti-nautch campaign, inaugurated by Bishop Thorburn in Calcutta in 1893, against this form of dancing. In fact, it was this campaign which tended to equate the devadasi system with prostitution in the eyes of the middle-class, urban public. The Temperance and Social Hygiene Movements seemed to acquire popularity among Indian social reformers due partly to missionary influence and partly because their values blended well with uppercaste conceptions of asceticism and purity. For example, R. Venkata Ratnam Naidu, speaking at the annual meeting of the Madras Temperance League in 1894, stated: 'It is more the question of how to enforce the practice of total abstinence rather than the theory ... that is required to be put before the people of India, whose national conscience was altogether in favour of purity (in these matters)' (1894: 6). Resolutions of the National Social Conference in 1900 in favour of temperance and against nautch dancing were also passed. An editorial in the Indian Spectator by Balramji Malabari, a prominent Mahrashtrian social reformer, set the tone for what was to follow: 'Do you not think it immoral to patronize dancing girls? It is no secret that these girls belong to the class of women of ill-fame and the only difference between them and the others ... is that they can dance and the latter cannot... It is time for Anglo-Indian officials to realize that nautches are not as pure amusements as they have been led to believe ... For the sake of all that is pure in our society, nautch girls should be banished from respectable society.'11 The term 'nautch' was an anglicization of najna, the Hindi word for dancing, and referred to a popular form of elite entertainment which engaged women dancers who were not always classically trained and were not, like devadasis, attached to temples. Social reformers throughout India petitioned the government to take legislative action to ban the dance at official functions. Memorials were presented to the Viceroy and the Governor of Madras who were assured that these performances were 'of women who, as everybody knows, are prostitutes, and Their Excellencies hereafter at least must know to be such ...' The

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 165 anti-nautch campaign had some success, particularly in banning nautch performances at forthcoming visits of British dignitaries, and in popularizing the equation between devadasis, 'dancing girls/ and prostitution. This was seen in the discourse surrounding legal cases contesting the inheritance rights of devadasi households and in attempts to prevent adoption of girls by devadasis between 1890 and 1910. The movement to prevent adoption was responded to with a Secretary of State's dispatch in 1911, but only became law in 1924 when devadasi dedication below the age of eighteen was also banned. Between the decades 1880-1910, most male and female leaders of the liberal-nationalist Indian National Congress developed a construct of the ideal female citizen, whose role was primarily that of an educated mother and wife. The mother was simultaneously perceived as the repository of ancient traditions and an icon of the modern nation (Chakravarti 1990: 20-87). In this process, less respectable expressions of female sexuality became devalued and marginalized, and were seen as a symbol of the historical degeneration of a great tradition. The Influence of the Eugenics Movement Partly through the influence of the eugenics movement, the Western medical profession infiltrated social policy and legal debates concerning sexuality internationally in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Rockefeller Foundation, the major financier of tropical disease institutes after 1910, drew a close connection between national progress, racial health, the health of mothers, and the moral hygiene associated with monogamy and campaigns against venereal disease. The League of Nations after World War I also adopted social hygiene policies and promoted hygienically educated motherhood as the goal for all nations. As a result of the dissemination of social hygiene models, which ignored connections between poverty and ill-health, the health of each nation became linked with the behaviour of 'its' mothers. Although the influence of Western medicine on most people's lives in India was negligible before 1910 due to its enclave character, by the second decade of the twentieth century, Western-trained physicians were competing with vaids and hakims in major cities through the growth of dispensaries. At the level of legal debate, their influence was much more profound, and nationalist concerns about health and progress politicized the human body through a medical idiom. The editorial in the first issues of the first all-India women's magazine,

166 Judith Whitehead Stridharma, reflected the equations that were made between the nation's state and the role of motherhood: 'Women's health was viewed as important to national progress because, women [were] the mothers of the nation, and if they [were] physically underdeveloped and sickly, then the whole nation would become weak and enfeebled' (Anon. 1913: 2). 'Science,' it was argued, 'should be brought into the training of the strong, great race of the future children of India through its mothers.' In fact, Stridharma continued to agitate throughout the 1920s on the issue of prostitution, seeing it as a social evil spreading potential disease to the body politic of 'respectable society.' A 1921 editorial in Stridharma praised the Social Purity Committee of the Bombay Women's Council for strenuously agitating to remove the 'Bombay Blot': The increasingly immoral state of the city is becoming a menace to the health of even the purest women.' Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy argued that prostitution in Madras constituted a menace to children and that 'mothers of the race could not tolerate places that were centres of moral and physical disease.' The 1920s were a watershed in legal reforms for women, marking the first period in which the necessity for changes in the position of women acquired near-unanimous consent from various currents of the nationalist movement. These concerns increased after the MontaguChelmsford reforms in 1919 which instituted a principle of dyarchy that enfranchised Indian-elected legislatures at the provincial level for an array of domestic matters. During the 1920s, the colonial administration was often criticized for inhibiting social reform and for its lack of concern with public health and social hygiene measures. Since the family and the home were symbolized as a microcosm of the nation, the domestic roles of women were absorbed into various nationalist debates concerning the nation's progress. By 1920, most reformers accepted the unconscious distinctions between chaste and unchaste women that were now, in turn, linked to medicalized conceptions of normality and deviance. Even Gandhi idealized the chaste Sita as the role model for both male and female nationalists, and expelled the Barisol prostitutes from participation in the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee. For most liberal nationalists and social reformers of the 1920s, the respectable icon of the selfsacrificing mother figure excluded the devadasis. Their association with Brahman patrons was viewed increasingly as a recent degeneration from an ancient past when they were chaste temple servants as well as dancers.

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 167 Given the prominence of the eugenics model in international and national health policies, it is perhaps not surprising that the leader of the anii-devadasi campaign in Madras was a prominent doctor. She was, in fact, the first female doctor to graduate from medical school in India, Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy. Dr. Reddy became a prominent member of the Women's India Association, an editor of Stridharma, a member of the British Social Hygiene Council, the first female MLC in the Madras Legislature, and also the president of the All-India Women's Congress in 1931. Born into a Brahman family of modest means in Pudukottah,12 she was sent to a boys' school, where she excelled in the sciences (passing among the top ten students in matriculation exams) and finished her intermediate schooling at Pudukottah Boy's College. Admitted to Medical College in Madras in 1907 for the MB & CM Course, she obtained her medical degree in 1912. In the next ten years, she set up her own obstetrics and gynecological practice, married another doctor, and completed postgraduate study in London in 1925. Although specializing in the study of cancer treatment in London, she became active in the child welfare movement there and joined the British Social Hygiene Council, a body to which she remained a member throughout her life. Her year in London persuaded her that venereal diseases and the lack of hygienic practices in Indian mothering were among the most important medical dangers facing India. Upon returning to Madras, she was elected the sole woman member to the Madras Legislative Council in the anti-Brahman Justice Party Ministry headed by the Raja of Panagal. From this position, Dr. Reddy campaigned relentlessly against the devadasi institution until she resigned from the legislature in 1931 to protest Gandhi's arrest. She introduced the major law that was instrumental in spelling an end to the devadasi institution, the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act of 1929, which delinked temple service from the granting of inam lands and revenue rights to the devadasis. In her medical practice and legislative career, Dr. Reddy was a major proponent of eugenics views, by which the application of scientific medicine and hereditarian principles to sexuality, childbirth, and socialization was thought to lead to increased national fitness and economic progress. She also saw many similarities between the views of eugenics and those of Hinduism: '[Hinduism] is a religion advocating such virtues as Brahmacharya, self-control, continence as conducive to the proper growth of the human mind and the human intellect and for the alignment of worldly fame and heavenly bliss, which grand truths

168 Judith Whitehead came to light in the West only a few years ago.'13 Reddy's deep involvement in social purity and moral hygiene issues also led her to establish homes for devadasis and women rescued from brothels, and to oppose AIWC resolutions favouring the introduction of birth control (Reddy 1936: 23-5). In the legislative debates on the devadasi land endowments, she criticized the devadasi system, thus: It is beyond my comprehension how in a country which can boast of innumerable saints ... irresponsibility in vice has been ignored and even encouraged [through the devadasi system] to the detriment of the health of the individual and of the future race ... Modern science has proved that continence is conducive to the health and well-being of the individual, family, and the future race, and that sexual immorality harms both the individual and the community. Venereal disease is responsible for fifty percent of child blindness and deafness, much insanity, and other diseases such as paralysis, liver and kidney disease and heart disease ... and it is a racial poison capable of being transmitted to one's children, the second, or even the third generation. (Reddy 1926:146-7) In Stridharma, Dr. Reddy editorialized on the devadasi problem, attempting to convince women's organizations and social reformers that the institution was an expression of backwardness, disease, and irrational tradition: I would advise my country people to shut the stable before the horse is stolen. Who does not realise that 'prevention is better than cure?' Why then this nervousness on the part of our people to put an end once and for all to a practice that disfigures and defiles our sacred temples, that contaminates the youth of the country, a practice that brings ill-health, disruption, discontent into happy families and is thus a menace to family life and finally poisons the future race through venereal diseases. If we want to come up as a nation to command the Self Respect of the world, I feel very strongly that all the social diseases must be cured, because to my knowledge India is the only country in the world that condemns a particular class of girls into prostitution ... What is still more deplorable is the prevalence of the popular belief that this iniquitous custom has the sanction of our holy religion - hence should not be interfered with ... Hindu Society... is neglecting a most dangerous disease and so deserves the serious attention of all healthy-minded citizens, of all earnest reformers, patriots, and statesmen. Only an ... amendment of the Hindu Religious

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 169 Endowments Act will save the future race from further mental, moral, and physical decay.14

In Dr. Reddy's as well as in many other liberal or conservative nationalists' concept of the nation, medical health and moral boundaries were frequently conflated.15 The future of the nation and the health of the 'race' was linked to sexual continence, motherhood, and the hygienic education of young girls and women. Although Dr. Reddy may have possessed more strident social hygienic views than many other leaders of the twenties, many social reformers of this period shared her views linking motherhood, female suffrage, increased female education, and national independence. The health of the nation was linked to the goal of swaraj, through self-governance over physical, moral, and spiritual aspects of life. Hence, those aspects of Hinduism which extolled sexual continence and purity were highlighted. Dr. Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society, leader of the Home Rule League, and editor of Stridharma, opined that devadasis were originally virgin devotees attached to Hindu temples whose status had fallen in recent centuries.16 Gandhi, a cultural nationalist in many other respects, viewed the abolition of devadasis as a positive step: 'The whole of enlightened public opinion that is vocal is against the retention of the system in any shape or form. The opinion of the parties concerned in the immoral traffic cannot count ... The Devadasi system is a blot upon those who countenance it... I hope that Dr. Reddy will receive the hearty support of all lovers of purity in religious and general social life' (Gandhi, cited in Reddy 1932: 113-14). For most liberal nationalists in India and elsewhere, the revered mother role was emphasized, while other roles for women were denigrated. By the 1920s, many social reformers and liberal nationalists in India drew implicit equations between national morality and community hygiene, tending to criticize British inaction on matters of health, hygiene, and sanitation. Hence the scientific discourse of public health and the more 'traditional' discourse of national honour and morality were frequently conflated, becoming metaphors for each other. Fears about the spread of venereal disease became a potent symbol for underlying anxieties about sexual transgressions of national boundaries and moral communities. Kay Jordan (1989) has explained the criminalization of the devadasis in Madras Presidency as due to a growing sense of shame that was imparted by Western colonial education and missionary activities

170 Judith Whitehead towards indigenous traditions among middle-class Indians. Yet this explanation ignores the fact that by the 1920s, social reforms such as devadasi abolition were promoted by and seen as emerging from the nationalist agenda itself. At this time, social reformers and nationalists joined together in arguing that British commitment to a policy of noninterference with Indian beliefs and customs had led to a serious neglect of public health (Arnold 1993: 241). Jordan has assumed that all cultural influence is disseminated from the colonizer and none originates from the civil society of the colonized themselves (Sarkar 1993: 1869-70). Yet by the later colonial period, during which time the actual criminalization of Madras devadasis occurred (1927-47), Gandhi had forged a mass movement for India's independence, and various electoral reforms enacted through pressure from the nationalist movement had partially devolved power in stages to the Indian electorate. Indeed, Jordan's own information, taken mostly from legislative records, shows that the colonial administration during this period was far more reluctant to intervene in the devadasi institution than were provincial legislators. She also ignores local discourses of gender and power, in particular the non-Brahman and Brahman conflict in Tamil Nadu that provided a major backdrop for Madras politics in the late pre-colonial and post-colonial periods. The influence of the colonial state on local discourses of gender, caste, and power was more indirect during this period. The census categorization of castes in a varna scheme in the late nineteenth century eroded pre-colonial flexibility in non-Brahman caste statuses, and hence intensified the potential opposition between Brahman and non-Brahman communities. The Non-Brahman Movement in Madras It could be argued that the most successful exponents of devadayar abolition arose from the Dravidian movement, if only because it became arguably the most important political force in Madras politics in the late-colonial and early post-colonial periods. Non-Brahman activists condemned devadasi dedication, but for apparently different reasons than those of the Women's India Association. The main reason Periyar and other activists of the Dravidian movement condemned devadasi dedication was their perception that it represented the concubinage of Shudra women for elite male Brahmans. Between 1925 and 1947, non-Brahman activists in Madras advocated the creation of a separate country, Dravida Nadu. It was to include all

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency

171

non-Brahman castes in the region, theoretically excluding south Indian Brahmans and all north Indians. The strength and longevity of the nonBrahman movement in Madras can be explained by the numerical, commercial, and landed importance of non-Brahman castes in Tamil Nadu. Brahmans constituted only 3 per cent of the population of Tamil Nadu and were concentrated in just two river valleys in the Presidency. There were also a number of non-Brahman communities who possessed substantial economic power, such as the Mudaliar and Vellallar communities. The dissatisfaction of wealthy non-Brahman communities was initially spurred by discontent at the professional gains made by Brahmans through British patronage of their education in the late nineteenth century. Non-Brahmanism acquired a mass following after the creation of the Self Respect Association in 1926. It was founded by E.V. Ramasami, respectfully termed Periyar, one of the most prolific and articulate leaders of the non-Brahman reform movement. The grievances of the Dravidian movement focused on the dominant position accorded Brahmans in social hierarchy by Brahmanical scriptures and epics, the predominance of Brahmans in ritual practice, and the influential roles played by members of this caste in the government and professional spheres created during colonial rule (Subramanian 1995). Leaders such as E.V. Ramasami and C.N. Annadurai argued that traditional Brahman status dominance enabled their modern professional dominance in the late colonial period. Non-Brahman reform policies were the basic focus of the Justice Party which predominated (along with the Indian National Congress) in the Madras Provincial Legislature from 1925-36, the years during which the major antidevadasi laws were enacted. The Justice Party and the Self Respect Association were the precursors to the Dravida Kazagam, formed by Periyar in 1944, and of the Dravida Munnetra Kazagam, formed by activists dissatisfied with the DK, including Annuradai, in 1949 (Geetha 1998: 9-17). Periyar raised important questions concerning the relationship between the monogamous family, patriarchy, landed property, and norms of chastity prescribed for and enforced upon women, going far beyond most contemporary social reformers in his critique of these interlinkages. In relation to women's education, an important topic among nationalist social reformers, he argued that instead of concentrating on domestic education, it should have the aim of providing employment for women, since this would enable them to be economically independent. He regarded marriage and the family as key institu-

172 Judith Whitehead tions supporting patriarchy, since they forced women to become the property of men. While he thought such institutions ultimately should be abolished, he also believed that divorce and birth control would improve the health and status of women in the interim: 'The concept of husband-wife relationship has been one of master-slave relationship. The essential philosophy of marriage has been to insist on women's slavery ... until women are liberated from such marriages and from men, our country cannot attain independence' (Periyar, cited in Anandhi 1991: 19-47). Periyar also painted a vivid portrait of the relationship between landed property, propriety, and caste status, arguing that the abolition of untouchability was dependent upon the attainment of self respect by adi-dravidas: 'When people were totally free without property in land, I do not think there were these slavish practices of women's oppression and compulsory marriage contracts. When there was no concept of accumulating property ... there could not have been any compulsion for acquiring heirs for the family through child-birth' (Periyar, cited in Geetha 1998). Dravidian activists attacked symbols of scriptural Brahmanism in a series of inversion rituals that were meant to shock caste society into sensitivity to the ramifications of caste. These symbolic protests included denigrating Brahmanic norms, abusing Hindu deities, epics, and scriptures, and deriding acts of god men who claimed divine inspiration. Periyar also deconstructed Rama while elevating Ravanna to heroic stature in his reinterpretation of one of the epic Ramayana, which he saw as an allegory of North-Indian Brahmanical, 'Aryan' conquest of the Dravidians (Richman 1991). The Self Respect movement, which he created in 1926 to raise the status of backward castes, promoted inter-caste marriages, widow remarriages, and marriages of consent. These marriages were conducted without Brahman priests or the recitation of religious texts and did away with tali-tying. Although Periyar and other Dravidian activists promoted the concept of a closed Tamil community, they allowed for several layers of inclusion and exclusion. At the core of this community were the Shudras of Tamil Nadu, and in successive concentric circles around this centre, Tamil Christians and Muslims, Tamil-speaking Scheduled Castes, and other South Indian non-Brahmans (Subramanian 1995). Groups who were beyond inclusion were Brahmans from Tamil Nadu and other parts of South India, as well as all north Indians; all the latter groups were deemed 'Aryans/ Periyar called for a separate country in which Dravidians as Shudras would enjoy primacy. He sometimes

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 173 went so far as to state that 'Aryan' Brahmans were to be expelled from Tamil Nadu, or at least that their cultural dominance in the region had to be reversed. Despite the fact that Periyar articulated a radical vision of the relationship between property, propriety, gender, and caste, he and other activists opposed the devadasi system. In an attempt to raise the status of non-Brahman communities in Madras, Periyar condemned the institution as equivalent to the concubinage of Shudra women for Brahman men, and hence a severe marker of disrespect for the non-Brahman community. Women who were dedicated to temples and trained in classical dance and music were almost invariably from non-Brahman castes. Their patrons, however, were usually Brahmans, and indeed a wealthy Brahman patron was the desired ideal of most devadasi households. Periyar argued that Brahmanical legal codes had treated nonBrahman women as dasis (prostitutes) of gods. He also argued that in the scriptures the word shudra implied someone who was born out of wedlock, while parayan, or untouchable, carried no such connotation. This, he argued, showed that the shudras were more dishonoured by Brahmans than were the untouchables, since the former were illegitimate while the latter were not. A number of former devadasis, inspired by Periyar's concerns for gender and caste equality, joined the Self Respect Association and became important activists for the Dravidian movement. This was probably also a reflection of the increasing numbers of lower-status devadasis who had been dedicated due to their family's declining economic fortunes in the colonial period.17 For example, Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar, who was born in 1883, brought up in a devadasi family in Thanjavur district, and initiated as a devadasi at puberty, left the community to follow Periyar. Interestingly, Ammaiyar joined first the Congress Party and then the Self Respect movement after Periyar's break with the Indian National Congress. She acted as a relentless campaigner against what she viewed as women's slavery, elaborating how Brahmanical Hinduism and upper-caste men were legitimizing women's sexual oppression. In a widely read Tamil novel, she wrote: The women of the lower castes have been suppressed in all spheres. The legitimisation of the suppression given through the shastras is evident in the manner in which women have been assigned the role of religious prostitutes and concubines in the devadasi system' (Cited in Anandhi 1991: 32). Ramamirith Ammal of the Issai Vellallam Sangam, a reform organization associated with the Self Respect

174 Judith Whitehead movement, argued that the Sangam was of the view that the children of devadasis should be separated from their mothers, since temple dedication had brought 'ruin to the entire community' (Ammal 1929: 409). Ammaiyar and others, who joined the Self Respect movement out of its apparently emancipatory potential for women, lived to see many gender reforms jettisoned by the anti-Brahman movement when it became a formal political party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazagam, or DMK. These included intercaste marriages, marriages of consent, and permission of divorce. The Dravida Munnetra Kazagam was formed out of elements of the Justice Party and the Self Respect movement, and was first led by Periyar, but was taken over by Annuradhi in 1949. One of the first pieces of legislation of the provincial government was the Madras Devadasi Act XXXI, which made any performance of the devadasi dedication ceremony a penal offence. It was enacted on 27 Jan uary, 1948. It proscribed the following activities: • Dancing by a woman, with or without kumbhaharathy (pot-shaped temple arati lamp), in the precincts of a temple or other religious institution; • or in any procession of a Hindu deity, idol or object of worship installed in any such temple or institution; • or at any festival or ceremony held in respect of such a deity, idol or object of worship, is hereby declared unlawful; • any person who performs, permits or abets [temple dancing] is punishable with imprisonment for ... six months; • a woman who takes part in any dancing or music performance ... is regarded as having adopted the life of prostitution and becomes incapable of entering into a valid marriage and ... the performance of any [marriage] ceremony ... whether [held] before or after this Act is hereby declared unlawful and void.

Thus, by the late 1920s, there were a number of converging discourses which constructed either Tamil or national identities as bounded groups and linked these with a concept of sexual morality that was tied to monogamous female sexuality contained within the boundaries of community and/or the nation. Missionaries and Western medical doctors opposed prostitution in both medical and moral terms, and linked the latter with the devadasi institution. This condemnation was paralleled by a modernist conception of the nation, whose major reconceptions of moral regulation included eugenicist ideas of

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 175 the family that paralleled Brahmanical norms in eerie ways.18 These ideas were most clearly articulated by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy and the Women's Indian Association. In addition, the Dravidian movement that played such an important part in the political arenas of Madras and Tamil Nadu in the late-colonial and post-colonial periods also opposed the devadasi institution on the basis of defending the status, integrity, and even honour of the shudra community. In addition, men from the devadasi community who occupied a subordinate position as musicians and accompanists to the devadasis' dance ceremonies joined the Self Respect movement in large numbers. The aggressive anti-Brahmanism and anti-ritualism of the Backward Classes Movement19 provided the men of this group with an ideology with which to fight for respect within the wider society. Unfortunately, 'respect' within the wider society also entailed the disenfranchisement of the women of this community, and accorded with the domestic norms of the urban upper castes.20 Pressed from both above and below, the criminalization of devadasis was a foregone conclusion. Actual laws criminalizing devadasis in Madras included a 1924 amendment to the penal code to make the dedication of girls under 18 a crime, the 1929 Amendment to the Madras Hindu Religious Endowment Act, which disallowed devadasis from being remunerated in land and revenue-collecting rights on temple lands, and the 1948 Madras Devadasi Act XXXI. All these laws were introduced and passed in a legislative assembly dominated either by the Justice Party, the precursor to the Dravida Munnetra Kazagam, or by the Congress Party and the DMK in 1947. The crucial bill spelling an end to the devadasi system was the 1929 Amendment, which eliminated any financial incentive for the devadasi institution or economic autonomy for devadasis. It was introduced by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy during her term as the Deputy President of the Legislative Council. This amendment detached the inam grants - both land and revenue rights - from the requirement of temple service. Future and potential generations of dancers were therefore precluded from receiving any lands whatsoever. By the time devadasi performance in temples was outlawed in 1948, most devadasis had already stopped dancing, and the institution was irreversibly eroded. Many devadasis provided a vigorous defence of the system during the 1927 Legislative Debates. They first differentiated themselves from commercialized prostitutes, objecting to reform efforts to equate the two. If some devadasis were practising prostitution, then existing legislation against prostitution was in place to deal with it, they argued.

176 Judith Whitehead They also argued that the marriage of religiously inclined individuals to deities was found throughout devotional Tamil literature, and they pointed out the importance of dance aesthetics to the worship of both Siva and Vishnu. They also argued that, since their right to property would be eroded by the proposed legislation, their freedom of worship would be infringed upon. However, the devadasis were not able to mount an effective challenge to the increasingly hegemonic discourse of Western medicine, with its apparently universalistic and scientific proof of the relation between prostitution, deviance, and venereal disease. Neither were they able to challenge effectively the male members of their own community who viewed the devadasi institution as a mark of community dishonour and subservience to Brahmans, and who may also have been somewhat jealous of the devadasis' relatively greater fame and acclaim.21 In addition, the Brahman community (who were the patrons of devadasis) were numerically and economically too weak in Tamil Nadu to challenge effectively the non-devadasi views of the non-Brahman, backward classes movement. By the late 1940s, the devadasi institution was virtually dead, while their dance, sadir, was delinked from temple service and reborn in a more 'respectable' form as Bharata Natyam. The Madras Musical Academy sought to maintain the dance through sponsoring public performances by former devadasis from 1931 onwards. The devadasis themselves fared quite badly. While a few were able to marry wealthy patrons, and some were able to maintain themselves as dance teachers, the majority became increasingly impoverished and obscure. Those devadasis who were not well-known or well-rewarded for their dance activities, however, may have experienced little change in their status. Conclusions The common thread in these anti-devadasi discourses is the idea that women's sexuality is the property of the community, and that it is the community which can decide how women's sexual choices are to be made. This idea contradicts the view that a person's choices - sexual and otherwise - are a matter of individual rights of women. Through this underlying problematic, the distinctions between respectable and unrespectable feminine sexuality socially organized the class relationships of women to men. Upper- and middle-class women were defined partly by their monogamous and familial sexual relations to men, and those who violated norms of chastity and fidelity were thought to

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 177 bring dishonour to their families and communities. As Lerner (1986) notes, the class relations of women in patriarchal societies are defined differently than the class relations of men: While men are defined in terms of their relations to property, women are defined through the character of their sexual relations to propertied or propertyless males. This is a common theme in patriarchal, class-based societies, and is evident in all three discourses discussed in this chapter. The Public Health model, which idealized the role of motherhood, reproduced distinctions between respectable and unrespectable femininity, mothers and 'others/ even though it was couched in the apparently value-neutral language of Western science. It tied the expression of female sexuality to an idealized mother figure who was envisaged as the icon of tradition, the site of spiritual solace, and the modern educator of future generations. The nationalist movement, including its reform sections, also promoted a chaste maternal icon as the ideal feminine citizen, producing a tension between modernist ideals of equal citizenship for all and an upper-caste habitus of chastity and fidelity for women. The nonBrahman movement, despite articulating clear connections between propriety and property, caste, and gender oppression, still viewed women's sexual choices as a matter of community honour and antiBrahman closure. Honour for Shudra women thus became subsumed under the honour of the men of the community. Hence 'concubinage' within the Shudra community had to be suppressed. Ironically, the Self Respect movement, so explicitly anti-Brahmanical, culminated in a politics of moral regulation, through its condemnation of non-marital sexuality, that seemed to resemble the Sanskritizing tendencies it so criticized. The moral forms and norms espoused by the Dravidian movement may therefore be interpreted as a type of 'accomodating protest,' that is, protest which ultimately reinforces dominant norms in crucial ways.22 Functionally speaking, all three forms of moral'regulation converged in their view that appropriate feminine sexuality was that contained within the monogamous family. All these discourses were mediated through notions of property and propriety, since the monogamous patrilineal family was clearly associated with middle- and upper-class inheritance patterns. The control over women's sexual choices was connected to a range of social practices which had the effect of delineating clear lines of patrilineal inheritance of property. These included the dichotomy between public and private spheres, dowry, restrictions on divorce, marriages, bans on widow remarriage, and arranged marriages. The notion that the home

178 Judith Whitehead was the microcosm of the nation imbued the domestic sphere in each community with an imagined cultural defence against outsiders, thus pulling the question of sexuality into a discourse concerned with maintaining feminine propriety. In all these forms of moral regulation, there was a convergence in idealizing the pure and faithful motherhood figure. She represented the metaphor of ideal femininity, an icon that signalled the respectability and power of the middle class through its symbolic and legal exclusion of the unchaste female. Hence patriarchal norms of propriety were reproduced in a new form through the converging interaction between colonial, capitalist, legal norms and the elite Brahmanical normative order. Notes 1 A. Srinivasen (1989: 210-48) provides a more nuanced explanation, seeing the movement to suppress the institution as bound up not only with colonial attitudes, but also the politics of the anti-Brahman movement in the early twentieth century. 2 In the classical period, religious and military functionaries were most often paid in cash salaries. 3 Tamil Nadu is the post-Independence term that applies to the region in southeast India around Madras. During the colonial period, it was referred to as the Madras Presidency. 4 Unfortunately, it has not been possible to find material relating to increasing landlessness and its possible connection to increases in devadasi dedication during this period. 5 However, according to Thurston (1909) and Mines (1984), the Melakkarars were considered to be offspring of Kaikkolar devadasis and men from Brahman communities. 6 L. Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus (1966) introduced the binary structuralist argument that castes were symbolically defined by a basic opposition between purity and impurity. More recently, F. Marglin, in Wives of the God Kings (1984), has added a shading to this polarity by arguing that auspiciousness and inauspiciousness were also fundamental values of Hindu social life and explain the high stature of devadasis. The latter were considered permanently auspicious since they had been married to the gods. 7 Oriental and Indian Office Collections, L\P 7 J\5\10,1868. 8 Ibid., Kaminsky 1979: 78-83. 9 Oriental and Indian Office Collections L\P 7 J\5\10,1868. 10 Indian Spectator, 21 June, 1868,427. 11 Indian Spectator, 16 Sept., 1888: 734.

Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency 179 12 While Dr. Reddy's official biographer writes that her family was of a Brahman background, other writers have suggested that she came from a non-Brahman family. Indeed, there is a rumour that her natal family was itself of a devadasi background. Despite searches in archives, through e-mail queries, and in biographies, I have been unable to corroborate this rumour. 13 M. Reddy, cited in Kay Jordan 1989: 240, from Madras Legislative Debates of 1927. 14 In Stridharma, May 1927:103. 15 Nor were such views confined to liberal and conservative thinkers. For example, the Fabian Society of England was a supporter of eugenics views, while T.C. Douglas, one of the founders of the CCF, also adhered to them until he learned how they were being applied by the NSDAP in Germany, see P. Mazumdar 1992. 16 In Stridharma, June 1928: 24. 17 However, I have been unable to find any material directly linking increasing pauperization and indebtedness to increasing dedication of girl children. 18 M. Foucault, in his History of Sexuality (1980), has explicitly noted the parallels between feudal conceptions of honour and shame as regulating marriage choices 'through a politics of descent,' and eugenic's notions of ideal family forms, which regulated marriage and sexual choices through a 'politics of blood/ Functionally, they both acted to restrict marriage choices and sexual partners to prescribed range. 19 There was a great deal of overlap between the non-Brahman, Dravidian, and Backward Classes movements, the latter being the administrative term for groups who may or may not be well-off, but who belong to Shudra status. As non-Brahmanism gathered momentum, it became transformed into a positive assertion of Dravidian identity. 20 The men gained from the denial of property rights to female devadasi members since they could now inherit the shares of land that had earlier been kept aside for their sisters. 21 Amrit Srinivasen points out that the devadasi community was divided into two sections: the periamelam and cinnamelam. The former were considered the 'pure' section, and were offspring of marriages from within the community. The latter were 'impure' or 'mixed,' and were the offspring of the devadasi and her patron, usually a Brahman man. The periamelam produced the dance teachers and also a large orchestra, while the latter were associated with the small orchestra, as well as the devadasis themselves (Srinivasen 1985: 184). Typically, it was men from the periamelam section who most vigorously condemned the devadasi dedication during the reform movement. 22 I take this term from Arlene McLeod (1991).

180 Judith Whitehead References Ammal, Ramamirith. 1929. 'Women's Slavery.' Madras Mail (11 April): 409. Anandhi, S. 1991. 'Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement.' Social dentist 5-6:3-28. Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ballhatchet, Kenneth. 1980. Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Chakravarti, Uma. 1990. 'Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?' In K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, 27-87. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Davidoff, Leonore. 1983. 'Class and Gender in Victorian England.' In J.L. Newton, M.P. Ryan, and J.R. Walkowitz, eds., Sex and Class in Women's History, 17-23. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Davin, Anna. 1979. 'Imperialism and Motherhood.' History Workshop Journal 2 (1): 9-54. Dumont, Louis. 1966. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Engels, Dagmar. 1996. Beyond Purdah: Women in Bengal, 1890-1939. Delhi: Oxford University Press. - 1987. The Changing Role of Women in Bengal: 1890-1930. SO AS Ph.D. thesis. London. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Geetha, V. 1998. 'Periyar, Women and an Ethic of Citizenship.' Economic and Political Weekly of India 33, no. 17 (25 April): WS 9-17. Hamlin, Christopher. 1985. 'Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease.' Victorian Studies 28 (3): 381-412. Jordan, Kay. 1989. From Sacred Servants to Profane Prostitutes: A Study of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis. Ph.D. thesis. University of Iowa. Joshi, Rama, and Joanna Liddle. 1986. Daughters of Independence. London: Zed Press. Kaminsky, A.P. 1979. 'Morality Legislation and British Troops in Late Nineteenth-Century India.' Military Affairs 43 (2): 78-83. Kersenboom-Story, Saskia. 1987. Nityasumangali: Devadasi Tradition in South India. Delhi: Motilal Benarsidas. Kishore Prasad, A. 1991. Devadasi System in Ancient India: A Study of Temple Dancing Girls in South India. Delhi: H.K. Publishers. Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Marglin, Frederique. 1985. Wives of the God King. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mazumdar, Pauline. 1992. Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources, and Its Critics in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McLeod, Arlene. 1991. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press. Mines, M. 1984. The Warrior Merchants: Textiles, Trade and Territory in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mukherjee, P. 1978. Hindu Women: Normative Models. Calcutta: Orient Longman. Reddy, Muthulakshmi. 1935. The Peril in Our Streets.' Indian Social Reformer (February): 23-5. - 1932. My Experience as a Legislator. Adyar: Theosophical. Richman, Paula. 1991. 'EV Ramasami's Reading of the Ramayana.' In P. Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of Narrative Tradition in India, 175-201. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sarkar, Tanika. 1993. 'Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child Bride.' Economic and Political Weekly, WS 4 (Sept.): 1169-81. Srinivasen, Amrit. 1985. 'Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance.' Economic and Political Weekly, Nov. 2. - 1989. 'Reform or Conformity? Temple "Prostitution" and the Community in Madras Presidency.' In B. Aggarwal, ed., Structures of Patriarchy, 210-48. London: Zed. Subramanian, N. 1995. Ethnicity, Populism, and Pluralist Democracy: Mobilization and Representation in South India. Ph.D. thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thurston, E. 1909. (Assisted by K. Rangachari.) Tribes and Castes of South India, Volume 2. Madras: Government of India Press. Weeks, Jeffrey. 1988. Sexuality and Its Discontents. London: Routledge. Whitehead, Judy. 1995. 'Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Reform and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India,' Gender and History 5 (1): 410-30.

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala KAARINA KAILO

Many times I wonder about the Finns' short memory. To consider that one hundred years ago Snellman and others said: 'For Swedes we are too small, Russians we do not want to become, so let us be Finns.' They do not remember and think that the same words could be borrowed by the Sami: 'We are too small to be Norwegians, Finns we do not want to become.' Kerttu Vuolab1

Ever since scholars began collecting folklore in Finland in the nineteenth century, it has been used to construct a strong feeling of national identity for 'Finns/ and to instil in all classes a pride in their 'own' culture. In Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland, William A. Wilson remarks that the Finns' reliance on folklore for self-definition went even further. Folklore was used not only to explain the Finns' difference from, but sometimes their superiority to, other cultures. Indeed, Wilson elaborates how folklore, as the cultural property of the Finns, was central to popular political discourse on the boundaries - both temporal and geographical - of the nation, while in the process becoming a strategic tool for both the Finnish political left and right to advance their respective causes (1976:176).2 Central to all of this is the Kalevala, a foundational text and master narrative of the Finnish nation. The background material was compiled in 1835 and published in its final form in 1849 by Elias Lonnrot. A country doctor and folklorist, Lonnrot became an idolized literary figure for the Finnish nationalist movement that sought and achieved independence from Russia in 1917. Predictably, the Kalevala has been analysed from almost every possible ideological and disciplinary per-

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 183 spective. Much has been written about the nationalist agenda behind the epic, and some studies on its redolent sexism exist. However, little work has been done to explore its post-colonial possibilities.3 The purpose of this chapter, then, is to discuss the representations of women and the indigenous population, the Sami/Lapps, in the Kalevala. This foundational epic set the ideological stage for representations of gender, class, and ethnicity in Finland that have retained their unconscious grip to this day. After all, the Kalevala is probably, next to the Bible, the most influential proscriptive and prescriptive book in Finnish educational and cultural institutions. Accordingly, I will focus on how the discursive politics of the epic relate to the theme of property and propriety in the broadest sense (material and cultural). I argue that the epic and the scholarship surrounding it tell us much less about the Finns' allegedly 'primitive' and distant shamanistic past than about the nationalist and patriarchal politics of 'proper' behaviour and 'proper' ethno-cultural boundaries. By becoming familiar with the many variants of folk materials from which the epic was created, and by familiarizing oneself with wholly other circumpolar storytelling traditions and belief systems, one can become aware of the extent to which the representations of a pre-Christian Finnic worldview have come to reflect a Eurocentric ideology. In turn, this awareness raises new questions that can and should be asked of Finnish folklore, literature, and nationalist politics. In her article, 'Lonnrot's Brainchildren: The Representation of Women in Finland's Kalevala/ Patricia Sawin studies the variants of the folk material that Lonnrot collected, edited, and combined to create the illusion of an authoritative, 'true' myth (1988: 197). I will refer to her insights, among others, and to the writings on and by the Sami themselves, which yield information about the 'other' interpretations of mythic and historical material. One cannot become fully cognizant of the impact of a dualistic, hierarchical, Christian-derived, and 'White mythology' in epics such as the Kalevala unless one can imagine other philosophies and modes of socio-cosmic organization, social contracts, and gender scripts, or other practices of 'moral regulation.' These include knowledge of differing definitions of the very concept of 'property.' The negative representation of women and minorities is only recently emerging as an important issue within contemporary cultural debates in Finland. I claim that Finnish men represent the subject - the Self - and women and 'Lapps' the subordinate Other.4 The Sami is

184 Kaarina Kailo the endonym the indigenous people of northern Europe prefer to call themselves; the word 'Lapp' is for them an exonym with negative colonial associations. Today, it is often used to refer to the Finns living in Lapland, making it a most inappropriate term to distinguish between the Finns and the Sami. In the context of the epic, however, I will refer to the Sami as Sami/Lapps when it is necessary to refer to and to retain the epic's politics of ethnic ambiguity or 'overlap/p' - a term I will elaborate later. The dominant and most memorable representations of both women and the Sami/Lapps in the epic are linked to images of victimhood or selfishness, greed, and arrogance. Although the southern men of Kalevala are the rapists and murderers, it is the women and the Sami/Lapps, as I will show, who carry the projections of evildoing. The attitude towards the Sami/Lapps is rooted in the same controlling stance and double standards as the attitudes towards women in general - both are subordinate classes in terms of representational power. The reality is the same as the mythic suggestion. Women and the Sami continue to fight for equal rights; the Sami also fight for rights over their land and water resources, their language and culture, and for political power.5 The world knows of no 'post-colonial' state that would willingly have granted women and men equal access to the rights and resources of the nation-state.6 As McClintock further notes, the needs of 'postcolonial nations have been largely identified with male conflicts, male aspirations and male interests' (1992: 298). This situation is also reflected in the Kalevala and its interpretations. The quotation at the beginning of this article draws attention to the Finns' political double standards and their roots in an internalized self-denigration. The double standards also apply, of course, to the male interpretation of Kalevala's women. I will begin by defining the key concepts underlying my theoretical framework - classism, sexism, and post-colonialism - followed by a description of the context of both the Finnish and the Sami colonial past and nation-building. Finally, I will discuss the portrayal of the Sami/Lapps and of women in the Kalevala as it relates to the theme of property and propriety, and the relevance of these representations within the Finnish contemporary global context. Theoretical Perspectives on Property and Propriety Nancy Hartsock defines 'class' from a Marxist-Feminist perspective a a set of distinctions in capitalist society that are part of a totality, a

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 185 mode of life structured as well by sexism and racism; she observes that 'these distinctions affect the everyday lives of women and men, whites or black or Third World people, in different ways' (1976-97; 1981: 40). It is in the sense of such differential subject positions structuring nationalistic-patriarchal societies (which may not be advanced capitalist systems) that I look upon the Sami and all women in Finland as a class, while acknowledging that treating them as if they were a single homogeneous category obscures the very real and tangible differences in their location and privilege. Their status overlaps, but also conceals, internal class relations (Kailo 1992; 1994a; 1994b; Helander and Kailo 1998). Class represents a specific oppression by which the rules, values, mores, and ideals of the dominant class are imposed upon the subjugated class within the hierarchy of class values. There has been much discussion in feminism about the 'class' distinctions within the women's movement itself (Packard 1983:11). The appropriation through unequal power relations of definitions of reality and self-expression reveals human/woman rights as 'property.'7 In the contemporary world, property issues are no longer limited by the boundaries of nation states; as the world's resources are shrinking, while the power of multinational corporations and the economically/technologically leading countries is increasing, 'class' concepts can be applied within a much broader and more complex spectrum. Not just women, the most exploited and exploitable cheap labour force, but entire populations risk becoming the working, exploited class of the world's economic masterminds. Proponents of 'development' and 'progress' thus include a power-wielding elite both inside and outside the countries whose resources are being robbed in the name of tendentious projects of 'development.' Maria Mies argues that for some, catching up with development is not possible, so that the world's dominant economic powers are in a position to control, as their property, much of the planet beyond national borders: 'The powers ... accept that the colonial structure of the so-called market economy is maintained worldwide. This structure, however, is masked by such euphemisms as "North-South relations," "sustainable development," "threshold-countries" and so on which suggest that all poor countries can and will reach the same living standards as that of the affluent countries' (Mies 1993: 60). Among all exploited groups, women are not just a class within their societies, but also within the global context since, in the theories of the French Marxist lesbian theorist Monica Wittig, the very meaning of 'woman' is to be exploitable:

186 Kaarina Kailo 'The category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society in which men appropriate for themselves the reproduction and production of women and also their physical persons by means of a contract called the marriage contract ... (1981: 6). Once the class "men" disappears, "women" as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters' (1981: 15). Wittig goes so far as to define 'woman' as essentially an economic category which has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Therefore, lesbians are not 'women' (1981: 32). For Wittig, a feminist is nothing less than someone who works toward abolishing 'women' as a class. Until such a revolution, only lesbians live beyond the boundaries of a female identity defined for women by men (1981: 45). For the purposes of this chapter, women and the Sami are seen as disadvantaged groups lacking full self-determination in terms of their own politics, economic base, and culture. Nationalist movements fell back on the ideology of respectability and propriety to mould gender to fit their ideals of the nuclear family and sexual norms, and thus impinged on the way of life of ethnic minorities. Wittig, citing Marx and Engel's The German Ideology, raises another central aspect of my paper, the way in which the power to control nonmaterial resources impacts on power in other areas: The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it' (1981: 4).8 Post-colonial feminist approaches are, like mine, often eclectic, and draw on a variety of perspectives, theories, and beliefs in an effort to identify the most effective strategies for emancipatory politics. I propose the anti-imperialist 'politics of affinity' as a post-colonial and politicized alternative/supplement to the approaches that have dominated, in dualistic ways, the 1980s and 1990s progressive feminist discourses.9 This is a carefully chosen term, for 'affinity,' in my view, is less dualistic than 'difference/ and more political than 'sameness' or the rhetorical emptiness of 'sisterhood.' The politics of affinity aims at analyzing the interconnections between the various social relations that provide industrial capitalism with exploitable labour. Women occupy different positions of privilege, but those who are actively opposed to the contemporary dysfunctional global politics and capitalistic free market thinking can forge communities of shared concern across the national and multinational borders of 'sexploitation.' Post-colonial theories, making their appearance within the general

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 187 crisis of legitimation of Western master discourses, foreground the multicultural rather than the unified identity of the nation-state, and insist on locally articulated criticisms of the globalization of relations of power/knowledge.10 For Mishra and Hodge, for example, 'postcolonialism' without the hyphen is not 'after' something or other, but is already implicit in the discourses of colonialism itself. Likewise, I will look upon post-colonialism as an ideological orientation rather than as a historical stage. It refers to an 'always present "underside" within colonization itself (1991: 290), the effects of which are with us even today. Furthermore, post-colonial theory, in my view, is useful for three major reasons: 1) it problematizes the conception of identity as fixed or essential; 2) it views identity as intertwined with culture and representation; 3) it further seeks to unravel how language, representation, and identification are fundamentally political, caught up in a struggle of alterity, marginalization, and centredness. Finnish Nation-Building and the Politics of Appropriation From the beginning of their settlement on the Gulf of Finland, thousands of years ago, the Baltic Finns have lived on the fringes of European cultural, economic, political, and commercial influences. It was not until after the Swedish and Russian colonial invasion of Finland, however, that boundaries began to be established, distinguishing the Finns from other neighbouring Finnic groups. For the Finnish people, colonized for so long by the Swedes and the Russians, re-claiming, recovering, and even inventing a specific Finnic Golden Past meant raising themselves to the level of the best 'civilized' and educated nations of the world, proving themselves worthy of self-determination. The Sami, the indigenous people of northern Europe, formerly referred to as 'Lapps/ have been divided by four states - Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia - in the course of history. During conversations and interviews I carried out in Samiland over the past four summers, I met with the Sami writer and artist Kerttu Vuolab, whose words at the beginning of this article provide a biting commentary on the double standards of the Finns regarding the desire for self-determination. As an immigrant Finn (on the outside looking in), I have ambivalent feelings about the nationalistic side of my Finnish 'identity/ for Finland has itself been marked by the long-term effects of colonial oppression arising from its own fight for independence. Considered the 'little brother' by former colonizers, the Finns in their turn

188 Kaarina Kailo have reacted in an immature way to their 'ethnostress/ by 'othering' and objectifying those they brand as their own 'little brothers.' The mythical ancestors of the Finns needed inimical 'others/ not close sisters and brothers as 'anothers.'11 Michael Branch notes in his introduction to W.F. Kirby's English translation of the Kalevala that the circumstances in which the epic took shape show that its full significance is not to be understood solely as a Finnish phenomenon, but that it is associated with a philosophy of nationalism which came to Finland from various parts of eighteenth-century Europe. When Finnish scholars began to record and collect the ordinary folk's traditions and beliefs, they came across a rich legacy of oral literature reflecting an ancient shamanistic and animistic world-view. As Branch points out, it is important to consider how and why 'small local traditions' in the course of history have come to be sacrificed to 'grand traditions' (Branch 1985: xi). In the case of Finland, local beliefs and myths were collected so that the 'essence' of Finnishness could be discovered or invented. Such an impulse has been referred to as 'strategic essentialism' (G. Spivak), or the performative framing of Self and Other that allows marginalized groups to posit viable if constructed identities in order to practise a strategically necessary politics of difference. Spivak posits that the subaltern's identity is not a unified subject-identity but an 'identity-in-differential' and 'that what matters is not to represent them but to learn to represent ourselves' (1990: 51). In the case of the Finns, the former 'subalterns' incorporated the strategies of other nations to raise their own self-esteem. However, the Finnish epic is more steeped in Germanic, central European, and Greek myths and ideals and interpretations of its contents than many Finns today realize. In my view, this is not because central European influences were necessarily more pervasive. Rather, Lonnrot combined the motifs in an attempt to impress the powerful elites of Europe with whom the Finnish nationalists wished to be identified, and by whom they wished to be recognized as sovereign people worthy of independence. According to Wilson, Lonnrot was motivated in his selection of epic materials by his interest in the classic epics and by his desire to create for Finland something of lasting worth. Apparently, while the compilation of the Kalevala was in process, he told friends that he would not quit collecting until he could match half of Homer, and that he hoped future generations would value the Finnish epic as highly as the Gothic peoples esteemed the Edda and the Romans their epics: 'If not quite Homer, then at least Hesiod' (1996: 38).

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 189 The Kalevala consists of stories, genres, and literary, folkloristic elements that are hybrids in terms of values, beliefs, and modes of expression. The stories mix adventure stories from the Viking period with a more ancient shamanistic cultural layer, and finally, with Christian philosophy. Treated with condescension by their aristocratic colonizers, the Finns were labelled primitive and barbaric. During the nineteenth-century folklore debates, Finland's animistic, shamanistic past was compared to the 'primitive' characteristics and culture of other circumpolar people. Social Darwinistic approaches by foreign folklorists interested in Kalevala allowed them to establish a kinship between Finnic myths and North American Native oral traditions that were seen to express an 'early, primitive' stage of folklore. Andrew Lang, for example, is reminded 'by the prevalence of the magical song in Finland of the popular poetry both of Red Indians and Australian blacks' (1898: xix). Lang's and Comparetti's views, focused on the noble primitiveness and the 'surprising metaphysics' (!) of the epic, are exemplary reflections of the nineteenth-century Darwinism and European condescension that marked folklore research. Domenico Comparetti, as an Italian scholar 'othering' the Finns, finds that the songs in Kalevala 'know but a very vague and indeterminate division of peoples, yet the idea of Pohjola, of the Maid of Pohjola, of the Lapps, does determine a difference of race' (1890: 251). The Sami/Lapps supposedly represented a 'relic of a former aboriginal people,' reflecting the hierarchical model adopted in Finnish science, as elsewhere. A Sami scholar, VeliPekka Lehtola, has written in his article, 'A Lower Culture, A People with No History?/ that 'an attempt was made to underline the differences that made a culture stand out as "primitive" end [sic] "uncivilized" and to define the boundaries of the civilized world through distinctions with respect to other cultures' (1996: 271). Just as the mythology of the Finns was believed by foreign scholars to reflect their 'primitiveness,' the Finns themselves viewed the Sami way of life and their 'deviant' forms of culture as racial features in which the 'early stages' of human existence could be seen. The Finnish epic has itself been treated as the primitive 'other' by the European elite, and idealized as a (mostly) noble savage world epic. The assumption that epics 'evolve' from 'primitive' to 'higher' stages of literary art has now been exposed as a primitive stage in patriarchal critical thinking about oral traditions. The epic's evolutionary stage was deemed to be in direct correlation with how far it has 'progressed' from an eco- and woman-friendly shamanistic world-

190 Kaarina Kailo view rooted in balance. Lehtola has analysed some of the Finnish representations of Saminess, and his comments confirm my own impression that, as evident during the ultra-nationalist writings on the Kalevala, the elite Finns suffered from a post-colonial lack of self-esteem and were motivated by their insecure political status within Darwinian philosophy.12 Some critics have praised the Kalevala precisely for its reflection of ancient shamanism, the power of magic and word power; for its adherence to a more peaceful, nature-bound philosophy; for its rare 'primitiveness/ which contrasts with the more war-oriented and aristocratic epics of European 'high' culture; and even for its structural 'looseness' and its shamanistic modes of expression - alliteration, assonance, spells, incantations, and so on. These alone should have created the conditions for affinity and kinship between the Sami and the Finns. So why was that not the case? And why have Finnish scholars and folklorists tended to measure the 'glory' of Finnish culture against the 'best' of European 'high' culture rather than, say, across the circumpolar north, with native and non-native peoples across the 60th parallel? In answer, one could argue that the colonized Finns had internalized the view of themselves as 'primitive/ and allowed these 'higher' cultures to regulate their sense of proper culture, instead of questioning the basis of such moral-mythical and ethno-cultural regulation of norms and standards of excellence. Lehtola claims that Finnish scholars felt a great need to correct the claims put forward abroad that the Finns were related to the Mongols (1996: 270). An attempt to parry this 'improper accusation' was to divert attention to kindred nations, emphasizing the weakness of the Sami people who, they suggested, were living at a 'lower level' relative to the 'more sophisticated' Finns (1996: 270). According to Lehtola 'the Finns were eager to emphasise Virchow's assessment of the Lapps as "a race withered by unfavourable conditions'" (1996: 271). Of course, there was no awareness in nineteenth-century scholarship that 'race' itself is a cultural concept with little validity in differentiating ethnic characteristics. Nevertheless, as has been the case with indigenous populations elsewhere, such a view was accompanied by the 'noble savage' idealization. In the case of the Finns, they were, together with the Sami, perceived as masters of magic, unsurpassable in knowledge of supernatural techniques (Moyne: 1981). As is true of most national epics, however, these were rooted in an imaginary cultural unity linked with a 'golden past,' an illusion which does not fully recognize

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 191 the myriad translations and hybrid ethnic influences that a culture undergoes constantly (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1990: 371).13 There is no 'pure/ 'authentic' Finnic self that the epic or any other folk material might reveal. Through conscious manipulation of the representations, however, more positive connotative evaluations are linked with the 'Finnish heroes' of Kalevala than with the polarized opposites, the Lapp/Sami women of the North. The Sami have been made to embody the idealized and denigrated Other of the mainstream male hero, of the national subject and legitimate citizen, considered both alien to the male Self and a much-desired fantasized female Other, a romanticized anima. The stereotyped portrayal of epic materials persists today in many forms, for example in the Swedish dictum, 'lapp skall vara lapp' (the Lapp should remain a Lapp) (Anon. 1990: 71). From the perspective of today's world one might say that civilized, technologically advanced people need a 'pure,' 'wild/ and 'untamed' other to fulfil their longings for that which their very 'progress' is destroying - ecological and human diversity. Hence the need for the positive pair of the dualism whore/madonna or primitive, drunk/ noble savage. Both Finno-Ugric peoples who have populated northern FennoScandia since immemorial times, the Sami and the Finns have been colonized by the neighbouring Russians and Scandinavians. However, today it is only the Sami, not the Finns, that continue to fight for selfdetermination. Written before Finland's independence, the Kalevala's ambiguous and overlapping portrayal of the Sami and the Finns does not as such represent full-fledged asymmetrical colonial relations as they exist in organized autonomous states. Yet, suggestions of how it was in the misty past create conditions for property issues relevant to contemporary land rights issues, and reinforce existing stereotypes while fanning opposition to the Sami as an allegedly greedy people of the North.14 Since the Sami were perceived as lacking in 'proper' knowledge, morals, and conduct, it was justifiable in the popular mind to appropriate their lands and to treat them as a subordinate people in need of 'help' and a civilizing influence. Women as a group were also viewed as needing male assistance and expertise, once the idea took root that women were too irrational, and emotional, and passive to look after themselves or to have equal power in social relations. A central theme of the nation-building Kalevala is the power struggle between the South and the North for the possession of ambiguous spiritual, material, and mental resources symbolized by the Sampo, a

192 Kaarina Kailo magic mill of plenty, that grinds endless resources of prosperity for its lucky owner. Even when it consists of many parallel, overlapping, and disconnected story lines, the dominant analyses and interpretations of the Kalevala have generally focused on the three 'heroes/ a kind of shamanistic Holy Trinity, and on the Sampo. The most 'visible' plot line of the Kalevala centres around the activities of three male characters prominent in the shamanistic tradition - Vainamoinen, Lemminkainen, and Ilmarinen. The structural and thematic unity of the story is built around the forging, capture, and loss of the Sampo which the 'Mistress of Pohjola/ Louhi, commissions as ransom for the hand of her daughter. The heroes' search for wives and their clash with Louhi over the Sampo form the core of the dominant interpretations of the epic. For readers unfamiliar with the Finnish epic, I will outline this 'core plot/ In the beginning, the chief 'hero/ Vainamoinen, is born from an egg that rolls into the sea from the knee of Ilman impi (virgin of the Air). Vainamoinen sets out to clear, cultivate, and sow the land. After a contest pitting him against Joukahainen, 'the slit-eyed Lapp/ he sings the latter to the swamp. Joukahainen promises his sister Aino as ransom if only Vainamoinen will save his life. Vainamoinen agrees to this and wants to claim his bride-to-be. In defiance of the old patriarch, Aino throws herself into the sea rather than marrying him. She joins three maidens sitting on a boulder, and goes down into the sea with them. Jouhahainen, who has long harboured hatred for the old patriarch, tries to shoot Vainamoinen and wounds him with his arrow. Ukko, the Finnish pagan god, bears Vainamoinen to Pohjola where he is given a warm welcome by Louhi, the crone of Pohja. She promises him the hand of her daughter if he can forge a Sampo - a mysterious mill of prosperity whose nature cannot be identified. Vainamoinen entrusts the smith Ilmarinen with the task, but Louhi's daughter chooses him over Vainamoinen as her husband. A garrulous, wanton, and turbulent character, Lemminkainen, appears in the story; he is also courting girls and seeking a wife in the North. He fails in one of the initiatory tasks to which Louhi subjects him and is dismembered in Manala, the river of death. His devoted mother manages, however, to put his pieces back together and bring him back to life. Enraged because he has not been invited to the magnificent wedding ceremony celebrated in Pohjola, Lemminkainen now sets out on the warpath against the people of the North. He beheads Louhi's husband, chief of the clan, but

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 193 then must flee before the angered people. His house and fields are burnt. He tries to raid the North a second time, but Louhi's magic power triumphs over him. Meanwhile, Ilmarinen loses his wife who is devoured by the bears of Kullervo. He returns to Pohja to ask for Louhi's second daughter in marriage. When all else fails, he carries off the woman by force. When she seizes the opportunity to sleep with another man, he changes her into a seagull. The heroes of Kalevala, meanwhile, learn of the great prosperity that the Sampo has bestowed on the land of Pohja. Ilmarinen and Vainamoinen decide to return to Pohja to seize the Sampo and are joined during the expedition by Lemminkainen. Their ship runs into an enormous pike from whose bones Vainamoinen fashions a wondrous zither-like instrument, the kantele. Vainamoinen uses the hypnotic sounds of this instrument to lull the 'enemies' to sleep and, meanwhile, takes possession of the Sampo. However, Lemminkainen's untimely foul singing wakes the people of Pohja, and a battle ensues over the Sampo. Louhi raises a terrible storm, during which the Sampo is lost to all. Vainamoinen is able to retrieve some of its scattered fragments, while Louhi picks up a bit of the lid. Vainamoinen's fragments are sufficient, however, to make Kalevala prosperous, and Louhi, outraged, unleashes a series of scourges against Kalevala. She locks the luminaries, the sun and the moon, in a cavern, but in the end Kalevala triumphs and light returns. A child is born to Marjatta who has conceived miraculously by eating a cranberry. The epic ends with the departure of Vainamoinen to the boundless sea as he, the 'great shaman,' is being replaced by Marjatta's son, the representative of Christianity. We are now aware that one of the colonial techniques for destroying women's and native peoples' own expressions of spirituality and power - their cultural property - has been to destroy their symbols, their language, and/or to rename their realities by recasting their sacred objects or deities in negative terms. Material dispossession and discursive denigration thus go hand in hand. The Sampo that Pohjola and Kalevala fight over may be seen as the symbol of self-determination and also of women's creative selfhood and communal living, as its roots with the Swedish 'sambu' (Comparetti 1898) suggest. Yet Finnish readers are accustomed to interpreting Sampo as the promise of the South's - Kalevala's - prosperity, which the three heroes are justified in stealing from Louhi, the Mistress of the North. Whether seen as a token of culture, or of psychic, material, and mental prosperity, the Sampo functions as a coveted object of desire for the polarized historical/

194 Kaarina Kailo mythical groups seeking to possess it. This historically multi-layered symbol and miraculous dispenser of fortune has also been interpreted as a symbol of nationhood and integrity. The very title of the Kalevala focuses the readers' attention on the patriarchal/nationalist agenda of the narrative/s: Kalevala is seen to refer to the 'southern land of heroes.' Its polarized other is represented as 'the land of women/ Pohjola, which, in contrast, is shrouded in associations of evil and the forces of death and darkness.15 In the polarized representation, Pohja, or its synonym, Pohjola, the North, is referred to as 'the man-eating village,' with women who are 'drowners of heroes.' This says everything about the southern men's projected fear of powerful women, for in its mythic and partly historical derivation, Pohjola refers to the land of women. Kalevala's hero-centred and predominantly epic 'main' plot predictably foregrounds the history of the male shamans and heroes, and represents women and the Lapps (Sami) as followers or helpers of men or as men's enemies in the margins - literally, in the Pohja, Pohjola, the bottom, the fringe of the world.16 Missionary Work, Colonization, and the Omission of the Samis' Ownership of Their Resources and Self-Definitions What then are the issues regarding Sami and Finnish land disputes, fights over property, and attitudes towards 'propriety'? One 'authoritative' source recommended by members of the Nordic Sami Institute (the Samis' own research institution in Koutokeino) is a book called The Sami People, which describes the Samis' experience of colonization, outlining the landmarks of Sami history with a focus on the experience with Norway (Anon. 1990: 26).17 As with native populations elsewhere in the world, missionary work and the appropriation of their lands and other resources went hand in hand. As early as the 14th century, 'according to the settlement statute issued by the Swedish King Magnus Eriksson in 1340, all those who believed in Christ or were willing to be converted were allowed to acquire hereditary property in Lapland' (Anon. 1990: 26). The book also reminds us that 'the various outsiders who came in contact with the Sami tended to spread the most amazing and unfounded tales about Lapland and the Sami. One motive may have been the desire to protect their monopoly over the Sami sorcery, and of the 'dumb trade' necessary with them; these outsiders tended to emphasize the frightening nature of the Sami and the difficulty of dealing with them (1990: 28).18

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 195 As with the 'woman problem/ the 'Sami problem' has been couched in terms of impending extinction.19 In their efforts to assimilate and thus destroy Sami culture, their colonizers have used a variety of strategies. Sanctions have been imposed to discourage potential opposition, and public grants for local development projects were often made contingent on the extent to which the projects furthered Norwegianization. Parents and pupils were promised prizes for progress in Norwegian (Anon. 1990: 124). Just as the Sami have been taxed by all three surrounding states simultaneously, there has been collaboration for their colonization across borders. This involved, for example, financial policy instruments such as the Finnish Fund bonus paid to teachers who could present proof of conscientious efforts to promote Norwegianization. J.A. Friis called it a 'prize for preventing the Sami from learning God's word in Lappish' (Anon. 1990: 124-5). A book I coedited with the Sami scholar Elina Helander, No Beginning, No End:The Sami Speak Up (1998), bears witness to the traumatic experiences of many Sami youth who, like native North Americans, were punished for speaking their mother tongue, mocked by their peers in boarding schools, taught from books lacking information about their culture, and whose behaviour, in short, was regulated by the Christian, patriarchal systems to which they were subjected (1998). It is illustrative to consider the regulation of 'proper' gender roles in animistic societies, which include the pre-Christian Finnish and Sami cultures, for they provide alternatives to the restricting dualisms that result from Christian, Western patriarchy's prescriptive gender roles. In my research on Sami sex/gender systems and their notions of property and propriety, I could find no consistent pattern or view, but rather a great deal of educated guesswork and academic speculation. I will cite some of the most provocative suggestions of social relations that contrast with those we know of in most Western societies. In Changes in Sami (Lapp) Conceptions of Male and Female as a Key to Cultural Transformations in Sami History, Sharon Stephens notes, regarding the ancient Sami social arrangements, that the terms 'male' and 'female' are not primarily 'about' biological differences between the sexes in the same way that Western gender concepts are (1983: 6). Rather, 'in the relations between male and female, Sami culture appears to be 'anchoring' in the physical world important aspects of any meaningful system - the relation between 'male' powers of differentiated and stable order and 'female' powers of integration and transformation (1983: 6). In contrast to the modern Western stance of

196 Kaarina Kailo defining women in relation to men and submitting this definition to the needs of a strong nation-state, according to Stephens 'it was these broader female powers that represented the common foundation of existence, out of which differentiated forms of the land, animal world, and human community emerged and were then able to enter into relations of exchange among themselves' (1983: 7). However, in the course of history, and with the increasing ascendancy of patriarchal thought and practices, there began to be observed a 'pastoral series of separate "levels of action" - such as the domestic household, the realm of herding activities or the spirit world' (1983: 12). Stephens points out that, within each level, the relation of male over female is replicated, but observes that in general, systematic terms there is an overall deemphasis of the transformative aspects of female powers, and a greater importance placed on female capacities to integrate units only within and subordinate to the dominant order of male differentiation (1983: 12). Stephens speculates that the gradual asymmetrical complementarity of the sexes in Sami society led to the demise of the 'old women akkas' (goddesses) who gradually become 'minor deities/ while male deities emerged as reigning divinities of the upper world, just as male heads of household and godly rulers controlled the boundaries of female powers (1983:12). Mythic and economic authority thus go hand in hand. What do Sami women of today say about the social regulation of gender? The Sami scholar, Louise Backman, considers the notion of a Sami matriarchy as at best speculative (1982: 143-62), but she surmises that Sami men and women had complementary roles which did not represent asymmetrical power relations, as is the case with the public/private division of Western sex/gender systems. There is one Sami tradition, however, which more than any other, contrasts with the Christian regulation of moral behaviour through appropriate sexual mores, particularly for women. Backman refers to 'hospitality prostitution' [sic], which has also been found to be prevalent among the Inuit. Backman points out that 'in this highly respectable custom [wife-lending] there was not a trace of moral laxity or an attempt to enliven a dull marriage with novelty' (J. Rytcheu as quoted in Backman 1982:143-62). Backman contextualizes the practice by noting that 'in the old days men [sic] lived in closed societies which were often separated from each other by vast wildernesses of snow and ice. Under such circumstances, the danger of inbreeding distracted the rules and forced people to renew their blood and inject new vigour into the community, clan and family' (1982: 144). For Backman, 'the

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 197 chief concern in this custom was again the welfare of future generations and the health of people who not only had to exist, but to live often in a bitter struggle against a harsh and treacherous nature.' The writings of the Sami themselves on issues of property, moral regulation, and Sami ways of living and knowing provide an important contrast to the mainstream depiction of their victimization and 'need for assistance.' For all their diversity, Sami women's writings reflect two areas of shared belief and concern: the importance of the Samis' selfdetermination in all matters affecting them (land base, education, politics, and so forth); and an emphasis on sustainable modes of living and coexisting with the natural world. Land is not a property for individual exploitation, but something to be shared communally. Likewise, spiritual interconnectedness imbues all aspects of life. Regardless whether this continues to be true for all contemporary Sami, it is nevertheless a strategically essentialist discourse about Sami ways and distinctness. Aino and Louhi - The Sami and Women as Property, Victims, or Witches I will now move on to a detailed discussion of the patriarchal representation of women and the Sami in the Finnish Kalevala. An appropriate way to expose the patriarchal subtext of Kalevala is to concentrate on an episode that generally receives little critical attention since it centres on a character who, in the patriarchal/nationalistic tradition, has been created as a minor female figure. This is the episode about Aino, a young maiden who has become an icon of Finnish womanhood and the epitome of tragic, passive femininity (Tarkiainen 1916). The initial set-up introducing Vainamoinen's direct attempt to take possession of what he considers rightfully his own - the young and innocent Aino sets the tone for the entire epic's treatment of women and implicitly of Lapland (see plot, above). Women are possessions that are passed on by fathers or brothers to husbands, they are currency of exchange between patriarchs for the purposes of the reproductive cycle and domestic labour.20 This episode also ties in in unsuspected ways with other episodes featuring the epic 'othering' of the Sami/Lapps. The episode in which we are introduced to Aino is intimately linked to the shamanistic duel. This episode about the creation of the world can easily be seen as an allegory of the origins of the Finnish nation. If we take 'nation creation' to be, by definition, appropriative of women's and minorities' legacies, the decision to leave out female creatrix fig-

198 Kaarina Kailo ures is of course appropriate, if not 'proper' from the perspective of those excluded. The two heroes are pitted against each other, evoking the ancient shamanistic contests of the Finnic peoples. For Finns, magic and power consisted in knowing the origins of phenomena, a recipe which allowed control over them. The old patriarch shows himself as powerful and knowledgeable, and claims to have presided at the creation of the world. He finally sings the 'Lapp' youth to a swamp, humbling him to admit his defeat. To save his life, Joukahainen promises his own sister, Aino, in marriage to Vainamoinen. This treatment of women as currency of exchange then prepares us for the dramatic episode featuring Aino, the sister of the 'slit-eyed Lapp' - an attribute that immediately brands Joukahainen as a 'non-Finn.' Property relations, as well as views on moral regulation, are closely connected with the myths from which they seem to derive their legitimation. Such representations of what is 'natural' thus divert attention from historical conditions of economic disparity and the fact that it is those with property and rights who have the power to control the creation of myths and representations serving their agendas. While Joukahainen's class relations appear to be determined by issues of shamanistic knowledge and property through which he can redeem himself from 'hot water/ it is obvious in his treatment of his sister that her relations to property are to be mediated by her sexual relationships to men. To Finnish patriots, the fact that the old patriarch Vainamoinen triumphs over the young Joukahainen no doubt represents subliminally the epic victory of the Finnish ancestors over the Lapps, the Sami, although the word 'Lapp' could also refer to Finns living in Lapland. This very ambiguity, however, renders the power relations between the two ethnic groups invisible, intangible, and hence, politically neutral. But of course, in the context of asymmetrical power relations, there is no space that is neutral; any ambiguity plays into the hands of those with power. It seems most curious to me that no scholar has elaborated on the projective nature of this song contest and the political underpinnings of singing the 'Lapp' boy into a bog. The very fact that the Finnic ancestor/shaman is older and wiser suggests that the Finns represent the older nation, the First Nation, and hence are justified in subjugating, literally singing, the Sami into a subordinate status - something that is believed to have happened historically, and which culminated in the Samis' dispossession under Finland and the other independent neighbouring states.

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 199 A typical, traditional interpretation of this episode, one that exemplifies a patriarchal, malestream reading of the Kalevala, is that of Pekka Ervast (1916), who interprets Aino as 'that tangible proof of the developed matured sense of beauty of the Finnish people, [which] is looking for its equal in world literature' (1916: 230). Totally oblivious to Aino's kinship with a Laplander, he looks upon her as the personification of the beauty of wisdom - beauty in Joukahainen, wisdom in Vaina-moinen (1916: 232). As the sister of Joukahainen, we are to assume that Aino is not necessarily the blond prototypical Finnish maiden - how she is generally depicted - but a Sami/Lapp. Other scholars have interpreted Aino's unwillingness to marry the old patriarch as her fear of sexuality, echoing the infamous Freudian assumption in the Dora case study that women should be willing to embrace any male's sexual advances to qualify as sexually normal. In Ervast's interpretation, Aino's refusal to marry wisdom in the form of Vainamoinen betokens her inner emptiness and the distance from truth and godliness that such a state symbolizes. Aino has also been idealized as the passive female victim silenced to the point that she disappears into the sea (and is assumed dead), while Louhi has been dehumanized as the 'pushy broad' who will not bend under patriarchal rule, and who returns the colonial male gaze. These mostly male scholars have not cared to look for a larger female pattern, even within the epic margins, although there are some scanty references to Greek myths echoing similar events, episodes, or characters. Since Lonnrot appears to have modelled the epic on central European cultural traditions, his female characters, too, have been represented in a way that echoes the Eleusinian mysteries and the triple goddess: the maiden, mother, and crone. Although it may take classical training to spot the Greek mythological motifs in the Kalevala, the very fact that the characters evoke them at the expense of Sami narratives is telling of the epic's ideological underpinnings: it represents an appropriation of both women's and the Samis' own ideologies and self-definitions - the Sampo as their property - however diverse they may be. The two women (Aino and Louhi) can be situated at two ends of a spectrum of classic Western male fantasies regarding women - the tragic victim and the castrating bitch. The daughters of the 'Hag of the North Farm' whom the 'heroes' court also lend themselves to the denigration/idealization paradigm. It is of course typical of nationalist, patriarchal hegemony to represent women in polar categories conducive to male domination. As Patricia Sawin has noted: 'Only virgins

200 Kaarina Kailo and mothers, women who act to reproduce the patriarchy and remain fully under the men's control, are evaluated positively. Women who want to retain control over their own sexuality and alternative knowledge are condemned as whores, witches, or monsters' (1988: 199). Since men in many cultures have insisted on women being the other, they are disturbed by any blurring of clearly defined differences; thus, through the lens of the male gaze, the Sami/Lapp woman would be seen as provocatively masculine rather than simply as a well-rounded human being, able to come to terms with the demands of her environment. The Finnish epic likewise uses several strategies to create the polarization and to regulate gender roles and gender-appropriate behaviour. Sawin also notes the impact of the German philosopher Herder, who believed that the nation should be modelled after the family in which the father 'naturally' and universally holds absolute authority (Sawin 1988:197). In Sawin's summary, Herder also regarded cultural traditions, which should serve as the focus of a national identity and the backbone of a proper education, as masculine in their essence, the sole property of the fathers who would pass them along only to their sons (1988: 197). The Finns' desire to create a nation with 'one tongue, one mind' (monoculture) is no doubt a reflection of Herder's belief that, although it is healthy for nations to differ, each people should have a single, unified national character (1988:197). Patricia Sawin's deconstruction of the epic is useful for analyzing its portrayal and manipulation of proper female behaviour and 'proper' femininity. Evoking Herder's view that women's proper role was the silent provision of those physical necessities that would enable their husbands and sons to accomplish great deeds, she draws attention to the practices in the Finnish context, based on this philosophy, whereby any variant expression on the part of women would be subsumed and eliminated in the creation of a single voice (1988:197). However, Sawin does not elaborate on the treatment and othering of the Sami/Lapps but focuses merely on sexism. It has been typical of colonialism to justify greedy deeds, broken treaties, and questionable 'missionary' actions on the grounds that the colonized peoples were 'cruel savages or cannibalistic heathens without morals.' Just as indigenous peoples have often been represented as cannibals, 'phallic' mothers, and witches, so too women who do not fit into the patriarchal requirement of proper 'feminine' behaviour are often represented in folklore as 'man-eaters.' As we have seen, Louhi as the Sami Wise Woman condenses these two tendencies; as matriarch and shaman woman of

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 201 power, she stands at the head of a country depicted with such an epithet as the 'man-eating village/ and she herself is a 'drowner of heroes/ Her epithet as drowner of heroes is all the more ironic in that it is a reversal of the actual plot and of the actual reality of Sabi/Suomi (Sami/Finland) relations. She is a projection, no doubt, of the way men drain women of energy through the phenomenon of 'emotional labour.' It is Aino, the sister of the Sami/Lapp Joukahainen, who is made to 'drown' (although the reports of her suicide can be interpreted as a male fantasy regarding the fate of rebellious women), and it is the Finnish male heroes who drown out the power of the Sami by snatching their property - the Sampo. In Kalevala, the patriarchal selection and combination of 'high' culture myths, is apparent in that in the end nothing is reflected of a woman-centred mythology - shamanism is presented as another patriarchal system. The epic manages to depict Sami women as rival witches whose power consists primarily of sending diseases, metamorphosing into eagles and bears, and hiding the luminaries in a mountain. Lonnrot chose to surround the people of the mythic North with negative associations and negative pagan traditions, setting the stage for a disparaging attitude towards the Sami, and reinforcing a myth of strong, powerful, matriarchal Sami women. These representations merely obscure the very real economic disadvantages faced by the Sami. However, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the ethnicity of the representations of the Sami/Lapps. Since there is nothing but speculation about the ethnicity of the first people living in the North, who may or may not have been Samis, Lonnrot probably chose the ambiguous and hybrid representations to leave the status of the 'First Nations' open-ended, thus allowing those who control these representaitons the freedom to interpret them in any way they wish. Of course, I also may be accused of selecting a particular reading to serve my own agenda. If I provoke debate about the subtle or overt impact of the epic representations, however, I will have achieved my goal. I have argued that for many Finns, Louhi represents the Sami. In a movie version of the Kalevala, 'Rauta-aika' [Iron Age], Louhi and her people are clearly portrayed as Samis, on the basis of the drums, specific cultural items, and symbolic idioms that are associated with them in various film episodes. The main point here is that the choice of imagery and characterization represents an appropriation of aspects of Sami identity - itself a theft of the Sampo as a symbol of the nationhood of the Sami people and their land base, cultural idioms, and expression. How-

202 Kaarina Kailo ever, exactly the opposite impression is being conveyed, and this projected view continues to prevail and influence children and scholars. Louhi, the creator of the very concept of the Sampo, can be interpreted as a Sami or as a representative of any ancient Finnic tribe, who could have been taught in schools as having kinship with the Sami's powerful mythic goddess, Maderakka. Owing to the frequent references to 'Lapp/ Sami people in her story. To my knowledge, no such education exists, however. The Finns, including myself, have not been taught until recently about Sami mythology and reality, let alone from the Sami point of view.21 But this is where the double standard comes in: while the Finns have an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to ancient shamanic knowledge and ways of living, their negative, 'primitive/ and 'uncivilized' aspects are attached mostly to women and to the non-Sami men. In the case of Finnish shaman figures, however, there is an element of admirable traditional wisdom and a pride about the magic powers of the ancient Finnish men. According to the logic of Christianized and patriarchal hierarchy, Louhi, as a powerful leader, must be represented as a threat to what is 'proper.' In the great majority of interpretations of Louhi, she been portrayed as the epitome of greed and evil.22 Louhi also features as the epitome of evil in a series of science fiction novels by the FinnishAmerican Emil Petaja: in these stories the whole world is threatened with ecological disaster and it is the Lapp witch of the North who is behind it all. Here again, the Sami women who are the least powerful are the scapegoats for the very power by which they are victimized: short-sighted, dysfunctional, anti-planetary, male body politics! Moreover, the patriarchal-nationalistic agenda has worked, for few Finns question why they consider Louhi to be evil.23 On close scrutiny, Louhi is merely defending her own property, her own daughters, testing the men soliciting the hand of her daughters, and then retaliating against the Finnish invaders' arrogant aggressions. Nothing is made of her kindness towards Vainamoinen when the Finnish sage first lands in the waters of the north, stranded, pathetic, crying, and lost. Her nurturing at the beginning of the encounter gets no press because she is an agentic, self-determining woman not amenable to the dualistic roles of the Christian view of proper female behaviour. Sawin notes that: Tor the mature woman who insists upon her independence, rejecting complicity both with men's schemes of conquest and with her own subjugation to those men, there is only one definition available, that of the irredeemably evil opponent who must be defeated. Indeed, such a

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 203 woman is defined out of the nation altogether [emphasis added]. She is a foreigner whose only benefit to the race is to unify them by strengthening their collective identity in the face of a common enemy' (1988:198). Most visual representations of Louhi are of a withered, ugly, gaptoothed hag. This image of Louhi combines ageism, racism, and sexism. As has been true of Western folklore and fairy tales, the witch tends to be old, ugly, powerful, and independent precisely so that children would not wish to identify with agentic femininity. A demand that one country turn over the primary source of its wealth to another is generally construed as a declaration of war. In Lonnrot's Kalevala, however, the story suggests that the men should get the Sampo 'back' because the wives procured from Pohjola have not proven to be as lasting or as valuable a contribution to the fertility of their land as the Sampo has been for Pohjola. Thus their aggression is transformed into a justified attempt to regain one's own property (Sawin 1988: 199). When Aino drowns, commits suicide, or simply goes underground in the epic plot, what happens to her prefigures what will happen later on a broader, national level. The nation's loss of Aino to the sea subsequently results in the loss to the sea of the Sampo; we may interpret this as a portrayal of the fragmentation of women's sexuality, and spirituality, and, if we see Aino as a Sami maiden, as a fragmentation of Sami spirituality, self-determination, and selfhood. It is also clear that, despite its relatively loose and disjointed structure, the Kalevala is essentially interpreted and read as a linear story telling of the 'progress' and evolution of the Finnic race from shamanistic, 'primitive' times to the 'beneficial' arrival of Christianity. This bears the imprint of Darwinian notions of evolution, which have prompted the Finns to buy into the myth of progress and development, and which continues to distinguish the Sami, who favour sustainable modes of living, from the increasingly 'coca-colonized,' Americanized, Westernized, and technologically oriented Finns. Sami Women and 'Proper' Roles: The Contemporary Context The loss of balance - symmetrical relations between the Sami and mainstream societies - continues today. Indeed, Kalevala, the South, continues to prosper at the expense of the exploited North, Pohjola, and of real life rather than mythic Sami women. Among today's active Sami scholars and feminists, Jorunn Eikjok notes in her 'Indigenous Women's Situation: Common Struggle for Our Future' that it was some

204 Kaarina Kailo time after the Second World War that the former complementary and symmetrical roles of men and women changed, and the responsibility for farming was formally passed to men. She writes that 'formerly, most [Sami] women formed part of a female exchange and dependence-relationship a so-called "verdde" system but at that historical moment, a large number of women and their knowledge and experience were no longer needed. They were increasingly isolated in the home, in the private sphere. The practical consequences of this have been that Sami culture and language became defined as inferior with the woman bearing the brunt of the loss of status, self-determination, support and respect' (1990: 10). Eikjok also notes the impact that the development of capitalism had in creating a new 'sectorization' of society, leading to segregation by sex and the appearance of a private (domestic)/public dichotomy (1990: 10). Capitalism brought with it the market system in which women lost their role as producers. The domestic sphere was simultaneously devalued. In many ways, this also diminished women's influence (1990: 10). Eikjok concludes that for women there are no developed countries, and while it is clearly better for women to live in some places rather than in others, the comparatively richer countries of the world do not always provide better living conditions for women than do poorer countries. Eikjok, comparing the situation of indigenous women across the Atlantic, observes that in both Canada and Norway the state defines who belongs to the indigenous population in a way that creates an internal hierarchy (1990:11). State policies are engendered in invidious and predictable ways. She mentions as an example the Indian Act of Canada whereby, before it was repealed and replaced, Native women who married non-Natives lost their status rights. Unlike their female counterparts, Native men who married non-Natives retained their status rights and passed these on to their children. Eikjok observes that the same practice applies to Sami women in Sweden who lost Sami rights when moving away. She notes that the dominant society's negative ideas about women are reproduced within the indigenous culture, resulting in a worsened situation. Indigenous women, then, are regulated both within mainstream society and within their own culture. The state facilitates assimilation by turning to men in the management of the indigenous population: 'In Canada 80% of the members of the reservation councils are men. In Norway the reindeer herding is about to become a purely male occupation. In 1978 we had a new law of reindeer herding, and later agreements ... [W]omen are about to lose their

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 205 former rights' (Eikjok 1990:12). Eikjok suggests that it is because of the co-optation of the Sami men to patriarchal social relations that the Sami women are now torn between two sets of demands: they are required to uphold values and customs in the culture connected with the former subsistence economy and, simultaneously, they are required to fill the modern female roles which, Eikjok believes, are incompatible because there is little social support for their efforts (1990: 12). Eik- jok notes that the dominant society's regulation of gender roles and public/private spheres has led to a worsening of the Sami woman's status within the public sphere, which is defined as male and of higher status. Because of interventionist state policies, the traditional subsistence way of life of the Sami people (harvesting of natural resources) is threatened. Echoing the writings of Mies and Shiva in Ecofeminism (1994), Eikjok finally situates the plight of the Sami in the context of global monocultural trends which threaten all, but are particularly damaging to indigenous peoples. Another Sami scholar, Elina Helander, has written an article specifically about Sami women's movements in which she summarizes the differences between Sami and non-Sami feminist issues. She also notes that equality is now an issue in a part of Sami life that has long been seen as the special preserve of Sami tradition, namely reindeer breeding. Marit Sara, in her article 'Reindeer Herding Women Are Oppressed,' notes that Norway's laws regarding reindeer husbandry have changed since ancient times, when men and women were equal owners of reindeer and reindeer property. Now reindeer are held solely in the husband's name. If a woman who owns reindeer falls ill, she cannot access government subsidies, whereas a man reindeer-owner can. If she divorces, the reindeer remain the legal property of the man (Sara 19901). Based on descriptions given by the older generation of Sami women, Helander asserts that women experienced equality in the past, but that modernization, overprotective national policies, and non-Sami legislation have led to their oppression (Kailo and Helander 1998: 149). Like Eikjok, she stresses that Sami women perceive colonization rather than sexism as their chief source of oppression, given that Sami rights to land and water have not yet been recognized, and the Sami that have no real right of self-determination and are thus still subject to colonization and racism (Helander, 1994: 20). The most persistent view in Sami women's writings is the emphasis on ecological issues rather than nation-building in the Western, nationalistic sense. Helander claims that the philosophy of indigenous peo-

206 Kaarina Kailo pies, in which Mother Earth is central, has been passed on to them from their forebears, and that it is their task to look after their lands for future generations (Helander 1994: 24). Sami women - and men stress that their people do not believe in nation-states with boundaries, having themselves become a people divided by four states. Furthermore, they have a complex, multifaceted notion of property that for all its variation, is concerned with communal good, and is based on both communal and family rights, as well as on individual rights and private property (Korpijaakko in Kulonen et al, 1994). It is important to remember that there is no unified 'Sami people/ so that their notions of property are not homogeneous, although they have more in common among the ten groups distinguished by a different dialect than with the neighbouring states. For Pentikainen, it is more appropriate to refer to areas of Sami culture rather than to a unified people (1995: 323). Nor do I wish to suggest that Sami women's experiences and writings are homogeneous. In fact, the experiences of Sami women living within Russian borders are specific to their political context, although the ideas expressed above also apply to them (Hirvonen 1999). With these qualifications in mind, I suggest that the sexist and racist regulation of economic behaviour is closely tied to the nationalism of the colonizing, mainstream society. The resulting policies that are espoused and enacted reinforce the 'othering' of women generally, and of indigenous cultures specifically, eroding these cultures' survival base. However, women's subjugated position cannot be reduced simply to an effect of colonialism, since patriarchal self-interest has deeper roots. According to many Sami activists, patriarchal trends are on the increase in contemporary Sami society despite their political gain of partial self-determination (Aikio 1989; Hirvonen 1996, 1999; Helander 1997).24 Post-colonialism, Kalevala, and the Regulation of Historical Time The time is ripe, then, for a post-colonial revision of the dysfunctional histories and legacies that have brought the world to the brink of ecological disaster. Not only does post-colonialism open a space for new paradigms and ways of ordering reality, it also encourages the 'other' modes of expressing 'truths/ Post-colonialism, at best, becomes the pivot for other histories, landmarks, significant events, and values. In my approach, the pivot is balanced relations, not just on the basis of class, ethnicity, and gender, but of earth-human and animal relations.

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 207 Of course, this approach can also be looked upon as 'constructed' and with its own bias. However, such other paradigms are necessary to allow scholars to deconstruct the most dysfunctional, misogynist, ethnocentric, and anti-ecological dimensions of the dominant philosophies and practices. Even though the epic Kalevela embeds the values of a prehistoric Finnic world, ordered according to a cyclical understanding of time, it was compiled and reconstructed along a linear axis of time; the story 'line' 'develops' and culminates in the advent of Christianity. According to Anne McClintock, 'the almost ritualistic ubiquity of "post-" words in current culture (post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-feminism ...) signals ... a widespread epochal crisis in the idea of linear, historical "progress"' (1992: 292). I agree with McClintock that the term 'post-colonialism' marks history as a series of stages according to a Western notion of chronology and linear progress, from 'the pre-colonial' to 'the colonial' to 'the post-colonial.' Of course, other cultures also have linear and non-linear patterns of thought, even though one mode of ordering reality may predominate in different historical periods. There is no question that 'if the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism, multi-dimensional time, and so forth, the singularity of the term [post-colonial] effects a re-centering of global history around the single rubric of European time' (1992: 293). Indeed, in their most persistent self-representation, the Sami, for example, do not order events along a linear axis, but, in the words of the Sami scholar, Elina Helander, order things according to a cyclical model based on critical moments within the life of reindeer herding and the economic activities that supplement reindeer husbandry. This example of a native, non-linear, animistic world-view serves as one important contrast to the stereotypical view of the 'primitive and inferior Sami' that Finnish folklore, interpreted by nationalistic scholars, has helped to reinforce. Helander refers to an alternative to the Western obsession with linearity, reminding us that animistic thought does not necessarily belong to the golden past, but continues to be present in the thinking of some individuals and in some minority discourses: 'It is important for a modern person to rethink whether the existing philosophy of time serves a purpose ... On the production side the linear concept of time is associated with the maximal exploitation of the natural resources. Human beings, too, are exploited as resources. Life in the Sami circle gives them more room and opens up more possibilities. In the traditional culture, time was and still is partially "sun-centered," it

208 Kaarina Kailo is tied with observing the stars, nature and animals' (Helander and Kailo 1998:160). One could say that this reinforces a myth of 'authenticity/ and reproduces the stereotype of native philosophy as 'animistic' and 'cyclical/ The Sami are, of course, a modern people who must live by linear time. Nevertheless, the references in Sami scholarship to the value of a cyclical mode of ordering life are too numerous and central to be ignored (Helander and Kailo: 1998). It is important to realize that animistic thought and the cyclic vision of life can and do, to some extent, coexist in modern Sami society. It is possible, however, that animism has been re-introduced as a value because it allows the Sami to distinguish themselves from mainstream, anti-ecological, linear thought. Although animism is often generalized to apply to all Sami, few today live by animistic, earth-related values. However, in Sami writings animism no doubt functions as an important example of Spivak's strategic essentialism that challenges the fragmenting, bounding tendencies of Westernstyle, progress-oriented nationalisms. What then constitutes the Samis' cultural idioms (Stordahl 1994: 59), their 'Sampo/ or magic mill of 'Saminess'?25 This is a question Elina Helander and I asked several Sami cultural practitioners and ofelas, or pathfinders (Helander and Kailo 1998). Although their answers reflect different interpretations of culture and reality, the following themes predominate: ecological balance and sustainability; opposition to crass materialism; the importance of storytelling and traditional extended families; functional rather than commercial and useless 'aesthetic' handicrafts; suspicion of 'development'; and the importance of the Sami language, clothing, yoiking, cultural ceremonies, festivals, holy days, and shamanism. My interview with Elina Helander provides one example of a vision of life that contrasts with the Western myth of progress. For her, the gift of the Sami culture to the world is easily missed because it has not left many landmarks: 'We do not have Eiffel towers, Statues of Liberty, nuclear plants etc. The cyclic nomadic Sami circle of life has not made room for the self-centred exhibition of one's own power by leaving behind monuments. The nomadic life style and mythical-ecological thinking has prevented the Sami from accumulating material belongings. The quantity and quality of materials have become nature-preserving. Many items match easily the natural surroundings or are part of it' (Helander and Kailo 1998:146). The work of the Sami scholar, Lehtola, reveals a different picture of Sami 'reality/ based on a different interpretation of 'factual' information. Its importance lies in challenging the evolutionary trajectory of

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 209 history as written and framed by Finnish historians. Lehtola goes so far as to challenge a founding belief about the early relations between the Finns and the Sami. Significantly, he notes that the idea that the Sami were forced northwards by the more powerful Finnish settlement (reinforced by the Kalevala and its scholarship) has been re-examined only recently. For Lehtola: 'in light of current data it seems the disappearance of the Sami from Central Finland and Kainuu, for example, reflects a change in documentation rather than their actually [sic] displacement. That is to say: those Sami who took up agriculture were registered as Finns' (1996: 273). Scholars arrived at the theory of a forced retreat of the Sami northwards because of the fact that they were 'a people with no history,' since they had not undergone the customary development from a nomadic hunting culture to an agrarian one. The Finns possessed a profoundly Hegelian view of history according to which only a people that had progressed from a tribal community to the level of a nation could justifiably speak of having a history of their own. (1996: 274) Lehtola's challenge to historians is vital, for it has direct consequences for who is defined as 'Sami,' and what lands and resources, therefore, are the traditional 'property' of the Finns and which are those of the Sami. The view that the Sami are a people without history may also explain the belittling representation of the Sami/Lapp Joukahainen as having no worthy knowledge of the beginnings, and no shamanistic lore worthy of a separate nation. The Sami were disconnected from the modern world by writers who emphasized the permanent, archaic features of their culture, and who described cultural change only as a reprehensible decline. Lehtola points out that the criteria used to define the Sami as a people without 'history' were their lack of warfare and their failure to build cities or forts (1996: 274). Lonnrot's editorial decision echoses this view from the 1920s, in which Vainamoinen, the Finnish cultural hero, refers to the Sami youth, Joukahainen's knowledge as trivial and 'womanly.' For Lehtola, the settler theory views the Sami as a passive, submissive people travelling from one place to another, constantly being forced to retreat northwards. Even opinions sympathetic to the Sami regarded them as victims who had never been capable of resistance or of defying 'development' (1996: 274). Both the characters Joukahainen and Aino are portrayed precisely in this light, despite their ethnic ambiguity.26 The crisis of legitimacy of the Western world view and the emergence of powerful critiques of the West's collective dysfunctional male

210 Kaarina Kailo body politic have facilitated the re-emergence of native philosophies as viable paradigms. An ordering of time founded on the idea of cyclic renewal explodes the master narrative of progress and evolution and has important implications for political action. In fact, with the crumbling of trust in linear progress brought about by science and by ecofeminist, post-colonial, and post-modern forces, what for so long was considered 'primitive' now is being reassessed as a much-needed, sustainable modus vivandi. Conclusion At the end of the epic, the much-sought-after Sampo is broken into pieces, sinks into the sea and is lost. However, Christian men pick up its lid which has washed ashore, and Louhi, the Sami/Lapp matriarch, manages to retrieve some bits and pieces. In a contemporary reading of this nationalist narrative, the Sampo represents the creative and economically reproductive possibilities of the Ugro-Finnic people's cultural and ecological heritage, while the fragmentation of the Sampo foreshadows the fragmentation inherent in Western-style nationalisms. Thus the stage is set for a property dispute, a dispute that, to this day, has not been resolved. In its broadest sense, Western nationalism has fragmented our global ecosystem, threatening the intricate balance that sustains us all. My approach is not founded on the 'proper' control and commodification of the reproductive power of women, minorities, and nature. Rather, it accepts and embraces Otherness, and acknowledges the interconnectedness of our human 'idea-sphere' to our biosphere. In this chapter, I have both deconstructed the gendered, class, and ethnic politics of the Kalevala, and hinted at alternative traditions that have been neglected in favour of the predominantly Greek/Cretan myths considered even by the Finns as 'high' culture. I have discussed the ways in which gender and ethnicity overlap as categories of class, since, as I have shown, both women and the Sami occupy the position of political, cultural, and economic 'Other' within the epic and in our 'real' world. The Kalevala provides, in my view, a good example of what happens when a rich, multi-layered body of oral stories is melted down through the act of patriarchal selection and combination into one dominant, national, monocultural narrative; an epic interpreted and reified in this way creates closure and static fictions about national character, male and female spheres and qualities, and the

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 211 nature of all others. In the process, it conceals the constant hybridity and displacement of identities. It creates the essentialist woman, native, and other. As Smith suggests in Theories of Nationalism, 'Like plants, societies grow, flower and whither. The aim of the "nationalist educators" was to recreate the flowering phase' (1983: 55). Women around the world, including the circumpolar North, 'the land of hero-drowners' and 'powerful shape-shifters' are now recreating the flowering phase of the pre-Christian, nature-loving world view. Since Finland joined the European Union, the Finns and Sami living in Northern Finland have begun to have visions of an impending golden future, with funding flowing from Brussels to indigenous populations. Suddenly, the definition of 'indigenous' becomes a matter of immediate urgency - economics, resources, funding. And the question, 'Who came first?' fuels fierce debates on the differences, similarities, and hybrid origins of the Finns, the Sami, and the Lapps. For most people in Finland, the distinction between the three has become blurred, and some of this ambiguity is political, arbitrary, and motivated by economic benefits. For, if the indigenous people are Finns, and the Finns are Lapps, and all are really Sami, why should the Sami deserve special treatment - and special funding? Hence the importance of exposing the dangers inherent in the representation of hybrid identities. Creating the 'third space' and a politics of affinity across dualistic and stereotyped divisions of allegiance, between the politics of difference and the need for affinity and social cohesion, continues to be challenging. The challenge is to negotiate individual and communal uniqueness without losing a viable economic base. For Vaino Salminen: A society does not create, does not move mankind [sic] ahead, if it only borrows from others and imitates others. Borrowed fripperies are always borrowed fripperies, no matter how resplendent. There is at least one spiritual area where the Finns have created something original: that is folklore, folk knowledge, folk literature. One of its most striking manifestations is the Kalevala, to which we dedicate this day. For a century now research has tried to find in it foreign loans, but with precious few results ... Our forefathers [sic] have for a millennium composed these poems [and] faithfully preserved them, and Finnish men have at least collected them from the memory of the folk. (Cited in Wilson 1976:129)

I have argued that the Finns' most influential self-identification, the Kalevala, itself bears harmful traces of 'borrowed fripperies' - not in the

212 Kaarina Kailo body of the folklore, but in its arrangement and interpretation,27 which are intended to impress Finns and the world with their long history and 'civilized' national musings. I suggest, however, that there is also pride in acknowledging kinship with others. In the most primitive sense, there is pride in having survived, so far, modern nationalisms, essentialisms, and the threat posed by multiple ecological disasters.28 What then can one do to undo or resist the Kalevala's impact as an agent of acculturation or to fight Hollywood versions of our respective national heritages, even as multinationals are seizing the whole planet as their property and increasingly regulating through the ideal of monoculture what is normative and proper? Exposing biases in the epic is one thing; recreating or re-inventing an alternative tradition among women including the Sami is another. It is a matter of actively seeking the epic's post-colonial possibilities. In this way, hybridity and 'overlap/p' need not remain in service of the androcentric nationalist project; the open-endedness of Kalevala allows us to reverse the interpretation and recover its hybridity as a source of positive 'a-finn-ity/ of interconnectedness. In my work, I hope to collaborate with Sami women on Tohjola,' 'the Northland,' to counteract the epic of the South, Penisland, the Land of Heroes. Rauna Kuokkanen, a young Sami scholar and activist with whom I am collaborating, is busy tracing a new 'strategic' identity for her people: I proposed a new term, Nomadic Saminess to draw attention to the overlapping Sami self existing on many intersecting points of contact and zones of influence ... Traditionally, the identity of the Sami has been limited through static foreign-imported concepts; the so-called 'authentic' Sami has been approached and created through foreign eyes with foreign paradigms. Our cultural products have been packaged and interpreted through alien paradigms which prevent us from even accessing the Saminess of the Sami cultural expression. The Nomadic Sami approach recognizes the third space and being where the Sami are between two airs, a living modern culture that continues in new ways to wander across multiple crisscrossing borders. (Kuokkanen 1997)

It is time to focus on the creation of one's own cultural idioms - whatever one considers proper as property. It seems that in the context of Finnish female culture, this reinterpretation of sacred books of 'Finnishness' as a viable cultural property has only just begun. The Sami, however, have retained at least the strategic ideals of ecologically healthy self-definitions, showing the extent to which the mythic edge

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of the world is now the cutting edge of survival wisdom. Matriotic stories, particularly those constructing a 'Mother Earth/ are pivotal in resisting patriarchal nationalisms. They may also resist the worst aspects of globalization, and help envision ever-broader rings of 'working class' peoples. I hope the time will come when Finns will remember their own rallying cry and move beyond double standards to hear also the rallying cries of the Sami, 'We are too small to be Norwegians, Finns we do not want to become.'29 What then does the Sami woman want, or wish to become? Guardians of a planet without borders? Why not let the Sami answer that question! Self-definition is the basis of self-determination in a world in which resources are common property. For me, this is only proper. Notes 1 From my interview with Kerttu Vuolab on Sami cultural practices and selfdefinitions, at Outakoski, Finland (Samiland), 5 August 1993. The interview is published in Elina Helander and Kaarina Kailo (eds.) (1998). 2 Wilson notes: 'The only hope for their salvation, they had been taught, was to be true to the national spirit and to cultivate the national characteristics reflected in their folklore. To the advocates of this doctrine, the concept of internationalism was anathema, a sure road to cultural suicide. Initially, Finnish labour leaders had also shared this view, but as they grew disillusioned with nationalist leaders and accepted Marxist philosophy, they gradually moved toward international socialism' (1976:175). 3 The analysis of the Kalevala from a feminist perspective has included studies of 'female genres' (e.g., Tuohimaa 1990), as well as an analysis of gender representations (Niemi 1985); for an extensive analysis of the women in Finn-Ugric folklore, see, for example, Nenola (1986); Nenola and Timonen (1990). 4 For Simone de Beauvoir, 'Man' represents both the positive (male) and the neutral which in common usage stands for the generic designation of human beings. 'Woman,' in sharp contrast, tends to represent only the negative, or to be defined with limiting criteria and without any true complementarity. De Beauvoir notes that Man is the Subject, the Absolute, Woman, the Other, 'the Second Sex,' (1965). The same othering process can be applied also in analysing power relations across divisions of class, ethnicity, age, ability, and other variables. 5 For discussions of these issues, see Anon. (1994).

214 Kaarina Kailo 6 On women and nationalism, see also Marie Mies, 'Women Have No Fatherland,' in Ecofeminism (1993). 7 Zillah R. Eisenstein also points out the gender aspects that are often missing from Marxist definitions of class, but like Hartsock, she fails to consider the impact of the free trade zones and global economic forces on the broadening of the notion of 'class': 'Presently class categories are primarily maledefined, and a woman is assigned to a class on the basis of her husband's relation to the means of production; woman is not viewed as an autonomous being... A feminist class analysis must begin with distinctions drawn among women in terms of the work they do within the economy as a whole ... among working women outside the home ... among houseworkers (houseworkers who do not work outside the home and women who are houseworkers and also work outside), welfare women, unemployed women, and wealthy women who do not work at all' (1979: 31-2). 8 According to Pratibha Parmar, 'the deeply ideological nature of imagery determines not only how other people think about us but how we think about ourselves' (cited in hooks 1992: 5). 9 To situate myself: I am an immigrant Finn living in Canada, with one foot on both sides of the Atlantic, both in terms of my research and my ethnic allegiances. I grew up and was educated in Finland, but did not learn much about the Sami and other Finno-Ugric minorities through the official educational system. Hence, I am informing myself both in the pre-Christian beliefs and values of Finno-Ugric peoples which were approached in Finnish schools only in a patriarchal, Christian spirit. I greatly lament the fact that the Finns and the Sami themselves are taught so little about Sami ways and mythology, and about woman-specific spiritual beliefs and traditions through the education system. As regards the concept of 'affinity/ I am stressing the 'Finn' in my Finnish background, not to engage in nationalistic chauvinism, but to underline that I am trying to ground my own political/spiritual practice in my own roots and my own ethnicity, taking no short cuts through other peoples' spiritual rituals and beliefs. 10 My adoption of the term 'post-colonial' accords with the definition provided in 'What is Post(-)colonialism?' by Mishra and Hodge: 'We use the term 'post-colonial'... to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression' (1991:285). The theorists further point out that post-colonialism is not a homogeneous category either across post-colonial societies or within a single society, but refers to a typical con-

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 215 figuration which is always in the process of change, and is never consistent with itself (1991: 289). Post-colonialism is, as Mishra and Hodge point out, 'an always present tendency in any literature of subjugation marked by a systematic process of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power' (1991: 290). 11 The affinities the Finns could be seen to have with indigenous peoples, from the Sami to native North Americans, have thus been neglected; although the Finns, with their sauna, and the natives, with their sweats, have many things in common, the fear of being grouped with 'primitive' people has prevented scholars from seeking out such affinities. The question remains: Have the Finns really had more in common, throughout history, with central Europeans, the Greek and Roman culture that they wished to emulate, than with these other distant groups? 12 According to Wilson: 'With Kalevala, Finland could now say: "I too have a history!" to a people who for years had been taught that they were a somewhat inferior part of Sweden with no history independent of the mother country.' Now, for the first time in centuries, Finns could be proud to be Finns. The poet Zachris Topelius, Jr. summed up the feeling of the times in the following lines: 'One people! One land! One tongue! One song and wisdom!' (1976: 42). How ironic to think, in this context, that the Finns then labelled the Sami as 'a people without history.' 13 To quote Minh-ha: 'Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one's consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self,... the not-I, other. In such a concept the other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self's dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal... The search for an identity is, therefore, usually a search for that lost, pure, true, real, genuine, original, authentic self, often situated within a process of elimination of all that is considered other, superfluous, fake, corrupted or Westernized' (1990: 371). 14 According to Wilson, 'Lonnrot adopted von Becker's historical interpretation and argued vigorously that the heroes of the epic poems were not gods but men. In the preface to the 1835 Kalevala he mentioned that the battle between the peoples of Vainola, or Kalevala, and Pohjola represented the ancient struggles between the Finns and the original Lappish inhabitants of the land; later, in the 1849 edition, he changed his mind and argued instead that the battle reflected the fight between two branches of an ancient Finnish kingdom located somewhere between the White Sea and the Gulf of

216 Kaarina Kailo

15

16

17 18

19

Finland, but he never deviated from his original vision of Vainamoinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkainen as flesh-and-blood heroes who had once walked the land' (1976: 50-1). Reclaiming the endonym SUOMI may also become a necessity for womanidentified women; as I have found out, the most likely etymology of Finland is 'land of heroes, men/ a phrase Branch uses to subtitle the epic. According to Sheila Embleton and Raimo Anttila, 'Like SUOMI, until now [Finn] has also remained without a convincing etymology. Martin Huld (1994) now has a new suggestion that by far surpasses the previous speculation. Apart from proper name function, FINN also carries the meanings "Man, hero; dwarf" in the earliest Scandinavian contexts. Thus it is not unreasonable to assume that *finna- reflects Proto-Indo-European *pes-no"penis," which also in Hittite pesna- has given "Man, Male" (cf. Latin penis, Greek peos "penis"). The actual reconstructed stages, all of which exemplify totally regular changes, are: *pesno-, *fezna-, *fenna- *finna-...' (1994: 31). In contrast, according to the most recent speculation, both Sabmi and Suomi are derived from the same original endonymic self-description, meaning 'the land, our land' (Embleton and Anttila 1994). For Anna-Leena Siikala, those within Kalevala research who were opposed to the historically-based interpretation of the epic followed the trends of myth research in continental Europe. She finds it 'not an exaggeration to claim that the more international the researcher's orientation, and the broader his or her knowledge of comparative materials representing different cultures, the more clearly s/he has perceived the mythic nature of the Finnish epic' (84). She cites Julius Krohn as an example of a cosmopolite who sought his material for comparison without prejudice from East and West. She further cites Uno Harva and livar Kemppainen for whom the images of Pohjola correspond to international, cross-cultural beliefs in an abode of the dead (84). My sources include non-Sami sources because of the relative scarcity of writings by the Sami themselves. As one example of the treatment of the Sami in the four states that colonized them: 'Norway's policy as regards the Sami was highly paternalistic. The Sami were a people who would succumb in the struggle for survival. Nevertheless, it was a humane duty to provide them with "enlightenment" for as long as possible: it was a question of softening the evening of their lives. Physical, anthropological and psychological descriptions of the Sami reflected racist views' (Anon. 1990: 26). It is a commonplace to hear the older anthropology predicting the impend-

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 217 ing death of native cultures; likewise, mainstream magazines and other media repeatedly try to bring about the death of feminism with such unfounded headlines as 'Post-Feminism/ 'Is Feminism Dead?/ and so on. These views can be seen as reflections more of the death wish of the people expressing them than as true reflections of the impending death of the movement or fate of native peoples. 20 As Michael Branch, Matti Kuusi, and Keith Bosley note in their 'Finnish Folkpoetry Epic' (1993), Lonnrot's version of the Aino story is a literary retelling of motifs that appear in the folklore Lonnrot collected in Ingria and Karelia, and in parts of Estonia. This does not mean, however, that the representation itself is ambiguously linked with the Sami. 21 Klinge (1993), among other noted Finnish historians, privileges a linear account of Finnish history following our independence, bypassing the importance of the mythic continuum, or of women's or the Samis' landmarks. See Vahtola (1997) for an analysis of the failings of the Finnish educational system regarding the privileged and less privileged histories. 22 For a positive interpretation, however, see Niemi (1985) and Korte (1989). 23 Sawin points out that 'by assigning to the Louhi of the Kalevala the deeds performed by both parents in the original song, Lonnrot makes her appear both cold-hearted and inconsistent. Lonnrot's Louhi appears to be essentially a cruel and manipulative mother, since she would marry off her unwilling daughter in return for money, though at other times she is (according to the narrative logic thus established) confusingly compassionate and supportive of the maid's desire to choose her own husband. Furthermore ... Louhi is depicted as sneaky and dishonest dealer in legal transactions, since Lonnrot's combination of texts makes her try to marry her daughter to Vainamoinen, even after he has lost a prior competition for the bride to his rival Ilmarinen' (1988:197). 24 The Finnish scholar Kaisa Korpijaakko is an example of a researcher who, in her own description, has been able to break through the stereotyped moulds of the representations of the Sami and to unearth highly significant new information about the Samis' own definitions of property rights and land ownership. She sums up the land rights issue in an article (based on her doctoral dissertation) which has proven very useful for the Samis' land claims since it reveals the matter of land ownership to be much more complex than the Finnish legal system had claimed and assumed. She shows that there is, in sophisticated ancient records, notations of Sami private ownership, although, as she points out, this was never applied in the capitalist way; lots were owned for subsistence purposes, not for profiteering

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27 28

29

based on contemporary real estate values, and, side by side with private family ownership, the Samis had common lands as well as lands given out for use by landless people (Kulonen et al. 1994: 53-67). To quote the Sami Vigdis Stordahl: 'In order to be successful in mobilizing group spirit and joint political action vis-a-vis the majority population, ethnopolitical movements need a "language" of signs, symbols and categorizations which have a bearing on identity management' (Eidheim 1971: 7112). Identity management is thus dependent on a language loaded with ethnic meaning, what Eidheim (1971: 7112) calls idioms. The challenge for the Sami ethno-political movement emerging during the 1950-60s was to find idioms that at the same time could a) destigmatize Sami culture, b) embrace internal cultural and social differences; and c) serve as signs of equality between the Norwegian and Sami cultures (1994: 59). Lehtola points out, echoing common predictions made about North American native peoples, that the Sami were believed to be doomed, through social Darwinism, to perish; after all, 'lower' cultures would merge with 'higher' ones. For Lehtola, then, 'the concept of the inability of the Sami to adjust to the challenges posed by the modern era reflected not only a lack of confidence in the ability of this "lower" people to survive, but also ignorance of their history and a lack of understanding of the very nature of their culture' (1996: 273). The singing of Joukahainen into the swamp could, of course, be read as a representation of the disappearance of the 'weaker, less knowledgeable' nation into oblivion. Sarmela (1990) has also discussed the tenuous and fragile nature of all essentialist myths of ethnicity, including those of the Finns and of the Sami in the global village. Finland (and Finns) is now facing a very different issue of identity than was the case during its emergence, one marked by insecurity and an inferiority complex rooted in its colonial past. A self-denigrating trend is, however, noticeable in the current 'coca-colonization' of Finland, to which, as an immigrant Finn, I am more sensitive than many Finns in Finland. The Americanization of Finland has received coverage in newspapers, but the trend continues unabateed. While I am not an advocate of the chauvinistic self-glorifications attendant upon nationalism, I am also not a proponent of the monoculture and loss of ethnic diversity and uniqueness that is threatening Finland and other small nations in the wake of globalization and the new economic alliances. From my interview with Kerttu Vuolab on Sami cultural practice and selfdefinitions, at Outakoski, Finland (Samiland), 5 August 1993.

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 219 References Aikio, Maria-Sofia. 1989. The Changing Role of Women in Sami Society.' Northern Studies Forum: 16-7. Social Change and Space Ethic. In Ludger Miiller-Wille, ed., Indigenous Nations and Communities in Canada and Finland. Montreal: McGill University Press. Anonymous. 1990. The Sami People. Karasjok, Davvi Girji o.s. Anttila, Raimo, and Sheila Embleton. 1994. 'On the Origin of Suomi Finland.' Scandinavian-Canadian Studies/Etudes scandinaves au Canada 7: 25-32. Backman, Louise. 1982. 'Female-Divine and Human: A Study of the Position of the Woman in Religion and Society in Northern Eurasia.' In Ake Hultkrantz and Ornulv Vorren, eds., The Hunters, 143-62. Troms0: Universitetsforlaget. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. 'Interview: The Third Space.' In Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 207-21. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Bosley, Keith, trans. 1973. The Song ofAino. Maidenhead, Berks: Moonbird. Bosley, Keith et al., trans, and eds. 1977. Finnish Folk Poetry Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Branch, Michael. 1985. 'Introduction.' Kalevala: The Land of Heroes. Ed. W.F. Kirby. London: Athlone. Branch, Michael, Matti Kuusi, and Keith Bosley. 1993. 'Finnish Folkpoetry Epic.' In Matti Kuusi and Senni Timonen, eds., The Great Bear. A Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry in the Finno-Ugrian Languages. Helsinki: SKS. Churchill, Ward. 1992. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians. Ed. M. Annette Jaimes. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage. Comparetti, Domenico. 1898. The Traditional Poetry of the Finns. Trans. Isabella M. Anderson. New York: Longmans, Green. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1965. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam. Eidheim. H. 1971. Aspects of the Lappish Minority Situation. Universitetsforlaget: Oslo. Eikjok, Jorunn. 1990. 'Indigenous Women's Situation: Similarities and Differences. Common Struggle for Future.' International Conference and VI General Assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Tromso, Norway, 8-12 Aug. Unpublished manuscript. - 1992. The Situation of Men and Women in the Reindeerherding Society.' Diehtogiisa 1: 7-8. Ervast, Pekka. 1916. Kalevalan Avain. Helsinki: Teosofinen Kirjakauppa ja Kustannusliike.

220 Kaarina Kailo Hall, Stuart. 1989. 'Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.' Framework: A Journal for Film Studies 36: 68-81. - 1991. 'Ethnicity: Identity and Difference/ Radical America 13 (4): 9-20. Harasym, Sarah, ed. 1990. Gayatri Spivak. The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge. Hartsock, Nancy. 1981. 'Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective.' In Building Feminist Theory: Essays from Quest. New York: Longman. Helander, Elina. 1993. The Role of Sami Traditions in Sustainable Development.' In Jyrki Kakonen, ed., Politics and Sustainable Growth in the Arctic, 67-81. Dartmouth, Hants: Dartmouth. - 1994. 'Den samiska kvinnororelsen.' Naistutkimus/Kvinnoforskning 2:17-24. Helander, Elina, and Kaarina Kailo. 1998. No Beginning, No End: The Sami Speak Up. Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute. Hirvonen, Vuokko. 1996. 'Research Ethics and Sami People: From the Woman's Point of View.' In Elina Helander, ed., Awakened Voice: The Return of Sami Knowledge, 7-13. Guovdageaidnu: Nordic Sami Institute. - 1999. 'Saamenmaan aania. Saamelaisen naisen tie kirjailijaksi' [Voices of Samiland. Charting the Path of Sami Women as Writers]. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sami and Finnish. Oulu University, Kailo, Kaarina. 1992. 'Outside In: Reconsidering Pohjola (Women and Samiland) as Kalevala's Polarized Other.' Baiki: A North American Journal of Sami Living 4: 6-8. - 1994a. Trance-Cultural Travel: Indigenous Women and Mainstream Feminisms.' In Mari Peepre, ed., Trans-Cultural Travels: Essays in Canadian Literature and Society, 19-36. Text series of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies/L'Association nordique d'etudes canadiennes, 11. - 1994b. Tntegraatiofeminismin ihanteet [The Ideals of Integrative Feminisms']. Kvinnoforskning/Naistutkimus 7 (4): 41-5. Kirby, W.F. 1985. Kalevala, The Land of Heroes. London: Athlone. Kulonen, Ulla-Maija, Irja Seurujarvi-Kari ja Juha Pentikainen (toim.). 1994. Johdatus saamentutkimukseen. Helsinki: SKS. Kuokkanen, Rauna. 1997. 'Etnostreassas sapmelasvuoda oddasit huksemii. Sapmelas identitehtaid gowen dala sapmelas girjjalasvuodas' [From Ethnostress to the Reconstruction of Sami Identities in Modern Sami Literature]. Pro gradu-tutkielma [M.A. thesis]. Department of Finnish and Sami, Oulu University. Lang, Andrew. 1898. 'Introduction.' In Domenico Comparetti, ed., The Traditional Poetry of the Finns. Trans. Isabella M. Anderson. New York: Longmans, Green. Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. 1996. 'A Lower Culture, A People with No History? The Image of the Saami in the Nationalist Finland of the 1920s and 1930s.' Bjorn-

Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala 221 Fetter Finstad, Lars Ivar Hansen, Henry Minde, Einar Niemiand, and Hallvard Tjelmeland, eds., Stat, religion, etnisitet. Rapport fra Skibotn-konferansen, 27-9.4 Mai. Sami dutkamiid guovddas/Senter for samiske studier. Liski, Paavo, and Marjatta Herva. 1986. 'Kalevala on maailman humaanisin ja hyvantahtoisin paikka.' Kirjokannesta Kipinit. Kalevalan Juhlavuoden Satoa. Helsinki: SKS. Lonnrot, Elias. 1849. Kalevala. Helsinki: Otava. McClintock, Anne. 1992. The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "PostColonialism."' Social Text, 1-15. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. Halifax: Fernwood. Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - 1990. 'Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.' In Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul. Hadendo Caras. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Mishra, Vijay, and Bob Hodge. 1991. 'What Is Post(-)Colonialism?' Textual Practice 5 (3): 399^14. Moyne, Ernest J. 1981. Raising the Wind: The Legend of Lapland and Finland Wizards in Literature. Newark: Delaware. Nenola-Kallio, Aili & Timonen, Senni (toim.). 1986. Miessydaminen Nainen. Naisnakokulma Kulttuuriin. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. - 1990. Louhen Sanat. Kirjoituksia kansanperinteen naisista. Helsinki: SKS. Niemi, Irmeli. 1985. 'Kvinnorna i Kalevala.' Trans. J.O. Tallqvist. Nya Argus 4: 75-80. Packwood, Marlene. 1983. The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady: Sisters Under the Skin?' Trouble and Streifl: 7-12. Pentikainen, Juha. 1995. Saamelaiset. Pohjoisen kansan mytologia. Helsinki: SKS. Petaja, Emil. 1967. The Stolen Sun and Tramontane. New York: Daw. - 1996. The Saga of Lost Earths and the Star Mill. New York: Daw. Sarmela, Matti. 1990. 'Kansankulttuuri-minka kansan?' Suomija kansainvaliset paineet. Sakari Haapaniemi (toim.). Helsinki: Otava. - 1991. 'Reindeer Herding Women Are Oppressed.' Sarahkka. Second International Indigenous Women's Conference, 1990-1. Newsletter of Sami Women's Association in Karasjokk, Norway. Sawin, Patricia. 1988. 'Lonnrot's Brain Children: The Representation of Women in Finland's Kalevala.' Journal of Folklore Research 5 (3): 187-217. Siikala, Anna-Leena. 1992. Suomalainen Shamanismi. Helsinki: SKS. Smith, Anthony D. 1983. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth. Spivak, Gayatri. 1990. In Other Worlds, Outside in the Teaching Machine. The Postcolonial Critic; Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge.

222 Kaarina Kailo Stephens, Sharon. 1983. Changes in Sami (Lapp) Conceptions of Male and Female as a Key to Cultural Transformations in Sami History. East Lansing: Michigan State University. Stordahl, Vigdis. 1993. 'Identity and Saminess Expressing Worldview and Nation.' Majority/Minority Relations. The Case of the Sami in Scandinavia. Report of Proceedings, Guovdageaidnu, Norway. 2-4 July. Tuohimaa, Sinikka. 1990. Kapina Kielessa. Tampere: Gaudeamus. Vahtola, Jouko. 1997. Lukion historianopetuksen pulmat. Kulttuurien kosketus, tormays ja yhteys. Historian ja yhteiskuntaopin opettajien vuosikirja 24: 65-82. HYOL ry. Oulu: A.J. Mattilan kirjapaino. Vuolab, Kerttu. 1993. Personal conversations with Kaarina Kailo and Elina Helander. Outakoski, Finland (Samiland). 5 August. Wilson, William A. 1976. Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Winant, H. 1990. 'Gayatri Spivak on the Politics of the Subaltern.' (Interview). Socialist Review 20: 81-97. Wittig, Monique. 1981. The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon.

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Female Sexuality, Surveillance, and the State in Eighteenth-Century Maharastra UMA CHAKRAVARTI This chapter explores the relationship between patriarchy, caste, and the state in the context of eighteenth-century Maharastra. The impulse to embark upon such an exploration is twofold: (1) to draw attention to the complex of factors by which a specific set of cultural practices with respect to gender codes is upheld, reinforced, and reproduced not merely by particular communities but by the state; and (2) to draw attention to both the state and other social institutions of the precolonial period, mainly because recent trends in social science analysis in India have tended to valorize 'indigenous' society in a variety of ways, without looking closely at the relations between caste, gender, and the state.1 The analysis in this chapter outlines the consolidation of a 'Brahmanya-raj' under the Peshwas around the Poona Deccan region during the eighteenth century. Brahmana power was expressed during the Peshwai through a monopoly of ritual power, dominance in the administration, and an expansion of land control and general privileges. The Peshwas' increasing recourse to Brahmanic ideology was evident in their privileging of Brahmanic textual law over customary law, and in their suppression of shifts in caste hierarchies, both of which were achieved through an expansion of the state's power over the community. Privileging Brahmanas, and particular subcastes among them, went along with suppressing the lower castes. The burden of ensuring the normative structure of the Brahmanya-raj required tight control over women's sexuality, especially that of Brahman women. This was a high priority of the state, which detailed a number of rules, taking care to separate the wife from the widow, while maintaining a rigorous control over the sexuality of both. Through a sys-

224 Uma Chakravarti tern of surveillance and punishment, including enslavement, the state tried to ensure the compliance of women. Any expression of a counterideology or leakage in the 'traditional' practices was also suppressed by the state. State power was thus a crucial element in the reiteration and expansion of Brahmanical gender codes. The Peshwa State as Brahmanya-raj The rule of the Peshwas centred mainly in the Poona Deccan region between 1713 and 1818, and the analysis here is based on evidence, available in the Peshwa Daftar, which has recently been the subject of several historical studies (Fukazawa 1991; Guha 1992, 1994; Kadam 1988). Peshwa rule in eighteenth-century western India is unique in recorded and documentable history for its combination of secular and ritual power in the hands of the Brahmanas. The Peshwas were actually the ministers of the Maratha dynasty, founded by Shivaji, with its headquarters in Satara. In 1713, Shahu was appointed Chitpavan Brahmana, Balaji Vishvanath, as the Peshwa in recognition of his signal services. Following this, the Peshwas became the de facto rulers of the Maratha kingdom, ruling from Poona, while the descendants of Shivaji sank to nominal rulership at Satara. This peculiar situation possibly accounted for a rapid expansion of the Brahmanas over various branches of administration, including the army, to provide a secure support structure for the Peshwas. Consequently, under Peshwa rule, in the Poona Deccan region in particular, the Brahmanas combined secular power with sacerdotal status. This situation, symbolized by the term 'Maratha-Brahmana/ was somewhat unusual, and was seldom replicated in other parts of India. The terms 'Poona/ 'Deccan/ and 'Maratha-Brahmana' came to be regarded as synonymous for the Chitpavan Brahmanas, as well as for other Brahmanas who combined political, military, and economic activities with traditional Brahmana pursuits during the Peshwai Brahmana power in general, and the Chitpavan power in particular. These activities have been aptly summed up thus: Of the significant concentrations of power in society, namely the institution of religion, the administration, and the ownership of land, the Chitpavans virtually controlled all three. Their status in the scale of caste assured their supremacy over the institutions of religion: their ties with

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 225 the Peshwas secured for them a monopoly over the administration; and finally the ties of caste once again encouraged the Peshwas to create a landed aristocracy which was recruited from Brahmana families and on whose loyalty they could rely in all circumstances ... The privileges enjoyed by the Chirpavans enabled them to dominate the rest of the community. (Kumar 1968:44)

The Brahmanas, and particularly the Chitpavans, thus became a constituent element in what Gokhale has termed the 'military-bureaucratic elite' of the kingdom (1988: 106). The most notable feature of these developments was the successful entry of Brahmanas into military and financial roles, both regarded as alien to their varna (Kosambi 1989: 248). Further, even those Brahmanas who were not part of the military, financial, and landed elite were privileged by virtue of their caste. The control of political and social power by the Chitpavans through their connection with the Peshwas was best expressed through the institution of the dakshina, which represented an informal alliance between the Chitpavans and the state. The dakshina, literally, a 'gift/ was the means by which the Peshwas extended their support to the Brahmanas in their role as 'custodians' of Hinduism. It involved the distribution of enormous sums of money to thousands of scholarly Brahmanas after they had been examined by a body of shastris on their knowledge of the sacred texts of Hinduism. In return for the recognition that the grant of dakshina accorded, the Brahmanas were unstinting in the support they extended to the state (Kumar 1968: 39). This steadfast support is also attributable to the general policy of Brahmana pratipalana (protection of the Brahmanas) pursued by the Peshwas. As part of this protection, throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, all categories of Brahmana men enjoyed land revenue remissions and exemption from transit dues, house taxes, forced labour, the death penalty, and enslavement (Wink 1986: 232). It is not surprising that the Peshwai was characterized as Brahmanya-raj and Brahmani daulat (Kadam 1988: 342). The Peshwa State and the Caste System The need for a distinctive self-image for the Peshwai in the unusual situation in which brahma and kshatra were combined in the person of the Peshwa, rather than being distributed between the king and the Brah-

226 Uma Chakravarti mana, and in particular the need to validate the marginalization of the actual rulers at Satara, may account for the Peshwa's attempt to recreate, at least ideologically, a Brahmanical Hindu kingdom at Poona. Brahmana rituals and texts were reiterated, and an attempt was made to strictly uphold the Brahmanical social order. In such a situation, privileging Brahmanas and suppressing the other castes went together (Fukazawa 1991: 42). For example, in Poona, the seat of the Peshwai, Mahars were not allowed within the city gates after 3 P.M. since their long shadows would defile people of higher castes. They were also required to carry earthen pots tied around their necks to contain their spittle, lest it defile an unwary caste Hindu, and also to sweep away their defiling footprints. According to one source, a Sonar who performed religious rites according to vedic mantras had his tongue cut off for defiling the sacred verses (Desai 1980: 39). The Peshwai's attempt to consolidate the sacred Brahmanical traditions suggests that there may have been an erosion or weakening of social arrangements in the practice of caste rules, or even their non-observance, in the prePeshwai days. It is also possible that the weakening, or non-observance, of caste rules may have been linked to the less active role played by the state in enforcing textual traditions upon social arrangements. Fukazawa's argument that there was a close connection between the caste system and the state's enforcement of its interests has relevance here. As Fukazawa shows in his study of eighteenth-century Maharastra, the caste system in Maharastra was not a 'spontaneous' social order of the people, but very much a state order of society, controlled and protected by the state (1969: 32-44). Fukazawa's analysis of materials available in the Peshwa Daftar indicates that, apart from suppressing the lower castes, the state played a decisive role in two ways: (1) in the removal and, more particularly, in the restoration of the caste status of individual persons who had deviated from the traditional religio-social code of conduct; and (2) with regard to individual castes as status groups, the state often confirmed internal splits within a caste and enforced certain codes of conduct to be observed by, as well as between, separate castes (1968: 33). The Peshwai self-consciously functioned as a dharmajya, privileging shastric law over customary law. A case in point is that of the Yajurvedi Brahmanas of the Bassein region who, like many other peninsular Brahmanas, practised cross-cousin marriage. This practice was banned by the Peshwai, who regarded it as an aberration attributable to laxity in the application of the dharma during Portugese rule. An order

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 227 (sanad) sent by the Peshwa in 1744 stated that, now that the dharmajya, or the kingdom of dharma, had been established, the law according to the dharmashastra henceforth would be applied, and no improper conduct would be permitted. Those who had begun to practise crosscousin marriage were treated as a separate caste and were fined for their improper behaviour (Fukazawa 1968: 38-9). The Peshwa government's concern as upholders of the dharma extended not only to the behaviour of the upper castes, but also to the lower castes. For example, disputes about the pedigrees of a weaving community were decided upon, and weavers of good pedigree were separated from weavers descended from female slaves. Intermarriage between the two groups was banned, and weavers of good pedigree had a certificate issued to them by the Peshwai. In return, a tribute of Rs. 5,000 was levied upon them. The government, as the dharmapratipalana, thus confirmed and systematized caste divisions, but at the same time used every possible occasion to raise revenue by levying fines (Fukazawa 1968: 39). The Peshwai's agenda in relation to the Brahmana caste was dual. The government suggested and formulated codes of behaviour for Brahmanas based on their understanding of the shastric law. It is significant that the Peshwa state was far stricter in its upholding of caste norms for the Brahmanas than for any other community to which a transgressor may have belonged. Fukazawa cites the example of a Brahman who converted to Islam while away from his native village. After some years he returned to his village and was readmitted to his original status by his caste fellows in the village. However, since all cases of readmission to the caste had to be sanctioned by the Peshwa government, it overrode the decision of the man's caste-fellows and refused the Brahmana and his wife readmission (1968: 36). At the same time as upholding an extremely strict code for Brahmanas, the Peshwas also ensured, through various actions, that they retained the highest status in society by expressly forbidding lower castes from imitating usages and customs practised only by Brahmanas. For instance, the lower castes were prohibited by the government from wearing the sacred thread and from the performance of certain rituals, both allowed only to the Brahmanas in Maharastra (Fukazawa 1968: 42). The Peshwai's unambiguous upholding of Brahmana superiority over other sections of the elite is extremely interesting. On the complaint of the Brahmanas, the Peshwai commanded the Prabhus to behave like Shudras. They sent almost two hundred order

228 Uma Chakravarti letters to bureaucrats and representative Brahmanas all over the kingdom, instructing them to ensure that the Prabhus observed the code laid down for them. The code stipulated that the Prabhus should not recite the vedic mantras, and that they should visit only those temples visited by Shudras. Even the greeting 'namaskar/ used by Brahmanas, was denied to them. Instead, they were to use the term 'dandvat' among themselves, as was customary among the Shudras. (The Untouchables were expected to use a third term, 'johar'l) The Prabhus were not permitted to use Brahmanas as their servants, and were commanded not to oppose the remarriage of widows (Fukazawa 1968: 42) - that supposed 'privilege' being the prerogative of the Brahmanas. The Peshwai's privileging of the hierarchical Brahmanical traditions laid down in the most conservative shastric texts is best exemplified in its attitude to the Bhakti tradition in Maharastra. Pandharpur, the great centre of Bhakti worship, was brought under the 'totalizing' power of the Peshwai, which ordered seven rules of worship to be executed by the officers of the state. The image in the main shrine was of Vithoba, a form of Vishnu, a central figure in the Bhakti cult. As part of the attempt to democratize worship in the Bhakti movement, Vithoba had become accessible to the lower castes during the period of Bhakti influence. Among Vithoba's worshippers was Chokhamela, an Untouchable saint of the fourteenth century, and a stone image of the saint came to be installed north of the main shrine which the Untouchables frequented for their worship. By the eighteenth century, emboldened perhaps by the pro-Brahmana Peshwai, the Brahmanas complained that the place was so narrow and crowded that the visitors touched each other, thus 'polluting' the Brahmanas. The Peshwai ordered the Untouchables to perform their worship of Chokhamela from the nearby Maharvada. They were prohibited from approaching the temple of Vithoba, and were threatened with punishment if they failed to comply (Fukazawa 1968: 42). Thus we see that state power was crucial in providing or obstructing the space available to the lower castes for worship, even within the Bhakti tradition. Under the Peshwai, the Untouchable Mahars were required to demolish their huts if they were located too close to the village. Records show that, despite upper caste suppression, not all Untouchables were reconciled to their fate. The Mahars in the Konkan area demanded that Brahmana priests officiate at their marriages. This demand was supported by the local official who, in his enthusiasm, even attached the offices of the Brahmanas, but the Peshwai decided against such practice. The government reprimanded the local official,

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 229 and threatened to deal with the Untouchables suitably if they continued to 'trouble' the Brahmana priests (Fukazawa 1968: 43). Thus, the Peshwai acted effectively on behalf of the Brahmanas and against the lower orders. Sanctions were imposed on those who transgressed these injunctions. The state also ensured that the Untouchables would continue to occupy the lowest rungs of the social and religious ladder. What is significant is that, even among the Untouchables, there were demands for better treatment, and that ultimately it was state power that suppressed such demands and kept the Untouchables in the lowest position in society. It is not surprising that, in the social memory of the lower castes, the Peshwai was synonymous with Brahmana power, and a time of great oppression for them (Muktabai 1855). To sum up the working of the caste system during the Peshwai, we may note that the internal functioning of caste rules and the maintenance of the established hierarchies were of crucial significance to the government. While a contested situation between the Brahmana subcastes was sometimes manipulated according to political expediency by the Peshwas themselves (Wink 1986: 232), such a challenge between the lower castes and the Brahmanas does not appear to have been tolerated by the state, which was the ultimate arbiter of status within the caste system. No explicit contested situation appears to have been possible for the individual, especially of the upper caste, in relation to the caste group to which the person belonged because, even in such situaitons, it was the Peshwai that defined what was Brahmanical law. Brahmana and the Structure of Gender Relations during the Peshwai The Peshwai, with its notions of Brahmanya and the rigid hierarchies of the caste system, could not but have a direct and crucial bearing on gender relations in eighteenth-century Maharastra. Inter alia, the Brahmanya implied a certain, strictly regulated code of conduct for women, differing to some extent according to caste, but always the index in fixing rank within the caste hierarchy. Administrators and observers in the nineteenth century have noted the phenomenon of castes seeking and achieving higher rank by adopting new ceremonial practices, the most important of which was a prohibition on the remarriage of widows. Other castes lost their ranking by admitting the remarriage of widows (Steele 1986). As noted earlier, the Prabhus, who were

230 Uma Chakravarti regarded by the Peshwa as unfit for the higher status they were seeking, were also prohibited from enforcing a ban on remarriage, lest this establish their case for higher status, equivalent to that of the Brahmanas. Under the system which I have elsewhere termed 'Brahmanical patriarchy/2 the relationship between caste and gender is critical. Ultimately, the degree to which the sexuality of women is controlled is the degree to which a caste group is regarded as maintaining purity of blood, thereby establishing its claims to higher caste status (Chakravarti 1993). This enables us to understand the gender codes enforced in eighteenth-century Maharastra under the Peshwas. The sexuality of all women was closely monitored under the Peshwai, although according to different norms. The brahmanya implied that questions about which women could be legitimate wives; which women could remarry; which women must practise ascetic widowhood and never remarry; which women must have their heads tonsured; which women must be excommunicated for their lapses; by what age women must marry, and how they must marry - all were objects of regulation by the Brahmanas, and ultimately the state's concern. Most significantly the sexual 'offences' of women, especially widows, were punishable by imprisonment and, uniquely, by enslavement. Women thus lived under the continuous, combined surveillance of the community and the state. As Fukazawa pointed out in the case of caste, gender codes were not merely an arrangement of society they were extended, consolidated, and reinforced by state power under the Peshwas. In order to ensure legitimate reproduction, marriage and sexual codes for men and women, but particularly for women and members of the upper castes, were major elements in the organization of gender relations. Elaborate rules were devised relating to prohibited and preferred factors in settling marriage alliances (Kadam 1988: 347). Proper rituals had to be completed for the marriage to be regarded as legal in the case of the high castes. Practice among the high castes of the asura form of marriage (in which bride price was taken, or wives abducted) was frowned upon by the Peshwai (1988:347). Instead, the practice of dowry gradually gained ground. In general, as remarked earlier, the Peshwai favoured textual or shastric law over cutomary law in the matter of the marriages of Brahmanas, and forbade cross-cousin marriage. The most significant factor in ensuring legitimate reproduction, of high priority during the Peshwai, was the requirement of pre-pubertal marriage for women. As early as the second century C.E., Manu recom-

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 231 mended eight years of age as the ideal age for the marriage of girls (Manu smrti IX.88), so that girls would already be the sexual property of their husbands at the time of puberty. All sexual activity would then be exclusively concentrated upon the husband and there would be less possibility of women going 'astray/ Immediately after puberty, referred to locally as shanee (Steele 1986: 356-9) (literally 'inauspicious/ probably regarded so because women become dangerous [Yalman 1963: 258] and need to be safeguarded thereafter), the garbadhana ceremony would be performed (Hassan 1989: 105), thus harnessing female sexuality for the sole purpose of ensuring legitimate reproduction. The upper castes followed the practice of early marriage (in the case of the Peshwa family, between the ages of five and eight) scrupulously. For most Brahmana families, the age varied from five to ten years. The Yadi dharmasthapana of the year 1735, a set of rules of conduct issued by the government to regulate the lives of Brahmanas, laid down that all Brahmana women should be married between the ages of seven and ten (Kadam 1988:346-8). Severe strictures were faced by fathers who failed to perform their duty of organizing the marriage of their daughters at the proper time. If a girl began to menstruate before she was married, her marriage could only be performed (if anyone was willing to marry her) after the prescribed ceremony of penance (Kane 1941: 444-5). Such was the force of the obligation requiring that fathers marry off their daughters before puberty, that on one occasion the government released a whole family of sixteen prisoners on the grounds that the marriages of two girls aged ten and eleven were impending. The government even provided clothes and ornaments worth Rs. 1,000 to cover the expenses of the marriage (Kadam 1988: 350). Anxiety about daughters' marriages (a nine-year-old girl was regarded as far advanced in age) was a matter often referred to in the correspondence which survives from the period. It was regarded as a venture of the highest priority for completion when the death of a father left unmarried daughters. Even while racked by internal dissension, the Peshwai did not forget its obligation to the Brahmana dharma with regard to customs monitoring female sexuality. For instance, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the government under Nana Phadnis passed twenty orders to the mamlatdars and Brahmanas of certain talukas, stating that the government had come to know that some Brahmanas kept their daughters unmarried after the age of nine. The orders advised the Brahmanas to refrain from such practice, and officials were ordered to keep a close watch on those who violated government orders (1988: 350).

232 Uma Chakravarti From the evidence available to us, it is clear that the Peshwai regarded the family as a key institution, and took a very serious view of adultery as a violation of social norms. All castes were expected to conform to the pattern of confining sexual activity within marriage, and to restrict marriage within the endogamous circle (Fukazawa 1968: 34). Surveillance of all categories of women and, in the case of highcaste women, virtual confinement within the private domain of the household, were prescribed both by the texts and by the customs prevalent in eighteenth-century society in order to prevent 'illicit' sexual activity. Institutional structures designed to prevent 'illicit' sexual relations did not, however, eradicate sexual 'lapses' altogether, and there were some publicly recorded instances of adultery (Gune 1953: 85; 259). It was held that women were more responsible for such acts, and the severest condemnation was reserved for them. Women faced both public and private measures of punishment: for example, a Brahmana woman visiting her natal home was seduced and impregnated by the son of a priest. When the husband learned of the relationship, he discarded his wife and demanded that the priest arrange a new marriage for him. Fearing public criticism, the priest did so by giving the husband Rs. 800, after which he got himself another wife. There is no indication that the priest's son was punished, but the woman was soon found dead, and it was widely believed that she had been murdered by the priest (Kadam 1988: 364-5). Socially sanctioned and enforced punishment, including 'private' remedies such as the one cited here, were common, since the state shared and upheld similar and sometimes even more rigid patriarchal codes. The case of Ahili, a nonBrahmana woman who was charged with having adulterous relations with another villager, is notable. The mamlatdar fined the adulterous man and imprisoned Ahili. However, the husband appealed to the Peshwa that Ahili had not been punished sufficiently. The Peshwa government under Nana Phadnis then ordered that Ahili's nose be cut off in the presence of an official sent by the government (1988: 361). The symbolic castration of Ahili was probably meant as a deterrent to other potential offenders. Adulterous women could be imprisoned after conviction. For example, in a case recorded in 1772-3, a Brahmana woman named Rukmi was charged with having committed adultery with both Brahmanas and Shudras. It was said that she also ate with Shudras. The defaulting woman was imprisoned (probably for a considerable term, as the punishment indicates and as was the practice with upper caste women),

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 233 put on food ration of two seers per day, and supplied with two saris per year (Kadam 1988: 374). The punishment meted out to the Brahmana woman suggests that she had committed a double offence: Adultery was offence enough, but Rukmi, by including Shudras among her partners, was committing the most reprehensible offence possible for a Brahmana woman, that of pratiloma connection. The traditional punishments in the shastras included public humiliation and even death. In a significant decision taken by the Peshwai in 1788, a woman was convicted of adultery and imprisoned for three months. At the end of this period, when she was to be freed, it was found that there was no one to vouch for her future 'good' behaviour, that is, there was no one available to keep her under effective surveillance. Since the authorities were apprehensive that the 'errant' woman would repeat her offence, she was sold as a slave (batik) for Rs. 50 (Gokhale 1988:166). This case is significant because it constructs the unguarded woman as a permanent hazard: selling her as a batik provided her with a master who would have authority over her and whose responsibility she would then be. Punishments for adulterous women were more numerous than for men, suggesting that adulterous men, if they were punished at all, got off comparatively lightly. For instance, a Brahmana man who committed adultery with a Brahmana woman in 1773 had merely to perform a prayaschitta (penance) consisting of twenty-four pradakshinas (circumambulations) of Brahmagiri and Harshagiri (Kadam 1988: 371). The only adulterous men who faced severe punitive action were those involved in relations with women of a higher caste, particularly if the woman was a Brahmana. In 1772, a non-Brahmana named Balaram Manikram who displayed illicit amour for a Brahmana woman had his property confiscated and sold; a fine of Rs. 1,000 was recovered from the sale (Gokhale 1988: 167). In contrast to the comparative laxity shown to men involved in adultery, none of whom appears to have faced imprisonment, a woman could face imprisonment or enslavement even without being adulterous. In 1979 a woman was abandoned by her husband when she made public his impotence. Interestingly, she was then convicted of leading an immoral life, and fined. Since she could not pay the fine she was reduced to the status of Kunbin and made to labour for others (1988: 166). Here, punishment was not for the actual violation of the strict sexual code for wives, but for the violation of strimaryada (code of conduct for women), something no good wife would do. Under the pativrata dharma, the impotence of the husband was not regarded as being of any consequence; certainly it was a

234 Uma Chakravarti taboo subject not to be made public, since it made the sexual need of the wife explicit, and delinked sexuality from reproduction. Adultery was regarded as offensive, not only because adultery complicated the problem of ensuring legitimate reproduction, but also because it was thought to represent 'excessive' sexual energy, and was considered deeply reprehensible in the case of women. Punishments, especially imprisonment, were structured by caste considerations, but always fell unequally upon men and women. Adulterous women of the middle and upper castes (not just Brahmana women) were regarded as serious offenders in the eighteenth century because, as in the past, caste and class reproduction were jeopardized. Therefore, the Peshwa state acted vigorously against 'errant' women of almost all castes. It is significant that, in the case of women of the lowest castes, their offence of excessive sexuality was punished by making them available to men of the higher castes through the intervention of the state. According to Rege (1993), the Peshwai, especially in its last phase, charged lower-caste women with adultery in order to enslave them. Some were enslaved to labour in kakhanas, and others to provide sexual services and dance in the lavani tamashas. The Peshwai thus simultaneously upheld normative gender codes for women of all castes in the matter of adultery, and yet maintained caste distinctions in the way the offence was dealt with in practice. Pragmatic use was made of the sexuality and labour of the 'adulterous' low-caste woman. Brahmanya and Widowhood in the Peshwai I have argued at some length elsewhere that the relationship between labour, caste, and gender was germane to the conceptualization of widowhood in Brahmanical patriarchal codes (Chakravarti 1994). It is not unexpected, therefore, to find that, in practice, the greatest difference between castes in eighteenth-century Maharastra was manifested in the case of enforced widowhood and the remarriage of widows, with the strictest ban on remarriage reserved for the highest caste. As noted earlier, the brahmanya of the Peshwai reserved the most privileged position for the Brahmanas, but also expected the strictest observance of caste norms from them. Violations were dealt with by enforcing permanent excommunication from the social community of Brahmanas. Brahmana women, in turn, were closely guarded as wives and were expected to observe ascetic widowhood of the most extreme kind after the death of their husbands. The outward symbol of ascetic

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 235 widowhood in Maharastra, the tonsure of Brahmana widows, was also strictly enforced. Resistance to the custom was virtually impossible since, in the eighteenth century, widows lived as propertyless, shelterless women in the custody of kinsmen and within the larger social unit of the caste group into which they were born. It is significant that, even if the immediate kinsmen of a widow allowed her to remain untonsured, the Peshwai would act to uphold the Brahmanical gender codes enforced by religious authorities. There are instances of widows who remained untonsured for a time with the support of their natal kinsmen, mainly their fathers or brothers. However, the Brahmana community invariably brought excommunication orders from a religious head such as the Shankaracharya, as happened, for example, in the case of Malharpant of Karhad, who was banned from marrying till his untonsured widowed sister was tonsured. When Malharpant defied the ban, he was excommunicated under orders from the Shankaracharya (Kadam 1988: 356). In another case, a brother who had given shelter to his unshaven widowed sister was excommunicated along with his entire family. The Shankaracharya also ordered the excommunication of a father because his widowed daughter had retained her hair (Kadam 1988: 356). That the ultimate authority of the Peshwai was fully invoked to maintain enforced widowhood, including tonsure, is evident from the Yadi dharmasthpana, literally, 'memorandum of the establishment of the dharma/ of 1735. Six separate orders related to the Brahmana child widow who, on attaining puberty, was to discard the hair on her head, along with ornaments and the blouse (Kadam 1988: 355). Thereafter, the Brahmana widow was permitted only a single garment (ekavastra) in the characteristic colour worn by Brahmana widows in Maharastra. Order number 37 specifies when the tonsure of widows is to be performed: on the first or the tenth day after the death of the husband (1988: 355). The tonsure ceremony itself was fairly elaborate, accompanied as it was by religious rites such as homa, prayaschitta, and the all-important dakshina. The relationship between the material and the ideological elements in enforcing the rite of keshwapan (tonsure) is evident from an account of the expenditure of a widow from a Vaidya family in the year 1798. The total expenditure on the various ceremonies was Rs. 41; the major beneficiaries of the dakshina were the Brahmanas themselves, since almost three-fourths of the money spent was given to the Brahmanas. Apart from this amount, some money was spent on cloth, gold, and silver, which were shared among the Brahmanas (Kadam 1988: 356).

236 Uma Chakravarti Contesting the Brahmana dharma on the tonsure of widows appears to have been virtually impossible, for the Yadi dharmasthpana laid down that only upon the completion of the keshwapan of a widow was the death pollution in the house of the dead Brahmana terminated, and the purification of the house and the widow complete. Until the keshwapan of the dead man's widow, other Brahmanas were barred from having any relationship with the entire household, all of whom were regarded as impure (Kadam 1988: 356-7). The widow thus carried the burden and responsibility for the purity of the entire household upon her tonsured head. In view of such strict orders and the surveillance maintained by the community of Brahmanas, who had much to gain, ideologically and materially, from the reiteration of the belief structures regarding tonsure, all acts of attempted resistance were swiftly and effectively suppressed by patriarchal structures working through the Brahmana community, the religious authorities, and the Peshwai. In 1735 the Peshwai felt the need to reiterate the social and ritual distinctions through which the structural opposition between the wife and the widow was expressed (Chakravarti 1994). One of the orders of 1735 forbade the Brahmana widow from eating along with a married woman; a corresponding order banned married women from sitting in a pangat (row of persons taking food) with Brahmana widows (1994: 355). The distinction between the wife and the widow was to be assiduously maintained at all times in the brahmanya. According to the normative structure of Brahmanical patriarchy, the ban on widow remarriage was a feature of high status, the hallmark of certain castes, and a 'privilege' not to be shared with inferior castes. Sacred, indissoluble marriage was regarded as the sign of a superior culture, and the Brahmanas, as the highest caste, were entitled to the most sacred rituals. The eight forms of marriage described in the shastras conform to this basic distinction, enforcing proper sacred rituals for the Brahmanas and permitting the less acceptable forms of marriages for the lower castes (Baudhayana dharmasutra 1.11.14-16; Manu smriti III.20-4). Thus, sustaining the distinction in the gender codes between high castes and low castes, enforced widowhood for widows of the highest caste was paralleled by an inferior form of widow marriage, locally known as pat, which prevailed among the agricultural castes such as the Kunbis. Kunbi women participated directly in production through work in the fields. Additionally, they reproduced a class of producers. The demographic compulsions of labouring castes were quite different from those of the high castes such as the Brah-

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 237 manas. As with the small-holding agricultural castes such as the Kunbis, low-caste women were not debarred from remarrying or cohabiting. Both among agricultural castes and among the landless low castes, women functioned as direct producers and as reproducers of producers. Their continued sexual activity following widowhood was in consonance with the larger labour needs of the economy (Chakravarti 1994; Chowdhry 1994). The caste system as a system of production thus shaped the hierarchy of social practices for women. Upon this structure, which was both 'open' and 'closed' at the same time and which had different cultural and social norms for different castes, the Peshwai introduced certain modifications. Both Gune (1953: 85) and Kadam (1988: 342-3) have suggested that the Peshwai expanded state control over traditional judicial arrangements. This was possible because there were overlapping jurisdictions between the caste panchayat and the state in punitive matters, particularly with regard to crimes related to the violation of caste norms and sexual misconduct. According to Gune (1953:109-14), there were three processes of punishment: (1) royal punishment; (2) prayaschitta; and (3) the feeding of caste-fellows. The caste panchayat or local panchayat worked in close collaboration with the government in enforcing punishments. The government applied royal punishment, using the coercive power of the state to imprison when required. All excommunications and reentries into the caste also were ultimately in the hands of the government Brahmasabha, the council of Brahmanas, in matters pertaining to Brahmanas. The appointment of nominated members on the local panchayats was an additional means of asserting effective control over the decisions of government regarding practices such as pat. Apart from expanding the revenue base of the state, the gunehgari was a reiteration of the view that such customary practices as pat, though valid, were inferior in the eyes of a 'Brahmanical' state. The Peshwai presented itself as a unique kind of state, more 'moral' than earlier state forms had been. The Peshwai thus 'permitted' remarriage for certain castes and maintained the social distinction between Brahmanas and non-Brahmanas by debarring certain upwardly mobile castes from enforcing celibate widowhood upon their women. Those castes in which widows were permitted to remarry were required to pay a tax upon the occurrence of a pat connection (Kadam 1988: 351). There were other prescriptions relating to rights over children by the earlier marriage and to jewellery, and so on, given by her earlier husband, which were required to revert

238 Uma Chakravarti to the kinsmen of her first marriage, as was any property of the husband she may have controlled as his widow (1988: 351-3). A widow's performance of pat was considered superior to that of a woman remarrying after leaving her first husband. In the latter case, the remarriage expenses of the first husband would have to be borne by the woman's second husband. Often, fathers sought permission from the government for pat connections on grounds that there was no one to provide for their widowed daughters. In one case a father argued that there was no one to provide his daughter with food, clothes, and 'company' (Kadam 1988: 352). The government's approval was, however, linked to the payment of gunehgari and nazar, indicating that the women's remarriages were not in their own hands. Furthermore, approval was contingent upon her kinsmen's or second husband's ability and willingness to pay the due amounts to the government, whose sanction was required to formalize the connection. The practice of pat marriage may thus have been more a theoretical possibility under the Peshwai rather than a widespread custom. The significant factor, however, is that it was permitted for some and denied to others. The marital and sexual arrangements of all women were monitored and regulated ultimately by the authority of the eighteenth-century state in Maharastra. Adultery, especially by the widow,3 represented the most dangerous subversion of the ideological structures of Brahmanical patriarchy: the whole edifice of brahmanya was threatened by it. The Peshwai, which was committed to upholding the brahmanya, acted decisively to suppress such subversion. We need to remember that the community of Brahmanas, without the support of the state, could use only social coercion by enforcing excommunication (ghatasphot} upon the widow. It was the state that used the superior coercive power to imprison and reduce to servitude Brahmana widows charged with adultery (badkarm). There are examples of widows who were imprisoned in various forts and made to perform penal labour (Kadam 1988: 363). In one case a Brahmana widow who had been tonsured later allowed her hair to grow and also wore bangles. She lived with a Golak and bore him a son. When the Peshwa, Madhavaroa I (often regarded as the ideal Peshwa ruler), came to know of the case, he ordered that the widow be sent to the Purandar fort to be imprisoned, along with her eight-yearold 'illegitimate' son. The Peshwa also ordered that both mother and son be employed in the daily work of preparing mortar (Gokhale 1988:

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 239 167). Even the last Peshwa, regarded as something of a debauchee, a man who married eleven times (the last occasion only a few weeks before his death) (1988: 58), had no qualms about doing his 'duty' by upholding the brahmanya for Brahmana widows. In January 1796, soon after he ascended to the throne, he ordered the imprisonment of a Brahmana widow who had committed 'adultery' (Kadam 1988: 364). To summarize the relationship between women, the social community, and the state, we may say that adultery remained the most important offence as far as women were concerned in the eighteenth-century Maratha kingdom. It was the non-observance or defiance of the sexual codes that brought women into the public gaze, leading to the most stringent action by the community and the application of the full coercive power of the state. It is significant that permanent excommunication (ghataspot) of a person, whereby the individual's connection with the family and community was irreversibly broken (as if the offending individual were dead), was used most often in cases of sexual misconduct by Brahmana women. In the case of Brahmana men, however, a break seems to have occurred only when a Brahmana man himself broke his connection with brahmanya, as in the case cited earlier. Thus, men lost their brahmanya by renouncing it, while women lost their brahamanya through sexual lapses. The brahmanya of women lay in their chastity, in their pativarta dharma within marriage and in chaste and prayerful widowhood. Brahmana Women, Complicity, and the 'Erahmani daulat' As we have seen, it was the sexuality of upper-caste women (in Maharastra, mainly Brahmana women) that was closely monitored and highly valorized. It was these women also who were most carefully socialized in their specific stridharma - the pativarta dharma - of wifely duty and sexual fidelity. And since the ideology was powerful and richly elaborate, the inequity inherent in the gender codes was rendered invisible. Thus, while many women experienced the punitive power of the Peshwai, there is evidence that many women, especially those of the upper strata (for instance, in the family of the Peshwas) were themselves complicit in the structures of gender and caste, reproducing the material structures which privileged their social group as well as its values and ideology. Such an example is provided by Anandibai, the wife of Raghunath-

240 Uma Chakravarti rao, a prominent member of the ruling Bhat family from the Chitpavan Brahmana subcaste, who described the rule of the Peshwas as 'Brahmani daulat' (Kadam 1988: 342), meaning the rule for, by, and of the Brahmanas. Another example is provided by Radhabai, the mother of Peshwa Bajirao I, who both identified with and personally upheld stridharma, enforcing the moral order for women (Gokhale 1988: 48). Radhabai, it must be noted, was the mother of the real founder of the Peshwai, and her upholding of certain moral values would have been significant in shaping the Peshwai's notion of brahmanya. Ramabai, the wife of Madhavrao, who immolated herself on the death of her husband in 1772, was another key figure in upholding the stridharma of Brahmana women. The proof of her satitvai was accompanied by elaborate rituals and the distribution of massive dakshina to Brahmanas and servants: Rs. 14,600 is listed as the expenditure incurred on the occasion; jewellery estimated at Rs. 60,000 was also given away to various beneficiaries (Gokhale 1988: 74). Brahmanya was upheld with regard both to women and to the larger community of Brahmanas. But even as women from elite families reflected the successful internalization of the pativarta dharma and were rewarded with great reverance for their satitva, there was surely strain on the gender codes and belief structures around them. The incidence of widowhood, including child widowhood, would have been high, due both to mortality patterns and to the polygamy popular in the Peshwa's family. Ascetic widowhood, tonsuring, and the marginalization of the sonless widow with its attendant hardships would have created a high level of insecurity. Polygamy would also have aggravated succession disputes and intrigues, a regular feature of the family politics of the elite (Sangari 1993). The stridharma or the pativarta dharma could easily break down in such situations, and it is likely that constant refurbishing was required to sustain the existing codes of gender and caste. We know that, in a similar situation in the court of Tanjore in the eighteenth century, texts to socialize women of the royal household were commissioned by senior women in the ruling family (Leslie 1989: 20-1). Ideological structures evidently had to be renewed constantly with the complicity of at least some women. Unlike the low castes, whose attempts at higher status were suppressed by the use of state power, gender, structures were such that, although the coercive power of the state was required to keep the structures intact, many women were complicit in the structure that gave men power over them.

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 241 Conclusion: Brahmana Women in the Dharmarajya In concluding our analysis of caste, gender, and the Peshwai in the eighteenth-century Maharastra, we can argue that the Peshwai ensured that all castes maintained the status order, with a pre-eminent position for the Brahmanas. Peshwa rule also reiterated the structures of Brahmanical patriarchy, because to a large extent the pre-eminent status of the Brahmana depended on the undiluted purity of Brahmana women. The Brahmanas' superior ritual and moral status entitled them to rule and to consolidate themselves economically through dakshina and through the other economic privileges cited earlier, over and above their hold on administrative positions based on their reading and writing skills. The Brahmanas' entitlement to a privileged position was, however, not always self-evident; in fact the moral and ritual superiority of the Brahmanas needed to be demonstrated physically and acknowledged by the other castes as distinguishing the Brahmanas from themselves. The brahmanya of the Brahmanas had two major foci: one was the strict observance of purity and pollution taboos; the other was the purity of their women. It is in this context that the proclamation of the Yadi dharmasthapana assumes importance. Issued in 1735, within twenty years of the Peshwaship becoming hereditary, and almost as soon as the new government had stabilized, it represented the public image of the Peshwai. It was a statement that the Peshwai was serious in its intent to 're-establish' the dharma. Crucial to the dharma were rules and norms concerning Brahmana women - prescribing pre-pubertal marriage, the maintenance of distinctions between married women and widows, and the strict observance of ascetic widowhood, both visibly and actually. Only thus could the superior morality and purity of the Brahmanas be established. In the final reckoning, it was the Brahmana women who carried the burden of upholding brahmanya, providing legitimacy to the Brahmanas' claim both to the highest ritual position as well as to power in a state represented as a dharmarajya. If they were well-schooled in their pativrata dharma, they might live their lives unnoticed by the state. If they flouted the pativrata dharma, the combined surveillance of their kinsmen, the community, and the state ensured that the state's coercive authority would be brought to bear upon them. What is sobering is that, in the dharmarajya, enforcing the brahmanya upon Brahmana women may have left 'errant' women with no exit from their oppressive situa-

242 Uma Chakravarti tion. Gune's evidence regarding suicides during the period 1752-91 shows that it was mostly Brahmana women who committed suicide (1953: 259). Perhaps it was the extraordinary burden of upholding the bmhmanya, or having it enforced upon them, that led Brahmana women to feel compelled to take their own lives and marked them as the largest group among those who killed themselves in the dharmarajya. Notes 1 I have in mind the works of certain sociologists such as Dirks (1987), Dumont (1962), and Irtden (1990), whose writings on the pre-colonial period (though each is distinctive) have tended to concentrate on kingship as conceptualized in the Brahmanical texts, or on inscriptions or documents emanating from kings. These works are concerned either not at all, or are only marginally concerned, with the way the king actually administered his territories, whom and how he punished, and how the upholding of a 'moral' order worked on the lives of people, especially on the low castes and women. I am concerned here with how power was actually used, not merely how it was conceptualized. 2 I find the term 'Brahmanical patriarchy' a useful way to isolate a structure of patriarchy which is dominant in the social formations of many parts of India. Brahmanical patriarchy is a set of rules and institutions in which caste and gender are linked, each shaping the other, and in which women are crucial in maintaining the boundaries between castes. Patriarchal codes in this structure ensure that the caste system can be reproduced without violating the hierarchical order of closed endogamous circles, each distinct from and higher or lower than others. Brahmanical patriarchal codes for women differ according to the status of the caste group in the hierarchy of castes (Chakravarti 1993:1994). The codes incorporate both an ideology of chaste wives and pativrata women, who are valorized, and a structure of rules and institutions by which caste hierarchy and gender inequality are maintained through both the production of consent and the application of coercion. In sum, Brahmanical patriarchy implies the model of patriarchy outlined in the Brahmanical prescriptive texts, to be enforced by the coercive power of the king. This set of norms has shaped the ideology of the upper castes in particular. It continues to be the underpinning of beliefs and practices extant among these castes even today, and is often emulated by the lower castes, especially when seeking upward mobility. 3 The English term, 'adultery/ is not entirely an appropriate translation of the local term, badkarm, which refers to an illicit sexual act. Since the only

Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery 243 243

category of woman who could be engaged in a legitimate sexual act was the wife with her husband, neither the unmarried girl nor the widow was permitted a sexual relationship. Furthermore, in castes in which the widow was not permitted remarriage, she was regarded as still married to her dead husband and therefore committing adultery. In the lower castes, especially in north India, the widow may be regarded as the sexual property of her male affines and as committing adultery if she had relations with other partners (Kolenda 1987: 289-354). References Buhler, George, trans. 1975. Baudhayana Dharmasutra. In Sacred Laws of the An/as, Part II. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass. - 1984. The Laws ofManu. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass. Chakravarti, Uma. 1993. 'Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State.' Economic and Political Weekly of India. 28 (14): 579-85. - 1994. 'Gender Caste and Labour: The Ideological and Material Arrangements of Widowhood.' Conference paper, 'Widows in India.' Bangalore: Indian Institute of Management. Chowdhry, Prem. 1994. The Veiled Woman: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana, 1880-1990. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Desai, Sudha V. 1980. Social Life in Maharashtra under the Peshwas. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Dirks, Nicholas B. 1987. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of a Little Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont, Louis. 1962. 'The Conception of Kingship in Ancient India.' Contributions to Indian Sociology 6: 48-77. Fukazawa, Hiroshi. 1968. 'State and Caste System (Jati) in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Kingdom.' Hitoesubashi Journal of Economics 9 (1): 32^14. - 1991. The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gokhale, E.G. 1988. Poona in the Eighteenth Century: An Urban History. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Sumit. 1992. 'Fitna in Maratha Theory and Practice.' Unpublished manuscript. - 1994. 'An Indian Penal Regime: Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century.' Occasional paper. New Delhi: Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Gune, V.T. 1953. The Judicial System of the Marathas. Poona: Deccan College.

244 Uma Chakravarti Hassan, Syed Sirajul. 1920. The Castes and Tribes of the Nizam's Dominions. Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989. Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kadam, V.S. 1988. The Institution of Marriage and the Position of Women in Eighteenth Century Maharashtra. Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (3): 341-70. Kane, P.V. 1941. History of the Dharmashastras, 2.1. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Kolenda, Pauline. 1987. 'Widowhood among Untouchable Chuhras.' In Pauline Kolenda, ed., Regional Differences in Family Structure in India, 289-94. Jaipur: Rawat. Kosambi, Meera. 1989. 'Glory of Peshwa Pune.' Economic and Political Weekly of India 24 (5): 247-9. Kumar, Ravinder. 1968. Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Leslie, Julia. 1989. The Perfect Wife: The Orthodox Hindu Woman according to the Stridharmapaddhati ofTryambakayajavan. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Muktabai. 1855. Mang Maharachya dukhavisayi [About the griefs of the Mangs and Mahars]. Reprinted in S. Tharu and K. Lalitha, eds., Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, 1: 215-16. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rege, Sharmila. 1993. 'State and Sexuality: The Case of the Erotic "Lavanee" and "Tamasha" in Maharashtra.' Paper presented at workshop on Social Reform, Gender and the State. Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Sangari, Kumkum. 1993. 'Consent, Agency and the Rhetoric of Incitement.' Economic and Political Weekly of India. 28 (18): 867-82. Steele, Arthur. 1927. The Hindu Castes: Their Law, Religion and Customs. Delhi: Mittal, 1986. Wink, Andre. 1986. Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yalman, Nur. 1963. 'On the Purity of Women in the Castes of Ceylon and Malabar.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 93: 25-58.

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