Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire 9780822387978

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specters of

Mother India

Radical Perspectives: A Radical History Review book series Series editors: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University Barbara Weinstein, University of Maryland, College Park

specters of

Mother India The Global Restructuring of an Empire

Mrinalini Sinha

duke university press durham and london 2006

2nd printing, 2007 © 2006 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Dante by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For my mother, Premini Sinha, who has sustained this, and countless other projects, with her wisdom, strength, and love.

Contents

About the Series ix Acknowledgments xi Note on Nomenclature and Transliteration xv Introduction: The Anatomy of an Event 1 1. A Transitional Moment: The Dynamics of an Interwar Imperial Social Formation 23 2. Unpredictable Outcome: The Trajectory of a Transatlantic Intervention 66 3. Ironic Reversal: The Rhetoric of ‘‘Facts’’ in the Controversy over Mother India 109 4. Refashioning Mother India: The Sarda Act and Women’s Collective Agency 152 5. Ambiguous Aftermath: Political Consolidation on the Eve of the Second World War 197 Epilogue: History, Memory, Event 248 Notes 255 Bibliography 336 Index 361

About the Series

History, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty years the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspectives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will offer innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, transnational, and global histories that transcend conventional boundaries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to ‘‘provincialize Europe’’; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what constitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books published in the series may privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused. Mrinalini Sinha has been widely recognized for her brilliant and innovative scholarship on British colonialism in India and her penetrating analysis of race, class and gender in the persistence of political hierarchies and the construction of both colonial and anti-colonial discourses. In Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Sinha displays again a remarkable capacity not only to provide genuinely new interpretations of old questions, but to be innovative even in what she deems a ‘‘historical event,’’ in this case the debates generated by the publication of a single book.

x About the Series

When Katherine Mayo’s Mother India appeared in 1927, it set off a chain of controversies that both illuminated the increasingly transnational status of the colonial question in the interwar period and introduced new discourses on the relationship between the political and the social under imperial rule. Mayo, a U.S. citizen with impeccable right-wing credentials, sought to intervene in favor of continued British rule in India with her ‘‘revelations’’ of social degeneracy in Hindu communities and with dire predictions of contagion unleashed should India gain its independence. But as Sinha cogently demonstrates, neither Mayo nor her supporters could contain the diverse interpretations of and reactions to Mother India, and whatever ideological work Mayo intended the text to perform, the outcome quickly escaped her control. One of the most challenging problems for historians, and especially radical historians, in the wake of the linguisticcultural turn has been to understand how shifts in discourse and ideology occur, and to what political ends. Specters of Mother India provides us with a fascinating and compelling study of the way in which a particular publication can provoke a storm of criticism and a public debate that destabilizes and ultimately reorients the discourse on crucial political questions, whether in the realm of the anticolonial struggle or in the movements for women’s rights.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making. In the process it has accumulated a long list of debts for which any accounting must remain partial at best. I have spent many pleasurable hours discovering and rediscovering various traditions of scholarship from several eras and schools of thought. I have learned from the work of numerous scholars, beyond those who are mentioned in the notes. Even where I have disagreed with particular works, or pushed them in directions they were not necessarily intended, I have been conscious of how much they have galvanized my own arguments. I remain humbled by the magnitude of this intangible influence that everywhere informs my own thinking. There are, of course, also more concrete and tangible debts that are somewhat easier to acknowledge. I am grateful to a number of sources for providing funding for this project: a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation; a joint National Endowment for the Humanities and American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship; grants from the American Philosophical Society and from the Bernadotte E. Schmitt grant of the American Historical Association; and several internal grants and fellowships from Boston College, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), and Pennsylvania State University (University Park), including a grant from the Institute for Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. These have provided support for work at numerous libraries, archives, and private collections scattered in India, Britain, and the United States. Here I have been sustained by the guidance and expertise of librarians, archivists, and staff without whom this would have been impossible. I would like to mention especially the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), Boston College, Southern Illinois University, and Pennsylvania State University for going that extra mile to track down all manner of obscure publications for me. I am also indebted to my editorial and production teams at Duke University Press for help in bringing this manuscript to print. Several students have provided much-appreciated research assistance to me on this project: Susan Kollin at the University of Minnesota; Kari Staros and Michael

xii Acknowledgments

McNally at Southern Illinois University; Uma Asher, Lori Molinari, and Karen Bonde at Pennsylvania State University; and Srabasti Roy in Kolkata. I thank them for being that extra pair of eyes and hands at critical stages in the project. For help with translations, I am grateful to Mr. Ramani Iyer of Madras, Shri Amitabha Choudhury of Fatasil High School, Guwahati, and to another individual from Guwahati who chooses to remain anonymous. My father, Srinivas Kumar Sinha, helped facilitate the work of some of the translations. Judith Walsh brought the two Shankar cartoons from the Hindustan Times to my attention; and Ian Petrie introduced me to the Mayo cartoon in the Philippines Free Press. I am touched by their thoughtfulness. The Library of Congress in Washington kindly provided me a print of Miguel Covarrubias’s portrait of ‘‘Auntie India.’’ The artist, Walton Ford, and the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York were generous in giving permission for the use of Ford’s painting Nila; and Shaukat Khan was kind enough to allow use of the movie poster for Mehboob Khan’s Mother India. My graduate seminars have always provided some of the first testing grounds for my arguments. I have learned much from such classroom exchanges. As students, Erin O’Connor, Uma Asher, and Utsa Ray have been, perhaps, the least able to escape participating in the development of my opinions on a variety of topics, including the discipline of history itself. At the final stages of the project, the readers for Duke University Press gave me the benefit of their insightful and astute readings. To my friends and colleagues, I owe much. They have been most generous in taking time off their own busy schedules to let me pick their brains and to read portions of my manuscript. The following read some parts of this manuscript in one incarnation or the other and offered invaluable feedback: Uma Asher, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Indrani Chatterjee, Kumkum Chatterjee, Saurabh Dube, Geraldine Forbes, Catherine Hall, Sankaran Krishna, Barbara Ramusack, Sonya Rose, Biswarup Sen, Angela Woollacott, and Melissa Wright. They have been the best interlocutors that I could have hoped for. Nan Woodruff read a draft of the entire manuscript with the stern eye of a painstaking copy editor; I could never thank her enough for her input. The manuscript is much improved because of her. I also thank the following additional persons for their part in my intellectual journey: Itty Abraham, Srimati Basu, Urvashi Butalia, Catherine Candy, Lori Ginzberg, Dane Kennedy, Joan Landes, Philippa Levine, Thomas Metcalf, Marjorie Morgan, Theodore Norton, Susan Pedersen, Robert Proctor, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Londa Schiebinger, Joan Scott, Rachel Stocking, Sylvia Vatuk, Theodore Weeks, and Kathleen Wilson.

Acknowledgments

xiii

My family and friends have tolerated with good grace my obsessions and anxieties about this project. I regret all the times when I let the manuscript come in the way of our time together. My mother, to whom this book is dedicated, embodies the resilience and grace that I have learned to cherish more with each passing year. This is a small, and belated, token of my gratitude. Finally, I share midwife responsibilities for this book with Clement Hawes. I have gained not only from his scholarship but also from his active involvement with mine. We have thrashed out every idea in the book together; he has introduced me to many of the lines of argument that I have adopted; and he has read numerous drafts of all the chapters. He has been there from the uncertain beginnings of this project. When my confidence flagged he still believed in the book. The faults in the book, of course, are as much his as they are mine.

Note on Nomenclature and Transliteration

Throughout the text I have followed the common usage from the time in referring to names of places and provinces. For example, I use Bombay, Poona, Madras, and Calcutta instead of their contemporary names Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata when referring to the cities. Likewise, I use Bombay and Madras to designate both the province and the city in British India; the distinction is apparent from the context of the usage. I have made some exceptions to this general practice of using names and designations from the time. I have selectively used the contemporary term dalit for groups at the bottom of the hierarchy of a caste society (variously referred to in the past as untouchables, depressed classes, Harijans, and Adi-Dravidas). As this is somewhat anachronistic, I use the term only when writing in my own voice. I have taken the liberty of standardizing the spelling of the names of many of the principal characters in my text, except when the names appear in direct quotations. For example, I have chosen consistently to use the spelling Muthulakshmi Reddi over the equally familiar spelling Reddy for her last name. All translations in the text are my own unless otherwise specified. I have followed contemporary scholarly practice for transliteration from Indian languages, but without the use of diacritical marks. The words themselves are italicized, and where their meanings are not common in English, they are included in parentheses in the text.

She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of India. That sphinx-like face with its elusive and sometimes mocking smile was to be seen throughout the length and breadth of the land. —Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India

Introduction The Anatomy of an Event

This book tells a story with many twists and turns. It furnishes the narrative of a small episode that cascaded through a global network of social structures and public spheres to produce big effects: the ‘‘tipping point’’ for an important historical transformation in the period between the two world wars.1 The episode at the center of this book is a massive international controversy that raged across three continents with great intensity in the 1920s. Even before Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) or Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), there was Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927).2 Mayo was an American journalist who with the help of British officials and powerful social groups in the United States wrote what became one of the most sensational exposés on India. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially as they affected the position of women, whose roots Mayo traced to an inherently backward Hindu culture. The title of the book, which was meant to evoke popular nationalist representations of the nation as mother, signaled Mayo’s overtly political intervention. The social backwardness of India, according to Mayo, made Indians unfit for political self-government.3 The political case presented in Mother India contributed in making it an instant international cause célèbre. The controversy it generated drew in an impressive international cast of characters from legislators and leading political figures to social reformers, women activists, journalists, writers, artists, doctors, and several ordinary men and women who attended public debates and participated in public protests against the book. The sheer scope of the controversy over Mother India provides a glimpse of its international ramifications. Mother India went into numerous reprints as well as multiple editions in the United States, Britain, and India. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Hebrew, as well as into several Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu.4 By 1955, the original American publisher of Mother India, Harcourt Brace and Company, reported having sold 395,678 copies of the book.5 The book

2 Introduction

was reviewed in almost all the major publications of the time on five continents. While the heart of the controversy over Mother India was located in the United States, Britain, and India, its ripples spread far and wide. For example, contemporaries could read about the book in Excelsior (Paris), Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), and Tidevarvet (Stockholm) in Europe; the Argus (Melbourne) in Australia; the Daily Chronicle (Georgetown) in British Guyana; the Natal Advertiser (Durban) and Cape Times (Cape Town) in South Africa; the Times of Mesopotamia (Basrah) in Iraq; and the Shanghai Times and China Press (Shanghai) in China.6 The reach of the book was phenomenal. Many of the leading contemporary political and cultural figures around the world expressed an opinion about Mother India. In Britain, King George V himself was reported to have shown great interest in the book, as did his prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, and other members of the British cabinet.7 Mother India inspired Madame Nazimova’s India, a play about a twelve-year-old mother with two daughters and a middle-aged husband, which had a brief but controversial debut in 1928 at the Palace Theatre on Broadway in New York City.8 There was also an abortive attempt in 1932 to make the book into a Hollywood movie.9 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as one contemporary observed with just a little exaggeration, Katherine Mayo shared the world’s spotlight on India only with M. K. Gandhi, who had already emerged as the leading advocate for Indian nationalism. The ‘‘legend of Mother India,’’ as theTimes of London called it, was sustained by the impassioned conflict between the supporters and critics of the book.10 While Mayo’s admirers compared the significance of Mother India to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Gandhi famously dubbed Mayo’s book a ‘‘Drain-Inspector’s Report.’’ 11 Mother India spawned a veritable mini-industry with more than fifty books and pamphlets written in direct response to Mayo, of which at least one, K. L. Gauba’s tu quoque book on the United States, Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok (1929), came close to matching the phenomenal sales of Mother India.12 Mother India was also hotly debated on a variety of public platforms in India, Britain, and the United States and was burned in protest outside Town Hall in New York City.13 Numerous public protest meetings were held against the book in various parts of the world, and several political careers were launched in connection with it. Except perhaps for Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, few books have ever come close to matching Mother India in provoking such fury and such vehement support across several continents.14 The immediate context for the controversy was the future of the British policy

Introduction

3

figure 1. Abanindranath Tagore, Bharat Mata (Mother India), 1905. Watercolor on paper, 26.5 × 15 cm. Courtesy of Rabindra Bharati Society, Kolkata, India. This painting, which helped crystallize the nationalist iconography of India as Mother India, was made against the background of the Partition of Bengal (1905) that had enflamed nationalist passions. It offered a visual representation for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s famous nationalist poem Bande Mataram (Hail to Thee, Mother) (1882). The ethereal female figure of the nation (portrayed here in a Bengali Hindu incarnation) bears in her four hands the objects of nationalist aspiration: food, clothing, secular learning, and spiritual knowledge.

of the devolution of political power by stages in colonial India. Yet from the outset the international contours of the debate were informed by a variety of post– First World War developments: the growing economic and political muscle of the United States on the world stage; the anxiety among the imperial powers about the spread of the so-called Bolshevik menace; the legal battle about citizenship rights provoked by the global movement of nonwhite peoples; the implications of the recent political enfranchisement of women in the United States, Britain, and India; the impact of the postwar restructuring of the political economy of late colonialism in India; and, not least, the future of the entire postwar experiment with colonial self-government outside the ‘‘white’’ Dominion colonies of the British Empire. The controversy linked debates about British policy in India with postwar U.S. policy in the Philippines, further revealing the increasingly internationalized arena in which British colonial rule in India and its future were debated after the Great War. My history of this contentious episode from

4 Introduction

the 1920s is thus set against the background of a crucial imperial restructuring: that is, a shift from the ‘‘illusion of permanence’’ that characterized the high imperialism of the late nineteenth century to the recognition of the conspicuously altered state of metropolitan-colonial ties at the advent of what has been called the ‘‘American century.’’

the controversy as historical event My argument about the significance of this episode proceeds from a densely historicized narrative of the controversy over Mother India as a global public ‘‘event.’’ To what extent, however, can the controversy surrounding a book qualify as an event? To be sure, this controversy qualifies as a dictionary definition of ‘‘event’’— an important happening—in that it still occupies a place in the collective national memory in India. The name ‘‘Katherine Mayo,’’ at least for a certain generation of Indians, continues to stand as a byword for imperialist propaganda: the most egregious example, perhaps, of a purposeful imperialist calumny against India. The nationalist attempts to counter such British-inspired negative representations of India have provided the stuff for lingering popular memory of this episode from the colonial Indian past. The further question, of course, is what kind of event the controversy over Mother India was. Understood simply in terms of a nationalist struggle to counter negative imperialist representations of India, the controversy does not capture the break or rupture that contemporary theorists attribute to an ‘‘event.’’ 15 As several scholars have recently demonstrated, both colonialist and cultural-nationalist arguments about India occupied a common discursive field; that is, cultural-nationalist defenses of Indian society typically proceeded by inverting the values attributed to it in colonial discourse.16 The shared imperialistnationalist terms of the protest against Mother India would seemingly render it a ‘‘nonevent,’’ in that nationalist attempts to substitute Mayo’s negative with positive representations of India supposedly turn out to be continuations of a colonial understanding of India and do not decisively break from the normative and everyday logic of the colonial social context. Even all the passions and media hype surrounding the publication of Mother India in the 1920s, then, would make the controversy, at best, a relatively ‘‘banal event’’ in the sense that Wendy Brown speaks of contemporary media events that flare up, like transient fireworks, out of the everyday and are not part of ‘‘a larger historical force or movement.’’ 17 However, the controversy over Mother India was much more than this. Its sensationalization in the media, pace Pierre Nora’s diagnoses of modern events,

Introduction

5

does not alone exhaust the meaning of the controversy.18 The Mayo controversy manifested broader social transformations that make it a ‘‘creative event’’ (or, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie puts it, an événement matrice).19 When the hitherto familiar imperialist-nationalist framework of the controversy is expanded, and the controversy is emplotted anew within a global narrative, the disruptive impact of the public debate over Mother India is revealed. Engendered by global historical networks that cut across and beyond various local contexts, nation-state formations, institutional organizations, and stable discursive contexts, the controversy over Mother India was far too dense to be captured within any simple logic of the existing social context.20 The expanded global perspective marks the controversy as a limit—a break that signifies a before and an after—in the dominant colonial understanding of Indian society. The contagious and self-propagating waves of commentary on Mother India cascaded through the transnational system to produce an unpredictable event: a social epidemic comparable in its ramifications to the South Sea Bubble or to a catastrophic computer virus. The snowballing effect of the controversy rendered the ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India, despite their enormous popularity, vulnerable to rearticulation in an alternative interpretive framework. The ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India had consisted of graphic details, frequently buttressed by numerical representations from hospital statistics, census data, police records, and a variety of official reports and findings, that purported to demonstrate the degeneracy of India in general, and of Hindu culture in particular.21 The particularized descriptions of the various indicators of social degeneration—most notably the alleged sexual obsession of the Hindus that was manifest in practices such as child marriage and premature maternity, as well as in rampant masturbation and homosexuality—were the basis for Mayo’s systematic claims in defense of British colonial rule in India. The point of these facts was to demonstrate that all the political, economic, and social problems of India had a single cause, and that cause—not to be found in the nature of the colonial state or its policies—was the very essence of the beliefs and practices of Hinduism. Mayo’s major contention, therefore, was that the manifestations and the causes of the backwardness of India were primarily and fundamentally ‘‘social’’ and so unrelated to the ‘‘political’’ context of colonial rule. As such, moreover, the social backwardness of India disqualified Indians from any further political advancement toward future self-government. This familiar and reified construction of the relationship between the domains of the political and the social, or the state and society respectively, had a long precedent in colonial knowledge about India. This dominant colonial understanding of the political and the social, the state and

6 Introduction

society, succumbed suddenly and dramatically to the challenges thrown up by a global public event. The controversy over Mother India consisted precisely in a decisive semantic struggle over competing conceptions of the relationship between the state (the domain of ‘‘high politics’’) and society in colonial India. The controversy, which began with the publication of Mother India in the summer of 1927, came to an end in the closing months of 1929, when Mayo’s critics claimed public victory for a revised conception of the relationship between the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘social.’’ By October 1929, public pressure had prevailed on a reluctant colonial state to support the passage of an important piece of social reform legislation in India: the Child Marriage Restraint Act. The public campaign for this bill effectively identified the colonial state as an obstacle to the progressive social reforms in India, thereby reversing Mayo’s argument about the relationship between the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘social’’ in India. The crux of the controversy, indeed, was never just about the ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India. Mayo’s critics were not content simply to refute her ‘‘facts.’’ Instead, many of her leading critics appropriated Mayo’s ‘‘facts’’ only to reverse the basic interpretive grid of her book: the ‘‘social’’ backwardness of India, they now argued, was the result of the ‘‘political’’ condition of colonial rule. The colonial state had been revealed as a hurdle in the path toward social reform. This reversal of the conceptual schema of Mother India constituted a break with far-reaching implications for many of the founding assumptions of colonial Indian society.22 Mayo’s critics had chosen support for a law against child marriage in India as the most fitting nationalist riposte to Mother India. The practice of child marriage was a major plank in Mayo’s critique of the social backwardness of India.The public campaign for a law against child marriage in India posed an ironic challenge: the colonial state, far from being absolved of responsibility for the social backwardness of India, was shown up for its timid and obstructionist response to modernizing social reform.The mounting public pressure for social legislation against child marriage rested precisely on an alignment of the state—the domain of ‘‘high politics’’—with society in ways that eroded the legitimacy of the colonial state. It brought the very nature of the colonial state and its role as a force for progressive social change into question. Between the start of the Mayo controversy in 1927 and its end in 1929, a revised configuration of the relationship between the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘social’’ in India had gained wide public currency. Hence a media event— an intense struggle over rival appropriations of the ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India—was at the center of a broader global restructuring of colonial rule in India.

Introduction

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At the level of historiography, then, my book is about one of those rare and unstable moments that appear unexpectedly in public view as harbingers of broader social change. The rupture that is at the center of this book is precisely the public crisis in the hitherto dominant understanding of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India. The sweeping overview that I will go on to provide in this introduction is intended to supply a framework for gauging the significance of the detailed narrative that constitutes the remainder of this book. Those readers impatient with theoretical concepts—the ‘‘show-me’’ readers—will find the subsequent chapters suitably concrete: a pointedly archival reconstruction of a story that constantly exceeds the framework of familiar narratives. The logic of such a global story requires both empirical concreteness and philosophical reflection on the tools of historiography.

the rupture of the event The struggle over rival conceptions of the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘social’’ during the Mayo controversy had its roots in what various scholars have identified as the contours of a peculiar colonial sociology. This was manifest in India in the particular constitution of the relationship between state and society. In this, the colonial state differed from its metropolitan counterpart. To be sure, the colonial state in India by the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth had extended its reach deep into society. Yet the working of the colonial state was haunted by the persistent reminder of its ‘‘externality,’’ that is, the self-conscious view of the state as a graft from outside rather than a political instance of indigenous society.23 Even the attachment of indigenous elites to the colonial state was largely a reflection of the state’s obsessive concern with its security. The nature of the colonial state in India serves as a reminder of what Gyan Prakash calls a particular ‘‘colonial genealogy of society’’: an account of the political constitution of society under colonial conditions. This colonial genealogy starkly exposes the myth of the concept of society as a prepolitical category.24 The pattern of state-society relations in India registered the particular imperatives of the colonial situation. The ideal of a liberal state that related to all its subjects as individuals even in imperial-metropolitan societies was seldom more than a normative vision of state-society relationship, but its limits became especially evident under colonial conditions. The concept of bourgeois civil society, an association of sovereign individual subjects based on laws and contracts, had a

8

Introduction

precarious existence, at best, in colonial India.25 In colonial India, therefore, there emerged an alternative framework for the constitution of society. Its building block was not so much the sovereign individual subjects of civil society, but ‘‘communities’’ constituted by castes, tribes, races, and religious groups. These were defined by ‘‘notions of collective interest and affiliation’’ and invoked ‘‘collective bonds and rights based on imagined ties of kinship, religion, culture, past, and sentiments.’’ 26 These supposedly primordial communities of ascription, while building on a precolonial past, were largely newly homogenized modern constructs. They were the products of the complex negotiation between indigenous processes of class formation and the bureaucratic categorizations of the colonial state that together produced a politics of community-based claims. For example, various caste and denominational communities were formed and reformed as colonial administrative categorizations became the preferred avenues for class mobility as well as for the retention of status and class power in India.27 This vision of colonial India as a society constituted by supposedly timeless and particularistic communities was fueled, in turn, by the imperatives of a growing cultural nationalist politics in the second half of the nineteenth century. The belief in supposedly organic and ancient communities (each with a claim to cultural autonomy) provided the basis for nationalist demands for self-governance. The coalescence over several decades of this shared colonial sociology of India had underpinned Mayo’s argument about the separation of the political and the social as the foundation for her defense of British rule in India. The peculiar colonial sociology of communities in India had consequences in gender terms. There were, of course, many different types of communities as well as diverse modes for the constitution of collective communal identities in India. Yet at the level of ‘‘high politics’’ and public debates, both colonial initiatives and nationalist apprehensions typically coalesced around certain dominant modes for the constitution of community-based identities. The community, in this view, was constituted through the symbolic identification of women with the ‘‘inner’’ essence of the community. In other words, communities constructed seemingly nongendered public and collective identities by asserting the right to define ‘‘their’’ own women: a process that implicitly marked the default identity of the community as male.28 The predominant form of community in colonial India, of course, was the religious community. The gender norms that constituted religious communities were given institutional recognition by a dual colonial legal system. The colonial legal system consisted of uniform civil and criminal law, on the one hand, and, on the other, separate religious ‘‘personal laws’’ (laws govern-

Introduction

9

ing marriage, inheritance, caste, and religious institutions).29 The personal laws, while themselves the product of the colonial state’s attempts to codify and homogenize religious laws and customary practices, were delegated as the site of the autonomy of discrete religious communities and, as such, subject to internal self-regulation. Certainly the view of colonial Indian society as constituted by communities, each with an ‘‘inner’’ domain that was immune from the universally applicable laws of the state, was in practice considerably more complicated. Both the diverse modes of community formations in colonial India and the colonial state’s own drive toward legal rationalization, whose brunt was borne more by marginalized social groups than by the elite, made for a far more contradictory relationship in practice between the state and society. More accurately, as scholars have begun to demonstrate, the contexts in which the state responded to its subjects primarily through collective identifications and those in which it imposed uniform legal obligations were the product of political struggles whose outcomes were shaped by both class and gender.30 Still, the public mobilizations in defense of the collective identity of communities rested typically on the right to define and self-regulate ‘‘their’’ women. Women’s relationship to the state thus came to be mediated typically through the collective interests of communities. However, the Mayo controversy gave a surprising and unexpected twist to a metamorphosis already under way in India in the years following the First World War: the development of a new political nationalism. By challenging the colonial conception of the relationship between the state and society, the controversy had created an opening for an unprecedented development: the first universally applicable law regulating marriage for all communities in British India.31 The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, because it was framed as a penal measure, was able to bypass the various personal laws of separate religious communities to be universally applicable without consideration of religious differences. The act, as such, provided the potential for an alternative understanding of the relation between women and the state independently of the mediation of the collective identities of communities. Herein lay the rupture of the controversy over Mother India: the emergent reconfiguring of the hitherto dominant equation between women, community, and the state. Women themselves were pivotal to this shift. Whereas previous social reform legislations, including those dealing with reforms for women, were justified typically on the basis of the collective interests of the community, the campaign for the Child Marriage Restraint Bill constituted women as themselves a collective public

10 Introduction

identity and, as such, a rival to the community as the proper constituency for the law. The assertion of women and of women’s organizations played a key role in the public campaign that brought the ‘‘inner’’ domain of the community—conjugality—within the purview of the intervention of the state. The associational politics of women acquired public legitimacy precisely in this critical moment of the reimagination of the relationship between the state and society in India. The Dowager Begum of Bhopal captured the political implications of the novel construction of ‘‘women’’ as subjects in the campaign for the bill. In a speech before the largest gathering of women in India in 1928, she commended the support from women’s organizations for a uniform law against child marriage in these politically evocative terms: The mere fact of such a gathering of educated and broad minded ladies representing all the different creeds is an event unique even among the assemblies of the stronger sex. . . . It is indeed most gratifying to see that a noble cause has wiped out differences which are the natural outcome of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the two chief causes of friction and disunion, now unhappily rampant among our brothers in India. Even if this conference were to fail in the fulfillment of its objects, the comradeship so much in evidence today will by itself be an achievement, the value of which cannot be easily estimated.32

The celebration of an inclusive and broad-based identity of women was certainly premature and problematic, undermined by numerous material and political considerations. Nevertheless, the very act of imagining a collective identity for women on the basis of a shared cause that potentially bridged sectional and communal differences was an achievement worthy of note. The collective political identity of women was mobilized self-consciously during the campaign for the child marriage bill as both above, and separate from, the allegiances of other collectively constituted identities. The contribution of women gave the controversy over Mother India a political significance that was twofold. Women offered a precarious universality constituted through a shared political agenda (crosscutting discrete communities) as the basis for a critical reimagination of the national polity.33 In addition—and this point is widely neglected—the alignment of the social with the political, prizing women apart from the tight embrace of communities, legitimated a new language of individual rights (beyond simply the collective rights of communities). This nationalist refashioning briefly—but importantly—provided public legitimacy (even if more rhetorical than substantive) for an alternative construction of women: that is, as paradigmatic citizen-subjects of a nation-state-in-the-making.

Introduction

11

However, our story does not end here. The controversy over Mother India, despite Mayo’s attempt to turn the clock back on postwar political reforms, was followed by a major political overhaul of metropolitan-colonial ties in India. The proposals for a reform constitution for India in the 1930s acknowledged, in the wake of the Mayo controversy, women as a new political constituency. Hence the various proposals accorded a place for women in any future constitutional framework for India. However, this new political recognition also brought to a head conflicting views on the nature of the collectivity constituted by women and its relation to other collective identities in India.The ensuing debate about the terms for expanding women’s franchise and political representation pitted individual rights for women versus the collective rights of differently constituted communities: issues that rested on competing conceptions of the nature of the revised national polity in India. Women’s political agency under these conditions was recruited for reconstituting a collective identity that was premised once again on a renewed separation between the social and the political: an equilibrium with negative consequences for the citizenship of both women and of other disadvantaged groups. The consolidation of a new political orthodoxy in the aftermath of the Mayo controversy nipped in the bud the political possibilities created by the rhetorical mobilization of women as paradigmatic citizen-subjects. The rupture of the controversy was thus retrospectively neutralized in its ambiguous aftermath. Hence an ever-widening circle of ripple effects: appropriations, in effect, of the original rupture of the controversy over Mother India into the service of diverse and competing agendas. The fraught outcome of the construction of women’s collective agency was neither ‘‘natural’’ nor inevitable; it issued from the contingent outcome of the constitutional wrangling for a new political settlement in India. The conditions for the grouping of ‘‘women’’ as newly conceived political subjects, to paraphrase Denise Riley from a different context, were shaped by the ways in which women were articulated in advance of their spectacular public emergence.34 To disentangle women from the symbolic ‘‘inside’’ of collective community identities, Indian feminists addressed, and so constituted, women as an identity apart from that of discrete communities. Yet the abstraction of women from their implication in other social identities also issued in a more paradoxical result: the reconsolidation by default of an apparently gender-neutral collective identity. The paradox of Indian feminism, as this book demonstrates, did not consist in the contradictory denial and assertion of sexual difference—in the political claims of women’s equality with, and difference from, men—that Joan Scott has identified

12 Introduction

for a French feminism arising out of the universalistic rhetoric of republicanism.35 Rather, it consisted in another set of contradictory assumptions shaped by the peculiar constitution of colonial society: the simultaneous disavowal and constitution of communities in the political claims made for and by women. These contradictions came to the fore in the ambiguous aftermath of the Mayo controversy. Ultimately, then, the Mayo controversy is precisely ‘‘about’’ a moment of ideological discontinuity when for a short period the Indian woman emerged as the model for the new Indian citizen. This particular outcome of the construction of women’s collective agency was possible precisely at a moment when the contours of the future nation-state formation were still being visibly and contingently put together, and fought over, in late colonial India. The far-reaching implications of the controversy were produced precisely in a brief moment of flux: a period when the cracks in the post–First World War British empire had not yet congealed into the new political settlement of the years just before the Second World War.

a new vocabulary of rights I am aware that scholars writing from various perspectives have demonstrated the limitations of a liberal conception of individual rights and citizenship. Feminist scholars, for example, have long demonstrated the implicitly male-centered construction that has underpinned the supposedly universal subject of political rights in liberal democracies.36 Even when women acquire formal political rights in the public domain, therefore, their political equality continues to be undermined by women’s subordination in the private sphere. Furthermore, as others have argued, the universal political subject of liberal thought was marked by specific cultural attributes that issued in ‘‘liberal strategies of exclusion.’’ 37 Hence the withholding of political rights under colonialism was not an aberration of, but intrinsic to, the universalistic doctrines of liberalism. Against such formidable critiques of the liberal discourse of rights, my attempt to provide an alternative lineage for the language of rights and citizenship in India in the collective political agency of women might seem foolhardy. Postcolonial critiques have certainly demonstrated the limits of the liberal conception of rights in the colonies; they have also pointed to the alternative foundations of society and of political subjectivity under colonial conditions.38 These critiques, however, have not always been equally attentive to the different trajectories for the language of rights in the collective struggles of women and of

Introduction

13

other marginalized social groups. The implications of their appropriation of the role of the state have not received the attention they deserve.39 Feminist critiques, by the same token, manifest a comparable blind spot. They have made possible the insight that ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women,’’ no less than masculinity and femininity, are relational categories: that is, they are historically and discursively constructed not just in relation to each other but also in relation to a variety of other categories, including dominant formulations of the political and social spheres, which are themselves subject to change.40 Yet this insight has not been extended to the divergent conditions for, and implications of, the construction of a collectivity ‘‘women’’ in differently constituted societies. These overlapping lacunae of postcolonial and feminist critiques present an opening to explore anew an alternative lineage for the liberal conception of individual rights and of citizenship in colonial India: one that is traced through the political outcome of the collective agency of women qua women. The liberal conception of civil rights, whose origins have been traced to the challenges in Europe to the arbitrary power of an absolutist state, had a different trajectory in its colonial reincarnation in India. The claims for protection and rights, as Tanika Sarkar has argued, had an alternative history in the intimate domains of elite and middle-class women’s lives in India. Here the claims emerged as a challenge to the arbitrary power of the community that identified women as the inner essence of its identity and thus subject to the internal self-regulation of the community. What looks like ‘‘dead-letter liberalism’’ in the public and political realm of colonial India, therefore, had hidden histories and possibilities in the lives of middle-class women. The language of social reform in nineteenth-century India, despite its many limitations, provided a means for mitigating the arbitrary mastery claimed by men, who had been denied rights in the public sphere, over women in the private sphere. This was the context in which new political values—a ‘‘fledgling notion of something like rights’’—emerged in women’s private lives long before they came to be articulated in the public and political realms.41 In other words, the public debates about the reform of the intimate domain of women’s lives in the nineteenth century had laid the foundations for an agonistic or truly adversarial liberalism: a language of rights that developed both alongside and against classical European liberalism.42 This alternative language of rights entered the public realm when the social and the political were brought into alignment in the controversy over Mother India. The associational politics of women, articulated as an agonistic liberalism, did crucial ideological work in this moment. It offered the new political subjec-

14 Introduction

tivity of women that potentially bridged the collective identities of discrete communities as the model for the individual citizen of a reformulated national polity. If the civic republican notion of the virtuous male citizen had served to underwrite the ‘‘individual’’ of liberal democracy in modern Western political culture, it was, in fact, the political identity of ‘‘women’’ as an alternative to the collective constitution of the community that provided the basis for the individual citizen at a crucially transitional moment in late colonial India.43 This moment of transition—before the revised contours of a new political settlement had been established—created the rhetorical openings for the novel political vocabulary of the agonistic liberal universalism of women’s citizenship. To be sure, once the semantic crisis of the Mayo controversy had been stabilized, the conditions quickly changed. The aftermath of the controversy saw the political agency of women recruited for the consolidation of a normative Indian citizen that was both defined as implicitly male and marked as having, by default, dominant community affiliations (upper-caste and Hindu). This outcome is familiar, but the reasons for it are not. Because the rupture of the Mayo controversy has been so poorly understood, the contradictory mediation of women’s collective political agency has remained obscured. There are, of course, numerous developmental accounts of women’s associational politics in late colonial India. The social limitations of this movement of educated and privileged women are well known. However, these accounts too often assume a simple and unmediated relationship between the presumed material interests of the movement’s chief protagonists and the politics of women’s collective agency. The reading of ideology from material interests in simple and unmediated ways has tended to downplay the outcome of political processes and of the choices made. Furthermore, the emergence of organized women as a force in the public realm was itself not a ‘‘natural’’ development waiting to be realized in the fullness of time. The formation of the middle class in India relied precisely on constructing middle-class women as separate from lower social castes and classes. How, then, could the political imagination of a collectivity ‘‘women’’ become possible in colonial India? The relation between the contingent public emergence of a universalizing politics of women and the contingent political permutations of the time deserves more attention. The supposedly familiar episode of the Mayo controversy thus reveals a more unexpected and unfamiliar dimension: the contribution of women’s collective political agency, contradictory in its effects, to a new national imagining of the individual Indian citizen.

Introduction

15

Much of the scholarship on women’s organizations in the early twentieth century in India, including some feminist scholarship, has taken its cue from the subsequent marginalization of women’s associational politics as a force in the ‘‘high politics’’ of late colonial India.The result, ironically enough, has been overly hasty assessments of the public contribution of the Indian women’s movement: ‘‘Unlike the women’s movement in nineteenth-and-twentieth-century Europe or America, the battle for the new idea of womanhood in the era of nationalism was waged in the home.’’ 44 Easy dismissals of the collective politics of women in the public realm, however, obscure an important point: the contradictory and discontinuous role of women’s collective agency in the rugged process of fashioning the citizen-subject of the future nation-state in India. My attempt to trace an alternative genealogy of the vocabulary of rights and citizenship in India bears finally on the historiographical challenge of writing so-called Third World histories in the wake of European imperialism. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has most urgently addressed the legacy of imperialism for the project of Third World histories. He argues that the universal categories of modern European thought—including those of individual rights and citizenship—are both ‘‘indispensable’’ and also ultimately ‘‘inadequate’’ for the histories of the Third World.45 He thus recommends a project of ‘‘provincializing Europe’’: that is, of confronting the parochial or provincial foundations of the supposedly general or universal categories of modern European political culture. This entails a dual strategy of critique that is directed, on the one hand, against historicist accounts that assimilate non-European histories in a developmental narrative whose teleology is set by the history of Europe, and, on the other, against nativist accounts that invoke the cultural authenticity of non-European traditions to claim autonomous paths of development for non-European histories. Clearly the pluralizing gesture of merely asserting multiple and alternative modernities is ultimately inadequate; it elides too easily the unequal and asymmetrical effects produced by the intertwined and interconnected history of the modern world. The strategy of provincializing Europe consists instead of foregrounding the ‘‘translational process’’ through which the supposedly generic concepts and practices of European modernity were both adopted and adapted in the colonial context. For Chakrabarty this has meant a salutary attention to the ‘‘fragmentary histories’’ of modernity in colonial India. Yet an emphasis on the small and fragmentary histories of modernity alone too readily concedes an exclusive and monolithic European provenance to the concept of universal rights and citizenship.46 I offer a different route for addressing the simultaneous indis-

16 Introduction

pensability and inadequacy of European concepts through an insistently global and intersecting history. The insights afforded by a global account of intersecting histories, no less than ‘‘fragmentary histories,’’ have contributed to dethroning Europe as the implicit subject of Third World histories. Studied together, the combined histories of the ‘‘West-and-the-Rest’’ have already begun to demonstrate that several key aspects of modern European political culture—including the concept of universal rights—were forged either in the crucible of Europe’s relation with other parts of the world or outside Europe and only then retroactively internalized as the essence of a sui generis European/Western modernity and the basis for its difference from a supposedly premodern non-West.47 They have also complicated the picture further by highlighting an internally contradictory history of modernity within Europe itself. I take these insights as the basis for a historiographical intervention whose starting point is not the purity of abstract concepts but the messiness of historical practices: that is, the actual processes of ‘‘translation’’ in particular sociohistorical spaces. The European provenance of the liberal citizensubject is thus only one part of its history in India.48 The other part of this history is its alternative genealogy in the mobilization of ‘‘women’’ as a collective political identity in late colonial India. The implication of such a combined history suggests that the language of citizenship-based individual rights in modern Europe, no less than its unfolding in India, was contextually shaped and hence equally partial and parochial in both places. By the same token, moreover, the entangled but differently inflected history in both places also suggests the potential universality of the rights of individuals. This is the double move that is enabled by a global narrative of intersecting histories: both the demonstration of generic European concepts as partial or parochial, and their simultaneous remaking as potentially universal.

the framework of the imperial social formation My argument about the surprising political significance of the Mayo controversy ultimately rests on the theoretical and methodological contribution afforded by a dense global narrative of intersecting histories. My exploration of the differing scales and interlocking networks of the debates over Mother India—as the controversy percolated through and across several sites in the United States, Britain, and India—is thus crucial to understanding the meaning of this event. The close narrative of the controversy provides a revised spatial unit—an expanded space

Introduction

17

defined by the flow of historical forces above, below, and between nations and states—as well as a thickened density of historical analysis based on a recognition of the inherently messy and contingent pattern of historical developments. Herein lies the ambition of my particular approach to the writing of global history: a simultaneous widening and deepening of a multiply scaled mode of analysis. As the controversy snowballed, spilling over from one local cluster of intellectuals to another, the event jumped scales with unpredictable and unforeseen consequences. I use the heuristic of the imperial social formation to analyze the different scales of this event. My choice requires some elaboration. I use it, building on my earlier introduction of the term in Colonial Masculinity: The ‘‘Manly Englishman’’ and the ‘‘Effeminate Bengali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995), to refer most broadly to the imperial ordering of modern society.49 The term ‘‘social formation’’ has been used broadly to refer to the character of particular societies (feudal, capitalist, and so on) as well as to specify individual societies (British, American, Indian, and so on).50 To these usages I bring a transformative dimension. The imperial social formation, as a preferred term for describing the modern society that we have inherited around the world, is meant to reframe the traditional concept by drawing attention to the following points: (1) the historical role of imperialism in assembling different societies into a system of interdependencies and interconnections; and (2) the uneven effects produced by the simultaneous connections and distinctive constitution of societies in a globally articulated imperial system. My choice of terms is thus meant to emphasize the systemic operation of imperialism without reducing its effects to the static product of a central organizing element of society or the invariant manifestation of a fixed totality.51 Furthermore, my use of the term ‘‘imperial social formation’’ is also meant to acknowledge the irreducible and generative role of culture as a dynamic social process. I take for granted that we have absorbed salutary lessons from the so-called cultural turn in contemporary historiography, which attributes to ‘‘discourse’’ an active role in the production of meaning and in the articulation and mediation of social reality.52 The concept is designed, given these lessons learned, to suggest the interaction of the cultural, political, and economic elements within a social formation. Nevertheless, the contextual weight of the concept, by refusing to grant absolute autonomy to any one of the realms, emphasizes their combined articulation in an imperial ‘‘structure.’’ 53 As such, therefore, it also registers what is often neglected in certain current assertions of the omnipotence of discursive constructions: the limits, that is, that the choices of historical subjects

18 Introduction

impose on the constructive power of discourse. For when subjects act in relation to the competing interests generated within society, their actions presuppose a choice between different sets of priorities. The conditions of possibility for the choice of one set of priorities over others themselves emerge out of historical struggles. This is the ‘‘double conditioning’’ at the discursive and material level that Robert Wess has in mind when he distinguishes the ‘‘rhetorical idealism’’ that he finds in much contemporary cultural theory from his elaboration, via Kenneth Burke, of a ‘‘rhetorical realism.’’ Rhetorical realism, in his words, ‘‘concedes that we can’t get outside the constructions of discourse, but it insists that neither can we construct our way outside the materiality of living.’’ 54 An emphasis, following Wess, on discourses as social phenomena that transform and change in historical practices brings renewed attention to the possibilities of rhetorical invention and of social change. The imperial social formation is thus meant to register this specifically social dimension of discourses. Finally, I also use the term ‘‘imperial social formation’’ to foreground particular historical situations and the specificities of historical conjunctures within a globally articulated imperial structure. The term thus combines a focus on the particularity and contingency of specific historical events with a concept of structures.55 The emphasis on the contingency of an event, apart from drawing attention to the fact that structures are constituted and reproduced through concrete practices, deliberately works against the illusion of autonomy and teleology often produced by a nation-centered historiography. It is misleading at best to collapse the ruptures produced in particular historical moments merely within a history of the imagined longue durée of the nation. The event-centered model of the imperial social formation thus works to restore the unpredictability of the twists and turns that make up the process of historical change.56 The recognition of unexpected moments of rupture in this model draws attention to what Duncan J. Watts calls a nonlinear view of historical causality: that is, an understanding of causality that ‘‘renders the relationship between initial cause and ultimate effect deeply ambiguous.’’ 57 The recognition that relatively innocuous triggers may sometimes engender big social transformations serves to bring into focus the unexpected making and remaking of the imperial social formation: both its enduring stability and its unpredictable vulnerability. The multifaceted context of an imperial social formation, as I demonstrate in this book, foregrounds the unforeseen effects of the extraordinary, and yet richly illustrative, political event of the controversy over Mother India. The unfolding of the controversy over Mother India touches precisely on such

Introduction

19

questions as the dialectic between historical continuity and change. This has emerged as an especially vexed question in contemporary analyses of the impact and legacy of colonial knowledge and power. My approach signals an attempt beyond the determinisms of various kinds—whether material or discursive—to draw attention to the varied nature and processes of social change.The contingencies both large and small that engender historical events provide a useful model for thinking about those unexpected and unpredictable moments that bring the ongoing processes of rhetorical readjustment and realignment in society to a head in the public realm. As I hope to show in the controversy over Mother India, the intersection of multilayered and diffused historical forces, with outcomes seldom predictable in advance, created the conditions for the critical agencies that produced a rupture in the shared colonial and nationalist understanding of the relationship between the state and society in India.58 This is the sense in which the debates surrounding Mother India represent the crossing of a critical threshold: the tipping point for a global realignment of historical forces that created the conditions for the crisis in the dominant colonial sociology of India. The chapters in the book are organized thematically. Together, they foreground the controversy over Mother India as a transformative ‘‘historical event’’: that is, in the sense that William H. Sewell Jr. defines any historical occurrence marked by ‘‘dislocations and transformative rearticulations of structures.’’ 59 The constellation of changes, which began in the summer of 1927 with the impassioned debates over competing conceptions of the relationship between the political and the social in India and culminated with the authoritative sanction for a revised conception of the state and society in the passage of a uniform law against child marriage in 1929, constituted a transitional moment in the remaking of the interwar British Empire. Furthermore, as Sewell suggests, a historical event is more than just a culmination of gradual and cumulative social changes; it ‘‘transforms social relations and practices in ways that could not be fully predicted from the gradual changes that may have made them possible.’’ 60 To be sure, the terms of the controversy over Mother India built on a variety of post–First World War changes. By bringing these changes to a dramatic crisis, however, it steered them in unforeseen directions. A network of multiple and overlapping social forces mediated the context of Mayo’s initial intervention; their discrepant agendas, however, produced the unpredictable trajectory of the event. Starting as a localized break in the understanding of the social ‘‘backwardness’’ of India, it escalated enormously, provoking a cascading series of effects that presaged an unforeseen political transformation.

20 Introduction

the setting The chronological scope of my book covers the period starting with the Government of India Act of 1919 and leading up to the Government of India Act of 1935. The former, coming after the immediate economic dislocations and political pressures of the First World War, put into effect the first official declaration of the goal of British colonial policy in India. The declaration of 1917 had identified British policy in India with the ‘‘progressive realization of responsible government.’’ While some devolution of power was already under way long before this official declaration, the announcement of 1917 as a prelude to the constitutional changes of 1919 provided for a considerably expanded arena for Indian political activity in relation to the state. The biggest change was in the structure of provincial administrations, where a curious principle of ‘‘dyarchy’’ was introduced. This transferred certain less sensitive functions of the provincial governments, such as education, health, and local self-government, to Indian ministers responsible to the legislature, while leaving other more vital subjects as ‘‘reserved’’ to be directly under the governor and his executive council. The political changes of 1919 opened a new era for thinking about the relationship of the social and the political spheres in colonial India. My book ends with the Government of India Act of 1935, which came in the aftermath of the impact of the worldwide Great Depression and of the nationalist revival in India of 1928–29. The essential features of the act included limited Indian responsibility at the center; greater autonomy in the provinces with the removal of ‘‘dyarchy’’; an expanded franchise still based on property qualifications; and a provision for an All-India Federation that included British India and the areas left to be ruled by indigenous rulers (called ‘‘princes’’ under the British). These changes were hedged with numerous ‘‘safeguards’’ that ensured all essential tools of sovereignty remained exclusively in British hands: a proposed counterbalancing of any democratic tendencies through a federation in which a powerful nominated contingent of princes would enjoy considerable clout; the diversion of Indian political demands to the provincial arena that left the all-India arena as a British preserve; and a divide-and-rule strategy that pitted one community against another in India to put the brakes on a rapid advancement toward self-government. Even though the act itself was designed to be ‘‘both concessionary and pre-emptive in nature,’’ it was a symptom of the radical transformation by the end of the decade of the political and economic foundations of the British Raj (rule) in India.61

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21

The chronology of my study dovetails with the British constitutional initiatives that dictated Mayo’s various interventions in the controversy; but my point is emphatically not to endorse a view that reduces, too easily, all Indian politics to a mere reaction to imperial initiatives.62 There are, of course, alternative political landmarks to frame the narrative of the Mayo controversy. Even as the content and pace of political reforms for India became a heated subject of debate in Mayo’s pro-imperialist circles, the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885), the official representative of the nationalist movement in India, was preparing for a major shift in its official demand: from Dominion status for India within the British Empire to complete independence. The resolution for complete independence was first entertained in the annual conference of the Congress in Madras in December 1927—at the height of the Mayo controversy. After much initial hesitation, the resolution was finally incorporated into the official platform of the Congress in Lahore in 1929, coincidentally on the heels of the passage of the first uniform law on marriage in India, which also brought a certain closure to the Mayo controversy. Yet, as the historian Sumit Sarkar reminds us, history ‘‘was not made by elite politicians alone, whether British or Indian.’’ 63 The moment of the controversy over Mother India was a critical phase in the development of a variety of social movements in colonial India not easily subsumed within the bilateral conflict between the Congress and the imperial state: for the political struggles of women, peasants, workers, and ‘‘tribals,’’ as well as for anti-Brahmin and radical anticaste movements. Equally significant were the changes in the politics of religious sectarianism or ‘‘communalism’’ (a term whose negative meaning as the disunifying ‘‘other’’ of political nationalism was emerging precisely during this period); these took an especially virulent form as new Hindu social movements and organizations were established, provoking their counterparts in similar Muslim responses.64 The political equation between British India and princely India (the myriad of princely states under ‘‘native’’ rulers) also underwent important changes in the march up to the constitutional reform of the 1930s. All these developments bore on the semantic struggle over the redrawing of boundaries of the political and the social during the Mayo controversy and its aftermath. My study, while framed by the high drama of constitutional reforms in colonial India, is informed by the combined historiographical contributions of social history and cultural history to what has loosely been called the ‘‘political turn’’ in contemporary historiography.65 My focus is thus on making visible the contingent outcome of political choices made against the backdrop of the play of multiple social forces. This has meant a reliance on some familiar archives and

22 Introduction

a juxtaposition of them alongside others less familiar. I attempt thus to reframe certain well-known constellations of events and explanations by demonstrating the sheer contingency of their seemingly inevitable outcomes. The substantive and methodological contribution of my argument depends on a narration of the controversy over Mother India by means of a detailed engagement with its zigs and zags, its convoluted twists and turns, in order to illuminate the pressurized context for the choices available in the controversy and its aftermath. The rather ironic legacy of the controversy over Mother India, as my book demonstrates, lay in the remarkably heavy contribution of Indian feminism to the ‘‘normalization’’ of the project of a mainstream Indian nationalism: an elaboration of the political as a domain to be inhabited by a normative citizen-subject.66 My title ultimately refers to this unintended outcome: the multilayered and muchhaunted making of a transitional political event provoked by the exigencies and opportunities surrounding Katherine Mayo’s book, which was itself remade in ways unforeseen either by her or by her critics.

1

A Transitional Moment The Dynamics of an Interwar Imperial Social Formation

The preface of a 1970 British reprint of Katherine Mayo’s famous book Mother India, originally published in 1927, begins by describing the book as a ‘‘grimly factual and harrowing picture of India.’’ ‘‘For this,’’ as the preface concludes, ‘‘is India as it truly was—and as parts of it still are—in all its helplessness, hopelessness and horror.’’ 1 It would seem easy enough, in the wake of the vast body of scholarship that has followed on Edward Said’s pathbreaking book Orientalism (1978), to account for the staying power of Mother India simply in terms of a continuous history of colonial knowledge and power: a history that produced, and has since apparently sustained, the ‘‘horrors’’ of India as timeless ‘‘facts.’’ 2 I hope to undertake in this book a more challenging, but also more productive, task. Precisely in the face of the supposedly seamless logic of such ‘‘facts,’’ I aim to recall that, in the context of the historical conjuncture of the 1920s, the debate over Mother India represented a moment of ideological discontinuity. It marked a sharp and significant break: an episode in, and a catalyst of, the remaking of an empire in the early twentieth century. The ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India, as conveyed in the overheated prose of a U.S. author and journalist, were widely debated and appropriated within competing imperial and nationalist narratives.3 However, the rehashing of this imperialnationalist debate alone does not capture the far-reaching dynamics of the controversy.The ideological mobilization of the book by imperialists and nationalists was necessarily selective, emphasizing only certain elements of its operation in multiple social processes (from U.S. immigration policies to anti-Brahmin political mobilization in India) that included different discursive fields (from law to racial theory). The surface content of the controversy, therefore, does not exhaust the full range of its effects. The recognition of this discrepancy—the gap, that is, between the book’s imperialist and nationalist mobilization, on the one hand, and the multiple fields of its operation, on the other—helps to open up the controversy to an analysis of its internal tensions and contradictions.4 The network of public spheres in which the struggle over Mother India oc-

24 A Transitional Moment

curred was from the outset global: a configuration that demands far more in the way of historical understanding than the supposedly seamless logic of imperialism or nationalism. The contours of the controversy, with diverging local appropriations and generic realignments on three separate continents, highlight its significance as a barometer of global instability. The worldwide social processes and the manifold discursive fields of the first half of the twentieth century produced the ideological vulnerability of Mayo’s initial intervention to reappropriations whose sheer multiplicity illustrates the working of a global dynamics: the restructuring of the interwar imperial social formation.The meaning of Mayo’s intervention did not come from the familiar imperialist-nationalist conflict. Rather, and more importantly, its meaning came from the global dynamics of the interwar period that produced a transitional political event.

an expanded framework Scholarly as well as popular interest in Mayo’s Mother India is sustained in large part by the sheer passion that the book once generated and, perhaps, still continues to generate by its rival uses in imperialist and nationalist discourses. The initial scholarly engagements with the book, which often felt compelled to take sides on the reliability of Mayo’s account, reached their peak in the 1970s with the publication of Manoranjan Jha’s pioneering work on the political affiliations of Mayo’s project. Jha demonstrated what many of Mayo’s contemporaries had long suspected: the extent of Mayo’s involvement with British officials responsible for propaganda on behalf of colonial rule in India.5 Yet questions about the nature of Mayo’s project were not put to rest so easily. An influential second-wave feminist scholarship in the United States made its own attempt in the 1970s to rehabilitate Mayo and Mother India. Here Mayo was resurrected as a feminist precursor concerned with women’s issues internationally. The colonial amnesia of this move, which tried briefly to provide Mayo with progressive feminist credentials, was itself quickly subject to withering critiques.6 These critiques coincided with a post-Orientalism scholarship that was alert to the continuing legacy of colonial discourse in First World feminist scholarship. As a result, the imperialist and racist underpinnings of Mayo’s argument about India and Indian women are now much harder to escape.7 This interest in Mother India has helped to expose Mayo’s project, but it has not helped to explain the full ramifications of the controversy that erupted with such intensity l’entre deux guerres. The popular and scholarly engagements with Mother

A Transitional Moment

25

India have tended to present the opposition between imperialism and nationalism as seamless and unchanging. This underestimates the turbulence of the decade that produced the Mayo controversy. Several critics also point to the continued popularity of Mother India, especially in the United States, where fascination with Mayo’s ‘‘facts’’ about India has enjoyed a long history, as evidence for the lasting hold of colonial knowledge and power. However, this emphasis on continuity comes at the cost of eliding crucial transformations of imperialism in the twentieth century. Surely the abiding popularity of Mayo’s Mother India in the United States is no coincidence. In the 1950s, as Harold Isaacs observes, Mother India was second only to the works of Rudyard Kipling in the United States as the most popular source of information about India. India thus ranked at the very bottom in a survey of American perceptions of foreign countries conducted in the 1950s.8 Other scholars have offered anecdotal evidence to suggest that up until the 1970s Mother India was being recommended to Peace Corps volunteers as a source for information about India. During the Cold War, Mayo’s Mother India served as an important backdrop for the formation of U.S. foreign policy toward India.9 The appropriation of Mayo’s pro-British argument within a distinctly U.S. context has served the ideological purpose of suturing over the twentieth-century shifts in the global dynamics of imperialism of which Mother India itself was an earlier manifestation. Hence accounts of Mother India as evidence of the continued popularity of colonial knowledge and power disguise the extent of the ideological work necessary before Mayo’s defense of British colonial rule in Mother India is made to serve a revised imperial agenda of the United States. The focus on the interwar context of the controversy over Mother India draws attention precisely to the gaps and asymmetries in the reconsolidation of twentieth-century imperialism. The implications of the particular post–First World War context of the controversy over Mother India have been buried differently in its subsequent nationalist renderings.The ghost of Mayo’s Mother India has arguably never entirely been laid to rest in the national imagination in India. The hugely popular nationalist film with the same name from the 1950s reveals the dominant contours of the subsequent nationalist retelling of Mayo’s contentious perspective on India and on Indian women. Although Mehboob Khan’s film Mother India (1957) itself makes no direct reference to Mayo’s book, the film’s reappropriation of the book’s title and its use of female sexuality in the film’s central character of a strong and chaste Indian woman resonates, as Rosie Thomas suggests, as a nationalist rebuttal of its infamous namesake.10 There is a certain sense in reading the film’s iconic invocation of the figure of the Indian woman qua Indian nation as a nationalist retrieval

26 A Transitional Moment

not only of Mayo’s Mother India but also of the contours of the controversy over Mother India. This particular nationalist disposition of Mother India, via a return to the figure of the Indian woman as the metaphor of the nation, reinscribes a dominant nationalist consensus by papering over its own more discontinuous history: the alternative construction of women in the transition from a cultural to a political nationalism of the citizen-subject and the nation-state. These are the particularities that become visible in an expanded framework of the controversy over Mother India as a threshold event in the global restructuring of the interwar British Empire. Two shifts of scale are needed to bring this more unsettling and disruptive dimension of the Mayo controversy into focus. At the level of macropolitics, the horizon needs to be expanded to foreground the constitutive operation of empire as a global and international system. At the micropolitical level, the recognition of discourses as social phenomena that transform and change within social practices draws attention to the process of rhetorical invention: the construction of new meanings and categories whereby one discursive frame is substituted by another.11 While discursive patterns manifest considerable inertia, they are not impervious to creative turns and breaks. My chosen lens of the imperial social formation, therefore, is meant to provide a multiply scaled context for the Mayo controversy beyond the overt terms of its ideological constitution in imperialist and nationalist discourse. I do not deny a generative role to the discursive articulation of the controversy. My point is to acknowledge the constitutive effects of the competing and contradictory force fields in which the controversy simultaneously operated, and with which it was itself coextensive, to disclose its more unruly history in the interwar period. The expanded horizons of the imperial social formation also discloses another dimension of this profoundly malleable ideological event: its discontinuity as a transitional moment in the interwar period. Many different possibilities emerged, including some that were subsequently foreclosed, amid the historical contingencies that shaped the Mother India controversy. The serendipitous convergence of empire-wide social forces in the controversy over Mother India gives it meaning as a profoundly destabilizing political event.

imperial politics on the world stage The horizons of the imperial social formation bring to bear the impact of systemic dynamics—the remaking of the postbellum British Empire—on the con-

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tours of the Mayo controversy. The interwar period, which produced Mayo’s contribution, was a moment of far-reaching historical changes both in the structure of the British Empire and in the sphere of imperial politics. The so-called Second British Empire (the empire after the loss of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies) emerged transformed after the First World War.12 Certainly this empire was never a single entity; its component parts were governed differently, and their formal relationship to Britain varied enormously. While the colonies of settlement had considerable local autonomy and evolved gradually into self-governing colonies, the dependent empire and India were ruled by means of a heavy hand from Britain with a mixture of coercion and collaboration. Outside the formal empire, moreover, there were vast areas of the world from Latin America to China that formed part of Britain’s so-called informal empire. The conglomerate of vastly differing regions that made up Britain’s formal empire, what was counted as the true empire, had been buffeted since the nineteenth century by two opposing trends. The heyday of Britain’s era of free trade had set in motion devolutionary tendencies, which were most pronounced in the self-governing colonies. At the same time, the hopes for greater imperial cohesion and unity, as in the attempts to promote a system of imperial trade preferences and create an imperial federation, were periodically articulated from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the eve of the First World War, the dreams of binding the different components of the empire closer to Britain through some formal constitutional arrangement, especially with the self-governing colonies, were finally evaporating. Hitherto the continuing dependence of Britain’s self-governing colonies on Britain for the exercise of foreign policy had served as a reassuring reminder that the empire was in no danger of disintegration through devolution. The impact of the First World War on the process of political devolution, however, stretched to its limits the disparate and loosely structured entity that constituted the Second British Empire. In the aftermath of the First World War, the once-familiar structures of the Second British Empire were gradually dismantled to make way for what some scholars have referred to as a ‘‘Third British Empire.’’ 13 The territorial reach of the British Empire had been extended after the war with the addition of territories to be administered by the British as mandates of the League of Nations. More importantly, however, Britain’s reliance on its empire for forces and resources to subsidize its war effort, together with the Allied powers’ acceptance of president Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war aims, brought the question of constitutional devolution within the empire to a head. By the end of the war, not only

28

A Transitional Moment

had the process of constitutional devolution proceeded much further in the selfgoverning colonies of the empire, but its application was accepted at least as an ideal—however restrictive its interpretation, and however long it was deferred— even for some of the dependent territories of the empire. The postwar years saw important changes in the structure of the empire: the self-governing colonies, or the ‘‘white Dominions,’’ as they have been called, acquired a new formal constitutional status as virtually ‘‘independent’’ units within the empire; the union with Ireland was dissolved and an Irish Dominion set up in southern Ireland; the protectorate of Egypt, although Britain retained a strong controlling position, was declared ‘‘independent’’; Arab territories in the Middle East were added to the empire; important decisions were made about the political future of the African colonies in West, East, and Central Africa; and the administrative framework of British rule in India was reorganized.14 The result, for all the diffuseness and multiplicity of the arrangements that existed in the different component parts of the empire, was an empire-wide restructuring of imperial relations. For a variety of reasons, the status of British rule in India was at the hub of the forces unleashed by the postwar restructuring of the British Empire. British India came to occupy a uniquely anomalous status within the empire. Its roots went back to wartime arrangements. The Imperial War Conference of 1917 and the Imperial War Cabinet, convened by British prime minister David Lloyd George in recognition of the importance of the empire’s contribution to the British war effort, included representatives from the Dominions and, surprisingly, also from India. India, alongside the Dominions that now claimed an ‘‘adequate voice in foreign policy,’’ was also represented separately in the peace conferences after the war. When India, along with the Dominions, was even granted membership in the newly established League of Nations, its status as a non-self-governing member of the league emerged as a conspicuous contradiction. The implications of constitutional devolution in India, indeed, raised important questions about the unresolved tensions in the postwar restructuring of the British Empire. The turning point for the status of British rule in India had come at a time when British officials were less sanguine that the initial expression of wartime loyalty in India was adequate to counter the negative effects of the continuing agitations for self-rule. The Irish example had inspired Home Rule Leagues in various parts of India, and the two major political parties, the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League, had come together in the Lucknow Pact of 1916 for a joint Hindu-Muslim front against colonial rule. On August 20, 1917, E. S. Montagu, the new Liberal secretary of state for India, responded with

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a declaration in the House of Commons favoring ‘‘the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.’’ 15 Whereas the nationalist movement in India had in the past won modest constitutional concessions from Britain, this was the first official declaration of the direction of British policy toward India. It was translated into the political reforms of the Government of India Act of 1919. Despite the initial alarm of diehard British Conservatives and the raised expectations of Indian nationalists, the carefully chosen phrase ‘‘responsible government’’ was elastic enough to be open to different interpretations. The real conflict over the precise meaning and timetable for responsible government was to come in the decades following the war. The fits and starts in the unfolding of the postwar policy of political devolution in India created the opening for Mayo’s various interventions against progressive self-government in India. The question of ‘‘responsible’’ government in India—whether it was understood by many nationalists in India as something akin to the status of the selfgoverning colonies within the British Empire or by the British government in the Government of India Act of 1919 as something that fell far short of the status of a self-governing colony—embodied many of the unresolved tensions of the ‘‘Third British Empire.’’ The nature of the military and fiscal ties that hitherto bound Britain to India, unlike those that tied Britain to the Dominion colonies, made it extremely difficult to contemplate a status akin to the ‘‘white Dominions’’ for India. The loss of British control over Indian tariffs and over India’s share in subsidizing imperial defense costs was feared for its enormous repercussions not only for the British taxpayer but for the imperial system as a whole. At the same time, wartime exigencies had already introduced important changes whose cumulative effect would alter India’s economic role for Britain. The drain on India’s human and material resources for financing British war efforts had brought great hardship for large sections of India’s population, but wartime dislocations had an uneven impact in India. For example, the war also provided an opportunity for the development of Indian industry that eventually challenged Britain’s industrial dominance in India. Most notably, the Indian cotton-textile industry was already surpassing imports from Lancashire by the end of the war. Colonial economic policies were forced into crucial concessions in trying to negotiate between British metropolitan interests and continued political and economic dominance over India. By 1922, the metropolitan government had conceded full fiscal autonomy to the colonial government in India, allowing it to impose taxes and import duties without London’s permission.16 Henceforth Brit-

30 A Transitional Moment

ain’s economic stranglehold over India would rely on retaining firm control over financial policy in India.17 The economic significance of India for Britain and its empire was undergoing significant change. Elsewhere in Asia, as in China, Britain also found itself increasingly more dependent on the United States to safeguard its economic interests after the war. The debate about postwar political reforms in India occurred against this background of important changes in the political economy of Britain’s empire. Even with the slow postwar erosion of India’s old economic contribution to Britain and its empire, however, the reverberations of empire-wide events complicated the debate over the nature and pace of postwar political reforms in India. For example, in 1919 Britain had to deal with anti-imperial uprisings in Ireland, Egypt, and the Punjab; a war with Afghanistan; and a revolt in Mesopotamia against the new British occupation. These local crises weighed on the minds of imperial policymakers mindful of their knock-on effect. Montagu put this best in his telegram to the viceroy of India: ‘‘The concessions which look likely to be necessary in Ireland harden public opinion against any new concessions in Egypt. Anything that is done as to complete independence of Egypt might appear to encourage Indian extremists.’’ 18 The bitter British experience of the Easter Uprising of 1916, and of the bloody Anglo-Irish wars that preceded the granting of Dominion status to southern Ireland as the Irish Free State in 1921, especially left many Tories and Liberals in Britain determined not to see a repeat of that experience in India. The ‘‘moral authority’’ of the British Empire, the opponents of a future Dominion status for India now argued, rested on Britain’s hanging tough in India and refusing to concede to nationalist agitation on the nature and pace of political reforms.19 The clarification of the meaning of Dominion status at the Imperial Conference of 1926, which formalized what the British government had already acknowledged about the autonomy of the Dominions during the peace conferences of 1919, added further difficulties in accepting Dominion status as the stated goal of the political reforms in India. The Dominions were now formally recognized, for all practical purposes, as independent states that could, if they so desired, even secede from the empire itself. Few imperial policymakers at the time were willing to contemplate a similar path for India anytime in the foreseeable future. Yet the postwar conjuncture transformed the contours of the colonial political system in India in ways that could not be controlled by imperial policymakers in London. The restrictive and contentious interpretation of ‘‘responsible government’’ in the Government of India Act of 1919 notwithstanding, the British

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ambivalence toward political changes in India had to confront the impact of immediate events on the ground in India. The economic hardships of the war and its immediate aftermath were the prelude to an upsurge of radical movements of peasants, workers, and ‘‘tribals,’’ much of it outside mainstream nationalist leadership. At the same time, the uneven economic impact of the war and its aftermath also brought two new social groups—the masses and an expanding Indian capitalist class—into the arena of nationalist politics.20 Hence, even as a conservative backlash in Britain resisted political concessions in India, the need to expand the circle of collaborators in India bore heavily on imperial calculations. Multiple pressures in both India and Britain beset the imperial response to the altered economic and political conditions of the postwar years. The impact of the introduction of the Government of India Act of 1919 was swiftly overtaken by events in India. The immediate reception of the act in India, for example, was complicated by the operation of the repressive police ordinances known as the Rowlatt Acts, and by the infamous Amritsar massacre of 1919. In 1920–21, Gandhi had launched the vast Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement (a protest against the postwar treatment of the defeated Khalifah, the sultan of Turkey and the spiritual leader of Muslims, by the victorious British and the Allied powers). This movement was unprecedented in its mobilization of masses on a national scale, thereby bringing the pressure of mass politics to bear on the imperialistnationalist equation in India.21 With the suspension of the movement in 1922, many of the erstwhile noncooperators abandoned Gandhian noncooperation to participate in the constitutional processes set in motion by the 1919 reforms. The Hindu-Muslim political unity of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat agitation was also punctured in its aftermath by a spate of religious sectarian riots that erupted in many parts of the country.Yet the combined impact of Gandhian direct action and the growth of a relatively more democratic, electorally oriented political culture following the 1919 reforms—by which one-tenth of the adult male population had been enfranchised—had considerably broadened the colonial political system. The repercussions of these changes produced a dilemma for the recasting of the political legitimacy of colonial rule in India. The outcome of the postwar political changes in India, however, was from the beginning marked with contradictions. The political flux of the 1920s triggered important changes in the nature and role of the Indian National Congress, the oldest major political organization in British India and the umbrella organization of the mainstream nationalist movement.The organizational structure of the Congress was subject to a reshaping along the lines of a modern political party.22

32 A Transitional Moment

The nationalist platform of the Congress, with its hitherto intricate overlay of national with class, provincial, ethnic, and religious affiliations, was being reimagined to press its claims, against a variety of challenges to the contrary, to speak for the nation as a whole. At the same time, the working of the expanded political and bureaucratic reforms, to which the act of 1919 had contributed greatly, also functioned in more insidious ways to pit the demands of various groups in India against each other. The resulting constitutional wrangling and internecine conflicts played into the hands of the coalescing conservative British opinion against political concessions in India. The contradictory developments were also evident in the political relationship between the ‘‘two Indias’’—the India of the princes and British India—that became up for grabs with the devolution of power set in motion by the 1919 reforms. For example, a Chamber of Princes (1921), a forum of middle-sized states, was formed to serve as a potential imperial ally against the democratizing trends being unleashed in British India. The emergence of the princes as a new factor in British Indian politics was reflected in the imperial reassurance to the princes that they would not be subject without their consent to a new government in British India that was responsible to an Indian legislature.23 Yet the princely states, widely regarded as out of step socially and less ‘‘advanced’’ politically than the provinces of British India, were also entering the political imagination of Indian nationalists in British India in new ways. The ‘‘progressive’’ social reforms enacted by individual princely states, together with the examples of modernizing measures enacted by national governments in Japan, Turkey, and Egypt, provided nationalists with a handy stick with which to beat the colonial state as an inert and ineffective force for social modernity.24 These were some of the contradictory changes to which Mayo responded with her reactionary call for keeping all political power in India firmly under the control of the British. The postwar conjuncture had already created a novel dynamics for imperial apologists. The ideological defense of the British Empire, despite the British government’s efforts to keep the empire a purely ‘‘domestic’’ affair, was forced now to operate on a wholly new scale.The internationalization, which had been proceeding apace at least since the early decades of the twentieth century, had acquired new significance in the context of the various challenges to Britain as a world power after the war. British war debt, for example, had given the United States a greater leverage in shaping the postwar world. British officials now found themselves increasingly sensitive to public opinion about the empire both at home and abroad. This growing sensitivity to international and domestic public opin-

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ion about the British Empire responded to a variety of developments: the emergence of the United States as a leading player in the field of international politics; the anxiety about the spread of ‘‘Bolshevism’’ around the world, especially among disaffected groups in the empire; the international scrutiny that organizations such as the League of Nations and its various affiliated bodies brought to bear on a variety of social and political questions in the metropoles and the colonies; the changing contours of political democracy at home that brought women into the arena of formal politics and provided the Labour Party a foothold in the government; and the increasingly international arena in which nationalists from the colonies now pursued their struggles for self-determination. So, for example, the wartime activities of expatriate Indian revolutionaries, which extended to such places as the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Afghanistan, Egypt, Japan, China, and the Philippines, had forced the British government on a diplomatic offensive against this global ‘‘nationalist conspiracy.’’ 25 Even though the relatively favorable climate for the activities of expatriate Indian revolutionaries disappeared at the end of the war, the postwar importance of the United States as an emerging world power meant that public opinion in the United States remained a crucial battleground in the propaganda wars between British imperialists and Indian nationalists. Mayo’s book was an important salvo in these wars. Although the British government could always count on official U.S. support for the British Empire, especially after the Spanish-American and the PhilippinesAmerican wars and the United States’ own adventure with an overseas empire, it did not underestimate the importance of U.S. public opinion.26 The United States, as Winston Churchill noted in his History of the English Speaking Peoples (1956– 58), had come much closer by the end of the nineteenth century to appreciating the imperial responsibilities of Britain: ‘‘The Spanish War helped to promote a new and warmer friendship with Britain, for Britain, alone of European nations, sympathized with the United States in the conflict. This the Americans appreciated, and as the nineteenth century drew to its end the foundations were laid for a closer concert between the two peoples in facing the problems of the world.’’ 27 President Theodore Roosevelt, who in his message to the U.S. Congress in 1904 had likened U.S. rule in the Philippines to that of the British in India and Egypt, proved willing to oblige the British with official expressions of sympathy for the British Empire. At the urging of the British government, for example, Roosevelt in his speech before the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Washington, D.C., on January 18, 1909, singled out the British achievements in Egypt and in India as the noblest and most philanthropic form of rule known in all of history.

34 A Transitional Moment

Despite overwhelming official support, however, British officials remained wary of the small pockets of anti-imperial and liberal public opinion in the United States that voiced skepticism toward such fulsome commendations of Britain’s imperial achievements. Roosevelt’s speech had been met with a strongly worded protest published in an open letter to the New York Times signed by William Lloyd Garrison Jr., Myron H. Phelps, and others, drawing attention to British colonial rule as an economic drain on the resources of India.28 Roosevelt, in fact, had been prompted by British officials to make his public speech on the British Empire in large part to counter the blistering speech of William Jennings Bryan, the twotime unsuccessful Democratic Party presidential hopeful, on the economic exploitation of India by the British during his trip to India. The British press in India, always the first to howl in protest against any criticism of British rule in India, had been quick to remind sanctimonious Americans of their own ‘‘Negro Problem’’ at home and of the effects of U.S. colonial policies in Cuba and the Philippines.29 British concern over anti-British propaganda in the United States, however, far exceeded the actual strength and influence that critics of British colonial rule in India could muster in the United States. Yet growing sensitivity toward American public opinion frequently prompted British officials to call for official U.S. retaliation against sundry groups in the United States, such as the American section of the Theosophical Society and Indian students and political exiles, for their antiBritish propaganda. U.S. officials found their hands tied in taking any cognizance of British complaints against anti-British activities in the United States, at least until the famous trial of Indians in the so-called Hindu Conspiracy Case of 1917– 19.30 The Hindu Conspiracy Case—the term ‘‘Hindu’’ was commonly used in the United States to designate all Indians—had centered on the accusation against Indian revolutionaries for their ties to German agents in the United States; the trial had a sobering effect on even those small pockets of support that existed in the United States for the Indian case against British rule. To be sure, in a few quarters, the defendants in the case, once the trial was over and the wartime hysteria had calmed down, were rehabilitated as freedom-fighters rather than mere criminals. Yet U.S. public interest in the Indian struggle against British rule remained limited throughout the early decades of the twentieth century.31 Britain’s ‘‘Irish problem,’’ which unlike the Indian case did threaten for a while to become a factor in Anglo-U.S. relations, had colored British responses to antiBritish propaganda in the United States.32 Expatriate Indian nationalists and their sympathizers in the United States, a country with a population of fewer than seven thousand Indians, and at a time when the American citizenship of Indians was

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being challenged under the law, were unlikely to attract the kind of wide-scale public attention in the United States as the cause of Ireland.33 Their influence, however, had been exaggerated by their connections with the Irish struggle. The Clan-na-Gael’s boast of supporting Indian nationalists in the United States was not an empty threat.34 Started by Taraknath Das in 1908, the Free Hindustan (Vancouver), probably the first regular nationalist paper of Indians in North America, was inspired by, and received considerable support from, Irish Americans. Whether it was the revolutionary activities of the Hindustan Ghadar Party in the United States, whose heyday lasted until the Hindu Conspiracy Case, or the constitutional work of leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai, the activities of Indians in the United States drew strength from the sympathy and support for the Irish cause.35 The Friends of Freedom for India (ffi), formed in 1919, was modeled on, and tied to, the Friends of Irish Freedom, with which it shared several board members; Indians formed their own section in various Irish Day parades in cities like New York and Philadelphia; the publications of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul accused of spreading anti-British propaganda in the United States, often included the case of India, along with those of Ireland and South Africa, in their criticisms of the tyranny of British rule; and Irish American papers, like the Gaelic American (New York), frequently carried articles against British rule in India, including several reprinted from the Indian press as well as contributions from expatriate Indians themselves.36 The Irish nationalist Eamon De Valera, at a dinner hosted for him by the ffi on February 28, 1920, in New York, paraphrased George Washington’s famous words ‘‘Patriots of Ireland, your cause is identical with mine’’ as ‘‘Friends of India, your cause is mine.’’ 37 The Indian case, largely through its Irish connections, had also reached the U.S. Congress and the American labor movement by the early 1920s. The Congress, during its postwar deliberations over the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, was forced to confront Indian grievances against British rule. The Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate agreed to allow the Indian Home Rule League of America to depute a U.S. citizen, Dudley Field Malone, the vice president of the Irish National Convention of American Associations for Recognition of the Irish Republic, to testify on behalf of India’s case for self-determination. To be sure, British rule in India, as U.S. senators were quick to assure British officials, would never become the subject of a congressional resolution as had been passed on British rule in Ireland. Even so, the British government was made acutely aware that so long as Britain’s Irish problem remained unresolved, the Indian case would have considerable traction in the United States.38

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The settlement of the Irish problem, with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, did much to take the wind out of the sails of anti-British propaganda in the United States. If the Hearst publications can be seen as an index of the change, it is telling that by the mid-1920s they were promoting greater union between the English-speaking peoples of the United States, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to the deliberate exclusion of India and other ‘‘nonwhite’’ colonies of the British Empire.39 The British Foreign Office in London, which was responsible for coordinating imperial propaganda in the United States on behalf of British rule in India, was now convinced that ‘‘India is not and should not be an Anglo-American issue of importance in the way that Ireland did [sic].’’ 40 Nevertheless, the Irish case had served to bring home to the British the growing importance of the international arena, and especially of the United States, in the politics of the postwar British Empire. This lesson was learned especially by a new generation of imperial ideologues in Britain, men like Lionel Curtis, L. S. Amery, and Philip Kerr, who most recognized that in the twentieth century the British Empire could no longer stand alone. This new generation of imperial ideologues typically despised the League of Nations, but they saw in Britain’s ‘‘special relationship’’ with the United States the means both of underwriting Britain’s postwar empire and of keeping Britain out of Europe.41 These were the men who saw in Mayo a useful ally. The international arena had also brought attention to new political groups in the propaganda wars about the British Empire. British officials, for example, took increasing notice of women as a separate political constituency in the United States, especially in the postsuffrage years of the 1920s. British officials expressed particular concern about the romantic appeal of Indian mysticism and Gandhian nationalism among women and women’s clubs in the United States. When L. F. Rushbrook Williams, the occupant of the newly created post of the Director of Public Information in India, made his first official visit to the United States in 1920 to put postwar propaganda on behalf of British rule in India on a sure footing, he spent a considerable amount of his time addressing women’s clubs throughout the United States on the situation in India.42 Reports from British officials in the United States suggested that in public debates about the empire, such as those in the 1920s between Syed Hossain and Kenneth Saunders on the question ‘‘Is British Rule in India ‘Satanic’?’’ Americans tended to favor Indians. British officials attributed the popularity on the lecture circuits in the United States of Indians such as Hossain and Dhan Gopal Mukherjee (who expounded on ‘‘The India of Kipling vs. the India of Gandhi’’ and on ‘‘Mysticism and Ethics’’) mainly to the

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influence of American ‘‘ladies.’’ 43 The existing machinery in place for monitoring public opinion about India in the United States, which included the British Foreign Office and the India Office in London, the British Embassy and Consulate Offices in the United States, the British Library of Information in New York, which had been set up specifically for the purposes of coordinating all British propaganda work in the United States, and the Central Bureau of Public Information in India, was often pushed to the limits in meeting the challenges of the times. These were obviously new times when officials at the India Office were scrambling to devise a strategy for infiltrating the international conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf), to be held in Washington, D.C., in 1924.44 Much to the chagrin of the India Office, the wilpf (whose founding member Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, had recently visited India and expressed public admiration for Gandhi’s nonviolent movement) had issued an invitation to the leading Indian woman-activist and Gandhian nationalist Sarojini Naidu to attend the conference in Washington. Only a few years earlier, Naidu had been involved in a fairly public controversy in Britain with the secretary of state for India, E. S. Montagu, over the alleged mistreatment of Indian women during the martial law administration in the Punjab after the Amritsar massacre.45 The India Office found itself hard-pressed to find an appropriate delegate to attend the conference and counter any charges that Naidu might raise at the conference against British rule in India. It was clear, as officials at the India Office recognized, that not just any woman favorable toward British rule in India would be adequate for the job. In order for her to be credible, she would have to be in general sympathy with the views of the organization. The efficacy of such a woman at the conference, moreover, would be seriously compromised if any hint of her connection to British officialdom became public. In their search for a suitable candidate, several officials despaired as to whether any English or American woman could be up to the task of representing the imperial view at the wilpf conference. The India Office eventually settled on a Mrs. Sowton, of the Salvation Army (and with some prior experience of India), who would be paid a small honorarium in strict secrecy to attend the conference and present the British case.46 Since Naidu declined the invitation to the conference due to pressing commitments in India, the India Office in the end had no need to make use of Sowton’s services. Even though Addams in her presidential address to the conference made favorable references to Gandhi and his movement in India, British officials were pleased that India, in the absence of any representative from there, had not emerged as a significant subject of debate at the

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conference.47 In fact, reports from the British Embassy in Washington indicate that British officials felt quite smug about their handling of the conference; the British ambassador in Washington had reportedly charmed all the delegates, including even the Irish delegates, by the hospitality he had extended them during the conference.48 While the flap over the 1924 wilpf conference was resolved to the satisfaction of the India Office, it provides a preview of the expanded context in which the propaganda wars between British imperialism and Indian nationalism would be fought in the interwar period. The forces that had been gathered to act through Mrs. Sowton would find an apt vehicle in Katherine Mayo. Mother India, published by an American woman in 1927 for the supposed purpose of enlightening an American audience about the unfitness of Indians for selfrule, mediated the global reconfigurations that confronted the postwar British Empire. Although the mainstream American press had largely ignored the significance of the 1919 reforms in India, the changes in the political foundations of British rule in India reverberated with postwar changes in U.S. rule in the Philippines.49 The Jones Act passed in the U.S. Congress in 1916, and the policy of ‘‘Filipinization’’ inaugurated under governor Frances Burton Harrison, a Wilson appointee, had brought a measure of self-government in the Philippines. British and U.S. officials, of course, were acutely aware of the parallels between the new political context in India and the Philippines. The U.S. State Department was anxious for officials in the Philippines to examine the Government of India Act of 1919; and after 1923, U.S. consular officials in India were expressly enjoined to make copies of their report on the political situation in India available in the Philippines.50 Likewise, the public debates in the United States in the 1920s that led to a reversal of the Wilsonian policy of Filipinization, a debate to which Katherine Mayo had contributed, drew the attention of British policymakers concerned about the trajectory of the postwar political reforms in India.51 Mayo’s book on the Philippines, a vitriolic condemnation of the policy of Filipinization, raised doubts about the fitness of ‘‘nonwhite’’ colonies for the devolution of political authority that had gained momentum after the war. ‘‘Every now and again a book is published,’’ as a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (London) wrote, ‘‘which may not be a great book in itself, but which suddenly clarifies a situation previously thought hopelessly confused like a chemical in cloudy water.’’ The reviewer compared Mayo’s Isles of Fear: The Truth about the Philippines (1925) to books such as Richard Jebb’s Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905), which had ‘‘literally wrought a revolution in British thinking about Empire’’ by transforming the relation with the

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Dominion colonies, and to Norman Leys’s Kenya (1924), which ‘‘threw into high relief some of the hidden problems of Africa, the Dark Continent.’’ The review predicted that Mayo’s book on the Philippines would have an impact not only on American thinking but ‘‘in due time on British thinking on India and Egypt too.’’ 52 The international stakes of Mayo’s attack on Wilsonian policy in the Philippines were captured in the aptly titled review of her book in the Japan Advertiser (Tokyo): ‘‘How Is New Asia to Govern Itself ?’’ Mayo’s argument about the Philippines ‘‘raises in the sharpest possible manner,’’ the anonymous reviewer wrote, ‘‘the question confronting every nation which owns colonies or dependencies.’’ 53 The Pioneer (Allahabad), almost an official paper of the British in India, was quick to take note of the implications of The Isles of Fear for British India: ‘‘We can hardly afford to ignore the experience of others,’’ the review claimed, ‘‘especially that of the light-hearted masters of the world with a language the same as ours, and traditions and institutions which flow from a common source.’’ 54 The subject of Mayo’s book on the Philippines—the bankruptcy of Filipino nationalism and of the postwar experiment with self-government in America’s Asian colony—was a preview of the debate on the devolution of political power in a ‘‘nonwhite’’ colony that erupted with full force in the international controversy over Mother India. The global ambitions of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism promoted through such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, whose top officials were involved in their personal capacities with Mayo’s books on both the Philippines and India, further contributed in drawing the United States into the postwar debates about the political future of colonial India. Notwithstanding Churchill’s optimism about the convergence of British and U.S. imperial interests, the expansion of U.S. capitalism in the early twentieth century was a matter of some concern to British interests. So, for example, the steady expansion of American business interests in India in the 1920s challenged Britain’s own commercial interests in the region. The Negro World (New York), the paper of the anti-imperialist movement of Marcus Garvey in the United States, commented on the emerging squabble between ‘‘Anglo-Saxon business men’’ over the ‘‘divine right’’ to exploit India’s wealth. ‘‘It is manifestly contrary to all the tenets of common justice,’’ the paper quoted the head of the British Chamber of Commerce in India as complaining, ‘‘that a country which has contributed so little to the advancement of India should reap the benefits made possible by a country which has for many years risked not only capital but even the life of its subjects in India.’’ 55 The expanding economic power of the United States upset the political equation of the prewar British Empire. The American Rockefeller Foundation, no less than the League

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of Nations, gave the British colonial state a run for its money as alternative agents of a new civilizing mission in India. These changes in the international dynamics of imperialism created an opening for Mayo’s transatlantic intervention: an early prelude to a time when the survival of the British Empire would become pegged less ambiguously to a ‘‘special relationship’’ with the United States. These global dynamics of the postwar period, despite Mayo’s attempt to turn the clock back on the direction of political reforms in India, could not be halted. The changes in the metropolitan-colonial relations in India begun long before Mayo’s intervention continued apace well after it. Economic and political changes of the interwar decades made any return to status quo ante impossible. The economic ties between Britain and India, already dented by Britain’s postwar imperial concessions on fiscal autonomy in India, were dealt a decisive blow by the worldwide impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s.56 The fallout for Britain’s commercial domination in India was most starkly symbolized in the crisis of the Lancashire textile industry; the adoption of protective duties in India had stimulated Indian industrial growth that soon outstripped Lancashire imports. The Ottawa agreement of 1932 with its preferential tariffs for British over nonempire imports managed to keep Japan from taking over the Indian market, but British industry had been forced to yield important ground to indigenous Indian industry, especially to the cotton mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad. The decade following the controversy over Mother India had witnessed a quickening in the pace of economic changes, including the ending of free trade and the acceptance of protective tariffs and imperial preferences. By 1932–33, the Depression had also produced a precipitous decline in the value of Indian exports, leading to a collapse in India’s export surplus with the rest of the world: hitherto the chief mechanism for the transfer of wealth from India to Britain. While this did not mean an end to metropolitan economic exploitation, it did entail structural adjustments and realignments of earlier colonial economic patterns. For example, the transfer of wealth from India to Britain now proceeded apace through other means, such as the distress sale of gold from the Indian countryside, a good deal of which, not coincidentally, ended up in the Federal Reserve of the United States.57 Furthermore, foreign companies found ways to work around protective duties by setting up subsidiary units behind tariff walls in India, and Britain maintained its economic domination by control over Indian finances, including tying the Indian rupee at an artificially high rate to the pound sterling, which was taken off the gold standard in 1931. The post–Mother India changes thus included a simultaneous overhauling as well as an updating of

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the economic foundations of colonial rule in India: the same that also guided the changes in the political foundations of colonial rule that culminated with the Government of India Act of 1935. The unevenness of these changes notwithstanding, the 1930s ushered in a decisive new phase in the history of metropolitan-colonial relations in India. These were the realignments at play in making the controversy over Mother India a threshold event between the changes begun with the Government of India Act of 1919 and those culminating in the Government of India Act of 1935. The nationalist revival of 1928–29 in India, mediated in part by the controversy over Mother India, had created the crisis of legitimacy for British colonialism in the 1930s. The imperial government at first responded to mounting Indian demands for political reforms with a halfhearted initiative that ended in a debacle; the public uproar over Mother India helped shape the reception in India to the government’s unsatisfactory initiative in 1927. The clumsiness of the imperial government’s initiative breathed new life into the anticolonial nationalist movement after the years of decline and fragmentation that had followed the ending of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement of 1922. The most visible mark of this shift was the adoption of purna swaraj (complete independence) as the goal of the Congress at its annual session in Lahore in 1929.58 The Congress resolution for complete independence in 1929 and the Gandhian civil disobedience campaigns of the early 1930s were evidence of a radicalization of the anticolonial nationalist struggle in the post–Mother India period. The radical currents of the time had been anticipated by the labor militancy in India that had culminated with the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33), the trial of thirty-one labor leaders for Communist leanings and for a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The government responded to these changes with the characteristic mix of a carrot-and-stick policy. It kept up the offensive against labor militancy in the Meerut trials leading in 1934 to the outlawing of all Communist organizations in India; likewise the colonial government adopted draconian measures to crush the revival of Gandhian civil disobedience in 1932. At the same time, the imperial government also opened up a dialogue for constitutional reforms for India. The latter were aimed at making tactical concessions to political aspirations in India while retaining the vital aspects of government in British hands and safeguarding the continued economic benefits of the colonial connection for Britain. The changes set in motion in the 1930s became a turning point in what Sumit Sarkar has so aptly identified as the process by which the Congress ‘‘while fighting the Raj was also becoming the Raj.’’ 59

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The political equation of the 1930s, however, was not without its contradictions for the nationalist struggle under Congress leadership. The rejuvenation of the anticolonial struggle had raised expectations that the Congress itself could not fulfill, producing fresh fault lines both inside and outside the Congress. Congress policy, constrained by the interests of industrial capitalists and of the better-off peasantry whom it increasingly came to represent, pushed a younger generation toward more radical alternatives: to individual acts of revolutionary violence as well as to radical ideologies like Marxism. There were also novel political forces on the horizon. In the 1930s, B. R. Ambedkar emerged as an all-India leader of the dalits (literally, broken or oppressed peoples: formerly referred to as ‘‘untouchables’’ or ‘‘depressed classes’’ that drew attention to their status at the very bottom of the hierarchy of caste society). He represented a formidable alternative to Gandhi’s and the Congress’s claims to represent the depressed classes; instead of the Congress’s focus on reforming Hindu society, Ambedkar stressed the importance of political power and of the need for dalits to liberate themselves.60 There were additional pressures at work that further complicated the ability of the Congress to speak for the ‘‘people.’’ Sectarian Hindu political organizations exercised undue influence on the Congress; this jeopardized Congress’s attempts to arrive at a satisfactory political compromise with the most powerful religious minority, the Muslims. The imperial government was always quick to exploit the political divisions in British India, just as it had been ready to use the princely states as a buffer against any democratizing trends in the colonial administration of British India. Nevertheless, the Government of India Act of 1935 had established irrevocably the progressive devolution of political power in India against which Mayo had lobbied so famously in her 1927 book. The act of 1935 was a symbol of the new political reality on the ground in India. Even though it would take another world war to break the back of imperial resistance to political self-government in India, the changes of the 1930s went a long way toward fostering the realization of the British Raj as conspicuously terminal.The interwar controversy over Mother India was bookended by constitutional reforms in the structure of the colonial administration in India that were themselves manifestations of worldwide developments.

rhetorical inventions The dynamics of the moment also bring into focus the rhetorical adjustments and reshuffling of preexisting discourses and of older discursive patterns in the

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articulation of the postwar changes in India. For example, on the eve of the publication of Mayo’s Mother India, the discourse of the Indian ‘‘woman question’’ was already ripe for a major rhetorical reorientation. The women’s question in colonial India, as various scholars have suggested, had its foundations in the first half of the nineteenth century in the curious symbiosis of the interests of colonial and indigenous male elites. Colonial accounts were critical of indigenous society on a wide range of issues, including gender relations, the caste system, class hierarchies, and various religious beliefs and practices, which allegedly confirmed the backwardness of India; but for a variety of reasons, the condition of women occupied the central place in debates about indigenous society between British and Indian elites.61 The changes in the contours of the women’s question captured many of the shifts in colonial Indian society. In colonial discourse the status of women was the index of the social backwardness of India. Likewise, an emerging new elite in colonial India saw the modernization of the social condition of women as part of the reformation of its class and caste identity. Hence support for social reform legislations directed at modernizing certain upper-caste customs and practices affecting women, especially the treatment of Hindu widows, had gained a degree of public legitimacy by the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet women themselves, in Lata Mani’s pithy formulation, were neither the subjects nor the objects of these early imperialist and reformist initiatives at social reform for women. Rather, as a metonym for indigenous culture, women were merely the ground on which British officials, missionaries, indigenous social reformers, and their opponents elaborated competing interpretations of culture and traditions.62 If in the hands of indigenous social reformers the reform of women’s position was tied both to the consolidation of new class formations and, through appeals to a supposedly lost golden age in the ancient past, to the project of national regeneration, in colonial discourse that reform was tied to evidence of the cultural degeneration of India and of the need for the benevolent paternalism of colonial rule.63 Even though the debate about the condition of women had entered the public arena in colonial India largely under male auspices, both colonial and indigenous, the terms of this debate did not remain static. To be sure, the colonial emergence of the ‘‘woman question’’ in India was identified with a reified notion of culture that cast it narrowly as a ‘‘social problem,’’ and hence as the object of ‘‘social reform’’; but its articulation was from the outset tied to shifting political and material concerns. Imperialists who championed reforms for Indian women frequently did so by pitting social reforms for women

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against indigenous demands for political reforms: that is, they urged Indians to put their ‘‘homes’’ in order and concentrate on social as opposed to political reforms. When the so-called Ilbert Bill of 1882 tried to place Indians in the Indian Civil Service on the same legal footing as their British counterparts, the bill’s European opponents pointed to the treatment of women in India as an argument against the change.64 By the same token, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, the women’s question by the second half of the nineteenth century had undergone a shift as it acquired a new political valence for an emerging cultural nationalist politics.65 Indigenous elites responded to the belated and derivative foundations of their nationalism visà-vis the West by searching for creative and imaginative alternatives. For example, nationalist thought came to rest on an elaboration of a supposed split between an ‘‘outer’’ or ‘‘material’’ realm, where it acknowledged the superiority of European institutions, and an ‘‘inner’’ or ‘‘spiritual’’ realm, where the autonomy and the true identity of the nation resided. Women were symbolically identified with the ‘‘inner’’ realm as the essence of the nation and where nationalists claimed autonomy from colonial intervention. The subsequent identification of women with the true essence of the nation recast the women’s question in India. It underwrote the modernizing of women as part of a broader regeneration of the nation; but it also set limits to that modernization in keeping with the supposedly authentic traditions of the nation.66 Henceforth the reform of women’s position was no longer left as a subject of debate with colonial rulers. Instead, the discourse of cultural nationalism now claimed ‘‘autonomy’’ over the women’s question and consigned the agency for reforms for women to the internal self-regulation of the community. The new nationalist consensus of the second half of the nineteenth century did not mean that interest in modernizing the position of women had disappeared from the arena of public debate; but it no longer looked typically to the agency of the colonial state for reforms for women. This so-called nationalist resolution of the women’s question, however, was from the beginning both a more complicated and a more contradictory affair than the nationalist desire for cultural autonomy alone might suggest. Even in Bengal, with its prominent role in elaborating a cultural nationalist politics in the late nineteenth century, the reframing of the women’s question was not just part of an anticolonial nationalist politics; it was also a symptom of a growing conservative indigenous backlash against challenges from various quarters in society. For example, the legal reforms for women in the nineteenth century had produced, as Tanika Sarkar puts it, a piecemeal aggregation of various ‘‘immunities and entitle-

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ments,’’ if not quite ‘‘rights,’’ for women. This created the space for a challenge, however limited, to the subsuming of women entirely within the prerogatives of kinship and communal ties.67 These challenges were most evident in a burgeoning print culture in the nineteenth century where the concerns, and sometimes even the contributions, of lower castes, peasants, women, and other marginalized people emerged as subjects of debate and held up existing social privileges to scrutiny. The first known full-length autobiography published in the Bengali language (1875) was written by Rashasundari Debi, an upper-caste housewife from a conservative village household, whose writing reveals a certain disjuncture between a woman’s own recollections and the nostalgic patriarchal representations of home and community.68 The patriarchal anxieties about potentially ‘‘disorderly women,’’ no less than the imperatives of anticolonial nationalist politics, animated the assertion by century’s end of the collective prerogatives of the nation as the final arbiter of social changes for women. On occasion, therefore, even the ostensible proponents of the cultural autonomy of the nation did not hesitate to call on state intervention when it came to defending familial, communal, caste, and class privileges that they perceived as increasingly embattled. Take the example of the famous legal case of Rukhmabai (1884–88), which pitted her freedom and autonomy against the conjugal claims of her husband. The case quickly demonstrated that those who were often the most vocal in arguing against the state’s interference in the socioreligious affairs of their community were at other times quite content to invoke the external laws of the state for the disciplining of ‘‘their’’ women. Rukhmabai had refused to cohabit with her husband. Her husband’s suit against Rukhmabai for the restitution of his conjugal rights became an immediate cause célèbre. While a lower court decided in Rukhmabai’s favor, on appeal she was ordered to live with her husband or go to prison. The law for the restitution of conjugal rights itself was imported from English canon law, with little precedent in indigenous traditions. Rukhmabai’s critics were not only willing to rely on an ‘‘alien’’ law, but were also willing to invite further state intervention to preserve the privileges of the husband.69 The reframing of the women’s question in the second half of the nineteenth century was thus also fashioned in the context of the subversive potential of an expanding indigenous public sphere where the claims of all kinds of marginalized groups potentially threatened vested privileges. The further irony was that the withdrawal of the ‘‘woman question’’ as a subject to be debated with colonial rulers by the second half of the nineteenth century coincided nicely with the political calculations of the colonial state. Notwith-

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standing the colonial state’s interventions in the family, especially in its dealing with marginalized social groups and populations, familial matters were typically consigned outside the jurisdiction of the universally applicable laws of the state to a separate body of ‘‘personal laws’’ dictated by religion (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and so on).70 The colonial state, especially in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, was anxious to foster loyalty among conservative and orthodox sections of indigenous society by conceding autonomy on certain matters to indigenous communities. The official policy of noninterference in religious and familial matters thus abdicated responsibility of domestic affairs to the reforming agency of the communities themselves. The result was that the female legal subject in colonial India was caught between the contradictory pulls of the state’s drive toward administrative centralization and the political calculations that motivated an official policy of noninterference in religious and personal affairs of communities.71 The dominant imperialist and nationalist articulations of thewomen’s question— which left the fate of women to be decided by the self-regulation of indigenous communities—not only shared a common discursive and ideological terrain but also provided the imaginary glue for the political cohesion of discrete religious communities in colonial India. The nineteenth-century feminist Pandita Ramabai faced the brunt of the contradictions of this twist in the discourse on women in colonial India. Born a highcaste Brahmin, Ramabai’s iconoclastic upbringing had allowed her to escape the discipline and constraints typical of a woman of her status. She gained considerable renown, especially in indigenous reformist circles, for her learned expositions of ancient Hindu texts. Ramabai was at first embraced by reformers as the ideal type of the educated woman in India. Her refusal to conform to their more narrow prescriptions for women soon cost her the support of her erstwhile allies. Her subsequent conversion to Christianity and her persistently strident critiques of the status of Hindu women did not sit well with the ideal type of the modern Indian woman imagined by male reformers.72 Ramabai’s assertion of her autonomy made strange bedfellows out of both conservative and reformist sections of the nationalist elites, who were united in opposing her independent projects on behalf of women. By the close of the century, indeed, the priorities of the community had set the limits on the ‘‘proper’’ agency of women. The limited contours of the women’s question, however, were from the beginning also susceptible to new meanings produced by the interlocutions of women themselves. The cultural-nationalist project had provided the tools for the selffashioning of modern subjectivities, however restrictive, to women; it also ush-

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ered in the entry of elite and middle-class women to the public sphere, whether in the field of social reform or of anticolonial nationalist activities. Local women’s organizations proliferated in several parts of the country, and individual women became prominent in a variety of social reform and nationalist activities, albeit largely under male guidance. The sphere of women’s activities, indeed, was being expanded gradually to encompass, as it were, both the ‘‘home and the world.’’ 73 To be sure, the new subjectivities made available to elite and middle-class women were constituted within the constraints of a refurbished nationalist patriarchy. The modern woman of the anticolonial nationalist imagination was thus expected to occupy a precarious position as the symbol of the colonized nation’s ‘‘betweenness’’: a self-conscious middle ground suspended between the poles of a ‘‘Western’’ modernity and of an unreformed indigenous ‘‘tradition.’’ 74 Hence the hostility toward women like Ramabai who did not fit easily within the narrow confines of an acceptable nationalist modernity. Indeed, the modern Indian woman of the nationalist imagination was invested with a very specific meaning. Her ‘‘modernity’’ was to be neither Western nor Westernized; and her ‘‘Indianness’’ was to be defined against both the orthodox and the lower castes and classes in India. Not surprisingly, then, women themselves often legitimated their public activism through an idiom of religion and ‘‘tradition’’ that offered an alternative to supposedly alien Western norms.75 Yet women’s own involvement in the public sphere also stretched to the limits the prescriptive nationalist norms for women. This is the double meaning that Himani Bannerji invokes in the concept of ‘‘inventing subjects’’: that is, the idea of social subjectivity as both invented (the cultural and ideological effects of others’ invention) and as inventing (as opportunistically self-inventing new subjectivities enabled within a given sociohistorical context).76 Hence an important dimension of the early-twentieth-century conjuncture: the cumulative effect of women’s involvement in the public sphere, whether through print or through activism, on the reinvention and renegotiation of dominant nationalist constructs of modern Indian womanhood. A number of factors made the early twentieth century a critical period for constructing a new public discourse by and for women in India. The advent of Gandhian nationalism provided an unprecedented resource and catalyst for change. The involvement of women in the Gandhian Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement in the 1920s extended women’s roles in public; but Gandhi’s own thinking about the supposedly ‘‘natural’’ propensities of women for self-sacrifice and service to the nation often did not appear to be fundamentally different from nineteenth-century male-

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nationalist discourses. Yet the narrowness of Gandhi’s stated views on women was exceeded by the more radical impact of his influence: the force of his personality; his emphasis on nonsexual relations between men and women; and the novelty of his political strategies that revolved around the ‘‘seemingly trivial but essential details of daily living’’ that inevitably redefined the place of women in the struggle.77 Hence the growing prominence of a cadre of what one contemporary called ‘‘Gandhi’s women’’: it included prominent nationalists such as Sarojini Naidu and Sarla Devi Chaudhrani, as well as a host of lesser-known women.78 Several other factors also at work in the 1920s contributed to expanding the presence of women and of women’s concerns in the public domain. For example, some middle-class women, like Ushabai Dange, Prabhabati Devi, Maniben Kare, Parvati Bore, and Anusuya Behn, were inspired by the struggles of working people to become labor leaders in organizing working men and women in the workers’ strikes of the 1920s.79 Some exceptional peasant movements, like Baba Ram Chandra’s movement in Oudh, were not only mobilizing rural peasant women but also expanding the scope of the movement itself to address the particular exploitation of peasant women.80 Likewise, the radical anticaste movements of the 1920s, led by leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar in western India and E. V. R. Naicker (Periyar) in the south, combined a critique of caste and gender hierarchies in ways that opened up new spaces for women.81 For example, on December 25, 1927, dalit women participated at the famous Mahad conference where Ambedkar burned a copy of the Manusmriti (Hindu law codes), thus rejecting its implications for the exploitation of both women and dalits.82 The participation of women in a range of social and political movements, from the predominantly middle-class to worker, peasant, ‘‘tribal,’’ and dalit movements, was beginning by the first half of the twentieth century to put pressure on the hitherto dominant framing of the ‘‘woman question.’’ There were novel possibilities on the eve of Mayo’s intervention for constituting women as the focus of a collective mobilization in the public realm. The steady growth in educational opportunities and professional appointments for elite and middle-class women, as well as the emergence of new all-India women’s organizations, had provided considerable impetus to the development of women as a constituency of their own in India.83 The local and fragmented nineteenthcentury women’s organizations were supplemented by larger and more ambitious organizations that, as their names suggested, aspired to a self-consciously more expansive and inclusive vision of their mission: the Bharat Stri Mahamandal

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figure 2. Logo of the Women’s Indian Association (1917), from the Fourth Report of the Women’s Indian Association, 1926–1927. Courtesy of the National Archives of India, Government of India, New Delhi, India, and the Women’s Indian Association, Chennai. The logo was meant to represent ‘‘the ideal influence of women’’ that the association hoped to make an ‘‘actuality in every detail of daily life in every part of India.’’ The contours of the female figure are explained thus: ‘‘The work has begun in the Madras Presidency (the place of the woman’s feet), but its lifeforce springs from religion (her heart is in the region of Benares), and its intellect must be as clear and cool as the Himalayan regions into which rises her head. Serene and self-reliant must stand each member, with hands outstretched to sisters and brothers, both in the East and the West, to give them from her active right hand Beauty and Prosperity represented by the lotus, the flower that bears within itself male and female qualities equally, and from the lamp in her left hand to extend the steady flame of inspiration which will light the fire of the united life of man and woman, the fire of devotion to our Sacred Religion and of love for humanity, the fire of patriotism, the fire of zeal for reform. Thus she represents Religion, Knowledge, Organization, Service, Beauty, Prosperity, Inspiration, and Co-operation, all offered freely to Mother India by each of her daughters.’’

(Great Circle of Indian Women) (1910), the Anjuman-i-Khavatin-i-Islam (All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference) (1914), the Women’s Indian Association (1917), and the All-India Ladies’ Association (1918).84 While concerned largely with the kind of modernizing social reforms for women that had been the staple of male political discourses, these organizations at the same time laid the grounds for the development of an autonomous all-India women’s movement. By the 1920s, this movement centered around three major women’s organizations: the Women’s Indian Association (wia, 1917), the National Council of Women in India (ncwi, 1925), and the All India Women’s Conference (aiwc, 1927). This nascent all-India women’s movement was poised to respond to Mayo’s ostensible concern with the degraded social position of Indian women in Mother India. The impact of these early-twentieth-century developments was felt on the subtle shift in the rhetoric of the women’s question in India. Women’s print culture in the early twentieth century best reflected the opening of a new discursive space for women. These new spaces were evident not just in the official organs of women’s organizations and in explicitly feminist tracts; they could also be seen in more popular vernacular women’s journals like Chand (Allahabad).85 The example of Chand, as Francesca Orsini’s study demonstrates, is especially illuminating not only because it was the most prominent Hindi women’s journal, but

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because it was also the most widely read Hindi journal of its time generally.86 Even though Chand was started in 1922 under male editorship, women contributed extensively to the journal. The contributions of women in features such as Chitthi-patri, or the readers’ letters column, as well as confessions, epistolary novels, and social romances as much as the regular articles and discussions in Chand offered a new discourse on social reform that was concerned less with reforming women than with reforming society on behalf of women.87 The personalization of the social and political issues affecting women in the columns of the journal further popularized a new notion, as Orsini puts it, of women’s ‘‘right to feel’’: the first-person narratives, in effect, drew attention to the gap between women’s aspirations as individuals and normative ideals and societal and familial expectations.88 Women were being gradually constituted as themselves the subjects of social reform. Furthermore, through self-conscious claims to speak for and about all women, journals like Chand also offered a new construction of women not as simply saturated by their identification with kin, community, and the nation but, pointedly, as a universal and homogeneous gender category. Hence Chand’s focus on Indian women’s concerns and activities existed alongside discussions of women internationally. Even though Chand eventually came to be dominated by concerns of a largely urban and middle-class readership, the journal in its early years in the 1920s attempted to address issues affecting women all over the country and beyond the limited social strata of its readership. Chand frequently carried discussions of the particular conditions affecting lower-caste and working-class women in India.89 Certainly middle-class notions of domesticity and respectability informed the new discursive spaces for women, but the self-conscious investment of women’s journals in constituting women as a collectivity in the 1920s also necessitated a broader interest in women of different classes as well as nationalities. A small anecdote, seemingly trivial in itself, illustrates the transforming impact of the emerging concepts through which women’s interests were beginning to be articulated in the decade before Mayo’s Mother India. When Montagu became the first secretary of state to visit India in 1917 in preparation for the Government of India Act of 1919, he received requests from deputations of women’s organizations for an appointment to discuss educational opportunities for women in India. These requests were turned down because educational reforms, as a social question, fell outside the purview of political reforms, which were the sole charge of the secretary of state. One woman’s deputation came right back with a redrafted request: the inclusion of women on the same terms as men in the

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franchise qualifications of any new political arrangement for India.90 To be sure, this woman’s deputation defended its demand on familiar cultural-nationalist grounds: the legitimizing authority of an ancient past when women had supposedly enjoyed the same political rights as men. Yet the political context of the act of 1919 also obliged the women’s organizations to move beyond cultural-nationalist arguments of India’s past. The political demands of women were also beginning to be articulated by means of a new set of concepts—equality, rights, representation—that were associated less with the imperatives of enduring cultural or national ‘‘difference’’ than with a liberal political discourse of women as themselves rights-bearing subjects. Here lay the early stirrings of the reformulation of the women’s question in colonial India. The first suffrage campaign of Indian women, despite its relatively prosaic history, is significant precisely for revealing cracks in the dominant nineteenthcentury colonial and nationalist consensus on the Indian women’s question. Neither Montagu, who summarily dismissed the demands of the women’s deputation, nor the major Indian political parties who supported the women’s demands sensed the full implications of the discourse of women’s suffragism. The suffrage demands of women had a bearing on the community-based paradigm of colonial governance in India. The colonial paradigm of discrete communities had been given official recognition in the constitutional reforms of 1909 that introduced the principle of separate communal electorates for Muslims. Even though some British officials, including Montagu, were beginning to question communal electorates as divisive, they continued to frame the enfranchisement of women in terms only of the collective interests of the community.91 For example, Montagu rejected the demands of the women’s deputation in deference to the rights of communities over ‘‘their’’ women. He feared that the various communities in India were not ready for the enfranchisement of ‘‘their’’ women: a decision best left to be decided by indigenous agency. The principle of sex equality for the vote was thus made a casualty to the gendered norms that constituted colonial communities in India. The anomalous position of women was thus glaring in the provisions of the act of 1919. The act retained special communal electorates for Muslims and extended the same to Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians, and domiciled Europeans; it reserved seats for non-Brahmins and for Mahrattas in Bombay and provided special electorates and reserved seats for certain ‘‘special interests’’ like landowners, businessmen, and university graduates. But it rejected the demands for the enfranchisement of women. The final shape of the act was explained as a

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concession both to practical considerations of colonial rule and to the demands made by various political constituencies in India. The imperial authorities decided only to defer the responsibility for the enfranchisement of women to the decision of the postreform legislatures in India. In a relatively short period in the 1920s, the newly formed provincial legislatures with their elected Indian members gave women the right to vote in nearly all the provinces of British India.92 The extremely restrictive property qualification for the vote meant that no more than a million women in all of India were actually affected by this move. The first suffrage campaign of women in India thus ended with something of an anticlimax as women received the right to vote on the same terms as men with relative ease. However, the imperial government’s decision to leave only the question of women’s franchise to be decided by Indian legislators in India did not go unnoticed by the female subjects of the British Empire. The imperial government’s decision to abdicate responsibility for Indian women’s suffrage was scrutinized within an internationalist idiom of women’s suffragism that laid the grounds for a questioning of the relationship between women, community, and the state in colonial India. Hirabai Tata of the wia, and her daughter Mithan Tata, had taken the case for Indian women’s vote to England to influence British public opinion and the British Parliament in anticipation of the Government of India Bill of 1919. In England, the Tatas worked closely with British and Dominion women’s organizations and formally affiliated the wia with the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. When even the joint international efforts of women’s organizations failed to persuade an obdurate British Parliament to take the initiative on women’s enfranchisement in India, the Tatas returned to carry on the campaign in India.93 Sorely disappointed by the outcome of their efforts in England, however, they persuaded Carrie Chapman Catt, as president of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, to issue a widely published plea ‘‘to the progressive men of India’’ in support of Indian women’s suffrage. British suffragists, including Millicent Garrett Fawcett, sympathized with the disappointment of the Tatas but endorsed the imperial government’s decision to shift the responsibility for the enfranchisement of women back to India. Fawcett was of the opinion that it was ‘‘better for the vote to come to Indian women from Indian representatives rather than the Imperial Government.’’ 94 The Indian and Dominion women’s suffrage organizations, however, pointed to the contradiction that postponed only the question of women’s representation to be decided by a future Indian legislature. Indian and Dominion suffragists protested the iniquitous ‘‘double standard’’

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practiced by the imperial government in its attitude toward men and women of the empire. The British Dominions Women Citizens’ Union sent a strongly worded protest to this effect to prime minister Lloyd George on the occasion of the Government of India Bill of 1919. The protest agreed that in principle the ‘‘practical details as regards franchise in the case of men as of women should be settled by the people of the country in question, in accordance with the principle of self-determination.’’ Yet ‘‘by affirming the principle of the right to vote in the case of men and declining to affirm it in the case of women,’’ Dominion women complained, ‘‘the Imperial Government practically abdicates its right to govern one half of the people.’’ They saw the imperial government’s deferment on Indian women’s franchise as a ‘‘wrong done not only to the women of India but to women in every part of the Empire,’’ for ‘‘such a decision,’’ as Dominion women argued, ‘‘upholds the outworn superstition that women are not ruled by government at all, but are merely the chattels of individual men.’’ 95 More accurately, in the particular context of the gender dynamics in the constitution of communities in India, the government’s decision reflected the sacrifice of women’s rights to those of the community. Some Indian suffragists seized on the anomaly exposed during the suffrage struggle to question the colonial state’s hands-off policy toward women who were relegated as ‘‘internal’’ to the community. The Indian suffragist Mrinalini Sen complained that the British Parliament’s decision affirmed that the imperial government treated women as if they did not belong to the British Empire. ‘‘Women in India sometimes have occasions to go for justice to a court,’’ she argued, but in the light of the British Parliament’s decision on the reform bill, ‘‘they may as well be told not to go there and have their disputes settled at home.’’ 96 V. Kamalabai Ammal expressed similar frustration when some of the provincial legislatures in India delayed in enfranchising women. She reminded the government of India that females were ‘‘as much children of India as males’’; to leave the fate of women’s suffrage to the mercy of male legislators, therefore, ‘‘implies the monopoly of the male sex not only to enjoy the privilege but to confer [it] upon others—women—as a matter of charity.’’ 97 The suffrage campaign had introduced a telling shift in public rhetoric whereby women were being constructed not merely as the symbols of the community’s identity but as themselves subjects of the state. The emerging new rhetorical grounds of the women’s question, of course, coincided with the changing political imperatives of mainstream nationalist politics in India: the result of the inauguration of an era of mass politics no less than of

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the shifting grounds of the imperialist-nationalist struggle. By the 1920s, as Gyanendra Pandey reminds us, the cultural-nationalist vision of Indian society ‘‘as already formed into discrete communities, each with its own priorities and interests and each with the right to determine its own [‘‘social’’] future,’’ was already under challenge. The popular nationalist view of India as a mosaic—the view that ‘‘ ‘India’ was ‘Hindu’ + ‘Muslim’ + ‘Sikh’ + ‘Christian,’ et cetera’’—became vulnerable to the dangers posed by community-based mobilizations in an era of mass politics.The Hindu-Muslim riots that erupted with some frequency after the collapse of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement in 1922 were a symptom of what a community-based politics could lead to in an era of mass mobilization. A new understanding of political community and political subjectivity had become necessary. The growing disaffection of the movements of non-Brahmins and dalits from the Congress in the 1920s, together with the mobilizations on behalf of separate communities, posed a threat not only to the putative unity of ‘‘Hindus’’ as a majority community but also to Congress’s claims to speak for the nation as a whole.98 The project of mainstream nationalism, therefore, had begun to take seriously the search for a ‘‘pure’’ or political nationalism: that is, ‘‘a nationalism that stood above (or outside) the different religious communities and took as its unit the individual Indian citizen, a ‘pure’ nationalism unsullied, in theory, by the ‘primordial’ pulls of caste, religious community, etc.’’ 99 The result was a gradual rethinking of the salient colonial category of the subnational religious community as the fundamental unit of the national polity. If hitherto the dominant understanding of society had rested on a construction of women as the symbols of a community’s essential identity, then the redefinition of society was likewise mediated by a rival construction of women as themselves the subjects of the state. This was the context in which the politicization of the social domain of Indian gender relations in the massive international controversy over Mother India would provide public legitimacy (albeit not uncontested) for a feminist rearticulation of women as a political grouping with direct claims on the state.

a moment of discontinuity Finally, the coalescence of particular social forces as well as their eventually discontinuous and evanescent political outcome draws attention to the political significance of the conjunctural moment of the controversy over Mother India. On the eve of the controversy, a new public discourse of women qua women in

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colonial India had become ideologically ‘‘sayable.’’ 100 Yet there was nothing inevitable about the mobilization of gender as a salient category of public identity for women. In fact, the political imagining of a collectivity ‘‘women’’ may well have been ‘‘out of its time’’: that is, operating against the grain of the prevailing social circumstances of the time.101 The rhetorical invention of women as a political collectivity, therefore, cannot be taken for granted; the specific conditions that made this political achievement possible need to be explained. This calls for a mode of historical analysis sensitive to the possibilities enabled in highly specific contexts: the logic of the specific conjuncture rather than of the longue durée. Historicist accounts that are based on the presumed unity of the object of study and its linear development over time miss the often discontinuous outcomes produced in the unfolding of political processes.102 The ideological and material construction of women’s sexual difference with men, especially in the context of the colonial constitution of society, was never enough to produce the kind of ‘‘objective’’ interests that could supersede other claims on women’s solidarities. To be sure, the decade preceding the publication of Mother India saw self-conscious attempts on the part of women’s organizations to constitute women as a putative political collectivity in the public realm. Yet these attempts were always embedded in the competing claims of sectional differences of religion, caste, kinship, class, region, occupation, ideology, and so on. The normative upper-caste, middle-class, and Hindu framing of the women’s question was never entirely absent from even the avowedly nonsectarian women’s organizations. Activist women frequently made the case for reforms for women by appealing to the supposedly exalted status of women in an ancient Vedic past. They appealed to a version of the past that was constituted both as Hindu and Brahminical or upper caste.The decline for women from this supposedly glorious past was frequently attributed to the results of the ‘‘foreign’’ invasions of Muslims. Adding to these limits in the rhetoric of women’s reform was the uneven ‘‘modernization’’ of middle-class Hindu and Muslim women: this enabled some Hindu women to entertain notions of the ‘‘backwardness’’ of their Muslim sisters.103 The possibility of constructing alliances across these differences was certainly not inevitable. The early struggles to constitute a politics around the shared concerns of women across class, religious, regional, and national differences provide a preview of the issues at stake. The All India Women’s Conference, created just before the publication of Mother India, represented the most self-conscious and ambitious experiment, linking women’s organizations in both British India and the

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princely states, in fashioning a putative solidarity for women around issues of concern to them as women.104 In preparing for the first national conference of the aiwc, Margaret E. Cousins took special pains to secure adequate participation of Muslim women and contacted Muslim women’s organizations to join the conference.105 The second annual conference of the aiwc in 1928 in Delhi, noted for an especially large participation by Muslim women, demonstrated the success of this strategy. The leading Urdu journals for Muslim women had welcomed the new all-India organization. Still, when the female editor of Nur Jahan (Amritsar), one of the Muslim women’s journals of the time, criticized the Delhi conference, some Hindu women in the aiwc worried that it might have a negative impact on the goal of drawing more Muslim women to the conference.106 The attempts to construct a collective politics of women were always, at best, an extremely fraught and tenuous political exercise. The all-India ambitions of the aiwc were likewise almost derailed by the regional self-assertions of provincial women’s organizations. For example, the Bengal Women’s Education League held its own conference a month after the first meeting of the aiwc at Poona; the women involved with the league objected to Bengal being included as one of the constituent conferences of the aiwc, wishing instead to be affiliated only as equals. The difficulties over including Bengal as a constituent unit of the aiwc were eventually resolved when a separate constituent conference of women was formed in Bengal.107 The biggest challenge for the development of a women’s movement, as one of the organizers of the aiwc put it, was to teach women to think ‘‘nationally,’’ that is, to make them think beyond the needs of their family and caste, their province, and the professional class to which they belonged. She recommended that the aiwc focus on the problems of the daughters of peasants and of agriculturalists because their problems were ‘‘much the same wherever they live’’; this would teach the privileged delegates at the conference, she believed, to think beyond their own narrow experiences.108 Neither the propaganda nor the membership of the aiwc ever reached much beyond the lower middle classes in urban and mofussil (district-level) towns in India. Nevertheless the early history of the aiwc registered some of the hard ideological work necessary before women could be imagined as a political constituency. The organizational structure of the aiwc was designed precisely to produce the very constituency on behalf of whose concerns the conference was founded. The numerous constituent conferences held in preparation for the annual conference, the travel by delegates from all over the country to the annual conferences, and the closed-door, single-sex proceedings of the conference were all aimed at

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formulating a shared politics of women. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the first organizing secretary of the aiwc, noted with satisfaction that the conference was creating in women a ‘‘desire for united action’’ and the ‘‘realization of the truth that womanhood is one.’’ 109 The limited evidence from individual delegates who attended the annual conferences reveals the often small and mundane steps that were taken in this direction. Two friends, a Hindu and a Muslim, attending the third annual aiwc in Patna, requested explicitly to be accommodated together in the arrangements made for the delegates to the conference. The simple request for joint accommodation, against the background of the exclusivity typically practiced in the upper-caste and elite Hindu household, offers a brief glimpse of the alternative social space that was being produced in the conference.110 The decision of the aiwc to eschew party politics was similarly made with the express aim of minimizing ideological conflicts between women and thus promoting the ‘‘unity of women’’ as a ‘‘precious factor’’ in Indian life.111 These efforts, however, always existed alongside other countervailing tendencies. The early-twentieth-century context of the hardening of several supposedly homogeneous and monolithic group identities in India worked against the kind of cross-community politics being attempted within women’s organizations. The terrain on which group identities were typically formed had complicated and contradictory implications for a collective politics of women. Numerous social histories of the period have demonstrated that discourses of domestic and gender reform, which were often quite explicit in their goal of disciplining women, animated a wide range of social projects in the period: from movements of national regeneration to caste reforms and the mobilization of exclusive and monolithically conceived religious identities that produced a virulent distancing of those defined as outside their communities.112 Not surprisingly, as a period when a number of different political identities were being consolidated and mobilized in the public realm, public discourse at the local, regional, and national levels was saturated with prescriptions for reforming the position of women. Their implication for a politics based on a critique of gender hierarchies was at best ambiguous. For example, the impact of ‘‘Sanskritization,’’ the process by which intermediate and low-caste groups adopted upper-caste practices to strengthen their claims for upward mobility, frequently entailed fresh restrictions on women as a marker of the higher social status claimed by the group.113 As a result, certain lower-caste and poor women who often enjoyed a greater flexibility in domestic arrangements found their options limited by a new emphasis on marriage and monogamy. The ‘‘modernization’’ of caste identities could likewise often have ambiguous

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implications for women at various levels of the caste hierarchy.The social reforms among the matrilineal Nairs of Malabar offer an especially interesting example.114 The matrilineal households of the Nairs, reconstituted under colonial rule, came under attack by urban middle-class Nair reformers. The structure of the jointfamily household often disadvantaged individuals in relation to familial claims on rural landed property. The fact that rallying around the banner of caste reform also served to elide the challenge posed by the social divisions of classes and subcastes within the community only provided further grist for the mill of urban middle-class Nair reformers. However, in attacking their matrilineal traditions as ‘‘backward’’ and in need of change, the reformers championed a nuclear patriarchal family form. Women who once enjoyed certain rights in the matrilineal household found these only further marginalized in the process of reform. The colonial constitution of various group identities thus not only complicated the prospects of a cross-community politics of women but also had contradictory effects on the position of women. At the same time, however, the context of overlapping identity formations meant that group mobilizations were inevitably vulnerable to the possibility of different political combinations that threatened to destabilize the group. The mobilization of ostensibly monolithic political blocs was thus always unstable. The competing pulls of national, linguistic-regional, religious, ethnic, caste, labor, peasant, and gender solidarities always threatened to unravel such mobilizations.115 This was true of even the more aggressive forms of religious sectarianism (labeled pejoratively as ‘‘communalism’’ to distinguish it from a mainstream political nationalism) that erupted with particular virulence in the politically charged decade of the 1920s.116 Scholars have drawn attention to the use of gendered discourses and of gendered stereotypes of the ‘‘other’’ to secure a communal common sense that Hindu-Muslim antagonism trumped all other forms of social divisions in society.117 Yet the impact of the crosscutting pressures of caste, class, gender, linguistic, regional, and national identities even on such monolithic Hindu or Muslim mobilizations was seldom given in advance: it was shaped instead by the political exigencies of particular social contexts. Here the lessons of P. K. Dutta’s exemplary study of a popular Hindu communal mobilization in 1920s Bengal bear rehearsing as a representative anecdote. Reports of the alleged abductions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas (ruffians) enjoyed considerable currency in Bengal in the early twentieth century. These reports, which had their origins among low-caste Rajbansis of the Rangpur district in Bengal, became the basis for a broader Bengali Hindu provincial formation in

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the 1920s.118 The pioneering role of Rajbansi caste associations in developing the abduction narrative was prompted by a variety of local political exigencies that included attempts by Rajbansi elites to assert their domination within the community and to secure upward mobility for the Rajbansi caste through alliances with upper-caste Hindu communal groups. The abduction stories from Rangpur, in turn, provided upper-caste Hindu activists in metropolitan centers like Calcutta with an opportunity to link up with a low-caste group in fashioning a single communal Hindu identity. The momentum of the movement against abductions eventually passed from the hands of local Rajbansi caste associations to a separate organization, the Women’s Protection League (1924), which was spearheaded by a broad coalition of Hindu lawyers and journalists in the province. The local campaign originating with the low-caste Rajbansis was thus recast as a broader Hindu communal bloc; but the efficacy of the translation of the anti-abduction campaigns into a national bilateral example of Hindu-Muslim antagonism also remained limited because of the campaign’s specifically regional or parochial aspects. The communal trope of abductions retained a strongly regional dimension in Bengal. The campaign against the alleged abduction of Hindu girls by Muslim goondas took place against the background of a bitter parochial contest over the meaning of Bengali identity. The debate was provoked by the Hindu-Muslim political compromise of the recent Bengal Pact (1923). The pact, which reserved a significant percentage of seats for Muslims in the Calcutta Corporation and in the provincial administration, was in stark contrast to the failure to arrive at a similar political compromise at the national level. The anti-abduction campaign was directed in part against the Bengal Pact’s inclusion of Muslims in an expanded understanding of what it meant to be Bengali. The attempts to nationalize the anti-abduction campaign within a monolithic all-India construction of Hindus came up against this specifically Bengali dimension of the campaign.The All India Hindu Mahasabha (1915), the leading national Hindu communal organization, briefly took note of the anti-abduction campaign in Bengal.119 At the annual session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Benares in 1923, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya referred to the abductions in eastern Bengal and linked them to other stories about the alleged violation of Hindu women during the outbreak of communal riots in other parts of the country, especially in the Punjab. Yet neither the national Hindu Mahasabha nor the local Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha, whose membership was identified largely with non-Bengali ‘‘upcountry’’ Hindus, was in the end adequate for a campaign that centered on reclaiming Bengali iden-

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tity as Hindu. Hence the anti-abduction campaign in Bengal was spearheaded by a separate organization, the newly formed Women’s Protection League, which was distinct from both the national and provincial Hindu Mahasabha. The recognition of the multiple pressures on the communal narrative of abductions in Bengal, and their disparate political agendas, provides a useful reminder of the fluid political context whereby discrete group identities could be assembled as well as disassembled in a variety of ways in response to the simultaneous pressures of overlapping claims of identification. Furthermore, in this case at least, the gender dimension of the trope of communal mobilization to stabilize differentiation along religious sectarian lines proved to be a double-edged sword. The Women’s Protection League in the 1920s was actively engaged in producing sectarian difference between Hindus and Muslims, but in the course of dealing with the actual effects of abduction, the league came up against biases and prejudices that cut across both Hindus and Muslims. The focus on the abducted women themselves, for example, raised awkward questions about the meaning of women’s consent, the complicity of the family in the abductions, and the rehabilitation of the ‘‘rescued’’ woman. The anti-Muslim narrative of the abduction of Hindu women was susceptible to an expanded agenda that recognized the ubiquity and inequity of gender differentiation both within and across the two communities.120 On the whole, the hardening of Hindu-Muslim sectarian politics were clearly detrimental to a gender-based politics of women, but as Dutta’s study illustrates, even sectarian religious mobilizations in certain circumstances revealed the possibilities for alternative forms of collective solidarities that challenged the binary communal common sense. Even seemingly monolithic ideological mobilizations fissured sufficiently to permit the possibility of alternative appropriations. Hence the possibility of different political solidarities was never given in advance; they were the contingent outcome of specific political processes in particular socio-historical contexts. How and why numerous sectional divisions could be negotiated in specific circumstances to produce temporary alliances and unities, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar reminds us, are questions whose answers lie in the working of politics.121 The working-class consciousness that Chandavarkar identifies in the labor militancy of the 1920s and 1930s in Bombay provides a useful analogy for exploring the political possibilities of cross-sectional solidarities. The Bombay millworkers, despite various occupational and sectional polarizations that divided the working class, disclosed a strongly held working-class consciousness in the strikes of the 1920s and 1930s. However, the conventional definition of ‘‘the working class’’ as

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an urban factory proletariat has to be expanded to take into account the very different labor-force formation in colonial India: one that included powerful links between factory proletarians, casual workers, rural migrants, agrarian labor, artisans, ‘‘tribals,’’ and dalits. By the same token, therefore, the workplace did not serve as the primary site where Bombay millworkers forged their solidarity for collective action. Their class formation was fueled instead by the interplay between the social relations of the workplace and the social organization of the neighborhood. The neighborhood emerges as an arena both where the political solidarities of workers were forged and where their divisions and differences were most starkly manifest. The formation of a working-class consciousness, then, was the outcome of a political process shaped by particular exigencies. To account for the formation of a collective consciousness as women on the basis of their gender calls for a parallel shift in the conventional definitions and analytical tools of feminist scholarship to address the particular conditions of late colonial India. The lesson of this shift in analytical perspectives is precisely this: the formation of a collective identity as women was a specifically political achievement (rather than a historical inevitability) whose conditions of possibility need to be explained. Just as the working-class consciousness disclosed in the labor militancy in Bombay was neither ‘‘the natural outcome of popular culture’’ nor the ‘‘reflex of the specific character of production relations,’’ the collective identity of women likewise had no ‘‘real essence’’ of its own: it was always a political achievement facilitated by the convergence of particular social forces. The collectivity ‘‘women,’’ like the ‘‘working class,’’ encompassed within it several different identities that could be realigned potentially in any number of ways either by the supposedly primordial ties of caste, kinship, and religious loyalties or by the divisions of class, occupation, and ideology. The cohesion of women as a gender-based collectivity was thus always ‘‘politically constituted, and as such [was] contingent, sometimes transient and even evanescent.’’ 122 The construction of women as a collectivity based on gender was a political achievement that was necessarily contingent and was enabled by the tools made available in a specific historical context. The importance of the particular forces at play in the controversy over Mother India becomes evident by way of comparison with the response to a collection of short stories by the popular Hindi writer Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘‘Ugra,’’ published the same year as Mayo’s Mother India. Ugra’s Chaklet (Chocolate) (1927) raised something of an uproar among the Hindi-speaking literati for its sexually explicit material. It provoked defensive middle-class responses about upholding

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the norms of sexual respectability.123 The collection’s title story, which had first appeared a few years earlier in a Calcutta journal, alluded to a slang term for young boys who were the objects of lust in same-sex liaisons. The stories of homosexual practices recounted in Ugra’s collection were purportedly drawn from real-life incidents prevalent in several all-male settings in urban areas. The ostensible aim of Ugra’s book was to condemn such practices, but its great commercial success alarmed the self-appointed guardians of public morality, who accused Ugra of merely exciting and titillating the reading public. A variety of different groups in India, from communalists to mainstream nationalists and organized women, periodically expressed anxieties about the defense of community standards of sexuality and morality against a variety of perceived internal and external threats. Many of these same forces came together in the debate about Ugra’s Chaklet to launch a campaign directed against the market for such ‘‘filthy literature.’’ The concern of Ugra’s critics, who spoke on behalf of the norms of sexual ‘‘respectability,’’ was to defend the community from the challenge of a popular marketbased print culture. Here the collective interests of the community remained the stable point of reference in the uproar against the popular taste for sexual material. The Chaklet flap helps to underscore the contingencies that determined the particular contours of the more famous controversy: Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. The expanded scale of Mayo’s intervention brought a range of different social forces and concerns into play in the response to her book that went beyond the defense of collective community norms. Certainly Mayo’s portrait in Mother India of an oversexed Hindu culture, manifest in practices such as early marriage, masturbation, and homosexuality, drew its own fair share of defensive responses about the sexual respectability of indigenous society; but the controversy snowballed into much more than merely a cultural defense of the community. Mayo’s indictment of Indian political aspirations was made on the grounds of modernity; nationalist responses to Mother India had to reclaim precisely the same terrain— the legitimating cloak of modernity—to prove the nation’s fitness for self-rule. Here the familiar cultural-nationalist assertion of a ‘‘different but modern’’ culture, whereby a selective modernization was legitimated via the symbolic identification of women with the inner essence or the cultural authenticity of the nation, was no longer sufficient to stake India’s claim among the modern nation-states of the world.124 Whereas hitherto women had been mobilized to assert the nation’s cultural difference, the new political stakes for the nation created an opening for a different mobilization of women. The situation was further complicated by an interwar process of political devolution that had brought various claims of caste,

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class, and religious identities emphatically to bear on the claims of a mainstream nationalism to speak for the people as a whole. The subsequent move toward a reconstituted conception of the political community and of political subjectivity created an opening for women—rather than the community—to emerge as the point of reference in the controversy. The imperialist discourses that had formerly given currency to the view of Indian women only as victims came under similar pressure from the social forces that converged in the Mayo controversy. The recent conjunction of women’s enfranchisement in the United States, Britain, and India presented a challenge to the benevolent paternalism of colonial rule. The postsuffrage women’s organizations staked out a role for themselves in the debate on the social and political conditions in India. Even when some British feminists rallied around Mayo’s sensational exposé of the position of women in India, their campaign no longer served as a defense of the colonial status quo in India. The provocation of Mother India to the humanitarian and reforming zeal of organized women, as well as of Labour and League of Nations internationalists in Britain, only raised the stakes for the colonial state and its responsibility for the social conditions—especially the position of women—in India. These metropolitan attempts to renew and expand the understanding of colonial rule as a ‘‘trusteeship,’’ which called for state support for the protection of women and children in India, inevitably came up against the political expediency of the colonial government and the active hostility of colonial officials on the spot.125 The ideological legitimacy of colonial rule took a further beating from the alternative agencies for social modernity represented by organizations such as the American Rockefeller Foundation, which emerged in the controversy as rivals to the civilizing mission of British colonial rule. These were some of the social forces that opened up the controversy over Mother India to the possibility of novel political combinations whose like had not quite been seen before. The following episode in the midst of the controversy over Mother India, however, serves as a reminder of the fraught conditions for new cross-community political solidarities in colonial India. The Fortieth Annual Indian National Social Conference was held in Madras in December 1927 with the dual agenda to support legislation against child marriage and to protest against Mayo’s Mother India. ‘‘The two most important features of the conference,’’ according to the Indian Social Reformer (Bombay), were ‘‘the predominant part taken by women in organizing it,’’ and ‘‘the presence and participation of men and women of all communities and political parties in its proceedings.’’ 126 However, the participa-

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tion of S. N. Arya, the president of the Madras Non-Brahmin Youth League, soon became the grounds for an acrimonious debate between the organizers of the conference. In supporting a conference resolution on women’s rights, Arya had made favorable mention of Mother India and thanked Mayo for drawing attention to the ill treatment of Hindu women.127 Even though Arya later clarified that his comments referred only to Mayo’s discussion of child marriage and not to her political conclusions, his speech became an occasion to call into question the status of non-Brahmins as a community organization. Arya’s speech at the conference was greeted with loud jeers from the audience, but the press reports disagreed on the extent of the disruption caused by his unpopular speech on the first day of the conference. Muthulakshmi Reddi, the vice president of the Women’s Indian Association and chair of the Reception Committee of the National Social Conference, helped bring the conference to order; she also went on to defend her decision to invite Arya to participate at a conference that was open to all who supported the same social reforms. Reddi, who was also a non-Brahmin, drew on the support of the Non-Brahmin Youth League and the anticaste self-respect movement of Madras in her campaign against child marriage. The objections to her invitation to Arya centered on the nature of the non-Brahmin movement as a whole. The heart of the discussion that followed Arya’s speech was whether the non-Brahmin movement, as a mere negation of Brahminism, constituted a welldefined community of its own. O. Kandasami Chettiar, a local congressman and a member of the Reception Committee, raised objections to Arya’s participation along these lines. He criticized Reddi for issuing an invitation to an organization that was not a legitimate communal organization. ‘‘I regard social reform,’’ he averred, ‘‘as the legitimate work of communal associations.’’ He made a distinction, however, between a ‘‘communal association which aims at the progress of a particular community’’ and a ‘‘communal combination against a particular community.’’ Chettiar favored a ‘‘well-defined community’’ coming together to form an association for its progress, but he opposed a community association formed solely on the basis of political affiliations. The Non-Brahmin Youth League, according to Chettiar, was an example of the latter; it was comprised of ‘‘a number of loosely-knit communities or individuals belonging to these communities’’ whose only ‘‘common bond’’ was anti-Brahminism. Chettiar found an ally in S. H. Shafee Mohammad, a Muslim congressman and a fellow member of the Reception Committee, who also argued that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate community associations had a bearing not only on Arya’s participation at

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the conference but on the nature of ‘‘the so-called non-Brahmin movement’’ as a whole, which was strongest in Madras and Bombay.128 The debate about the non-Brahmin movement foreshadowed similar questions about the nature of the collectivity constituted by women and its relation to other collective identities. The issue of Arya’s participation at the conference was easily resolved, but the question of different kinds of collective political mobilizations was not. Reddi’s critics had argued that organizations like the Non-Brahmin Youth League did not belong in a general social conference that included representatives of only legitimate community associations represented by the ‘‘natural’’ ties of affiliation and ascription. K. Natarajan, the president of the Social Conference, defended Reddi and the status of the Non-Brahmin Youth League as a legitimate community association. ‘‘The attitude of a communal body to other communities,’’ according to Natarajan, ‘‘is not material so long as it has among its objects any of the social reforms advocated by the National Social Conference.’’ 129 Similarly, Reddi insisted, ‘‘In a social conference all parties should find a place whatever their political denomination may be.’’ 130 Ultimately Reddi’s and Natarajan’s defense of the invitation to Arya prevailed; the conference remained open to different types of associations committed to the agenda of social reform. The episode is revealing, nevertheless, about the competing pulls of the ties of ascription and affiliation that characterized the political landscape of late colonial India. The triumph of one kind of collective mobilization over another at any point was determined by the specificities of the social forces at play at that moment. Hence the analytical point of a ‘‘thick description’’ of the controversy over Mother India as it unfolded in the specific postwar conjuncture.The intersection of several overlapping developments produced a controversy whose contours could not be predicted in advance. The terms of the controversy disclose a threshold event that generated various new configurations—alternative visions of community and subjectivity—the political outcomes of which were as yet not determined. Herein lies the significance of reframing the Mayo controversy from the perspective of the reconstitution of the interwar imperial social formation. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the event was not simply part of the everyday logic of the colonial social context. The Mother India controversy, rather, was a disruptive and enabling event that was deeply implicated in the broader reconfiguration of established modes of power in the first half of the twentieth century.

2

Unpredictable Outcome The Trajectory of a Transatlantic Intervention

The editorial notice in the New York Times at the death of Katherine Mayo (1867– 1940), born in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, captured the peculiar paradox of her unevenly digested legacy: ‘‘Time changes perspectives and chills enthusiasms; and a generation has grown up that has hardly heard of Katherine Mayo.’’ 1 By 1940, Mayo had fallen victim to her own phenomenal success. Having become primarily identified with India as the result of an interwar international bestseller, she was cut off from the more mainstream concerns of the domestic and imperial questions of the Progressive Era in the United States.2 The resulting compartmentalization has both impoverished the legacy of Mayo’s career and obscured the full implications of her magnum opus, Mother India. At the time of the publication of Mother India in 1927, Mayo was already a well-established author of several books and articles as well as a seasoned veteran of campaigns designed to shape public opinion and public policy in the United States.3 In the context of her career as a whole, Mayo’s intervention with Mother India appears less as an isolated episode in the history of British-Indian relations than as a lightning rod for the changing global contours of imperialism in the post–First World War period. The future of the colonial administration in India was only the immediate context for Mayo’s intervention. The Government of India Act of 1919 was itself a product of the global dynamics of a changing postwar world. The British members of the so-called Round Table group, an imperial think tank devoted to securing a place for the British Empire in a shifting twentieth-century world, had played a role in designing some of the major provisions of the act.4 The transatlantic context of Mayo’s intervention, itself an indication of the new importance of the United States in debates about the future of British rule in India, was a further signal of the expanded terrain on which the struggle for the legitimacy of British colonialism was now fought. The act of 1919 had put Indian politicians on notice that they were on trial to determine the fitness or otherwise of Indians for self-rule. Built into the act, therefore, was a provision for the appointment of a statutory commission within ten

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years to judge the efficacy of political reforms in India and to make recommendations for the future. Yet the act had already become the target of widespread dissatisfaction in India. Indian politicians called for revisions of the act and for new reforms based on the recognition of Dominion status, that is, self-government on the model of the Dominion colonies, for India within the British Empire. In 1924, elected Indian representatives in the Central Legislative Assembly were already demanding a round table conference, rather than simply a statutory commission, to formulate further constitutional changes for India. At the other end of the political spectrum was conservative British opinion both in Britain and in India that feared the postwar changes had already gone too far in sacrificing imperial interests.5 The consensus of the major political parties in Britain was against the need to concede to any further demands for political advancement in India. The interim measure of a reforms enquiry committee in 1924 did little to resolve the deadlock over the postwar changes in the colonial administration in India. Mayo, with her recent experience of U.S. policy in the Philippines, entered the fray as a self-conscious partisan against the drift of the postwar political reforms in India. Yet Mayo’s contribution, despite her own best intentions, could not help bolster the political status quo in India. On November 8, 1927, at the height of the Mayo controversy, an outgoing Conservative government in Britain announced the appointment of a statutory commission to visit India in 1928, a year before it was originally scheduled, to review the working of the act of 1919 and to make recommendations for the future. The announcement of the commission and the controversy surrounding Mayo’s book, according to the official report of the Government of India for the period 1927–28, were the two chief political events of the year.6 The deliberate exclusion of all Indians from the commission, following closely on the heels of Mayo’s Mother India, was widely interpreted in India as preparing the grounds for a retreat from the commitment in the secretary of state’s announcement of 1917 to ‘‘responsible government’’ in India.7 The protest against the commission, in large part mediated by the response to Mayo’s book, spurred the anticolonial nationalist struggle to new heights. On October 31, 1929, the viceroy of India, with the approval of the Labour government in Britain, declared that ‘‘Dominion status’’ was the implied goal in the secretary of state’s 1917 promise of ‘‘responsible government’’ in India.8 To be sure, the viceroy’s announcement provoked a storm of controversy in Britain, and successive British governments continued to resist naming self-government as the stated goal of the constitutional reforms for India. By the end of the decade, however, British official policy had been compelled to recognize that the clock could no longer be turned back re-

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garding the ‘‘devolution of power by stages’’ in India. The audacious intervention to the contrary by an American woman was not enough to bolster the legitimacy of an unreformed British colonialism in India. The transatlantic making of Mayo’s book, itself a sign of the times, made her pro-British contribution less than an unambiguous triumph for British colonial rule in India. Mother India, indeed, bore all the traces of its making in the different registers of both British and U.S. imperialism in the early twentieth century. The added American component of Mayo’s intervention had an unstable outcome, at best, for the ideological legitimacy of British colonial rule in India. The irony of the dual making of Mother India was precisely this: Mayo’s sensational exposé of the social backwardness of India had a tremendous impact on U.S. and international public opinion, but it did not necessarily redound to the credit of the existing political system in India. The failure of Mother India to bolster the political status quo in India did not rest on the weakness of Mayo’s case. Rather, it rested on the unstable outcome of Mayo’s transatlantic investment in a combined Anglo-U.S. imperialism.

the transatlantic context How did a publishing event by an American woman become a tipping point for debates about the nature of British colonial rule in India? The trajectory of Mayo’s career reveals something of the wide network of social structures that bore on the transformative impact of her intervention. Mayo’s early friendship with Oswald Garrison Villard, the famous editor of the New York Evening Post and the Nation (New York), for whom she had served as a research assistant, had helped launch her career as a writer and establish her connections in the world of New York’s publishers and magazine editors.9 Yet her political views, and, in particular, her attitude toward the ‘‘Hindus’’ of India, had taken shape even earlier. The inspiration for much of Mayo’s early writings on Indians had come from her eight-year stint (starting in 1899) in Dutch Guiana (Surinam) with her father, a mining engineer. Enamored with the way of life in a postemancipation colony that relied on a heavy influx of indentured labor from India, she expressed all the dominant prejudices of colonial society in Surinam in her fictional stories. She peopled her stories with strong and paternalistic whites, loyal and well-tamed blacks, and sly and mysterious ‘‘Hindus,’’ whose alien culture invariably threatened the ‘‘proper’’ ordering of colonial society.10 Disturbed by the ‘‘general tenor of these stories,’’ Villard had advised Mayo not to let her prejudice against the ‘‘Hindus’’ dominate her work: ‘‘There surely must be,’’ he wrote to Mayo in 1911, ‘‘many sweet and

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beautiful traits about these Hindoos.’’ 11 The political differences between Mayo and Villard on a number of issues mounted over the years, leading eventually to a temporary breakdown of their relationship during the height of the controversy over Mother India. Mayo’s former mentor was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), a member of the Anti-imperialist League, a pacifist during the First World War, and already in the 1920s a strong advocate in the United States for the Indian nationalist cause.12 In contrast, Mayo was a proud member of the Society of Mayflower Descendants who defined her own mission as a defense of a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment at home and of Anglo-U.S. colonialism and imperialism abroad. Many of the themes that later came to dominate Mayo’s public career were evident in the first major campaign that she undertook on behalf of the creation of a state police force in New York. Once again, it was Villard who had provided Mayo with her break as a crusader by introducing her and her longtime domestic partner and collaborator, Moyca Newell, to the Committee for the State Police in New York. This group, formed specifically to wage a campaign for the creation of a state police force, was tied to the Chamber of Commerce in New York. The police force for New York was to be modeled on the newly created Pennsylvania State Police, which itself had drawn inspiration from imperial sources: the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Royal Canadian Mounted Force, U.S. military adventures in Cuba and the Philippines, and the constabularies set up in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, as Gerda Ray has argued, the role of a powerful military to defeat Native Americans and to subjugate colonial populations abroad provided an attractive model for a police force to handle domestic labor problems that were associated increasingly with the influence of ‘‘foreign’’ immigrant populations.13 The Pennsylvania force, created in 1905, had already accumulated a controversial record in the state and was much maligned by labor and socialist groups as an instrument of employers used for breaking up strikes. As part of the campaign for the state police in New York, Mayo’s contribution in three books and almost two dozen articles was to provide an alternative glorified image of the Pennsylvania State Police through semifictionalized stories of its accomplishments. The first of these books, Justice to All: The Story of the Pennsylvania State Police (1917), even contained an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt and was distributed to every New York State legislator before the passage of the state police bill.14 The campaign for the state police in New York acquired a new professionalism and took a new direction under the guidance of Mayo and Newell. The important role that Mayo and Newell played in the controversial cam-

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paign for the state police, leading eventually to the passage of the New York State Police Bill in 1917, won for them an important place in the early-twentieth-century movement for the creation of state police forces all over the United States.15 To be sure, the demand for a state police force was also raised by African Americans and by the naacp concerned about southern lynchings, but the South would not get a state police force until much later than the North.16 Mayo’s and Newell’s contribution was to expand the demand for the state police in New York from its narrow origins in, and close identification with, the Chamber of Commerce to a broader bipartisan upper- and middle-class coalition. This was accomplished in large part through Mayo’s sensationalist writings, which played on popular racial and sexual anxieties, to paint a positive picture of the Pennsylvania force as protectors from rural crime.17 Mayo’s vivid and graphic accounts demonstrating the impotence of the existing state machinery in combating the invasion of foreign immigrants into the rural countryside and of the northward migration of African Americans widened support for the New York state police bill.18 She invoked the twin specters of male immigrant hordes and of ‘‘Negroes,’’ who lacked ‘‘manly’’ self-control, on the one hand, and of defenseless Anglo-Saxon women in need of protection, on the other. Her writings paid tribute to the ‘‘manliness’’ of the members of the Pennsylvania State Police who upheld law and order and civilization itself: a far cry from the labor and socialist characterization of them as ‘‘brutal Cossacks’’ and strikebreakers.19 The popularity of racist and anti-immigrant views in the early twentieth century in the United States buffered Mayo’s writings from widespread public controversy. In fact, the only major source of public embarrassment for Mayo and her publishers came from the anti-Catholic tenor of some of her stories, especially of ‘‘The Honor of the Force’’ (1918), which was first published in the Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia). The story faced a barrage of criticism from Catholics and almost provoked a lawsuit against Mayo. In the absence of full corroboration of the details of her story, Mayo’s publishers, Houghton Mifflin and Co., persuaded her to drop the offending passage about a Catholic priest in the version of the story that was later reprinted in her book The Standard Bearers (1918).20 Mayo’s crusade on behalf of the state police in New York encapsulated her signature contributions to a variety of causes in the early twentieth century: imperialist sympathies, pro-business advocacy, anti-immigrant or ‘‘nativist’’ sentiments, religious prejudice, a heavy dose of Anglo-Saxonism, and the mobilization of a daunting array of political and media connections in support of her public campaigns. The political networks that had launched Mayo’s public career also motivated

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her interest in British rule in India. Her insistence that Mother India had been written for an American audience, and with U.S. interests in mind, was thus not entirely disingenuous. In the postwar period, indeed, Mayo’s concern had been with promoting better Anglo-U.S. relations through a shared understanding of U.S. and British colonialism. To that end, Mayo and Newell had started the British Apprentice Club in New York in 1921 to provide American hospitality for British seamen.21 Some of Mayo’s supporters, like Lawrence F. Abbot of the liberal magazine the Outlook (New York), which had provided an outlet for Mayo’s writings during the campaign for the state police force in New York, urged her to turn her attention next to Ireland. The ‘‘Irish question,’’ as Abbot wrote to Mayo, was ‘‘the one serious obstacle to a rapprochement between the people of Great Britain and the United States.’’ 22 At the recommendation of powerful friends at the Rockefeller Foundation, however, Mayo became involved in a campaign against self-government in the Philippines. These same friends would later recommend that she turn her attention next to British rule in India.23 In U.S. pro-imperialist circles, like Mayo’s friends at the Rockefeller Foundation, interest in India was motivated as much by the promotion of better Anglo-U.S. relations as by the expansionist drives of a triumphant North American capitalism. The expanded agenda of U.S. pro-imperialist circles, however, did not always sit well with British officials. In the 1920s, for example, the British Foreign Office deliberated between various proposals for promoting propaganda in the United States on behalf of British rule in India. The Foreign Office, perhaps wary of potentially conflicting U.S. interests, had firmly rejected a proposal by Lt. Col. Sir Frank Popham Young that encouraged representatives of American capitalist enterprises to visit India and develop it as a potential field for American investment and industry. Both the Foreign Office in London and the director of public information in India had preferred, instead, an alternative scheme proposed by Col. J. C. Faunthorpe of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., for facilitating trips to India by several popular American journalists, preferably including a ‘‘lady journalist,’’ to write for an American audience a sympathetic account of British achievements in India.24 These differing agendas rubbed up against each other in Mayo’s Mother India with contrary results for British colonial rule. Enter Lionel Curtis, a prominent member of the Round Table group who had played a key role in formulating the Government of India Act of 1919. Curtis began to take a keen interest in Mayo’s writings in the early 1920s, primarily in her campaign to restore U.S. dominance in the Philippines.25 Mayo’s strong indictment of governor Frances Burton Harrison’s policy of ‘‘Filipinization’’ in The Isles of Fear

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figure 3. ‘‘The Isles of Fear’’ (Las ‘‘Islas Del Miedo’’), Philippines Free Press, January 17, 1925. From Alfred W. McCoy and Alfredo Roces, Philippine Cartoons: Political Caricature of the American Era, 1900–1941 (Quezon City: Vera-Reyes, 1985), 188. Courtesy of the Philippines Free Press and Alfred W. McCoy.

(1925), and her support for the reversal of that policy under his successor, Leonard Wood, had done much toward scuttling any talk in the United States of supporting independence proposals for the Philippines.26 She argued that paternalistic U.S. dominance in the islands was necessary to protect the helpless Filipino taos, or peasants, from the corrupt and domineering class of native caciques, or ‘‘politicos.’’ Struck by the parallels between the political situation in the Philippines and in India, Curtis had lobbied successfully for a British edition of The Isles of Fear, to which he wrote the preface. Curtis confided to Mayo that his preface was deliberately dry and moderate in its praise ‘‘in order to conciliate the officially minded class,’’ he explained, ‘‘who I want to read your book.’’ ‘‘A good wine,’’ he wrote to Mayo, ‘‘needs no blush, and my one object is to get the book read by the small circle who are influential in Indian affairs.’’ 27 John Coatman, the new director of public information in India, expressed his gratitude to Curtis for sending him a copy of the Philippines book a few months before Mayo’s own arrival in India. ‘‘I have already used it in my account of the Indian Reforms,’’ Coatman wrote to

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Curtis, ‘‘and it will give me the material for some good argument.’’ 28 While influential circles in Britain and in India digested the implications of The Isles of Fear for British policy in India, Mayo’s own book on India intervened to add a further layer to the debate on the extension of political reforms in India. Yet Curtis and the many British sympathizers of The Isles of Fear who saw a natural ally in Mayo could not have predicted the destabilizing effects of the transatlantic context of Mother India on the political status quo in India.

the burden of modernity The awkwardly combined influence of the different discursive fields of earlytwentieth-century U.S. and British imperialism on Mother India had an unintended consequence: a reconsideration of the role of the British colonial state as an agent of modernity in India. The consequences of Mayo’s dual investment were evident in the ambivalent focus of the book itself. ‘‘Miss Mayo’s original idea,’’ Moyca Newell admitted some decades after the publication of Mother India, ‘‘was a book on the problems of Public Health as seen through the eyes of the League of Nations—but ‘Mother India’ was the result.’’ 29 Throughout the controversy itself, Mayo and Newell preferred to describe the book as a report on public health in India. ‘‘Isn’t it amazing,’’ wrote Newell to one of Mayo’s informants in India soon after the book’s publication, ‘‘that a health report should stir up three continents?’’ 30 The central thesis of the book and the theme for which it would become best known—the abhorrent sexual practices of the Hindus in India—was something of an afterthought. The competing emphases of the book—itself the contingent outcome of an attempt to bring together the legitimating rationales for U.S. and British imperialism—brought the aggressively modernizing discourse of an early-twentieth-century U.S. imperialism to bear on the debate about the nature of the colonial state in India. Mayo’s search for a central thesis for Mother India reveals the awkward contingencies that determined its blurry focus. Immediately upon her arrival in India in December 1925, Mayo had written to Sir Basil Blackett, the finance member of the Government of India, that her intention was to promote greater sympathy in the United States for the British colonial administration in India by countering the negative views that were being spread in the United States by Indian nationalists and their U.S. sympathizers. She wanted to do ‘‘some such work’’ in India, she wrote, as Newell and she had done previously in the Philippines, where they had provided a powerful counterargument against the policy of Filipinization in

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the islands. She wrote that her original plan, which she had discussed with the India Office and with the Health Ministry in London, was to choose some ‘‘nonpolitical and non-controversial’’ field, such as public health, away from the areas typically covered by the political agitators in the United States. Her friends in the United States, whom she identified as George E. Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Victor G. Heiser, one of the directors of the foundation’s International Health Board, had advised her to direct her work ‘‘entirely on [the] lines of public health.’’ Within the field of public health, they had advised her to focus especially on ‘‘cholera rather than plague, because cholera is concerned with people rather than rats.’’ 31 The exclusive focus on cholera, they had suggested to Mayo, could be used for the ‘‘double end’’ of defending British colonial rule and of expanding U.S. commercial and industrial interests in India. In the course of Mayo’s contact with British officials with direct connection to India, however, the original focus exclusively on cholera underwent considerable modification. The case for modifying Mayo’s original thesis reflected important differences in the articulation of early-twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism. The choice of cholera and public health, given Mayo’s connections with the Rockefeller Foundation and her involvement in shaping the discussion of U.S. imperial policy in the Philippines, had not been accidental. By the early twentieth century, public health had come to occupy a unique place in the discourse of U.S. imperialism. The emissaries of North American capitalism, as David Arnold has suggested, were among the most keenly attuned to the value of the emergent discipline of ‘‘tropical medicine’’ as proof of the benefits of a superior ‘‘Western’’ civilization.32 The Rockefeller Foundation, which was at the forefront in promoting campaigns against various diseases and funding research on tropical medicine, had expressly recognized the virtues of public health as a means for expanding the area for U.S. commercial and industrial penetration, whether in the southern states of the United States or overseas in Asia, and for demonstrating the superiority of Western civilization. The mix of domestic and overseas concerns was reflected in the absorption of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission into the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Sanitary Commission was most noted for its campaigns against hookworm in the southern states of the United States as part of a broader initiative to create an efficient labor force for the expanding industrial economy of the North.33 Recognizing Britain’s position at the center of a vast empire, moreover, the foundation also targeted Britain for its philanthropic activities, which included the creation of the London

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School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The broad aim of the foundation, as E. R. Brown has argued, was to promote the physical productivity of labor as well as to break down the cultural resistance of ‘‘backward’’ and ‘‘uncivilized’’ peoples at home and abroad to the penetration of industrial capitalism. The development of tropical medicine as a field in the United States, as well as the impact of the ‘‘germ theory’’ on new public health policies, was consolidated in large part in the context of U.S. involvement in formal overseas colonial rule. The establishment of a U.S. ‘‘sanitary regime’’ in the Philippines, drawing on an elaborate set of practices aimed at isolating infected ‘‘native’’ hosts, had provided a controlled laboratory for advancements in tropical medicine.34 The U.S. public health policies in the Philippines not only maintained strict surveillance over Filipino society but also became the pride of the U.S. imperial achievement. Victor G. Heiser, who was one of the architects of the U.S. public health administration in the Philippines before becoming the director for the East of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, was keenly aware of the United States’ lead in the field of public health in the colonies. ‘‘A few years ago,’’ as Heiser wrote in 1906, ‘‘the medical profession looked to its representatives in India for its research work on all tropical diseases.’’ By the first decade of the twentieth century, he asserted, the U.S. experiment in the Philippines had become ‘‘a monument to American ambition and progressiveness’’ and was beginning to attract ‘‘interest and comment from medical men in all parts of the world.’’ 35 As a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation, Heiser would later be involved in providing assistance for improving the comparatively less scientific and efficient public health administrations in various European colonies, including British India. The Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in public health policy in India from 1916 onward was shaped by the alarming public health situation in India exacerbated by the withdrawal of the colonial state from responsibility for public health, now left to underfunded provincial and local initiatives.36 By contrast, public health policy was the cornerstone of the expansionist interests of earlytwentieth-century U.S. capitalism: it provided the basis for grounding the claims for, and the necessity of, the global dissemination of Western civilization on supposedly more scientific lines. The global interests of U.S. capitalism were an integral part of Mayo’s project in India. Her original idea to focus on the obstacles confronting British public health administration in India, apart from providing a sympathetic understanding of British colonial rule, was also meant to serve the expansionist ambitions of

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U.S. capitalism. Her book on India, for example, was part of a larger ‘‘Oriental’’ survey that had included the Philippines and would be completed, as she confided to Sir John Thompson, the political secretary of the Government of India, with books on China and Japan. Although eventually international events led Mayo to abandon her book projects on China and Japan, she was still writing in 1934 to Thompson of her desire to complete her survey by doing a ‘‘Mother India’’ on China.37 What Mayo had in mind was obviously a similar book that would demonstrate that the causes of all of China’s problems were purely social in nature and could be remedied only with a healthy dose of Westernization administered by an imperial power. In connection with her project on India, moreover, Mayo’s personal connections to the Rockefeller Foundation had brought her into contact, apart from health officials of the League of Nations and British colonial officials, with the representatives of Standard Oil in India. C. F. Meyer, vice president of Standard Oil Company in New York, gave Mayo a letter of introduction to Walter F. Guthrie, manager of Standard Oil in Calcutta, who became one of her valuable informants in India.38 Mayo’s project hoped to strike a delicate balance between the expansionist interests of U.S. capitalism (as represented by Standard Oil, which had once shared personnel as well as physical space with U.S. consular representatives in India) and the interests of British colonial rule in India.39 This double burden, as Vincent and Heiser had assured Mayo, could best be accomplished by demonstrating the obstacles that an intransigent and irredeemably backward Hindu culture posed for British public health administration in India, in particular in the containment of cholera. There was a compelling precedent for such a case in Mayo’s earlier book on the Philippines. Through her discussion of public health management in the Philippines, Mayo had presented a strong case for a reversal of U.S. policy toward the colony. Her book had gone beyond the recently appointed Wood-Forbes Commission in rejecting the policies of Filipinization adopted during the tenure of Governor Harrison (1913–21); at the same time, it also provided support for the Territorial Government Plan on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines.40 Mayo accused Burton of tossing ‘‘his responsibilities, his authority, and with them the good name of America, into the hands of a small native political ring.’’ 41 This Filipino oligarchy, she argued, had dismantled the system of public health service in the island, whose foundations had been laid under Heiser as commissioner of public health in the Philippines (1902–13). Heiser’s public health administration in the Philippines, she believed, had ‘‘challenged the world’s

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admiration.’’ 42 She held the policy of Filipinization directly responsible for the increase in the incidence of diseases such as cholera, smallpox, and dysentery, as well as for the general collapse of the system of education and justice in the islands. Her book therefore hailed the reversal of Harrison’s allegedly reckless policy by his successor Leonard Wood, a personal friend of Mayo’s, who had invited Heiser back to rebuild the American ‘‘sanitary regime’’ in the Philippines. Wood, beleaguered by stiff opposition to his policies in the Philippine Congress and by defenders of the policy of Filipinization in the United States, had written to Mayo that he would ‘‘appreciate tremendously having the Philippine situation written up.’’ Wood would later acknowledge that Mayo’s book had ‘‘done more than [she] realized to help out the situation here.’’ 43 Mayo’s and Newell’s good friend Nicholas Roosevelt wrote one of the most influential reviews of The Isles of Fear in the New York Times Book Review in 1925. Roosevelt recommended that the book—already widely distributed by Mayo’s supporters to senior government officials, including President Coolidge—‘‘should be read by every American Congressman and by all politicians and editors who have occasion to discuss the Philippine Islands.’’ 44 Not surprisingly, Roosevelt, as a close personal advisor to President Hoover on the Philippines, would go on to testify in 1930 before the Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs against a resolution on Philippine independence. Mayo’s discussion of the breakdown of the public health administration in the Philippines and her descriptions of the unsanitary habits of the Filipinos—hailed ‘‘as the most vivid and true picture of the general milieu in which our most important colonial venture is being carried on’’—had provided a powerful basis for legitimating a policy of continued U.S. tutelage in the Philippines before the Filipinos could be declared fit for independence.45 Yet as Mayo would quickly discover in the course of preparing for her book on India, public health did not translate into an equally reliable basis for the ideological justification of the British colonial administration in India. Even though the ‘‘hygienic modality of colonial power,’’ as Nancy R. Hunt puts it, was also a staple of British colonial discourse, its efficacy as a justification for the British colonial administration had become extremely precarious against the background of an increasingly internationalized discourse of public health in the twentieth century.46 By the 1920s, as Radhika Ramasubban has argued, ‘‘the deteriorating public health situation in the absence of sanitary reforms had successively brought India into the glare of international attention.’’ In the context of the ‘‘near-complete abdication by the colonial government of responsibility for intervention, international agencies like the League of Nations and the Rocke-

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feller Foundation’’ had begun to take on an increasing role in public health management in India.47 Mayo thus encountered considerable skepticism from British officials with direct connection to India about her original plan to rest the entire case on behalf of British colonial rule on public health administration in India. The League of Nations officials in Geneva, to whom Mayo had carried letters of introduction from Vincent of the Rockefeller Foundation, were among the first to raise doubts about basing her entire case against India on the public health menace that India posed to the rest of the world.48 At least since the nineteenth century, the British administration in India had itself been under considerable international pressure because of the spread of cholera epidemics from India to Europe. The prevalent image of British India as a ‘‘factory of cholera’’ did not exactly redound to the credit of the colonial administration and to its ability to undertake large-scale preventive measures in India. Throughout the nineteenth century, as various scholars have suggested, sanitary commissioners in India had to overcome considerable obstacles. The preventive work of sanitary commissioners was plagued by a lack of adequate funds, staff, and authority to carry out practical reforms as well as by stiff competition from other representatives of the Western medical community in colonial India.49 The relative failure of British efforts at wide-scale public health administration in India—whether, as scholars continue to debate, because of financial constraints, the political priorities of the colonial state, or indigenous practices and customs— had already come under repeated censure by the international community.50 It thus hardly provided the kind of secure foundation, especially when compared with the interventionist policy of the United States in the Philippines, for Mayo to rest her claims about the modernizing benefits of Western civilization through British colonial rule in India. The modification of Mayo’s original focus on cholera developed in conjunction with her contacts with British officials in India. Colonial officials on the spot were hardly sanguine that Mayo’s focus on public health could by itself be of much help to the British administration. The officials of the Department of Education, Health, and Lands in India, who were expressly enjoined by the India Office to assist Mayo with her project, were nervous about the results of Mayo’s investigations into public health. Since Colonel Graham of the Public Works Committee expected to be away during Mayo’s visit to Delhi, he was anxious that another officer from his department, Lieutenant Colonel Fleming, should interview the ‘‘ladies’’ and take over the duties of looking after them and preparing their itinerary. ‘‘For,’’ as he warned, ‘‘if left on their own they could come to the wrong

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impression.’’ 51 In the meantime, Mayo, who was already sobered by the skepticism of the League of Nations officials in Geneva, let it be known to sympathetic British officials upon her arrival in India that her team was ‘‘most anxious to be advised and guided’’ about the exact focus of her book.52 Several British officials, who were already predisposed to be sympathetic to the general aims of Mayo’s project, were equally eager to introduce her to alternative themes for the central thesis of her book. The idea for what eventually became the central thesis of Mayo’s book—the oversexed culture of the Hindus—came from an officer of the Indian Political Intelligence (ipi). This was a shadowy and nonavowed organization within the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office and shared accommodation in London from 1924 with mi5, the British counterespionage agency. The ipi had been created expressly for the purpose of countering the activities of revolutionaries in the United States and Europe.53 J. H. Adam of the ipi was introduced to Mayo by J. W. Hose, of the India Office, as a companion on board her ship out to India.54 Adam, who was an officer of the North West Frontier Police in India on deputation since 1923 with the Central Intelligence Division on a secret mission to the India Office, became Mayo’s primary British advisor in the making of Mother India.55 She later acknowledged in private the tremendous debt she owed him for providing her with the central argument of her book: ‘‘It was by no accident,’’ she wrote to Adam, ‘‘that you came and gave me that one idea at the beginning of my journey—if I write a general book, write a couple of chapters on this, it makes escape from the point more possible. Shall I make this just a complete bomb—self-contained and exclusive?’’ 56 Mayo found Adam’s ‘‘bomb’’ about the oversexed culture of India—even more than her original idea of an exclusive focus on cholera—exemplary for the purposes of her overall argument: that is, the view that the fundamental causes for all the problems of India were social, rooted in the religious and cultural practices of Hinduism, rather than political or having anything to do with the nature and limitations of an alien and colonial form of government. The eponymous chapter of Mayo’s book on India was meant to bring together its dual focus on both public health and sexuality. It described in detail the allegedly cruel and unsanitary practices of the filthy native dhai, or midwife, who attended the delivery of the weak and stunted offspring of the sexually overused child wives of India. Not coincidentally, the condition of women’s health in India was a particular concern in female medical missionary circles in North America that were the most active in bringing the benefits of modern medicine to Indian

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women.57 The particular argument about the effects of the sexual practices of the Indians was elaborated in parts 1 and 2 of the book. The central thesis was clearly laid out in the first two chapters of part 1. In the first chapter, ‘‘The Argument,’’ Mayo introduced her case thus: The British administration of India, be it good, bad, or indifferent, has nothing whatever to do with the conditions . . . indicated. . . . Take a girl child twelve years old, a pitiful physical specimen in bone and blood, illiterate, ignorant, without any sort of training in habits of health. Force motherhood upon her at the earliest possible moment. Rear her weakling son in intensive vicious practices that drain his small vitality day by day. Give him no outlet in sports. Give him habits that make him, by the time he is thirty years of age, a decrepit and querulous old wreck—and will you ask what has sapped the energy of his manhood?

The second chapter, ‘‘Slave Mentality,’’ spelled out its implications further: The whole pyramid of the Hindu’s woes, material and spiritual—poverty, sickness, ignorance, political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting that subconscious conviction of inferiority which he forever bares and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social affronts—rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life thenceforward. . . . Given men who enter the world physical bankrupts out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at the age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or hold the reins of Government?

In the rest of the book, which included parts 3 to 5, Mayo chose to ‘‘widen the picture, stretching into other fields and touching upon other aspects of Indian life.’’ 58 These included a host of other issues, such as cruelty to animals, the inhuman treatment of ‘‘untouchables’’ by caste Hindus, the obstacles to the development of a broad-based education system in India, the disastrous consequences of the policy of ‘‘Indianization’’ initiated by the political reforms of 1919, and, in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘‘World Menace,’’ the public health risk that the unsanitary practices in India posed to the rest of the world community. The underlying theme of the inherently social nature of all the problems in India— the roots of which were to be traced to the hopelessly unregenerate cultural and

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religious influence of Hinduism—was meant to bring the wide range of topics covered by Mother India together. The hybrid focus of Mother India was the result of the awkwardly connected discursive fields of British and U.S. imperialism. The heady mix of themes recast the loosely held colonial prejudices about the sexual immorality of Hinduism in terms of a supposedly scientific argument about public health in India. The combination of themes in Mother India, despite certain differences in emphasis, resembled Mayo’s The Isles of Fear. Mr. Raniche, an American, was quick to alert his audience to the similarities between the two books at a protest meeting against Mother India in Calcutta.59 The similarity between the two books spurred considerable interest in the shared colonial experiences of the Philippines and India. Dhirendra Nath Roy’s The Philippines and India (1930) was written against this background. Roy’s book began its discussion of the Philippines with a nod toward Mayo’s book in a chapter self-consciously titled ‘‘The Isles of Hope.’’ This title, as Raphael Palma, the president of the University of Manila, wrote in his introduction to Roy’s book, did the Filipinos more justice than the title of Mayo’s notorious book.60 Yet for all their obvious similarities, Mayo’s The Isles of Fear and Mother India played out very differently as a defense of U.S. policies in the Philippines and of British policies in India. The aggressively modernizing case on behalf of colonialism in both books carried an extra political burden for British colonial rule in India: the difficulties of an ostensibly noninterventionist colonial state in wearing the mantle of social modernization’s agent in India. The sprawling subject matter of Mother India, which went beyond the dual focus on public health and sexuality, had already blurred the distinction between the social and political cast of Mayo’s argument. Its emphasis on the social nature of the problems could not mask the book’s explicitly political conclusions. Even reviewers who were not unmoved by Mayo’s descriptions of the social backwardness of India were skeptical of her overreaching in making her case against political reforms in India. So, as one reviewer noted, ‘‘if Miss Mayo had published the first 134 pages of her book by themselves the effect would have been overwhelming.’’ ‘‘But,’’ he added, ‘‘the effect is dissipated by the next 230 [pages],’’ which make it just ‘‘prolonged nagging.’’ 61 Similarly S. R. Das, the law member of the Viceroy’s Council in India, admitted to Lord Irwin that he found much to agree with in the book’s first half: ‘‘These are dreadful things but a friend to India might write them.’’ The latter part of the book, however, convinced him that ‘‘this is a subtle attack on us, intended as a whole (first part and latter part)

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to bring us into disrepute and stop the reforms.’’ The viceroy, upon reading the book, found he was forced to concede Das’s point.62 While Mayo’s overt case against the devolution of political authority to Indians was too obvious to miss, its implications for the existing foundations of the colonial state were not immediately foreseen. The expanded focus of Mother India subjected additional areas of the noninterventionist policy of the colonial state— beyond public health—to international scrutiny. It confronted the ideological justification of British colonialism in India with the contradiction of a socially conservative colonial state, which, in the name of a policy of ostensible noninterference in the social conditions of India, was hard-pressed to live up to its claims as a modernizing social force. Hence even as Mayo’s dual investment in the discursive fields of U.S. and British imperialism had created a sensational potboiler—immediately upon publication it ignited an explosive controversy on three separate continents—Mother India’s devastating exposé of the social backwardness of India posed a peculiar dilemma for the ideological legitimacy of British colonialism. As the controversy over Mother India unfolded, it raised troubling questions about the impotence and, even worse, the intransigence of the colonial state and its ability to be a force for modernizing social change, especially for women, in India. Mayo’s discussion of the sexual excesses of Hinduism touched on hot-button topics such as legislations for raising the age of consent and against child marriage, which were already on the agenda of indigenous social reformers. As such, the book gave sundry social reformers an opportunity to hold up the colonial state’s record in obstructing reforming social legislations, no less than its record in public health administration, as evidence of the failure of British colonialism to be a force for modernizing change in India. The result, not surprisingly, was not to the credit of the colonial administration in India. The apparently fortuitous modification of the original focus of Mayo’s book had not, after all, produced the desired political result. Instead, it had subjected the colonial state to the modernizing gaze and censure of an increasingly critical world community, and the colonial state had come up short. Henceforth even a familiar staple of British colonial discourse—the ‘‘woman question’’—was rendered unstable as a foundation for the ideological justification of the modernizing influence of British colonialism. The increased pressure for the enactment of reforming social legislations for women in India now became the source of a considerable political dilemma for a colonial administration and for officials on the spot who were unwilling to jeopardize colonialism’s alliance with orthodox social forces in India.

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The peculiardilemma that Mother India posed for its British supporters became apparent in the effects of the book’s mobilization by imperialist feminists in Britain. Eleanor F. Rathbone, one of the most influential interwar British feminists, who had been inspired by Mayo’s writings to become a member of Parliament in 1929, used Mother India to launch her own crusade on behalf of Indian women. Rathbone’s initiatives called on the colonial government to take up an expanded notion of imperial ‘‘trusteeship’’ for the protection of the victimized women of India.63 As a committed imperialist, moreover, Rathbone also immediately called for a cheaper edition of Mother India to be made available to the British Labour Party and its supporters, as, she was convinced, they ‘‘badly need the corrective of [Mayo’s] book because of their tendency to espouse self-government everywhere.’’ 64 She herself wrote a favorable review of Mother India for the Women’s Leader and Common Cause (London), the organ of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (nusec), as well as a more extended defense of the book entitled Has Katherine Mayo Slandered Mother India? 65 For Rathbone, the revelations of the plight of Indian women in Mother India were a rallying cry to give the postsuffrage British women’s movement a new purpose in imperial concerns. Yet as Rathbone quickly discovered, the publicity that the book gave to child marriage and other social problems in India also called for a reexamination of the role of the colonial state in India. Rathbone’s reforming zeal awakened by Mother India severely tested her avowed imperialist sympathies. She complained, for example, of the taunts from colleagues in the closely connected circuits of the international women’s movement whose questions went to the heart of the role of the colonial state in India: ‘‘How is it that a century and a half of British rule has done so little to combat these social evils?’’ When attending the League of Nations Child Welfare Committee at Geneva as an assessor, Rathbone’s imperial pride took a direct beating as she ‘‘noted the shoulder-shrugging and whispered comments among the State members of other European nations (especially France and Germany) when the Indian figures concerning child marriage and maternal and infant mortality’’ were discussed.66 In the course of her own post–Mother India involvement in the campaign against child marriage in India, moreover, she was eventually forced to confront firsthand the intransigence of the British colonial state on social reform. The impact of this experience led even Rathbone to begin to question the efficacy of an external and despotic form of government as an appropriate instrument for social reform. By 1931, in fact, she was declaring before the House of Commons that ‘‘there is only one safeguard for any section of people who are differentiated from others, whether by race or creed or colour or sex, and that is the

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safeguard of their full and real participation in the working of self-governing institutions.’’ 67 Although Rathbone was far from being converted to the nationalist cause in India, her crusade on behalf of social reform had raised troubling doubts for her about the modernizing agency of an unrepresentative colonial state. Rathbone’s own book, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (1934), even though inspired by, and covering much the same grounds as, Mother India, took issue with Mayo on one important point: the share of the colonial state for the continued social backwardness of India.68 The Mother India controversy contributed to a new and expanded understanding of the ‘‘white man/white woman’s burden’’ that drew the colonial state in India inexorably into the midst of the debate over India’s ‘‘social’’ backwardness. Contrary to Mayo’s explicit thesis in Mother India, the response to her book implicated the colonial state, as much as indigenous cultures, with responsibility for the social backwardness of India. Henceforth, indeed, the political domain of the colonial state could no longer safely be insulated from the social problems of India. The latter, as the fallout from Mother India demonstrated, now risked exposing the limits of the colonial state as an agent of modernity for the reform of social conditions in India. Reflecting on Mother India in 1931, H. N. Brailsford in the New Republic (New York), a magazine that had avowedly been partisan to the nationalist case during the controversy, summed up the shift in evaluating the book’s political impact: ‘‘Its first effect, alike in England and America, was to set everything Indian in a context of mingled pity and contempt. On further reflection, most of her readers were moved to ask a question which she had not foreseen. If, after a conquest which had lasted for a century and a half, the British in India have done so little to educate her masses, to reform their customs, or to introduce sanitation into their impoverished villages, would anything be lost by a transfer of responsibility, and might not something be gained?’’ 69 Not only had Mother India complicated the understanding of the relation between the domains of the political and the social in British colonial discourse, but it had also raised fundamental questions about the nature of the colonial state. The debates surrounding Mother India laid the grounds for a new discourse about the colonial state: the ‘‘externality’’ of the colonial state, which had once served to absolve it from responsibility for the continued social backwardness of India, now cast a shadow on the very ability of such an alien and unrepresentative state to be a force for modernizing social change.

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the question of self-government Another unexpected consequence of the transatlantic context of Anglo-U.S. imperialism was to challenge the hoary colonial view that despotic rule alone constituted good government in nonwhite colonies. Tested against North American public opinion, which proved more willing to support some measure of self-government in Europe’s colonies, this view was forced into ideological retreat. The price of the close identification of Mother India with British officialdom was to raise doubts in North America about Britain’s good faith toward the Indian political reforms set in motion at the end of the war. The controversy over the book put official colonial policy toward responsible government, as much as the social condition of India, on trial.Widely viewed as official propaganda, therefore, Mayo’s intervention not only poisoned the atmosphere for government initiatives at reforming the colonial administration in India; it also cast a long shadow, especially in North America, on the seriousness of the postwar British commitment to the devolution of power in India. The manner in which the controversy over Mother India played out in North America thus forced a key clarification in British official pronouncements about India: the admission, at least in principle, of political advances toward self-government in India as the ultimate and irreversible goal of British imperial policy. The terms of official British involvement with Mayo’s book demonstrate its vulnerability to being received as British propaganda. When Lord Winterton, the Conservative under secretary of state for India in London, decided that the objectives of Mayo’s project would be affected best ‘‘by quieter means’’ rather than ‘‘full official recognition,’’ he had hoped that Mayo’s book would do its work without arousing suspicion of official involvement.70 The Foreign Office in London had only recently been embarrassed and forced to end its earlier arrangement with their paid propagandist in the United States on behalf of British rule in India. Even though the Government of India maintained the official position that all propaganda work in the United States had been suspended at the end of the First World War, the question of the government’s payment to Rustom Rustomjee, an Indian national who was employed to do propaganda work in the United States, had begun to surface in public. In 1924 the Foreign Office was forced finally to terminate its arrangements with Rustomjee, with only a modest pension to him for services already rendered. His credibility in the United States had already seriously been damaged because his official connections had become widely known. The Hearst publications in

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Boston had connected Rustomjee to the British propaganda machinery in the United States. The Government of India, which until that point had refused to disclose any information about Rustomjee or about the postwar Secret Service Fund attached to the newly created Bureau of Public Information for propaganda work, was forced to admit its connections to Rustomjee in response to questions raised in the Central Legislative Assembly in India.71 The task of official propaganda, complained L. F. Rushbrook Williams, one of the architects of the wartime propaganda carried out by the Central Publicity Board in India, had become extremely complicated as a result of the new postwar legislature in India with its expanded elected Indian element.72 Yet in 1924 Williams, as director of public information in India, was still confident that propaganda work in the United States could continue under a new arrangement that would give ‘‘better value for our money.’’ 73 The success of any new arrangement, as the government’s experience with Rustomjee had demonstrated, would have to lie in ensuring that the official connections remained secret. The trouble with Mother India was that the extent of Mayo’s involvement with British officials was, at best, an open secret.When Mayo, on Adam’s advice, wrote to Winterton that she had decided it was best, contrary to her original intentions, not to submit her manuscript to the India Office for approval before publication, Winterton had immediately concurred.74 Even though Curtis’s friend and fellow traveler with the Round Table group, Sir Valentine Chirol, had vetted the manuscript for Mayo’s British publishers, the only person apparently to have read and approved the entire manuscript before it was sent to the publishers was Heiser of the Rockefeller Foundation.75 This allowed Mayo to disclaim publicly any official patronage from the British government for her project and enabled British officials to deny having provided Mayo with much more than the ordinary courtesies provided to any tourist in India. Even though officials repeatedly responded along these lines to any questions raised in the British Parliament and in the Central Legislative Assembly in India about the nature of official involvement with the book, the government’s response did little to allay popular suspicions.76 The timing of the book’s publication to correspond with the announcement of the statutory commission to investigate the future of political reforms in India provided grist for rumors of official patronage of Mayo’s project. Mayo’s supporters among officials in Britain and India had wanted her book to come out in time to influence the composition of the commission. As a result, Mayo had been under considerable pressure to get the book completed so that, as her supporters in India urged, it could be of ‘‘help in the solution’’ of the proposed commission.

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Newell admitted that she and Mayo were ‘‘working day and night’’ in accordance with ‘‘cabled orders from London to get the job done.’’ 77 The question of the commission’s composition was one of the major issues being deliberated in private in the highest official circles in London and Delhi. The weight of official opinion in India, as expressed in the advice given by the viceroy of India to the secretary of state in 1926, was for the exclusion of all Indians from the commission. The secretary of state for India, the Earl of Birkenhead, was apparently persuaded by the viceroy’s advice. ‘‘I too, now think,’’ he wrote to the viceroy on September 23, 1926, ‘‘that the advantages of having Indians on the Commission are outweighed by the disadvantages.’’ When Mother India was published in the summer of 1927, however, the secretary of state was still of two minds about the composition of the commission. In his private correspondence with the viceroy between March and June 1927, Birkenhead was still weighing the various pros and cons of Indian membership. He wondered, for example, if it might not be ‘‘useful to have [the political] deadlock of Hindu and Muslim members on the Commission,’’ and if its outcome might not be compromised because a ‘‘Commission in which Indians were unrepresented might easily and not very unnaturally be boycotted.’’ 78 The eventual announcement of an ‘‘all-white’’ commission in November 1927 became widely perceived by contemporaries to be a result of Mayo’s recently published polemic against the unfitness of Indians for self-government. There were enough reasons to fuel public suspicions that the purpose of the Simon Commission, as it was called after its chairman Sir John Simon, was somehow connected to Mayo’s Mother India. Mardy Jones, a member of the British Labour Party, had confirmed that a copy of Mayo’s book was distributed to every member of Parliament in Britain just before the discussion of the commission. The press, especially the Indian press, was rife with rumors that the India Office had not only made a substantial payment to Mayo to subsidize her project but had also purchased five thousand copies of the book to be distributed in Parliament.79 Even the international press, including the New York Times and the London Times, could not ignore the widespread speculations about the possible source for the distribution of free copies of the book to members of Parliament. Although the mystery was finally resolved by Katherine Lyttleton’s letter to theTimes, revealing that the book had been distributed by a private individual and not by an official hand, the damage had already been done both to the reputation of the commission and to Mayo’s claims of ‘‘independence’’ as a private American citizen merely interested in social conditions in India.80 The close identification of Mother India with the Simon Commission proved

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extremely difficult to shake off. Birkenhead’s speech to Parliament, outlining the unfitness of Indians to be appointed to the commission, was redolent with the language and spirit of Mayo’s Mother India.81 Labour mps such as George Lansbury complained of the psychological impact of Mother India on members of Parliament, including on members of their own party, during the debate over the commission in the House of Commons.82 Pandit Motilal Nehru, one of the foremost leaders of the Indian National Congress, immediately responded with a speech at the Indian Students’ Hostel in London in which he identified the proposed commission as a pretext merely for confirming Mayo’s conclusions.83 Similarly, when the All India Muslim League (founded in 1906) gathered for its annual meeting, Maulana Muhammad Ali accused the government of subsidizing Mayo to prepare the ground for the Simon Commission.84 Long before the ill-fated commission arrived to an almost total boycott by the major political parties in India, its association with Mother India had already added considerably to its political woes. While critics who were keen on discrediting Mother India naturally fueled accusations about official involvement, their suspicions received some confirmation from Mayo herself. The official line on Mother India was undercut by some of Mayo’s own public pronouncements. Ignoring her disclaimer of official involvement that was printed in the foreword to Mother India, Mayo committed a major political blunder by later acknowledging in a public speech her tremendous debt to the British government, without whose help, she now admitted, she could not have written her book. Mayo’s admission not only embarrassed British officials but also cost Mayo their full cooperation for her subsequent books on India.85 The newly created Bureau of Public Information in India, which was at the mercy of the elected Indian majority in the Central Legislative Assembly to vote funds annually for its continued existence, was the hardest hit by Mayo’s revelation. Coatman, whose meeting with Mayo in his official capacity as director of the bureau was revealed in the course of an investigation into the nature of official involvement with Mayo, tried to rescue the situation by admitting to having discussed only the political situation in the North West Frontier with Mayo. Burned by the experience, however, he recommended that henceforth any such meetings with visiting journalists take place unofficially.86 Mayo herself was forced to be much more circumspect in the course of producing her sequels to Mother India. Although Hugh MacGregor, the information officer at the India Office in London in 1935, thought it expedient to continue to assist Mayo, he sympathized with the nervousness of the bureau as well as of British officials in New York and London about extending any further coopera-

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tion to Mayo. Given the nature of her work, however, MacGregor concluded that, at least for the India Office, it was much safer to continue to play a role in Mayo’s projects rather than to leave her to her own devices. MacGregor therefore first ‘‘lectured’’ Mayo for her blunder in referring to government help for Mother India, and then, as a precondition for his office’s continued support of her work, he ‘‘obtained from her the promise that in no circumstances will references again be made to official sources of help.’’ 87 While none of Mayo’s subsequent books drew the kind of scrutiny to which Mother India was exposed, the persistent rumors about Mayo’s involvement with official British propaganda continued to dog the reception of Mother India. The representatives of both the British government and the Government of India found themselves on more than one occasion called on to deny official involvement with Mother India. Even Mayo’s British publishers, Jonathan Cape, weighed in with a letter to the Times that the company had had no dealing with officials or any political body before accepting Mayo’s manuscript for publication.88 This had little weight with Mayo’s detractors, who persisted in linking British officialdom to her project. John Jesudason Cornelius represented this point of view succinctly in his review of the book in Current History (New York). He remained convinced that the ‘‘India Office—which seldom interests itself in every Tom, Dick and Kate touring in India’’—had gone out of its way to assist Mayo. He echoed many of Mayo’s critics in concluding that ‘‘though the hand be that of Katherine Mayo, the voice is that of the British bureaucrat.’’ 89 The repeated denials that such charges forced on the British and Indian governments were in themselves a testimony to the mixed results of their cultivation, however circumspect, of Mother India. One subtle consequence of this obsessive focus on official British backing for Mother India was that Mayo’s connections to the Rockefeller Foundation, outside a few critical circles in the United States, never attracted the same degree of suspicion.90 The extra political baggage of Mayo’s association with British officialdom extracted a high price on British policy toward India in the 1920s and 1930s. Mayo’s hostility toward any devolution of political power was certainly no secret to those who had come into any extended contact with her.When E. C. Carter, the former American secretary of the National Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca) in India, who had earlier helped Mayo with her book That Damn Y (1920), heard about her trip to India, he was reluctant to give Mayo letters of introduction to Gandhi and his other friends in India. Carter suspected from the start that her proposed book on India would end up being simply ‘‘pro-British’’ instead of ‘‘pro-

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humanity.’’ 91 Even British officials who were sympathetic to Mayo’s pro-British sympathies expressed some misgivings about her extreme political views. The lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, Sir William Marris, who was one of her early contacts from the Round Table group in India, harbored serious reservations about the direction of her investigations. He expressed his concern about Mayo to her secretary and friend Harry Field. Field in turn tried to warn Mayo of the impression she was creating among some British officials in India: [The lieutenant governor] is really perturbed about you, dear, he says that you appeared to them all, here, to be like a good hound on a scent running it down in a splendid manner . . . or like an excellent barrister preparing a brief . . . against India. He couldn’t give any viewpoint against you except ‘‘playing cricket’’ and ‘‘it is their country and they have a right to rule it.’’ He said that many of your questions pointed to a preconceived opinion . . . and all lead in one way.92

Not surprisingly, the circle of officials with connections to the Round Table group, who made up some of Mayo’s initial contacts in India, were the first to raise the alarm about her hostility toward any political reforms in India. While critical of nationalist demands for further political reforms, they were equally wary of Mayo’s complete repudiation of involving Indians in the upper reaches of the administration of the country. Hence at least some in the extended circle of Round Table sympathizers also recognized, like Marris, that Mayo’s views put even the precarious official promise of reforms in the act of 1919 in jeopardy. The implications of Mayo’s views should have cautioned British officials who put their weight behind her project. The identification of the ‘‘official hand’’ in Mayo’s attempts to discredit the reforms of 1919 would come back to haunt the official British propaganda machinery. Even though the book’s enormous popularity would suggest that the British got a big bang for their pounds with Mayo’s Mother India, the officials most responsible for monitoring colonial propaganda, especially in North America, were far less optimistic about the book’s impact. British consular officials in the United States, who had been asked along with the British Library of Information in New York to help promote the book’s circulation across the country, manifested repeated concerns about whether the book’s massive popularity had actually translated into greater sympathy for British colonial rule in India. They expressed considerable pessimism in their official correspondence about the outcome of the public meetings that were held in many cities across the United States to debate Mother India. ‘‘Interest in Miss Mayo’s book ‘Mother India,’ ’’ Gerald Campbell,

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the British consul general in San Francisco, reported in 1928, ‘‘shows no signs of abating, and the subject matter provides a topic for addresses of every kind in Church and Women’s Club circles.’’ 93 Yet, as Campbell’s assessment of the public debates held on the West Coast suggests, he did not consider the book’s popularity an unmixed blessing. The book’s identification with the position of the Government of India meant that debates over Mayo’s contribution, instead of focusing on the details of the social backwardness of India, inevitably turned into debates about the direction of colonial policy toward India. So, for example, when Charles Rowell was asked to chair a debate on Mother India on March 27, 1928, at the Scottish Rite Hall in San Francisco, he turned automatically to Campbell to recommend a speaker to represent the ‘‘British government side’’ in the debate. Herein lay the catch. As Campbell reminded Rowell, ‘‘The less the Government of India is brought into it all the more clearly is attention focused on domestic details with which Miss Mayo deals.’’ 94 When the debates became a referendum on colonial policy toward India, as the reports from North American consular officials indicate that they often did, the American audience tended inevitably to favor the ‘‘Indian’’ side and demonstrate support for the extension of self-government, however gradually, in India. At another meeting in San Francisco on May 8, 1928, on the question ‘‘Are the Statements in Mother India True or False?’’ Cyril H. Cane reported that the audience voted two to one against Mother India: 355 votes were cast on the negative side and only 127 in favor.95 Angus Fletcher of the British Library of Information was sufficiently alarmed to report to the India Office that these debates were ‘‘having considerable success in reviling British rule in India.’’ ‘‘On several occasions,’’ he complained, ‘‘they have gained the sympathy of big majorities in audiences that filled large public halls.’’ 96 Even though Fletcher felt confident that on the East Coast at least ‘‘the indignants [sic] would not have it all their own way in a public meeting,’’ the reports of meetings on the East Coast were not any more reassuring. The British consular representative in New York, for example, reported that at the Town Hall meeting in New York City on February 14, 1928, the discussion about the book quickly turned into a debate that pitted Katherine Mayo’s credibility against that of M. K. Gandhi. The result was that the audience of approximately six hundred people gave a much bigger round of applause to the anti-Mayo side led by Syed Hossain than to P. W. Wilson, who led the pro-Mayo side.97 The strange irony that the book’s popularity represented for the British propaganda machinery in the United States was captured in a telling comment made by one speaker at a public meeting in San Francisco: ‘‘The Rockefeller In-

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stitute,’’ he claimed in an uncanny coincidence, ‘‘with its army of doctors and research students could do more for India than all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, if they were only permitted to do so.’’ 98 However much Mayo and her friends at the Rockefeller Foundation may have intended for the popularity of Mother India to translate also as a defense of British colonialism, the reception of the book did not produce the desired results: it not only brought further opprobrium on the ineffectual colonial management of social problems in India, but also cast doubt on official British commitment to political reforms. The ambiguous outcome of Mother India’s identification with the official point of view led British officials henceforth to be more cautious regarding both the form and the content of official sponsorship of colonial propaganda, especially in North America. The India Office, for example, learned to become far more circumspect in extending its patronage for propaganda work in the United States and Canada. Presumably hoping to avoid the mischief done by the popular perception of official involvement with Mother India, the India Office was much more wary in 1929 when it financed B. C. Allen, a retired member of the Indian Civil Service, to visit Canada on a ‘‘private’’ lecture tour to promote sympathy for the British position in India. This time, indeed, the India Office took extra precautions to ensure the complete secrecy of the project. Wishing to avoid the kinds of embarrassing questions that had been raised in Parliament in Britain and in the Legislative Assembly in India about official involvement with Mother India, the India Office financed Allen’s trip through nonvotable secret sources and kept even the Government of India in the dark about his mission. Sir Arthur Hirtzel reminded Sir William Clark, the British high commissioner in Ottawa, of the need for total discretion on the nature of Allen’s mission: ‘‘My object in writing is to emphasize what we said in our telegram—that the fact that he is being sent and paid by government must on no account be disclosed. . . . If by any mischance we are challenged, we should like to be able simply to say that he is there by the invitation of so and so, and leave it at that.’’ 99 The High Commission in Canada was likewise extremely cautious in its dealings with Allen. He was informed in no uncertain terms that ‘‘no one should know of your connection to our office and of you as an emissary of India Office.’’ 100 The public exposure of official involvement with Mother India had proved far too costly for colonial propaganda in North America. The Mayo controversy had also starkly exposed to British officials that North American public opinion was generally more sympathetic toward the extension of political reforms in India than they had anticipated. ‘‘The problems of India

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are little understood in Canada,’’ as R. H. Hadow wrote on behalf of the high commissioner in Ottawa to Leo Amery, secretary of state for Dominion affairs, on March 7, 1929, still some months before the eventual announcement by the viceroy of India that ‘‘Dominion status’’ was indeed the goal of colonial policy in India. Hadow warned that ‘‘the intelligentsia; the faculties of the Canadian universities; the younger members of the Department of External Affairs (who are drawn from among the professors of the Canadian universities); some of the leaders of the Progressive Party in the House of Commons, and other thinking Canadians of the same type have, in private conversation, shown a disposition to sympathize on general grounds with India’s demands for increased freedom which will place her on the same level as Canada.’’ 101 The public debates about Mother India in the United States and Canada had brought international attention not only to the social backwardness of India but also to the demand of Indians, a demand that seemed increasingly legitimate in various circles in North America, for a greater share in their country’s administration. In the aftermath of the debates over Mother India, the once widely held view that despotic rule was necessary for the rule of law in ‘‘nonwhite’’ colonies had become increasingly embattled. Public opinion in favor of continued British control over the essentials of sovereignty in India now was in need of new ideological justification. By the 1930s, the dominant contours of officially sponsored propaganda on behalf of colonial rule in India, especially in North America, had moved away from the kind of case that Mayo had made against self-government in Mother India. Henceforth the focus of official propaganda was to defend Britain’s commitment to the expansion of political reforms in India. In part, of course, this reflected the political and economic situation on the ground. Yet the Mayo controversy did much to demonstrate that favorable North American public opinion on British colonial rule could not be built on an outright rejection of political reforms. Emissaries presenting the official British point of view in North America in the 1930s, who included erstwhile liberal critics of the prewar empire like Edward Thompson, tended to stay clear from invoking the social backwardness of Indians as evidence of their unfitness for self-rule.102 They emphasized, instead, the internal political struggles in India that apparently made overly hasty attempts to transfer further political power to the Indians dangerous. By the 1930s, mainly conservative die-hards in Britain like Dudley Myers of the Conservative and Unionist Central Office and Winston Churchill of the India Empire Society, who kept up a steady correspondence with Mayo, persisted in believing in the efficacy of a Mother India–style propaganda on behalf of British rule in India.103 For the official British

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propaganda machinery there was a more ironic lesson to be learned from the North American context of the controversy over Mother India: the renewal of the ideological legitimacy of British rule on the grounds of an unpopular compromise—the retrospective integration of self-government as the logical unfolding of the entire history of British colonialism itself.

racializing the debate The transatlantic context also brought domestic immigration concerns in the United States to bear on the debate over the reform of the colonial administration in India with unwelcome consequences for British colonialism: the introduction of an explicitly racial argument. The social problems of India, as Mayo had argued, demonstrated not only the unfitness of Indians for self-rule but also the inability of expatriate Indians to be suitable U.S. citizens. Notwithstanding the culturalist basis of Mayo’s prejudice, her investment in the anti-immigrant climate in the United States injected an aggressively Anglo-Saxonist and racist discourse into the interwar debate on British colonialism. When the Indian social reformer Kamakeshi Natarajan compared Mother India to Abbé Dubois’s Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (1821), the book to which Mother India was most often compared and which Mayo herself had lavishly quoted in her text, he put his finger on precisely this aspect of Mayo’s contribution. While Dubois’s case against India had been made on the grounds of the religious superiority of Christianity, Natarajan argued, Mayo made her case on the basis of the superiority of whites, and in particular of the Anglo-Saxon race.104 The overt association of Mayo’s case with the privileges of ‘‘whiteness,’’ especially as her book came to be debated in the United States, made her book impolitic from the point of view of many of the apologists of the British Empire. The explicit link that Mayo drew between the defense of British rule in India and the politics of Anglo-Saxonism and of anti-Asian immigration in the United States created complications for her official British backers. Even before Mother India, the question of the status of Indians abroad had already become an especially charged issue for the imperial government. The issue, to be sure, had arisen primarily in the context of empire-wide changes that had brought considerable political autonomy to the so-called white Dominion colonies that sought to regulate ‘‘nonwhite’’ immigration to their territories. The stated principle of British policy toward Indians, at least since Queen Victoria’s declaration in 1858, was one of ostensible nondiscrimination on the basis of race, religion, and creed. Hence

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the British government, the Government of India, and the Dominion governments were often at odds with each other over immigration policy. The new pressure to regulate the free migration of Indians, unlike that of the state-assisted indentured migration, to the Dominions posed a unique challenge for the British: it implicated the imperial government in the ‘‘whites-only’’ policies adopted by the self-governing Dominion colonies.105 Even though imperial policy often ended up directly colluding with the discriminatory regulations that developed to restrict the movement of nonwhite British subjects within the empire, the dictates of political expediency also required it to be tempered by the imperial promise of nondiscrimination toward the subjects of the empire. With Gandhi’s movement on behalf of Indians in South Africa, moreover, the question of the rights of Indians in the empire had also firmly entered the agenda of nationalist politics in India. While strictly speaking the question raised in the Mayo controversy of the status of Indians in the United States was not an empire-wide issue, it nevertheless touched on the central dilemma that the immigration question posed for imperial policy: the political awkwardness of the articulation of imperial policy with ‘‘whites-only’’ policies of racial privilege. Mother India was strongly informed by the sentiments in the United States against Asian immigrants. While commenting on her reasons for writing Mother India at a private meeting in London, Mayo was reported to have confessed— a report that she later denied—that her concerns had been aroused in particular by the introduction in the U.S. Senate of the Hindu Citizenship Bill.106 Senator Royal S. Copeland’s Hindu Citizenship Bill (S. 4505 of 1926)—which actually covered all Indians—was a response to the lobbying efforts of expatriate Indian organizations and their U.S. sympathizers against the recent efforts to deny Indians rights as U.S. citizens. In the landmark Bhagat Singh Thind case in 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the denaturalization of forty-two of the approximately seventy to one hundred Indians who had been naturalized as U.S. citizens between 1907 and 1923.107 Whether or not efforts such as the Copeland Bill had actually prompted Mayo to write Mother India, she made no bones in her book about capitalizing on the support of the U.S. anti-Asian immigration lobby. The overlapping networks of Mayo’s concerns are revealed in this episode. Even before the publication of Mother India, Mayo together with her trusted team of Moyca Newell and Harry Field tried to balance the pro-imperial and antiimmigrant angle of her case. It was a tribute to her team’s public relations skill that at least some expatriate Indian activists—who were at the forefront of the struggle for citizenship rights for Indians in the United States—had been fooled

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into helping generate prepublication publicity for her book.When Sailendra Nath Ghose of the Indian Freedom Foundation in New York invited Mayo to a banquet in honor of Senator Copeland, presumably because she was in the process of publishing a book on India, Field politely declined the invitation on Mayo’s behalf. He, however, jumped at the opportunity to publicize her forthcoming book under the auspices of Ghose’s organization. He had Mayo’s publishers deliberately generate some innocuous prepublication notices for the book that he could then pass on to an unsuspecting Ghose to distribute to individuals on his organization’s mailing list.108 The remainder of the publisher’s notices about the book made clear that it was designed to provide valuable information to help determine the status of Indians as ‘‘neighborhood assets’’ or ‘‘neighborhood nuisances’’ in the United States. Once the book was published, moreover, Mayo felt less constrained in making her views about the incompatibility of Indians as U.S. citizens more generally known. In articles like ‘‘When Asia Knocks at the Door’’ in the Brooklyn Standard Union and ‘‘India’’ in Liberty (Hagerstown, Maryland), Mayo went on to elaborate the dangers that ordinary Americans faced from admitting Indians as neighbors and U.S. citizens. The crux of Mayo’s anti-immigrant argument rested on the inherent immorality of Hinduism that allegedly dominated all aspects of the social and cultural life of the majority of Indians. One of the primary objectives of Mother India, as Mayo reiterated in several subsequent articles on India, was to provide ‘‘John J. Smith of Smithville, U.S.A.’’ with the kind of information that would be useful to him and his family. Mr. Smith, according to Mayo, was less concerned with the philosophical foundations of Eastern religions than with the personal habits of the Indians, which determined their compatibility as good neighbors in the United States. In short, she claimed, her purpose in writing Mother India was to warn John J. Smith and his family about the kind of neighbors that Indians would make. She had reserved the book’s special import for Mrs. John J. Smith of Smithville, U.S.A.: ‘‘ ‘Keep away, Mrs. John, from the swamis, the yogis, the traveling teaching men.’ You would need no such bidding, if for an instant you guessed the truth. In your innocence, in your good faith, in your eager-minded receptivity of high-sounding doctrine, in your hunger for color, romance, glamour, and dreams come true, you expose yourself, all unsuspecting, to things that, if you knew them, would kill you dead with unmerited shame.’’ 109 By providing the Smiths with alarmist details of the sexual habits of Indians, Mayo no doubt added considerably to the book’s popularity among what W. Norman Brown, in his critical commentary on Mayo’s work in the New York Herald Tribune, called

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the ‘‘pornographically inclined who were finding in ‘Mother India’ a Red-Hot Mamma India.’’ 110 Mayo’s arguments in Mother India were reminiscent of organizations such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which from the early 1900s had been calling for the termination of ‘‘Hindu’’ immigration because of ‘‘their lack of cleanliness, disregard of sanitary laws, petty pilfering, especially of chickens, and insolence to women.’’ 111 The centerpiece of Mayo’s combined attack on Indian nationalism and Asian immigration was her attack on Hinduism. This, as Mayo could have guessed, was unlikely to become as controversial as her earlier anti-Catholic writings. In her earlier writings on the Philippines, Mayo had attributed the depraved moral practices that she claimed to find in the islands, such as incest, child abuse, rape, and adultery, to the influence of the Catholic Church and to its official teachings. ‘‘When Queen Heaven has three synchronous spouses one of whom her own son,’’ Mayo asked, referring to the cult of Mary among Catholics, ‘‘why should spirit mortal proud assume stricter virtue?’’ 112 Mayo’s critique of the immoral influence of Roman Catholicism in the Philippines had first appeared in an article in the Public Ledger (Philadelphia) and a few other newspapers in the United States before being published in The Isles of Fear. Mayo was accused of blasphemy, and her attack on Catholicism was followed by a storm of protest in the Commonweal (New York), the Catholic Standard and Times of Philadelphia, and other syndicated Catholic newspapers in the United States. The fact that Curtis Publishing Company was the publisher of both the Public Ledger and the Saturday Evening Post, which had printed Mayo’s earlier attack against a Catholic priest, was not lost on her critics. The call went out to individuals and organizations, business houses and merchants, to withdraw subscriptions and advertisements from the newspapers that had published Mayo’s offending article. The threat of a boycott forced the Public Ledger, the New York Evening Post, and the Washington Post to publish a ‘‘disavowal’’ for having published Mayo’s comments on the Roman Catholic Church.113 While there had been a price to pay for her snide attack on Roman Catholicism, Mayo was counting on her critique of Hinduism to resonate more widely. Mayo’s equation of Hinduism with sexual immorality was an especially pointed response to the cultural-nationalist appropriation of the domain of religion in India as proof of India’s superiority to the West. There was, indeed, a long tradition of expatriate Indians as well as visiting speakers from India who preached in the United States about the superiority of ‘‘Eastern spirituality’’ over ‘‘Western materialism.’’ The Indian Nobel laureate and internationalist Rabin-

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dranath Tagore, who in his recent lectures in the United States had criticized the materialism of the West, came to symbolize for Mayo and her supporters the point of view against which her book was meant as a corrective. F. C. Mortimer of the New York Times, referring to the Western acclaim for Tagore, described him in a letter to Mayo as a ‘‘dog that bites the hand that feeds him.’’ To Mortimer, therefore, the real achievement of Mother India was as a warning to Americans who had too easily succumbed to the view of the ‘‘spirituality’’ of Hinduism: ‘‘Probably India is much like other Eastern lands in morals and manners,’’ he wrote to Mayo, ‘‘but unlike the others it has claimed a ‘spiritual’ superiority to the West and usually this claim has been admitted.You have put an end to that.’’ 114 Mayo and her supporters aggressively took on board the task of countering cultural-nationalist arguments of the ‘‘spiritual’’ superiority of India. One of Mayo’s aims in writing Mother India, as she would later admit, had been to demonstrate precisely that ‘‘ ‘spiritual’ Hinduism disentangled from words and worked out in common life, is materialism of the grossest and most suicidal form.’’ 115 Numerous supporters of Mayo, indeed, expressed particular satisfaction that her book had challenged the supposed superiority of Eastern religions and established that perverse sexuality and unhygienic practices were endemic to Hinduism. Mayo’s anti-nationalist and anti-immigrant cases in Mother India had thus come together nicely in her critique of the sexual immorality and materialism of Hinduism. Yet for apologists of British colonialism, this potent combination in Mother India also posed a problem: the registers for the articulation of colonial and antiimmigrant arguments were not always compatible. Critics of Mother India, for example, immediately drew attention to certain telling discrepancies in the U.K. and U.S. editions of the book.116 In the former, Mayo had made clear that her criticisms of the sexual practices of the Indians were directed primarily, and pointedly, only at the Hindu population in India. Yet in the U.S. edition, where ‘‘Hindu’’ was a commonly understood term for all the inhabitants of India, Mayo had curiously preferred the less ambiguous term ‘‘Indian’’ for her attack. The discrepancy between the two editions, as several of Mayo’s critics pointed out, responded to two quite different political strategies: one suited to the ‘‘divide and rule’’ strategy of British colonial politics aimed at fostering intercommunal rivalry between Hindus and Muslims in India; and the other more suited to the anti-Asian discourse in the United States, where all Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, were considered undesirables as U.S. citizens. The charges of her critics hit home; one of the very few changes that Mayo made to the original edition of Mother India in 1928 was to substitute ‘‘Hindu’’ for ‘‘Indian’’ also in the American edition of the book.117

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The question of whether Mayo’s attack was directed only at Hindus or at all Indians was not, at least for the Government of India, an entirely trivial matter. So when Madame Nazimova’s Broadway play India, inspired by the original American edition of Mayo’s book, portrayed a twelve-year-old child wife and her fifty-two-year-old husband as Muslims, the Government of India was immediately perturbed about the play’s potential political impact on Muslims, whom the government hoped to court as allies and to isolate from anticolonial nationalist struggles in India. The Government of India made a request to the India Office, which the latter passed on to the British Foreign Office, to ‘‘get the play modified unofficially.’’ It was only after the Foreign Office had concluded that ‘‘the playlet was attracting little attention in America and had secured few bookings outside New York’’ that it saw fit to inform the Government of India ‘‘that the matter was too insignificant for formal representations to the U.S. government which might in any case only have the effect of giving the playlet unnecessary and undesirable attention.’’ 118 Although Nazimova informed Mayo shortly afterward that her show had been prematurely canceled for lack of sufficient interest, the episode illustrates the awkward contingencies of combining American anti-Asian with pro-British colonial views. Mother India’s combination of the defense of British colonialism with the defense of Anglo-Saxonism in the United States also revived charges of the failure of the colonial state to protect the rights of British subjects abroad. When the U.S. Supreme Court had rescinded the naturalization of Indians in 1923, expatriate Indian activists accused British officials in the United States of apathy, or worse, complicity in the decision. These charges were further fueled when the colonial administration in India, under pressure from London, had temporarily restrained the Central Legislative Assembly in India from retaliating in kind by revoking the rights of Americans to naturalization and to ownership of property in India.119 The charges of the British government’s complicity in the anti-Indian initiatives of U.S. immigration policy received considerable airing during the controversy over Mother India. Expatriate Indian activists like Dalip Singh Saund, who would later become the first Indian American congressmen in California in the 1950s, were alive to the book’s implications for the status of Indians in the United States. Saund, then a student activist, contributed to the controversy with his own reply to Mayo’s Mother India. When another expatriate Indian, Sudhindra Bose of the University of Iowa penned his recollections of the Indian struggle for U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, in a book aptly titled Mother America (1934), he squarely implicated British imperial policy for the legal discrimination against Indians in the United States.120 By bringing together the question of the status of Indians in

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the United States and the political rights of Indians in India, the Mayo controversy starkly exposed the racist underpinnings of the imperialist apprehension about the extension of self-government in ‘‘nonwhite’’ colonies. The inadvertent outcome of this racialized context was to clarify a shared agenda between the struggles for colonial self-determination in India and for racial justice in the United States. This outcome, however, was not inevitable. Hitherto the outrage of Indians against legal discrimination in the United States had been shaped by what Sucheta Majumdar has rightly characterized as a ‘‘racist response to racism’’: the claim that high-caste Hindus, as members of the ‘‘Aryan race,’’ were Caucasian, that is, white, and hence entitled to citizenship under the terms of the U.S. Naturalization Act.121 This ‘‘racial’’ genealogy of Aryanism, which was an enormously powerful idea throughout the British Empire and was deployed by various groups with multiple agendas, allowed for a special pleading on behalf of Indians.122 Both expatriate Indians and their American supporters had long relied on the myth of the Aryan connection to generate sympathy for India. So, for example, Bernard Sexton, an American supporter of the noncooperation movement in India, elaborated on the Aryan connection to urge support for Gandhi’s movement in the American media. ‘‘Those Aryans who are our own cousins and whose speech we still carry into daily life,’’ he wrote, now ‘‘cry in different words the same slogan that was used by our ancestors—the words that fired the English at Runnymeade and the Americans at Bunker Hill. It is an ancient word, a word that has ever stirred the Aryan blood—the word Freedom.’’ 123 The racist underpinning of the self-identification of Indians as Aryans in the United States was hardly conducive to identifying Indians with a broader antiracist alliance. To be sure, the belief in the racial equality of Europeans and Indians as Aryan cousins had already received a blow in the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Thind case. The court had declared that even though the term ‘‘Caucasian’’ and ‘‘the words ‘white persons’ are treated as synonymous . . . they are not of identical meaning.’’ It thus justified revoking the status of Indians who had previously been naturalized as U.S. citizens on the grounds that in the ‘‘language of the common man,’’ Indians did not qualify as ‘‘white.’’ When Indians in the Friends of Freedom for India (ffi), which counted the African American political leader W. E. B. Du Bois as a member, contacted Senator Copeland to sponsor a bill in the U.S. Congress, their aim was precisely to have Indians reclassified as ‘‘white persons.’’ 124 At the banquet for Copeland by the Indian Freedom Foundation in New York on May 4, 1927, the one to which Mayo had unknowingly been invited,

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Copeland called for modifications in the U.S. Immigration Law of 1924. This law effectively stopped the legal immigration of all Indians to the United States as they had been declared ineligible by the Thind case (1923) for naturalization as U.S. citizens. Copeland argued for removing national and geographical quotas as well as the criterion of color and substituting them with the ‘‘physical, mental, and moral qualifications of the immigrant.’’ 125 Nevertheless, Copeland explained the rationale for his abortive Hindu citizenship bill in the following ‘‘racial’’ terms: The Hindu has the skill, the features, the hands, the figure, and above all else, the intellect of what we call the American. He is truly ‘‘Nordic’’ in the final analysis, as the blonde citizens of Sweden. At least, he possesses every physical trait of the Northern European races except his possession of a tainted skin. The Hindu is an Aryan, a Caucasian, in the true sense, a ‘‘white person.’’ 126

The prospect of the Copeland Bill was monitored enthusiastically in India; even the All India Congress Committee passed a resolution in support of the bill.127 However, the anomaly of the Indian insistence on the privileges of ‘‘whites’’ became more glaring in the strengthening of the alliance between Indian and African American leaders during the controversy over Mother India. There were, of course, individual examples from the past of the interest in African American struggles among Indians in India, from sympathy with the North during the American Civil War, and support for President Lincoln, to more recent interest in the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes and outrage at the lynching of African Americans. The vernacular press in India had begun to report incidents of lynching in the United States, as one U.S. consular official in India reported, because ‘‘the Indians consider the Negroes as fellow sufferers under suppression.’’ 128 By the same token, and notwithstanding the racist claims to citizenship rights for Indians in the United States, individual Indian activists in the United States had for some time cultivated political ties with African American leaders and movements from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and W. E. B. Du Bois’s naacp. The link that individuals like Du Bois provided in the 1920s between organizations such as the naacp and the ffi prepared the ground for the alliance that emerged as a result of the convergence of Mayo’s overtly racist and imperialist arguments in the controversy over Mother India. The interest among African Americans in the Indian struggle against colonial rule also went back well before Mother India to at least the dawn of the twentieth century and had picked up considerable momentum with the advent of

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Gandhi’s leadership of the noncooperation movement in 1920.129 Whether it was Garvey’s the Negro World (New York), Du Bois’s the Crisis (New York), or the columns of Mary Church Terrell, the founder and former president of the National Association of Colored Women, in the Chicago Defender in the late 1920s, there was evidence of growing interest and support for the nationalist struggle in India in the African American press. Yet the anti-imperialism of the African American press, especially in the late nineteenth century and in the case of U.S. overseas imperialism, was not free from ambivalence; support for the ‘‘black man’s burden,’’ especially in relation to Africa, was not uncommon.130 But by the early twentieth century, criticisms of both U.S. and European imperialism were much more common both by the African American intelligentsia and in the African American press. The African American press was also prominent in its criticism of racist immigration restrictions in the United States. By the 1920s, however, many African American leaders and political commentators, with the exception of Du Bois, had undergone a shift in their attitude toward immigration policy. Most seemed to favor some sort of immigration restrictions and had gone along with the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924.131 At the same time, the sympathetic coverage in the African American press of the Indian struggle to claim citizenship rights in the United States was evidence of the continued opposition to the racially discriminatory foundations of immigration policies and of citizenship rights in the United States. The agendas of the African American and Indian political struggles did not automatically overlap, but the controversy over Mayo’s Mother India inadvertently provided a catalyst for bringing the disparate struggles closer together. The African American press provided support for the Indian case in the United States against Mother India. For Lawrence J. Roose, writing in the Negro World, the problem with Mother India was precisely that Mayo had deliberately absolved the economic effects of British imperialism on the existing social conditions in India. ‘‘She does not take into consideration,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the treacherous part that British capital plays in this miserable piece of business.’’ 132 Du Bois provided a curt dismissal of Mother India in the Crisis: ‘‘Katherine Mayo, a white American, declares that brown India is sexually immoral. Thus the pot calls the kettle black.’’ 133 More relevant to American Negroes, he claimed, was a book by another American, which even if it was not a direct response to Mother India was widely seen as effectively undoing the damage wrought by Mayo’s book. In quoting from Savel Zimand’s Living India (1929), Du Bois drew particular attention to passages that demonstrated the racial discrimination in India against Indians: an experience with which many of his readers could be expected to relate. As a counter to

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Mayo, Du Bois recommended the book written by his old friend Lala Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India (1928), which was a direct rebuttal of Mother India. Rai’s book, he wrote, was ‘‘teeming with facts and unanswerable arguments.’’ 134 Several of the books written in response to Mother India, including Rai’s, had attempted to turn the tables on Mayo to ask if the statistics on lynching in the United States demonstrated the unfitness of Americans for self-government. The controversy had provided an opportunity to draw parallels and forge links between the struggles of Indians and of African Americans. The visits to the United States from the chosen representatives of the nationalist movement in India to counter ‘‘Miss Mayo’s slanderous statements’’ were especially significant in strengthening political ties. Sarojini Naidu, Gandhi’s handpicked choice for the mission of countering the impact in the United States of Mother India, included in her itinerary meetings with various African American political leaders and speaking engagements at numerous African American and Jewish clubs and organizations all across the country. The Negro World gave publicity to Naidu’s visit, especially noting her charges against British methods of domination in India. The Chicago Defender, describing the reception for Naidu in Brooklyn, New York, at which Du Bois had presided, dubbed her as India’s ‘‘greatest woman.’’ 135 To Mayo’s friends, however, Naidu was just a ‘‘sloppily garbed Negress’’ whom they tried to discredit for allegedly bribing an American woman to cover up the death of her husband during political disturbances in Bombay.136 Naidu herself was greatly moved by her reception in the African American community. ‘‘I have reached the homes and I hope the hearts of the as yet disenfranchised children of America, the ‘colored population,’ ’’ she wrote to Gandhi of her trip, ‘‘the descendents of those whom Abraham Lincoln tried to set free.’’ 137 These visits from ‘‘official’’ representatives of the nationalist movement in India in the wake of Mother India did much to awaken an awareness of the two struggles. One unexpected fallout, however belated, was the emergence of a certain degree of critical self-consciousness in India, and among its supporters, about the racist implications of Indian attempts to claim Aryan privilege in the United States as white persons. The African American press had been monitoring the struggle to restore the citizenship rights of Indians.When the U.S. Supreme Court restored the citizenship of Sakaharam Ganesh Pandit of California in 1926, it had decided his case res adjudicata and thus fell short of declaring Indians to be white persons. Soon after Pandit’s victory, the New York Amsterdam News published an interview with Pandit on December 29, 1926, in which he reflected critically on the ‘‘pseudoscience’’ in the definition of a ‘‘white person.’’ The ‘‘Nordic pride and prejudice

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was given a slap in the face,’’ the paper declared, in bringing Pandit’s message to the ‘‘Negroes of America.’’ Pandit’s message—which could have been more aptly applied, perhaps, to Indians themselves—was for African Americans to refuse to imitate the white man.138 The Norfolk Journal and Guide, reflecting on the anomalies of the racist politics in the United States as seen in the Pandit case and in another case involving a Chinese girl, Martha Lum, who had been disallowed from a white school in Mississippi, commented on the emerging potential of a ‘‘new democracy of color’’: ‘‘If, perforce, the Caucasian’s outcasting of all other race groups from a democracy associated with his own, should serve to bring these groups together in mutual respect and friendship, it is they who are helped and the Caucasian himself who will be the ultimate loser—loser of that opportunity and understanding between racial groups that is so essential to universal peace.’’ 139 The notice in the African American press could not help but produce a greater self-consciousness of the racist grounds on which the rights of Indians in the United States were defended: the separation of the treatment of Indians from other Asians, especially the Chinese and the Japanese, as well as from African Americans. The dual imperialist and anti-Asian immigrant stance of Mayo’s Mother India had crystallized the possibility of a new anti-racist alliance. The critique of Mayo’s combined anti-immigrant and pro-imperialist agenda was thus often expressed in a universalist anti-racist political rhetoric. The potential of solidarity among all people of color, for example, was directly addressed in an editorial entitled ‘‘Color-Baiting America’’ that appeared in the Garveyite paper the Negro World on October 29, 1927. Although occasioned by the Hearst Syndicate’s growing anti-Asian propaganda, the editorial could just as well have been addressed to the contemporary example of Mother India. The editorial warned more broadly of the outcome of such color-baiting: ‘‘Any combination of white nations to form a race unit, will perforce cause a grouping of yellow and brown, and perhaps black, in retaliation, and it will certainly not be a pleasant time if they clash.’’ 140 The lesson that was being drawn by some in the African American press was not lost on many a spokesperson in the United States for Indian nationalism. C. F. Andrews, the close friend and confidant of Gandhi and Tagore, took this lesson especially to heart. Like Naidu, Andrews too visited the United States in 1929 to counter Mayo’s imperial propaganda and to address the situation of expatriate Indians. He was a guest of the Tuskegee Institute, then under Robert Moton. Andrews grew critical of the attempts of expatriate Indian groups to claim status as ‘‘whites.’’ ‘‘First of all,’’ he wrote, these claims ‘‘would divide Indians themselves, because Dravidian India could never make the claim valid. Secondly,

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it would separate Indians in their claim from Japanese and Chinese on the one hand and the Africans on the other; for none of these could be included in the title of the White Race.’’ ‘‘But far more serious than that,’’ Andrews concluded in a telling reference to the expanded understanding of the anticolonial movement, was the recognition that the ‘‘ ‘White’ claim itself would put Indians in the wrong position of arrogance as distinct from the rest of the world.’’ 141 The ‘‘ambassadorial’’ visits to the United States from the representatives of nationalist India also led the Indian National Congress, as the official body of the nationalist struggle in India, to become more wary in the future of those who spoke in its name abroad.142 Mayo’s book had contributed inadvertently to the framing of the anticolonial struggle in India increasingly as part of a broader struggle against racist domination worldwide. Mayo’s challenge to this political configuration between African American struggles and Indian nationalism failed. Mayo and her supporters tried to seize the opportunity afforded by the growing criticism of nationalists in India by radical leaders of the non-Brahmin and dalit movements to drive home a different parallel. They looked to the visit by B. R. Ambedkar, the leading spokesperson of the ‘‘depressed classes’’ in India, to the United States in 1931 for just such an opportunity. The New York Times announced Ambedkar’s arrival, describing his mission to ‘‘make the plight of untouchables depicted in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India’’ known to America.143 Mayo hoped to recruit Ambedkar, whose disagreement with Gandhi over the political representation of dalits at the constitutional conferences in London had received considerable publicity in the British and American press, for her own case against Indian nationalism. She urged Villard, a supporter of Gandhi and the Congress in India, to remember the legacy of his own grandfather, the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, to help Ambedkar in his fight for the true ‘‘underdog’’—the untouchables—of India.144 Mayo’s attempt to exploit the Gandhi-Ambedkar rift at the Round Table Conference in London for her own purposes, however, could not go far. Ambedkar’s views ultimately proved too recalcitrant for Mayo’s exploitation of dalit critiques of Indian nationalism. Mayo had little time for either Ambedkar’s critique of British rule, which he had reiterated at the Round Table Conference in London, or his theory of the origins of the outcastes in India. The latter topic, she warned Villard before his meeting with Ambedkar, should be avoided because it ‘‘is only theory without bearing on the present facts.’’ Ambedkar himself would ask Mayo to remove the ‘‘wrong’’ she had done him by misrepresenting his views in her later book Volume II (1931). The vigorous attempt of Mayo and her friends to recruit political

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leaders of the non-Brahmin and dalit movements in India to their cause failed to take hold: her own racist and pro-imperialist views precluded a meaningful political alliance.145 Mayo’s book brought together international criticisms of imperialism, racism, and capitalism in the debate about the political future of British India.The League against Imperialism, formed in February 1927, represented this emerging international convergence.146 The members associated with the different national sections of the league and their organs provided a nucleus for mobilizing international criticism of precisely this type of blatant imperialist propaganda. So, for example, the paper of the league’s Dutch section, Recht an Vryheid (Rights and Freedom), responded to the Dutch translation of Mayo’s book with an extended review meant to expose the imperialist bias and connections of its author.147 Even in Britain, feminists associated with the Labour Party, other Labour Party supporters, socialists, and women’s organizations with strong empire-wide connections, such as the British Commonwealth League, theWomen’s Freedom League, and the British section of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, constituted visible dissenting minorities on Mayo’s book.148 The latter, in fact, published a pamphlet titled Mother India’s Daughters (1934) to publicize reliable information about the women’s movement in India against the kind of negative propaganda Mayo had unleashed about India and Indian women.149 Mayo’s book was both a product of, and contributed to, what had become an undeniably internationalized arena for debating imperialism and anti-imperialism. The most telling loss for Mayo and her British sponsors, perhaps, was the failure of this cross-Atlantic initiative to impress what Alan Raucher identifies as the loose coalition of ‘‘feminists-pacifists-liberals-radicals’’ who made up the American anti-imperialist and pro-India movement in the early twentieth century.150 To a considerable extent, of course, the small pro-India movement in the United States overlapped with the forces that had confronted Mayo previously on her other public campaigns. Take the example of the socialist James Maurer of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, who, along with fellow socialist Norman Thomas, was also a member of the ffi. Maurer was widely credited as the author of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor’s The American Cossack (1912), a book about the Pennsylvania State Police Force, which was the classic reference point not only for socialist and trade union opposition to the creation of a state police force but also for Mayo’s revisionist characterization of the ‘‘cossacks’’ in her own descriptions of the members of the force.151 Agnes Smedley, a contributor to the socialist New York Call, which had done the most to take on Mayo’s Justice

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to All in 1917, was the executive secretary for the ffi and an important link for Indian nationalists to the New York intelligentsia and to American feminists, including Margaret Sanger, the most famous advocate for birth control. Smedley’s extended critique of Mother India appeared in the Modern Review of Calcutta.152 Likewise, when Sanger visited India in 1935 bearing greetings from the international birth control movement, she described her visit pointedly as undertaken in a ‘‘spirit of atonement’’ to ‘‘undo the false and mischievous impressions created regarding India by an American author.’’ 153 Even liberal periodicals like the Nation and the New Republic, which admittedly had a long history of criticizing British imperial policy in India, added their voice to the dissenting U.S. minority on Mother India.154 While the more mainstream U.S. media may have marginalized these voices, even the columns of the New York Times were not immune to their critical intervention. A letter to the editor from an ‘‘RB’’ of New York appeared in the New York Times at the height of the controversy. The letter writer, who was most likely Roger Nash Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and member of the ffi and the League against Imperialism, attempted to give the paper’s readers an alternative perspective on Mayo’s contribution by fleshing out her pro-imperialist and anti-immigrant baggage.155 It might be conceded that in these circles, at least, Mayo’s overt political brief in Mother India was doomed from the start. The further point about the overlapping discursive fields of U.S. and British imperialism in which Mother India operated was that the book did not necessarily endear itself even to the champions of British commercial interests in India. The initial overwhelmingly positive response to the book in major media outlets, especially in Britain and the United States, was dictated by and large by Mayo’s support for the colonial enterprise in India; but soon even some colonial die-hards in India failed to rally completely behind Mother India.156 For example, the British press in India, a logical bastion of support for Mayo’s book, was far from unanimous in its praise for Mother India. In fact, Mayo’s supporters grumbled that editorial responses to the book in the British press in India were relatively lukewarm.157 The editorial notice in the Capital (Calcutta), the organ of British commercial and industrial interests in Bengal, partly in response, perhaps, to the competing interests of British and North American capital in India, was the most critical.158 When treated with adequate specificity, therefore, the reception of Mother India reveals a more complex picture of a transatlantic intervention whose foundation in rival imperial discourses posed a problem for many an apologist of British colonial rule in India. It also serves to illustrate that Mayo’s baggage in Mother India in-

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cluded more than just her overtly pro-imperial politics; impeding her also was her simultaneous investment in U.S. domestic concerns. As a transatlantic product that was shaped by a range of competing and contradictory agendas, therefore, Mayo’s Mother India failed to do the kind of ideological work for British rule in India for which the book had been intended. The scale on which the Mayo controversy operated placed it at the center of an imperial reconfiguration: the increasing accountability of British colonial rule within a combined Anglo-U.S. imperialism. The consensus of recent scholarship has been to caution against overly easy interpretations of the post–First World War British Empire as a narrative of ‘‘imperial decline.’’ 159 Nevertheless, the postwar internationalization of colonial rule put considerable strain on the ideological basis for justifying British colonialism. Many of the foundational assumptions of British colonial discourse, hitherto unproblematized on such a scale, were now up for grabs. The extension of colonial self-government outside the white Dominions to the nonwhite colonies, for example, was a far more contentious episode in the reshaping of the postwar British Empire than has commonly been assumed. When the transatlantic context for Mayo’s intervention is given its due, the controversy over Mother India emerges as a profoundly destabilizing affair: a symptom of, and a catalyst for, a substantial shift in the understanding of imperialism and colonialism in the interwar period. Against the background of this transition, the critics of Mother India would seize on Mayo’s ‘‘facts’’ about the social backwardness of India to reconfigure the understanding of the relationship between the political and the social, or the state and society, in colonial India.

3

Ironic Reversal The Rhetoric of ‘‘Facts’’ in the Controversy over Mother India

When Gandhi took time off his hectic tour of south India in September 1927 to respond to Mother India, his review captured the most confounding aspect of the Mayo controversy. ‘‘The book is without doubt untruthful,’’ he claimed, ‘‘be the facts stated ever so truthful.’’ 1 The polarizing reception of Mother India has obscured the extent to which Mayo’s facts were not the main subjects of dispute in the controversy surrounding the book. Mayo’s critics more often than not conceded the validity of many of her individual facts—as indicators of the social condition of India. Many of Mayo’s harshest critics would have agreed with Gandhi’s verdict on Mother India. ‘‘We may repudiate the charge as it has been framed by her,’’ he concluded, ‘‘but we may not repudiate the substance underlying the many allegations she has made.’’ The crux of the controversy over Mother India, indeed, was less about the facts than about its explanatory framework. Here was the peculiar anomaly of the Mayo controversy whereby critics acknowledged many of the facts of Mother India to be true only to pronounce the book itself to be untrue. The role of ‘‘facts’’ in the controversy most perplexed Mayo and her supporters.The straightforward attacks on the facts of Mother India were relatively easy to deal with. The preface of Mutter Indien (1929), the German translation of Mother India commissioned by Mayo’s American publishers, thus brushed off the charges of factual inaccuracies fairly lightly. ‘‘For the Hindu it is a very important thing if Miss Mayo here or there has made an error, or given any point greater significance than it merits,’’ it claimed, but ‘‘to the German reader . . . uninitiated in such details, the fact remains that he decidedly sees a problem before him of which previously he scarcely had any knowledge.’’ 2 The critics who accepted and used many of the same facts as Mother India could not be dismissed so easily by Mayo and her defenders. These critics parted company with Mayo not so much on the facts as on the ‘‘independent variable’’—the domain of the social—as the explanatory framework for the facts. For Mayo, the explanation for all of India’s problems was purely social and unrelated to the political condition of colonial rule. Some of the

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most trenchant criticisms of Mother India were directed precisely at reversing this explanatory framework for an alternative understanding of the social problems of India. The most successful rhetorical maneuver of Mayo’s critics lay in domesticating and appropriating her facts within an alternative framework: a challenge that went to the very heart of the conceptual apparatus of Mother India. The real challenge to Mayo’s Mother India did not consist in the repudiation of Mayo’s facts. Rather, and more importantly, it consisted in a more ironic reversal: the use of Mayo’s own facts to repudiate her basic conceptual paradigm of the relationship between the social and the political.

the rhetoric of factuality The contours of the controversy over Mother India reveal the uniquely beleaguered status of Mayo’s fact-laden rhetoric. Mayo had designed the authority of ‘‘facts,’’ as she wrote in Mother India, to appeal especially to ‘‘hard-headed Americans’’ (21). The newly fashionable field of ‘‘social science research’’—to which Mayo self-consciously aspired by insisting that her book was primarily a public health report—was already well established in the United States. Hence American social reformers, including several women’s groups, had a history of employing scientific methods to investigate social conditions, using their findings to argue for reform legislations.3 Mayo was enormously successful as a writer marshaling public opinion for her own pet causes, but her success did not rest on the trappings of social scientific research. Mayo may have won high praise from the likes of Oswald Garrison Villard for her work as a research assistant on his historical study of John Brown. But her own writing career was repeatedly dogged by accusations of her cavalier attitude toward the facts. She encountered frequent criticism for blurring the distinction between ‘‘fact’’ and ‘‘fiction.’’ The socialist New York Call had questioned the factual accuracy of Mayo’s Justice to All, and many of her informants in the Pennsylvania State Police Force had likewise expressed concern in private over the artistic liberty she had taken with the facts in her stories about the force.4 George Lumb, the acting superintendent of the Pennsylvania State Police and one of Mayo’s main sources of information, summed up the dilemma posed by Mayo’s writings: ‘‘There is such a faint line between the actual truth and the same truth dressed in literary style.’’ ‘‘So again,’’ he wrote to Mayo, ‘‘we are confronted with the question of whether your stories are historical facts or literary master pieces for the entertainment of the reading public, and of this you must be the judge.’’ 5 Mayo confronted similar accusations

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of sensationalism in her later forays into the supposedly more ‘‘factual’’ genre of social investigative reporting for her subsequent books on the Young Men’s Christian Association and on the Philippines. A review of The Isles of Fear in the New York World, for example, questioned the protocols of Mayo’s purported documentary research. It dismissed The Isles of Fear for its reliance on only a ‘‘few scattered facts and figures’’ that were backed up by ‘‘page after page of anonymous quotations . . . to suit the thesis of the book.’’ 6 The Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, while sympathetic to Mayo’s anti-Filipino case, considered The Isles of Fear too full of ‘‘inaccuracies and half-truths’’ to serve as a scientific indictment of Filipinization. The paper instead preferred D. R. Williams’s The U.S. and the Philippines (1924), which in its view provided a more objective basis for overturning the policy of Filipinization.7 Mayo’s purported public health report on India, with copious citations from government documents, institutional reports, and communications from official and nonofficial sources, was meant to silence critics who had hitherto questioned the scientific status of her social investigations. There was a certain irony in Mayo’s self-conscious appeal to scientific evidence in Mother India, for in the end the book’s defense had little to do with hard facts. Writing on June 12, 1927, in the New York Herald Tribune, a reviewer could still say of Mayo: ‘‘She is neither muckraker, sob-sister, alarmist nor propagandist. The calm, hard-headed—though not hard-hearted—style in which she presents her evidence makes the conviction all the more ghastly.’’ 8 The first wave of enthusiastic reviews, especially in the United States, flattered Mayo by presenting Mother India as a ‘‘scientific,’’ ‘‘objective,’’ and ‘‘unsentimental’’ treatment of the social conditions in India. Yet very soon Mayo’s champions, even in the United States, found themselves shifting the grounds for their defense of Mother India. The book’s claims to objectivity and hard facts had begun to unravel as critics made the many flaws in Mother India fair game.They illuminated its various omissions, its lack of proportion, the unreliability of some of its statistics, and its misrepresentation of individual opinions, especially that of Rabindranath Tagore. Mayo had misquoted Tagore’s published writings to portray him as an advocate of the practice of child marriage.9 Tagore feared that Mayo’s ‘‘numerous lies mixed with facts’’ might never be exposed fully before ‘‘the circle of readers which it is easy for Miss Mayo to delude.’’ 10 Yet the relentless exposure of some of the more glaring inaccuracies in the book, like the distortion of Tagore’s views on child marriage, had a sobering impact on the promotion of the book for its allegedly scientific documentation.

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Mayo’s claims to scientific objectivity became increasingly embattled in the course of the controversy. While managing to hold her ground against charges that there were ‘‘errors on almost every page,’’ she was unable to respond to many of the attacks raised about the book’s method. Mayo found herself especially hardpressed when asked to provide documentary support for some of her most sensational claims. She had claimed, for example, that mothers in India routinely stimulated their children sexually to keep them content, that parents generally condoned the use of young boys for the sexual pleasure of older men, and that seven to eight out of ten men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty in India were sexually impotent.11 Mayo provided no sources for these outrageous claims. The charges of exaggeration and sensationalism had begun to stick. Still, ‘‘Militancy and Truth,’’ an editorial in the New York Times on October 16, 1927, made a last-ditch effort to defend the overall credibility of Mother India. ‘‘Shall we rally to a book which sins against facts, but which thereby dramatizes a situation and advances a cause? Shall the writer practice absolute factual fidelity and balance and miss his public,’’ the editorial asked, ‘‘or introduce jazz and get a hearing?’’ 12 If Mother India had come out in favor of ‘‘jazz’’ over factual fidelity, the editorial implied, it was only to secure a wider public hearing for its ‘‘truth.’’ Only months into the controversy, Mother India had begun to shed its guise as a supposedly ‘‘scientific’’ or ‘‘objective’’ report. The status of Mayo’s facts, however, formed the tip of the iceberg in the controversy. As even the New York Times editorial recognized, the more ironic challenge to Mother India came from critics who used the same facts, but for their own purposes. ‘‘The most difficult problem,’’ the editorial complained, ‘‘is presented by reviews which take large exceptions to her indictment and yet suggest that her book is well worthwhile.’’ 13 Herein lay the peculiar vulnerability of Mayo’s selfstyled factuality: the assertion of her critics that even ‘‘true’’ facts had added up to an ‘‘untrue’’ book. As one critic aptly put it: ‘‘The keynote to this book is the word ‘facts.’ It is full of them; and they are nearly all true. . . . Yet the picture of India which is given is untrue.’’ 14 Margaret E. Cousins, an Irish feminist and one of the principal organizers of two of the leading all-India women’s organizations, the Women’s Indian Association (wia) and the All India Women’s Conference (aiwc), conceded that her own experience in India ‘‘corroborate[d] a large number of [Mayo’s] facts and illustrations regarding sex, health, untouchability and the treatment of animals.’’ Yet Cousins concluded that the ‘‘total impression [Mayo] conveys to any reader, either inside or outside India, is cruelly and wickedly untrue.’’ 15

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figure 4. Miguel Covarrubias, ‘‘Auntie India’’ (Katherine Mayo). From John Riddelhi’s ‘‘A Step-Son of Mother India’s Aunt Answers: A Parody Investigation of America in Miss Mayo’s Best Manner, Literary Grist of the Month,’’ Vanity Fair, August 1928, 67. Miguel Covarrubias, Vanity Fair © 1928 Condé Nast Publications Inc. Reproduced by permission of Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The issue, indeed, was not so much the facts themselves as the inferences that Mayo had drawn from them. Hence, as another critic declared, the facts were ultimately irrelevant for any assessment of the book: ‘‘Let the facts stand—but let no one think to portray India by quoting any number of facts; ‘Mother India’ pays little heed to them, and it is hopeless to judge her by them.’’ 16 Ernest Wood, the author of An Englishman Defends Mother India: A Complete and Constructive Reply to ‘Mother India’ (1929), wrote: ‘‘As to facts . . . [Mayo] is generally wrong, and as to deductions from facts, she is almost entirely wrong.’’ 17 Cousins, like Gandhi before her, eloquently expressed the dilemma posed by Mayo’s facts: ‘‘Some of [Mayo’s] facts as isolated facts can be substantiated,’’ Cousins admitted, ‘‘but when they are magnified into generalizations they achieve the paradox of turning a fact into a lie.’’ 18 The rhetoric of factuality thus did little to save Mother India from the charges of its critics. The attempts of Mayo and her defenders to find refuge in the authority of facts missed the full import of a challenge that was directed less to the facts themselves than to the explanatory framework for the facts. Cornelia Sorabji, a self-described loyalist of the British Empire and one of the few Indian women to identify pub-

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licly with Mayo, found herself stumped by the rhetorical strategies of Mayo’s critics. Sorabji handled specific charges made against individual facts in Mother India such as the one that Margaret Balfour, a British doctor in India, had leveled against Mayo’s statistics on premature maternity: ‘‘I do not think Miss Balfour’s answer,’’ Sorabji wrote in defense of Mother India, ‘‘covers the areas identically covered by Miss Mayo’s instances.’’ 19 Yet when legions of critics, including Sorabji’s sister Alice Pennell, repudiated the book without controverting its specific facts, she threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘‘I keep on saying to these folks here,’’ Sorabji wrote to a friend, ‘‘if you want to prove KM [Mayo] wrong take her specific instances—she has given you her sources—and disprove these. They do not do this because they can’t!’’ The problem, as Sorabji herself recognized, was in fact more complex: ‘‘Reformers attack Miss Mayo,’’ she complained, ‘‘but urge just what she urges.’’ 20 Similarly the British feminist Eleanor Rathbone provided documentary support for Mayo’s facts in Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’? (1929) but failed to recognize the two-track challenge to Mother India.21 Rathbone’s own subsequent social research into the conditions in India, despite her earlier support for Mother India, led her to a similar position that was advocated all along by many of Mayo’s critics. Rathbone, in her own book on India, accepted many of the facts of Mother India, especially concerning the prevalence of child marriage. However, she rejected Mayo’s explanations and conclusions about the facts.22 Herein lay the peculiar irony of the rhetoric of factuality in the Mother India controversy: the facts of the book gained wide public currency even as the book’s basic conceptual apparatus came undone.

aligning the ‘‘political’’ with the ‘‘social’’ The controversy over Mother India provided an alternative framework—the effects of the political condition of colonial rule—for explaining the social condition of India. The new paradigm reversed the relationship between the political and social domains in the explanation of the ‘‘social question’’ in India. The codification and textualization of Hindu culture under colonial rule, from at least the late eighteenth century onward, had produced a seemingly unchanging, textual (leaning in favor of the authority of the most ancient texts), and homogeneous version of Hindu culture that served as a baseline for competing arguments about social reform. The Mayo controversy challenged this in providing an expanded terrain, beyond the ‘‘contentious traditions’’ of competing interpretations of a textualized Hindu culture, for the debate about the causes and solutions of the

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social condition of India.23 Mayo’s critics, while conceding the prevalence of reactionary social customs and practices, traced its causes not to an essential Hindu culture but to historical and material processes that implicated British colonialism in India. For example, Kamaladevi Chattopadhya, a leading women’s activist, reflected this new understanding of some of the reactionary social customs in India: Little do those who think that the emancipation of the Indian woman began with the coming of the British realize how successfully Imperialism propped up a dying society and gave a fresh lease of life to obsolete old traditions and customs under the guise of ‘‘Religious Neutrality’’ and sought to perpetuate their slavery.24

While Mayo provided a purely social explanation for India’s problems, her critics turned to a political analysis that identified colonial rule as the root for the social condition, including the position of women, in India. The contours of the controversy from the beginning demonstrated the seriousness of the issues at stake. To be sure, Mother India provoked numerous ad hominem attacks as well as defensive arguments in favor of the social status quo in India. So, for example, ‘‘an Indian student of sociology,’’ in the aptly titled article ‘‘Mother India: A Defense of Caste and Women’s Place in Hindu Society’’ in the Englishman (Calcutta), simply resorted to an unabashed apology for the genderand caste-based social hierarchies in India.25 Nor was Bipan Chandra Pal, a veteran nationalist leader in Bengal, immune from lapsing into a purely defensive repudiation of Mother India. At the famous Calcutta Town Hall protest meeting on September 4, 1927, Pal condemned Mayo’s book without even having read it! At the ad hoc platforms set up outside to accommodate the overflow from the Town Hall meeting, numerous self-appointed speakers matched Mayo in their vitriol. They regaled the audience with personal anecdotes of the questionable morality of Western women they had encountered in the cities of Europe and America.26 In the course of the controversy, Mayo also came in for her share of personal attacks as an American ‘‘spinster’’ with a morbid fascination with sex. Some critics recommended that Mayo secure a ‘‘respectable marriage’’ as a cure for her sexual obsession.27 Such frivolous and defensive responses to Mother India were in themselves hardly surprising, but they drew fire from many of Mayo’s critics. Leading social reformers, nationalist politicians, and women activists reframed the ad hominem attacks against Mayo, as well as her critics’ defensive invocations of a glorious Hindu culture, for an expanded framework for the critique of Mother India.

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The concern over strategy and the backlash against the most egregious responses to Mother India testified to the more serious implications of the affair. The critical responses to Mother India were typically quite hybrid, with most combining a variety of rhetorical strategies in their critiques. Yet leading reformistnationalist journals like the Indian Social Reformer (Bombay) and the Modern Review (Calcutta) became self-appointed arbiters of the merits of the different books and pamphlets written in response to Mother India. In reviewing Upendra Kumar Kar’s Bengali response to Mother India, Visva-Janani Bharat-Mata (Mother-India— the Universal Mother) (1928), the Modern Review launched a broader critique of the methods that many of Mayo’s vernacular critics deployed. The review complained that the ‘‘majority of vernacular writers’’ in the controversy suffered from the ‘‘want of a rational and scientific training, and an over-lively sense of our past greatness to compensate for its loss in the present.’’ It blamed the problem on the ‘‘class of readers’’ to which the vernacular contributions typically appealed: readers who ‘‘are not trained in the historic method, to whom comparative study is an unknown quantity, and who are unaccustomed to the rigid tests by which literary evidence is sifted.’’ 28 For numerous critics of Mother India, as for this writer in the Modern Review, neither a simple denunciation of Mayo’s facts nor an unscientific appeal to a glorious past represented an adequate response to the book. The wide public dissemination of the book, in India as much as abroad, also reveals something of the multiple agendas the controversy served. Some of Mayo’s critics sought to ban her book in India, and the Central Legislative Assembly in India entertained a resolution to this effect. Influential sections of the Indian press, however, criticized attempts to ban the book and advocated wide publicity of the book in India.29 The book soon formed the basis of a nationwide public debate. The Servants of India Society, a social reform organization in western India, argued that Mother India did not deserve a response from its critics, but a great many notable Indian social reformers, nationalist politicians, and activist women clearly thought otherwise. Kamakeshi Natarajan, a veteran social activist and editor of the Indian Social Reformer, strongly advocated ‘‘a detailed answer’’ to the book. He feared that, without critique, Mother India for years to come ‘‘will be cited, as Abbé Dubois’ book is now cited, as a work, the statements in which have never been challenged and are therefore irrefutable.’’ 30 The sheer volume of the responses to Mother India was itself impressive. A variety of newspapers and journals in India serialized the book, and numerous critical responses to it were translated into several Indian languages. However, many of the vernacular contributions rarely saw English translations, thus belying

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Mayo’s dismissal of the nationwide debate as designed simply to appeal to American public opinion. In fact, critics often distinguished between the audience in India and abroad for the various contributions to the controversy. C. F. Andrews, whose own contribution was The True India: A Plea for Understanding (1929), found the expatriate Indian Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s A Son of India Answers Mother India (1928) suitable mainly for an international reading public. Andrews praised the general tone of Mukerji’s book but questioned its usefulness for Indians. The book might be ‘‘effective with Western readers,’’ Andrews declared, but it was likely to be ‘‘somewhat stale’’ for Indian readers.31 The sensitivity to the different sites for the debate over Mother India—Indian as much as international—revealed the broader pedagogical aims of Mayo’s critics: the reframing of the terms of the debate on India’s social condition. Even the critics who used an exposé of the social problems of the West—the popular tu quoque (thou also) response to Mother India—played some part in revising the dominant understanding of the social ‘‘backwardness’’ of India. The Indian politician C. S. Ranga Iyer, in Father India: A Reply to Mother India (1927), juxtaposed revelations of the social and sexual problems in India alongside similar problems in the West. Ranga Iyer drew from judge Ben B. Lindsey in The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925), a study of juvenile delinquency and sexual practices drawn from Lindsey’s experience in Denver, Colorado, to balance Mayo’s ‘‘facts’’ of social depravity in India.32 Scores of Mayo’s critics, in public speeches, reviews, pamphlets, and books, both in English and in various Indian languages, turned to the authority of Western sources and to personal experiences in the West to draw attention to comparable, or worse, ‘‘social’’ problems. The titles of some of the contributions, such as Norman Douglas’s How about Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (1929), illustrated the relativizing aims of their authors.33 This seemingly frivolous tu quoque strategy was nevertheless significant: it challenged Mayo’s assumption of a fundamental difference between the nature of the social problems in India and the West. In short, the tu quoque response was premised on the rejection of Mayo’s essentialist argument that in the West social ills were merely historical anomalies that could easily be corrected, but they were deeply rooted in religion and a static culture in India. Numerous studies of Western social conditions, only slightly less lurid than Mayo’s, captured the Indian public imagination during the controversy. Indeed, U.S. consular officials in India complained about the vernacular press’s focus on sensational sexual scandals in their country and the public lynchings of African Americans.34 Few critics honed this strategy to greater effect than K. L. Gauba,

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who wrote one of the most self-consciously wicked satirical ripostes to Mother India. His Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok (1929) became a runaway bestseller comparable to Mayo’s Mother India.35 He was convinced that harking back to a glorious Indian past or a detailed engagement with Mayo’s charges was inadequate as a rebuttal of Mother India; he thus concocted, at Mayo’s expense, an elaborate and self-conscious ‘‘joke.’’ 36 Gauba, without so much as a reciprocal four-month tour of the United States, uncovered the ‘‘true’’ essence of U.S. society in sensational accounts of racial, sexual, and class antagonisms. The phenomenal sales of his book, like Mother India, led to the possibility of censorship when its entry into the United States was briefly threatened. Uncle Sham best illustrated the runaway success of a book that simply turned Mayo’s technique against a ‘‘Western’’ society. The fault lines in Mayo’s essentialist argument about an absolute difference between Indian and Western social problems began to take their toll. Mayo conceded to her critics that in the United States, ‘‘individuals may, and do, offend every law of decency and humanity.’’ Yet she reiterated her point about the fundamental difference in the nature of the social problems in the United States and India. ‘‘The raping of girl children, called marriage,’’ she insisted, ‘‘is not only sanctioned, but virtually imposed by Hindu social and religious customs,’’ 37 whereas bad social practices in the United States were supposedly more easily broken. Several American critics of Mother India, however, learned a different lesson; they freely drew parallels between the two countries’ social problems. Samuel McCrea Cavert, an American missionary, noted that any book on the United States resembling Mayo’s on India must include the following chapter headings: The Only Land Where Lynchings Occur; The Land of Marital Scandal—One Divorce to Every Seven Marriages; The Land of the Crime Wave—Armored Motors Necessary to Transport Payrolls; The Land of Industrial Strife—Incessant Strikes and Lockouts; Child Laborers—A Million and a Half No Older Than Thirteen—In the Richest Land in the World.38

Likewise, the advice that Blanche Watson, an American admirer of Gandhi, gave to the Indian publicist Syed Hossain on how best to prepare for his U.S. debate on Mother India was revealing. She encouraged him to visit the office of the naacp journal the Crisis to consult the ‘‘pictures of lynchings at which the average American reader of Mother India would be more horrified than he has been at Miss Mayo’s book.’’ ‘‘The pictures may not capture the true essence of

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U.S. culture,’’ she wrote, ‘‘because efforts were being made to stop [public lynching].’’ Nevertheless, she felt they revealed a certain truth about the United States because ‘‘one half of the country broadly speaking condones this practice.’’ For Watson, therefore, the comparison would urge American readers of Mother India to be aware of the similarly ‘‘variable character of the truth’’ revealed in Mayo’s account of India.39 The relativizing arguments in the tu quoque responses to Mother India ultimately placed into greater relief Mayo’s political conclusions about the unfitness of Indians for self-government. As the Vartman (Kanpur), a Hindi newspaper, concluded, ‘‘If social progress was the touchstone, no country would be ready for self-government.’’ 40 The tu quoque responses had revised Mayo’s fundamental conceptual apparatus by placing the social problems of India on the same rhetorical and analytical plane with those of the West. Hence to dismiss the tu quoque response as merely defensive would be to underestimate its important rhetorical contribution. Not all tu quoque responses, moreover, entailed a refusal to acknowledge the validity of Mayo’s facts about the social problems of India. Chandravati Lakhanpal’s Mother India Ka Jawab (The Reply to Mother India) (1928), one of the several anti-Mayo responses by an Indian woman, was exemplary in this respect.41 Notwithstanding its tu quoque strategy, Lakhanpal refused to deflect attention from the social problems of India. She vigorously argued for a commitment to reform the social problems of India as the best response to Mother India. Lakhanpal’s intervention in a Hindi publication that was not translated into English spoke self-consciously to an indigenous public. The book devoted considerable space to the social ills of Europe and America, quoting from writers such as Havelock Ellis to demonstrate that ‘‘sexual perversion’’ was more common in the West than in India. Yet for Lakhanpal, who went on to become a prize-winning author of a book calling for reform in the social position of women in India, the revelations of Western social ills did not excuse smugness among Indians. The preface to Mother India Ka Jawab specifically cautions against such a reading of her anti-Mayo response: There is no doubt that problems associated with drink, larceny, and violence are daily on the rise in both Europe and America; yet at the same time I want to make clear that pointing these things out cannot serve as the real reply to Mother India. Many of Miss Mayo’s statements are false, not only are they false but they are downright dirty and degrading; but no one perusing through the pages of her book can deny that many of Mayo’s statements are also true. . . . Readers, let these words echo in your ears as you turn the pages of this book and may you resolve to take off the blinkers from your eyes and expel the filth from your society. This alone can be the proper reply to Mother India! 42

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Mayo’s British friends assured her that Lakhanpal’s argument was unworthy of Mayo’s engagement.The Indian press was far more favorably disposed to Lakhanpal’s book. The Modern Review included in its review another anti-Mayo book written by Uma Nehru, a leading woman activist and frequent contributor to women’s journals and periodicals in India. In this case, the reviewer compared the contrasting styles of the two authors with an implicit suggestion that Lakhanpal’s focus on the social problems of the West, unlike Nehru’s, may have been somewhat gratuitous in making the case against Mother India.43 Lakhanpal’s book, which drew parallels between the social problems of India and those of the West, no less than Nehru’s, which focused on repudiating Mayo’s claim that all the problems of India were purely social in origin, contributed to an emerging revised understanding of the social condition of India from beyond the confines of a reified notion of culture. Hence the focus on the political roots of India’s social problems—deemed by Mayo to be purely social in origin—was widely acknowledged as the most effective strategy adopted by Mayo’s critics in the controversy. Lala Lajpat Rai’s Unhappy India: Being a Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ (1928) serves as an example of this latter strategy. In a deliberate echo of Mayo’s ‘‘Argument’’ in Mother India, Rai countered in his book with a chapter appropriately entitled ‘‘Poverty—the Rock Bottom Physical Base of India’s Ills.’’ 44 Poverty, according to Rai, was caused by the heavy burden of British taxation and the economic exploitation of colonial rule. This, not an oversexed society, was the root cause of the unhygienic conditions, the illiteracy, the superstition, and the other reactionary social practices in India. Rai, like Mayo, marshaled an impressive array of sources—from government officials, missionaries, and committee reports—to make his case about the far-reaching effects of the grinding poverty of the majority of Indians. Gandhi, in his interview with Mayo, had also emphasized poverty as an important cause of India’s social problems. He had recommended to Mayo that she consult the British civil servant W. W. Hunter’s The Indian Empire: Its History, People and Products (1882) to corroborate his own remarks on the impoverishment of India under British rule.45 Concerned with finding a social origin for all the problems of India, however, Mayo had made a deliberately selective use of Gandhi’s words and his published writings in her book. Mayo now responded to these economic critiques of her argument by reiterating her initial diagnosis of the social roots of all of India’s problems: ‘‘Hindus,’’ she insisted, were slaves of social customs and practices and would remain ‘‘hungry and poor on the richest farms of Iowa after they had eaten off the first crops.’’ 46

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More typically, Mayo and her supporters tended to dismiss such challenges to her basic explanatory framework on grounds that they did not controvert the specific facts of the book. Yet Gandhi’s critique, no less than Rai’s, challenged precisely Mayo’s focus on timeless Hindu sexual proclivities, rather than historical and material conditions, as the explanation for the social retardation of India. From their perspective, then, the basic premise of Mayo’s book made it ‘‘untrue’’ no matter how true its individual facts might be. These critiques of Mayo were engaged in the more difficult task of fleshing out an alternative explanation for her facts. The ironic use of Mayo’s own facts provided the grounds for some of the most sustained critiques of the colonial state and of colonialism. J. J. Cornelius, a former professor at Lucknow University whose offer to debate Mayo at the Town Hall meeting in New York she had summarily dismissed, set the standard with his hard-hitting review of Mother India in Current History (New York). Cornelius’s argument did not shy away from Mayo’s revelations of the social degradation of India, but he demonstrated point by point how British misrule in India had created this social degradation. He held the administrative framework of colonial rule responsible for most of the problems of India, including policies that were directed at preventing ‘‘close union between Hindus and Mohammedans upon which political progress so largely depends’’ and the system of political devolution that had burdened elected Indian representatives with the task of social improvement without granting them financial autonomy. Cornelius contrasted British India unfavorably with independent princely states such as Baroda and Mysore where the state had decreed free and compulsory education and had outlawed many reactionary social practices. Viewed in this light, he insisted, British rule had retarded social progress in British India. He replied caustically to Mayo’s claims that British policy had been cautious so as not to wound the susceptibilities of the people. Such caution, he wrote, ‘‘seems to be conspicuous by its absence when it is a question of repressive legislation or economic exploitation’’; but it is, nevertheless, ‘‘piously invoked when it concerns the need to uproot customs and practices retarding social and economic progress.’’ 47 This reversal of the relationship between the political and the social created an opening for arguing in favor of a representative national government in India. For Agnes Smedley, no apologist for reactionary social customs and practices in India, Mother India had only demonstrated the truth of the following: ‘‘An Indian national government—but not the abortion England is trying to force upon the country now—could solve all such social evils as Miss Mayo writes of in her book.’’ 48 Natarajan further clinched the case in the Indian Daily Mail (Bombay):

122 Ironic Reversal British rule itself is a good deal responsible for hardening fluid custom and neglecting and even resisting social legislation during the last fifty years. Social reformers have come to realize that their work must remain unfruitful until a national government takes it courageously in hand confident of the support of the people.49

This rhetorical maneuver, rather than quibbling over the veracity of Mayo’s facts, had recast the facts in specifically political terms. The linking of the political condition of colonial rule to the social retardation of India became one of the major achievements of Mayo’s critics in the debate. For this reason, Natarajan’s Miss Mayo’s Mother India: A Rejoinder (1927), which was first published in serial form in the columns of the Indian Social Reformer, became the most noted challenge to Mother India. Natarajan was a veteran social reformer who in the course of his career had addressed many of the social problems that were the mainstay of Mayo’s revelations. As such, he knew that the government had not been ‘‘very helpful’’ and had opposed all reform legislations ‘‘invariably throw[ing] their weight on the side of the status quo.’’ 50 Both he and his friend S. K. Dutta of the Young Men’s Christian Association in India argued that Mayo had falsified the record of recent attempts to pass reform legislations in India. They were specifically outraged over Mayo’s use of quotations from debates on marriage and age-of-consent regulations in the Legislative Assembly in India without her noting the role of the government in defeating such measures.51 In no uncertain terms, Natarajan blamed the colonial government, no less than Hindu orthodoxy, for the prevalence of reactionary social customs and practices in India. This line of attack proved especially effective in the controversy, persuading even the Liberal British politician Sir John Simon, chair of the notorious Simon Commission. After reading Natarajan’s riposte, which he did on his journey out to India, Simon wrote in his diary: ‘‘It seems to knock the bottom out of Miss Mayo’s book.’’ 52 This line of argument rendered impossible any attempt to absolve the political condition of colonial rule of responsibility for the social problems of India. Uma Nehru’s Mother India Aur Uska Jawab (Mother India and Its Reply) (1928) represented perhaps the most original and fascinating contribution in this genre.53 Nehru’s book stands out as one of the most self-conscious engagements with the central target of the controversy: Mayo’s explanation for the social condition of India. In the preface to her Hindi translation of Mother India, Nehru argued that the fundamental objective of Mayo’s book was precisely to deflect attention away from the consequences of almost two hundred years of British rule on the current state of India. This, Nehru suggested, was the primary reason for Mayo’s insis-

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tence on a purely social explanation for India’s problems. As a means of focusing the attention of her readers on the importance of this central question, Nehru chose to limit her own critique of Mother India to an imaginary dialogue with Mayo in which she put Mayo’s explanation to the test. Nehru, as a renowned social critic in her own right, was not interested in defending the social customs and practices in India but sought to understand their cause.54 Her imaginary dialogue with Mayo thus merits closer attention for the alternative it offered in locating the explanation of the social—as much as the political and economic—condition of India in the effects of the global and systemic operation of European imperialism and colonialism. The opening exchange in Nehru’s imaginary dialogue sets the stage for her important correction to dominant colonial and nationalist interpretations of India’s past and for her alternative account of the effects of the material and discursive practices of British colonialism in India. The dialogue begins with Mayo expressing a certain justifiable impatience with Nehru for raising the hoary question of contemporary India’s decline from the glories of its ancient past. Mayo points to the impotence of Hindus, still content simply to rest on the laurels of a long-lost ancient civilization. She goes on to remind Nehru of the ruinous effects in the medieval period of the Muslim conquerors of India, contrasting Muslim rule in India with the stability and security provided by British rule. Nehru immediately rejects Mayo’s explanation of the past and elaborates a basic difference between the Muslim and British rulers of India. Muslim rulers had made India their home, while the British sought only to exploit India as a colony for the benefit of Britain. The British had thus inaugurated a distinctly colonial or ‘‘alien’’ form of rule in India. For Nehru this difference was of crucial importance. It signaled an important shift in the understanding both of the Indian past and of the nature of colonialism. The decline of India, in this version, came not from the period of Muslim rulers, but from the advent of a distinctly alien rule associated with colonialism as a system. The colonial form of rule inaugurated by the British, Nehru argues, had far-reaching consequences for the subsequent political, economic, and social development of the country. The negative consequences of this form of rule, she suggests, exceeded even the temporary ravages of the plundering raids of certain Muslim conquerors of India such as Mahummud of Ghazni and Nadir Shah. Colonial exploitation was far more deep-seated and insidious in its effects than any mere military conquest, however brutal.55 For Nehru, then, the very ‘‘alienness’’ of colonial rule—unprecedented in the history of India—shoulders

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responsibility for the distortion of India’s social, economic, and political development. In a telling reversal of the colonial understanding of society, therefore, Nehru suggests that the alienness of the colonial state does not render it exempt from, but directly implicates it in, the social problems of India. Nehru’s imaginary dialogue with Mayo is also notable for enacting a further twist in reconstructing the relationship between the political and the social in India. Parting company with the tu quoque responses, Nehru uses to very different effect the comparison between Western and Eastern civilizations. Nehru, in a clever reversal of Mayo’s argument about the difference between the social ills of the West and the East, makes the following observation: The only difference is that in eastern civilizations blind prejudices have remained confined primarily to the field of social relations as in dining and marriage regulations. In the West, however, these prejudices have been allowed to infect the political realm. In the name of ‘‘national pride’’ and ‘‘security,’’ therefore, Western rulers have enacted discriminatory regulations in their nations against Asians and other races, limited their access to work, and are further regulating their free movement. In ancient times, even before the advent of history, the Brahmans on the strength of their religious superstitions had made a section of their own society into untouchables. Today, in these modern times, Europe is the New Brahman that is reducing the rest of the world to untouchables.56

For Nehru, the political bigotry of the West, which fueled modern imperialism and racism, was even more insidious than the social bigotry of the East. Whereas the problems of the East were by now widely acknowledged and were being addressed, the problems of the West remained largely unacknowledged and unaddressed. The consolidation of irrational prejudices and bigotry in the different domains of the social and the political in the East and in the West respectively, she implies, are the contrary effects of the global operation of colonialism and imperialism in metropolitan and colonial societies. Nehru’s dialogue with Mayo thus represents one of the more sophisticated examples of the revised framework emerging out of the Mayo controversy: the shift in the debate on India’s social condition from a reified and textualized understanding of culture to a global understanding of the effects of the ideological and economic working of imperialism. The recasting of the debate on the social condition of India within a new interpretive framework opened the way for a reintegration of social and political reforms in the service of an expanded nationalist project. As such, it breathed new life into an old nationalist debate about the respective priorities of political

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versus social reforms in India. As early as 1886, Justice Telang had raised the question in his speech in Bombay: ‘‘Should social reform precede political reform?’’ While concluding that the two were not watertight compartments, he noted that in most societies political reform actually preceded social reform.57 The Indian National Congress had given birth to the National Social Conference in 1887 in an attempt to separate the social from the political work of nationalism. When the Congress decided to hold its annual meetings separate from the National Social Conference in the 1890s, it gave institutional form to this separation.58 The two spheres of nationalist activity, however, had been brought together again by the early twentieth century as a response to a variety of developments, including the advent of Gandhian leadership in the Congress. For Shanataram Ganabarao Warty, an ardent anti-Mayo critic, the original debate about political versus social reform was as relevant in the 1920s as it had been in Telang’s time. Warty’s Sister India: A Critical Examination of and a Reasoned Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ (1928), appearing in Marathi as Miss Meyo-Khandan ‘Mother Indio’ ’Turkshudhvivechanatmak Uttar (Miss Mayo Explained: A Reasoned Response to Mother India) (1928), summarized the stakes of this debate in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘‘More Political than Social.’’ He characterized Mayo’s cry ‘‘that social reform should precede political reform in India’’ as an ‘‘interested cry’’ that was ‘‘heard most when some political advance is due as at the present time.’’ History, he concluded, clearly ‘‘justifies the precedence of political reform over social reform.’’ 59 Yet Warty’s emphasis on political reforms was not a simple argument for the precedence of political over social reforms. He, too, sought a new integration of political and social reforms: ‘‘We want political power,’’ he argued, ‘‘to effect social reform.’’ ‘‘The only way out of our social difficulties,’’ he insisted, ‘‘is to entrust us with larger political powers, so that we can utilize them to our social ends.’’ 60 The British government, as a foreign government, was both uninterested in, and fearful of, active participation in socioreligious reform in India. Mayo’s critics thus reshaped the relationship between political and social reforms and provided an expanded case for the devolution of political power in India—a project that they now took to a wider audience by disseminating critiques of Mother India in a variety of Indian languages and in the vernacular press. The reverberations of the controversy thus served a revised nationalist agenda by presenting the intransigence of the colonial state as an obstacle for both political and social reforms. Nationalist reformers thus adopted, with considerable enthusiasm, the reform of the ‘‘backward’’ social conditions as their response to

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Mayo. Take the example of Dr. P. Varadarajulu Naidu, a leading figure in south Indian politics in the 1920s, who contributed a foreword to Inthiya Matha (1928), a Tamil translation of Mother India. He condemned Mayo’s overt political propaganda while simultaneously urging publicity for the book to promote social reform in India. ‘‘To change ourselves according to the situation,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the most fitting reply to those like Mayo and others who are spoiling the name of the Indian people.’’ 61 George Joseph, another leading nationalist politician from south India, expressed similar sentiments in his foreword to V. Ramaswami Iyengar’s Maya Meyo, Allathu, Mayo-Vukku Savukkadi (Mayo the Witch, or A Scourge for Mayo) (1928). Joseph admitted the usefulness of the controversy in giving a boost to the movement for social reform in India. ‘‘The attack of ‘Mother India,’ ’’ he wrote, ‘‘was based on the facts noted originally by Indian reformers themselves.’’ Hence ‘‘educated men and women are now at the task of meeting the challenge of the book in a spirit of pure constructiveness.’’ 62 Similarly, though Mayo had exempted Muslims from harsh criticism, an Urdu translation of her book urged Muslims as well as Hindus to answer Mayo by reforming themselves. In his preface to Bharat Mãta (1928), Mirza Abdul Majeed rejected Mayo’s attempt to create misunderstanding between Hindus and Muslims; her book, he argued, had ‘‘injured all sections of the people’’ by its attack on national political aspirations in India. He advised Indians—Muslims and Hindus alike—to read the book, notwithstanding its political motivations, in order to ‘‘ameliorate their condition’’ and ‘‘to endeavor to remove the social evils from the soil of India.’’ 63 The message of several critics of Mother India presented a similar attempt to recuperate Mayo’s revelations of the social condition of India for an expanded political and social project of nationalism. The rhetoric of this new project was also increasingly integrated ‘‘horizontally’’ between religious and linguistic communities. The sheer volume of the response to Mother India did much to shift the terms of the debate on the social condition of India. Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the international representative of the Congress at the time of the publication of Mother India, summed up the shift in the official Congress line on social reform. In his note to the All India Congress Committee, dated September 13, 1927, Nehru had the following to say of Mother India: ‘‘The book is a particularly mean and disgraceful effort at propaganda, and yet I should like as many Indians as possible to read it. We have our plague spots. Let us face them squarely and root them all out.’’ 64 Once the domain of the social had been recast—reconnected to the domain of the political—the project of social reform could be embraced anew. Even favorable responses to Mother India frequently operated within the alter-

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native conceptual framework made available in the controversy. Take the example of Kovai A. Ayyamuthu’s Meyo Kutru Moyya Poyya (Mayo’s Charges: True or False?) (1929), one of the most elaborate and extended defenses of Mother India produced in India.65 Ayyamuthu’s book stretched the nationalist framework of the controversy to its limits but did not endorse the basic conceptual premise of Mayo’s intervention. Ayyamuthu’s defense of Mother India had first appeared in the columns of the Kudi Arasu, the Tamil weekly of the self-respect movement in Madras. E. V. Ramaswami Naicker, better known as Periyar, and the founding leader of the self-respect movement, wrote the foreword. Once a Gandhian noncooperator and a champion of Gandhi’s promotion of khadi (homespun cloth), Periyar’s growing differences with Gandhi had come to a head in 1927 over the latter’s defense of the varnashramadharma—Gandhi’s own idealized interpretation of the caste system. In sharp editorials in the Kudi Arasu in 1927, Periyar proclaimed his disenchantment with the Gandhian vision of swaraj (self-rule) for its failure to adequately address the roots of caste and gender oppression in India.66 The final break between Periyar and Gandhi occurred roughly in the same period when Gandhi was reading and composing his response to Mother India on his tour of south India.67 The political differences were reflected in the position of the self-respect movement in the controversy. Periyar endorsed Ayyamuthu’s book as an expression of the distinctive views of the self-respect movement on Mother India. The aim of Ayyamuthu’s book, as Periyar explained, was ‘‘to demonstrate that the contents of the book ‘Mother India’ written by Miss Mayo, are by and large factual.’’ ‘‘Though we have certain reservations about Mayo’s book and about the purpose for which it was written,’’ he averred, ‘‘we have no hesitation or fear in first of all accepting most of the contents of the book as facts of reality.’’ 68 Ayyamuthu’s acknowledgment of the veracity of many of Mayo’s facts was not unlike that of many of Mayo’s reformist critics, but his uncompromising focus on the social inequities of Hindu society, especially of the caste system, went much further than most of Mayo’s critics. He provided a deliberately sympathetic assessment of Mayo’s intervention; concluding his book by provocatively offering his gratitude to Mayo for having ‘‘opened our eyes to the realities and helped us discard our deformities.’’ The expression of gratitude toward Mother India strongly differentiated Ayyamuthu’s response from those of Mayo’s critics. On closer examination, however, Ayyamuthu’s defense of Mother India enacts the same reversal as many of Mayo’s critics of the basic understanding of the relationship between the social and the political in Mother India. Ayyamuthu’s

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evaluation of the difference between his own contribution to the controversy and the dominant nationalist responses to Mother India is instructive. Dismissing the purely defensive attacks on Mother India as unworthy of attention, he focused on the more complex response of the leading nationalist critics of Mayo’s book. He singled out the foreword written by the non-Brahmin congressman Dr. Varadarajulu Naidu for the Tamil translation of Mother India. Ayyamuthu acknowledged that Naidu ‘‘accepts that unpardonable evils exist in Indian society as a whole and emphatically advocates the need of eradicating them once and for all.’’ Yet he criticized Naidu for condemning Mayo, who similarly pointed out these evils, simply because of her partisan political motivations. ‘‘I too vehemently condemn Miss Mayo’s ill motives, her sinister intentions, her incendiary remarks, and her impertinence,’’ Ayyamuthu admitted. But he added that ‘‘if an individual were to accuse me vengefully in front of an assembly of persons for being a drunk,’’ my duty should be ‘‘to remove that evil in me rather than to waste my time quarrelling over the degree of my addiction or the objective of the individual making the charge against me.’’ 69 Similarly Ayyamuthu refused to be seduced by the argument of Mayo’s critics that social problems existed in India as in the West: ‘‘There is a fundamental difference between corruption in other countries,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and in our country. For almost 90% of our activities are based on religion and casteism.’’ 70 Yet notwithstanding his emphasis on the social nature of the problems of India, Ayyamuthu departed from Mayo on a significant point: his refusal to absolve ‘‘British rule’’ from responsibility for the social cast of the problems of India. Ayyamuthu was skeptical of nationalist claims that political reform alone would ensure social reform in India, but he was no less skeptical of Mayo’s claims both about the benefits conferred by colonial rule and about the inherent superiority of Christianity and of Western civilization. Ayyamuthu’s argument, while condemning the hold of meaningless rituals and blind faith in India, extended to a critique of the role of religion and superstition more generally both in India and in the West. He thus reminded Mayo that ‘‘even among the people of your country, dear lady, ignorance is rampant to a certain extent.’’ ‘‘You have also,’’ he wrote, ‘‘created a class of ‘Bishops’ and other evangelists and fall at their feet in reverence.’’ He thus concluded that ‘‘whatever be the religion, people under the spell of bigotry would only remain as persons who have, to a certain extent, mortgaged their knowledge and freedom.’’ 71 He entertained the possibility that the rationalist credo of the self-respect movement, a challenge to all forms of mental slavery, may offer a solution not just for India but for the West as well.

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Ayyamuthu rejected the premise that India’s social problems, even if marked by the enormous hold of Hindu superstitions and bigotry, presented an argument either for the inherent superiority of Christianity or for a fundamental difference in the character of the East and the West. The most telling departure from Mother India, however, came in Ayyamuthu’s chapter on British rule. He conceded to Mayo that British rule in Britain may be the best in the world, but the same could not be said of British rule in India. ‘‘Compare and weigh the benefits the English are getting and the Indians have got under this rule,’’ he asked. ‘‘Can you find any similarity in quantity and quality?’’ ‘‘For the progress of the people,’’ he insisted, ‘‘governmental support and assistance are necessary in all walks of life.’’ The government in India, however, served British interest to the detriment of the Indians. Thus, he concluded, ‘‘we openly express our resistance to this government.’’ 72 To be sure, Ayyamuthu’s book focused much more on ‘‘Brahminical hegemony’’ than on British tyranny because the former, he suggested, operated through even more insidious and unassailable sets of hierarchies. He thus warned against the dangers of the unrestrained operation of Brahminical tyranny in the absence of the British presence in India. Nevertheless, Ayyamuthu’s defense of Mayo—with its refusal to subscribe to Mayo’s conceptual premise—operated within the broader context of the reconfiguration by Mayo’s critics of the relation between the social and the political. The line of defense in Ayyamuthu’s book could thus provide only cold comfort to Mayo and her supporters. Mayo showed some interest in various non-Brahmin organizations in Madras and elsewhere to recruit potential supporters for her cause. She preferred those who were far less critical of her motives and of the basic premise of Mother India. Mayo thus found more pliable Bhagat Ram of the Audi Achut Sabha (Depressed Classes Society) of Ferozepur Cantonment, Punjab, whom she and Newell immediately befriended and provided with a modest monetary contribution for his social reform work in India.73 Bhagat Ram’s support of Mother India expressed a more deep-seated pessimism about the existing possibilities for social reform in India. He pinned his hope, moreover, on the paternalist benevolence of British rule. The pessimistic tone of his article led even the Women’s Leader and Common Cause (London), the organ of Rathbone’s National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, to append a cautionary editorial disclaimer to his contribution: the article, it noted, ‘‘shows one side of the picture— the darkest side—neither a complete nor perhaps a quite fair presentation.’’ 74 Bhagat Ram’s dismissal of all indigenous efforts at social reform appeared too one-sided even to Rathbone and her circle.

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More interesting, perhaps, was the response to Ayyamuthu’s Meyo Kutru Moyya Poyya in the Hindu, the dominant English-language nationalist paper of Madras: a further sign of the expanded contours of the new interest in social reform. The Hindu’s review seemed to take Ayyamuthu’s relentless rationalist critique of the social problems of India in stride: ‘‘While thanking Katherine Mayo for opening the eyes of India,’’ the review concluded, Ayyamuthu ‘‘urges reconstruction of society on the fundamental doctrine [that] man is the architect of his own fate.’’ 75 The book received its due, however perfunctorily, in the columns of one of the most popular English dailies in Madras. The self-respect movement’s devastating exposure of Brahminical caste and sexual practices in India, in spite of its defense of Mayo and its skepticism of the promise offered by a mainstream nationalism, fell within the alternative interpretive grid of Mayo’s critics. The fanfare and vitriol that accompanied the publication of Mother India has often clouded the central object of the controversy, which was not about the social ‘‘backwardness’’ of India but about its cause and solutions.

missionary disaffection The repudiation of the explanatory framework of Mother India, rather than of its ‘‘facts,’’ produced an unfamiliar context for the reception of Mayo’s book. This was most evident in the dilemma that confronted missionary circles in India and abroad in responding to Mayo’s book. The highly public, and somewhat unexpected, disaffection of some of the major missionary boards and their journals provided one of the most telling examples of the peculiar effects of the Mayo controversy. The typical foreign missionary accounts of India, often produced for consumption in missionary recruiting grounds in Europe and North America, were far from neutral. The pressures of raising funds and recruiting volunteers for the missionary project abroad had partly shaped these accounts. The missionary narratives of India played a major role, especially in the United States, in popularizing images of the ‘‘backwardness’’ of the country’s cultural and religious practices. Christian missionaries, indeed, played an important role in the United States in mediating public knowledge and attitudes about India. The political attitude of American missionaries, moreover, was typically identified closely with the project of British colonial rule in India. The popular support in the United States for American missionary work in India, apart from some isolated criticisms in a few liberal journals such as Unity (Chicago), the Nation, and the New Republic, had provided missionaries with little incentive to reorient their political affilia-

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tions. Against this background, Mayo’s Indian critics jumped to a seemingly plausible conclusion: the view that Mother India simply reflected the familiar negative missionary attitudes toward India. However, the contribution of Christian missionaries to the Mayo controversy marked something of a turning point for the missionary enterprise in terms of its relationship to the colonial project. By the postwar period, the self-identification of foreign missionaries with British colonialism had begun to hurt missionary work in India.76 A gradual rethinking of the missionary enterprise was already under way as a result of a variety of pressures: low conversion rates, the indigenization of the church, and the growing pressures of Indian nationalism. American missionaries contributed to the emerging trend toward self-criticism in missionary circles in the 1920s with books such as Daniel J. Flemings’s Building with India (1922) and Eli Stanley Jones’s The Christ of the Indian Road (1925).77 Several prominent American and British missionaries adopted a public stand during the Mother India controversy that brought these changes to a dramatic climax. The first contemporary scholarly investigation into the controversy over Mother India—Dorothy M. Snedegar’s master’s thesis at Duke University in 1938 —was motivated precisely by the surprising anomaly of the negative missionary reaction to Mayo’s book. British and American medical missionaries, after all, had provided much of the information for Mother India; and Mayo herself had been generous in her acknowledgment of the selfless work of Christian missionaries in India.78 Yet, as Snedegar’s findings suggested, missionary commentary on the book, both British and American, did not reciprocate Mayo’s generosity. Snedegar discovered a strongly divided missionary opinion on Mother India, with a slight majority, especially among American missionary organizations, against the book’s political conclusions.79 In fact, American missionaries’ rejection of Mayo’s political framework went much deeper than the usual suspects long identified as political partisans for the Indian nationalist case: John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church in New York and his journal Unity; and the Unitarian Reverend J. T. Sunderland, whose India in Bondage (1928), censored by the British, included a sharply critical assessment of Mother India.80 The much more widespread public reticence of missionaries to be identified with Mayo’s Mother India reflected a significant shift: a reorientation of the missionary understanding of the nature and cure of the social condition of India. This shift makes sense only in the context of a controversy whereby the interpretation of the facts of the social ‘‘backwardness’’ of India, and not necessarily the facts themselves, was called into question. Few, even among the missionary

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critics of Mother India, disputed the facts of Mayo’s revelations about the social condition of India. For the most part, individual missionaries testified to the accuracy of this picture. The correspondence of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions contained evidence of private testimony from missionaries confirming the facts of Mother India. Individual missionaries, contrary to the public position of several missionary boards and journals, confirmed in their private correspondence many of the social problems discussed in Mother India.81 To be sure, there were also some who went public with their endorsement of the book. Several British and North American missionary journals, like the Church Overseas (Westminster), the Missionary Review of the World (New York), and even the Catholic World (Paramus, New Jersey), reviewed Mayo’s book favorably.82 The Christian Advocate of Cincinnati recommended that ‘‘every member of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society should read this book’’ to recognize that the salvation of India lay not in the hands of the Tagores of India but in the adoption of Christ.83 At least one missionary produced a pro-Mayo book in the mini-industry that Mother India spawned. Edith Craske of the Women’s Medical Training School in Ludhiana wrote Sister India: One Solution to the Problems of ‘Mother India’ (1930), openly praising Mayo’s book.84 Yet the public endorsements of Mother India in missionary circles remained relatively few and far between; this public reticence prompted the Baptist Missionary Review (Madras) to take up the cudgels on behalf of the book against fellow missionary detractors.85 The absence of the expected support from missionary circles, more perhaps than any individual missionary criticism of Mother India, put Mayo and her missionary supporters on the defensive. Several of the most important missionary boards, and their journals, issued official statements against the book. The National Christian Council of India, Burma, and Ceylon, the most authoritative Christian organization in the region, entered the fray first. The council’s executive committee, with only one dissenting member, issued a public statement criticizing Mother India signed by the Reverend Dr. N. Manicol, of the United Free Church of the Scotland Mission at Bombay and Poona. The statement protested Mayo’s ‘‘sweeping generalizations’’ and challenged accusations that Mother India was ‘‘promoted in the interests of missionary propaganda.’’ 86 Manicol, in his own review of the book in the National Christian Council Review of India (Poona), drew a line clearly separating Mayo from the vast majority of missionary workers in India: ‘‘To Miss Mayo the missionary will say, ‘Non tali auxilio’: we do not desire cooperation in the case of India,

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rendered in such a spirit.We do not view India as a ‘world menace,’ but as a potentiality of much blessing for a world which cannot afford to despise her.’’ 87 The Reverend Alden H. Clark of the American Marathi Mission wrote a highly critical review of Mother India that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly under the title ‘‘Is India Dying?’’ He joined six other ‘‘leading American missionaries’’ in India to issue a strongly worded protest against ‘‘the unfairness of Mayo’s book.’’ The signatories to the statement expressed their sentiments thus: ‘‘[We wish] to pay our tribute of love and respect to the people of India from whom we, of the west, may learn many valuable lessons. We wish to express our sense of humiliation that an American should write with such unfairness and apparent prejudice in presenting India.’’ 88 The public distancing by prominent missionaries was an embarrassment for Mayo and her supporters. Critical missionary reviews of Mother India also appeared far too commonly in missionary journals and other publications both in India and abroad. The Indian Witness (Lucknow), the weekly journal of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Southern Asia and the largest American ‘‘Oriental’’ newspaper in the subcontinent, carried a strong denunciation of Mother India in a review by the Reverend H. A. Popley. The minister had served in the London Missionary Society at Erode before his transfer to the Indian ymca.89 A major part of Popley’s review featured the response of the Bengali Christian educator, Mona Bose, to Mayo’s inaccurate portrayal in Mother India of Bose’s views. It quickly became one of the most widely cited missionary reviews in the controversy. Even the editorial in the Indian Witness went on to adopt a somewhat critical stance toward Mother India; it pointed, for example, to the book’s many ‘‘false specifications.’’ 90 For Samuel McCrea Cavert in the Federal Council Bulletin, the New York–based organ of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the extent of the missionary disapproval of Mother India proved that Mayo did not reflect the attitude of Christian missionaries in India: ‘‘The spirit of this book,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the antithesis of theirs.’’ 91 The prestigious interdenominational journal the International Review of Missions (Edinburgh) agreed. It carried a strongly negative review of Mother India by Margaret Underhill, a former ‘‘hospital evangelist’’ in Nasik and at the time the associate editor of the paper.The review contained hints of the possible reasons for the missionary disaffection in the controversy. Underhill concluded her review with the following assessment of Mayo’s project: ‘‘Her admiration of British rule is as great as her admiration of India is small, in fact, the former depends upon the latter. It is ungracious to accept appreciation grudgingly, but we think, in this case the price is too great.’’ 92 Underhill feared that

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association with Mayo’s views undermined the missionaries’ social and religious work in India. The fear of aggravating antimissionary and anti-Western sentiments in India certainly explained in part the attitude of leading missionaries and missionary journals toward Mother India. The extreme views by some of Mayo’s earliest supporters who, apart from directing considerable vitriol against indigenous culture, quickly harnessed the book against political reforms in India had set the tone of the controversy. For example, Clifford Sharp, the editor of the New Statesman (London), in his anonymous review of Mother India offered some of the most notorious statements of its political implications. He confessed that Mother India ‘‘contains nothing that is really new,’’ but he praised the book for driving home what many in Britain already knew: ‘‘the filthy personal habits of even the most highly educated classes—which, like the degradation of Hindu women, are unequalled even amongst the most primitive African or Australian savages.’’ These, he argued, made the ‘‘claim for Swaraj [self-rule] seem nonsense and the will to grant it almost a crime.’’ 93 The early American supporters of the book may have put greater emphasis on Mayo’s ‘‘objectivity’’ and her supposedly scientific and dispassionate revelations of social conditions in India, including the problems of hygiene, than the British; but they were no less vitriolic in their tone. The New York Times Book Review published one of the earliest and most influential American reviews of the book, entitled ‘‘India Is Her Own Worst Enemy,’’ by P. W. Wilson, the author of various previous polemics against self-government in India. The review contrasted ‘‘the dirt of India’’ with ‘‘the dirt of Europe’’ only to conclude: ‘‘If Christendom has been unclean, the reason is a sin of omission. India is unclean as an act of piety.’’ The review suggested in no uncertain terms that without the controlling presence of British rule, the dirt, disease, and immorality of India could engulf the entire civilized world.94 The extreme views of many of the early champions of Mother India and of the book itself created the politically charged context of the book’s reception for missionaries. Foreign missionaries thus faced a stark political choice: to remain identified with the interests of British colonial rule or to create the conditions favorable for their own work among the inhabitants of India. The missionary disaffection for Mother India, which Mayo’s friend and secretary Harry Field attributed to self-censorship and timidity, became a matter of some concern to Mayo and her defenders. Indeed, Field complained that ‘‘magazines supported by missionary funds, while welcoming critical reviews, have in several known instances refused statements supporting ‘Mother India.’ ’’ 95 He

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knew of several missionaries, he wrote, who had received rejections from their own denominational publications for their letters in support of Mother India. Frustrated by the appearance of widespread missionary opposition to her book, Mayo and her team challenged the extent to which these criticisms accurately reflected the attitudes of individual missionaries. Consequently, in his book After Mother India (1929), Field provided the example of the Reverend James Smith in India, who had challenged the representational character of the statement issued by the executive committee of the National Christian Council against Mother India. Smith questioned the unanimity of support for the committee’s decision. At least one bishop, J. W. Robison, had publicly dissented from the statement, and Smith argued that others on the committee had probably also disagreed with the official statement.96 In Mayo’s defense, moreover, Field produced a private letter to Mayo endorsing Mother India from the Right Reverend Henry Whitehead, a missionary of forty years’ service in India with twenty-three years as bishop of Madras. Stung by the criticism from missionaries, Mayo began her sequel, Slaves of the Gods (1929), with Whitehead’s letter as a response to her missionary critics. Yet to the chagrin of Mayo and her supporters, the missionary community was by and large loath—whether because of timidity, as Field accused, or because of an acute sense of self-interest—to rally publicly around a book that had become so closely identified with British propaganda against political reforms in India. The missionary opinion, in its most vocal public pronouncements, had been forced to break away from Mayo’s dominant colonialist explanation of, and solutions for, the social condition of India. The post–Mother India missionary ‘‘betrayal,’’ especially on the part of American missionaries, was given concrete shape in the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Commission (1930–32). Prominent American laymen initiated its organization with the official endorsement of the foreign mission boards of six leading Christian denominations in the United States. This fact-finding investigation of the work of Christian missions in Asia confirmed the gravity of the social problems of India.While confirming the existence of major social problems in India, it marked a considerable departure from the conceptual apparatus of Mother India: the view that colonialism was the only answer to the social problems of India. ‘‘The Betrayal Commission,’’ as it was aptly titled by one of Mayo’s supporters, gave concrete public shape to the departure of the missionary enterprise from its close identification with the project of British colonialism. As such, the report of the commission became the target of criticism by Mayo and her supporters. In an article entitled ‘‘Renegades,’’ Mayo castigated the new breed of Christian

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missionaries who had supposedly betrayed their basic calling by sympathizing with the nationalist case against British colonial rule.97 Newell even tried to persuade Mayo’s publishers to print a cheaper edition of Slaves of the Gods in the hope that it might counter the report of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Commission.98 The coup de grâce, however, came when Mayo found that by the 1930s she no longer had the unqualified support for her political agenda from some of the mission boards in North America. During the making of The Face of Mother India (1935), Newell discovered that the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Board in the United States were quite nervous about cooperating with the infamous author of Mother India.99 The missionary dissent—despite the widespread acceptance of Mayo’s facts by individual missionaries—illustrated the ironic results of the controversy: the failure of the facts alone to guarantee public support for the book.

appropriating the ‘‘woman question’’ The most significant reversal of the conceptual apparatus of Mother India came from the appropriation of the book’s discussion of the condition of women for a new public discourse by and for women in India.The book’s reliance on the dominant colonial trope of the women’s question in India—the view of white men and occasionally white women saving brown women from brown men—was under challenge well before Mayo’s decision to write about India.100 Even Mayo, in preparing for her book, had to acknowledge such challenges. Most troubling, perhaps, was Indian women’s challenge to the idea of the benevolent paternalism of colonial rule. For example, Mayo was especially concerned about the impact that Naidu’s much-publicized charge against the mistreatment of women under the British martial law administration in the Punjab would have on her decision to represent British colonialism as the benevolent protector of Indian women. Looking for assurance, Mayo queried her British informants in India about Naidu. ‘‘Naidu,’’ as J. H. Adam replied, was ‘‘neither English nor Indian in mind or in expression’’; her charges, he assured Mayo, reflected only ‘‘the sexual delusions of a perverted mind.’’ 101 Having thus been reassured, Mayo proceeded to fashion her project on the unquestioned premise of British and Western chivalry toward Indian women. Mayo, with very few exceptions, chose simply to ignore the writings and activities of women, especially when they failed to accord with her own more benign understanding of colonialism’s modernizing impact in India. There

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was thus a certain fitting irony that a book that had little time for the views of Indian women themselves became a critical moment in India in ‘‘the passage of women from objects of another’s discourse to women as subjects of their own.’’ 102 The agitation against Mother India helped crystallize a new public discourse— beyond both colonialist and nationalist articulations of the women’s question— on Indian women. To begin with, Mayo’s assertion of Western chivalry toward Indian women ran into an unexpected challenge: the perception that her own intervention insulted Indian womanhood. ‘‘Rather humorously, in view of the real nature of the book,’’ Mayo protested in an interview in October 1927, ‘‘the critics have charged it is a ‘vilification of Indian womanhood,’ whereas those Indians, if any, who persist in reading ‘Mother India’ . . . will find it is a plea for mercy for their womanhood.’’ 103 Mayo’s claims as a champion for Indian women from the beginning stood on shaky grounds, at least in part because of the hyperbolic nature of some of her own assertions in Mother India. Her claim that Indians, especially Indian women, were constantly preoccupied with sex provided grist for the mill for Mayo’s critics, especially in this notorious assertion of one of her British informants that Indian women ‘‘only think from the waist downwards.’’ 104 Such ‘‘insults’’ to Indian women belied in the public mind Mayo’s claims to have written a book on behalf of these women. The over-the-top enthusiasm of some of Mayo’s most ardent supporters did much to aggravate such perceptions. The British mp George Pilcher, a former editor of the Calcutta Statesman, poured fuel on the fire with his speech at the 1912 Club at Bucklersbury, London. His speech, reported in the British-owned Statesman, endorsed Mayo’s verdict on the sexual preoccupation of Indian women. He added his own observation that India’s ‘‘thirty million widows’’ were ‘‘sluts at home and prostitutes abroad.’’ 105 Indian subscribers immediately threatened the Statesman with a boycott. Pilcher’s comments on Indian women stirred indignation in the Calcutta press. Manindra Nath Ganguly, a Bengali lawyer, filed a defamation suit against A. H. Watson of the Statesman for publishing the speech and causing mental pain to him and his widowed relatives. The presiding magistrate in the case eventually dismissed the suit.106 But, Mayo’s Mother India never shed its association with the Pilcher fiasco. The perceived insult to Indian women now loomed large in the Pilcher-Mayo controversy, as it came to be called in Bengal. For example, Ramnarayan Dutt’s The Mayo-Pilcher Carnival of Slander: A Reply to Mayo and Pilcher about Their Alleged Libels (1928) called on readers to defend the ‘‘honor’’ of Indian women against the

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likes of both Mayo and Pilcher.107 Several women activists also answered the call, such as Latika Basu in her article the ‘‘Tragic Beauty of the Indian Widow’’ in the Forward (Calcutta). She concluded her article with a hyperbolic warning and a call to arms: ‘‘I would like to remind Mr. Pilcher that the insult to Draupadi’s honor was the final cause of the mighty war of the Kurukshetra and that the insult to Seeta led to the downfall of Ravana.’’ To which she added, ‘‘It is hoped that India is not dead to her ancient ideals.’’ 108 Santa Nag, another Bengali woman activist, referred to the episode sarcastically as ‘‘the culmination of Britain’s imperial chivalry.’’ 109 Charulata Devi’s The Fair Sex of India: A Reply to ‘Mother India’ (1929) gives some indication of the extent to which Mayo’s book was seen in some quarters as a deliberate insult to Indian women.110 Charulata Devi’s ‘‘reply to Mother India’’ consisted entirely of brief biographies of ‘‘women worthies’’ of India, as if to prove without a doubt the achievement and moral worthiness of Indian women. At the Mahila Samitis, or Women’s Institutes, in Calcutta, Rajshahi, Bally, Comilla, Sylhet, Noakhali, and several other places in Bengal, women met and passed indignant resolutions protesting against the recent insults to Indian womanhood.111 Some three hundred women in Benares passed a similar resolution against the ‘‘unmerited malicious and grossly lying aspersions made by Miss Mayo and Mr. Pilcher against Indian womanhood’’ and called for an immediate boycott of the Statesman.112 Even in faraway Bombay, the two women councilors of the City Improvement Board, Avantikabai Gokhale and Bachubai Lotvala, were galvanized to take action against the Statesman. Gokhale persuaded the board to pass a resolution prohibiting advertisements in the Statesman for having published Pilcher’s speech. The European members of the board, objecting to the resolution, walked out in protest.113 The cry of Mayo’s insult to Indian womanhood provided the controversy over Mother India, especially in Bengal, with an unexpected stridency: ‘‘It has a degree of bitterness about it,’’ the Calcutta Forward reported, ‘‘which all our political and economic grievances could not possibly evoke.’’ 114 The terms of women’s protests against Mayo’s Mother India, however, exceeded the limiting terms of the paternalistic rhetoric of redeeming the honor of Indian women. There was, of course, nothing new about invoking the honor of women to rally opposition. The British Labour Party mp Graham Pole, for example, noted a striking parallel between the Bengali agitation against Mother India and the concurrent agitation in the European community in India against sexually suggestive portrayals of white women in Western films: both invoked the

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honor of women for rallying their respective troops.115 At the same time as Mayo charged Indians with sexual licentiousness, the European community in India feared that imported, sexually explicit Western films might lower public morals in India and bring white women to disrepute. Yet the sheer number of public meetings and protests against Mother India by women themselves made the anti-Mayo agitation in Bengal, as well as in other parts of India, different from European protests against the portrayal of white women in Western films in India. Despite a certain degree of hyperbole, there was some truth to the observation of the male author of Sister India: the ‘‘women of India,’’ he noted, ‘‘have held meetings in every part of India and have unanimously protested against her description of their trouble’’ [emphasis in the original].116 The Indian press extensively covered women’s meetings to protest Mother India—from Bengal to Mysore and from the Punjab to Madras. In Lahore, for example, Lady Shafi presided over a number of prominent women gathered to protest Mother India. These included Manmohini Zutshi, Kumari Lajjavati, Kamla Kaul, Begum Shah Nawaz, Bibi Fatima Begum, Parvati Devi, and Vinoba Kohli, among others.117 There was a certain premium, as Mayo’s critics recognized, to the demonstrations of women’s own protests against their treatment by Mayo and her supporters. Even the famous Calcutta Town Hall meeting, reportedly one of the largest anti-Mayo protest meetings held in India, was attuned to the symbolic significance of the presence of women in the opposition. Such well-known women activists of Bengal as Sarala Devi Chaudhrani, Latika Basu, and Jyotirmoyee Ganguly attended the meeting, which was advertised as avenging Mayo’s and Pilcher’s gross insults to Indian womanhood.118 A telegram from Naidu, who was unable to attend in person, was read publicly at the meeting: ‘‘The mouths of liars rot and perish with their own lies, but the glory of Indian womanhood shines pure and as the morning star.’’ 119 The cry of insult to Indian women, however, often took on a different meaning in the hands of women themselves. In her Kamala Lectures at the Calcutta University Senate in 1928 on the ‘‘ideals of Indian womanhood,’’ Naidu spelled out the implications more explicitly: The women of India should answer all those who come in the guise of friendship to interpret India to the world and exploit their weakness and expose the secrets of the home, with the words ‘‘whether we are oppressed, treated as goods and chattels and forced on the funeral pyres of our husbands, our redemption is in our hands. We shall break through the walls that imprison us and tear the veils that stifle. We shall do these by the miracle of our womanhood. We do not ask any friend, or foe in the guise of a friend, to come merely to exploit us while they pretend to interpret, succour and solace our womanhood.120

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For Naidu, at least, the heart of Mayo’s insult to Indian women consisted precisely in her underestimation of Indian women’s own ability to act as agents of social change. In numerous public meetings, books, reviews, and letters to the editor, activist women in India intervened to challenge Mayo’s underlying premise of Indian women as helpless victims whose only salvation lay in British colonialism. Organized women answered with a resounding ‘‘no’’ the question raised in a contemporary article in the Times of London: ‘‘Indian Women: Are They Voiceless?’’ 121 Some, like Maya Das, conducted a spirited debate with one Patricia Farley in the columns of the Pioneer, a British-owned newspaper in Allahabad. She contested Mayo’s suggestion that the patriarchal subordination of women was unique only to India.122 Others, like Kamala Sathianadan in her editorial in the Indian Ladies Magazine (Masulipatam), rejected Mayo’s claim to be a sympathetic advocate on behalf of women in India: We honor Miss Mayo for her courage in not caring for resentments and accusations; we congratulate her on her public spirit in ‘‘shouldering the task’’ of ‘‘holding the mirror’’ to that part of the human race which is a ‘‘physical menace’’ to the world; we do not question her ability or her cleverness in writing the book; but we do deny her the self-presumption that she is ‘‘in a position to present conditions and their bearings,’’ and we do not for a minute admit her ‘‘plain speech’’ as the ‘‘faithful wounds of a friend’’; for she is no friend of ours.123

The Stri Dharma (Madras), the feminist organ of the wia, as well as popular women’s publications such as the Hindi journal Chand, gave Mother India publicity, protesting against Mayo’s claim to be a friend of women in India.124 Still others, like Cousins, attacked Mayo’s voyeuristic exploitation of Indian women for the denial of self-government to India.125 Vijaylakshmi Pandit testified to the galvanizing impact that Mother India had on her generation of middle-class women in India; she traced her own entry into politics to her encounter with Mother India and her burning desire to counter such imperialist exploitation of the condition of Indian women.126 Whether it was Sushama Tagore, who disrupted Mayo’s discussion of Mother India at the Town Hall meeting in New York City, or Mrinalini Sen, who spoke out against Mother India at the British Commonwealth League’s protest meeting in London, women activists from India seized every opportunity both in India and abroad to assert a political voice on behalf of ‘‘Indian women’’ themselves in the controversy.127 The controversy provided an unprecedented opportunity for both constructing and showcasing a new public discourse by and of Indian women.

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The nascent all-India women’s movement’s position toward Mother India thus merits some attention. The largest protest meeting of women against Mother India occurred in Triplicane, Madras, under the auspices of the wia, the oldest of the three dominant all-India women’s organizations in the 1920s. Muthulakshmi Reddi, a longtime wia member and the first woman deputy president of the Madras Legislative Council, presided over the meeting. The assembly, comprising women from several women’s organizations in Madras, unanimously passed a resolution denying that ‘‘Indian womanhood as a whole is in a state of slavery, superstition, ignorance and degradation as Miss Mayo falsely concludes from individual instances and from statistics unproportioned to other balancing figures.’’ The gathering also passed unanimously a second resolution: ‘‘Notwithstanding the misrepresentations and false generalizations of Miss Mayo’s book there are admittedly social evils in our country which need reform and for which we have been keenly working.’’ They thus went on to urge the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Councils to enact measures that prohibited child marriage, early parentage, enforced widowhood, dedication of girls to temples, and commercialized vice (prostitution) in India.128 The two-part resolution intended both to express ‘‘indignation at the exploitation of Indian women that has been made by Miss Mayo in the interests of Western domination of India’’ and to spur the efforts of organized women to secure the passage of reforming legislations for women in India. The wia emphasized the nuance of its position on Mother India, using its connections with international women’s organizations to give their position publicity. The Jus Suffragii (London), the organ of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, published the wia protest under the heading ‘‘Indian Womanhood Protests against Miss Mayo’s Book.’’ 129 The Women’s Freedom League, a sympathetic British women’s organization, also publicized the wia protest against Mother India in its paper The Vote.130 The wia protest revealed an attempt on the part of organized women and of the women’s movement in India to wrest control over the articulation of the women’s question in India, that is, to become themselves the ‘‘enlightened’’ architects of a new public discourse about women. The debates surrounding Mother India provided a national, and even international, stage for the constitution of Indian women as subjects of the discourse on the women’s question in India. Even the titles of some of the books women wrote in response to Mother India mirrored the shift in the understanding of the women’s question. Padmabai Sanjeeva Rao, the president of the provincial branch of the aiwc in the United Provinces, came out with her aptly titled anti-Mayo contri-

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bution, Women’s Views on Indian Problems (1927). Rao wrote self-consciously from the ‘‘women’s point of view.’’ She sought to condemn the exploitation of the condition of women for the purposes of colonial propaganda and to urge Indians themselves to recognize the potential of the ‘‘wonderful creative power’’ locked up in the womanhood of India. ‘‘I hope, friends, you will pardon this insistence on the necessity of closer co-operation between man and woman,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but I personally see no hope of ever bettering this world except by restoring the balance that has at present been lost by the keeping of women within the narrow domestic walls of our homes.’’ 131 While Rao still justified the awakening of women primarily in the name of service to humanity, other contributors to the anti-Mayo agitation went further in presenting reforms for women as its own justification. This was the case, for example, made in Jayalakshmi Kumar’s speech at the wia protest meeting in Triplicane: If [Mayo] had done something for us, lived with us and tried to understand us with sympathy in order to help, we would gladly welcome her comment. But her setting out on a quest for finding fault with a great country, simply because others overpraised it, cannot meet with any sympathy. . . . She deals in her book with child marriage and suggests all kinds of loathsome things as contributing towards this custom. But this was uncalled for, as the enlightened are trying their utmost to stop this evil. . . . She talks of the British being unable to pressure natives to accept reform. That is exactly our complaint; the natives of the land can compel with impunity where a foreigner cannot and that is why we want political freedom so that we may compel social improvement. . . . Let us endeavour to change the really bad social customs and let that be our protest against all such books.132

Jayalakshmi Kumar’s speech, while typically nationalist in its argument, justified the demand for political freedom in the name of ‘‘social improvement,’’ including the position of women. Such arguments by women contributed a new twist to the familiar framing of the ‘‘woman question’’ in India—from a discourse that justified reforms for women as necessary for the sake of the nation to one that endorsed national self-government for its role in changing the position of women. The assertion of ‘‘women’’ as the subjects of the discourse on the women’s question even gave discursive commonality to what was otherwise a range of positions—both for and against Mother India—adopted by individual women activists during the controversy. Reddi, the non-Brahmin vice president of the wia and the deputy president of the Madras Legislative Council, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the well-known Muslim feminist writer and educator from Bengal, came out

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on opposing sides in the debate on Mother India. Reddi, who often declared that for her the cause of women always preceded nationalist politics, was among the public critics of Mother India. Reddi conceded the prevalence of social problems, especially the condition of women in India, but she found reprehensible Mayo’s deliberate exploitation of these problems for her own political agenda.133 Reddi did not question Mayo’s right as a Western woman to speak for the women of India. There were many individual Western women who, as Reddi was at pains to point out, had done, and continued to do, excellent work on behalf of women in India. Her chief objection to Mayo, then, was Mayo’s subordination of the cause of women to her own imperialist agenda. ‘‘Mayo readily condemns the orthodox representatives,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but does not have moral courage to blame those Christian and cultured European members, her own kith and kin, who as the custodians and saviour of our religion found arguments enough to side with our superstitious, ignorant, and orthodox countrymen.’’ 134 Reddi was bothered precisely by Mayo’s lack of real interest in the condition of women in India. By the same token, therefore, Reddi did not hesitate to chastise Indian political leaders when they similarly subordinated the cause of women to their own political agenda. She famously threatened to reveal details of social customs and practices in India—that could match, as well as outdo, many of the horrors in Mayo’s Mother India—unless her male colleagues in the Madras Legislative Council moved swiftly to pass reforming social legislations for women.135 To be sure, Reddi’s feminist rebuttal of Mother India did not always escape many of the premises of both colonial and cultural-nationalist versions of India’s past. She attributed the advent of child marriage and the seclusion of women in India, for example, to a ‘‘fall’’ from the golden age of the ancient past that came with the ‘‘foreign invasions’’ of the Muslims in the medieval period. In this respect, at least, Reddi’s critique of Mother India fell far short of Uma Nehru’s more radical attempt to rethink the interpretation of the Indian past. Reddi’s speeches and writings in the controversy nevertheless contributed to the changing contours of the women’s question in India, which eventually brought even such myths about the Hindu past into question. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘‘Rani Bhikarini’’ (The Beggar Queen), published in the Bengali paper Masik Mohammadi, was not written as a response to Mother India.136 Her essay was addressed to fellow Muslims. Although the political premise of Mayo’s book clashed with Hossain’s own declared skepticism in many of her published writings toward the benevolent paternalism of British rule, Hossain gave Mother India the benefit of the doubt. She gave the book its due for its

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‘‘amazing portrait of the tragic lives of Hindu women.’’ ‘‘I too have been speaking of those evils for the last twenty years,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but no one heard my faint voice, today they have all sat up at the roar of Miss Mayo’s voice!’’ 137 Hossain addressed her essay mainly to those Muslims who had been lulled by Mayo’s particular critique of Hindus and had chosen to ignore its significance for Muslims. She thus directed her argument to the ‘‘fathers of Muslim India’’ who had so far been content to ‘‘play hide and seek’’ with the implications of Mother India. Hossain reminded her readers that even though Islam grants legitimate rights to women—unlike the Hindu scriptures—Muslim women who ought to be the ‘‘queens’’ of the community had found themselves in the position of ‘‘crippled beggars.’’ Hindus had at least begun to redress some of the problems, in her view, and she urged Muslims not to remain ‘‘backward’’ in promoting reforms for women. Unlike Mayo, however, Hossain found no easy answers to the situation of women in either the superiority of particular religious traditions or the chivalry of British rule in India. Her essay, in fact, identified most societies as equal offenders: ‘‘Let alone granting women their rights, there is no country, no race, no religion in this wide world which has acknowledged women’s sense of self.’’ 138 To be sure, the contributions of Hossain and Reddi to the Mayo controversy were very different, but despite this difference, they still had more in common with each other than with Mayo’s position: the shared refusal to subordinate women’s reforms to other political agendas. The contrasting public response to Cornelia Sorabji and G. Sumati Bai, whose interventions in the Mayo controversy appear similar at first glance, further illustrates the effects of this rhetorical reframing of the women’s question in the controversy. Sorabji’s two-part review in support of Mother India, published in the Calcutta Englishman, was relatively moderate by the standards of the controversy. Yet her close identification with Mayo made her an immediate target for attack by Mayo’s critics.139 Sorabji had served as a host to Mayo, Newell, and Field during their visit to Calcutta. This marked the beginning of a long friendship that led Sorabji in the 1930s to agree to play the role of ‘‘Scarlet Pimpernel,’’ as she put it, for Mayo’s subsequent books aimed at discrediting nationalist politics in India.140 The degree of Sorabji’s involvement with Mayo on Mother India came under intense public scrutiny. Not only had Mayo cited from Sorabji’s published writings, but she also endangered Sorabji as the anonymous source for some of the anecdotes in Mother India. Sorabji herself noted Mayo’s habit of working over some of the stories, often merely changing Christian to Hindu names for her pro-

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tagonists to support the specifically ‘‘Hindu’’ focus of her attack.141 While Sorabji expressed dismay in private communications about individual aspects of Mayo’s crusade, she stood by Mayo loyally in public. For example, in private Sorabji admitted freely to Lady Richmond, her longtime friend and confidante, that Mayo had mistakenly drawn explicit conclusions about political reforms in India instead of confining her book to social conditions. In her view, moreover, Mayo had kept the controversy alive with repeated provocations rather than letting her book speak for itself.142 Sorabji’s public loyalty to Mayo, however, cost her dearly. Ranga Iyer’s Father India dismissed Sorabji’s own earlier works from which Mayo had quoted as the ‘‘vapourings of an unbalanced and unstructured mind.’’ 143 To make matters worse, Sorabji, as president of the Federation of University Women in India (fuwi), confronted a revolt from the members. The members of the local chapter of the fuwi in Bengal attempted to send to the president of the International Federation of University Women in London a strongly worded protest against Mother India on behalf of the organization. Even though Sorabji succeeded in defeating this attempt, the episode left its scars. Sorabji accused Latika Basu of launching a door-to-door campaign in Calcutta against her to isolate her further from the mainstream of activist women in Bengal.144 Yet Sorabji’s support for Mayo, as Sorabji herself admitted, did not make her a permanent persona non grata in the organized women’s circles. For example, the women of the University Settlement Project in Bombay invited Sorabji to contribute to a volume of essays, Women in Modern India: Fifteen Papers by Indian Women Writers (1929), which was one of the several anthologies by and about the ‘‘new awakening’’ of Indian womanhood published in the wake of Mother India. This volume rivaled another post–Mother India volume on women in India that was planned by a group led by Rathbone in London.The women of the University Settlement in Bombay, despite the unpopularity of Sorabji’s support for Mother India, were willing to ‘‘honor her history of service for the cause of women’’ in India.145 The eventual alienation of Sorabji from the women’s movements both in Britain and in India had less to do with her stand on Mother India than with her relation to the new public discourse on the women’s question in India. Sorabji later came out publicly in support of Hindu orthodoxy and opposed the efforts of British and Indian feminists to strengthen anti–child marriage legislation in India in the 1930s. She refused to identify with feminist efforts to enforce legislation against child marriage for fear of creating a political embarrassment for the colonial government in India.146 Her opposition to social reforms, more

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than her position on Mother India, placed Sorabji outside the mainstream of the associational politics of women in both Britain and India. The experience of G. Sumati Bai during the controversy offers a revealing contrast. Sumati Bai was the author of some of the hardest-hitting articles on the treatment of women under Hinduism that were published in the wia journal Stri Dharma as well as in the self-respect movement’s journal Revolt.147 Sumati Bai’s Woman Awakened (1928) was not written strictly in response to Mother India but was conceived as a self-conscious extension of Mayo’s critique of the treatment of women in Hindu society.148 It included several favorable references to Mayo’s Mother India. Mayo even referred to Sumati Bai’sWoman Awakened in her bookVolume II (1931) as an example of a book written by an Indian woman who had dared say much the same things as Mother India but had escaped the latter’s widespread repudiation in India.149 Sumati Bai admitted that Mayo, ‘‘minus her motives and sweeping generalizations,’’ had written a ‘‘ ‘spades are spades revelation’ of the present condition of Indian womanhood.’’ Her references to Mayo in Woman Awakened were deliberately strategic: meant both to urge ‘‘women [themselves] to speak out their woes’’ and to chastise the self-appointed guardians of women who talked of ‘‘dharma’’ (religion) to oppose women’s demands for reforms.150 Annie Besant, who was identified both with the Indian women’s movement and with the reformed Brahminical Hinduism of the Theosophical Society in India, was the unlikely choice to write the foreword to Sumati Bai’s searing attack on Hindu society’s treatment of women. Even Besant’s imprimatur, however, was not enough to keep Sumati Bai’s book from ruffling feathers in some nationalist circles. The debate on Woman Awakened began in Besant’s paper, the New India (Madras and Bombay), which published the response of a hostile critic who was so alarmed by the tone of Sumati Bai’s book that he dubbed it another Mother India.151 Activist women in Madras rallied to the defense of Sumati Bai, and the appellation did not stick. The attack on Sumati Bai was balanced by the favorable review of her book from ‘‘MR,’’ who was most likely Muthulakshmi Reddi.152 The paper also received protests from women for the unfair comparison between Sumati Bai and Mayo. Kanakalakshmi Ammal wrote to the editor rejecting outright any basis for a comparison between Mayo and Sumati Bai. ‘‘The latter is a foreigner ‘opening out the gutters of India’ with the motive perhaps to ridicule and revile the Indians,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but the former is a Hindu herself, who, out of genuine feelings for her own people, holds but the mirror to society with a view to betterment and correction.’’ For Kanakalakshmi Ammal, therefore, it was the re-

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spective motives of Sumati Bai and Mayo—and not the facts—that made the contribution of the two books and their authors so different. Kanakalakshmi Ammal also justified the vehemence of Sumati Bai’s language—in response to the critics’ objections to the author’s ‘‘gnashing of teeth’’—as the legitimate and righteous outcome of intense feeling. ‘‘Sweet voice has got us nowhere,’’ she concluded, and Sumati Bai’s ‘‘stentorian voice’’ is thus the need of the hour for women in India.153 The anger of Sumati Bai’s voice, unlike the sensationalism of Mayo’s, was justified because it was raised on behalf of women. The political contribution of ‘‘enlightened Indian womanhood’’ in the controversy—whether in outright repudiation of Mother India or in support of Mayo’s facts—brought a new element to the discourse on the women’s question in India: a construction of the interests of women themselves. Mayo and her supporters scarcely grasped the full implications of this development for the reception of Mother India. Mayo, in a chapter later addressed especially to the ‘‘women of India’’ in her sequel Slaves of the Gods, explained that she had chosen the title of Mother India deliberately: ‘‘Its purpose was to awaken your intelligent patriotism and the consciousness of your men, by making inescapable the contrast between, on the one hand, florid talk of devotion and ‘sacrifice’ poured out before an abstract figure, and, on the other hand, the consideration actually accorded to the living woman, mother of the race.’’ 154 Mayo’s belated efforts to align Mother India on the side of Indian women, including this attempt to appeal directly to the ‘‘women of India,’’ ended in repeated frustrations. At the start of the controversy, Naidu, at a public meeting in Bombay, had urged Indian men to stop ranting about Mother India and to answer Mayo by resolving to educate their wives and daughters instead. The London Times, and Mayo herself, were eager to enlist Naidu’s speech as an example of progressive Indian women’s support for Mother India.155 When Naidu’s opposition to Mother India became too hard to escape, Mayo and her friends turned to discrediting Naidu during her publicized tour against the book in the United States. Mayo and Field first tried to implicate Naidu, along with Gandhi, in an elaborate coverup to bribe the widow of an American engineer killed in nationalist demonstrations in Bombay in the 1920s.156 Later, in Volume II, Mayo used the testimony of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Naidu’s sister-in-law and secretary of the aiwc, before the Age of Consent Committee in India to discredit Naidu’s own more benign statements about child marriage in her speeches on her U.S. tour.157 The retaliation against Naidu was some indication of the extent to which Mayo and her supporters were taken off guard by the discourse fashioned by Indian women.

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Mayo’s much publicized difficulties with Indian women, however, did not end here. Mona Bose, one of the few Indian women directly quoted in Mother India, issued a highly public denial of the views attributed to her in the book. While Mayo’s defenders made light of its impact on the credibility of Mayo’s facts, the issues at stake in Bose’s repudiation once again had little to do with the facts themselves.158 These failed public encounters with Indian women left Mayo quoting from private communications with Sorabji at public meetings in the United States as proof of support from some progressive women in India. Sorabji, who was already under considerable pressure for her identification with Mayo, was annoyed at the unauthorized use of her private communications. She insisted that Mayo stop quoting from her letters. She also requested that Mayo issue a statement, published in the Statesman and the Forward, absolving Sorabji of any involvement with the book.159 Finally, in Slaves of the Gods, Mayo took to quoting from the published speeches and writings of women activists in India to demonstrate the similarity between their views and hers on the condition of Indian women. This attempt, a bit too little and too late, failed to take full note of the fate of Mother India: even as Mayo and her supporters took comfort in the book’s ‘‘facts,’’ the ground beneath Mayo’s feet had slowly but surely shifted. The reluctance of the U.S. women’s movement to embrace Mother India also says something about the book’s failure to convince as a treatise written for, instead of only about, women. Support for Mother India in the American women’s movement came mainly from conservative and patriotic women’s groups like the Massachusetts Public Interest League and the Daughters of the American Revolution, which by the mid-1920s had broken ranks with other women’s organizations and were reviling feminists for their allegedly ‘‘bolshevist’’ sympathies. The split in the women’s movement had come to a head in the debate over the renewal of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act (1921).160 Margaret Robinson of the Massachusetts Public Interest League, which was active in contributing to the ‘‘red scare’’ of the 1920s, found Mother India useful not only ‘‘to counteract communist propaganda about India.’’ She also found it useful against liberal American women’s clubs more generally, which, as Robinson informed Mayo, supported theosophists like Annie Besant who put the ‘‘degrading religion of India on a par with or above the Christian religion.’’ 161 Mayo endorsed Robinson’s views. At her speech at the Massachusetts Public Interest League meeting at Copley Plaza in Boston she railed against the tendency of American women ‘‘to swallow whole the story of our comparative materialism’’ and of ‘‘Hinduism’s superior spirituality,’’ and, even more, ‘‘to pay handsomely for the administra-

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tion of the dose.’’ 162 The various local branches of the Daughters of the American Revolution were equally eager to have Mayo on their platform. Mayo’s popularity with these women’s organizations, which were already quite controversial both for their overtly racist politics and for their role in redbaiting feminists, was not repeated with other liberal American women’s organizations. While some British feminists had rallied behind Mother India, their counterparts in the United States found less convincing Mayo’s attempted reincarnation as a champion of women. Even though Mayo and Field repeatedly assured the British feminist Eleanor Rathbone that they would organize American women’s support for Mother India through the Federated Women’s Clubs of America and the Daughters of the American Revolution, the desired political response from organized women in the United States never materialized. Mrs. Henry P. Loomis managed to organize a reception of some three hundred women for Mayo at the Colony Club in New York, an exclusive club for women from some of the richest families in the United States; but the sustained support for Mother India from women’s organizations in the United States was just not forthcoming.163 It was not only organizations like Jane Addams’s Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, with its attempt to forge interracial coalitions and to support anti-imperial causes, but also more mainstream organizations like the League of Women Voters that remained skeptical of the politics of Mother India. Gertrude Ely of the League of Women Voters had been in India shortly after Mayo’s visit in order to build contacts with the Indian women’s movement. Adam—Mayo’s old stalwart in India—had been alarmed at the different objectives of Mayo’s and Ely’s visits to India. He had warned Mayo that Ely was an ‘‘enthusiastic busy-body,’’ who was likely to cause trouble for her in the United States.True to Adam’s fears, Ely would later register her disagreement with Mayo on Mother India.164 When local chapters of the League of Women Voters organized public debates on the book, like the one in Westchester County, New York, that was attended by Carrie Chapman Catt, Mayo’s critics managed to do more than hold their own against her defenders.165 Mayo’s book, no doubt, enjoyed immense popularity with both American men and women, but Mayo herself was never under any illusion of drawing feminist support for her book in the United States. While Mayo received a number of invitations to speak at various women’s clubs and colleges throughout the United States, she remained nervous, with good cause, of being heckled by feminists in the audience who, as one of her supporters claimed after one such episode at the Contemporary Club in Phila-

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delphia, were unstable women who combined support for ‘‘birth control’’ with the love of ‘‘Negroes’’ and ‘‘Hindoos.’’ 166 American women’s organizations were certainly not immune to their own racist and imperialist strategies of exclusion, but the tepid response of organized women in the United States to Mother India was a testimony to more than just a lack of interest in things Indian.167 It also reflected the interference of Mayo’s political baggage, especially evident in the United States, with successfully exploiting her new self-styled role as champion of Indian women. The great loss to Mayo’s arsenal was reflected in her subsequent contributions on India. By the time of her final book about India, The Face of Mother India (1935), Mayo had all but given up any illusions of enlisting the women’s question in India to her cause. This last book on India, the only one the government banned in India, showcased another social problem for her case against colonial self-government in India: the communal divisions between Hindus and Muslims. Having also failed to enlist the legitimate grievances of the depressed classes to her cause, as witnessed in her abortive encounter with Ambedkar, Mayo now turned with gusto to exploiting the Hindu-Muslim problem.168 ‘‘The whole thesis’’ of this last book, as one British official in India explained, ‘‘is Hindu-Muslim antagonism.’’ 169 Even Hugh MacGregor of the India Office, who had helped Mayo with the book, supported the government’s decision to ban the book in India. ‘‘The anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim bias’’ of the book, he explained to Mayo, was ‘‘too pronounced’’ for the government to permit its sales in India.170 For The Face of Mother India, indeed, Mayo had abandoned any pretense of being a feminist crusader for women in India. Her attempt to exploit the women’s question in Mother India had fallen victim to an unexpected development: the emergence of a new conceptual field in which the situation of women in India would henceforth be addressed. There is certainly no denying either the enormous popularity of the facts of Mother India or, indeed, the extent to which the book has entered into the common sense about the social problems of India. What has been less understood, however, is that the interwar controversy had managed to reframe the facts of Mother India in an alternative conceptual schema. The reframing of Mayo’s facts by her critics produced a more far-reaching challenge than merely the repudiation of Mayo’s imperialist intervention. The anomaly of the rhetoric of factuality in the controversy over Mother India registered the emergence of a competing understanding of the social and the political. Hence the pedagogical use to which Mayo’s various critics put the ‘‘facts’’ of Mother India. The semantic crisis of the

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controversy could thus culminate in public support for legislation against child marriage that applied irrespective of religious differences: a final reversal of the separation of the social and the political in Mother India. Here lay the opening for the construction of a new collective agency of women that challenged the hitherto dominant equation between women, community, and the state in late colonial India.

4

Refashioning Mother India The Sarda Act and Women’s Collective Agency

When the Child Marriage Restraint Act—also known as the Sarda Act after its sponsor Har Bilas Sarda—was passed on October 1, 1929, it brought the controversy over Mother India to an end. Both Mother India and Mayo certainly continued to stir up passions well into the future, but the public support for the Sarda Act gave authoritative sanction to Mayo’s critics’ revised understanding of the relationship between the social and the political spheres. The Sarda Act—the first legislation against child marriage in British India—was heralded in triumphalist tones by its supporters as the advent of a modern India ready to take its stand alongside the modern nations of the world. Contemporaries compared this achievement most frequently to another landmark ‘‘modernizing’’ social-reform legislation during the colonial era: the Act of 1829 that had abolished the practice of the immolation of widows (satidaha), or sati, as it came to be called.1 The abolition of sati had allowed the colonial state to stake the claims of British colonialism as the modernizers of indigenous patriarchy in India. But nationalist support for the Sarda Act wrested that claim away from colonialism to make the case instead for a modern national state in India. The earlier abolition of sati represented the legitimacy of a modernizing colonial state, whereas the Sarda Act represented the potential of a modernizing national state in India. The act itself was a poor candidate for such momentous political significance. While it penalized the marriage of girls below fourteen and boys below sixteen, the provisions of the act were so toothless, as both proponents and opponents recognized, as to have little practical effect. In fact, it required reinforcement from an amending legislation in 1938 before it could be anything more than a ‘‘dead letter’’ in the statute book.2 The ameliorative effect of the Sarda Act itself, apart from any long-term ‘‘educational impact,’’ was widely acknowledged by contemporaries as quite limited. Its immediate result, in fact, was a dramatic spate of child marriages conducted hastily to avoid persecution before the act came into effect (thereby temporarily reversing the trend toward an increase in the age of marriage).3 Yet an emphasis on the practical effectiveness of the act alone obscures

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its crucial rhetorical and ideological significance: the Sarda Act was the first and, since then, also the only law dealing directly with marriage that was universally applicable across different religious communities each with their own ‘‘personal laws’’ governing marriage and family life. The Sarda Act was thus a critical turning point in the development of a revised national political imagination in India. Otherwise, indeed, there would be a cruel irony to the grandiose statements with which supporters anticipated the act. Motilal Nehru, the leader of the Swarajist Party in the Legislative Assembly, wrote on the eve of the vote on the Sarda Bill: ‘‘We are today on our trial before the civilized nations of the world, and the measure of the Assembly’s support to the Sarda Bill will be the measure of our fitness to rank among those nations.’’ 4 Another Swarajist leader, Raizada Hansaraj, greeted the act enthusiastically as a ‘‘clear dawn of Swaraj.’’ 5 Even M. K. Gandhi, who opposed cooperation with the newly formed legislatures in India, urged Indian legislators to vote for the bill as a national duty.6 While Malati Patwardhan, the honorary secretary of the wia, shared the dissatisfaction of many women activists with the actual provisions of the act, she too chose to hail its passage in similarly laudatory tones: ‘‘The passing of this Bill is one of the biggest steps India has ever taken towards her freedom.’’ 7 The hyperbole surrounding the Sarda Act registered the crystallization of an alternative political imagination enabled precisely by the construction of women’s collective agency. Hence the significance of the emergence of women—as opposed merely to the collective interests of the community—as a legitimate constituency in their own right for the reform of the Sarda Act. To be sure, the debates on the ageof-consent and marriage regulations in colonial India were typically more concerned with claims to modernity than with the social position of women per se.8 Yet activist women’s claims of the Sarda Act as the ‘‘personal triumph’’ of their organizations, and as a testimony to the ‘‘victory for our movement,’’ were not merely empty boasts.9 Women in the debates around the Sarda Act were far more than just the ‘‘ground’’ on which imperialists and male nationalists elaborated competing definitions of ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’: a logic that with few modifications could be extended to most nineteenth-century public debates on social reforms for women in India.10 The unprecedented involvement of women and of women’s organizations in the debates surrounding the Sarda Act underwrote a crucial political development: the construction of women as both the subjects and the objects of social reform in India. In other words, the collective mobilization of women qua women authorized new gendered subjectivities for women in

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the public realm that itself empowered different groups of women unevenly. As such, the campaign for the Sarda Act provided an alternative political subjectivity to the seemingly nongendered collective identities of communities who marked their ‘‘difference’’ by the symbolic identification of women with the ‘‘inner’’ or private domain of the community.11 Here lay the significance of the construction of women’s collective agency in late colonial India. The contribution of the Sarda Act to the nationalist refashioning of Mother India did not lie in the public support for modernizing marriage reforms. Rather, and more importantly, it lay in the implications of the mobilization of a collective identity for and by women in the public realm.

the choice of the sarda act The strategic choice of the Sarda Act as nationalist India’s riposte to Mother India was freighted with consequences for the formation of women as a political constituency. To be sure, the focus on the modernization of marriage and family life—out of a possible range of social problems also discussed in Mother India— was itself shaped by the convergence in the early twentieth century of particularly dense economic and social forces in India. The family as an arena for the management of both sexual and property arrangements had been subject to a variety of transformations and was no more traditional or precolonial than the supposedly primordial caste and religious communities in India.12 By the same token, the agenda of family reform taken up by a reforming urban class in India reflected all the social and economic contradictions produced by a colonial capitalist modernity. For example, the property and inheritance arrangements of certain colonial family forms, like the Hindu Undivided Family, were protected by religious personal laws, and, as such, they interfered with individual property rights. These contradictory forces of capitalist modernization had laid the ground by the late nineteenth century for various reformist initiatives for the family, based broadly on the model of a revised companionate marriage suitable for an urban Indian middle class under colonial rule: a reforming public discourse of ‘‘nationalizing marriage.’’ 13 Marriage by the early twentieth century, indeed, had become an especially dense site for indigenous reformist public concerns. The support for modernizing marriage reform among an urban educated class in early-twentieth-century India was further animated by an international discourse of public health: the new grounds, in Judy Whitehead’s phrase, for an updated version of the ‘‘motherhood archetype.’’ 14 The public agendas of hygiene,

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eugenics, and national health, which shaped both the making of Mayo’s book and its popular resonance, had made the reform of the ‘‘private’’ domain of family life into an important national as well as international priority. It fostered public concerns about infant mortality, maternal welfare, and the scientific education of housewives. In an overall climate where biomedical arguments and the scientific management of domesticity occupied considerable prestige, the arguments of the supporters of the Sarda Act were in themselves fairly predictable. Activist women, no less than other social reformers and nationalist politicians in India, frequently drew on the public health model to make their case against child marriage in India: that is, the link between the health of the nation’s mothers and the future progress of the ‘‘race.’’ By legitimating the agency of the state or civil legislation in reforming the ‘‘inner’’ domain of the community, however, the arguments for the Sarda Act carried a further political twist in India: the reconstitution of the hitherto dominant relationship between women, community, and the state. The interwar international context had brought considerable attention to the legal age of consent and of marriage in different countries. The League of Nations, mainly in response to international concerns about the so-called white slave trade, had placed firmly on its agenda the question of the appropriate legal age of consent for girls.15 While the age of consent applied to boys as much as to girls, the sexuality of girls was the main preoccupation in most national and international debates about the age of consent. The League of Nations began to compile information regularly on the legal age of consent and of marriage in various member countries, and the Government of India was frequently obliged to compile data and figures relating to consent and marriage regulations in India for international scrutiny.16 While international debates on the age of consent focused on nonmarital sexual relations, the Indian debates were largely animated by the implications of consent within marriage. This additional burden carried by the consent laws in India puts the novelty of the Sarda Act in perspective. In 1860, against a background of early marriages in India, the legal age of consent was extended to apply equally inside and outside marriage. The law in India was thus somewhat exceptional in recognizing the category of ‘‘marital rape.’’ 17 Paradoxically, the curtailment of the husband’s absolute right of sexual access to his wife in the consent law in India had itself been occasioned by the tortuous logic of a powerful colonial myth: the relegation of marriage to the personal and religious realm constituted as standing outside the scope of universally applicable law. In keeping with this myth, therefore, the

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colonial government had chosen the politically expedient path of using indirect means to deal with the problem of early marriages by extending the law dealing with the age of consent in nonmarital relations to marital relations in India. The dual import of the age-of-consent laws in India, however, added to their fraught meaning. When the age of consent was raised in 1891, for example, it provoked a storm of opposition against the government. The weight of indigenous opposition to the act, centered on its implication within marriage, had a sobering effect on the support of the colonial government and of indigenous reformers for legislation that interfered even indirectly with marriage practices.18 Reformist social critiques of early marriage, however, continued to flourish, but mainly outside the purview of state intervention. These critiques were fueled typically by the negative effects of early marriage on the physique of the ‘‘race’’ and on the education of women as companionate wives. Even though a womenoriented print culture often articulated broader critiques of child marriage from the perspective of women themselves, the more utilitarian modernizing concerns of the urban upper classes continued to shape the reformist discourse against early marriage in India.19 Women’s organizations in India also took up the cause of the reform and abolition of early marriage in terms of its negative impact on the formal education of girls and of women primarily as companionate wives and scientific mothers. The emphasis of most previous reforming efforts, moreover, was on reform through the agency of education and social propaganda: that is, on internal self-regulation by communities for the reform of ‘‘their’’ women. The grounds for a shift to the external agency of the state for the reform of marriage practices were prepared by a number of factors. By the early 1920s, elected Indian representatives in the Legislative Assembly in India introduced various bills for raising the age of consent inside and outside marriage. This was partly in response to the League of Nations’ interest in the problem of the international traffic in women and girls. Reformist Indian legislators supported the league’s recommendations for raising the minimum age of consent for single women to twenty-one years and went on to sponsor various bills for raising the age of consent for unmarried as well as married girls in India.20 As had been predicted by the secretary of state E. S. Montagu, the reformed post-1919 legislatures with their elected Indian representatives were more open to social reform initiatives. Individual Indian legislators were willing to initiate social reform bills that colonial officials had hitherto considered politically inexpedient. Beyond the Assembly, moreover, the women’s movement in India also provided stimulus for the renewed attention to the law. In 1921 the wia had inserted

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a new clause in its constitution to work for social reform through the newly constituted post-1919 legislative councils in India. In 1926, the wia’s amended list of objectives now included the abolition of child marriage and the raising of the age of consent for girls.21 When Hari Singh Gour, an enthusiastic sponsor of several consent bills in the Assembly, introduced his bill to raise the age of consent in 1924, the wia organized numerous public meetings and directed public resolutions from women to the government in support of the bill.22 Even Cornelia Sorabji, who confessed that she was ‘‘against Hindu marriages being discussed in the Legislative Assembly,’’ identified a silver lining in the attention that organized women were giving to the bills in the Assembly. Sorabji was thus willing to support the decision of the members of the recently formed National Council of Women in India (ncwi) to take up publicity for Gour’s age-of-consent bill in 1925. ‘‘Going over these questions in council,’’ she insisted, would provide a distraction for women and ‘‘keep them away from politics.’’ 23 She wrote against the background of the pull of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement as well as of revolutionary political organizations on middle-class women in the 1920s. Yet Sorabji did not anticipate the extremely charged political terrain of social reform legislation itself. The legislative fate of Gour’s consent bill starkly exposed the government’s policy of ‘‘noninterference’’ in marriage practices. The government had labeled bills to raise the age of consent ‘‘too radical,’’ especially insofar as they covered marital relations. The home member of the Government of India, Sir William Vincent, made clear that official support for such measures could be forthcoming only if the bill excluded marital relations from its purview.24 The official bloc, with the help of nonofficial Europeans and conservative opponents of reform, thus effectively ensured the defeat of Gour’s bill on the age of consent. Since elected members of the Assembly, however, had voted in support of Gour’s bill, the government felt obliged to provide an alternative initiative to raise the age of consent.25 Having first defeated Gour’s more comprehensive bill in the Assembly, the government responded with its own bill on the age of consent, which became law in 1925. Not only was the government bill considerably watered down, but for the first time it introduced a distinction between a ‘‘husband’’ and a ‘‘stranger’’ by setting the age of consent at thirteen inside marriage and fourteen outside marriage.26 Gour, in coordination with representatives of the wia outside the Assembly, tried to propose further amendments to raise the age of consent, as well as to remove the distinction between marital and nonmarital sex in the consent law introduced by the Act of 1925. Still, the government remained hostile

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to any change. Alexander Muddiman, the home member of the Government of India, reiterated the government’s decision to oppose any social reform legislation introduced by individual members in the Assembly.27 Organized women had been among the first to cry foul at the government’s defeat of consent bills in the Assembly. At a meeting of the National Council of Women in Great Britain held in 1925 at Birmingham, for example, Dorothy Jinarajadasa, a founding member of the wia, bitterly accused the Government of India for the bills’ defeat.28 The wia even contacted the British Federation of University Women in 1925, over the head of Sorabji, the president of its Indian branch, to express frustration at the opposition to reforming bills from the official bench in the Assembly. It also urged British women to organize representations to Parliament to pressure the Government of India.29 Even before Sarda’s bill, therefore, the question of legislative agency for the reform of marriage practices was already ripe for recruitment to a new conception of the relationship between the state and society in India. The controversy over Mother India pushed it to the brink. The legislative focus of the Sarda Bill defined the particular loss, both for Mayo’s Mother India and for British colonialism, of valuable rhetorical ground in the controversy. The passage of the bill, which was introduced in the Central Legislative Assembly on February 1, 1927, as the Hindu Child Marriage Bill, was the unintended political outcome of Mayo’s intervention. The bill itself was introduced some months before the publication of Mother India. But the book’s publication transformed its fate in the Assembly. In a confidential memo on July 11, 1927, shortly before Mother India became widely available in India, Muddiman as home member presciently voiced concern about the book’s potential impact: [It is] naturally most desirable to avoid in any way conveying to the Assembly and to the world at large that we were opposed to beneficial social legislation and Government must as far as possible avoid being put in that position. The subject is likely to be pretty fully ventilated as Miss Katherine Mayo’s book will doubtless drag cranks in many parts of the country and at Home into the discussion.30

The Viceroy’s Executive Council meeting on August 19, 1927, discussed the need for an adequate official policy toward Sarda’s bill. The discussion revealed the peculiar political dilemma posed for a government forced to choose between two equally unpalatable options: to support the bill and risk alienating support from orthodox social forces in India at a time when Indian nationalism had succeeded

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in considerably eroding the support base of the colonial government; or to oppose the bill and appear reactionary before domestic and international public opinion aroused by Mother India to the conditions of child marriage in India. Impaled on the horns of the dilemma, the Government of India opened the way for its own ideological undoing. The Viceroy’s Executive Council opted for a stalling policy that called on officials to adopt ‘‘dilatory tactics’’ in the hope of bringing out the ‘‘fissures’’ over the bill and killing it prematurely in the Assembly.31 The dilatory tactics subsequently adopted by James Crerar, Muddiman’s successor, quickly turned into something of a public relations fiasco; at one point Crerar’s tactics even forced an intemperate public outburst against the home member from Sarda, who was otherwise noted for his cautious and politically moderate views toward the government.32 Since dilatory tactics had failed to kill the bill in the Assembly, the government, by order of the Executive Council on February 2, 1928, decided to oppose the bill. On February 15, 1928, the secretary of state in London telegrammed his approval of the government’s decision.33 By September 1929, however, the government was forced to relent. The bill to which the viceroy gave his final consent on October 1, 1929, on the condition that it was not to come into effect for six months after its passage on April 1, 1930, had been considerably recast.34 Sarda’s original Hindu Child Marriage Bill had been reframed in the legislature as the more comprehensive Child Marriage Restraint Bill. The belated and reluctant government capitulation to the expanded Sarda Bill confirmed the prescience of Muddiman’s warnings: his so-called cranks—social reformers and feminists both in Britain and in India—had entered the fray to make the contradictory foundations of the colonial state, and of its alleged policy of noninterference in religious and family life, the subject of unwanted national and international scrutiny. The political reversal that the Sarda Act represented for the apologists of the benevolent paternalism of the colonial state is evident in Mayo’s ambiguous relationship to the bill. Even though Sarda’s original bill had been introduced before Mother India, its fate had become inextricably tied to Mayo’s book. The discussion of the bill in the Indian Assembly had commenced only on September 15, 1927, at the height of the furor over Mayo’s book. In the long two-and-a-half-year period it took for the bill to be passed, supporters and opponents in the Assembly frequently invoked the notoriety of Mayo’s book for making their opposing cases about the bill.35 Initially, at least, Mayo was pleased to be at the center of the debate in the Assembly and gladly took credit for the debate, if not for the introduction of the bill itself.

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Likewise, the mainstream newspapers in the United States, including many in Britain, gave Mayo’s book credit for having initiated the debate against child marriage in the Indian Assembly. A headline on Sarda’s bill in the New York Times captured this self-serving sentiment: ‘‘Miss Mayo’s Book on India,’’ it declared, ‘‘Gets Action on Child Marriage.’’ 36 The Negro World (with a history of more extensive coverage of news from India), took a longer view of the trajectory of child marriage reform in India. It barely acknowledged the impact of Mother India and connected the bill to post–First World War political and social changes in India that had made the moment ripe for reform. The notice of the Sarda Bill in the Negro World also invited comparison of the Indian reform with another report, appearing on the same page, that referred to a parallel effort by the New York state legislature to ‘‘curb child marriage’’—the issuance of marriage licenses to girls in New York between the ages of fourteen to seventeen.37 The persistent attempts in some quarters to hijack Sarda’s bill as evidence of Mayo’s salutary intervention ran into an even more formidable and unexpected roadblock: the disaffection of none other than the author of Mother India. Mayo became increasingly wary of the public support for the bill, in direct proportion to the discomfort of the Government of India under unwanted national and international pressure. She anxiously warned her British supporters, like Eleanor Rathbone (who had been inspired by Mother India to lobby for the passage of the Sarda Bill), against placing their faith in legislative solutions. Mayo reminded Rathbone that the crux of her critique was ‘‘social’’ and was thus not answerable by legislation.38 Mayo’s hostility to the bill continued long after its passage. Even Sorabji, no friend of legislative interference in marriage practices in India, had hoped that Mayo would be content simply to take credit for the measure. In Volume II, however, Mayo dismissed the act as mere ‘‘window-dressing’’ and declared the day that the act came into effect in India as ‘‘April Fool’s Day.’’ 39 Rathbone, not unlike many of the bill’s supporters in the women’s movement in India, recognized the limitations of the act. However, Mayo’s ‘‘cynical’’ response alienated Rathbone. She preferred flawed legislation to none at all.40 The contortions of Mayo’s response to the Sarda Act suggested that her contribution to its passage was, at best, unintentional. In fact, Sarda singled out Mayo as the ‘‘chief representative’’ of those ‘‘who are unhappy over the abolition of child marriage’’ for ‘‘fear that when child marriage disappears their profession of ruling the country on which they flourish shall have gone.’’ By ‘‘belittling the enormous importance of the new law,’’ Sarda wrote, ‘‘they betray their hostility to the advancement of the country.’’ 41 The nationalist recuperation of the state’s agency

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for social reform made the Sarda Act a fitting vehicle for cementing the decisive reversal of the understanding of the relationship between the political and the social in Mayo’s Mother India. The legislative recasting of Sarda’s original Hindu Child Marriage Bill as the Child Marriage Restraint Bill gave it further import in the realignment of the relationship between the state and society in India. When the controversy over Mother India broke in the middle of 1927, there were two related private bills, including Sarda’s original bill, still pending in the Assembly. Despite public support for both bills, however, the political resonance of Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill came to overshadow by far Hari Singh Gour’s Children’s Protection (Age of Consent) Bill. Sarda’s bill acquired its significance as it was revised and expanded to become applicable beyond the Hindu community as the Child Marriage Restraint Bill. The original civil measure that sought to invalidate the marriage of Hindu girls below the age of twelve was remade in the context of the controversy over Mother India into a penal measure that was now applicable universally without considerations of religious differences.42 Hence was framed the first direct legislative intervention in marriage practices in British India: a law that, as a penal measure, could bypass the various personal laws of communities governing marital relations to be applicable across communities. This gave the Sarda Act a nationalist resonance that went beyond even the famed Act of 1829 abolishing sati—widely acknowledged as the first ‘‘modern’’ piece of social legislation for women in India—that had affected only a certain section of Hindus. Muslim women activists acknowledged in a petition the novelty of the Sarda Act: ‘‘We consider it to be even more important than the Act abolishing satti which was passed in Lord Bentinck’s regime. That Act affected only a section of India. This present Act affects every girl and woman in India irrespective of caste and creed from Peshawar to Cape Comorin.’’ 43 The case for the Sarda Act was made precisely in the name of ‘‘every girl and woman’’ in India. The mobilization of a gender identity as women, beyond the collective identities of communities, formed the basis for a novel political universality in the public realm. The lineage of a revised nationalist politics, centered on the nation-state formation and on the citizen-subject, can be traced to the effects of this rhetorical invention in the public realm of a universalizing identity—‘‘women.’’ Although the term ‘‘invention’’ is now often used to debunk objects of the social imagination, the rhetorical invention of gendered identities for women in the debates on the Sarda Act bespeaks a significant gain in the destabilization of the colonial constitution of community identities. Something new had emerged.

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nationalizing the state One implication of the construction of women’s collective agency in the debates surrounding the Sarda Act was the appropriation of the domain of ‘‘high politics’’ associated with the state for an expanded nationalist agenda. The role of the state in the construction of women’s collective agency was foreshadowed at Poona in January 1927 at the first annual conference of what later became the All India Women’s Education and Social Conference (aiwc). Even though this conference focused exclusively on women’s education, it entertained a discussion of child marriage as an extension of its concern with promoting women’s education. Cousins, the principal organizer of the conference, prepared a resolution for the conference in support of Gour’s bill for raising the age of consent inside and outside marriage.44 In keeping with the conference’s primary interest on women’s education, the resolution favored sixteen, the age at which girls passed the School Leaving Certificate examination, as the age of consent for both marital and extramarital relations. The delegates, not content with merely raising the age of consent, spontaneously proposed a second resolution directly against child marriage. The resolution recommended as undesirable the marriage of girls and boys respectively below sixteen and twenty-one years of age.45 Even before Sarda’s bill, therefore, the aiwc responded to the separation between married and unmarried girls introduced in the consent act of 1925 by calling for separate legislation dealing directly with child marriage. The particular emphasis on a legislative agenda for social change, moreover, also prompted the organizers of the conference to select Delhi, the seat of the government, as the venue for the next annual conference. The conference proposed to send a deputation to the viceroy in support of Gour’s bill. The focus of the conference on legislative agency for social change— as yet only a relatively minor item on the national political agenda—rose into national prominence in less than a year and gave public legitimacy to a new and more direct relationship between women and the state. The awkwardly fractured articulation of the justification for social legislation against child marriage at the Poona conference provides a preview of the charged political implications of appealing to the state for the reform of domestic and marital practices in India. The official reports of the Poona conference stressed unanimous passage of the resolutions on consent and marriage that, as one newspaper account noted, carried extra weight because well-known conservative Hindu women from Madras such as Lady Sadasiva Iyer spoke in favor of the resolution.46 More instructive for our purposes, however, is the price of the una-

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nimity on the marriage resolution. The resolution on child marriage provoked heated debate as a result of an amendment to the resolution proposed by Hansa Mehta, who was described in one newspaper as representing the views of the younger generation of women at the conference.47 Instead of merely penalizing the marriage of girls below sixteen, Mehta’s amendment sought to invalidate such a marriage. The resolution provoked considerable opposition because of its impact on the ‘‘illegitimate’’ children of such unions, but, more importantly, because the legislation contravened the sacramental nature of Hindu marriages under the shastras (Hindu scriptures).48 The conference, for the sake of unanimity, passed the original resolution that merely penalized the marriage of girls below the age of sixteen; but the long-term significance of the debate over the marriage resolution lies elsewhere. The minority view of bringing marriage under the scope of social legislation foreshadowed a significant breach in the prevailing logic of the colonial constitution of communities: the extension of a language of universal individual rights to the ‘‘inner’’ domain of the community. The Sarda Bill, representing the nationalist appropriation of the domain of the state, provided an unprecedented opportunity for aligning the political with the social sphere in colonial India. Otherwise, indeed, neither the choice of the Sarda Bill as the test case for the first major all-India agitation of the women’s movement nor the victory claimed by women’s organizations at the passage of the bill made much sense. The provisions of the bill, as most activists conceded, were themselves seriously flawed. The aiwc, an umbrella organization for numerous local women’s organizations of differing political views, had rapidly become the most important voice in the women’s movement.49 It raised some of the strongest objections among the supporters of the bill to the proposed age limits in the bill. Since the aiwc resolution at Poona had favored sixteen as the marriage age of girls, it strongly opposed the original draft of Sarda’s bill that had recommended twelve as the age of marriage for Hindu girls. Even the higher minimum of fourteen for girls of all communities, as proposed in the amended bill, fell short of the aiwc’s recommendation for sixteen for girls and twenty-one for boys. Cousins informed Sarda in no uncertain terms that organized women had favored a much higher age of marriage and did not support the ages proposed in his bill.50 The aiwc’s opposition to the provisions of a bill that it otherwise supported gave rise to some awkward moments. At its second annual conference in Delhi in February 1928, the aiwc had proposed a standing committee of the conference to carry out public propaganda against child marriage in preparation for the passage of Sarda’s bill.51 The formation of the All-India Child Marriage Abolition League

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recognized the ‘‘highly technical nature of propaganda’’ in modern times; it aimed to coordinate public opinion against child marriage along the professional lines of propaganda pioneered in the United States.52 Since it chose to focus its efforts on the ages proposed in the Sarda Bill, however, its formal links to the aiwc became a matter of some concern. The committee had to develop into a ‘‘practically independent organization’’ so as not to give the impression that the aiwc had backtracked on the higher ages it had deemed fit for the marriage of boys and girls in India.53 The aiwc, though it was one of the leading proponents of the bill, never officially reconciled itself to the age limits proposed in the Sarda Bill. Various local women’s organizations similarly recognized other provisions of the Sarda Bill as woefully inadequate. These included the following: the application of the original bill only to the Hindu community; the territorial application of the bill only to marriages performed within British India (exempting those who went to the princely states to perform child marriages); the proposed delay between the passage of the bill and the date it came into effect; and the absence of provisions for the actual prevention of child marriages, as opposed to the penalizing of the marriage after the event.54 The Select Committee of the Assembly incorporated only a few of these criticisms into the revised version of the bill; others were ignored or not addressed until the amendment to the Sarda Act in 1938 after almost a decade of its virtually ineffectual operation. Likewise, at least some women’s organizations revived the debate at Poona by calling for the invalidation of child marriage. Hansa Mehta, as joint secretary of the Bhagini Samaj (Women’s Society) in Bombay, conveyed her organization’s deep skepticism about the bill.55 Her organization doubted the practical effects of a measure that penalized early marriages, especially with a fine or a minor offense, without making the marriage illegal. She also recommended, in a telling commentary on the norms of respectability that informed the demands of the women’s movement, that either the bill itself or a follow-up measure should provide a clear definition of marriage as a ‘‘strictly monogamous and equal contract.’’ 56 Yet for Mehta, no less than for numerous other skeptics of the Sarda Bill, there was more at stake than the practical provisions of the bill itself. The significance for women’s organizations of a bill that was admittedly flawed was this: the possibility of reclaiming the state as a resource for a radical new form of constituency building for women. The strategic contribution of women’s activism was casting the state’s agency for social change in conspicuously nationalist terms. The Delhi conference of the aiwc in February 1928 proved decisive in this rhetorical shift. By the time of the conference, the overall public context had been radically altered for a legislative

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campaign against child marriage. The introduction of Sarda’s bill in the Assembly had provided the aiwc with a specific focus for its call for legislative action against child marriage, while the controversyover Mother India had created an opening for exposing the obstructionist role of the colonial state and so reclaiming state intervention for a nationalist agenda. A group of 176 delegates from the aiwc visited the Central Legislative Assembly on February 9, 1928, the day Gour’s consent bill was being debated. The attitude of the government toward the bill, as one of the delegates recalled, left them with a ‘‘vivid impression’’ of government obstructionism. The women emerged ‘‘hot with indignation against government policy and burning to press women’s views directly on those responsible and powerful in the Legislatures.’’ 57 Three separate deputations from the conference followed to make the case for the pending bills in the Assembly. The first, which had originally been planned at the Poona conference, met with the viceroy on February 11, 1928; a second deputation met with the European nonofficial members of the Assembly; and a third, which was developed spontaneously and was admittedly the liveliest of the three, met at a joint meeting with the leaders of all the major Indian political parties in the Assembly.58 When the women’s deputation met with the leaders of the Indian political parties, even sympathetic pro-reform nationalist politicians like Motilal Nehru were not yet prepared to make the enactment of social legislation on child marriage into the nationalist priority that it soon became.59 Leaders of the various political parties promised support for the bills, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but their assurances failed to satisfy at least one young woman in the deputation. ‘‘Lip sympathy,’’ she argued, ‘‘is of no avail,’’ and she demanded written proof of the support of their parties for Sarda’s and Gour’s bills.60 Women’s organizations’ extensive lobbying on behalf of the bills in the Assembly served to convert the Sarda Bill into a nationalist priority. The career of the Sarda Bill in the Assembly reflected this heightened significance. Women’s formal participation in the legislative debates was limited on both the age-of-consent and marriage bills. The viceroy had rejected a petition from the wia and the aiwc to nominate two women to participate in the debate on the bills in the all-male Assembly. A second petition was also rejected from the aiwc, backed by the wia, to appoint women to at least half the positions in the proposed Age of Consent Committee.61 The committee was appointed by the government to consider Gour’s bill before taking action on Sarda’s bill.62 Yet both Sarda and Gour themselves worked closely with women’s organizations to coordinate public support for their bills inside and outside the Assembly; they

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requested constant reinforcement from the resolutions, public meetings, and private propaganda on behalf of the bills outside the Assembly. On occasion, they also called on individual women to use their powers of persuasion to ‘‘straighten out recalcitrant members’’ in the Assembly.63 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, honorary secretary of the aiwc, set up a temporary office in a corner of the room of the Speaker of the Assembly, V. P. Patel, to carry out the work of lobbying legislators.64 Even the wives of legislators apparently weighed in on behalf of the Sarda Bill. M. K. Acharya, an orthodox Hindu from Madras, credited his wife for his vote in support of the majority resolution in the Assembly—in opposition to the government’s resolution—for allowing Sarda’s original bill to proceed to the Select Committee of the Assembly. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the most famous spokesman for orthodox Hinduism in the Assembly, defended his support for the resolution on the grounds that the marriage of girls at twelve in Sarda’s original bill accorded with the shastras; but Acharya attributed his own change of heart expressly to the influence of his wife.65 When several Muslim legislators, after some initial hesitation about the extension of Sarda’s original bill in the Select Committee to all communities, also came out in favor of the bill, Shareefah Hamid Ali of the aiwc speculated that they too had been persuaded to the cause by the influence of their wives.66 The initial victory for the bill’s supporters in the Assembly was in large part the fruit of the intensive lobbying effort by women and by women’s organizations. The expanded rhetoric of reform through the agency of the state served its nationalist purpose by exposing the ‘‘externality’’ of the colonial state—its selfconscious construction as alien to indigenous society—as the major obstacle to progressive social change in India.The vulnerability of the government’s attitude, reflected in its political timidity toward the Sarda Bill, lent credence to this challenge to the foundations of the colonial state. Women’s organizations directed much of their initial propaganda to convincing the government of substantial public opinion in India, especially among women, in support of legislation. Hence the flood of resolutions in support of the bill that reached the viceroy and the home member from the public meetings of women all over the country. The representatives of women’s organizations also pressured the government and the official members of the Assembly to support the bill or at least remain ‘‘neutral’’ when it came up for vote in the Assembly. The All-India Child Marriage Abolition League, as its secretary Dhanvanthi Rama Rau recalled, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the wives of European government officials to encourage their

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husbands to vote their conscience on the bills.67 The league also turned to the women members of Parliament in Britain to use their influence to change the attitude of the Government of India toward the bill.68 The women’s section of the Labour Party and the Women’s Co-operative Guilds in Britain responded to these requests with resolutions urging the Government of India to allow officials free voting on the bill.69 Several prominent women in Britain, under the auspices of Rathbone and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (nusec), also published a joint letter in the London Times urging the Indian government to pass Sarda’s bill.70 In Geneva, where the League of Nations was considering a resolution on a uniform age of marriage internationally, Cousins confronted the British delegation with the obstructionist attitude of British officials toward the Sarda Bill in India.71 For Mayo the externality of the colonial state had buffered British colonialism from blame for the ‘‘backward’’ social conditions of India. A newly expansive rhetoric of social reform in India now made that same externality a point of vulnerability for the ideological legitimacy of the colonial state. Even the metropolitan state, by choosing to set an example for India during the campaign for the Sarda Bill, only added to the legitimacy problems of the colonial state. Among its many surprising reverberations, the Sarda Bill also galvanized the metropolitan government to pass a similar legislation on the age of marriage for girls in Britain. To be sure, the initiative for a higher age of marriage for British girls was inspired before the Sarda Bill by reports on the traffic of girls issued by the League of Nations; but it gained momentum only in the context of the debates on the Sarda Bill in the Legislative Assembly in India.The initiative for a bill in the British Parliament was taken by British women’s organizations under Rathbone. A joint deputation of British women’s organizations—motivated by the desire to pressure the Government of India by example—met with the home secretary and members of Parliament to make the case for a bill that would raise the age of marriage for British girls from twelve to sixteen. Britain, they argued, could not afford to have a lower legal age of marriage than India.72 The debate on the British marriage bill, introduced in the House of Lords by Lord Buckmaster in February 1929, made frequent references both to the impact of Mother India and to the need for Britain to keep up with the proposed changes in India.73 Whereas the British Parliament passed the parallel bill for Britain without much opposition, the colonial state stalled for fear of the political fallout from the marriage bill in India. This was not lost on supporters of the Sarda Bill in India. The metropolitan example, contrary to the intentions of its supporters, made the alien foundations of the colonial state even more vulnerable to nationalist challenge.

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The legitimacy of a colonial versus a national state was now crucially tied to the issue of their relative efficacy as agents for social modernity, especially for women in India. Conceived within both a national and an international climate of concern about public health and racial hygiene, the Sarda Bill provided activist women with a particularly apt vehicle for making the case for a national state. Social reformers and feminists alike blamed the colonial government’s inaction and timidity, as much as orthodox social forces in India, for the problems of child marriage and for social stagnation more generally. Even Muthulakshmi Reddi, who worried that the independent women’s movement in India would adopt a position of premature opposition to the colonial government, expressed frustration at the official policy of pseudo-noninterference in the religious and social customs of India. Her speech at the National Social Conference in Madras in December 1927 captured a growing consensus in the women’s movement on the diagnosis of the social problems affecting women: We naturally expect a good and enlightened government to help and even if they do not find their way to take initiative in such good, urgent and much-needed reform, at least to embrace the very first opportunity given to them when private members bring any bill or resolution to improve the women’s lot in this country; but to our dismay and disappointment what do we find? . . . Cannot the enlightened British government follow in the footsteps of the progressive native states even if they do not want to offend the orthodox feelings? Even we women have become discontent and have begun to grumble at the attitude of our government, which is indifferent and unsympathetic towards social legislation.74

Two points stand out in women’s arguments for the need of social legislation: the direct criticism of the colonial state and the necessity, in the absence of basic primary education in India, of enlightened state intervention for the reform of society. Here also lay the significance of the alternative model of state-society relations invoked by activist women in the struggle for the passage of the Sarda Bill. The social legislation passed by progressive princely states provided examples of the contrast between the enlightened intervention of a national state and the social conservatism of the colonial state. The resolution passed at the Delhi conference of the aiwc called on ‘‘the Central Government and the Provincial Legislatures to follow the precedent set by the Indian states of Baroda, Rajkot, Kashmir, Gondal, Indore, Limbdi, Mandi, which have raised the legal age of marriage.’’ 75 A writer for the wia organ, Stri Dharma, similarly lamented the contrast between the gov-

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ernments in the princely states and the colonial government of British India: ‘‘The Indian states are peculiarly fortunate in being able to effect reforms in social and other conditions,’’ she wrote, ‘‘unhampered by the ‘neutral’ attitude of the government, as they are in British India.’’ 76 The princely states, often portrayed as political and social backwaters, served in this case as progressive models for a critique of the colonial foundation of the state in British India and for a new state-centered rhetoric of social reform.77 Similarly the examples of Turkey and Japan, where national governments had demonstrated courage in passing sweeping legislations to reform the position of women, were frequently recruited to highlight the political timidity of the colonial state. A sovereign and self-determining national state, it was argued, was both more responsive to public opinion and, when necessary, more free to brave unpopularity to enact progressive social legislation.78 The appropriation of the domain of the state not only made it available for an expanded nationalist politics but also created an opening for the construction of women’s collective agency for social reform. The new role of the state gave public legitimacy to women as a legitimate constituency—as both subjects and the objects—of the reform proposed in the Sarda Act. It pushed the contours of social reform to look to the future—instead of merely to cultural-nationalist myths of a ‘‘golden age’’ in the past—as a sanction for social change. Hitherto the familiar justification for social reforms for women had rested on the revival of the glories of an ancient past and on the symbolic construction of women as signifiers of the ‘‘different but modern’’ identity of an anticolonial modernizing nationalist project.79 The idea of the state as the guarantor of the individual rights of subjects provided a significant new resource for an expanded foundation of social reform for women. The bill, as Sarda argued in the Assembly, was a ‘‘very modest attempt’’ to recognize that female children have ‘‘inalienable rights’’ and that any state with pretensions to civilization had a duty to protect them ‘‘without heeding the vagaries that masquerade in the guise of social customs.’’ 80 Here lay the constitution of the interests of women, different from the gender-neutral collective concerns of the community, as a factor in the debates on social reform in India. The comprehensive scope of the debates surrounding the Sarda Act had created an opening for a different relationship between women and the state independent of the mediation of the collective interests of communities. Hence the significance of this moment for a recognition of women as themselves rights-bearing subjects. Not surprisingly, therefore, arguments made on behalf of women in the campaign were framed not just in a language of tradition and of enduring cultural

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difference but increasingly in the new political language of rights. S. Bhagirathi Ammal, responding to criticism of the bill from orthodox Hindus, argued, ‘‘It is a most important question vitally concerning the women and children of this country who should have self-determination in this matter.’’ ‘‘They alone,’’ she wrote, ‘‘have the moral right to say whether they want the bill or not and the men should have no voice in passing it however much they protest.’’ 81 She thus summarily dismissed the argument of men as ‘‘protecting angels’’ for uneducated and unfit women. ‘‘Education is not needed to form an opinion in this matter,’’ she argued, ‘‘for which women’s experience is sufficient.’’ Similarly, in a provocatively titled article, ‘‘Dominion Status in Matrimony,’’ Mrs. Munshi likened the relationship between husbands and wives to that of the Dominion colonies within the British Empire, acknowledging that the ‘‘right to secede’’ alone ensured the stability of both.82 The secession metaphor was carried further in the welcome address of Lakshmi Ammal at the first women’s conference in May 1930 organized under the auspices of the self-respect movement in Erode. ‘‘If men were to persist thus in not giving into women’s demands for freedom and if they were to persist in the belief that women were their playthings,’’ she argued, ‘‘women will have no choice but to practice a policy of Non-Cooperation with respect to the men in their lives.’’ 83 The language of autonomy and sovereignty, as encapsulated in references to secession and noncooperation, had arrived in a domain hitherto insulated from such political language.The self-consciousness of this rhetoric, indeed, made clear that a new space had emerged to provide public agency for women. The significance of women’s campaign for the Sarda Act lay precisely in the ways the domain of high politics became newly available both for the construction of women’s collective agency and for a revised nationalist politics. This point was lost on Rathbone, the one-time Mayo partisan, who went on to forge an uneasy alliance with Indian women on the Sarda Bill. To be sure, her experience with the Sarda Act considerably shook Rathbone’s initial faith in the benevolent paternalism of colonial rule. This was not an easy process. It was the outcome of both her eventual acknowledgment of the arguments made by her feminist interlocutors from India and her own firsthand experience of the colonial and the metropolitan governments’ attitudes.84 For example, soon after the Sarda Act was passed, the government in India decided against its ‘‘wholesale execution.’’ Local governments and administrations were secretly advised, by an order of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in March 1930, to do little to advertise the act or to enforce its provisions as it came into effect on April 1, 1930.85 The secretary of state in London concurred with the decision. This was not lost on Rathbone. De-

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spite this, Rathbone continued to have difficulty in understanding the position of Indian feminists and Indian women’s organizations in part because she could never appreciate fully the revolution in the relationship between the domains of the political and social that had occurred in India. Rathbone’s Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (1934), while faulting the colonial state for deliberately attempting to ignore the Sarda Act, concluded with a pointed criticism of Indian feminists for joining the Gandhian civil disobedience movement against the British instead of concentrating their energies on implementing the Sarda Act.86 For Rathbone, the spheres of high politics and of social reform still remained clearly demarcated, separate domains.The response of Reddi, who shared with Rathbone the view of herself as first and foremost a social reformer, highlights the impossibility of separating these domains in the colonial Indian context. In her otherwise largely positive review of Rathbone’s book, Reddi defended the record of the Indian women’s movement. More importantly, while herself abstaining from joining the Gandhian political movement, she defended women’s involvement in the movement in the following terms: Rathbone wonders why women who in such large numbers throw themselves into the nationalist movement have not come out in sufficiently large numbers to work out this much needed reform. Movement for political and economic freedom in any country draws lots of people; that for social reform [has] appeals only for an enlightened few. Further even the social reformers have fully realized that only with the help of National Government they could effectively further social reform and social progress in this country. It is a well-known fact that the active help of the state is necessary to eradicate long-standing social evils as is evidenced from the examples of Turkey, China, and Japan, and some of the progressive Indian states.87

Certainly Reddi was not naive in expecting from a national government automatic support for reforms. Her own experience of the Sarda Act led Reddi to a healthy skepticism of the apathy of most politicians, whether British or Indian, on an issue that she considered to be of considerable importance to women. So, for example, local congressmen in Madras exploited for their own political ends the government’s unease over the Sarda Act. Reddi organized a meeting of women’s organizations at Triplicane in September 1929 to condemn the hypocrisy of nationalist politicians who, in order to secure their votes, had assured conservative Brahmins in Madras that they could marry off their underage daughters. While some of the women at the meeting drew a distinction between the policy of the party and the action of local

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congressmen, the meeting finally passed a resolution condemning the action of Congress politicians as being ‘‘against the creed of the Congress itself.’’ 88 Furthermore Reddi refused to separate reforms for women from other progressive reforms for the nation. By contrast, Rathbone criticized Gandhi for devoting his time to the ‘‘untouchable problem’’ after his release from prison. ‘‘I wish he and some of his supporters,’’ she wrote to Reddi, ‘‘would be as keen about the women as about the untouchables.’’ 89 To this, Reddi responded that she was ‘‘very glad’’ that Gandhi was to ‘‘devote this whole year to the cause of the poor untouchables.’’ ‘‘Gandhiji,’’ she wrote, ‘‘is very favourable to all women’s reforms and he will give his support to all progressive social reforms.’’ 90 Neither the trumping of women’s concerns by national ones nor the relative priority given to political versus social reform adequately captures the differences underlying Reddi’s and Rathbone’s positions. Reddi’s defense of women’s involvement with ‘‘high politics’’ in India reveals the different conditions for the construction of women’s agency for social reform in Britain and in India. The dominant nineteenth-century formulation of the social in Britain, as Denise Riley has argued, provided a field for the domesticated intervention of women as subjects. The identification of women in Britain with the ‘‘social’’ was itself predicated on the prior separation of the social from the political sphere, which became exclusively the domain of ‘‘high politics’’ associated with juridical and government power. British women eventually became subjects in the political sphere, but this followed only after their prior identification with the social.91 By contrast, the dominant formulation of the social in India was associated with the collective imperatives of indigenous communities. Hence the construction of women’s agency for social reform had to follow a different process: the necessary realignment of the social sphere with the juridical domain of the state. The nationalist appropriation of the domain of the state provided the conditions for the construction of women’s collective agency. The liberal conception of the state in its colonial translation created the possibility for a different politics of women in colonial India.

expanding the social The annexation of social reform as an appropriate field for women’s organizations expanded the restrictive boundaries of the ‘‘social question’’ in colonial India. The potential impact of women’s associational politics on the expansion of the contours of the social in India was not lost on the colonial state. Hence the de-

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velopment of an independent women’s movement in India from the beginning met with government suspicion. While organizations like the wia were identified with anticolonial politics because of their close ties to the theosophical movement, most women’s organizations in the 1920s asserted their independence from party politics by self-consciously limiting their activity to a safely circumscribed domain of the social. The wia, therefore, was unique in linking ‘‘social reform’’ for women directly to ‘‘political progress’’ of the nation while strictly framing its platform as ‘‘political though non-party activity.’’ 92 The ncwi, part of the wartime philanthropic organizations of both British and Indian women that in 1925 came together to form a national Indian branch of the International Council of Women (icw), was more typical in asserting its neutrality in political affairs. The ncwi, as its annual report stated, was ‘‘not established in the interest of any one social, political, or religious agenda.’’ 93 The disclaimers notwithstanding, the colonial government eyed the development of all-India women’s organizations with a degree of suspicion. Even the ncwi, heavily dependent on the patronage of the wives of senior government officials, managed to provoke the Punjab government’s displeasure.The government expressed hostility to council work in the province, claiming that the ncwi was a cross between Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society and ‘‘bolshevism,’’ having apparently mistaken the ‘‘internationalism’’ of the movement for the Third International! The India Office finally convinced Lahore and Simla officials that the icw, under its international president, the Marchioness of Aberdeen, was a bona fide philanthropic organization, and not a revolutionary one; only then did officials permit their wives to join in the council’s work.94 The colonial government’s overly cautious attitude toward women’s organizations was partly a response to the involvement of women in nationalist and revolutionary political organizations in the 1920s. Even so, the potential reformulation of social reform as a field for mobilizing a gender-based collectivity ‘‘women’’ was no less fraught with awkward political consequences for the colonial state. The colonial state had circumscribed the scope of social reform activities in India, dictating the artificial contours that distinguished the properly social from the dangerously political. Having recognized the collective rights of communities in the sphere of religion and family life, for example, colonial officials saw the calls for legislative change in this sphere as inherently political and as an interference in the rights of indigenous communities. Hence official policies were directly implicated in delimiting the field of social reform in India. The policies of the colonial government, as the annual report of the wia complained, restrained

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several women ‘‘from expressing their opinions frankly and fearlessly on many of the problems that concerned our sex and our country.’’ The wives of government officials were bound by the same code of behavior as government servants in participating in political causes, as were those involved in the ‘‘professions of teaching, nursing, and medical work in the government institutions.’’ 95 In a country where only two out of every hundred women read or wrote in her own language, the artificial limit on the role of the ‘‘educated and well-to-do class of women’’ keenly affected women’s organizations, which depended precisely on the contributions of this class of women. Sister Subbalakshmi Ammal of the Sarda Ladies Union in Madras, a pioneer social reformer who ran a highly successful home for Hindu widows, found that as a government servant she ‘‘could neither discuss nor pass resolutions in the Union, either for the abolition of child marriage or any reforms for women, except on education and health.’’ 96 Reddi invited a teacher from a government college to speak at a women’s meeting in support of the Sarda Bill only to find that the teacher was under ‘‘definite instructions’’ from the government ‘‘only to attend and not to participate in the meeting.’’ 97 The deliberately narrow understanding of the social came to a head as women’s organizations adopted the cause of the Sarda Bill. The involvement of women’s organizations with the Sarda Bill, which many contemporaries identified as the beginning of a new ‘‘feminist phase’’ of women’s organizing in India, made for direct confrontation between the boundaries of the social and the political. Stri Dharma justified the wia’s stand on politics thus: ‘‘Women cannot ban politics anymore,’’ an editorial claimed, ‘‘for social reform and politics are not only interdependent, but also because as long as we need to arm ourselves with legislative enactment for social reconstitution, it means we depend upon political instruments for our purposes.’’ 98 Even the Saroj Nalini Dutt Mahila Samitis (Women’s Institutes), which had stayed away from advocating votes for women so as to emphasize a purely educational and social program for women, could not avoid the political implications of women’s social work. The Mahila Samitis, operating on the model of the ghar sansar (home-world), or the extension of women’s concerns with the home to the world, had typically avoided transgressing the boundaries that had hitherto circumscribed the domain of social reform in India.99 The Mahila Samitis’ support for the Sarda Bill, however, blurred the distinction between the social and political dimension of social work for women. The history of the aiwc’s involvement with the Sarda Bill demonstrated most starkly the political stakes of the expanded contours of social reform. wia mem-

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bers had organized the aiwc purely for the purposes of promoting women’s education.The aiwc was the most self-conscious of the three major all-India women’s organizations of the 1920s about eliminating any hint of politics from its platform, for it relied heavily on governmental machinery to implement its educational program. Cousins, the main organizer of the conference, was keenly aware of the limits that such a position imposed. She acknowledged the ‘‘difficulty [in] keeping aiwc from becoming interlinked with government’’ and offered the wia as the ‘‘next line of defense’’ for women interested in becoming involved in a more expansive agenda of women’s social reform.100 Despite resolutions for legislations on the age of consent and marriage at Poona and Delhi, the aiwc in its first two years faithfully stuck to the narrowly defined and government-approved understanding of social reform with its focus on women’s education. Even then, however, the aiwc did not entirely succeed in allaying official anxieties about the potentially political character of its social platform. The Bombay government, suspecting a possible political element in the conference, had prohibited its women educational officers from participating at the Poona conference.101 More trouble came at the Delhi conference when Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the honorary secretary of the aiwc, participated at a political rally against the ill-fated Simon Commission. Consequently Lady Irwin, the wife of the viceroy, threatened to boycott the opening ceremony of the conference.102 Cousins smoothed over the problem by insisting that Chattopadhyay had acted in her personal capacity and not as a representative of the conference. Nevertheless, the Standing Committee of the aiwc subsequently passed a resolution prohibiting its officeholders from taking part in any political activity during the week before and during the group’s annual conference.103 The real dilemma arose, however, when many of the local constituent conferences recommended that the aiwc expand its educational agenda to include a broader program of social reform for women. Many of the European members of the aiwc’s local constituencies already disapproved of its advocacy of the Sarda Bill. They feared that it placed the movement in opposition to the government’s position. For example, Calicut’s local constituent conference in December 1927 was sharply divided over the aiwc’s endorsement of the bill. ‘‘The local Christian missionaries, Chaplain’s wife, and the collector’s wife,’’ Mrs. V. S. Kanjilapadam reported from Calicut, ‘‘led the opposition by saying that the government might think we are against it by supporting such a political question. We had to invoke the aid of the local member of the Legislative Assembly to explain that the measure was only social and not against

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the government.’’ 104 Only then did the mainly European opponents of the resolution agree to remain neutral, and the constituent conference endorsed the aiwc resolution primarily owing to the enthusiasm of the local wia members.The aiwc found the expansion of its agenda an uphill battle because of the political connotations of a social agenda that advocated legislation for the reform of marriage or family life. The controversy provoked at the aiwc’s third annual meeting in Patna where it formally adopted an expanded social agenda was revealing. Feelings about the potential expansion of the education conference to cover social reforms ran high in the months before the meeting. Most of the politically influential Europeans and Indians of Bihar discouraged the aiwc from holding its next meeting in Patna. Lady Stephens, the wife of the governor, initially refused to open the conference for fear that it had become too ‘‘political.’’ 105 Thus the conference began in the midst of tensions, in spite of the efforts of local members, like Sushama Sen, to allay public distrust of the conference. Chattopadhyay proposed at the conference that all questions relating to women’s social welfare be included in the conference’s deliberations. Many stalwarts of the women’s movement in India, such as Sarala Devi Chaudhrani, opposed the idea. She was supported by Lakshmi Menon, an educator, who feared that the introduction of the word ‘‘social’’ in the title of the conference, rather than the original ‘‘All India Women’s Education Conference,’’ threatened its avowed designation as ‘‘nonpolitical.’’ 106 Menon’s and Sarala Devi’s objections were mainly tactical. A shift to the advocacy of social reform legislation, they feared, would result in the loss of official support for the organization’s educational schemes. Others, like the Bengali author Anurupa Devi from Muzaffarpur, opposed the resolution from a different direction. She argued that to shift the sphere of women’s activities beyond society’s minimum acceptance of women’s education would alienate indigenous society from the women’s movement.107 Sushama Sen brokered a compromise with an amending resolution that created two subsections of the conference, one on education and one on social reform, under the same parent committee. The scope of the conference thus expanded at Patna to include all educational and social questions affecting women, but as treated from the educational point of view.108 The heated nature of the debate, however, provided some indication of the implications arising out of the construction of women as themselves the subjects, as well as the objects, of social reform. The true contribution of the Sarda Act was not so much legal as political and ideological: it served to redefine the sphere of social reform work.

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The relatively innocuous issue of Lady Irwin’s relationship to the aiwc illustrates the political fallout from this development. The issue itself had its roots at a session chaired in Delhi in 1928 by the viceroy’s wife at the annual conference of the aiwc. At this session, the aiwc raised for women’s education in India a generous sum of thirty thousand rupees from wealthy patrons, such as the ranis and maharanis of the princely states. The question now arose about Lady Irwin’s control of the fund and the conditions for the aiwc’s access to the fund. Lady Irwin and her staff had become nervous about the direction of the conference and its implications for the control of a fund collected under her patronage.109 The decision at the Patna conference to reaffirm the ‘‘nonpolitical’’ character of the conference provided some reassurance to Lady Irwin and her staff, but the expanded social agenda of the conference left wide open the future of its political orientation. This ambiguity flared up around the question of whether Lady Irwin should have a permanent place in the proposed constitution of the aiwc. The aiwc had until now freely chosen its president and vice president, as one member noted, from mostly ‘‘a class of high placed women.’’ Yet a small group of the conference’s most active members guarded the membership of the Standing Committee, the main executive wing that set the agenda of the conference. Hence Shareefah Hamid Ali insisted that the president and the vice president of the conference should not be made ex officio members of the Standing Committee, since these highly placed women typically did not ‘‘work the whole year round.’’ 110 But the private secretary of Lady Irwin, Colonel Harvey, persuaded Hilla Rustomjee Faridoonji, a member of the Standing Committee, to accord the viceroy’s wife a prominent role in the draft constitution in lieu of the use of the educational fund. Lady Irwin’s relationship to the conference was thus bound to become controversial. The majority of the Standing Committee rejected the proposal as severely limiting for the conference’s newly expanded social reform agenda. Standing Committee member Hansa Mehta’s objections to the proposal were significant. According to Mehta, Faridoonji had displayed a ‘‘fundamental misconception or at least misapprehension’’ of the nature of the organization for which the constitution was being drafted: the aiwc or for a committee to manage the education funds.111 She argued against subordinating the conference to the needs of managing an educational fund. In clarifying the implications of the widened scope of the Patna conference, Mehta expounded on the goals of the conference: its aim was not merely ‘‘to offer suggestions for reform to the government,’’ she insisted, but ‘‘to educate our own community into an appreciation of the need for

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better education of our girls and improved status for us women in this country.’’ Mehta’s case was premised on a shift in the public rationale for social reform that acknowledged women, instead of merely the collective interests of communities, as the object of reform. Within this viewof reform, Mehta argued, the colonial government was ‘‘often the most determined opponent’’ of constructive suggestions for social reform, including the spread of education. Drawing from the history of the government’s vote in the Assembly on social welfare legislations, she called into question the role of the colonial state: ‘‘Government today, from the nature of the case, and unconsciously if not as a matter of deliberate purpose,’’ she claimed, ‘‘is a champion of vested interests and the established order.’’ Hence for women to expect to achieve their goal with the help of ‘‘official support’’ would be exposing themselves to a ‘‘most serious disappointment.’’ 112 Mehta did not intend to ‘‘drive out Lady Irwin from this movement’’; she intended, rather, to demonstrate the constraints that the powers given to her in the draft constitution placed on the reform goals of the conference. Eventually the question of control over the funds, and of Lady Irwin’s relation to the conference, was resolved by keeping the conference separate from its affiliated body, the All India Education Fund, with Lady Irwin as president of only the latter. The 1930 constitution of the aiwc reiterated the original nonpolitical character of the organization and retained for at least another decade its explicit ban on politics. Yet support for the Sarda Bill—an indication of the expansion of the territory of social reform in India—put even nonpolitical organizations such as the aiwc on a collision course with the policies and attitudes of a colonial state heavily invested in noninterference in the personal laws of communities. Henceforth, the boundaries of social reform would be expanded to make room for state legislation. The fate of Cornelia Sorabji’s Bengal League of Social Service for Women registers the altered field of women’s social reform work. In response to Mayo’s focus on the social condition of Indian women, Sorabji revived her scheme for an institute to train British and Indian social workers for work in India.113 Sorabji’s close friend Lady Richmond, who was also Rathbone’s niece, forwarded the proposed scheme to Rathbone, who in turn sent it to Mayo.114 Mayo agreed to fund Sorabji’s scheme with money she hoped to raise for India from American women’s organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution. However, Mayo insisted that Sorabji focus her efforts exclusively on the matters discussed in Mother India as a condition of her funding. Mayo further demanded that Sorabji’s institute have nothing to do with either women’s education or women’s citizenship

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issues.115 The success of any scheme associated with Mayo, on top of the limiting terms of Mayo’s demands, was doomed from the start. Wisely dissociating her institute from Mayo, Sorabji turned for help to official circles in India. Both Lady Jackson, the wife of the governor of Bengal, and Lady Irwin saw Sorabji’s scheme as a ‘‘safe’’ response to all the interest in Indian women generated by Mother India. Lady Irwin, who had heard from numerous British women wanting to help in India after reading Mother India, was receptive to Sorabji’s plans.116 The initial prospects for Sorabji’s plans seemed promising, but these changed quickly. Sorabji blamed the modest record of her Bengal League of Social Service, established in 1929, on the trumping of political as opposed to social causes in the field of women’s activism in India.117 However, Sorabji’s plans had already been overshadowed by her sister Alice Pennell, who captured Lady Irwin’s attention with an alternative plan for women’s education. Pennell, who sharply disagreed with Sorabji on Mother India, worked through the Punjab and Delhi branches of the Federation of University Women of India to develop an alternative all-India plan for a women’s educational institute. She presented her plan to the aiwc at the 1928 Delhi conference, where it was adopted as the basis for the all-India education fund at the conference. Feeling let down by her sister, Sorabji settled in 1929 for her more modest provincial social service league.118 Even in this sphere, the older Saroj Nalini Dutt Mahila Samitis greatly overshadowed Sorabji’s newly formed Bengal League. The Mahila Samitis experienced a renaissance in their popularity in India and in Britain that cost Sorabji’s league potential supporters. Hannah Sen, a supporter of the Mahila Samitis, had joined in 1929 with British women in London to form the Indo-British Mutual Welfare League.119 Its aim was to educate British and Indian women about social service in India through affiliation with the Mahila Samitis. The involvement of Sorabji’s brother on Sen’s London committee for the Mahila Samitis, not unlike her sister’s involvement with the plan for a women’s education institute in India, stole the thunder of Sorabji’s league. He boosted an organization whose work closely paralleled that of Sorabji’s proposed social service league.120 The disappointing trajectory of the league rested more in personal causes than in any trumping of social for political causes. The presumably political foray of women’s organizations in championing social legislations like the Sarda Act represented not a narrowing, but an extension, of the ‘‘social question.’’ Several types of women’s social organizations, with considerable overlap in membership, continued to flourish with widely differing views on the appropriate boundaries of social reform. Women activists, moreover, articulated the case

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for reforms for women from diverging and contradictory perspectives.121 The crumbling of the colonial boundaries of social reform as a result of the support of women’s organizations for the Sarda Bill, indeed, neither displaced the diversity of social work by and for women nor substituted political for social concerns in the women’s movement. The realignment of social reform with the political domain of the state, in fact, provided an extended terrain for the social work of women. Its rhetorical effect was the construction of women, rather than simply the community, as a new point of entry into the ‘‘social question.’’ The rhetorical inventiveness of this political gambit, far from abandoning one tradition of social reform by engaging another, aimed optimistically at a new and expanded future for the public debates about social reform: the redrawing of the boundaries of the social as an inherently political and public concern.

reconfiguring rights Finally, women’s advocacy of the Sarda Bill modified the dominant conception of rights in India by advocating the notion of universal individual rights. This put the choice of Sarda’s marriage bill, instead of Hari Singh Gour’s consent bill, for the first all-India campaign of women’s organizations in a somewhat different light. The government had appointed the Age of Consent Committee in June 1928 as an attempt to stall consideration of the Sarda Bill. Supporters of Sarda’s bill in the Assembly, most notably the women’s organizations in India, bombarded the committee with written and oral evidence from women witnesses who supported a law directly against child marriage.122 The committee, which included one Indian woman, Rameshwari Nehru, also met with an official delegation from the aiwc in 1929 in Patna. The representatives of the aiwc reiterated in no uncertain terms that organized women preferred a law against child marriage to one that simply raised the age of consent.123 The Age of Consent Committee, drawing on nine volumes of evidence in which women witnesses were well represented, issued a unanimous recommendation in favor of a separate law dealing directly with the age of marriage over merely raising the age of consent. To be sure, the preference for a law against child marriage over a law on the age of consent in nonmarital relations to jump-start an all-India women’s mobilization betrayed a preoccupation with ‘‘respectability’’: the concern for wives, as it were, trumping the concern for so-called prostitutes or sex workers.Thewomen’s organizations in India certainly favored monogamous marriage and motherhood as normative ideals for women. Even this emphasis, however, did not go unchal-

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lenged. For example, Lakshmi Menon’s amending resolution at the aiwc at Poona questioned the conference’s emphasis on marriage and motherhood in the name of single professional women.124 Others, like the anthropologist Irrawaty Karve, found the emphasis on monogamy in women’s organizations of the 1920s and 1930s too constraining. Unlike these organizations, indeed, the Marathi journal Samaj Swasthya, edited by a member of the Karve family, advocated cohabitation as an alternative to marriage.125 Marginalized women, like the devadasis, or the dancing girls associated with Hindu temples, also on occasion publicly contested the women’s movement’s sexual respectability platform.126 In the meantime, the radical self-respect marriages promoted by the self-respect movement challenged the understanding of marriage in terms of religious sacrament and of sexual respectability.127 The class and caste bias of the language of ‘‘respectability’’ notwithstanding, the ‘‘nationalization’’ of a women’s issue in the Sarda Bill did important ideological work: the loosening of the embrace of the community for the constitution of women as themselves subjects of rights. This extra political valence added to the potential of Sarda’s bill over Gour’s for challenging the colonial constitution of communities. The marriage bill, even more than the consent bill, made the ‘‘inner’’ domain of the community—the family arrangements of the upper classes no less than those of lower classes that rarely enjoyed the same immunity from ‘‘external’’ intervention—vulnerable to a new language of universal individual rights.128 Hence the rhetorical moment of the Sarda Bill raised in stark form the tension between the construction of women as themselves rights-bearing subjects and the collective construction of the cultural rights of communities, especially religious communities, whose dominant constitution was implicitly male. No wonder, then, that in the period between the introduction of the Sarda Bill in the Assembly and its eventual passage, opposition from conservative Hindu and Muslim opinion coalesced both inside and outside the Assembly. The Hindu opposition, which was strongest in Bengal and Madras, was primarily based on the argument of the authority of the shastras that supposedly enjoined marriages for girls below the age of fourteen. By contrast, the Muslim opposition did not typically condone early marriages per se, though the practice itself was common among Muslims in India, but raised the question of the precedent set by the Sarda Bill for interference in the personal laws of the Muslims.129 At stake in the spectrum of conservative Hindu and Muslim opposition to the bill, however, was precisely the fear that a law on marriage would replace the authority and autonomy of religious communities. Even Hindu arguments about the interpretation of

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the shastras reflected the anxieties of a religious community beleaguered by the political struggles of a variety of groups against its blatantly hierarchical constitution. By the 1920s, indeed, the authority of an orthodox Brahminical Hindu community was already confronted with a variety of internal challenges. This was especially true in Madras, where support for the Sarda Bill became identified with the broader non-Brahmin challenge to Brahminism. When Srimat Sankaracharya of Kamakotee Peeta petitioned the viceroy in his capacity as ‘‘Central Religious Head of the Orthodox Hindus of India’’ to oppose the Sarda Bill, the League of Non-Brahmin Youths in Madras sided with women’s organizations in publicly challenging his authority. ‘‘The Non-Brahmins of South India who form a major portion of the Hindu society,’’ read the counterpetition from the nonBrahmins, ‘‘do not recognize the said Sankaracharya as their religious head much less as Jagat Guru.’’ 130 The central place of women in the definition of the collective identity of the community added to the conservative opposition against a bill perceived to interfere in the personal laws of the community. Hence the widespread anxiety of the bill’s opponents that the challenge to the internal self-regulation of marriage practices and of women spelled the total collapse of the community. The fatwa (a ruling on a question pertaining to Islamic law) against the Sarda Bill issued by M. Aziz-ur-Rahman of Deoband provided a hint of the broader fear of social upheaval that opponents equated with the provisions of the Sarda Bill. His declaration that Islamic law does not permit the marriage of Muslims with nonMuslims or the restriction on the age of marriage collapsed several anxieties that coalesced around the Sarda Bill.131 Likewise, Acharya, who had now emerged as the leading Hindu opponent of the bill in the Assembly, wrote to his fellow Sanatanists (orthodox Hindus) and urged them to do everything in their power to defend their religion against the bill. The letter was brought to light in the Revolt, the organ of the anticaste self-respect movement in Madras, which wryly noted the strange irony of a politically conservative politician urging his fellow Hindus to offer civil disobedience against government interference in religion.132 The crux of Acharya’s fear, expressed during the final debate on the bill in the Assembly, was that late marriages encouraged sexual immorality among women and spelled the decline of the Hindu community. Both conservative Hindu and Muslim opponents saw the bill as undoing the very identity of their communities by shifting the regulation of women from religion to a legal authority. Most supporters of the Sarda Bill defended it on the grounds that it did not contravene the religious personal laws of communities. Still, women activists ex-

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pressed a pointed frustration with the invocation of religious laws as the only sanction for social change.This was especially relevant in relation to Hindu scriptures, for orthodox Hindus, unlike their Muslim counterparts, invoked a scriptural defense for early marriage. Kamalabai Lakshman Rao, a member of the aiwc deputation that had met with the leaders of the political parties in 1928 in Delhi, faced off with orthodox Hindu politicians who quoted the shastras against the Sarda Bill. She responded bluntly: ‘‘We want new shastras.’’ 133 Another member of the deputation responded with equal bluntness: ‘‘We have had enough of men’s laws for us, we want to make laws for ourselves!’’ Reddi, who as deputy president of the Madras Legislative Council had passed a resolution in favor of increasing the age of marriage, criticized the double standards of orthodox Hindu arguments that rested on ‘‘out-of-date and antiquated shastraic quotations.’’ While Brahmin men, she argued, ignored the injunctions of the shastras for Brahmins, they wished to impose the shastras on women. Recognizing the futility of getting drawn into intricate debates on the interpretation of the scriptures, however, Reddi argued that ‘‘it is as silly to refer to sacred books written five thousand years ago on these matters, as it is to request a legislator of today to enact what should be done five thousand years hence. Times are changing and laws have to change to suit the changing environments.’’ 134 ‘‘Even if ‘no-change’ orthodox people imagine [child marriage] to be religion,’’ Reddi insisted, ‘‘I say the old order must change yielding place to the new.’’ 135 The irrelevance of the shastras was a theme that emerged in the writings of several women in the campaign for the Sarda Bill. Neelavathi, a self-respecter writing in Kudi Arasu, expressed a growing frustration with Hindu orthodoxy, which railed against the bill on grounds of its interference in shastraic texts.136 Sarda, speaking about his bill in the Assembly, attributed the shift in the public arguments about the shastras precisely to the contribution of women: ‘‘The women of India do not talk of shastras; they do not bother themselves about the effect of marriage on their prospects in the next world. They are practical and think of this world, and they want their sufferings in this world should come to an end.’’ 137 The modernizing discourse of the law put the upholders of the shastras on the defensive. Acharya, in his book Indian Marriage Systems, or Siva-Shakti Unity in the Light of Western Science (1929) and in his speeches in the Assembly, demonstrated that the view of the shastras accorded with the latest scientific arguments of international sexologists and eugenicists, which allegedly confirmed that for women, early marriage produced the best physical and moral results.138 Clearly the authority of the shastras, and religious authority more generally, was no longer con-

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sidered adequate by itself as the arbiter for all social change. In taking on board the rhetorical authority of modern institutions, Acharya enacted the problem about legitimacy bedeviling all who had a stake in the dominant colonial constitution of communities bound by supposedly primordial ties of ascription. Yet more was at stake than merely modernizing and updating community identities in the shift from the sanction of religion to law. The nature of the crossexamination of women witnesses before the Age of Consent Committee illustrated the challenge it posed to the very foundation of community identities in India. The government had expressly selected members for the committee who, it presumed, did not hold extreme views either for or against social legislation.139 Some of the committee’s members grilled women witnesses in particular about their attitude toward religion and toward religious and parental authority over women in particular. The cross-examination of Salima Faiz Tyabji, a Muslim activist from Bombay, is indicative in this regard: Q. If the Maulvis [Muslim learned men] of your community give a fatwa to the effect that fixing an age for marriage or an age for consummation is against the Muslim law what would you say? A. I would ask the lawyers. Q. If they do [issue such a ruling] would you submit to the fatwa or rebel? A. I would better wait for the position to arise.140

Tyabji diplomatically avoided stating her position on the disobedience of religious laws, but her interrogation reveals the anxieties produced by the constitution of women as a potentially independent constituency for the Sarda Bill. The aiwc deputation was more blunt in affirming their demands ‘‘even if pundits and maulvis object.’’ Pressed on whether they intended to discard their religions completely, the women were more diplomatic: ‘‘We do not discard religion’’ was their reply. ‘‘We do not think it is religion at all.’’ 141 L. Krishnabai, the secretary of the League of Youth in Madras, who had taken a vow not to marry before she was twenty-five, was less circumspect. The shastras, she argued, ‘‘were made to suit our convenience’’ and ‘‘from time to time should change as laws change and must change.’’ When asked if she considered the convenience of the moment as sufficient reason to discard injunctions that had a long history in the shastras, she boldly answered in the affirmative. On the question of remarriage for women, she argued that parity demanded that women should remarry as many times as men even if religious texts did not sanction such practices.142 Likewise, Rukmini Lakshmi Pathi from Madras responded to her interlocutor that she thought it perfectly appropriate and wise for women to select their own hus-

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figure 5. ‘‘A Bit Too Late,’’ cartoon by Shankar, Hindustan Times, June 26, 1935, 9. © HT Media Limited. Courtesy of Hindustan Times, New Delhi, India. The cartoon, made on the occasion of a conclave of Sanatanist or orthodox Hindus, portrays them bemoaning the flight of women that was instigated supposedly by the recent passage of the Sarda Act.

bands.143 ‘‘Women,’’ as Mrs. S. K. P. Sinha of Patna informed the committee, ‘‘have now begun to express themselves.’’ 144 The claims on behalf of women’s own ‘‘feelings,’’ which several women witnesses claimed to bring before the committee, provided a new rationale for the bill. Women, suddenly self-fashioning, were no longer a stable foundation for fixing community identities. The mobilization of gender as a form of public identity, then, represented not only a challenge to religious authority but also a crack in the collective identities of communities as they had been constituted in colonial India. The evidence of women witnesses before the Age of Consent Committee testifies to this altered conception of women’s relationship to the community. The majority of women before the committee favored the need for social legislation against child marriage, with only a small minority opposing such legislation. Differing from both these positions, however, was the somewhat exceptional stand taken by Onilla Chatterjee, the honorary secretary of the Delhi Women’s League. She broke with the majority opinion of her organization to express her personal skepticism about the efficacy of legislation in the question of early marriages. In her evidence before the committee, Chatterjee invoked her seventeen years of ex-

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perience with child welfare work mainly among the poor, among whom the rates of child marriage were the highest. She insisted that education for the poor was of more use than the passage of any legislation, and that the causes for early marriage and premature maternity were mainly economic and needed to be treated as such.145 Chatterjee recognized the limited efficacy of a law that did not acknowledge in its approach to child marriage the role of economic causes and of class differences. Hers was an exceptional view among a majority of women witnesses whose responses confronted the equally thorny issue of extricating individual rights for women from the collective rights of the community. Mrs. T. S. Macpherson of the Bihar and Orissa Council of Women articulated a differently exceptional view before the commission: she championed the view of the rights of the community over the rights of women in her opposition to government interference in child marriage. She spoke admittedly only on behalf of a subcommittee of four European women of the council who expressed a preference for an ‘‘educational’’ instead of a ‘‘legislative’’ program against child marriage. Their opposition to a bill against child marriage stemmed from the view that the colonial state should not be dragged into legislating on marriage practices, which was the internal affair of a community.146 The preference for internal change in this case, of course, had the added advantage of taking the political heat off the colonial government. The majority of women who appeared before the committee favored the legislation and implicitly, if not explicitly, challenged the community as the sole arbiter for marriage practices. They typically made the case for legislation on the grounds that the majority of women in India, who presumably lacked the courage to stand up for their own interests against those of their community, needed legal help. With the help of the law, as one woman argued, orthodox women ‘‘would not then be troubled by their caste panchayats [councils] of which they are so much afraid.’’ 147 Malati Patwardhan similarly argued that orthodox women themselves most needed such a law because ‘‘they are so bound by their religion, superstitions, and what the neighbors would say that they have not the courage to carry out their convictions.’’ 148 The law, it was argued, would strengthen the hands of orthodox women who feared challenging religion, custom, and the common sense of their community. Whether these witnesses accurately represented the views of all women is of less immediate interest here. They argued on the basis of ‘‘women’’ as a political identity whose separate gender concerns could be transparently represented, to be sure, by organized women themselves. This putatively universal construction of women as a group provided the rhetorical

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ground for disaggregating women from the collective rights of the community, whether defined by caste, religion, or neighborhood, for a new language of individual rights. The Muslim response to the bill, which did not have to worry about religious arguments in favor of child marriage, provides a rare glimpse into the space created for an independent identity of women in relation to the collective identity of communities. The Muslim leader Maulana Muhammad Ali, who identified with the socially conservative positions of the Jamiyat-ul-Ulama of Deoband, headed a deputation to the viceroy on November 9, 1929, to ask that Muslims be excluded from the provisions of the Sarda Act.149 He defended his position from the perspective of the law’s impact on the collective identity of the Muslim community in India. The law on marriage, he argued, would go against the personal law of Muslims, ‘‘which alone was repeatedly guaranteed to be applied to them by British law-courts.’’ 150 Since the Shariat, or Islamic law, unlike the Hindu shastras, did not condone child marriage, he argued, the humanitarian basis for interfering in the personal law of the Muslims was unnecessary and gratuitous. Unlike many of the Muslim supporters of the measure, he saw the act as contrary to Islamic law. He thus challenged the understanding of Islamic law among the Muslim members of the Age of Consent Committee and others who argued that the Sarda Bill did not interfere with Muslim personal laws. These ‘‘sons and daughters of freedom, who pick up with avidity every Western fashion, generally when it is about to be discarded by the West itself,’’ he claimed, ‘‘would rob the Muslim of the perfect freedom that Islam gives to its followers.’’ Muslim women, like the Dowager Begum of Bhopal, who had presided over the Delhi conference of the aiwc, were especially targeted for going against the religious personal law of the community.151 The counterpetition to the viceroy entitled ‘‘Muslim Ladies Defend the Sarda Act’’ provided an alternative to Muhammad Ali’s interpretation of the collective identity of Muslims as a community.152 The petitioners, claiming to represent the ‘‘girls and women’’ of the community who directly experienced the effects of child marriage, argued differently: ‘‘This Act affects girls and women far more than it affects men,’’ read the petition, ‘‘and we deny their right to speak on our behalf.’’ The challenge, as framed by the Muslim women in this case, was directed not at the personal law of Muslims but at the double standards that often governed its operation for men and women. The ‘‘petitioners who now cry out in defense of Shariat laws,’’ the women pointed out, ‘‘have had no scruples in changing Shariat law when it suits their own end.’’ When Shariat laws of inheritance or of divorce

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fell into disuse, or when the law of Shariat on theft and murder was changed, they argued, no Muslim voices emerged against these changes. The assertion of women as a public identity was nowable to trump the dominant conception of the identity of the community by default as male. ‘‘We speak on behalf of ourselves,’’ the petitioners argued, and urged the government ‘‘not to pay any attention to people who have no right to speak on our behalf.’’ The petition from the Muslim members of the aiwc starkly confronted the cultural rights of communities with a complementary construction of the individual rights of women in the community. This was as yet crucially not, as in the ambiguous political aftermath of the Mayo controversy, framed as a choice between the rights of women versus the rights of minority groups. The hard-won achievement of disaggregating rights for women from a homogeneous construction of the community testifies to a different political moment in the construction of women’s collective agency in late colonial India. The aiwc continued to support the Sarda Act in the face of amending bills proposed for excluding Brahmins and Muslims from the provisions of the act. This came to a head at the fifth annual conference of the aiwc at Lahore in 1931, where the organization’s position ran afoul of the views of community spokesmen who objected to the act. Some local constituent conferences of the aiwc had already under pressure dropped resolutions supporting the Sarda Act to avoid political dissension. The local conservative Muslim press in Lahore pressured Muslim members of the conference to oppose the general aiwc resolution. Taking note of the ‘‘misunderstanding in the Muslim press at Lahore,’’ an editorial in Stri Dharma addressed the dilemma it posed for the recognition of women as subjects in their own right.153 The writer advised the aiwc ‘‘that it would do well to use the influence of all its members and helpers in creating a strong public opinion against child marriage itself, instead of laying emphasis on the law that has already been passed.’’ She also assured Muslim opponents that she appreciated the fact that their view was based not on a defense of child marriage but on a ‘‘conscientious objection’’ to the ‘‘interference of legislation with anything on which you have pre-existing rules of conduct in your religion.’’ At the same time, she insisted, they were ‘‘not justified’’ in criticizing ‘‘the decision of a society which represents many classes and creeds besides your own, if its majority express their views in favour of the new law.’’ Nor, as the editorial went on to add, should it be supposed that a resolution supporting the act at the aiwc ‘‘necessarily compromises the position of such Muslim members of the conference as may share the conscientious objections of their community.’’ 154 The language of rights for women in the debates on the

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Sarda Act was still willing to negotiate with the collective rights of other political identities. The opportunity to assert a certain autonomy for women in relation to the community, rather than a naive liberal faith in the efficacy of the law motivated the support of women’s organizations in India for the Sarda Bill. The years leading up to the passage of the Sarda Bill had seen a vigorous debate within women’s organizations on the respective merits of the law as opposed to ‘‘internal’’ persuasion as the appropriate agency for social change. The Delhi Women’s League, under Rameshwari Nehru, held a series of public debates on the subject in 1928 in preparation for the forthcoming aiwc conference. Prominent local activists like Begum Muhammadoli, Begum Sarubland Jung, Dhanvanthi Rama Rao, Alice Pennell, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay attended one such debate on January 26, 1928. Rameshwari Nehru, speaking in Hindi, made the case for social legislation, and a Miss Bose presented the opposing case for the reform of society from within. Nehru’s case for social legislation revealed the broader preoccupation with constructing a separate language of rights for women. Nehru pointed to the limits of persuasion and education for marriage reform by drawing on the examples of Bengal and Madras, where the figures on child marriage did not match the high levels of education. ‘‘Can you debate educated men on the evils of child marriage?’’ Nehru asked. ‘‘They will outstrip you in debate in pointing out the evils of child marriage and then go get their daughters married at an early age.’’ Nehru acknowledged that propaganda and education, while important for eradicating social ills, would produce at best a very gradual process of social change. Hence ‘‘to expedite social reform, society must make use of whatever power it can—Egypt, Turkey, England all make use of laws.’’ 155 Yet at another meeting, Nehru’s position on legislation appeared in more modified light. Propaganda, she conceded, successfully addressed certain social practices such as purdah (the custom of veiling and secluding women). However, she maintained that only laws could successfully change practices related to marriage or to the body because typically these practices were also enforced on the strength of laws.156 Nehru’s willingness to acknowledge some exceptions in the argument for social legislation was as revealing as her support for social legislation in the case of the Sarda Bill. Nehru’s exception in the case of purdah reflected a strategic compromise on an issue of particular sensitivity for Muslim women. The Anjuman-i-Khavatin Islam (All-India Muslim Women’s Conference), since its inauguration in 1914, had spoken out against the marriage of Muslim girls below the age of sixteen.

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The conference, largely defunct by the late 1920s, had established a precedent for Muslim women’s criticism of child marriage that the aiwc continued. The Anjuman’s criticism of purdah, however, was more moderate, confined mainly to the extreme form of purdah followed by many Indian Muslims.157 When the aiwc first entertained a resolution at Poona on purdah, it looked to the example of Turkey, where legislation attempted to abolish purdah. Many of the Muslim women present objected on the grounds that hasty resolutions on the question of purdah hampered efforts to promote education for Muslim girls and women.158 The aiwc dropped its resolution on purdah at Poona in deference to the views of many of its Muslim members, though it pursued the resolution later at Delhi in modified form with the input of Muslim members. The social section of the aiwc continued to maintain a distinction between those reforms that were best addressed through social legislation and those that required changing social attitudes. This example demonstrated that the new salience of individual rights for women, and not the emphasis on social legislation per se, defined the support of women’s organizations for the Sarda Act. The construction of women as a rights-bearing constituency was registered in the broader platform of women’s reforms associated with the Sarda Bill campaign. These included demands for changes in the laws of inheritance, divorce, and other unequal laws for women. The rhetorical contribution of the Sarda Bill gave impetus to these other reforms for women. For example, Stri Dharma now revived the demand first made in its pages in 1921 for changing the laws of inheritance as they affected women. Kamalabai Lakshman Rao’s ‘‘The Law of Inheritance and Indian Women’’ picked up where some of the women’s organizations in Madras had left off in the early 1920s, and now argued that changes in the law of inheritance deserved an equally prominent place on the national agenda of the women’s movement.159 While a variety of religious laws and customs thus came under scrutiny, the Hindu religious codes, which were recognized as the most unfavorable to women, drew the most attention. These laws, as many argued, were themselves modern interpolations and hence amenable to further change. K. L. Rau wrote in Stri Dharma: ‘‘Hindu laws have their origin not in old books’’ but have been filtered ‘‘through the archive of famous English institutions and through the writings of English writers.’’ 160 For the first time, the call for an extensive revaluation of all laws as they affected women achieved a place in the public platform of women’s organizations. This agenda included both reform of Hindu personal laws and the need to enforce those aspects of Muslim personal laws that were frequently more favorable to women than the customary laws that had substituted them.161

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Rameshwari Nehru, in her speech at a women’s meeting in support of the Sarda Bill, articulated this expanded agenda of the women’s movement: We propose that our non-official members in the legislature form such a Committee that can look into the question of laws.We cannot depend much on men to help us through this change as in other changes. Because even though men and women suffer equally under unequal laws the real harm is to women and the people who benefit are the men. Hence we must remember that in this struggle we will have to muster all our strength and in one united voice to demand those rights proposed in these resolutions. If these demands are not met in two to two and a half years then we should make such a struggle that at the next elections this becomes a live election issue—we should refuse our vote to anyone who does not promise to return to the legislature and try to pass legislations to that effect. We have the weapon of the vote—we must learn to use this to our purposes. The laws by which we are being ruled were made thousands of years ago. They may have been relevant then but today they are irrelevant and bad.162

To be sure, the agenda for an exhaustive reframing of the ‘‘private’’ and ‘‘domestic’’ domain of the community through the agency of modern secular law reflected a bias in favor of a middle-class reform agenda. Even so, the universalizing ambition in making women into a political constituency on the basis of their gender worked in more complex ways. It required the incorporation of the poor and of the working-class woman—even the female sex worker—to mobilize a construction of women as both the agents and the objects of reform. Middle-class women’s organizations had recognized this at least since the 1920s: the construction of a distinctive ‘‘women’s view’’ on social reforms could hardly afford to ignore the majority who were poor and working-class women.163 Mrs. S. Srinivasa Aiyangar, on December 28, 1920, urged fellow activists at the Indian Women’s Conference in Madras to recast the entire debate on social reform from a specifically women’s ‘‘point of view.’’ This conference that helped to construct a distinctive women’s approach to social reform was not unmindful of the majority of India’s poor and working women. Dhanvanthi Rama Rao’s paper ‘‘The Wages of Working Women’’ spoke especially to their concerns.The conference, apart from the more typical concerns of middle-class women, passed a resolution that the payment of wages be based on work and not on a person’s sex; the delegates unanimously supported equality for wage-earning women who, in India, were overwhelmingly poor women. These trends culminated on December 29, 1927, in the first-ever ‘‘Charter of Womanhood’s Vision of a Reformed India’’ issued at the ‘‘Woman’s Day,’’ organized by the wia, at Madras. Over three thousand women attended the Woman’s

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Day, which coincided with the annual conferences of the Indian National Congress, the National Social Conference, and the Theosophical Society in Madras. The event’s organizers emphasized its autonomous nature as an event organized by women and for women.164 The members drew up the unprecedented ‘‘Charter of Womanhood’s Vision of a Reformed India,’’ calling unequivocally for such things as equal pay for equal work, maternity benefits for factory women, ‘‘equal standards of morality,’’ equal rights of legal separation, and equal divorce laws for men and women.165 This list of demands surely exceeds a narrowly defined middle-class agenda. The unanimous approval of the demands of the charter at the Woman’s Day was still largely rhetorical. Moreover, as the organizers themselves complained, the national media largely ignored the demands of the charter, producing little in the way of debate. Then again only selected items on the list actually entered into the active program of the women’s movement itself and even then, not until a decade later.166 Notwithstanding its limited efficacy, however, the charter testified to the impact of the constituency building of women: a process that still made possible the recognition of the need to transcend the narrowly defined agenda of urban and middle-class women. The test of the resulting political formation of women as themselves rightsbearing subjects was evident in the willingness of women to confront even reformist visions of a modernized and updated national community. The public controversy that followed the call for equal divorce laws for women offers such an example. At the 1928 Madras Constituent Conference of the aiwc, it reiterated the resolution adopted in 1927 in the women’s charter for equal divorce laws. However, this time the resolution provoked a controversy in the Madras press about the nature and direction of the Indian women’s movement. Even though the Madras Women’s Constituent Conference once again approved the resolution as proposed by Malati Patwardhan, the organizing secretary for the Woman’s Day in 1927, some of the women present contested the vote. Radhabai Subbarayon initiated the controversy over the resolution in the press by accusing radical younger women of hijacking the women’s movement in ways that damaged its credibility with the wider public. Opponents of the resolution on divorce, though only Hindu personal laws did not permit divorce, accused its supporters of blindly imitating ‘‘faddish’’ Western ways.167 Despite extensive criticism in the Madras press, however, Patwardhan and other supporters of the resolution publicly defended their position in favor of equal divorce laws that provided legal recourse to abandoned and estranged wives. Sumati Bai’s ‘‘Why Divorce?’’ published in Periyar’s newspaper Revolt, argued that a law was a better remedy for this ques-

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tion: ‘‘Unless law entitles women to the right of divorce,’’ she argued, ‘‘even legal penalties cannot be a restraint to those domestic tyrants who are only too sure of there being neither a witness nor a prosecutor to proceed against them.’’ 168 The defense of divorce laws reflected few illusions about the collective sentiments of the family or the community. Even Gandhi’s attempt to offer an alternative remedy for estranged and abandoned wives, published in Young India (Ahmedabad), did not settle matters. Gandhi recommended that a woman whose husband had abandoned her did not need the protection of the law and could choose to lead a life of sexual purity apart from her husband. To this, Stri Dharma published a caustic response: ‘‘Gandhi’s Counsel of Perfection,’’ the author claimed, ignores the ‘‘sex aspect’’ in the situation and adopts a ‘‘typically Mahatma attitude regarding it.’’ 169 ‘‘There still remains the question,’’ the writer continued, ‘‘of the satisfaction of the sexual appetite on the part of young women thus leaving the inhospitable roofs of their husbands or being actually deserted by them when the relief given by divorce is unobtainable.’’ While the article faulted mainly the ‘‘asceticism’’ of Gandhi’s views on divorce, it also provided an implicit critique of the folding of the women’s question into the ‘‘inner’’ domain of the community as subject only to internal self-regulation by the community. ‘‘Too much of asceticism has been the besetting sin of Hinduism,’’ she asserted, ‘‘and it is unfortunate indeed that India’s greatest teacher today should only accentuate that trait.’’ Extending beyond the limits of Hinduism alone, moreover, the article concluded with a strong rejection of Gandhi’s alternative of ‘‘asceticism’’: the ‘‘denial of sex,’’ it claimed, ‘‘is the chief element of all ascetic philosophies, and it is this element that vitiates Gandhiji’s ideas of education, of marital problems, of social reform, and of individual perfection.’’ 170 These vibrant debates were the testing ground for reframing women’s relationship within the community with a vocabulary of individual rights. No wonder, then, that women’s novel claims as a political constituency remained hotly contested throughout the debate over the Sarda Bill as the thin end of the wedge that would destroy the colonial foundations of communities in India.171 The public, and often dramatic, antics of women supporters of the bill drew especially harsh criticism. Even Sorabji, who had gone along with the support of organized women for Sarda’s bill, commented disapprovingly on the behavior of two young Bengali women who had rudely disrupted a meeting of orthodox Hindus against the bill in Calcutta. They stood on top of tables and shouted down the speakers.172 The members of the Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society) of the Punjab who assembled daily to picket the final delib-

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erations of the Sarda Bill in the Simla Assembly seemed to intimidate opponents. They carried placards and shouted slogans to shame their opponents: ‘‘Prepuberty Marriage Is a Heinous Crime / Seek Legislation to Punish It’’; ‘‘To Amend the Sarda Bill Is Worse than Killing It’’; ‘‘If You Oppose Sarda’s Bill, the World Will Laugh at You’’; and, with some exaggeration, ‘‘ ‘Support It,’ Says Indian Womanhood / How Many Women Have Opposed It? / None.’’ 173 Some legislators even complained of harassment at having to pass through the gauntlet of the women picketers to the Assembly. Some three hundred women from the aiwc, as Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz vividly recalled, filled the visitors’ gallery of the Assembly to maintain pressure during the final debates of the bill. When, despite considerable orthodox Hindu and Muslim opposition, the Central Legislative Assembly passed the Sarda Bill, it vindicated the formation of a specifically women’s public opinion. Opponents of the bill, of course, vigorously contested the assertion that activist women and women’s organizations represented women’s collective voice on the bill. They responded with counterevidence to the visible public participation of organized women in the debates. Orthodox Hindu women had held at least one protest meeting against the bill at Kumbakonam in Madras, and two women had joined the orthodox Hindu deputation to the viceroy in opposing the measure.174 The Times of India (Bombay), which like several other organs of the European press was no friend of the Sarda Bill, challenged the Age of Consent Committee’s conclusion that women favored the bill. In dismissing the views of women who had given evidence before the commission, it wrote that the public was ‘‘desirous of discovering the views of the genuine Indian woman.’’ 175 The assumption, of course, was that ‘‘genuine Indian women’’ did not express an independent opinion. Hence, as critics of the Sarda Bill complained, the very nature of a public debate was disadvantageous to most women: it grossly inflated the contribution of a handful of activist women at the cost of the far more numerous orthodox women who did not take to the streets for a cause. They offered an alternative model of the public opinion of women: the voluntary submission of the majority of women to the collective interests of their community. This in itself was an implicit concession to the construction of women as a ‘‘consenting’’ constituency in the public debates on the Sarda Act. Opponents of the bill found themselves on the defensive regarding women’s relation to the bill. The women’s movement, as critics complained, represented only 1 percent of the female population. Its reliance on the state for social legislation against child marriage, they argued, was symptomatic of the limited reach

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of the women’s movement. Organized women, not surprisingly, justified their dependence on social legislation somewhat differently: ‘‘If only 1% of the women population could arouse the country to the magnitude of the social evil that retards the progress of our society,’’ Reddi retorted to the critics of the movement, ‘‘I may assure our conservative brethren that further progress of women’s education would surely result in the complete eradication of the social evils without the help of any social legislation.’’ 176 The assertion of a collective voice of women in the debates on the Sarda Bill, as the exchange between Reddi and the critics of the women’s movement illustrated, had little to do with the actual size of the women’s movement; it had to do, instead, with the rhetorical invention of women as a political category whose interests could be represented politically by a handful of their more fortunate sisters. ‘‘Women,’’ indeed, had been actively constructed as a new political constituency that temporarily challenged the colonial constitution of community identities in the dominant colonial sociology of India. The particular convergence of social forces in the controversy over Mother India had produced a precarious validation for a revised understanding of the relationship between women, community, and the state in the name of universal individual rights. This was the rhetorical context in which separate personal laws governing marriage for different religious communities gave way, at least temporarily, for the passage of the first uniform law directly regulating marriage for all communities. Looking back on the political achievement of this moment, Amrit Kaur of the aiwc best summed it up: ‘‘The passing of this Act,’’ she wrote, ‘‘was a fluke.’’ 177 The conditions that had enabled the Sarda Act could not be sustained for long. The Sarda Act, indeed, survived only precariously. In its immediate aftermath, the colonial government seriously considered various proposals for repealing the act or at least exempting Muslims from its application. Only the fear of political embarrassment in India, and the international scrutiny of the League of Nations, prevented any overt reversal of colonial policy on the Sarda Act.178 Gandhi introduced a further cautionary note to women who called for the act’s vigorous enforcement.Writing to Amrit Kaur in 1935, he warned against the disproportionate penalizing of ‘‘harijans’’ (children of God: Gandhi’s name for the untouchables of India) in the enforcement of the act.179 A committee in London under Rathbone eventually drafted an amending bill, which most women’s groups in India felt still did not go far enough in strengthening the act’s provisions; but it passed in 1938.180 The Sarda Act received official support only after independence; the new government, for example, passed several amendments in the decades after inde-

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pendence for raising the age of marriage in the original act. However, the context for the act itself had been transformed as it became primarily an instrument of the state for population control.181 More importantly, the rhetorical force that gave the Sarda Act its novel import—the applicability of the act across religious communities—was already considerably damaged by the 1940s.182 For example, women’s organizations had settled for reforms in Hindu personal laws instead of the more comprehensive agenda of a reevaluation from the point of view of women of all laws. The subsequent fortunes of the Sarda Act mirror the contradictory conditions for women’s collective agency once the controversy over Mother India was over and a revised nationalist understanding was firmly put in place. The political formation of women as a self-conscious constituency would now be represented as ‘‘natural,’’ and the language of universal individual rights would be pitted against the rights of minority groups. The social would once again be dislocated from the political, which would become identified exclusively with the concerns of nation building, producing ambiguous consequences both for the rights of women and for the rights of minorities. Hence an important moment of discontinuity: the Mayo controversy, as its ripples were cycled and amplified throughout the imperial system, produced a rupture. Indian nationalism, having found a means to delegitimate the British Raj, laid claim to the high ground of modernization through an alliance with the associational politics of Indian women. Yet the opening created in the making of women’s collective agency was also closed in the ambiguous political aftermath of the Mayo controversy.

5

Ambiguous Aftermath Political Consolidation on the Eve of the Second World War

When the Simon Commission, appointed at the height of the controversy over Mother India, issued its report in 1930, that report foreshadowed the Pyrrhic nature of the Indian women’s movement’s victory. The report on the proposed constitutional reforms for India registered the impact of the spectacular public emergence of women during the Mayo controversy: ‘‘The women’s movement in India,’’ the report concluded famously, ‘‘holds the key to progress.’’ 1 Henceforth, in a dramatic about-face from 1919, imperial proposals for any future constitutional framework for India would acknowledge a place for Indian women. The Government of India Act of 1935, which failed to satisfy any major political party in India, expanded women’s franchise through preferential or special franchise qualifications; it also reserved seats for women in the legislatures that were divided between the different communities, the voting for which was also to be through separate communal electorates (single-community electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and so on). The terms for women’s political recognition in the reform constitution had presented activist women with a wrenching dilemma, the outcome of which was a paradoxical retreat for the constitution of women as paradigmatic citizen-subjects in the Mayo controversy. Hence a historical turn that need not have been: a political consolidation that effectively shut down the opening during the Mayo controversy for women’s collective agency. The post–Mother India suffrage debate revealed a strategic and organizational rift in the Indian women’s movement over the terms on which women’s franchise and political representation should be expanded. The impossible choices of this debate were only superficially rooted in the classical liberal paradox of feminism: that is, the simultaneous denial and assertion of sexual difference in women’s claims of equality with, and difference from, men.2 To be sure, the opposing factions in India articulated their arguments in the familiar perspectives of ‘‘equal rights’’ and ‘‘women’s uplift.’’ 3 The official position of the Indian women’s movement, for example, was expressed in popular slogans such as ‘‘equality and

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no privilege’’ and ‘‘a fair field and no favor.’’ 4 It rejected special franchise qualifications and reserved seats for women in favor of universal adult suffrage. By the same token, the dissenting position that favored preferential franchise and reserved seats for women was justified in the parallel terms of the need for a distinctly women’s point of view in the political sphere. On the surface, at least, the Indian debate overlapped with the division between ‘‘equality’’ and ‘‘difference’’ feminists in Britain who, in turn, forged alliances with the respective sides in India. However, this was not the central issue at play in the Indian debate. The trajectory of the Indian debate reveals a different set of contradictions. Initially, all the sides in the Indian debate were united on a crucial principle: the recognition of women as a unified and cross-communal political bloc in the reform constitution. In the absence of a satisfactory political settlement on communal or proportional representation (representation for communities on the basis of their proportion in the population), however, the precise terms for women’s representation became fraught. The majority position within women’s organizations favored a joint electorate: an electorate constituted territorially combining men and women of all communities.This put it in conflict potentially with the demands for separate consideration by religious minorities and by depressed classes in India. Soon a section of disaffected Muslim women activists broke from the majority position of women’s organizations to support reserved seats and separate electorates for women on a communal basis. They sided with the major Muslim political parties who favored a composite rather than a unitary constitution of the revised national polity. The insistence under these circumstances on the representation of women as a unified political bloc became identified with Hindus, as the majority community, and with dominant upper castes who had the most to gain from a unitary conception of the new national polity.5 These competing conceptions of the nature of the revised polity asserted their priority with negative consequences for the nature of women’s citizenship. Our story thus ends with the containment of women’s political agency— but for reasons that are only poorly understood. Just as the crisis in the colonial sociology of India had created the conditions for a new construction of women as ideal citizens, so also the particular context of the political wrangling over a reform constitution for colonial India forced open its contradictory foundations. The mobilization of women during the Mayo controversy had disclosed a collective consciousness constructed around an alternative political identity for women: that is, an identity constituted apart from women’s symbolic identification as the ‘‘inside’’ of discrete community identities. The central tension of this

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political formation, therefore, was between women qua women versus women insofar as they belonged to, and ‘‘symbolized,’’ competing communities. Here lay the central paradox of the post–Mother India suffrage debate: the simultaneous disavowal and constitution of communal identities in negotiating rights for women vis-à-vis the collective rights of communities. Women’s collective agency became implicated in an ambiguous political consolidation that provided crucial ideological cover for a reconstituted Hindu, upper-caste, and male polity. In part because the significance of this moment has been so misunderstood, a widely prevailing assumption has dominated the historiography of colonial India: the truism that the contribution of women’s collective politics was, at best, marginal to the important political changes of the early twentieth century. Both the controversy over Mother India and its aftermath reveal a more politically charged legacy of women’s collective agency: its paradoxical role in the transformation and reconstitution of Indian nationalism for a revised politics of the nation-state and of the citizen-subject that ultimately contained the nature of the challenge once posed by the collective politics of women. This outcome, moreover, was far more contingent, far more tied to the exigencies of that moment, than is generally recognized. The fragile political formation of women as subjects in their own right was created against the identification of women as symbols of discrete communal identities. The antinomies that charged the post–Mother India suffrage debate produced a familiar result for very unfamiliar reasons: women’s solidarity yielded political and ideological ground to the claims of other collective solidarities. The contingencies that had prioritized the agency of Indian women during the Mayo controversy began to shift as political parties negotiated the task of forging a viable new national polity. Competing visions of this nascent polity squeezed out the rhetorical space that the associational politics of women had gained a decade before, redividing the social from the political, and impaling Indian feminism on the horns of a dilemma. The particular antinomies stemming from the post–Mother India suffrage debate did not lie in a generalized liberal paradox of women’s equality with, and difference from, men. Rather, and more importantly, they lay in the specific paradox of Indian feminism’s foundation in an agonistic liberal universalism. These antinomies explain the zigzags, backtracking, and ideological ‘‘conversions’’ that characterize the unfolding of this debate.

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the antinomies of an agonistic liberal universalism The first suffrage campaign of women in India, which was launched in anticipation of the Government of India Act of 1919, had identified the political demands of women’s organizations with an agonistic liberal universalism. To be sure, Indian women articulated the case for women in the political sphere largely within the familiar framework of ‘‘social feminism’’: that is, political and civil rights for women were typically justified on the grounds of promoting social reforms for women and children.6 Yet the demand for civil rights for women also carried a specifically political burden in India: the implications of a crosscommunal solidarity of women for communal or sectarian political divisions. When Sarojini Naidu made her case for the women’s vote before the British Parliament in 1919, for example, she presented the ‘‘solidarity of women’’ as the best guarantee for Hindu-Muslim unity in India.7 Herein lay the agonistic framing of the mobilization of women as paradigmatic citizen-subjects in India: both the articulation of the social with the political and the exemplary political lesson of the cross-communal solidarity of women. The dynamics of this double burden continued to animate the postsuffrage activism of women’s organizations in India. The wia, which was at the forefront of the battle for the political rights of women, lobbied the government to secure a place for women in various legislative and political bodies. The wia made repeated requests for the nomination of women to promote the cause of social reforms. In 1926 it managed to secure the nomination of one of its most prominent social workers, Muthulakshmi Reddi, to the Madras Legislative Council. The ‘‘presence of a lady doctor, of her position, in the Council,’’ as Stri Dharma declared on the occasion of Reddi’s nomination, ‘‘would help the cause of women and children in their education and physical welfare.’’ 8 Reddi’s nomination to the council, however, was also meant as a political lesson on the implications of the cross-communal solidarity of women. For example, upon her selection as deputy speaker of the council, Reddi elaborated as follows on the process of her nomination: ‘‘When our women associations sent up their representatives to request His Excellency to nominate a few women in the Council,’’ she explained, ‘‘you might have noted that we women did not ask for seats to the Brahmin lady, one to the non-Brahmin, one to a Christian and one to a Muslim etc. etc.’’ The principle on which the nomination of women rested, she argued, was different: ‘‘Our associations simply sent up a list of all the available, and capable candidates, to

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be judged by their individual merit, their capacity for public work, and entirely left the choice to the authorities to nominate whoever they liked.’’ 9 The assertion of the putative unity of women, no less than the special responsibility of women for reforming the social sphere, motivated the political campaigns of women’s organizations. An agonistic liberal universalism, a challenge both to social convention and to political sectarianism, had peaked with the unique contribution of women’s collective agency to the nationalist refashioning of the Sarda Act. The campaign for the Sarda Act served both to realign the relationship between the political and the social and to validate a novel language of universal individual rights. This fragile political achievement was severely put to the test in the aftermath of the Mayo controversy. The conditions of the postcontroversy period are worth recalling. The old colonial economic ties already made vulnerable after the First World War were dealt a decisive blow with the impact of the Great Depression.10 Furthermore, by the end of the decade, the anticolonial challenge had been revitalized on a number of fronts. In the years after the Mayo controversy, colonial India underwent a major structural readjustment and realignment of political and economic arrangements. The second suffrage campaign of women in the 1930s occurred against the background of this shake-up in the foundations of British colonialism in India. The process of formulating a reform constitution for colonial India dragged on for five long years, during which it was buffeted by various ups and downs: the conservative drift in British politics under a coalition National Government (1931); the backlash from British business interests who were anxious to restore and renew their hold in India; the obstructionism of the ultra-Tory opposition in Parliament; and the repeated inability of the different political groups in India to arrive at a satisfactory solution between them. The actual process consisted of three Round Table Conferences in London; several roving committees in India to go over details such as finance and franchise; Consultative Committees of the Conference working in India; a Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament that consulted with delegates from India to frame a draft bill; and a monthlong discussion in Parliament before the controversial Government of India Act was passed in August 1935.11 By the end of the process, the political representation of women was thoroughly enmeshed in the struggle over the nature of the revised polity to emerge out of the inter-war upheavals. This fraught political context put unbearable pressure on the dual claims of an agonistic liberal universalism. The origins of the second suffrage campaign of

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Indian women had been laid at the height of the Mayo controversy with the appointment of the Simon Commission. Mayo’s Mother India, with its revelations of the social condition of Indian women, had generated widespread interest in India and abroad in the extension of civil and political rights to Indian women. Organized women in both Britain and India were galvanized to stake the claims of women on the Simon Commission. British women argued for the inclusion of at least one British woman on the all-male commission on the grounds of Mother India’s revelations of the need for social reforms for Indian women. When British women failed to gain a seat on the commission, British women’s organizations issued a joint memorandum calling for the attachment of a British woman as ‘‘technical advisor’’ to the commission. The memorandum, issued under the auspices of Eleanor Rathbone of the nusec, argued that British women could keep the commission informed of the social condition of Indian women.12 The wia in India was likewise prompted to take note of the Simon Commission’s brief to promote social reforms, especially as they affected Indian women. The wia referred to Mayo’s notorious exploitation of the social condition of Indian women to press its political claims on the commission. Yet the wia, unlike the British women’s organizations, based its protest against the commission’s composition on three separate grounds: the exclusion of Indians; the exclusion of Indian women; and the exclusion of British women.13 The contrast between the wia’s carefully worded protest and that of British women’s organizations was an early preview of the subsequent hijacking of the terms of the Indian suffrage debate by British women’s organizations. The imperialist ‘‘absent-mindedness’’ in the joint memorandum of British women’s organizations was merely the tip of an iceberg of amnesia. The exclusive focus on British women in the joint memorandum did not go unchallenged by individual British and Indian women. Helena Normanton, the former British editor of the London-based paper of the Indian National Congress, took British women’s organizations to task for neglecting Indian women in their appeal to the commission. Normanton reminded the signatories of the joint memorandum that the British government contemplated the direct contact of the commission with the legislatures of the Indian provinces; the women members of the Indian legislatures, she argued, were ‘‘the proper women to voice the opinions of Indian womanhood.’’ 14 Several other individual British women also criticized the nusec memorandum for failing to clarify that ‘‘duly qualified women—Indian and English—be appointed to serve’’ on the commission.15 Isabella Ameer Ali, the wife of a prominent Muslim politician from India, wrote to the Times in response to

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the joint memorandum of British women’s organizations: ‘‘Indian women are not voiceless’’; those who had ‘‘received the franchise, and those among them who are able and willing to take advantage of it,’’ she insisted, ‘‘are aware of the needs of their own people.’’ 16 Behind the contrast between the inclusive terms of the wia’s protest and the exclusivity of the protest of British women’s organizations, however, were still more fundamental differences regarding the nature of the collectivity constituted by women. The nusec’s defense for ignoring Indian women in its memorandum reveals these differences. The nusec responded to complaints about the joint memorandum with a letter published in the Calcutta Statesman.17 The parliamentary secretary of the nusec defended the initiative of British women: it did not represent an imperialist interference, she argued, but a genuine desire to help their Indian sisters. Rathbone, as president of the nusec, provided what was the classic defense of the attitude behind the joint memorandum of British women’s organizations: as an ‘‘old suffragist,’’ she claimed, she could not be expected to ‘‘remember or bother about national distinctions.’’ 18 Rathbone falsely generalized from the experience of British women’s suffragist struggles to take for granted the primacy of sexual difference between men and women in the formation of a collective politics of women. The expanded terms of the wia protest, which self-consciously included both British and Indian women, reflected a different history for the formation of a collective politics of women in India. In India, as in the Mayo controversy, the consciousness of a gender identity (as women and for women) had to be formed precisely over and against the typical identification of women as symbols of discrete community identities. In other words, the formation of women as a collectivity in India could not be so easily naturalized. The wia could scarcely ignore either national or sectional distinctions in claiming universality for a woman-centered politics. Its appeal to the potential transcendence of these differences drew on a different experience: the cohesion of a political solidarity of women around a shared agenda. These differences in the understanding of the nature of women’s collective agency anticipated the contentious recasting of the post–Mother India suffrage campaign in India. British women’s experience came to exercise an undue influence on setting the terms of the suffrage debate in India. Rathbone, for example, helped shape the recommendations about women in the report of the Simon Commission, whose proposals set the basic parameters for the discussion of Indian women in the reform constitution. Working from behind the scenes, she persuaded Sir

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John Simon before his departure for India to take an interest in the condition of Indian women. She presented Simon with a detailed memorandum on Indian women that argued persuasively for the need for special franchise qualifications for women to increase the ratio of enfranchised women to men in India.This time she had learned her lesson; her memorandum even quoted from the published writings of prominent women in India, such as the Irish feminist Margaret E. Cousins, to support the case for various preferential provisions to increase Indian women’s political strength.19 To these Rathbone, drawing on the experience of British women, who had until recently been enfranchised along similar lines, included giving to the wives and widows of men with requisite property qualifications the vote in India. The philosophical basis for Rathbone’s proposals came from her own prior articulation of a controversial ‘‘New Feminism’’ in Britain. Its contours were formulated in response both to the dwindling popularity of the British women’s movement and to the antifeminist backlash of the postwar period in Britain. Rathbone’s ‘‘New Feminism’’ was a swerve away from an exclusive focus on ‘‘equality’’ toward a renewed emphasis on women’s ‘‘difference.’’ 20 To the adherents of an ‘‘old feminism’’ in Britain, however, Rathbone seemed to have become less of a feminist and more of a social reformer for whom ‘‘equality [was] a good but not an essential condition’’ for women.21 The domestic conflict between ‘‘equality’’ and ‘‘difference’’ feminists in Britain was echoed in the competing views that emerged both within and between British and Indian women’s organizations on the terms of Indian women’s suffrage. The real import of these debates, however, lay in the wedge they drove between the dual contexts in which Indian women were contending for political recognition. The concerns of imperialist feminists like Rathbone distorted the dynamics of the suffrage debate in India: it ignored the significance of the investment of Indian women’s suffrage in the combined domains of the social and the political. Rathbone’s emphasis on the potential benefits of the increased presence of women in politics was articulated predictably from the perspective of ‘‘women’s uplift.’’ Her interest in the political and civil rights of Indian women was sparked by the desire to redress the social disabilities of Indian women described in Mayo’s Mother India.22 Her exclusive concerns with a ‘‘social feminism,’’ which set the terms of the official proposals for Indian women, fatally upset the delicate balance of the agonistic liberal politics of Indian women’s suffrage. Sarojini Naidu’s presidential speech to the annual meeting of the aiwc in 1930 foreshadowed the charged stakes in the translation of the British suffrage experi-

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ence in colonial India. Before this ambitious gathering of organized women in Bombay, Naidu made her by now controversial declaration: ‘‘I am,’’ she stated bluntly, ‘‘not a feminist.’’ 23 Even though many prominent Indian contemporaries of Naidu’s did not share her repudiation of feminism, her particular interpretation of feminism deserves attention because it bears on the subsequent debate over the competing terms of women’s franchise and representation in India.24 Feminism, according to Naidu, had developed in response to the denial of political rights to women in relation to men in the West; as such, it necessitated a special pleading on behalf of the rights of women in the political sphere.25 Indian women had not been excluded similarly from political and civil rights. This, to be sure, was based on a highly selective interpretation of the history of feminism in the West, as well as on an overestimation of the relative ease with which Indian women had been enfranchised. Yet Naidu’s concern was not merely parochial: the assertion of national cultural difference. She went on in her speech to celebrate the women’s movement as the ‘‘greatest international gathering’’ and to embrace the ‘‘indivisible fellowship of women’’ as the privileged grounds for asserting the ‘‘common rights of humanity.’’ By the same token, therefore, she even declared herself a ‘‘bad nationalist.’’ The particular thrust of Naidu’s critique offers a useful corrective to a misleading assumption that has dominated much feminist scholarship: the idea that ‘‘Third World’’ feminism has always been caught up in the assertion of ‘‘cultural difference’’ rather than fought for the universal rights proposed by liberalism. The gist of Naidu’s speech was precisely that the political solidarity of women was an example of the universality of all humanity. For Naidu, the construction of the collective political agency of women provided a self-conscious alternative to the colonial constitution of sectional political identities in India. Hence the ambivalence of her stand toward a feminism that she identified with the assertion of a sectional identity for women in the political sphere. Hers was an alternative vision of ‘‘women’’ as constitutive of a universal political identity and, as such, as the exemplary citizens of a reconstituted political community in India. This intricate mobilization of the collectivity ‘‘women’’ fell apart in the altered dynamics of the post–Mother India suffrage debates. Just as Mayo’s Mother India had unexpectedly permitted Indian women activists to politicize the social, so new dynamics would again pull the social apart from the political and thus negate the possibility of women as exemplary Indian citizens. The implications of the changed dynamics of the suffrage question in the 1930s in India were not immediately apparent. To be sure, the Indian women’s move-

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ment had little input in the imperial proposals for Indian women’s suffrage. For example, the participation of Indian women’s organizations in the proceedings of the Simon Commission was minimal. The commission arrived to face a neartotal boycott of all the major political parties in India.The wia, for whom political and social reforms for women were interrelated, confronted a peculiar dilemma. Since it had long supported Dominion status for India, the wia joined the other political parties in boycotting the commission. The aiwc, whose second annual session Simon attended in Delhi, remained officially neutral toward the commission; its decision reflected the restricted mandate of the conference in 1928 that covered only the promotion of women’s education.26 The Simon Commission thus heard only from a handful of women in India in their individual capacities, as in the deputation of Indian women led by the Dowager Rani of Mandi. Yet the views of these Indian women accorded broadly not only with those of Simon and Rathbone, but also with that of the leading Indian women’s organizations.The application in India of an identical franchise for men and women, they complained, had resulted in a very small number of enfranchised women. Hence they made a case for preferential franchise qualifications that included votes for the wives and daughters of men with the requisite property qualifications and for women with a minimum educational qualification; they also called for reserved seats for women in the legislative and administrative bodies in India.27 Even those women who did not testify before the commission were in broad agreement with the fundamental line taken by the women’s deputation. For example, Cousins published an article in the Amrita Bazar Patrika and Maya Das in the Statesman to coincide with the commission; both supported some special provisions for women.28 Even though the commission did not hear officially from women’s organizations in India, therefore, the proposals under consideration for women’s suffrage were still within the ballpark of those who had given the question some thought in India. The terms of women’s franchise and representation had not as yet forced a wedge between the combined social and political investment of women’s suffrage in India. Indeed, the delayed hardening of rival positions within the Indian women’s movement is initial evidence that both the choices and their outcome in the suffrage debate were contingent: forged in the immediate political process of the constitutional reforms. When in 1929 the viceroy, even before the completion of the Simon Commission’s report, announced the holding of a Round Table Conference in London to draft a new constitution for India, it gave Indian women’s organizations a second opportunity to get involved in the constitution-making

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process. The wia, as the premier organization for the political rights of Indian women, immediately petitioned the viceroy to include women in the Indian delegation to the conference; it also urged friendly British women’s organizations, especially the British section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wil), to agitate for the appointment of at least two Indian women to the conference.29 The request of the wia was premised on the understanding that the new constitution would be drafted along the lines of Dominion status for India. The promise implicit in the announcement of the Round Table Conference, however, was subsequently reversed as a result of the conservative backlash in Britain that made any reference to Dominion status in relation to the Round Table Conference premature. The wia consequently decided to ‘‘sacrifice for its principles’’ and join the Congress in boycotting the limited scope of the conference.30 The wia may have lost the opportunity to have its members appointed to the Indian delegation to the Round Table Conference, but this did not prevent the wia from exercising some influence on the deliberations at the conference. Even the first Round Table Conference (November 1930–January 1931), despite the exclusion of the chosen representatives of Indian women’s organizations, did not as yet register the altered stakes surrounding the issue of Indian women’s suffrage. The imperial government, which was inundated with requests from British women’s organizations for the nomination of both British and Indian women to the conference, had eventually chosen Radhabai Subbarayon and Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz to join the Indian delegation.31 Their selection over the ‘‘out and out’’ rebels among Indian women, as the British loyalist Cornelia Sorabji hoped, left open the possibility that ‘‘perhaps the [two Indian women could] be inspired from behind the scenes’’ by Rathbone.32 Subbarayon, who was the wife of a leading Hindu magnate from Madras, and Shah Nawaz, who was from a prominent family of Muslim politicians in the Punjab, were both active in the all-India women’s organizations. During the conference, they worked closely both with British women’s organizations and with the London Committee of the wia, the latter protesting only the government’s lack of consultation with Indian women’s organizations.33 The wording of the joint memorandum submitted to the conference by Subbarayon and Shah Nawaz bore a striking resemblance to another memorandum prepared by Rathbone and signed by like-minded men and women in Britain.34 Both memorandums supported special qualifications for the franchise, including the ‘‘wifehood’’ qualification (enfranchising women on the basis of their husbands’ qualifications) that had prevailed in Britain from 1918 to 1925, and favored reserved seats for women. The shared ground of the two

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memorandums was the belief in an expanded representation of women as an ‘‘effective lever’’ for social reform in India. Competing arguments for women’s equality with men, or difference from them, had had little resonance until now in Indian women’s political campaigns. The wia, the only all-India organization with an established record on the demand for the political and civil rights of women, had always adopted a pragmatic approach to the question. The wia asserted the principle of sex equality in the political sphere but also championed special provisions for women. Hence the seeming anomaly of its position: the wia stood firmly for the principle of women’s political equality even as it campaigned for the nomination of women to legislative and administrative bodies in support of a distinct ‘‘women’s point of view’’ in politics. The belated hardening of competing positions on the terms of women’s suffrage and representation in India, then, had little to do with arguments about women’s ‘‘equality’’ or ‘‘difference’’: it had much more to do with the contingent consequences following from the new priorities of the post–Mother India suffrage debate. These new priorities, reflecting the agonistic origins of Indian liberalism, upset the previous balancing act of Indian women’s political demands. The delayed recognition by Indian women’s organizations of the altered dynamics of the suffrage question was also in part a result of the immediate crisis of large numbers of their members leaving to join Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement in 1930.35 The suspension of the civil disobedience movement in March 1931, and the renewed prospects of the participation of women’s organizations at the second Round Table Conference in London, freed the women’s movement in India to formulate its stand on the reform constitution. The stage was thus set on the eve of the second Round Table Conference (September–December 1931) for new battle lines to be drawn. The joint official position adopted by all three major Indian women’s organizations in early 1931 represented a dramatic reversal of the flexible stand previously common in activist circles in India: it rejected all earlier proposals for women’s suffrage and insisted only on universal adult suffrage and no reserved seats for women. The dual contexts of women’s suffrage demands in India—that of women as the model of the universal Indian citizen versus that of women as agents of social reform—now pulled in opposite directions. A 1928 report in the Women’s Leader and Common Cause, the nusec paper, put its finger unknowingly on the issues involved in the polarization that had emerged by 1931. When a group of Indian women submitted their demand to the Simon Commission ‘‘on behalf of the women of India’’ in 1928, they argued for separate sex-based electorates for

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women that drew their precedent from the separate communal electorates first provided for Muslims in the Government of India Act of 1909. At the time, this demand by Indian women provoked a condescending commentary from the organ of the nusec: ‘‘We do not find it easy to comment on this proposal,’’ it noted, but ‘‘would, on the whole, prefer to see women take a normal and unsheltered place in public life.’’ Yet the paper conceded that the precedent for separate electorates on religious grounds in India made the idea of a ‘‘separate electorate for women . . . less revolutionary and less differentiated than it appears in a homogenous political community [such] as our own.’’ 36 Even the Time and Tide, the paper of the equal rights faction Six Point Group in Britain, admitted that while special provisions for women were ‘‘open to serious objection in principle,’’ the ‘‘actual conditions’’ in India made them expedient for Indian women.37 The ‘‘rule of colonial difference’’—the view of a supposedly essential difference between metropolitan and colonial societies—eventually reconciled the majority of British women’s organizations not only to the special provisions for Indian women in the new constitution but eventually also to a communally divided representation for Indian women.38 This latter was precisely what Indian women’s organizations hoped to avoid by adopting their joint official position on women’s suffrage in 1931. Here lay the crux of the debate on the exact terms for women’s franchise and representation in the reform constitution. The official position adopted by the three major Indian women’s organizations in 1931 was crafted in response to the seemingly intractable dispute over the political representation of different groups in the reform constitution. The most contentious issue was the terms of the political representation of Muslims, the most important political minority, which also set the tone for the representation of other minorities. The famous Lucknow Pact of 1916 had represented an important political compromise between the Congress and the Muslim League on this issue; the Congress had accepted the temporary expediency of separate electorates for Muslims in an effort to further a combined Hindu-Muslim front against colonial rule. The collapse of this combined front by the mid-1920s, and the new prospects provided by the latest installment of political reforms for India, brought the dispute between separate electorates for Muslims versus joint or combined electorates for all the communities back into play. The tortuous history of this debate provided the background for the dramatic shift in the official position on women’s suffrage of the three major Indian women’s organizations. There were several abortive attempts to devise a satisfactory settlement on the political representation of Muslims in anticipation of the making of the new

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constitution. The breakdown of the historic compromise of the Delhi Muslim proposals of March 20, 1927, was a major setback. The compromise, brokered by a faction of the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was based on the league’s forgoing the demand for separate electorates for Muslims in exchange for certain statutory safeguards for Muslims in the new constitution. The Congress’s acceptance of the Delhi compromise opened the way for the series of All-Parties Conferences in India to draft an alternative constitution to the Simon Commission’s. Yet the Congress, under growing pressure from the Hindu Mahasabha, soon reversed its stand: it accepted proportional representation only in provinces where Muslims were a minority and also rejected the principle of statutory ‘‘weightage’’ for Muslims in excess of their ratio in the population. The reversal of the Congress’s stand, and its lack of generosity in dealing with Muslim political demands, did not bode well for a settlement with other political groups. The architects of the final report of the All-Parties Conference (the Nehru Report, named after Motilal Nehru) had hoped that the guarantee of religious liberty and of cultural autonomy for minority religious communities would be enough to solve the dispute over the terms of political representation, but this proved illusory. Jinnah, who was out of the country when the report was drafted, proposed several amendments whose rejection by the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha served to unify Muslim political parties at the All India Muslim Parties Conference of January 1929 against the Nehru Report’s support for joint or combined communal electorates. The Congress eventually decided to shelve the report at its Lahore session in 1929; it also agreed not to accept any solutions to the problem of minority representation without the consensus of the communities concerned. Yet the intransigent attitude of the Hindu Mahasabha ensured that the talks between Gandhi and Jinnah did not yield much by way of political compromise.39 The estrangement between the Congress and influential sections of Muslim public opinion did not augur well for rapprochement between various groups in India. The possibility of a communal settlement seemed remote as India prepared for the second Round Table Conference.The All India National Muslim Party, which was formed by Congress-Muslims in 1929, had failed to broker a deal with the Muslim Conference. The Congress-Muslims held a series of talks with the latter to devise a compromise. Their plan resembled Jinnah’s fourteen points, which formed the basis for the joint position adopted at the Muslim Conference, except for the important difference over joint electorates. The Congress adopted the proposals of the National Muslim Party in 1931.40 Yet the National Muslim Party

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itself was increasingly marginalized from the debates on the constitutional future of India. The imperial government deliberately excluded its members from participation at the second Round Table Conference, and the views of the National Muslim Party were overshadowed by those of the Muslim Conference. This was the background against which the all-India women’s organizations by April 1931, for fear of women’s representation being dragged into the communal deadlock, abandoned all earlier proposals for women’s franchise in favor of an implacable demand for universal adult suffrage and no reserved seats for women. Hilla Rustomji Faridoonji put the official position of organized women best: ‘‘We want the Hindu women to fight for their Muslim sisters as much as we want the Muslim women to fight for their Christian and Parsee sisters.’’ 41 This universalist option still seemed open and worth fighting for in 1931; the paradoxical outcome of these demands in consolidating a reconstituted Hindu, upper-caste, and male vision of the new national polity did not as yet seem inevitable. The example of B. R. Ambedkar, who as representative of the depressed classes at the first Round Table Conference broke rank with many in his constituency, to demand joint electorates for all provides some precedent for the official stand adopted by the three major Indian women’s organizations. Most political representatives of the depressed classes favored separate electorates for their constituency, but Ambedkar was willing to forgo this demand at the conference in exchange for universal adult suffrage (along with some necessary political safeguards for disadvantaged groups). He saw universal adult suffrage as the only way to ensure equality and avoid communal or sectarian divides; it was the only condition, he argued, that could make minorities give up their demand for separate communal or single-community electorates in favor of joint or combined electorates.42 The fear of a sectarian divide likewise weighed heavily on the major women’s organizations, who in a surprising reversal decided to go for nothing less than universal adult suffrage. The unresolved conflict over the representation of different political constituencies in India, in the absence of universal adult-suffrage, created the excruciating choices that beset the articulation of the demands of Indian women in the second suffrage campaign. The imbalance it had already produced was reflected in the insistence by the official representatives of the Indian women’s movement that women demanded political recognition ‘‘only as a unit of humanity and in no other capacity whatsoever.’’ 43 The special need for social reforms for women now rubbed against a construction of the universality of women as citizens. This contradictory framing of the suffrage demand of Indian women was a crucial

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turning point for the politics of an agonistic liberal universalism. The potential infirmity of this unidimensional stand on women’s sufrage took its toll. It marked a subtle shift in the politics of the women’s movement from a political individualism that had hitherto constituted women as individuals even as it acknowledged the claims of a variety of social relations on the allegiances of women to a new abstract individualism that insisted on a generic constitution of women as ‘‘separate’’ or ‘‘unencumbered.’’ 44 The agonizing choices this produced harnessed women’s collective agency for consolidating a national polity whose normative citizen was by default Hindu, upper-caste, and male. Herein lay the ambiguous consequences of the double framing of an agonistic liberal universalism in the political aftermath of the Mayo controversy. The distinctive contours of the post–Mother India suffrage debate offer a useful corrective to easy assimilations of Indian women’s suffragism within the classical liberal paradox of women’s equality with, and difference from, men.

redividing the political from the social One important consequence of the antinomies of the post–Mother India suffrage debate was the re-separation of the domains of the political and the social. The refusal of Indian women’s organizations to cooperate with the Simon Commission had already foreshadowed an emerging split in the combined investment of women’s activism in the social and the political spheres. The example of Reddi, a founding member of the wia and a signatory of its official boycott of the commission, is illuminating for this reason. Reddi did not appear before the commission to give evidence on women’s political representation, but she accepted a seat to serve on the Auxiliary Committee on Education (the Hartog Committee) appointed by the commission. The promotion of women’s education for social reform, she argued in defense of her decision to bypass the boycott of the commission, must take priority over political considerations.45 The minor flap over Reddi’s decision, though quickly resolved, was indicative of an impossible, and yet inescapable, choice that now emerged between the social and the political. The twists and turns of Reddi’s subsequent positions illustrate the severe dilemma in which Indian feminists were trapped. This agonizing choice arose in response to the deadlock over a national communal settlement in India. The initial concern of the wia, including Reddi, was primarily with increasing the number of women in the electoral rolls and the legislatures so as to promote the cause of social reform. Hence the original wia

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memorandum of March 1931, while acknowledging universal adult suffrage as its ultimate goal, was willing to accept a variety of concessions such as preferential franchise qualifications and a fixed percentage of seats reserved for women as a temporary measure for a transitional period.46 The subsequent shift in the wia’s position occurred only after a telling meeting between five of its most prominent members and Gandhi at Karachi during the annual session of the Congress.47 Gandhi reiterated to the wia delegation the Congress’s opposition in principle to reserved seats in the legislatures, but he offered to table a resolution himself the following day at the Congress session in support of universal adult suffrage. He promised to fight for adult suffrage for women, even if he failed to achieve the same for men, in lieu of supporting special schemes for the preferential treatment of women in the constitution. Under the present political stalemate, as the deputation understood from their meeting with Gandhi, any special provisions for women would inevitably mean the division of the concessions for women on the basis of separate religious communities. The wia considered this possibility too high a price to pay for the expanded political representation of women. By April 1931, therefore, the wia had drastically reconsidered its initial support for special concessions for women in the new constitution. The ‘‘sacrifice’’ came especially hard for women like Reddi whose concern with social reform made them especially predisposed to reserved seats for women in the legislatures.48 Yet in the current political climate, as Reddi came to fear, reserved seats would not only open the door for dividing the women’s seats along separate religious lines but, in doing so, ultimately defeat the goal of social reform. The fear was that the assertion of religious identities as the basis for political representation would limit the ability of women representatives selected under these conditions to question the personal laws of their communities. Hence the willingness of the wia to sacrifice its demand for reserved seats for women to ensure the recognition of women as a unified cross-communal political bloc. This decision had already forced a seeming opposition between social objectives that rested on an expanded franchise and representation and political objectives that sacrificed this preferential treatment for a cross-communal recognition of women in the constitution. When the wia joined the aiwc and the ncwi to sign a joint statement, the ‘‘Memorandum on the Status of Indian Women in the Proposed New Constitution’’ (August 1931), also known as Memorandum I, it ushered in a new configuration of the political and the social in the suffrage demands of Indian women.49 The ncwi and the aiwc had only newly entered the cause of women’s suffrage.50 As late as January 1931, the aiwc was still open to special preferential provisions

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for women; it had passed a resolution at its annual meeting calling for the nomination of two women to the Central Legislature.51 Even as late as the first take on drafting a joint memorandum, the aiwc was still uncertain whether the principle of adult suffrage alone could ever be adequate to ensure ‘‘real and effective equality’’ for women.52 However, the stakes of an avowedly ‘‘non-sectarian feminist movement’’ in a nationwide communal settlement eventually persuaded the aiwc also to forgo all special concessions for women in favor of universal adult suffrage and no reserved seats.53 Such sudden shifts in position, however, expose the fortuitous nature of the story’s outcome: the sheer contingency of the particular play of forces and ideas. No straight line of inevitability produced what has seemed, in retrospect, a familiar constraint on a feminism answerable to a nationalist agenda. The correspondence between the members of the Standing Committee of the aiwc just before the Bombay franchise meeting where the three organizations arrived at their joint memorandum reveals the factors that went into that fateful decision. The members of the Standing Committee were solicited to give their views on the original March 1931 wia memorandum in preparation for the Bombay meeting. Even though all the Standing Committee members agreed that the wia memorandum was an improvement over the previous proposals from the Simon Commission and the First Round Table Conference, important differences both on details and on principles soon emerged. At least one Standing Committee member clearly prioritized the ‘‘quantity’’ of the women’s vote: the need to increase the number of women voters and representatives relative to men through whatever special provisions could be had for women. She went beyond even the original wia memorandum in making the additional case for separate sex-based or women’s-only electorates to ensure that a sizable number of women would be successful in future elections.54 More typical, however, was the nervousness of the majority that even the modest special provisions for women advocated by the wia only as a temporary measure would be used against women to divide their representation along separate religious lines. While interested in the ‘‘quantity’’ of the women’s vote, most of the Standing Committee members seemed equally concerned with the ‘‘quality’’ of the women’s vote: the desire for the political recognition of women on the basis of a cross-communal solidarity. The proponents of quantity versus quality represented an emerging schism among activist women in India that was manifested as a division between the social and the political respectively. The fear of a communal division of the women’s seats weighed heavily on the thinking of the Standing Committee members of the aiwc. The original willing-

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ness of the wia to accept reserved seats for women even as a temporary measure, Amrit Kaur of the aiwc warned, carried the danger of allowing the ‘‘canker of communalism’’ to creep into the political arrangements for women in the new constitution.55 ‘‘In our country, harassed and distracted by racial, communal and economic divisions,’’ wrote Lalit Kumari of Mandi, S. I. Vincent, and Lakshmi Menon, the system of reserved seats for women ‘‘will only add another new distraction and harassment.’’ ‘‘[We] would like the women of India,’’ they urged, ‘‘to give a lead in the matter of the renunciation of special interests in the interests of all and of the proclamation of common interests, transcending class, community, race, or sex.’’ 56 Even Shah Nawaz, one of the two Indian women delegates at the first Round Table Conference, was convinced by the reasoning to drop her earlier support for special franchise qualifications and for reserved seats for women.57 Universalist political principles, as the proponents of the quality of women’s political representation feared, would be traded away for merely numerical gains in the enfranchisement of women. By the time the chosen representatives of the aiwc and the ncwi met at Bombay on April 17, 1931, therefore, the social argument for an expanded women’s representation was seemingly abandoned for the more political argument for the cross-communal representation of women. The public plea issued by the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, the Bombay branch of the ncwi that had taken the initiative in formulating what became the joint stand of the women’s organizations, provides a glimpse of the immediate provocation. The Bombay Presidency Women’s Council issued its public plea on the eve of the All India National Muslim Parties Conference in Lucknow in April 1931. The ninety-five women who signed the plea made an impassioned call for a political rapprochement. They cited the example of Indian women who had decided to eschew special treatment for themselves in the reform constitution as an example for their brothers to emulate. ‘‘You know we, the women of India, have been neglected, repressed, and suffering for ages,’’ they wrote, ‘‘but our very neglect and oppression has taught us sympathy, made us disdain bargaining, and value generosity.’’ 58 The political lesson they sought to teach was directed as much to the demands of the minority community as to the attitude of the majority community. They urged a spirit of generosity on the Congress in negotiating with the Muslim demand for the proportion of seats for Muslims in the legislatures. ‘‘If once we concede as we must the need for special treatment for a while to an important minority like the Muslims of India,’’ the women insisted, ‘‘we see no reason why their demands for an assured proportion in the national Legislature, say 30%, should not be agreed to even though their number or voting strength be

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below that figure.’’ Similarly, the women urged acceptance of the demand of reserved seats for Muslims in the legislatures of provinces like the Punjab and Bengal where Muslims constituted a slight majority. ‘‘If such concessions were made,’’ they argued, the Muslim political parties would ‘‘readily and handsomely agree to drop the frail shield of their present right to separate communal electorates in all provinces.’’ They feared that, in the absence of joint electorates (consisting of all communities), any special scheme for women would likely be framed within the contours of separate communal seats and electorates. This made a nationbased communal settlement vitally important for the agonistic liberal politics of women. The imperial government’s unequivocal opposition to the demand for universal adult suffrage put forward in Memorandum I made the separation of the social from the political inevitable. The application of universal adult franchise was the last hope of women’s organizations for combining the quantity and quality concerns of the women’s vote. It alone could ensure both an increase in the numbers of enfranchised women and the possibility of their cross-communal representation. The chances of the imperial government acceding to adult suffrage, even if only in the case of women (as Gandhi had hoped to secure at the second Round Table Conference), were always slim. Its outright rejection framed the competing pulls of quantity versus quality as an impossible choice between the social and the political. Under the circumstances, the decision to reject preferential treatment for women amounted to leaving the existing disparity between women and men in the electoral rolls unaddressed. As such, it seemingly sacrificed the promotion of social reform for more political considerations. This was the background that made the official position of the women’s organizations so immediately controversial among several of their members; it pitted social reformers who argued for increasing the quantity of women’s representation against political activists willing to sacrifice numbers for the quality of the women’s vote. Reddi, who had only reluctantly agreed to give up special provisions for women even as a temporary measure, was prescient enough to anticipate the polarizing impact of Memorandum I under these conditions. She argued against circulating the memorandum in an open meeting of the aiwc. The general membership, she argued, was not ‘‘politically-minded’’ and would be reluctant to forgo reserved seats for women.59 The choice that had been forced on women’s organizations in Memorandum I made it into a lightning rod for the split between supporters of the political versus the social dimension of Indian women’s suffrage. This split overlapped superficially with familiar arguments about women’s

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equality with, or difference from, men, thereby masking the real stakes of the Indian debate. Subbarayon, the only Indian woman at the second Round Table Conference to continue to make the case for preferential provisions for women, framed her difference with the official position of the Indian women’s movement precisely in these terms. In her memorandum to the conference, Subbarayon argued that the insistence of the Indian women’s movement only on universal adult suffrage was impractical and based on ‘‘theoretical equality’’ with men; in practice the same franchise qualifications with men would perpetuate great inequality for women.60 At the same time, she also complained to Rathbone that Reddi and the wia had been drawn into the vortex of party politics to abandon the cause of social reform for women.61 Rathbone too was of the opinion that Indian women’s organizations were simply toeing the Congress party line (which, incidentally, was also the line of the Muslim League).62 The ‘‘equality’’ versus ‘‘difference’’ arguments in India were inflected by the division between social and political activism. A previous equilibrium was unsettled: the polarization between the political and the social that had been repudiated in the support for the passage of the Sarda Act of 1929 was being reconsolidated rapidly in the contours of the post–Mother India suffrage debate. By the time of the arrival in 1932 of the Indian Franchise Committee, also called the Lothian Committee after its chair, this polarization had coalesced to give rise to dissenting factions on women’s franchise and representation. The veteran social reformer Sarala Ray, founder of the Gokhale Memorial Girl’s School in Calcutta, became the focal point for several women in Bengal who rejected Memorandum I on these grounds.63 Defending the cause of social reform, they specifically objected to the turn toward the political in abandoning special provisions for women. The official stand adopted by the aiwc on the franchise question, as Sarala Ray, its recent president, noted caustically, belonged to a different organization whose name ought not to be the All India Women’s Conference for Educational and Social Reform but the All India Women’s Conference for Educational, Social, and Political Reform.64 The evidence from women witnesses before the Lothian Committee confirmed the division of opinions among women activists on the question of special franchise qualifications and reserved seats in the proposed constitutional arrangement for India. Rathbone, in her eagerness to legitimize her own ‘‘women’s uplift’’ or social reformist perspective, encouraged opposition in India to the official position of the Indian women’s movement. The arrival of the Lothian Committee in India was already marred by bad timing. The government had cracked down with dra-

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conian measures against the renewal of the civil disobedience campaign upon Gandhi’s return from the second Round Table Conference; disillusionment and skepticism against the imperial government’s intentions ran high in India. Rathbone followed the committee in its travels in India with the aim of shoring up the dissenting view among Indian women. She found the women in Bombay and Madras the hardest to convince; the women of the Bengal Presidency Women’s Council in Calcutta were the most sympathetic; and elsewhere in India, in places like Lucknow, Nagpur, Benares, and Lahore, she claimed to find a more mixed audience for her views.65 For Mary Pickford, the Conservative member of Parliament appointed to the Lothian Committee, the cadre of organized women in India were in a ‘‘state of hysteria’’ over women’s suffrage; the committee could not take their ‘‘squabbles seriously.’’ 66 At the same time, the representatives of the aiwc and wia were making overtures to Rathbone to explain their position in the hope of converting her to their point of view.67 Even though Rathbone considered these women by far the ‘‘ablest Indian women’’ and the ‘‘natural leaders of the rest,’’ while disdaining her supporters as ‘‘tame women,’’ she remained unshakable in the wisdom of her own position regarding the political status of Indian women. Even after her return, Rathbone continued an extensive correspondence with her supporters in India, offering money to hire an Indian woman to disseminate her own views in favor of special provisions for women. She even wrote to wives of British officials to organize rival meetings of Indian women in support of this position.68 A ‘‘split,’’ as she wrote to one of her correspondents after the announcement of the Lothian proposals, ‘‘would be far preferable’’ to ‘‘our Parliament receiv[ing] the impression that Indian women are united and unanimous in rejecting the Lothian principles.’’ 69 Rathbone also arranged for the opposition to the views of the three major Indian women’s organizations to be heard before the Joint Parliamentary Committee, or Linlithgow Committee (1933), appointed for drafting the Government of India Bill. The suspicion expressed by some women activists in India that there were ‘‘unseen forces at work to divide the ranks of women’’ was not entirely unfounded.70 Rathbone’s promotion of dissent from those she otherwise dismissed as ‘‘tame women’’ served a strategic purpose in providing useful cover for her interventions on behalf of Indian women.71 These culminated with the expanded—but also communally divided—recognition of women in the Government of India Act of 1935. As a basis for the political recognition of women, the principle of the communal division of the polity starkly confronted both sides on the social versus the political spectrum of the debate in India with the futility of their choice. For

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example, Rathbone’s staunchest allies in India were among the most bitter at their betrayal by the imperial government. Subbarayon wrote to prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and the secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel Hoare, expressing her deep disappointment. ‘‘Those of us who demanded reserved seats for women,’’ she wrote to Hoare, ‘‘entirely agree . . . in principle [with those who rejected them for fear of communal divisions].’’ She added that she would rather forgo reserved seats for women altogether than accept them on a communal basis. ‘‘The women’s question,’’ she insisted, ‘‘stands by itself.’’ 72 In a letter to Rathbone, Subbarayon explained that a woman dependent on the whims of a communal electorate would become ‘‘first a communalist, then a woman.’’ 73 The women who entered the political arena through such means, Subbarayon feared, would not be able to go against the conservative elements of their community, who would uphold collective community norms over the interests of women. The representation of women only as members of discrete communities would defeat the very purpose of the social reforms advocated in the name of women. Maya Das Gangulee from Bengal, who had favored separate sex-based electorates for women but on a joint communal basis, also lashed out angrily: ‘‘I cannot help but conclude,’’ she wrote to Rathbone, ‘‘that the government, taking advantage of the new-fangled idea [communal disaffection], has taken undue advantage of it, and has taken this uncalled for step to serve its own interests. Thinking, that it will thus help to break up the consolidated power of the Indian woman, a unity which is evidently beginning to prove a real source of danger!’’ 74 Even Sarala Ray, despite sponsoring a dissenting memorandum from the Mahila Samiti of Bengal to the Joint Parliamentary Committee in 1933, joined ranks with the aiwc in a last-ditch effort in Britain to get the communal electorates for women modified after the passage of the 1935 act. She worked with the British liaison officer of the aiwc in an abortive attempt to convince the British Parliament to allow the seats reserved for women on a communal basis to be filled by joint electorates made up of all communities.75 The bitter lesson that the women on the social reform side of the suffrage debate learned from the debate’s outcome was the ultimate irrelevance of their decision to prioritize the social over the political in the debate. The social no less than the political dimension of the agonistic liberal universalism of Indian women’s suffragism had been sacrificed in the imperial proposals for women. While leading to a dismally familiar outcome, the dilemma itself is both unfamiliar and historically instructive. The failure of the communal compromise was the most crucial contingent variable in an outcome that could in fact have been otherwise. The dilemma posed by the renewed separation of the social and the political

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played out differently in the official stand of the three major women’s organizations. These organizations had staked their sacrifice of preferential treatment for women in part on the future promise of sexual equality contained in the fundamental rights and economic program passed at the 1931 Karachi session of the Congress. The wia received the Karachi resolution on fundamental rights warmly, declaring it as one of the most progressive statements on the equality between the sexes in the political sphere. Yet in refusing to identify with the Congress resolution, it also acknowledged that equal rights in the political sphere could not alone ensure substantive equality for women.76 The wia thus took up the Congress’s invitation to the public to comment on the nature of the swaraj envisioned for India in the Karachi resolution. The wia recommended expanding the statement on equal political rights for women to include ‘‘equal rights for both men and women in laws relating to marriage, to guardianship of children, inheritance rights and nationality rights.’’ Likewise, in the statement declaring the principle of the ‘‘religious neutrality’’ of the state, the wia asked for the following to be added: ‘‘religious neutrality as is consistent with the moral and wellbeing of the society or the nation.’’ This was a pointed reference to the experience of women with the ‘‘religious neutrality’’ of the colonial state that had hitherto blocked the passage of reforming social legislation in India. The final ‘‘Report on Fundamental Rights and Economic Program of the Congress,’’ however, rejected all the suggestions of the wia except for some minor changes regarding a clause on the protection of women workers.77 The Congress scheme for a communal settlement, presented by Gandhi at the second Round Table Conference, went even further in ignoring the premise of the wia’s suggestions by promising protection for the personal religious laws of communities.78 This was a direct and ominous foreshadowing of a political settlement that would provide cultural autonomy to minority religious communities in the social domain (often at the expense of individual autonomy for women) in lieu of a satisfactory settlement of minority demands in political terms. When in April 1931 the leading representatives of the women’s organizations in India, on the basis of the illusory promise contained in the Karachi resolution and in Gandhi’s commitment to the women’s deputation, abandoned all previous demands for special concessions for women, they were giving up much more than they had bargained. The decision was especially controversial for an organization like the aiwc, which had been formed expressly to promote social causes.79 The particular terms of the post–Mother India suffrage debate had forced on the aiwc an untenable emphasis on the political over the social. Under these circum-

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stances, the joint stand adopted by the aiwc, the ncwi, and the wia amounted to an abandonment of real substantive equality for women. Unstable as it was, this position-taking gesture—another unpredictable zigzag—highlights the unforeseen outcome of the official position adopted by the Indian women’s movement: the eventual normalizing of the equal rights of citizenship as implicitly male. The renewed dislocation of the social from the political in the suffrage debate had still broader repercussions. The language of ‘‘sacrifice’’ and ‘‘selflessness’’ began to permeate the official stand of women’s organizations: ‘‘Indian womanhood,’’ as the honorary secretary of the aiwc wrote, ‘‘are ready to forgo all temporary favors for obtaining a few seats in the Legislatures for the establishment of a principle which must in the end contribute to the general well being of the nation.’’ 80 The sacrifice made by the Indian women’s movement reflected the narrowing of the political in the aftermath of the Mayo controversy to refer almost exclusively to the needs of a unitary nation-state. This sacrifice provided the model for the consignment of the concerns of various groups, not only those of women, to a domain once again designated as the prepolitical or the social: the contours of this social were now contrasted with a renewed conception of the political as the exclusive domain of high politics. The choices made in the post–Mother India suffrage debate thus reversed the contribution of the collective politics of women in the semantic struggle over Mayo’s Mother India: the alignment of the social with this narrowed sense of the political at a critical turning point in the remaking of colonial India. For Rathbone, the numerical increase of women in legislative bodies to promote social reforms was its own justification; she never quite grasped the sinister consequences of the choices her campaign had forced on women activists in India. Reflecting on the differences between her position and that of the three major women’s organizations in India, Rathbone made the following comment: I think there is a fundamental difference between [their] working and ours in that we have got accustomed to the British method of granting reforms in slow stages and so press for what we can get rather than for the whole of what we want, if we know that the latter would in fact be crying for the moon. Our method is after all the result of long experience and has got us most if not all of what we need to secure a real equality of citizenship.81

For Amrit Kaur of the aiwc, however, there was clearly more than a difference in strategy at stake. ‘‘I am sorry I do not quite agree with your theory,’’ she wrote to Rathbone, ‘‘of getting what you can and make it a basis for getting more. In a free country like yours—yes—but in a subject country—no—because a start

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on the wrong basis means disaster ab initio and can never lead to the ultimate true goal.’’ 82 Even though Amrit Kaur was referring to the actual proposals in the Government of India Bill, her comment applies equally to the new dichotomy between the political and the social that was the enduring legacy of the suffrage debates on the political settlement in the aftermath of the controversy over Mother India. Ironically enough, the expanded political recognition of women after the Mayo controversy ultimately came at the cost of a renewed separation between the social and the political: a separation that neutralized the possibility of substantive equality for women as citizens.

naturalizing women, again The post–Mother India suffrage debate, by narrowing the scope of women’s collective agency to a circumscribed domain of the social, also recast the collectivity constituted by women as ‘‘natural’’ or prepolitical. Its impact shaped the stand of Amrit Kaur, an Indian Christian from a princely family in the Punjab, who became one of the most articulate exponents of the philosophical foundations of Indian women’s citizenship. She put the case most eloquently in her article ‘‘The Responsibility of Women as Citizens in the India of To-Day’’ (1934).83 Drawing on the classical liberal tradition, Amrit Kaur argued the case for women’s citizenship on the grounds of universal individual rights; but more importantly, she also invoked the parallel republican tradition going back to the Greeks that understood citizenship in terms of active participation in the life of the community. She married these traditions together to offer a model of women’s citizenship based on both rights and duties. The balance between rights and duties did not always survive the many twists and turns of the suffrage struggle. Amrit Kaur had insisted on women’s inherent right to equal political rights with men: ‘‘We are in ourselves,’’ she argued, ‘‘a vitally integral part of the body-politic.’’ Precisely, then, she explained that ‘‘civic rights will mean nothing to us unless we realize to the full the duties that these rights imply’’ (her emphasis). The popularized version of Amrit Kaur’s argument took the form of the frequent assertion by Indian suffragists that their struggle was motivated not by a ‘‘sex-war’’ but by the welfare of the entire community. Here lay a further permutation in the contradictory relationship between women and the community. The hopeless choices in the post–Mother India suffrage debate forced a narrowing of the lofty conception of women’s citizenship to more mundane and

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prosaic assertions. Amrit Kaur herself ultimately defended women’s suffrage on the grounds that there was a need for ‘‘the organized women of India to coordinate [the women’s] vote on right lines.’’ 84 The defense of the coordinating or vanguard role of organized women sustained the idea of a ‘‘natural’’ constituency of women bifurcated along class lines between women as subjects and as subalterns. In other words, the majority of Indian women—the poor—were cast as instrumental ‘‘objects,’’ a constituency to be served by organized women, and in whose name the expansion of the citizenship of women was now justified. Class differences now provided the medium for justifying the change in terms of women’s special duties as citizens: an intricate compromise that once again reflected the contingent outcomes of the post–Mother India suffrage debate. The class-based compromise was itself evidence of the particular pressures of the second suffrage campaign. Against the backdrop of the demands for separate recognition made by different groups at the second Round Table Conference, the representatives speaking on behalf of the Indian women’s movement had insisted that women were neither a ‘‘minority,’’ nor a ‘‘special interest,’’ but an integral part of the people.85 Hence they demanded only universal adult suffrage and a declaration of fundamental rights in the new constitution that removed sex, along with caste, class, and religion, as the grounds for any political disqualification. Memorandum I, having rejected the political recognition of women as a separate group with special rights in the new constitution, claimed for women rights only as universal individual citizens.The political compulsion to articulate the demands of women in universal terms, however, conflicted with the recognition of the special social needs of women as women. The resulting compromise created the conditions for the narrowing of the scope of women’s citizenship. The conflict between competing imperatives was evident from the outset.The same organizations that had rejected preferential treatment for women in favor of equality also wanted women’s point of view to be represented independently by women’s organizations at the second Round Table Conference in London. Even though the position of these organizations in Memorandum I was compatible with the official stand of the Congress, whose sole representative at the second Round Table Conference was Gandhi, organized women were not content to accept the Congress’s mandate to speak for the people as a whole. The private initiative of the wia through the Women’s International League in Britain to secure a separate representation for organized Indian women at the second Round Table Conference is especially revealing in this context. ‘‘Though [the wia] had taken sympathetic action with the Congress party when national issues were

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at stake,’’ Dhanvanthi Rama Rau explained, it ‘‘wanted to retain independence as a body of organized women when constitutional questions were discussed at the Round Table Conference.’’ In recognition of the particular concerns of women, she added, Indian women’s organizations were ‘‘anxious to have their own representatives as Delegates’’ to the conference.86 The independent representation of organized women at the conference was eventually forced to compromise. The Congress spokeswoman Sarojini Naidu, against whose inclusion at the conference Rathbone had lobbied the government extensively, was selected to represent the three Indian women’s organizations.87 The untenable position of the associational politics of women—caught between the claims of women as universal citizens and the specific needs of women—laid the grounds eventually for a miserably disappointing compromise. The frustration that had reached a peak by the time of the third Round Table Conference (November–December 1932) opened the door for this unsatisfactory outcome. The various government reports had made clear the imperial government’s resounding rejection of any mode of universal adult franchise. It had rejected as ‘‘idealistic’’ and ‘‘impractical’’ even the modified proposals put forward in the official position of the Indian women’s movement to the Lothian Committee for adult suffrage through an indirect group system.88 The futility of any prospect for adult suffrage only increased opposition within the ranks of Indian women’s organizations to their official stand. These organizations, by insisting on universal adult franchise, sacrificed even the moderate increase in numbers for women proposed by the Lothian Committee.89 At around the same time, the entire consultative process for the constitutional reforms took a decidedly conservative turn. The National Government in Britain, which had decided to abandon the consultative process entirely, was only reluctantly pressured into convening the final round of truncated talks on the constitution. The boycott of the third and last Round Table Conference by the Labour Party in Britain and by the Congress and the Liberal Party in India added to its unrepresentative character. This change in political climate, another contingent variable, set the stage for the leading women’s organizations to reconsider their official stand. The conservative swing of the constitution-making process forced anew the debate on Memorandum I. Shah Nawaz, the only woman delegate to the third Round Table Conference, warned of the retreat from an earlier more favorable climate toward an expanded representation of women. The arguments of social conservatives and of government officials opposed to an expansion of the Indian electorate came together in an alliance that was arrayed against the increase of

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women’s franchise in particular. These groups, Shah Nawaz warned the aiwc, were exploiting the division within the ranks of organized women for their own agenda of limiting the political representation of women in the reform constitution.90 The pressure already mounting within women’s organizations for a compromise on its official stand increased after Shah Nawaz’s return from London with the gloomy news of the decidedly more conservative drift of the constitutional reforms. The imperial government’s conclusions, published in a White Paper in March 1933, confirmed this prediction in a considerable whittling down of the expanded ratio of female to male voters recommended by the Lothian Committee.91 The retreat prompted representatives of the aiwc, ncwi, and wia to reconvene in Bombay in March 1933 to reconsider their stand in preparation for the Joint Parliamentary Select Committee meeting (April 1933–November 1934) to prepare the Government of India Bill. The compromise formula of a ‘‘united minimum demand’’ of Indian women developed at the meeting accepted a more limited agenda for women’s political representation: the construction of a female constituency as a preserve for organized women in India. The constraints of this agenda were reflected in Memorandum II that emerged out of the 1933 joint meeting in Bombay. Many who were disillusioned with the process of the constitutional reforms and were pessimistic about any improvements in the report of the Joint Select Committee, pointed to the futility of presenting any new demands to the government on behalf of women. Begum Mohammed Wasim, the Standing Committee member of the aiwc from Lucknow, was skeptical of any reasonable offer from the British government and argued against a new memorandum. The latter, she argued, would be seen as a sign of weakness and inconsistency; she preferred that the women’s organizations stick to their original demands in Memorandum I.92 Her views lost out to those who wanted to compromise in the absence of universal adult suffrage to increase the number of enfranchised women. The decision to present Memorandum II, with its backtracking on the original stand of women’s organizations, bespoke the thorny choice raised for the women’s movement in the ups and downs of the constitutional process. The rationale for presenting the new minimum demands represented a compromise in favor of the ‘‘quantity’’ issue: the attempt to secure for women the expanded ratio of female to male voters provided in the Lothian Committee’s recommendations. Even some of the principal brokers of this compromise, however, harbored serious misgivings about the implications of the ‘‘climb down’’ from the original position of the women’s organizations. The honorary secretary

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of the aiwc, Lakshmibai Rajwade, in a last-ditch effort to convince the Standing Committee members to stick with the original memorandum, tried to minimize the significance of an expanded female electorate. She wrote: ‘‘The object of the [original joint memorandum] was to promote rights of the women of India as a unit of the body politic, by the side of which object the question of numbers falling to the share of one community or other is undoubtedly of minor importance.’’ 93 The lure of an expanded female electorate—under the conditions of a limited electorate where an increase in the numbers falling to the share of women presumably translated into more support for the ‘‘social question’’—proved in the end too hard for activist women to resist. The price of this choice was costly. To be sure, Memorandum II brought the official stand of the dominant Indian women’s organizations broadly in line with that of the major British women’s organizations and their supporters in India.94 The report of the Joint Select Committee, as well as the final draft of the Government of India Act, was a considerable improvement over the White Paper proposals, at least on the question of the numbers of enfranchised women. However, as one of Rathbone’s supporters in India acknowledged, these improvements had little to do with Memorandum II.They were largely the work of Rathbone’s ‘‘master hand.’’ 95 The 1935 act had rejected all the alternative proposals of the leading Indian women’s organizations in Memorandum II, including the basic demand in the memorandum for a declaration of fundamental rights that included the removal of political disqualification on the basis of sex. The compromise, while it was ultimately pointless regarding the nature of the political concessions women received in the reform constitution, pointed to a more fundamental reorientation: the premature endorsement of women as forming an already achieved or ‘‘natural’’ constituency of their own. The mechanism of this reorientation consisted of the simultaneous acknowledgment and containment of the significance of class differences among women. The drama of Memorandum II reveals the playing out of the complex role of class differences in the new justification for extending the political representation of Indian women.The issue centered around the government’s endorsement of the ‘‘wifehood’’ qualification, which proposed to enfranchise the wives and widows of men with requisite property qualifications in India. After the adoption of Memorandum II, indeed, the wifehood qualification became the only remaining substantial difference between Rathbone’s faction and the official position of Indian women’s organizations. Rathbone considered the Indian objections to the wifehood qualification a ‘‘sentimental objection.’’ The objection, she argued,

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‘‘was also felt by British suffragists when the same franchise was introduced here in 1918. . . . But we were able to overcome it, and it has much less force in India, because nearly all women there are wives; the permanent spinster class scarcely exists.’’ 96 By contrast, the Equal Rights Committee in Britain now entered the fray to support the objections of Indian women’s organizations. ‘‘Believing in the principle of equality with all its advantages and disadvantages,’’ the memorandum from the Equal Rights Committee to the Lothian Committee read, ‘‘we wholeheartedly support the demand of Indian women’s organizations that the franchise should be based on equality between men and women.’’ 97 The alignment of opposing factions within the British women’s movement on the wifehood qualification for Indian women allowed a misleading analogy with the suffrage experience of British women. By the time of the Joint Parliamentary Committee in 1933, a five-organization coalition of British equal-rights groups, which included the British Commonwealth League, Six Point Group, Open Door Council, St. Joan’s Social and Political Alliance, Women’s Freedom League, and the wil, was formed to support the leading women’s organizations in India. They opposed the recommendations of the two major coalitions of British women’s organizations on Indian women’s suffrage: the Women’s Advisory Council on Indian Questions (1931) and Rathbone’s more recent coalition of eleven prominent British women’s organizations in the British Committee on Indian Women’s Franchise (1933).98 The five independent British women’s organizations sent their own separate memorandum to the Joint Parliamentary Committee in support of Memorandum II. They argued that not only were Indian women entitled to make their own demands and judge what was best for them in their country, but their objection to being enfranchised on their husband’s qualifications was ‘‘reasonable’’ and based on ‘‘right principles.’’ 99 By 1935 British women’s organizations were hopelessly divided on the question of the wives’ qualification for Indian women’s franchise.100 The opponents of the wifehood qualification in India freely invoked the available vocabulary of ‘‘equal rights’’ in defense of their position: ‘‘Realizing that, just because our western sisters did not fight for the principle of equality, and accepted some of these special privileges,’’ as one aiwc circular stated, ‘‘today, they have to struggle for many of the civil rights, such as the married women’s nationality; we decided not to seek for any special qualifications and reservation of seats.’’ 101 The equal-rights advocate Alice Paul of the Women’s National Party in the United States was also recruited on the side of Indian women’s organizations in a reminder of the expanded terrain of British-Indian conflicts after the Mayo controversy.102 Notwith-

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standing the international resonance of the debate, however, the analogy with the suffrage experience of British and U.S. women precluded more nuanced understandings: British feminists simply and tellingly mistook the particular stakes of the objections in India. The debate on the wifehood qualification reflects the particularities of its resonance in India. The resolution against the wifehood qualification in Memorandum II reiterated that an ‘‘extraneous factor like marriage’’ should not be used as the basis for women’s citizenship in the new constitution. But Sunderabai Sirur of the ncwi argued for the substitution of the phrase ‘‘extraneous factor like marriage’’ with the phrase ‘‘a woman should have the right of citizen by her own merits.’’ Sirur’s resolution lost five to ten at the meeting, and the original wording was retained in the draft Memorandum II.103 When the draft was sent to the ncwi for endorsement, the executive committee again raised objections about the same offending phrase. Ruby Navolkar revealed the reasons for the demand for the substitution of that phrase: ‘‘Let us preserve,’’ she argued, ‘‘the respect with which we are treated for being true to our marriage bond.’’ 104 Rajwade’s reply, on behalf of the majority vote at the meeting, was stinging: By this declaration of rights [stated in Memorandum I and reiterated in Memorandum II] was meant the state’s admission of the rights and privileges of individual citizens of the country, irrespective of sex and not the rights and privileges of married couples or for that matter of widows or wives. It was in keeping with this fundamental hypothesis, and perhaps as a logical corollary to it that the women of India wanted their enfranchisement to be based on their individual qualifications and not those derived from marriage, which in view of the declaration of rights asked for, became an extraneous factor so far as women’s individual rights and privileges was concerned [emphasis in the original].105

The ncwi, to be sure, dropped its objections, and Memorandum II was approved with its wording intact. Yet the ncwi was not persuaded by the logic of Rajwade’s argument. Its original ambivalence about the imagined slight to the marriage bond remained. The reason the issue blew over was that the ncwi, whatever it felt about the respect owed to marriage, shared with the other women’s organizations the commitment to the recognition of women in the reform constitution as individuals in their own right. Far more than has been recognized, Indian feminism fought for suffrage on the expanded terrain of an agonistic liberalism: a discourse of individual rights that arose not so much from women’s relation to men but from women’s relation to the collective identities of communities.

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The refusal of the official voice of the Indian women’s movement to accede to Rathbone’s wifehood qualification, even after the compromise of Memorandum II, had an interesting class dimension: it was fueled by the specific objection to the husband’s property qualifications. The application of the wifehood criterion to enfranchise the wives of propertied men, its opponents insisted, would double the vote of the vested interests of the propertied classes over the poorer sections of society.106 In this the representatives of the special interests of labor and of the depressed classes joined them.107 This was also consistent with the demand of the aiwc and others for universal adult suffrage as the fairest means of empowering their ‘‘poorer sisters.’’ So exasperated were the members of the Lothian Committee with the objections raised by the representatives of the aiwc against the husband’s property qualification, they even suspected them of an ‘‘extreme socialism!’’ 108 The objections to the enfranchisement of a propertied class of voters was thus as much at stake as the humiliating entry of women into the political system through a system of dependence on their husbands in the continued objections to the wifehood qualification in Memorandum II. It reflected an acknowledgment, however limited, on the part of Indian women’s organizations that social class matters. The elaboration of this point in the evidence of the three Indian women before the Joint Parliamentary Committee was revealing. The women enfranchised under the wifehood system, they argued, would be ‘‘terrorized’’ by the conservative men of their class and would thus be of little help in social reform for women. If wives were to be enfranchised in the new constitution, they asked, why were the wives of men with the requisite property qualifications preferred over those with the requisite educational qualifications? 109 They raised similar objections to the recommendation to enfranchise the wives of military men as simply reinforcing the conservative elements in society through the women’s vote. Yet here lies a paradox: the assertion of a ‘‘women’s cause’’ led ultimately to a politically conservative resolution that buried the earlier recognition of the differences of class and ideology. The alternative to the wifehood qualification proposed in Memorandum II begins to expose the dubious terms of this resolution. To match the expanded numbers that the Lothian Committee had made available for women, Reddi devised an ingenious alternative to the hated wifehood qualification. The existing system enfranchised only women with the same property qualifications as men; Reddi recommended in addition adult franchise for all women over the age of twenty-one in urban areas.This was meant, as Reddi explained, as a ‘‘second best’’

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option designed to balance the advantages that automatically accrued to the propertied classes by the existing property qualifications for the franchise in India.The architects of Memorandum II, in the name of equality, wished to modify Reddi’s proposals initially to include adult suffrage in urban areas for both women and men. Reddi objected to this modification on behalf of the wia. The inclusion of the clause ‘‘and men,’’ she argued, would do little to redress the disparity between men and women already present in the property qualifications. Several members argued for retaining the clause as a ‘‘matter of principle’’: that is, the recognition of equal rights for men and women.110 In this instance, the majority view conceded to Reddi’s objection in the name of promoting women’s interests. This was a prelude to an altered conception of women’s interests that was simultaneously abstract, above the usual fray in the larger body politic, and yet coextensive with its hierarchies. Politicized women, through the promotion of an abstract women’s cause, ‘‘represented’’ their subaltern sisters: a curious contraction, indeed, of the argument about the rights and duties of women’s citizenship. The implications of this newly abstracted vision of women’s politics came into full view in the arguments supporting the system of urban franchise adopted in Memorandum II. To arguments from the supporters of the wifehood qualification that the alternative proposal in Memorandum II unfairly discriminated against women in rural areas, its supporters had a ready-made response. The urban areas, as defined by the report of the Lothian Committee, included any area with a population of over one hundred thousand. Hence the definition of ‘‘urban area,’’ as the committee used the term, included several large agricultural villages.111 In the overall scheme of the constitutional arrangement, the supporters of this proposal argued, the balance between the representation of urban and rural areas would remain the same: the women’s organizations were not asking for a single extra seat for urban areas. The application of adult franchise for women in the urban areas, including some large agricultural villages, was thus presented as the fairest means of increasing the number of enfranchised women under the restrictive conditions of a limited electorate. The relative weight of the urban versus the rural women’s vote was not the major issue here; the recourse to an abstract women’s politics was. The alternative system proposed in Memorandum II was defended on behalf of a collectivity ‘‘women’’ whose shared interest was already constituted before its political achievement through any common struggle or agitation. Here lies the significance of Amrit Kaur’s elaboration before the Joint Select Committee of the relative merits of an expanded female electorate based on the system of

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urban adult franchise in Memorandum II over one based on the husband’s property qualification. The latter, according to Amrit Kaur, produced only a nominal enfranchisement of women. It created a conservative and geographically scattered female electorate, she argued, that was ‘‘mere camouflage on paper.’’ The female electorate created under such a system would be less amenable to coordination along the proper lines by women’s organizations; it would thus be of little use in promoting reforms for women, the sadly narrowed raison d’être for the women’s vote. In an ironic twist, the Indian women’s movement had come around to cementing the identification of women with a narrowed and hollowed-out conception of the social. In the process, it carved a vanguard position for women activists. ‘‘The interests of Indian women in urban and rural areas being identical,’’ Amrit Kaur explained, the alternative proposed in Memorandum II ‘‘will be an incalculable asset to our organizations and the cause of reform advocated by them.’’ 112 The supposedly identical interests of women not only served to negotiate the differences generated in the body politic; more importantly, they validated a crucial mediating role for organized women. Here is how the translation of the rights and duties of women’s citizenship sanctioned a hierarchical division: the ‘‘proper’’ coordination of the women’s vote by organized women. The hope that the ‘‘right women’’ would emerge, despite the limited electorate, was a preoccupation shared by all factions in the suffrage debate.The supporters of reserved seats for women, for example, opposed filling those seats through nomination or co-optation. The memorandum from the women of Bengal argued against these methods. They would open the door, it argued, to the ‘‘man’s woman’’ who was beholden to the government or to the political parties and not to the interests of women. Instead, it preferred that the candidates for these seats be selected from names provided by women’s organizations, which would ensure the presence of the ‘‘woman’s woman’’ who was genuinely interested in the condition of women.113 The compromise position on the expanded political presence for women thus demonstrated a more widely shared belief in an enlightened and educated class of women—the ‘‘vote that will carry some weight’’—carrying the Kiplingesque burden for the supposedly identical interests of all women. The post–Mother India suffrage debate culminated with a retreat from the mobilization of women as universal citizens to the parochial duties of organized women tending to a socially disadvantaged female constituency. The class-based resolution was premised on a reversal of the tenuous lesson of the Mayo controversy: the view that the solidarity of women was not natural but to be achieved in the

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outcome of a political process. The price of naturalizing women again was precisely the repositioning of women’s concerns within a prepolitical ghetto, a safely circumscribed horizon, represented by its own movement.

reconstituting dominant group identities The most intractable choice of all in the debate on Indian women’s suffrage was between the rights of women and the rights of minorities. It aligned women’s agency with a universalizing ambition that was by default Hindu and upper caste. Yet again there was nothing inevitable about this development. When the issue of the political status of women in the reform constitution was first broached in anticipation of the Round Table Conferences, the Government of India had still to register fully the implications of the collective mobilization of women during the Mayo controversy. It thus urged that the political status of women was best left to be decided by the future legislatures in India.114 Subbarayon and Shah Nawaz had to convince the imperial authorities that women’s political status should be decided at the conference along with the status of other groups. Subbarayon, in an explanatory statement to her joint memorandum with Shah Nawaz, explained their position: ‘‘We pointed out that if this question was deferred to a future and uncertain date,’’ she wrote, ‘‘it would be far harder to secure for it adequate examination after the Indian constitution had been re-formed and the claims of others to special consideration had been weighted and settled.’’ 115 The Round Table Conference, in a belated recognition of the realignment of the relationship between women, community, and the state during the Mayo controversy, agreed to take up the question of the political status of women along with that of other groups. Because rights for women existed in tension with the collective rights of communities, their framing as separate from the demands of other social groups was bound to be contentious. The implications of this framing in the absence of a satisfactory settlement between communities in India set up impossible choices for women. The potential problem was already present at the first Round Table Conference in the discussions of the Minorities Committee. The demand of the Indian women delegates paralleled the line adopted by the representatives of different communities and of various special interest groups such as labor, universities, industry and commerce, and landlords: they all demanded special consideration for their respective groups in the reform constitution. The respective demands were at least potentially in conflict with one another. Under a system where only a fixed percent-

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age of the population was to form the electorate in India, for example, the labor delegates argued that any proposal for increasing the numbers of enfranchised women on the basis of their husband’s property qualification came at the cost of the working classes.116 This confrontation revealed a paradoxical clash between the articulation of women’s political representation as part of, or as separate from, other groups and special interests. Attempts to negotiate these alternatives merely acted out the difficult choices of the suffrage debate. For example, the communal deadlock had already made the demand for reserved seats for women at the first Round Table Conference politically charged. The cleavages that emerged in the Minorities Committee of the first conference were not about the mechanisms of the franchise (the system of joint versus separate single-community electorates) but about the proportion of seats reserved for the different groups in the legislative bodies. Subbarayon, in an important intervention in the Minorities Committee, sought to keep women out of this dispute over the relative number of seats for one group over another. She thus proposed a complex system whereby a legislature elected on the basis of communal or proportional representation would then apply the same principle to fill a certain number of reserved seats for women. This system, she argued, ‘‘will avoid disturbance of the other reservations which will have been already decided on’’ for the legislatures, as well as ‘‘avoid introduction of any communal question in the election’’ of women. ‘‘We want our women representatives to be on the legislatures,’’ she explained, ‘‘not as members of various communities as Christians, Hindus, Mussalmans etc., but as representatives of women of all castes and creeds.’’ 117 The temporary deferral of the conflict at the conference only highlighted its possibility in the future. These contradictions were confronted head-on at the second Round Table Conference. Subbarayon had modified her demands at the second conference in anticipation of a possible confrontation between the political demands of women and of minority groups. Unlike Shah Nawaz, who had shifted to the official position of the Indian women’s movement, Subbarayon continued to demand reserved seats for women, but she made them optional (to be decided on by the future legislatures).118 Yet the demand for the reserved seats for women inevitably came up against similar demands made by others. No wonder, then, that even Ambedkar, who was otherwise sympathetic to the cause of women, shared the reservations of the conservative Muslim members of the Lothian Committee on the issue of reserved seats for women and other special interest groups: ‘‘The allocation of seats to labour, women, and other special interests,’’ he added in his note

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on the report of the Lothian Committee, ‘‘must not affect the proportion of seats which the depressed classes have claimed in the Minorities Pact submitted to the Round Table Conference.’’ 119 The issue of women’s seats in particular raised in acute terms the question of women’s relation to other groups and interests. Since women, unlike such special interest constituencies as labor or landlords, were seen as deeply implicated in the constitution of community identities, they could not be kept out of the maelstrom swirling around the framework of religious communities. The official position of Indian women’s organizations, presented at the second conference by Naidu and Shah Nawaz and backed by both the Congress and the Muslim League, even more starkly raised the issue of the relationship between women and minority demands. Gandhi was the first to spell out this more ambivalent use of the official stand of the women’s organizations. The continued deadlock in the Minorities Committee at the second conference had prompted Gandhi to shelve the communal settlement temporarily in the hope of continuing talks on other aspects of the constitutional framework for India. For the representatives of the Muslims, as well as of the depressed classes, however, the solution to minority representation was the foundation for any discussion of the constitution. Gandhi’s attitude prompted the representatives of five groups, including Muslims, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans domiciled in India, and the depressed classes, to come together on November 13, 1931, to present a joint Minorities Pact for communal or proportional representation based on separate electorates and reserved seats.120 Gandhi’s fierce opposition to this pact was directed chiefly at Ambedkar and at the inclusion of the depressed classes in the demand for separate electorates (apart from the general Hindu population). The use to which the political demands of women would now be put was captured in Gandhi’s response to the Minorities Pact. The exchange between prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and Gandhi on the Minorities Pact was telling. The prime minister reminded Gandhi that the Minorities Pact, which represented the views of some 46 percent of the Indian population, undermined the Congress’s claims to speak for the Indian people. Gandhi angrily retorted, ‘‘You have had on behalf of the women of India, a complete repudiation of special representation, and as they happen to be one half of the population of India, this forty-six per cent is somewhat reduced.’’ 121 The conference ended in failure with the humiliating admission of the inability of Indians to resolve the communal problem. Prime minister MacDonald, as chair of the Minorities Committee, was left to devise a solution for the representation of minorities.

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The ‘‘solution’’ offered in MacDonald’s Communal Award (August 1932) came at the price of assigning women once again to the ‘‘inside’’ of communities. Hence the Communal Award made the reserved seats for women, unlike the reserved seats for special interests such as labor, subject to the arrangements for separate religious communities.122 MacDonald would see women only as a plurality of collectivities nestled safely within various discrete bodies politic. His plan was to confirm these supposedly discrete political units as naturally separate communal electorates, asserting once again that women belonged only to ‘‘their’’ communities. Conversely, Gandhi identified women with the imperatives of a unitary political community by invoking an artificial transcendence of women over other social relations and identities. This in effect merely prioritized the collective contours of a reconstituted community—a unitary national community—over other political imaginations of community. Thus was the citizenship of women held hostage to competing conceptions of community. Women as a group, however, did not lose in any simple way to men as a group. Sexual difference did not substitute for equality. Because the Mayo controversy had created the possibility of individual rights and autonomy for women, that earlier achievement now inflected the nature of the conflict over women’s citizenship. The context of reinstated communal patriarchies, rather than sexual difference per se, trumped the recognition of women’s autonomy. The implication of women in this communal compromise was the product of the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of the colonial government. Ever since the failure of the second Round Table Conference, the viceroy Lord Willingdon was urging MacDonald’s government to make a speedy announcement of its communal settlement. He was concerned about the possibility of the political alienation of Muslims from the government and of their joining the Gandhian civil disobedience movement. The government’s reprisals against the Red Shirt Movement of Muslims from the North West Frontier Province increased Willingdon’s fears about the alienation of Muslim public opinion; he lobbied for strong safeguards of Muslim interests in MacDonald’s Communal Award.123 Official circles gave the conservative section of Muslim opinion, as expressed by the Muslim members of the Lothian Committee, more than its due. The committee’s final report had already reflected a truckling to patriarchal communal sentiments on women. Even though the committee itself overruled the objections of conservative Muslim members against an expanded women’s franchise, they did so only at the cost of confirming the special claims of religious communities on the political representation of women. Technically the question of communal representation was beyond the scope of the committee and was to await the prime minister’s

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award. Yet the original draft of the committee’s report approved by the members had contained a brief mention of the support from women witnesses for a joint or combined communal representation of women. Two of the Muslim members of the committee, Khan Bahadur Haque and Sir Mohammad Yakub, threatened a note of dissent on this point. The threat of a note of dissent from the committee’s Muslim members prompted Lothian at the last minute to drop from the report the sentence on women’s support for joint electorates for women.124 This was already too late for Yakub, who referred to this deleted section of the report in his own additional note, which forced, in a series of further notes, a clarification of the committee’s views on the terms of the expanded franchise and representation of Indian women. The achieved political compromise of the Lothian Committee came, predictably enough, at the expense of women’s political representation. The price of Yakub’s support was the reinstatement of community-based patriarchies.125 Yakub objected to the committee’s support for special franchise qualifications for women, aligning himself in this case with the official position of the Indian women’s movement. The current franchise qualifications, he offered by way of explanation, were more favorable to Muslim than to Hindu women, who under Hindu personal laws did not own property in their own rights.126 However, his more strenuous case was made regarding the reserved seats for women and the method of voting for these seats. ‘‘As regards the joint and separate electorates,’’ Yakub wrote in reference to the sentence that had been deleted at his insistence from the report itself, ‘‘Muslim women will have to be bracketed with their men and cannot be allowed to go outside the community.’’ Women most definitely for Yakub ‘‘belonged’’ to the community. In this instance, therefore, he repudiated the evidence of Muslim women witnesses in favor of joint or combined electorates that were not divided along communal lines. Of all the Muslim and Hindu women witnesses who touched on this question, only one woman from Assam, Mrs. A. Rahman, had recommended separate electorates for Hindu and Muslim women, but she stated that her recommendation was only on account of the strong feeling on this issue among Muslim men.127 ‘‘In the first place,’’ Yakub argued, the ‘‘half a dozen’’ Muslim women witnesses could not be ‘‘considered as representing the views of all Muslim women in the country.’’ Further, he noted, the Muslim women had not taken into consideration their support for combined communal representation for women under the conditions that ‘‘separate electorates formed the basis of enfranchisement for the Muslims.’’ Reserved seats for women were acceptable only if separate seats were

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reserved for Muslim and non-Muslim women in proportion to their numbers and ‘‘in such a way that it would not disturb the overall communal or proportional representation of the minorities.’’ The majority in the Lothian Committee conceded this point to Yakub: the community reserved the right to decide about ‘‘its’’ women. Subbarayon, the only Indian woman on the committee, considered both the change in the wording of the final report and the aspersions in Yakub’s note about the unrepresentative quality of the Muslim women witnesses unfair. She attached her own separate note to the report, making clear that the majority of women who expressed their view on the question had desired joint seats and electorates for women.128 Three Hindu members of the committee jumped into the fray with a ‘‘Note of Dissent.’’ In the light of the consensus among women, they argued, even if the principle of communal representation were applied to men, it should not be extended to women.129 The majority of the committee felt obliged to respond with a final ‘‘Brief Note.’’ They objected to claims about women’s support for combined communal representation for lack of sufficient evidence: ‘‘We are unable to confirm our colleagues’ remark,’’ they wrote, ‘‘that there was a strong and almost unanimous opinion by women witnesses against communal electorates for women.’’ 130 The committee, they insisted, could not sustain any claims on this issue, as it was beyond the terms of its reference.The ominous note struck by the majority position was not lost on Subbarayon or on the women’s organizations when the Lothian Report was published. The Lothian Committee’s report was a definite prelude to bringing women’s representation in the reform constitution firmly within the fold of separate religious communities. Lothian and his staff were already forewarned of Whitehall’s decision on the communal settlement. The note by the majority of the committee, as Subbarayon complained in a private letter to Lothian, was added after the report was signed and discussed at a meeting to which she was not invited. ‘‘No one including my woman colleague [Mary Pickford] informed me of it,’’ Subbarayon protested.131 The majority, ‘‘composed mainly of British members and advocates of communal electorates,’’ had ignored the evidence from women. Subbarayon’s complaint put Lothian on the defensive. He originally drafted a letter asking her for alternative proposals to ensure adequate representation of Muslim women in the event that the government approved combined communal representation of women; but his private secretary requested he delete any reference to alternative proposals so as not to give Subbarayon any ‘‘advance information’’ of the fact that ‘‘His Majesty’s Government are likely to communalize

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the women’s seats.’’ 132 The government had already struck a delicate compromise with conservative Muslim opinion that brought the extension of women’s franchise and representation firmly within the confines of the community. When the prime minister’s Communal Award was announced, therefore, it only confirmed what the pronouncements of the Lothian Committee had already foreshadowed about the terms of women’s representation. Any lingering doubts about the application of the principle of the Communal Award to women were removed by the time the Joint Select Committee met in 1933. The secretary of state for India, in response to a question asked by Pickford, answered in no uncertain terms: ‘‘The communal question,’’ he averred, ‘‘enters into the question of these women’s seats very definitely.’’ 133 Women, unlike special interests such as labor, whose seats were not communalized, could not be seen outside the bonds of community: a refusal to recognize that women could represent a political constituency. The imperial diktat, to be sure, left a door open for the modification of the Communal Award in the future on a settlement between the communities in India, but the Government of India Act of 1935 for all practical purposes sealed the fate of the hard-won realignment in the controversy over Mother India of the relationship beween women and community. Bounded religious communities were once again reaffirmed as the primary ground for political identity in India. Women’s suffrage had appeared on the horizon in the form of an impossible choice for organized women. On the eve of the Lothian Committee, prominent Hindu and Muslim members of the aiwc and the wia had issued an eloquent declaration reiterating the demands of Memorandum I. The widely publicized declaration testified to the determination of its authors to resist at all costs the entry of ‘‘a spirit of communalism amongst women.’’ ‘‘We realize to the full and with immediate sorrow,’’ they wrote, ‘‘to what an extent this canker amongst men has retarded and is retarding the progress of our beloved land.’’ They went on to declare, in a striking claim for the independence of women from men, ‘‘Even if men are in favor of expedients meanwhile, we wish to make it clear that women do not stand by them in this demand.’’ 134 The bluster of the wording notwithstanding, the declaration was the product of a fragile compromise that was itself an indication of the reinscription of the horizons of religious community in the political representation of women. The original draft of the declaration, as prepared by the Standing Committee of the aiwc, contained a specific reference to the demand for joint or combined communal electorates for women. Shah Nawaz, a Muslim member of the aiwc,

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figure 6. ‘‘In Brindaban,’’ cartoon by Shankar, Hindustan Times, September 2, 1934, 11. © HT Media Limited. Courtesy of Hindustan Times, New Delhi, India. The cartoon, which equates the impending report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee with the annual celebrations associated with the birth of Lord Krishna, was remarkably canny in capturing the contradictions of women’s status in the new constitution. The figures dancing to the tune of the imperial representative are all men dressed up as women: an acknowledgment of the paradox in the new political recognition of women. These figures, each representing a discrete group, once again relegate women as the markers of community boundaries.

requested the removal of the specific reference to joint electorates from the final version of the declaration. The issue of joint versus separate communal electorates for women, she argued, could not be resolved in the absence of a political settlement on minority representation. At least one Hindu member of the Standing Committee felt that since Memorandum I definitely implied joint communal electorates—even though it did not state it explicitly—Shah Nawaz’s modification took away from the spirit of the declaration.135 Yet in the case of a difference of opinion between Standing Committee members on this point, they decided to stand by ‘‘principles’’ and drop the specific reference to joint communal electorates for women in the declaration. This option was no longer available after the announcement of the Communal Award; the ‘‘solution,’’ indeed, was precisely what would ultimately align the political agency of organized women with an ab-

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stract individualism that could not escape its investment in a reconstituted Hindu and upper-caste polity. The Communal Award posed a unique dilemma for the agonistic liberal universalism of the Indian women’s movement. Neither the Congress nor Gandhi shared the specific objections of the women’s organizations to the Communal Award. They were willing for the sake of overall political unity to compromise on separate electorates for Muslims; hence the last-ditch effort for a settlement on the basis of the Congress’s acceptance of separate electorates for Muslims in the ‘‘unity conference’’ at Allahabad in 1933. By contrast, Gandhi’s critique of the separation of the so-called untouchables or depressed classes from caste Hindu society through separate electorates for the depressed classes in the Communal Award is well known; he went on a fast unto death to have the Communal Award’s recommendation for separate electorates for depressed classes, which separated them from the general Hindu population, overturned, in exchange for an expanded number of seats reserved for them.136 The Indian women’s organizations were far more concerned about political representation being based on collective religious identities; they were thus opposed to any compromise at all with the Communal Award.137 The stakes for women were different: opposition to ‘‘community’’ patriarchy. The harsh consequence of this choice, however, was support for an abstract individualism that was in effect a majoritarian Hinduism treated as generic. Shah Nawaz registered the particular difficulties of the consequences of this choice for Muslim women. She had already admitted to Rathbone the problem for Muslim women in asking for a representation different from the men of their community. She was also under considerable pressure from Muslim political parties to break away from the aiwc and start a separate organization for Muslim women in support of communal seats and electorates for women.138 Shah Nawaz, having returned from presenting the position of the three major women’s organizations at the third Round Table Conference, made a strong plea to the Standing Committee of the aiwc to ‘‘confine ourselves strictly to the women’s sphere’’ and for the sake of unity to ‘‘abstain from passing any resolutions about the Award or separatism.’’ 139 Rajwade, the Hindu honorary secretary of the aiwc, wrote to Shah Nawaz in her personal capacity: ‘‘I cannot appreciate the reasoning by which you arrive at the conclusion that unity can be reached only if women forbear from any allusion to the award.’’ To the contrary, Rajwade thought it was important at this juncture for organized women to reproclaim ‘‘our faith that there should be no communal distinctions where women voters are concerned.’’ ‘‘If we are not

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prepared to demonstrate equality of opportunity amongst ourselves by deprecating communal differentiation,’’ she argued, ‘‘our demand for the recognition of the equality of the sexes would not only be weakened but I fear must fail.’’ 140 Rajwade’s argument may have been consistent, but her confidence in an abstract women’s politics that transcended communal differentiation ultimately aligned women’s collective agency with a reconstituted and unmarked Hindu hegemony. When Memorandum II adopted the demand for joint electorates (constituted territorially and consisting of all communities) as the sine qua non for the political representation of women, it completed the unraveling of the agonistic liberal consensus of Indian women’s suffrage. The original statement issued by the twenty-member joint franchise committee meeting in Bombay, which included Shah Nawaz, condemned at first only in general terms the ‘‘system of franchise and representation based on communal electorates and interests’’ as ‘‘highly detrimental to the progress of the Indian people as a whole and to that of women in particular.’’ 141 This was passed unanimously. Later Reddi added an amendment reiterating specifically the demand for joint electorates. Shah Nawaz objected. While she claimed personally to favor joint electorates, she feared that the demand for them might not be accepted ‘‘by certain sections of Muslim ladies in the Punjab pending settlement of the question of joint electorates between all the parties.’’ Shah Nawaz agreed to support Memorandum II with a request that her strong note of dissent against the inclusion of the words ‘‘joint electorates’’ be recorded. The demand for joint electorates for women, as Shah Nawaz recognized, put Muslim women in an especially tight spot because all the major Muslim political parties demanded separate electorates for Muslims. The inclusion of joint electorates in Memorandum II became immediately controversial. The issue was the subject of much debate within women’s organizations. When the resolution on joint electorates was first raised in the Lucknow session of the aiwc (December 1932–January 1933), it revealed that Muslim members were clearly divided on the issue.142 Five Muslim members dissented. Lady Wazir Hassan, who did not agree with the dissent of her fellow Muslim members, tried to answer their objections. She granted the small grievances that Muslim women had against the conference: the insufficient regard to the convenience of the ladies in purdah and the absence of a Muslim woman from the presidential chair of the conference for the last four years. Yet these, she felt, were nothing compared to the need for Hindu and Muslim women to work together, since their joint fate depended on it: ‘‘My Hindu brethren and sisters should fully realize that if they annoy Mussalmans, they can never form a national government in

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this country,’’ she argued. ‘‘Similarly the Mussalmans should know that they can never remain happy if they separate themselves from the Hindus.’’ 143 The division was itself evidence of the false choices the issue posed for the Muslim members of the aiwc. The aiwc’s refusal to give up the demand for joint electorates underwrote a majoritarianism that negated its own objectives. At least some Hindu members of the aiwc were sensitive to this baleful outcome. Hence Reddi’s flip-flop on Memorandum II. Even though she had proposed the amendment for the inclusion of the demand for joint electorates in Memorandum II, she started having grave doubts about it soon afterward. When the memorandum was circulated to the Standing Committee members of the aiwc for discussion in their respective constituencies, it revealed again the opposition from at least some Muslim members. Four of the Muslim members from the Karachi subcommittee of the Sindh constituency of the aiwc recorded their dissent on joint electorates. The Standing Committee members engaged in a flurry of exchanges on the constitutional niceties of dealing with the dissent of the Muslim members; they decided that both Shah Nawaz’s dissent at the joint franchise committee meeting at Bombay and that of the Karachi members of the aiwc should be recorded only in the minutes of the meetings and not be included in the memorandum itself.144 Reddi recognized the troubling implications of this decision; she refused, as chairwoman of the aiwc and secretary of the wia, to ratify Memorandum II under these conditions. The swirling controversy that delayed the ratification of Memorandum II centered precisely on the implications of the rule by ‘‘majority.’’ The decision of the majority, as Reddi recognized, was no substitute for a political settlement between the communities. Anandi Devi Khemchand the Standing Committee member from Sindh had advised a general plebiscite among women to demonstrate majority support for joint electorates and for Memorandum II.145 The issue, according to Reddi, was far more complicated than could be addressed by a general plebiscite among women. The Hindus, who were the majority in the population, generally favored joint electorates. ‘‘How can their women (Anglo Indians, Christians, etc.) demand for joint electorates when their men do not wish it?’’ 146 Reddi’s conditions for signing the memorandum were either to have the dissent of the Muslim members recorded in the memorandum itself or to drop the demand for joint electorates altogether. The opposition to these changes from the other members of the Standing Committee almost threatened the collapse of Memorandum II. Eventually Reddi acquiesced to the original demand for joint electorates for fear of losing the hard-won compromise

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of Memorandum II; the latter, unlike Memorandum I, offered special provisions for women to enhance their franchise and representation. Reddi gave up her objections to the majoritarianism in Memorandum II so as to press for the modified minimum demand of adult franchise for women in urban areas; this was designed as an alternative to the more reactionary government proposals for expanding women’s franchise on the basis of the husband’s property qualification. Opposition to the class inequities of the property qualifications in the women’s vote won out against the more difficult task of extricating the specific political demands of women from a majoritarian politics. Yet Reddi, while signing the memorandum, recognized the impossible terms of her own false choice on women’s suffrage. As a result, she seriously considered giving up the cause of women’s suffrage altogether to work full-time instead against religious communal divisions.147 The price of women’s suffrage under these terms was precisely this: the tacit identification of the collective politics of women as Hindu. Willy-nilly, then, women’s collective agency had been communalized. The final mordant outcome of this choice was the recasting of women’s agency in the course of the suffrage debate as upper caste. The brief opening in the campaign against the Sarda Act for the collaboration between the women’s movement and the anticaste movement, especially in Madras, was lost.148 The more that representatives of the women’s organizations insisted on the political universality of their cause, the more they became complicit with the interests of existing dominant groups. This logic had already been foreshadowed at the annual session of the aiwc in Madras (December 28, 1931–January 1, 1932). The highlight of this meeting was the approval of Memorandum I and its manifesto against anything less than universal adult franchise; but the more telling development at the meeting was the passage of another seemingly unrelated resolution. Hilla Rustomji Faridoonji sponsored a resolution for the removal of special schools for different religious denominations and castes, as well as for the removal of all caste distinctions, in the application forms for admission to educational institutions. These special concessions, she claimed, went against the aims of a conference that ‘‘stands for unity.’’ Especially in Madras, however, the concessions for disadvantaged and underrepresented castes were a hard-fought victory won by the non-Brahmin political mobilization in the province. Several women opposed Faridoonji’s resolution on the grounds that removing these distinctions would be detrimental to the progress of backward communities. Khadijah Begum Ferozuddin reminded the conference of the absence of depressed-class women from the conference and from its Reception Commit-

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tee. ‘‘The conference was no doubt a training ground,’’ she conceded, ‘‘but they had not done what they ought to have done’’ in recruiting women from the depressed classes.149 Amrit Kaur’s point that women of the depressed classes were not prevented from entering the hall and that there was ‘‘hardly any difficulty for any women belonging to that class joining the Reception Committee’’ was not sufficient to answer these concerns. Lilamani Naidu insisted that the lack of adequate safeguards for the depressed classes would perpetuate the relations of superiority and inferiority. ‘‘Only the autocrats and aristocrats,’’ she argued, could be ‘‘in favor of the resolution.’’ When the resolution nevertheless passed at the conference, it marked a controversial new direction within the Indian women’s organizations against preferential treatment for any group whatsoever: a disturbing repercussion of the suffrage debate’s emphasis on the unity and abstract universality of women. This new direction—the rejection of all special concession to groups in favor of an abstract equality—was given institutional recognition after Madras in the changes to the constitution of the Standing Committee of the aiwc. Hitherto the aiwc had acknowledged the need for special provisions for the inclusion of women from depressed classes who may not otherwise have been included at the conference.150 By the time of the Lothian Committee in 1933, however, the conference refused to make any distinctions officially among women. ‘‘We have eliminated the words ‘depressed classes.’ That does not exist in our vocabulary,’’ Amrit Kaur testified before the committee. This nominal shift, however, was no substitute for the much harder work of coalition building among women. When questioned about the number of depressed-class women in the aiwc, Amrit Kaur replied defensively. ‘‘It is difficult to say,’’ she argued, ‘‘that all our women are not depressed economically, politically, or even mentally.’’ 151 The claim of women themselves as a depressed class elided questions about the absence of depressed-class women from the women’s organizations, but even more importantly, the universality of women was used to challenge the coherence of depressed classes as a separate interest deserving special consideration as such in the reform constitution. This took the form of the substitution, as a sort of political screen, of the political demands of the depressed classes, by those of the women’s movement. Hence the presentation of the political demands of women as the model for the welfare of the depressed classes: ‘‘The only way to bring the Brahmins, the women and the pariahs together on a common platform,’’ Reddi (herself a non-Brahmin) argued, ‘‘is by enfranchising the women and the depressed classes on equal terms with

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others.’’ She was convinced that ‘‘if women and the depressed classes are given freedom, power, and responsibility,’’ they would ‘‘very soon learn how to rectify the present social evils.’’ 152 In response to the Lothian Committee’s questionnaire that asked about the representation of depressed classes, labor, and other special interests, the aiwc responded as follows: ‘‘Not wishing to make any distinctions between the people of India as a whole we are opposed to all the suggestions under this head.’’ According to the aiwc, ‘‘Our method will give the depressed classes and everybody equal rights and equal opportunities.’’ 153 These organizations proposed a women’s politics constituted solely on the terms of gender as ostensibly expansive enough to stand in for social groups oppressed in other terms. To be sure, organized women in their personal capacities were more sympathetic to the demands of the depressed classes than of religious groups.154 Hence the range of opinions expressed by individual women on the preferential treatment for depressed classes. Subbarayon, in her note to the report of the Lothian Committee, went the furthest in recognizing the disabilities suffered by the depressed classes and the need for special provisions for them as a group. She only added that an adequate number of women electors from the depressed classes should be included. ‘‘The mistake made in other communities,’’ she argued, ‘‘by allowing one-sided progress only, amongst men, should be avoided’’ among depressed classes.155 Others were willing to go at least as far as Malini Sukhtankar, the honorary organizing secretary of the aiwc. While presenting her organization’s more uncompromising view on special provisions for any group before the Lothian Committee, Sukhtankar recorded her own personal dissent on the question of the representation of the depressed classes. Even as she rejected reserved seats for women, she was willing to make an exception in the case of depressed classes as a temporary measure. In line with the position adopted by Gandhi and the Congress, moreover, she advocated for these seats to be filled under a system of joint electorates that did not separate the depressed classes from the general Hindu population.156 The dissenting views on the mode of representation for the depressed classes testify to the polarized and extremist choices forced by the very contours of the post–Mother India suffrage debate: that is, either the view of women’s interests as valid only within the collective interests of religious communities, or a view of them as entirely apart and separate from that of all other social relations. The dismal choices of this debate foreclosed the sort of critique of a Brahminical Hindu patriarchy that was briefly possible in the alliance of women and anticaste organizations in support of the Sarda Act. The retreat for the politics of gender after the Mayo controversy lay precisely

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in the tacit alignment of the ‘‘we’’ constituted by women as implicitly Hindu and upper caste. The loss for women’s politics becomes most poignant in the contradictory stands it forced on such longtime members of the Indian women’s movement as the Muslim activist Shah Nawaz. Shah Nawaz emerged out of the suffrage struggle alienated from her erstwhile colleagues in the women’s organizations. She suspected a Hindu ploy in the official demand of the major women’s organizations for joint electorates. Its intent, she feared, was to use the women’s seats to counter the slim statutory majority of 1 percent guaranteed for Muslim seats in the Punjab by the Communal Award.157 She challenged fellow Muslim aiwc members, especially stalwarts such as Shareefah Hamid Ali, for ignoring Muslim sentiments in standing by the demand of the women’s movement. Hamid Ali had testified (along with the Hindu Reddi and the Christian Amrit Kaur) on behalf of the official stand of the major Indian women’s organizations against separate religious-based electorates for women. Such an approach, Hamid Ali argued, would only bring communally minded women to the legislatures who would be too timid to challenge their communities in the cause of women. Shah Nawaz, while differing from Hamid Ali on this point, was equally critical of her community. Some of the arguments made on behalf of Muslim interests by its representatives before the Joint Select Committee, she argued, simply ignored the interests of Muslim women. By opposing the need for an expanded franchise and representation through special qualifications for women, these self-styled representatives of Muslim interests failed to take account of women’s representation. The position of Muslim women, like Shah Nawaz, was not easy. Shah Nawaz had learned her first lesson in both the difficulty and the necessity of cross-communal solidarity for the efficacy of a politics for women. By the 1940s, for example, the Muslim League had its own women’s organization, and Muslim women were resigning in considerable numbers from the aiwc. Yet Shah Nawaz, herself a pioneer in the new Muslim women’s organizations, reiterated the mantra that the Indian women’s movement embodied a unique crosscommunal solidarity in the public realm of colonial India.158 The persistence of this fraught claim even after evidence to the contrary was a poignant reminder of the importance of the critical distance between women and the primordial claims of community once made possible by the collective politics of women. This precarious distance was squandered by the subtle realignment of women’s agency in the suffrage debate with a reconstituted Hindu and upper-caste politics. The collective political agency of women thus emerged, owing to the vicissitudes of this conjuncture, as considerably compromised in its ability to provide a critique of the gender norms in the constitution of the collective identities of community.

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This deflection of the collective agency of women provoked some soulsearching in the immediate aftermath of the Government of India Act of 1935. The terms of this autocritique, focused entirely on the elite and middle-class orientation of the women’s movement, were itself revealing. Here lay a last, dubious political twist that obscured the full implications of the reorientation of women’s collective agency in the post–Mother India suffrage debates. The introduction to an important collection of essays by Indian women right after the Government of India Act of 1935 reveals this more unexpected legacy. ‘‘The feminist movement in India,’’ it begins, ‘‘has assumed such proportions that it is no longer possible to ignore.’’ Yet it also concedes that ‘‘it may justly be said that practically nothing has been done to solve the problems of the vast majority of women—the workers in the field and factory. So far the woman’s struggle and agitation . . . has merely emphasised the needs of women of a particular class.’’ 159 The mea culpa is striking.This self-criticism of the movement, not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous dismissal of the aiwc as a ‘‘tea-party organization,’’ focused on the neglect of an adequate economic perspective from the Indian women’s movement.160 The recognition of its limitations substituted for an adequate reckoning of the recasting of women’s collective agency. The implications of this narrowly focused criticism have been this: to elide the far more obdurate legacy of women’s agency in the normalization by default of the politics of dominant religious and caste groups. To be sure, women’s organizations in colonial India continued to show interest in cross-communal alliances and in anticaste campaigns as social problems; but the problems of caste and of religious minorities were increasingly framed as social and as the special burden of these groups. Herein lay the most ironic role of the collective political agency of women: as ideological cover for a unitary nationalist imagination that was implicitly a reconstituted male, Hindu, and upper-caste conception. Hence one last political unraveling that need not have been: a reconstituted community returned, refashioned by the imperatives of a renewed politics of the state, to trounce the possibilities created briefly in the Mayo controversy for an alternative political relationship between women and community.

Epilogue History, Memory, Event

A decade after the independence and partition of India in 1947, Mayo’s sinister appropriation of the nationalist slogan ‘‘Mother India’’ continued to cast a long shadow on collective national memory in India. Hence the mandarins at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of India found the title of a forthcoming film Mother India sufficiently suspicious to summon the script for review. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (likewise cautious about the forthcoming film) could miss the resonance of the film’s title with its infamous namesake from 1927. The team making the film dispatched the script along with a two-page letter dated September 17, 1955: ‘‘There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding,’’ they wrote, ‘‘in regard to our film production ‘Mother India’ and Mayo’s book. Not only are the two incompatible but totally different and indeed opposite.’’ In fact, as the letter went on to insist, ‘‘We have intentionally called our film ‘Mother India,’ as a challenge to this book, in an attempt to evict from the minds of the people the scurrilous work that is Miss Mayo’s book.’’ 1 The rest, as they say, is history: a page turned, a case closed. The phenomenal success of Mehboob Khan’s film Mother India (1957), arguably the most significant national epic produced by Bollywood (the heart of India’s mainstream film industry located in Bombay), ensured that the ghost of Katherine Mayo was eventually exorcised from the most famous nationalist catchphrase. For all this, it is useful to be reminded of the sheer serendipity of this outcome. The filmmaker’s alternative source of inspiration was actually another American writer, Pearl S. Buck, whose books such as The Good Earth (1931) and The Mother (1934) had inspired his oeuvre. Mehboob had seen Sidney Franklin’s Hollywood version of The Good Earth (1937), and The Mother had inspired his own film Aurat (Woman, 1940), which had served as an early version for his Mother India.2 Even the title Mother India had already been taken by an earlier Bombay film (1938). Yet Mehboob’s Mother India went on to become a poster child for the patriotism inspired by the new Indian nation-state. Even though the film could not be released on August 15, Independence Day,

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as originally planned, but opened in theaters in Bombay and Calcutta on October 25, 1957, it was accompanied with sufficient nationalist trappings. The movie became a box office sensation in India and also received considerable international fame. It was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category in 1958, only to lose by just one vote to Federico Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957). Legend has it, and it has been confirmed by some film scholars, that Mehboob’s Mother India was in continuous circulation in India as well as across the globe until about the mid-1990s, when the advent of cable tv, among other things, apparently altered the viewing habits of moviegoing audiences.3 The film guaranteed that the specter of Mother India was once again made available for nationalist purposes.4 By the same token, however, the film also cemented a mythologizing of the historical event of the Mayo controversy that downplayed its significance as a moment of rupture. The controversy was now enfolded within a nationalist narrative that affirmed a seemingly unbroken tradition of Mother India: the identification of the Indian woman as mother with the nation at large. To be sure, several scholars have examined both the film itself and the publicity surrounding the film to analyze this slippage between woman and nation, as well as the complex dynamics of the powerful character of woman/mother.They have also noted the contrast between the central character in the film (a strong and chaste Indian mother), played to great acclaim by the legendary film star Nargis, and Mayo’s portrait of Indian womanhood in her book. Mayo claimed that ‘‘Indian women of child-bearing age’’ could not ‘‘safely venture, without special protection, within reach of Indian men’’ (202); and, as wives, they ‘‘commonly experience marital use two and three times a day’’ (58).The Indian mother, according to Mayo, was at least partly responsible for this oversexualized state of affairs: she routinely practiced an ‘‘abuse’’ on her children—on the ‘‘girl ‘to make her sleep well,’ ’’ on ‘‘the boy ‘to make him manly’ ’’—that at least the boy was ‘‘apt to continue daily for the rest of his life.’’ Practically every child in India, Mayo insisted, ‘‘bears on its body the marks of this habit’’ (25–26). No sharper contrast to this image can be found than the mother played by Nargis in the film: on her sturdy shoulders rests a rehabilitation of both the calumniated Indian woman and the worthy Indian nation. Yet because the controversy over Mayo’s Mother India has been so little understood, the historical elision represented by the film’s metaphorical identification of women with the nation has gone largely unremarked: the forgetfulness regarding the strikingly new political identity invented for Indian women in the event. The example of Mehboob’s Mother India indeed charts the movement of the Mayo controversy from event to inert myth. The mythologizing of Mayo’s book had begun not long after the contours of a new nationalist settlement were estab-

250 Epilogue

lished in colonial India on the eve of the Second World War. As we have seen, the significance of Mayo’s book derived less from its intrinsic argument than from its ability to generate a massive international controversy: a controversy, indeed, that recast the polity/society nexus in India in terms of the imperatives of a unitary nation-state. The subsequent expedient belief in a unitary national community, however, was only one political tradition (out of a possible spectrum) for the reformulated relationship between the political and the social spheres.5 The range of alternative possibilities for realigning the relationship between the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘social,’’ still visible during the controversy, became delegitimized in its aftermath. The controversy, abstracted from its context, functions simply as a reminder of a long history of imperialist misrepresentations of India. Hence Katherine Mayo, as part of a long line of imperialist traducers of India, becomes a familiar character in a national plotline. The controversy itself is reinscribed in a national narrative where it stands in as a supposedly timeless lesson about the challenges to the honor of the nation as woman and the valiant attempts to redeem that honor. Yet this mythologizing of the actual controversy also does crucial ideological work. Not only does it erase the contribution of the construction of a collective agency for women in the political and public realm in late colonial India, but, by the same token, it also represents a contingent politics of the nation as natural and inevitable by repressing all awareness that there were (or are) alternatives to that politics.6 The controversy over Mother India, for all its zigs and zags, is now part of a collective national memory in which its meaning has been retroactively fixed. Mayo’s Mother India has been frozen into a monumental ‘‘site of memory’’ (a lieu dé mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense) recalling the valiant struggles of the nation. Here the concept of ‘‘site’’ is meant precisely to capture the ‘‘crystallization of a vision of the past onto a specific place,’’ but also onto a ritual, book, or even an individual.7 The past that is being commemorated in Mayo’s Mother India is precisely one where women have timelessly and unproblematically served as symbols of community. The metamorphosis of Mayo’s book into such a nationalist site has been the result both of deliberate human effort and of the simplifying effects of time. The controversy it once generated has thus passed from being a historical event to a marblelike nationalist myth. The substantive concern in my account of the controversy over Mayo’s Mother India has been precisely to emphasize the historicity of this event. I take my cue from the efforts of several scholars to bring a historical approach, in a disciplinary sense, to the working of collective memory:

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figure 7. A movie poster for Mother India, 1957. Courtesy of Mehboob Productions Private Ltd., Mumbai, India.

Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective, is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes. Historical consciousness, by its nature, focuses on the historicity of events—that they took place then and not now, that they grew out of circumstances different from those that now obtain. Memory by contrast, has no sense of the passage of time; it denies the ‘‘pastness’’ of its objects and insists on their continuing presence.8

The importance of a historical perspective, as several scholars have argued, is to provide an indispensable resource for intervention in contemporary debates about the past.9 By offering a useful ‘‘alienation effect,’’ moreover, the knowledge offered by a specifically historical method pries open a range of political possibilities from the historical sedimentation resulting from dominant cultural practices. My emphasis on the controversy over Mother India as a moment of rupture has thus rested on reframing both the mythologizing of her book as a programmed and univocal site of national memory and the received historical narratives that ignore its significance for the political transitions of the period. The minute details of the political zigs and zags, often recoverable only through close analysis, highlight the sheer contingency of constellations involving the reconstituted politics of the nation. My case study of the Mayo controversy

figure 8. Walton Ford, Nila, 1999–2000. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 144 × 216 inches. Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, and the artist. Nila, which in Sanskrit refers to the pressure points on an elephant’s body, depicts an elephant in must, or a state of arousal. The elephant itself represents India, while the various birds on the elephant’s body incarnate the different attitudes represented by the many Westerners who over the years have tried to take the measure of India (Tunku Varadarajan, ‘‘Portrait of an Elephant,’’ India Today, June 5, 2000).

figure 9. Detail from Nila. Katherine Mayo is represented here as the jay, a ‘‘raucous and complaining sort of bird.’’ The artist also apparently alludes to Mayo’s supposedly hard-nosed approach toward the ‘‘facts.’’ Her book, she always insisted, was just a ‘‘spadesare-spades’’ revelation of the true picture of India.

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points to the conditions that facilitated the rhetorical invention of new political identities for women and its implications for alternative forms of political mobilizations and solidarities. As such, I also suggest a quite different genealogy in the collective politics of women for the nation-state formation and of the citizensubject in colonial India. This alternative genealogy makes clear that the ‘‘difference’’ of anticolonial nationalism was constituted not just in an inner/spiritual sphere where the cultural autonomy of community identities was asserted. It was constituted also in an outer/material sphere wherein a new construction of ‘‘women’’ provided the very basis for a national vocabulary of citizenship.10 The implications of this political moment, of course, were at best ambiguous.The possibilities briefly available in the controversy over Mother India were subsequently stifled as the collective agency of women was reoriented to usher a unitary national political imagination whose abstract citizen by default was Hindu, uppercaste, and male. Here history nevertheless offers the precedent for a strongly alternative conception of individual rights and of collective solidarity. The awareness of that precedent has the potential to change political equations in the present. I offer the micropolitical narratives that track the unfolding of this development in order to defy glib generalizations about women, nation, and citizenship. The unexpected dimensions of the Mayo controversy become visible through a proper accounting of the multiple scales of its operation in the interwar period. They demonstrate further that there was nothing inevitable about the political trajectory of the controversy. If the opportunities created in the controversy were the product of particular political processes, its subsequent recuperation was likewise produced in a changed political context and by different political choices. Hence the importance of emphasizing the various ins and outs of the controversy as it played out in the specific conjuncture of the interwar period for the opportunities it made available and for those it later foreclosed. The methodological emphasis on the details of the unfolding of the controversy is thus part of the substantive and theoretical investment of my argument: the demonstration of the controversy over Mother India as a moment of rupture in the reconstitution of the interwar imperial social formation. Subsequent accounts of this episode, by failing to attend either to transnational causalities or to the implications of the subnational reconfigurations of the social and the political, have contained its full significance. The scale of nation-based historiography tends to minimize its import. Historiography through the lens of the imperial social formation reveals the rupture for the break that it was.

Notes

introduction 1. Sociologists first popularized the concept of the ‘‘tipping point’’ in the 1970s in discussions of the flight of whites from northeastern cities to the suburbs with the arrival of African Americans.The concept was used to identify the moment when a neighborhood or community would ‘‘tip’’: a moment when the arrival of a sufficient number of African Americans would lead to an almost immediate flight of the remaining whites in the neighborhood. See Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000; Boston: Little Brown, 2002), esp. 3–14. The term, of course, has now acquired the status of a cliché; see William Safire, ‘‘On Language: Tipping; The Point of No Return,’’ New York Times Magazine, July 27, 2003, 15. 2. See Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927; and London: Jonathan Cape, 1927); Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988); and Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). My aim, of course, is not to suggest any similarity between these books but to draw attention to the huge controversy that each created. For a discussion of the Rushdie controversy, see Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989); and Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayotollah, and the West (New York: Carol, 1990). For the Bell Curve debates, see Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: Historical Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Book, 1995); and Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 3. For a newly edited and annotated reprint of the book, along with an extensive introduction, see Mrinalini Sinha, ed., Selections from Mother India (New Delhi: Kali Press, 1998), 1–64; reprinted as Katherine Mayo’s ‘‘Mother India’’ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–62. I have eschewed a detailed analysis of the content of Mother India here, as it is not directly relevant to the argument that I make. For discussion of the multiple contexts for the invocation of the nation as ‘‘mother’’ in India, see the following: Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 20–27, 1990, ws65–ws71; Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Nationalist Iconography: Images of Women in Nineteenth Century Bengali Literature,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, November 21, 1987, 2011–15; Samita Sen, ‘‘Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal,’’ Gender and History 5, no. 2 (summer 1993): 231–33; Indrani Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘‘Mother India and Mother Victoria: Motherhood and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,’’ South Asia Research 12, no. 1 (May 1992); 20–37; C. S. Lakshmi, ‘‘Mother, Mother-Community and MotherPolitics in Tamil Nadu,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 20–27, 1990, ws72–ws83;

256 Notes to Introduction

4.

5.

6.

7.

Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘‘Virgin Mother, Beloved Other: The Erotics of Tamil Nationalism in Colonial and Post-colonial India,’’ Thamyris 4, no. 1 (spring 1997): 9–39; Sugata Bose, ‘‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture,’’ in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–75; Charu Gupta, ‘‘The Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India: ‘Bharat Mata,’ ‘Matri Bhasha’ and ‘Gau Mata,’ ’’ Economic and Political Weekly, November 10, 2001, 4291–99; and Sadan Jha, ‘‘The Life and Times of Bharat Mata: Nationalism as Invented Religion,’’ Manushi 142 (May–June 2004): 34–38. See Moeder Indie (Britsch Indie), Dutch translation by J. de Gruyter (Amsterdam, 1927); Moder Indien, Danish translation by Gudrun Gregersen (Koberhavn, 1930); Moder Indien, Swedish translation by Else Kleen and Evert Berggren (Stockholm, 1929); L’Inde avec les anglais, French translation by Théo Varlet (Paris: Les Document Bleus Notre Temps, no. 4, 1929); India Madre, Italian translation by Roberto Palmarocchi (Firenze: Collezione ‘‘Viaggi ed esplorazioni,’’ 1933); Mutter Indien, German translation by Dr. Dora Muzky (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societas-Drukei gmbh, 1929); ‘Ima Hodu, Hebrew translation by A. Reuveni (Tel Aviv: Mitspeh, 1933). Translations of the entire book, or substantial portions of the book as part of a general response to Mayo, also appeared in some of the following Indian-language publications: Madar-i-Hind, Urdu translation by Mahbub ‘Alam Munshi (Lahore: Supply Store, n.d.); Mother India [in Urdu] (Lahore, 1929); Mother India, Urdu translation by Muhammad Abdal Rashid Khan (Delhi, 1928); Bharat Mata m’h Jawab, Urdu translation by Mirza Muhammad ‘Abad al-Hamid (Lahore: ‘Abad alHamid, 1928); Madar Indiya, ya’ni, Madar-i Hind Mis Kathra’in Mayu Ki Mashhur Ma’Ruf Kitab Madar Indiya Ka Mukammal Salis Urdu Tarjamah (Lahaur: Sapla’i Istaur, n.d.); Inthiya Mata [in Tamil] (Madras: K. S. Muttaya, 1928); S. G. Varti, Miss Mayo Khandan [in Marathi] (Mumbai: Sister India Office, 1928); Dattareya Ganesa Sarlokara, BharataMateci Sreshthata: Arthat Meyocya Asatya Vidhanance Khandana [in Marathi] (Mumbai: Bharata Guarava Granthamala, 1928); Meyo Grantha Khandamu [inTelugu] (Madras: G. S. Sastri, 1928); Uma Nehru, Miss Mayo Ki Mother India [Sachitra Hindu Anuwad] Jis Me Srimati Uma Nehru Likhit ‘‘Bhumika’’ Tatha Paschimiya Samajyavad Ke Vishey Me ‘‘Miss Mayo Se Do Do Bate’’ [in Hindi] (Allahabad: Hindustan Press, 1928); Jadunath Majumdar, Meyogita [in Bengali] (Calcutta: Sudhir Press, 1928); and Upendra Kumar Kar, Visva-Janani Bharat-Mata [in Bengali] (n.p., 1928). Letter from Harcourt, Brace and Co. to Moyca Newell (Mayo’s partner and companion on her trip to India), June 23, 1955, folder 96, series 1, box 11, Katherine Mayo Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter cited as KM Papers). See ‘‘Newspapers and Weeklies That Have Devoted a Column or More, or Three, Notices to ‘Mother India,’ ’’ folder 246, series 4, box 46, KM Papers. The list appears to have been compiled by Mayo for Liberty magazine. Dr. Victor G. Heiser, director of the National Health Division, Rockefeller Foundation, informed Mayo that the private literary advisor of His Majesty had endorsed the book; see Heiser to Mayo, November 11, 1927, folder 40, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. The viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, confirmed in a conversation with Cornelia Sorabji, a barrister in the Calcutta High Court, that the king, the prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and the secretary of state for India, Lord Birkenhead, had all either read, or were in the process of reading, Mayo’s book; see Sorabji to Elena Bruce Richmond, October 12, 1927, Cor-

Notes to Introduction

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

257

respondence and Personal Papers, no. 157, Cornelia Sorabji Papers, Oriental and India Office Collections (oioc), British Library, London (hereafter cited as CS Papers). For the Broadway musical, see the correspondence between Madame Nazimova and Mayo; and Walter J. Kingsley of Palace Theatre, New York, and Mayo, both in folder 41, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. The Government of India was forced to take notice of concerns over the troubling propaganda of the play; see files 25–124 of 1928, fo 395/429, Foreign Office, Embassies and Consulates, United States of America (News), National Archives: Public Record Office (pro), Kew (hereafter cited as fo News Files). For Hollywood’s interest, see Raymond Crosell of Curtis Brown Ltd. to Mayo, October 19, 1932, folder 62, series 1, box 7, KM Papers. See ‘‘The Legend of Mother India,’’Times (London), March 27, 1928, 17, 28; and March 28, 1928, 17. The immediate context for these reports was the controversy over the decision of the Times not to publish a letter of protest (August 9, 1927) against Mother India from distinguished Indians in London like the Indian Liberal Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Sir Atul Chandra Chatterjee, Sir Muhammad Rafique, and others; see report in Statesman, August 19, 1927, 13; and August 20, 1927, 13. The letter was subsequently reprinted in other papers; see Manchester Guardian, Aug. 19, 1927, 16; and Leader, Aug. 19, 1927, 15. For such comparisons of Mayo’s book, see Mrs. D. C. Austin to Mayo, August 12, 1933, folder 66, series 1, box 8, KM Papers; and the claims made by Mayo’s friend and collaborator Harry Field in his After Mother India: Being an Examination of Mother India, of the First Nine Volumes Written in Reply Thereto, and of Other Criticisms, Together with Certain New Evidence Mostly from Indian Sources (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), ix. Gandhi’s famous review of the book, under the title ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report,’’ was published in his paperYoung India (September 15, 1927), reprinted inThe Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 34 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1969), 539–47. Gandhi’s review was also widely reprinted in the liberal media in the United States; see ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report,’’ The Nation, November 2, 1927, 488, 490; and Living Age, December 15, 1927, 1083–85; as well as in numerous volumes in response to Mayo. K. L. Gauba, Uncle Sham (Ludhiana: Times of India, 1929). Gauba claims that during the week of the annual session of the Indian National Congress alone he sold nearly twenty thousand copies of the book. The book had already made him enough money by 1930– 31 to build a two-story home in Lahore; see K. L. Gauba, 4th Session, April 3, 1970, Oral History Archives, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (nmml), New Delhi. For a report on the Town Hall meeting in New York, see ‘‘Hindus Here Burn Miss Mayo’s Book,’’ New York Times, January 22, 1928, 3. For a firsthand account of the event from an Indian, who was arrested on the scene, see Jan Kothanda Ram, ‘‘Forgive Miss Mayo,’’ Letter to the Editor, The Nation, February 22, 1928, 211. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988). So, for example, Foucault shows that the prison and the politics of prison reform both coexist in a shared conceptual paradigm; and, as such, prison protests do not mark a break from the past. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1977), 268–71. Also see Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context,’’ in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–24. The concept of events has received the most extensive theoretical elaboration recently in the work of Deleuze; see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans.

258 Notes to Introduction

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). For the gloss on the Deleuzian concept of the event, I have relied on Paul Patton, ‘‘The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events,’’ Theory and Event 1, no. 1 (1997), http://muse.edu/journals/theory and event/v001/1.1patton.html; and Eric Fassin, ‘‘Sexual Events: From Clarence Thomas to Monica Lewinsky,’’ trans. James Swenson, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2002): 127–58. The argument that nationalist responses to imperialist critiques of indigenous society occupied a shared conceptual field has been variously made; versions of this argument may be seen in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). See Wendy Brown, ‘‘The Time of the Political,’’ Theory and Event 1, no. 1 (1997) http:// muse.edu/journals/theory and event/v001/1.1brown.html. For Pierre Nora, the modern event is defined precisely in its relation to the mass media; see Nora, ‘‘The Return of the Event,’’ trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), 427–36. The concept of the événement matrice is from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘‘Event and Long-Term Structure in Social History’’ (1972), in Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, trans. Ben and Siân Reynolds (1973; Brighton: Harvester, 1979), 111–32. The Annales school, of course, is associated with the most self-conscious rejection of ‘‘event history.’’ Yet implicit in Ferdinand Braudel’s own work, and more explicit in many of the later works of this school, is an attention to events in the unfolding of social structures; see Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (1949; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and especially Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: G. Braziller, 1978). My concern, however, is not with rehearsing the historiographical debate between ‘‘event’’ and ‘‘structure’’ but in suggesting a productive combination of the two. I also find Colwell’s discussion of the genealogical method, as drawn from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze, useful in this case for providing a counternarrative of the controversy over Mother India as generative of structural transformations. See C. Colwell, ‘‘Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Events, Genealogy,’’ Theory and Event 1, no. 2 (1997), http://muse.edu/journals/theory and event/v001/2.1colwell.html. Also see Michele Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Beuchard, trans. Donald F. Beuchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–63; and Thomas Flynn, ‘‘Foucoult’s Mapping of History’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutling (1984; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–46. My point here is similar to what Roland Bleiker calls ‘‘transversal’’ politics; see Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a discussion of Mayo’s motives in Mother India, see Manoranjan Jha, Katherine Mayo and India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971); and Sinha, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, 1–62. My point here is akin to what Mary Poovey alludes to via the concept of the ‘‘social imaginary.’’ Following Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, she invokes the con-

Notes to Introduction

23.

24.

25. 26.

259

cept of the social imaginary to refer ‘‘not to particular representations or actions but to the foundational assumptions about what counts as an adequate representation or practice in the first place.’’ The social imaginary, then, ‘‘is a concept that modern analysts use to describe the most foundational conceptual conditions of possibility for a society’s operation, even if the society in question lacks a theoretical formulation that describes its operation in the abstract for its participants.’’ See Poovey, ‘‘The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy,’’ Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 125–45, esp. 130–33. The essay is reprinted in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2002), 44–61. My point is that the Mayo controversy set in motion a new social imaginary for the conception of society in India. I am drawing on Gyan Prakash, ‘‘The Colonial Genealogy of Society: Community and Political Modernity in India,’’ in Joyce, The Social in Question, 81–96. The nature of the colonial state, and its difference from the liberal bourgeois state, has been the subject of much controversy in colonial Indian historiography. Ranajit Guha makes the argument about the ‘‘externality’’ of the state in his ‘‘Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,’’ in Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. R. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 210–309; and its further elaboration in Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Christopher A. Bayly emphasizes continuity by demonstrating the ways in which the early colonial state insinuated itself in the Indian polity; see his Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For other useful discussions, see Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002). I have found especially useful the emphasis on the specificity of particular historical contexts in the working of the state; see Radhika Singha, ‘‘Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India,’’ Studies in History, n.s., 16, no. 2 (2000): 151–98; and her ‘‘Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject,’’ Studies in History 19, no. 1 ( January–June 2003): 87–126. Prakash, ‘‘Colonial Genealogy of Society.’’ For a slightly different argument about the constitution of the ‘‘public’’ in colonial India, see Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); and also Amir Ali, ‘‘Evolution of the Public Sphere in India,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, June 30, 2001, 2419–25. The anomalies are demonstrated in D. A. Washbrook, ‘‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,’’ Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 649–721. Prakash, ‘‘Colonial Genealogy of Society,’’ 84. Prakash’s argument both builds on, and departs from, the pioneering work of Partha Chatterjee on civil society and community in colonial India; see especially Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and ‘‘On Civil and Political Society in Postcolonial Democracies,’’ in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 165–78. For other discussions of the colonial construction of ‘‘community,’’ see Freitag, Collective Action and Community; Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘‘The Imaginary Institution of India,’’ in Subaltern Studies, vol. 7, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (New

260 Notes to Introduction

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–39; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and, for its subsequent legacy for the independent nation-states in South Asia, Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). The historicity and modernity of these supposedly primordial ‘‘communities’’ in late colonial India are widely acknowledged. I do not get into the arguments about the extent to which these community identities were constituted by colonial strategies of rule or reflected the adoption and adaptation of precolonial communities; for the former view, see Kaviraj, ‘‘The Imaginary Institution of India,’’ and for the latter, see C. A. Bayly, ‘‘Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony,’’ South Asia 28, no. 2 (December 1994): 1–25. For a parallel argument about the colonial creation of the ‘‘decentralized despotism’’ of communities, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an example of how a pan-religious community identity was constituted under colonial conditions, see Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (New York: Routledge, 2000). Also see Kumkum Sangari, ‘‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies,’’ parts 1 and 2, Economic and Political Weekly, December 23, 1995, 3287–3310, and December 30, 1995, 3381–89.There is, of course, a vast body of scholarship on the classificatory regime of the colonial state in India; for an early pioneering study, see Bernard Cohn, ‘‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,’’ in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 224–54. I owe this point about the gendered constitution of the collective identity of the community as implicitly ‘‘male’’ to Nivedita Menon, ‘‘Women and Citizenship,’’ in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 241–66. She draws on the important work of Partha Chatterjee’s argument about the construction of an ‘‘inner’’/spiritual and ‘‘outer’’/material sphere by nationalist elites in the context of their negotiation with modernity; see his ‘‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,’’ American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 622–33; ‘‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,’’ in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. K. Sangari and S. Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 233–53; and The Nation and Its Fragments. For the contradictory legacy of the colonial legal system in India, see Washbrook, ‘‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’’; and Singha, ‘‘Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power.’’ For an overview of its implications in terms of gender, see Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996); and Archana Parashar, Women and Family Law Reform in India: Uniform Civil Code and Gender Equality (New Delhi: Sage, 1992). I owe this point to Singha, ‘‘Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power.’’ The Child Marriage Restraint Act, or the Sarda Act, as it was popularly called, was reincarnated from a civil to a penal law, thereby making it possible for it to be extended to all communities and castes in India; see Government of India, Home Department, Judicial Branch, 1024/26, 1926, National Archives of India (nai), New Delhi (hereafter

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33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

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cited as Home, Judicial). There were two earlier attempts at a uniform law on marriage when some Indian legislators in the 1920s tried to propose an amendment that would extend the Special Marriage Act (1872), which hitherto applied only to the Brahmo community, to all communities in India. However, nothing came of these earlier efforts; see Home, Judicial, 268/27, 1927, and Home, Judicial, 294, 1927. Report of the Second All India Women’s Conference, Delhi, 7–10 Feb., 1928 (Mangalore: Kanara Printing Press, n.d.), 25. My point is precisely to account for the conditions under which a crystallization of group feeling—what Roger Brubaker calls ‘‘groupism’’—occurred for women in colonial India. See Roger Brubaker, ‘‘Ethnicity without Groups,’’ in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Society (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 470–92. I borrow the idea of the universality of women from Étienne Balibar, ‘‘Ambiguous Universality,’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (1995): 165–87. See also Gail Pearson, ‘‘Nationalism, Universalization, and the Extended Female Space,’’ in The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, ed. Gail Minault (Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books, 1981), 174–91. See Denise Riley, ‘‘Am I That Name?’’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). I draw on Scott’s work to demonstrate the different foundations of the dilemma for Indian feminism. The tension between individual rights for ‘‘women’’ and the collective rights of ‘‘communities’’ in India has mostly been addressed in the context of contemporary political debates about the relationship between the state, minority communities, and gender justice; see Veena Das, ‘‘Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights,’’ in Gender and Politics in India, ed. Nivedita Menon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 441–72; Menon, ‘‘Women and Citizenship’’; Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, ‘‘Between Community and State: The Question of Women’s Rights and Personal Laws,’’ in Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 108–29; Kumkum Sangari, ‘‘Politics of Diversity’’; Sangari, ‘‘Gender Lines: Personal Laws, Uniform Laws, Conversion,’’ Social Scientist 27, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1999): 17–61; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘‘Women between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates in India,’’ Social Text 18, no. 4 (winter 2000): 55–82; and Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). The most familiar articulation of this argument, of course, is in Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and her ‘‘The Fraternal Social Contract,’’ in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (New York: Verso, 1988), 101–28. For an opposing argument of the potential of liberal rights, see Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); and Nanette Funk, ‘‘Feminist Critiques of Liberalism: Can They Travel East? Their Relevance in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union,’’ Signs 29, no. 3 (spring 2004): 695–726. For a critique of the language of rights from within Indian feminist contexts, see Nivedita Menon, Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics beyond the Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). See Uday Mehta, ‘‘Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,’’ in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of

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38.

39.

40.

41.

California Press, 1997), 59–86; and his Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). I have also found very useful the warnings about the limits and possibilities of a critical reconstruction of liberalism in Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Reconstructing Liberalism? Notes toward a Conversation between Area Studies and Diasporic Studies,’’ Public Culture 10, no. 3 (1998): 457–81; and Ajay Skaria, ‘‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (fall 2002): 955–86. The most compelling argument about the limits of the concept of ‘‘civil society’’ in colonial India is to be found in Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of what he calls ‘‘political society’’; see his ‘‘On Civil and Political Society in Postcolonial Democracies’’; and his ‘‘Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non-Christian World,’’ in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 35–48. For a parallel argument about the alternative constitution of modern political subjectivities in India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Modern Subject in Bengal,’’ in Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 49–86; and ‘‘The Subject of Law and the Subject of Narratives,’’ in his Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 101–14. For skepticism about the liberal language of rights and the institution of the nation-state, see especially Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). I am drawing from Sumit Sarkar’s critique of these trends; see Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82–108. Nivedita Menon’s criticism of the language of rights is more subtle, but even as I share her argument that the emergence of a rights discourse in colonial India was not ‘‘unambiguously and universally emancipatory,’’ I still find useful the attempts at its appropriation and revision in historical practice. See Menon, Recovering Subversion, 26–65. For a feminist reappraisal of the state in the Indian context, see Sunder Rajan, Scandal of the State, esp. 1–37. This argument in the context of the history of the West has been stated most forcefully in Riley, ‘‘Am I That Name?’’ Also see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). Mary E. John hints at the need for a similar exploration of women’s politics in the contexts of the changing contours of the political and the social in India that is suggestive for my argument; see her ‘‘Alternative Modernities? Reservations and Women’s Movement in 20th Century India,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 28, 2000, ws22–ws-30. I have also learned from Antoinette Burton, ‘‘Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History,’’ Social History 26, no. 1 ( January 2001): 60–71. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Enfranchised Selves: Women, Culture and Rights in NineteenthCentury Bengal,’’ Gender and History 13, no. 3 (November 2001): 546–65; ‘‘A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal,’’ Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (fall 2000): 601–22; and her Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). For historical essays on the multiple sources for the language of rights and justice in the Indian subcontinent, see Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha, eds., Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). For a different take on the language of ‘‘rights’’ in colonial India, see Rochona Majumdar, ‘‘History of Women’s Rights: A Non-historicist Reading,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, May 31, 2003, 2130–34.

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42. I borrow the phrase from Homi K. Bhabha, but the responsibility for its elaboration is my own; see Bhabha, ‘‘Liberalism’s Sacred Cow,’’ in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 79–84. The phrase comes originally from John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). I have also found useful the discussion in Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); and John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 43. The argument about the masculine representation of the republican and liberal traditions of citizenship in modern Western culture has been made, for example, in Karen Hagemann and Stefan Dudink, ‘‘Outline for an International and Interdisciplinary Symposium,’’ unpublished paper; see also the various papers presented at the symposium ‘‘Negotiating Citizenship: Concepts and Representations of Masculinity in the Creation of Modern Western Political Culture,’’ at the University of Trier, Germany, July 3–5, 2003. Also see Joan Scott’s argument in her Only Paradoxes to Offer about the ‘‘maleness’’ of the universality of the abstract individual in the republican tradition. 44. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 133. 45. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). For Chakrabarty’s earlier formulation of this problem of the universalization of European history as History, see his ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’’ Representations 37 (winter 1992): 1–26; and ‘‘Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,’’ Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (October 1992): 337–57. I am grateful to Professor Chakrabarty, who in the course of several conversations has helped me refine my thinking about the challenge of writing postcolonial histories. I bear full responsibility, however, for my reading of his important argument about provincializing Europe. It provides the basis for my debt to, and my difference from, Chakrabarty’s intervention. 46. It too easily allows for arguments of the singularly European provenance of universality as has been articulated by Slavoj Žižek in ‘‘A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism,’’ Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 988–1009. My critique of this position draws on the following debate: William David Hart, ‘‘Slavoj Žižek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion,’’ Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002): 553–78; Žižek, ‘‘I Plead Guilty—but Where Is the Judgment?’’ Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002): 579–83; and Hart, ‘‘Can a Judgment Be Read? A Response to Slavoj Žižek,’’ Nepantla: Views from South 4, no. 1 (2003): 191–94. 47. Tani Barlow elaborates a link between colonialism and modernity that refuses to construe modernity as prior to colonialism and thus ‘‘to assume, wrongly, the existence of an originary and insurmountable time lag separating colonialism from modernity.’’ Her use of the term ‘‘colonial modernity’’ emphasizes instead that the ‘‘modernity of nonEuropean colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity.’’ See Tani E. Barlow, ‘‘Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity,’ ’’ in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–20. The point has been demonstrated by Timothy Mitchell in ‘‘The Stage of Modernity,’’ in Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 1–34; also see Saurabh Dube, ‘‘Introduction: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities,’’ Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 197–219; and Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 310–28. For an example of the colonial arena that tested

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48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

the universalizing language of modern rights, see the classic account of the French and Haitian revolutions in C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Touissant L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); and also see Laurent Dubois, ‘‘La Republique Metisse: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,’’ Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 15–34; and Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). I am suggesting, pace Partha Chatterjee, that ‘‘difference’’ was a viable criteria even in the outer or ‘‘material’’ domain. In other words, there was more to nationalism as a political movement than merely to model itself on the ‘‘modular’’ form of European and American nation-states. I owe this point to Sugata Bose, ‘‘Post-colonial Histories of South Asia: Some Reflections,’’ Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 133–46. For Chatterjee, see The Nation and Its Fragments, esp. 3–13. See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘‘Manly Englishman’’ and the ‘‘Effeminate Bengali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), esp. 2–10. For subsequent elaborations of the concept, see also ‘‘Teaching Imperialism as a Social Formation, Radical History Review 67 (1997): 175–86; and ‘‘Mapping an Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,’’ Signs 25, no. 4 (2000): 1077–82; reprinted in Feminisms at a Millennium, ed. Judith A. Howard and Carolyn Allen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 82–87. For a parallel model for a systemic and interdependent understanding of the British Empire, see Tony Ballantyne’s concept of the ‘‘webs of empire’’ in Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2002). I am drawing here from Tom Bottomore, ‘‘Social Formation,’’ in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 444. For the structural Marxist understanding of social formation, see Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Autocritique of Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Macmillan, 1977). Together these two points, then, suggest that the heuristic of the imperial social formation is more than a warmed-over world-systems analysis. I take the point of postcolonial scholarship, especially the work of the subaltern school of Indian historiography, which has both highlighted the working of the ‘‘rule of colonial difference’’ in modern society and been wary of collapsing all of modern history simply within the structures of capitalism. For the former point, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, esp. 10; and for the latter see Gyan Prakash, ‘‘Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 ( January 1992): 168– 84; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,’’ Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 15–29; also reprinted in Economic and Political Weekly, February 28, 1998, 473–79. For Chakrabarty’s later emphasis on the relation between the history of the global expansion of capitalism and ‘‘minority histories,’’ see his ‘‘The Two Histories of Capital,’’ in Provincializing Europe, 47–72. Yet my heuristic differs from these postcolonial approaches by its insistent focus on a global systemic mode of analysis. I have found here Hennessy’s discussion of a ‘‘global social analytic’’ very useful. See Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1993). The term ‘‘discourse,’’ as used by Foucault, refers not just to ‘‘things said’’ but to ‘‘practice.’’ The crucial emphasis, then, is that ‘‘something is formed’’ in language. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972),

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54.

55.

56.

57.

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44–55; and ‘‘Politics and the Study of Discourse,’’ Ideology and Consciousness 3 (1978): 7– 26. I am indebted here to Hennessy’s discussion; see Hennessy, Materialist Feminism, chap. 2. The impact of the ‘‘cultural turn’’ has provoked by now a wide-ranging debate about the crisis of ‘‘social history’’; there have been numerous commentaries on history ‘‘after the social.’’ I see the impact of the ‘‘cultural turn,’’ following on recent arguments by Miguel Cabrera and Thomas Osborne, as not a crisis for social history but an opportunity for the field to renew and revitalize the concept of the social. See M. Cabrera, ‘‘Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism?’’ Social History 24, no. 1 (1999): 74–89; and T. Osborne, ‘‘History, Theory, Disciplinarity,’’ in Joyce, The Social in Question, 175– 90. For a different approach to negotiating with, and beyond, the ‘‘cultural turn,’’ see the introduction to Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 1–32. William H. Sewell Jr. expands on Anthony Giddens’s explication of ‘‘structures’’ as ‘‘both the medium and the outcome of the practices which constitute social systems,’’ to arrive at the following succinct definition: ‘‘We can speak of structures when sets of cultural schemas, distribution of resources, and modes of power combine in an interlocking and mutually sustaining fashion to reproduce consistent streams of social practice.’’ See Sewell Jr., ‘‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,’’ Theory and Society 25 (1996): 842; and Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1, Power, Property and State (London: Macmillan, 1981), 27. See Robert Wess, Kenneth Burke: Rhetoricity, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24. For my earlier attempt to work with Wess’s notion of ‘‘rhetorical realism,’’ see ‘‘The Lineage of the ‘Indian’ Modern: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act,’’ in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (New York: Routledge, 1999), 207–21. For some attempts to work with the concept of the ‘‘event’’ as a theoretical category in historical scholarship, see especially Sewell Jr., ‘‘Historical Events.’’ See also his ‘‘Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology,’’ inThe Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 245–80; and for a survey, see Peter Burke, ‘‘History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,’’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), 283–300. For some examples of engagements with an ‘‘event’’ as a theoretical category in colonial Indian historiography, see Vinay Lal, ‘‘The Incident of the ‘Crawling Lane’: Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919,’’ Genders 16 (spring 1993): 35–60; Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). For the idea of rupture and discontinuity, see Olivia Harris, ‘‘Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity,’’ History Workshop Journal 57 (spring 2004): 161–74. My point about historical analysis has certain parallels with Frederick Cooper’s argument in his new book. Unfortunately, it was published only after my manuscript went to press. See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See Duncan J.Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: W.W. Norton,

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58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

2003), esp. 246. The indebtedness of my analysis to Watts’s ‘‘new science of networks’’ will be obvious. I find Watts’s focus on a networked world a useful way of thinking about the dynamism of a continually evolving imperial structure that should be understood not as a static product of social forces but in terms of the very processes of interconnections that led to its creation. Yet his open-ended conception of a connected world is also ultimately of limited value in understanding the inequalities of power that underwrite the operations of imperialism. Certain contemporary accounts of globalization and of the British Empire are guilty of recuperating the emphasis on interconnected global histories for an astonishing evacuation of any attention to uneven power relations. For the fashionable argument that the age of imperialism is over and we live in a new global era characterized by the workings of a decentered ‘‘empire,’’ see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). For a useful and timely critique of similar trends in revisionist historical accounts of the working of the British Empire, see N. Dirks, Castes of Mind, esp. 303–16; and Edward Said, ‘‘Always on Top,’’ London Review of Books 25, no. 6 (March 2003). I am drawing again on Bleiker’s argument about ‘‘transversal forms of dissent’’ that are not immediately identifiable but work indirectly and slowly to produce change; see Bleiker, Popular Dissent, esp. 281. Sewell Jr., ‘‘Historical Events,’’ 841–81. See Sewell Jr., ‘‘Historical Events,’’ and ‘‘Three Temporalities,’’ 246–80. For other useful attempts to theorize historical events, see Marshall Sahlins, ‘‘The Return of the Event, Again: With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great FijianWarof 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa,’’ in Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 37–99. See Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 130; for the political changes of this period, I am also drawing on Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (1983; New Delhi: Macmillan, 1990), 254–348. Here I am distinguishing my approach from that of the early ‘‘Cambridge school’’ of Indian historiography. Historians of this school tended to dismiss the ideological motives of nationalist leaders in India and to interpret all Indian politics as a direct reflex of administrative changes introduced by the British. The classic early formulation of this approach in relation to India was Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). For two different critical assessments of this school, see Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘‘Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics,’’ Historical Journal 22, no. 3 (1979): 747–63; and M. S. S. Pandian, ‘‘Beyond Colonial Crumbs: Cambridge School, Identity Politics and Dravidian Movement(s),’’ Economic and Political Weekly, February 18–25, 1995, 385–91. See Sarkar, Modern India, 257. See Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 142. The point has been developed in Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Also see Ayesha Jalal, ‘‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity,’’ in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in Colonial India, ed. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 76–103. The two most famous examples of the ‘‘political turn’’ are Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (New York:

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Cambridge University Press, 1990). My focus on an imperial social formation, as will become clear, distinguishes my approach from much of the new political history. I have been influenced in my thinking about political history by William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘‘The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,’’ Journal of American History 73, no. 3 (December 1986): 585–600; and Susan Pedersen, ‘‘What Is Political History Now?’’ inWhat Is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 36–56. 66. I refer here, following on Foucault’s conception of power, to the process by which the project of a mainstream Indian nationalism became normative. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, and his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

1. a transitional moment 1. See the preface to Mother India, by Katherine Mayo (London: Howard Baker and Remploy, 1970). Mayo’s book was first published in the United States in May 1927; see K. Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). It was published in the U.K. in July 1927; see K. Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). 2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). For some examples of analyses of the nexus of colonial knowledge and power in India, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); C. A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); and Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3. For a history of ‘‘facts’’ as a social construction, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. I am drawing here from P. K. Dutta’s emphasis on what he calls the ‘‘excess of the social over the ideological.’’ The acknowledgment of this gap allows Dutta to unpack the ideological mobilization of ‘‘abductions’’ in the communal discourses of the 1920s in Bengal. See Dutta, ‘‘ ‘Abductions’ and the Constellation of a Hindu Communal Bloc in Bengal of the 1920s,’’ Studies in History, n.s., 14, no. 1 (1998): 37–88, esp. 40; and Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. See Manoranjan Jha, Katherine Mayo and India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971). 6. The classic example of imperialist-feminist appropriations of Mother India is in Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), esp. 119–29. For two contrasting views on Daly’s endorsement of Mayo, see Renuka Sharma and Purushottama Bilimoria, ‘‘Where Silence Burns: Sati (Suttee) in India, Mary Daly’s Gynocritique, and Resistant Spirituality,’’ in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, ed. Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), 323–48; and Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and ThirdWorld Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1997), 43–80. William W. Emilson, more re-

268 Notes to Chapter 1 cently, tries to make a case for rehabilitating Mother India in the name of the women of India; see his ‘‘Gandhi and Mayo’s ‘Mother India,’ ’’ South Asia 10, no. 1 (1987): 69– 82; and for the debate it provoked, see P. Athiyaman and A. R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘‘On Gandhi, Mayo, and Emilson,’’ South Asia 12, no. 2 (1989): 83–88; and W. Emilson, ‘‘A Note on Mayo, Athiyaman and Venkatachalapathy,’’ South Asia 12, no. 2 (1989): 88–93. Yet the view that Mayo’s book was basically a feminist contribution, despite her imperialist and racist views, has enjoyed far wider currency; for some examples see Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, ‘‘Gender and Imperialism in British India,’’ South Asia Research 5, no. 2 (November 1985): 147–65; Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (New York: Random House, 1990), esp. 21–22; and Liz Wilson, ‘‘Who Is Authorized to Speak? Katherine Mayo and the Politics of Imperial Feminism in British India,’’ Journal of Indian Philosophy 25 (1997): 139–51. 7. See Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘‘Sister India or Mother India? Margaret Noble and Katherine Mayo as Interpreters of the Gender Roles of Indian Women,’’ paper presented at the Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Wellesley College, 1987. I am grateful to the author for sharing this paper with me. Also see Veena Oldenburg, ‘‘Review: ‘May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons,’ ’’ Manushi 84 (September–October 1994): 39–43; Nina Mehta, ‘‘Stranger in a Strange Land,’’ Women’s Review of Books 8, no. 3 (1990): 19–20; Judy Whitehead, ‘‘Tropical Medicine and Inscriptions of Stigma: The Debate over Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India,’ ’’ Canadian Women’s Studies 13, no. 1 (November 1992): 47–50; Mrinalini Sinha, ‘‘Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice,’’ Journal of Women’s History 6 (1994): 6–44; Sandhya Shetty, ‘‘(Dis)figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor, Metonymy,’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (fall 1995): 50–79; Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s ‘‘Other’’ Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (London: Routledge, 1995), 95–100; Joanna Liddle and Shirin Rai, ‘‘Feminism, Imperialism and Orientalism: The Challenge of the Indian Woman,’’ Women’s History Review 7, no. 4 (1998): 495–520; and Catherine Candy, ‘‘The Inscrutable Irish-Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-American Hegemony, 1917–1947,’’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 1 (2001), (www.muse .jhu.edu/journals /cch/v002/2.1candy). Fora more general critique of second-wave feminist appropriations of women of color and Third World women, see Audre Lorde, ‘‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly,’’ in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), 66–71; Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘‘Challenging Imperial Feminism,’’ Feminist Review 17 (1984): 1–23; and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,’’ Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61–88. 8. See Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York: John Day, 1958), 271, 381. For the book’s popularity in the United States, also see Dorothy M. Snedegar, ‘‘The Mother India Controversy (as Illustrative of Certain Missionary Problems)’’ (M.A. thesis, Duke University, 1938); A. M. Rosenthal, ‘‘ ‘Mother India’ Thirty Years Later,’’ Foreign Affairs 4 ( July 1957): 620–30; Milton Singer, ‘‘Passages to More than India: A Sketch of Changing European and American Images,’’ in When a Great Tradition Modernizes (London: Pall Mall, 1972), 11–38; Veena Das, ‘‘The Imagining of Indian Women: Missionaries and Journalists,’’ in Conflicting Images: India and the United States, ed. Sulochana Raghavan Glazer and Nathan Glazer (Glendale, Md.: Riverdale, 1990), 203–20; and Paul Teed, ‘‘Race against Memory: Katherine Mayo, Jabez Sunderland, and Indian Independence,’’ American Studies 44, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 2003): 35–47.

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9. The influence of Mother India on U.S.-Indian international relations has recently received considerable attention; see especially Kenton J. Clymer, Quest for Freedom: The United States and India’s Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 10. I am drawing from Rosie Thomas, ‘‘Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India,’’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 11–30. Also see Parama Roy, ‘‘Figuring Mother India: The Case of Nargis,’’ in Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 152–73. 11. For the concept of rhetorical invention, see R. Wess, Kenneth Burke: Rhetoricity, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12. For a general overview of the British Empire in the twentieth century, see Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4, The Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 13. The term itself was being used in the 1920s; see Alfred Zimmer, The Third British Empire: Being a Course of Lectures Delivered at Columbia University, New York (London: Humphry Milford, 1927). I am drawing for my discussion from John Darwin, ‘‘A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics,’’ in Brown and Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4, 64–87. 14. Darwin, ‘‘A Third British Empire?’’ esp. 66. 15. Declaration of August 20, 1917, in Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 9109, para. 6. The original plan had been to promise ‘‘self-government,’’ but Lord Curzon’s opposition led to the wording being restricted to ‘‘responsible government.’’ See Richard Danzig, ‘‘The Announcement of August 20, 1919,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 28 (November 1968): 25–36; and Hugh Tinker, ‘‘India in the First World War and After,’’ Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (1968): 89–107. 16. See Clive Dewey, ‘‘The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade: The Eclipse of the Lancashire Lobby and the Concession of Fiscal Autonomy,’’ in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1978), 35–67. Also see Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 17. See Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126–34. For the argument of the declining economic value of the British-Indian connection in the interwar period, see B. R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 1919–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India (London: Macmillan, 1979). 18. Montagu to Reading, November 4, 1921, quoted in John Gallagher, ‘‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922,’’ Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 355–68, esp. 367. 19. See Andrew Muldoon, ‘‘ ‘Nothing that happens in Ireland should have the least reaction upon our Indian policy’: The 1935 Government of India Act as Imperial Event,’’ paper delivered at the British Study Group, Harvard University, April 3, 2000. I am grateful to the author for sharing this paper with me. For British opposition to political reform in India in the interwar period, see Carl Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution (New Delhi: Sterling, 1986); and Gerald Studdert-

270 Notes to Chapter 1

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Kennedy, ‘‘The Christian Imperialism of Diehard Defenders of the Raj, 1926–35,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 3 (October 1990): 342–62. See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan, 1990), 165–253. For the role of the expanding business classes in Indian nationalism, see Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931–1939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). G. Krishna, ‘‘The Development of Congress as a Mass Organization, 1918–1923,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (1966): 413–30. For the changing relation between British India and the princely states, see Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron-Client System, 1914–1939 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1978). For an integrated study of British India and princely India, see Ramusack, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 3, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Individual states like Baroda and Mysore acquired a special reputation as ‘‘progressive’’; see Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education, and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). See Tilak Raj Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad, 1905–1921 (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979); and Don Dignan, The Indian Revolutionary Problem in British Diplomacy, 1914–1919 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1983). See Richard J. Popplewell, ‘‘The Surveillance of Indian ‘Seditionists’ in North America, 1905–1915,’’ in Intelligence and International Relations, ed. C. Andrew and J. Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), 49–76; and R. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). W. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 4 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), 332, quoted in Diwakar Prasad Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes towards the Indian National Movement, 1905–1929’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1964), 30–31. See Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes,’’ 126–27. For support in the United States for the nationalist movement in India, see Alan Raucher, ‘‘American Anti-imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1910–1932,’’ Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 83–110. See W. J. Bryan, British Rule in India (London: British Committee of the Indian National Congress, 1906). For the response of pro-British papers to Bryan’s speech, see Earl Robert Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia, 1900–1940’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1955), 252. Sydney Brooks, who was a friend of the British secretary of state for India, Lord Morley, and editor of the British paper the Saturday Review, served as the liaison between the British government and the Roosevelt administration in urging the president to make a public speech about British rule in India. The British ambassador in the United States, James Bryce, was of the opinion that such a speech was best made in connection with a subject other than India. For details of this episode, see Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes,’’ 118–20. See Giles T. Brown, ‘‘The Hindu Conspiracy, 1914–1917,’’ Pacific Historical Review 17, no. 3 (August 1948): 299–310; Don K. Dignon, ‘‘The Hindu Conspiracy in Anglo-American Relations during World War I,’’ Pacific Historical Review 40 (1971): 57–76; and Joan M. Jensen, ‘‘The ‘Hindu Conspiracy’: A Reassessment,’’ Pacific Historical Review 48 (1979): 65–83. For the revolutionary activities of Indians in the United States during the war,

Notes to Chapter 1

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

271

see Malini Sood, ‘‘Expatriate Nationalism and Ethnic Radicalism: The Ghadar Party in North America, 1910–1920’’ (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1995); Kalyan Kumar Bannerjee, Indian Freedom Movement Revolutionaries in America (Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1969); and Anil Baran Ganguly, Ghadar Revolution in America (Delhi: Metropolitan, 1980). The mainstream American press, apart from a few exceptions, gave relatively little coverage to developments in India, at least until the 1930s; see Harnam Singh, ‘‘American Press Opinion about Indian Government and Politics, 1919–1935’’ (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1949). See Francis M. Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question: A Study in Opinion and Policy (New York: Gill and Macmillan, 1978); and Stephen Hartley, The Irish Question as a Problem in British Foreign Policy, 1914–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). For a history of expatriate Indians in the United States, see Joan Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989). For the scattered and small numerical presence of Indians in the United States, also see Surinder M. Bhardwaj and Madhusudana Rao, ‘‘Asian Indians in the United States: A Geographical Appraisal,’’ in South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, ed. Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 197–217. The Clan-na-Gael, demonstrating its interest in Indian affairs, had adopted ‘‘India’’ as the secret password of the organization for a three-month period starting in March 1908; see note by S. J. Stevenson, Criminal Intelligence, India Office: Public and Judicial Department Records, l/p&j/12/1, oioc (hereafter cited as l/p&j). For Lala Lajpat Rai’s constitutional agitation on behalf of Indian nationalism in the United States, see Naeem Gul Rathore, ‘‘Indian Nationalist Agitation in the United States: A Study of Lala Lajpat Rai and the Indian Home Rule League of America, 1914– 1920’’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965); and N. S. Hardikar, Lala Lajpat Rai in America (New Delhi: Servants of the People Society, 1965). For British concerns about Indo-Irish connections in the United States, see Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes,’’ 171–90; also fo 115/2597 of 1920; fo 115/2669 of 1921; fo 115/2749 of 1922, Foreign Office: Embassies and Consulates: United States of America (General Correspondence), pro (hereafter cited as fo General Correspondence Files). For Indo-Irish connections, also see Richard P. Davis, ‘‘India in Irish Revolutionary Propaganda, 1905–1922,’’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 221, no. 1 (1977): 66–89; R. P. Davis, ‘‘The Influence of the Irish Revolution on Indian Nationalism: The Evidence of the Indian Press, 1916–1922,’’ South Asia 9, no. 2 (December 1986): 55–68; Howard Brasted, ‘‘Indian Nationalist Development and the Influence of Irish Home Rule, 1870– 1886,’’ Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (February 1980): 37–63; David Andrew Campion, ‘‘The Irish Influence in the Development of Indian Nationalism, 1870–1947’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1997); and Michael Holmes and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin: Folens, 1997). Quoted in fo 115/2749 of 1922, fo General Correspondence Files. See also Eamon De Valera, India and Ireland (New York: Friends of Freedom for India, 1920), 15. Malone testified before the Foreign Relations Committee, accompanied by Rai and N. S. Hardikar, on August 29, 1919. Senator McCormick of Illinois, in a speech on August 20, 1919, became one of the earliest critics of British rule in India in the Senate. Senator

272 Notes to Chapter 1

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

Joseph I. Frances of Maryland also spoke out against the perpetuation of British despotism in India during the discussion of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles on October 8 and 9, 1919; see Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes,’’ 240–49. However, Senator Lodge reassured the British that neither India nor Egypt would be subject to a resolution in the Senate; see Manoranjan Jha, Civil Disobedience and After: The American Reaction to Political Developments in India during 1930–35 (Delhi: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1973), 19. For Indian disappointment over this shift in attitude of the Hearst publications, see New India, January 4, 1927, 6; and June 15, 1927, 2. Also see AJG, ‘‘Color-Baiting America,’’ Negro World, October 29, 1927, 2. Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Embassy, Washington, D.C., quoted in a memo by Hugh MacGregor of the India Office, in l/p&j/7/333. Also see Sir Auckland C. Geddes, British ambassador, Washington, D.C., to Lord Curzon, foreign secretary, February 10, 1922, in fo 115/2749 of 1922, fo General Correspondence Files; and Geddes to Montagu, January 23, 1922: ‘‘The Irish-Americans will, in my opinion certainly not contribute towards the support of a movement which was never anything more than an additional lever in the Irish agitation, and the radical Indian students here are small in number, and have no funds at their disposal unless such are forthcoming from India’’ (l/p&j/12/68). See Gallagher, ‘‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire.’’ For the ideas of this new generation of imperial thinkers, see Walter Nimock, Milner’s Young Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968); and John Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975). L. F. Rushbrook Williams, Inside Both Indias, 1914–1938 (Gloucester: Earle and Ludlow, n.d.), 39, in Rushbrook Williams Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge (hereafter cited as RW Papers). See report from British Consulate-General, San Francisco, March 13, 1923, in Government of India, Home Department, Political Branch, file 8, 1926, nai (hereafter cited as Home, Political). Also see Home, Political 191, 1926. One report on anti-British activity in the United States, for example, monitored the attendance at Myron H. Phelps’s IndoAmerican Club in 1909; it noted the following breakdown of the club’s members: at the first meeting in February 1909 there were ‘‘20 American ladies and 9 natives of India’’; at the second meeting on March 5, ‘‘5 American men, 12 ladies, and 15 Indians’’; and on March 12, ‘‘13 Americans of whom 9 were ladies, and 8 Indians’’; see circular no. 12 of 1912 in l/p&j/12/1. See correspondence between the Foreign Office, India Office, and the British Library of Information on possible measures to counter the impact of Naidu at the wilpf in l/p&j/12/192. For the Naidu-Montagu controversy, see Manmohan Kaur, Role of Women in the Freedom Movement, 1857–1947 (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1968), 258–62. Mrs. Sowton was to be paid twenty-five to thirty pounds for her expenses. See minute by J. W. Hose, Information Office of the India Office, March 17, 1924, in l/p&j/12/192. See Report of the 4th Congress of the wilpf, Washington, May 1–7, 1924, 1; and Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Pioneers for Peace: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1965 (wilpf British Section, 1980), 49–50. For the history of the U.S. section of the wilpf, see Carrie A. Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1946 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995); and Joyce Blackwell-Johnson, ‘‘No Peace without Freedom, No Freedom without Peace: African-American Women Activists in the Women’s Inter-

Notes to Chapter 1

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

273

national League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1970’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998). For Sir Esme Howard’s successful tea party for the conference delegates, see letter from Robert Wilberforce, British Library of Information, to Percy A. Koppel, News Department, Foreign Office, May 5, 1924, in l/p&j/12/192. A few writers did compare the declaration of the Government of India Act to the State Law of 1914 for the Philippines. See Bernard Houghton, ‘‘Reforms in India,’’ Political Science Quarterly 35 (December 1920): 546, cited in Singh, ‘‘American Press Opinion,’’ 47–49. See Department of State’s instructions, February 26, 1923, cited in Singh, ‘‘American Official Attitudes,’’ 410–12; also Jha, Civil Disobedience and After, 7. See Katherine Mayo, The Isles of Fear: The Truth about the Philippines (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925). Lionel Curtis, one of the architects of the Government of India Act of 1919, was a personal friend of Mayo’s and closely watched the Philippines debate unfold in the United States. See letter from Lionel Curtis to Moyca Newell (Mayo’s partner), August 9, 1922; and Curtis to Mayo, August 24, 1925, folder 26, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. Times Literary Supplement, in press clippings, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers; Richard Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism (London: E. Arnold, 1905); and N. Leys, Kenya (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf with Hogarth Press, 1924). Japan Advertiser, March 29, 1926, press clippings, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers. Press clippings, n.d., folder 211, series 4, box 40, KM Papers. See ‘‘U.S. Expansion Plans in India Anger British,’’ Negro World, August 20, 1927, 2. See Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression, 1929–1932 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1992). The foregoing has been taken largely from Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 126–34; and Sarkar, Modern India, 254–348. For the economics of the interwar period, also see Maria Misra, ‘‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and the Raj: British Policy in India between the World Wars,’’ in Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism, ed. Raymond E. Dummett (New York: Longman, 1999), 157–74; and G. Balachadran, ‘‘Towards a Hindu Marriage: AngloIndian Monetary Relations in Inter-war India, 1917–1935,’’ Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (1994): 615–47. See D. A. Low, ‘‘Vortex Debate: The Purna Swaraj Decision, 1929,’’ in Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929–1942, by D. A. Low (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41–71. Sarkar, Modern India, 254–55. For the term dalit, see Eleanor Zelliot, ‘‘Dalit—New Cultural Context for an Old Marathi Word,’’ in From Untouchability to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 267–92. For the contrast between Ambedkar and Gandhi’s program for dalits, see Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), esp. 175. See Sumit Sarkar, ‘‘The Women’s Question in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,’’ in Women and Culture, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Bombay: sndt Women’s University, 1985), 157–72. See L. Mani, ‘‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,’’ Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 119–56; and Mani, Contentious Traditions. See Uma Chakravarti, ‘‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,’’ in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,

274 Notes to Chapter 1

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

1990), 27–87. Also see Sangari and Vaid, ‘‘Recasting Women: An Introduction,’’ in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 1–26. See Mrinalini Sinha, ‘‘ ‘Chathams, Pitts and Gladstones in Petticoats’: The Politics of Gender and Race in the Ilbert Bill Controversy,’’ in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhury and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 98–118. See Partha Chatterjee, ‘‘Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,’’ American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 662–83; and ‘‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question,’’ in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 233–53. For a critique of Chatterjee’s ‘‘nationalist resolution of the woman question,’’ see Himani Bannerji, ‘‘Projects of Hegemony: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies’ ‘Resolution of the Women’s Question,’ ’’ Economic and Political Weekly, March 11–17, 2000, 902– 20, reprinted in Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism, ed. H. Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and J. Whitehead (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 34–84. This argument has been elaborated by Chatterjee; in addition to the previous citations, see P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Enfranchised Selves: Women’s Culture and Rights in 19th-Century Bengal,’’ Gender and History 13, no. 3 (November 2001): 546–65; and also her Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), esp. chap. 7. The point is made in Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal,’’ Studies in History, n.s., 13, no. 1 (1997): 63–95. Also see her discussion of women’s writings in Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of ‘‘Amar Jiban,’’ a Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999). For details of the case, see Sudhir Chandra, Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women’s Rights (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); for the resonance of the case in Britain, see Antoinette Burton, ‘‘From ‘Child-Bride’ to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the Debate about Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain,’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1998): 1119–46. For some examples of state intervention in the family, especially among marginalized social groups, see Radha Kumar, ‘‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 1 (1983): 81– 110; and Lucy Carroll, ‘‘Law, Custom, and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 4 (1983): 363–88. For this point, see Radhika Singha, ‘‘Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject,’’ Studies in History 19, no. 1 ( January– June 2003): 87–126. See Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); and Meera Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian Conversions: Focus on Stree Dharma-Neeti (Bombay: RCWS Gender Series, 1995). For accounts of other nineteenth-century feminists, also see Rosalind O’Hanlon, A Comparison of Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win. The phrase has acquired an iconic status in accounts of gender in colonial India. It was also the title of Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novel Ghare-Baire (1916). It was translated

Notes to Chapter 1

74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81.

275

as Home and the World. It was also made into a film by Satyajit Ray (1984). See Arundhati Bannerjee, ‘‘The Indian Woman’s Dilemma: A Study in the Formation of Gender Constructions through the Mediation of Western Culture in Tagore’s ‘Ghare Baire’ and Ray’s Film Version,’’ in Gender and Culture in Literature and Film, East and West: Issues of Perception and Interpretation; Selected Conference Papers, ed. Nitaya Masavisut, George Simson, and Larry E. Smith (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1994), 207–24; Nicholas Dirks, ‘‘The Home and the World: The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India,’’ in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, ed. R. Rosenstone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 44–63; and Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘‘The Home and the World’’: A Critical Companion, ed. P. K. Dutta (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). The phrase is fromWinifred Woodhull, ‘‘Unveiling Algeria,’’Genders 10 (spring 1991): 112– 31. For its elaboration in colonial India, see also Chatterjee, ‘‘Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women,’’ and ‘‘The Nationalist Resolution.’’ This argument is made, for example, in Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Politics and Women in Bengal: The Conditions and Meaning of Participation,’’ in Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work, and the State, ed. J. Krishnamurty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 231–41. Also see Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘‘Caged Tigers: ‘First Wave’ Feminists in India,’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 6 (1982): 525–36; ‘‘Goddesses or Rebels? The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal,’’ in Women, Politics, and Literature in Bengal, ed. Clinton B. Seely (East Lansing: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1981), 31–15; ‘‘The Politics of Respectability: Indian Women and the Indian National Congress,’’ inThe Indian National Congress Centenary Hindsights, ed. D. A. Low (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54–97; and Ayesha Jalal, ‘‘The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State of Pakistan,’’ in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 77–114. Himani Bannerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2001), esp. 3. This argument is from Madhu Kishwar, ‘‘Gandhi on Women,’’ part 1, Economic and Political Weekly, October 5, 1985, 1691–1702; and part 2, October 12, 1985, 1753–58. See Eleanor Morton, The Women in Gandhi’s Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953). For women’s involvement in workers’ movements, see Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800– 1990 (New Delhi: Kali forWomen, 1993), 66–75; and Sunil Kumar Sen,Working Class Movements in India, 1885–1975 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Also see Renu Chakrabarty, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement, 1940–50 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980). See Kapil Kumar, ‘‘Rural Women in Oudh, 1917–1947: Baba Ram Chandra and the Women’s Question,’’ in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 337–69. Also see Debal K. Singha Roy, Women in Peasant Movements (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1992); and Leela Kasturi, ‘‘Rural Women in Struggle in Colonial India: Some Aporiae,’’ Samya Shakti 6 (1991–92): 65–80. See Meenakshi Moon and Urmila Pawar, ‘‘We Made History Too: Women in the Early Untouchable Liberation Movement,’’ in Gender and Caste, ed. Anupama Rao (1989; New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003), 48–56; Prabha Rani, ‘‘Women’s Indian Association and the Self-Respect Movement in Madras, 1925–1936: Perceptions on Women,’’ in Women and Indian Nationalism, ed. Leela Kasturi and Veena Mazumdar (New Delhi: Vikas, 1994), 94–109; S. Anandhi, ‘‘The Women’s Question in the Dravidian Movement, c. 1925–1948,’’

276 Notes to Chapter 1

82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

Social Scientist 19, nos. 5–6 (1991): 24–41; Natalie Pickering, ‘‘Recasting the Indian Nation: Dravidian Nationalism Replies to the Women’s Question,’’ Thatched Patio, May– June 1993, 1–20; and V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998), 378–419. See Moon and Pawar, ‘‘We Made History Too.’’ The ‘‘self-respect’’ marriages promoted by the self-respect movement in Madras provided a powerful combined critique of gender and caste norms; see Periyar E. V. Ramasami, Self-Respect Marriages, trans. A. S. Venu (Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institute, 1987). For these changes, see Geraldine H. Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a comprehensive overview of the women’s movement in the colonial period, see Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India. The short-lived All India Ladies’ Association in Bhopal has received comparatively less attention; I owe this latter reference to Siobhan Lambert Hurley, ‘‘Fostering Sisterhood: Muslim Women and the All India Ladies Association,’’ Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 40–65. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 243–308. I am indebted to Orsini for the following discussion of Cha¯m ˙ d (I have preferred the alternate spelling Chand without the diacritical marks to the spelling used by Orsini). Also see her ‘‘Domesticity and Beyond: Hindi Women’s Journals in the Early Twentieth Century,’’ South Asia Research 19, no. 2 (1999): 137–60. From the sale of 1,000 to 8,000 copies in 1927, the sales figures for Chand jumped to a remarkable 15,000 copies by 1930. See Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 268. For other explorations of women’s print culture in various vernaculars, see Gail Minault, ‘‘Urdu Women’s Magazines in the Early Twentieth Century,’’ Manushi 48 (September–October 1988): 2– 9; Minault, ‘‘Sayyid Mumtaz ‘Ali and Tahzib un-Niswan: Women’s Rights in Islam and Women’s Journalism in Urdu,’’ in Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, ed. Kenneth W. Jones (Albany, N.Y.: suny Press, 1992), 179–99; Vir Bharat Talwar, ‘‘Feminist Consciousness in Women’s Journals in Hindi, 1910–1920,’’ in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 204–32; Himani Bannerji, ‘‘Fashioning a Self: Educational Proposals for and by Women in Popular Magazines in Colonial Bengal,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 26, 1991, ws-50–ws-60; Sonal Shukla, ‘‘Cultivating Minds: Nineteenth Century Gujarati Women’s Journals,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 26, 1991, ws-63–ws-66; and Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘‘Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women’s Magazines in Colonial India, 1890–1940,’’ Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003): 59–82. Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 273. Ibid., esp. 275. A similar point about emotions and female subjectivity in Tamil women’s journals is made in Sreenivas, ‘‘Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject.’’ See Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 267 n. 61, 274. Saraladevi Chaudhrani had applied for an appointment for the members of her Bharat Stri Mahamandal to discuss women’s educational needs. See ‘‘Ladies Deputation,’’ Indian Social Reformer, November 11, 1917, 121, cited in Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India, 92. A second deputation was sent on behalf of the newly formed Women’s Indian Association. The latter, under Margaret Cousins’s direction, shifted the terms of their demand from the extension of women’s education to votes for women; see James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950), 308–14.

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91. Russell Hocking, ‘‘Constituting the ‘Backward Classes’: Colonial Ideology and the Foundations of Political Representation,’’ South Asia 24, no. 2 (2001): 161–88. 92. For historical overviews of the struggle for the vote for women in India, see Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘‘Votes for Women: The Demand for Women’s Franchise in India, 1917–1937,’’ in Symbols of Power: Studies on the Political Status of Women in India, ed. Vina Majumdar (Bombay: Allied Press, 1979), 3–23; Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India, 92–120; and Jana Matson Everett, Women and Social Change in India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 101–40. For some regional overviews, see Gail Peterson, ‘‘Reserved Seats: Women and the Vote in Bombay,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 1 (1983): 47– 65; Barbara Southard, ‘‘Colonial Politics and Women’s Rights: Women’s Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India, in the 1920s,’’ Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (1993): 397–439; and Southard, ‘‘The Bangiya Nari Samaj and the Woman Suffrage Movement,’’ in The Women’s Movement and Colonial Politics in Bengal, 1921–1936 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 70–147. 93. For the activities of the Tatas in England from 1919 to 1920 for the suffrage cause, see Miscellaneous Collections 612, 1919–20, nmml; and Mithan J. Tata, ‘‘Autumn Leaves: Some Memories of Yester Year,’’ unpublished manuscript, in f 341/147, Forbes Collection: Publications and Papers Relating to Indian Women and Women’s Studies Collected by Professor Geraldine H. Forbes, oioc (hereafter cited as Forbes Collection). For the internationalism of the suffrage struggle in India, see Mrinalini Sinha, ‘‘Suffragism and Internationalism: The Enfranchisement of British and Indian Women under an Imperial State,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, no. 4 (1999): 461–84. 94. See Women’s Leader and Common Cause, August 16, 1929, 219. Mithan Tata, however, later recalled her initial disappointment at the British Parliament’s decision to leave the issue of the franchise to be decided in India very differently: ‘‘This [leaving the decision to provincial legislatures] was enough for us and we were satisfied for we felt sure that the provincial legislatures would soon grant the vote to the women in their provinces’’ (Tata, ‘‘Autumn Leaves,’’ 10). 95. See letter from Honorary Secretary, British Dominions Women Citizens Union, November 26, 1919, to Lloyd George, in Miscellaneous Collections 612, 1919–20. 96. See Mrinalini Sen, ‘‘The Indian Reform Bill and the Women of India,’’ Africa and Orient Review 1, no. 2 (February 1920), cited in her Knocking at the Door: Lectures and Other Writings (Calcutta: Living Age Press, 1954), 67–70. This echoed arguments made by anticaste activists who likewise claimed that the government’s policy of ‘‘religious neutrality’’ was tantamount to underwriting the domination of the higher castes; see Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 97. Cited in Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India, 102–3. For similar arguments, see [Tatas], ‘‘The Question of Women’s Franchise and the Government of India Bill,’’ in Miscellaneous Collections 612, 1919–20. 98. For the politics of anticaste movements in various parts of colonial India in the early twentieth century, see Gail Omvedt,Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873–1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976); Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969); Sekhar Bandyopadhyay,Caste, Protest, and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (Surrey: Curzon, 1997); and V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards

278 Notes to Chapter 1

99. 100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

107.

108.

a Non-Brahmin Millennium. For a useful summary of the implications of anticaste movements on Indian identity, see Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: The Anti-caste Movement and the Construction of an Indian Identity (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1995). See Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 231, 234, 235. I draw here from Wess’s discussion of ideology as rhetoric; see Wess, Kenneth Burke, 1–38. Gareth Stedman Jones discusses the language of Chartism in early-nineteenth-century Britain as similarly ‘‘out of its time’’: that is, it brushed against the grain of the social circumstances of the period; see Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I owe this explication to Osborne’s discussion of the tension between ‘‘concept’’ and ‘‘social reality’’; see T. Osborne, ‘‘History, Theory, Disciplinarity,’’ in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2002), 175–90, esp. 185. For a general critique of historicist arguments in relation to India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). For the tensions between Hindu and Muslim women in the women’s movement, see Gail Minault, ‘‘Sisterhood or Separatism? The All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference and the Nationalist Movement,’’ in The Extended Family, ed. Gail Minault (Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books, 1981), 83–108; and Jana Matson Everett, ‘‘ ‘All the Women Were Hindu and All the Muslims Were Men’: State, Identity Politics, and Gender, 1917–1951,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, June 9, 2001, 2071–80. For an organizational history of the All India Women’s Conference, see Bharati Ray and Aparna Basu, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990 (1990; New Delhi: Manohar, 2003). See Khadiya Shaffi Tyabji to Cousins, November 13, 1926, file 3, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, All India Women’s Conference Papers, nmml (hereafter cited as aiwc Papers). See Sushama Sen to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, May 17, 1928, file 3, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. There were two Muslim women’s magazines titled Nur Jahan from the Punjab, published from Lahore and Amritsar, in the 1920s. I surmise from the scanty information available on the two journals that Sen’s reference was to the magazine edited by Mrs. Sadat Sultan in Amritsar; see Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154. For the unexpectedly large participation of Muslim women at the Delhi conference presided over by a Muslim, the Begum of Bhopal, see Modern Review 43, no. 4 (April 1928): 472–73; and Annual Report of the Second All India Women’s Conference, Delhi, 7–10 Feb. 1928 (Mangalore: Kanara Printing Press, n.d.) (hereafter cited as aiwc Report). Even the wia, the avowedly ‘‘political’’ parent organization of the aiwc, claimed as late as 1930–31 that it had witnessed an increase in the numbers of Muslim women attending its meetings; see Annual Report of the Women’s Indian Association, 1930–1931 (hq: wia Pantheon Gardens, Egmore, Madras, n.d.), 10, Adyar Library and Research Centre, Chennai (hereafter cited as wia Report). See the correspondence on the subject: G. M. Wright, Bengal Women’s Education League, to Cousins, September 2, 1927; Cousins to Wright, September 15, 1927; and Hamid Ali to Cousins, November 2, 1927, file 6, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Jan Huidekoper to Cousins, October 11, 1926, file 3, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc

Notes to Chapter 1

109.

110.

111. 112.

113.

114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

279

Papers. Yet, as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay admitted, the conference did not reach into the villages of rural India; see Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, December 6, 1967, Oral History Archives, nmml. Quoted in Prabhat Chandra Sanyal, ‘‘All India Women’s Education Conference,’’ Modern Review 43, no. 3 (March 1928): 349–53. For self-conscious attempts at constituency building in the 1920s, also see MEC (Margaret E. Cousins), ‘‘Impressions of Women’s Life in North and South India,’’ Stri Dharma 4, no. 3 (March 1921): 9–13. Jan Huidekoper forwarded the request from Mrs. Nandlal Kaul (a Kashmiri Hindu) and Mrs. Khan Bahadur Ahmedbux (a Muslim) to the local Reception Committee of the conference in Patna; Huidekoper to Chattopadhyay, December 7, 1928, file 3, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The moment stands out especially in contrast to the recollections of activist Muslim women of their tense relations with Hindu friends toward the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s; see Begum Shaista Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (London: Crescent Press, 1963), 87. Stri Dharma 14, no. 2 (December 1930): 52–53. For some examples, see Prem Chowdhury,The Veiled Woman: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); P. K. Dutta, Carving Blocs; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Anshu Malhotra, Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); and G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c. 1850–1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). For the concept of ‘‘Sanskritization,’’ see M. N. Srinivas, ‘‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization,’’ in Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (London: Asia Pub. House, 1962), 42–62; and Srinivas,The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). The implications of this process for women have been noted in the studies of various castes and social groups; see Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). I am drawing from G. Arunima, There Comes Papa. I owe this point to Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), esp. 38–80. The 1920s were an especially critical moment for the crystallization of a sectarian Hindu nationalism in India. See Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); for Hindu and Muslim communalism, also see Mushirul Hassan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979). See Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, esp. 222–320; and Dutta, Carving Blocs. P. K. Dutta, ‘‘ ‘Abductions’ and the Constellation of a Hindu Communal Bloc in Bengal of the 1920s’’; also elaborated in Carving Blocs, 148–223. Dutta, ‘‘Abductions.’’ For the relation between Hindu Mahasabha and mainstream nationalism, see Richard Gordon, ‘‘The Hindu Mahasabha and the Indian National Congress, 1915 to 1926,’’ Modern Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (1975): 145–203. Dutta, ‘‘Abductions.’’ I am drawing from Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 4. For a different argument on working-class formation in India, see

280 Notes to Chapter 2

122.

123.

124.

125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Delhi: Oxford University Pres, 1989). Chandravarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, 9. The idea of ‘‘groupness’’ as an event—as something that happens—is also explored in Roger Brubaker, ‘‘Ethnicity without Groups,’’ in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Society, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Shola Orloff (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 470–92. For this controversy, I am drawing on Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 164–66; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, 49–66; Ruth Vanita, ‘‘The New Homophobia: Ugra’s Chocolate,’’ in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, ed. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (New York: Routledge, 2000), 246–52; and Ruth Vanita, ‘‘Homophobic Fiction/Homoerotic Advertising: The Pleasures and Perils of Twentieth Century Indianness,’’ in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002), 127–48. The phrase is from Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,’’ History Workshop Journal 36 (autumn 1993): 1–33. See Susan Pedersen, ‘‘Modernityand Trusteeship: Tensions of Empire in Britain between the Wars,’’ in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (New York: Berg, 2001), 203–20; and Pedersen, ‘‘The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over ‘Child Slavery’ in Hong Kong, 1917–1941,’’ Past and Present 171 (May 2001): 161–202. ‘‘The Indian National Social Conference,’’ Indian Social Reformer, January 7, 1928, 291. For a report of the events at the conference, see ‘‘The Indian National Social Conference, 1927,’’ Indian Social Reformer, January 7, 1928, 293–99. See letter to editor, S. H. Shafee Mohammad, Indian Social Reformer, February 11, 1928, 375. See ‘‘Editorial: The Last National Social Conference,’’ Indian Social Reformer, January 21, 1928, 321. See undated letter, in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 1, S. Muthulakshmi Reddi Papers, nmml (hereafter cited as Reddi Papers).

2. unpredictable outcome 1. New York Times, October 11, 1940, 20. 2. See Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 3. For biographical information on Katherine Mayo, see Mary E. Handlin, ‘‘Mayo, Katherine,’’ in Notable American Women: 16-7-1950, vol. 2, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971), 515–17; and The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 30 (New York: James T. White, 1943), 20.There is also some discussion of Mayo’s background in the work of her collaborator on Mother India, Captain Harry Field; see Field, After Mother India: Being an Examination of Mother India, of the First Nine Volumes Written in Reply Thereto, and of Other Criticisms, Together with Certain New Evidence Mostly from Indian Sources (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), esp. 275–86. 4. See Dewitt Clinton Ellinwood Jr., ‘‘The Round Table Movement and India, 1909–1920,’’ Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1971): 183–219.

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5. See R. J. Moore, ‘‘The Making of India’s Paper Federation, 1927–1935,’’ in The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives, 1935–1947, ed. C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright (Cambridge: mit Press, 1970), 54–78; Moore, ‘‘The Demission of Empire in South Asia: Some Perspectives,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2, no. 1 (1973): 79–94; and Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 6. J. Coatman, director of public information, Government of India, India in 1927–28 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publishing Branch, 1928), 3–4. 7. The desire of the Conservative Party to preempt a Labour government from making the appointments to the commission had led to an advance in the schedule of the commission. See S. R. Bakshi, Simon Commission and Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1977). 8. See S. Gopal, The Viceroyalty of Lord Irwin, 1926–1931 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 50. 9. Mayo served as Villard’s research assistant for his book John Brown, 1800–1855 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910).This role has recently been fictionalized in Russell Banks’s novel on John Brown; see Banks, Cloudsplitter (New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998). For Mayo’s and Villard’s collaboration on Villard’s book, and his encouragement of her career as a writer, see especially folders 3–7, series 1, box 1, KM Papers; and Villard-Mayo correspondence, folder 2555, Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter cited as Villard Papers). For an account of Villard’s life, see Villard, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Fighting Editor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939); and D. Joy Humes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Liberal of the 1920s (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1960). 10. Mayo’s earliest journalistic writings from the 1890s were written under the noms de plume Katherine Prence and Katherine Monck. Her fictionalized stories of life in Dutch Guiana frequently touched on the theme of the sexual treatment of women by nonwhite men. See ‘‘Bushed,’’ Scribner’s 49 ( June 1911): 754–61; ‘‘Big Mary’’ Atlantic Monthly 107 ( January 1911): 112–17; ‘‘My Law and Thine,’’ Atlantic Monthly 109 (February 1912): 239–44; ‘‘Sissa and Bakru,’’ Atlantic Monthly 110 (October 1912): 497–503; and ‘‘The DevilHen,’’ Scribner’s 54 (December 1913): 756–64. Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, eventually advised Mayo to move away from stories about Dutch Guiana; see Sedgwick to Mayo, March 6, 1912, folder 7, series 1, box 1, KM Papers. 11. See Villard to Mayo, July 21, 1911, folder 2555, Villard Papers. 12. For Villard’s involvement in the pro-India movement in the United States, see Alan Raucher, ‘‘American Anti-imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1900–1932,’’ Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 83–110. The tensions arising from Villard’s and Mayo’s diverging political views temporarily affected their friendship in the late 1920s when the Nation became extremely critical of Mayo’s books; see Mayo to Villard, August 31, 1928, folder 2555, Villard Papers. 13. For details on the Pennsylvania State Police, and on Mayo’s involvement in the creation of a parallel force in New York, I am indebted to Gerda Winston Pettus Ray, ‘‘Contested Legitimacy: Creation of the State Police in New York, 1890–1930’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1990). H. Kenneth Bechtel has further demonstrated that the period from 1917 to 1923 was a founding moment in the spread of modern military-style police forces, controlled by the state, which was inaugurated with the creation of a constabulary force in Pennsylvania in 1905. This occurred against a background of postwar hysteria, anxiety over labor troubles and Bolshevism, and hostility toward foreigners as immigration returned to prewar levels. See H. Kenneth Bechtel, ‘‘Policing the Common-

282 Notes to Chapter 2

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

wealth: State Police Development in the United States—with Case Studies of Illinois and Colorado’’ (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1983). For a history of the Pennsylvania force, see Gary Jones, ‘‘American Cossacks: The Pennsylvania Department of State Police and Labor, 1890–1917’’ (Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 1997). See Mayo, Justice to All (New York: G. P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1917). John C. Groome, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania State Police, had secured Roosevelt’s introduction for Mayo’s book; see Groome to Mayo, November 29, 1916, folder 12, series 1, box 2, KM Papers. Roosevelt supplied New York legislators with a copy of Mayo’s book before the passage of the Albany State Police Bill in 1917; see folder 13, series 1, box 2, KM Papers. Mayo’s and Newell’s pioneering role is credited in the official Web site of the New York State Police, http://www.troopers.state.ny.us.Intro/IntroHistory.html. See Ray, ‘‘Contested Legitimacy.’’ Mayo’s books on the Pennsylvania State Police included Justice to All; The Standard Bearers: True Stories of Heroes of Law and Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918); and Mounted Justice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). See especially K. Mayo, ‘‘Murder of Sam Howell,’’ Outlook, April 10, 1918, 584–86. I am drawing from Ray, ‘‘Contested Legitimacy’’; and her ‘‘From Cossack to Trooper: Manliness, Police Reform, and the State,’’ Journal of Social History 28, no. 3 (spring 1995): 565–86. See K. Mayo, ‘‘The Honor of the Force,’’ Saturday Evening Post, Jaunuary 19, 1918, 12– 13; 69–70; 73–74. George F. Lumb, the acting superintendent of the Pennsylvania State Police, urged Mayo to verify her facts in the wake of the controversy over her story in the Saturday Evening Post; see Lumb to Mayo, April 2, 1918, folder 17, series 1, box 3, KM Papers. Also see the letter from Houghton Mifflin and Co. to Mayo, April 10, 1918, folder 17, series 1, box 3, KM Papers. After two years of intensive effort on the part of the Catholic Standard and Times (Philadelphia) and the Knights of Columbus, the Saturday Evening Post issued an apology for publishing Mayo’s story. See Catholic Standard and Times, January 3, 1925, in press clippings, folder 174, series 4, box 31, KM Papers. For the history of Mayo’s and Newell’s involvement in the club, see the papers of the British Apprentice Club, New York Public Library, New York. See Abbot to Mayo, May 10, 1921, folder 24, series 1, box, 4, KM Papers. Mayo repeatedly claimed in her diaries and in her correspondence, as well as at public talks in Philadelphia and Boston, that George E.Vincent, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Victor G. Heiser, director east of the foundation’s International Health Board, had first suggested that she write a book about India. Heiser later forwarded an inquiry that the foundation received from S. G. Pandit on September 18, 1928, asking him to verify Mayo’s claims made at the Contemporary Club meeting in Philadelphia where she claimed to have been sent to India by officials of the Rockefeller Foundation. Mayo’s reply was that she had admitted only to being sent by her friends at the Rockefeller Foundation in their personal and not official capacity; see Heiser to Mayo, October 1, 1928, and Mayo to Heiser, October 5, 1928, folder 50, series 1, box 7, KM Papers. See Faunthorpe to Rushbrook Williams, January 23, 1920, and May 12, 1920; and Popham Young to the Secretary, British Embassy, Washington, D.C., April 23, 1920; and the latter’s reply, May 13, 1920, in fo 115/2597, fo General Correspondence Files. The ‘‘lady journalist’’ that Faunthorpe had in mind was Helen Dare of the San Francisco Chronicle. The names of journalists being considered, including some with whom the scheme had been preliminarily floated, included the following: Ellery Sedgewick of the Atlantic Monthly, F. T. Prichard of the New York Times, J. McClatchy of the Sacramento Bee, and

Notes to Chapter 2

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

283

Mary Roberts Reinhardt of the Saturday Evening Post. For British management of the media, see Chandrika Kaul, ‘‘A New Angle of Vision: The London Press, Governmental Information Management and the Indian Empire, 1900–22,’’ Contemporary Review 8, no. 2 (autumn 1994): 213–41; and her Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India c. 1880–1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). For Lionel Curtis and the Round Table group, see Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Ellinwood Jr., ‘‘The Round Table Movement and India, 1909–1920.’’ While at the Institute of Politics in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the early 1920s, Curtis had enjoyed the hospitality of Mayo and Newell. See Curtis to Newell, August 9, 1922, folder 26, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. See Mayo, The Isles of Fear: The Truth about the Philippines (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925; London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925). See Curtis to Mayo, August 24, 1925, folder 31, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. For Curtis’s preface, see K. Mayo, The Isles of Fear (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925), ix–xii. See Coatman to Curtis, December 17, 1925, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers. For a sampling of some British responses to the book that immediately picked up on the parallels with the political situation in India, see Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 1925; Madras Mail, June 21, 1926; Western Mail (Cardiff ), November 26, 1925, all in press clippings, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers. Note, n.d., folder 32, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Newell to Colonel Battye, February 25, 1928, folder 43, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. See Mayo to Blackett, December 25, 1925, folder 7, Sir Basil Blackett Papers, oioc (hereafter cited as Blackett Papers). See David Arnold, ‘‘Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire,’’ in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 1–26. See E. Richard Brown, ‘‘Public Health in Imperialism: Early Rockefeller Programs at Home and Abroad,’’ American Journal of Public Health 66, no. 9 (1976): 897–903; and his Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Also see John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). I am grateful to Leslie Reagan for alerting me to the connections between the public health campaigns of the foundation in the southern United States and overseas. See Warwick Anderson, ‘‘Colonial Pathologies: American Medicine in the Philippines, 1898–1921’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992); also see Reynaldo C. Ileto, ‘‘Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,’’ in Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, 125–49. Victor G. Hesier, ‘‘The Progress of Medicine in the Philippine Islands,’’ Journal of American Medical Association 47 (1906): 246, quoted in Anderson, ‘‘Colonial Pathologies,’’ 115. Shirish N. Kavadi, The Rockefeller Foundation and Public Health in Colonial India, 1916– 1945: A Narrative History (Pune and Mumbai: Foundation for Research in Community Health, 1999). See in folder 70, series 1, box 9, KM Papers. Also see Mayo to Thompson, October 6, 1927, folder 39, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. For Thompson’s help in gathering information for Mayo, see his note, July 28, 1926, in Government of India, Foreign and Political Department, 462-p, 1926 (hereafter cited as Foreign and Political), nai. Mayo to Meyer, October 8, 1925, quoted in Manronajan Jha, Katherine Mayo and India

284 Notes to Chapter 2

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

(New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971), 71–72; also see notes of Mayo’s dinner with Guthrie, folder 189, series 4, box 35, KM Papers. For the connection between Standard Oil and U.S. consular representatives in India, see Earl R. Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia, 1900–1940’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1955), 18. See review of Mayo’s book by Henry Kittredge Norton in the New York Herald Tribune, May 3, 1925, which describes the book as the ‘‘view of American merchants and capitalists who have invested in the islands’’; also see Manila Times, January 12, 1925, in press clippings, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers. For U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, albeit with a strong sense of American exceptionalism, see Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989). For a discussion of political reforms in the Philippines, see Patricio N. Abinales, ‘‘ProgressiveMachine Conflict in Early-Twentieth Century U.S. Politics and Colonial-State Building in the Philippines,’’ in The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, ed. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 148–81. K. Mayo, ‘‘Sanitation at the Sword’s Point,’’ Forum 79 (February 1928): 225. Mayo, Isles of Fear, 154. Wood to Mayo, January 29, 1923, folder 27, series 1, box 4; Wood to Mayo, February 9, 1925, folder 30, series 1, box 4; Wood to Mayo, April 4, 1925, folder 31, series 1, box 4; and Wood to F. B. Kirkbride, September 29, 1925, folder 34, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Arthur W. Page of The World’s Work had given Mayo a list of people to meet at Washington, D.C., including General Frank McIntyre of the War Department Bureau of Insular Affairs, before her trip to the Philippines; see Page to Mayo, November 19, 1923, folder 27, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. Roosevelt, ‘‘America’s Blundering Devotion to the Philippines,’’ New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1925, 3. W. W. Keen, a strong supporter of Mayo’s who wished to see the Jones law repealed, had supplied copies of her book to president Calvin Coolidge, vice president Charles C. Dawes, secretary of state Frank Kellogg, and secretary of the treasury Andrew W. Mellon, among others. See Keen to Mayo, April 4, 1925; and C. R. Everitt of Harcourt, Brace and Co. to Mayo, May 22, 1925, folder 31, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. See Norbert Lyons, ‘‘Review of ‘The Isles of Fear’ by Katherine Mayo,’’ Saturday Review of Literature, July 4, 1925, 873. See Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth: Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), esp. 1–26. Radhika Ramasubban, Public Health and Medical Research in India: Their Origins Under the Impact of British Colonial Policy (Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation: Sarec Report, 1982), quoted in Kavadi, The Rockefeller Foundation, 5. See diary entry for November 18, 1925, in folder 113, box 13, KM Papers. See D. Arnold, ‘‘Medical Priorities and Practice in Nineteenth Century British India,’’ South Asia Research 5 (1985): 167–83; Radhika Ramasubban, ‘‘Imperial Health in British India, 1857–1900,’’ in Disease Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (London: Routledge, 1988), 38–60; Ian J. Catanach, ‘‘Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896– 1918,’’ in Arnold, Imperial Medicine, 149–71; and John C. Hume Jr., ‘‘Colonialism and Sanitary Medicine: The Development of Preventive Health Policy in the Punjab, 1860–1990,’’ Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 4 (1986): 703–24. For a different view, see Mark Harrison, ‘‘Towards a Sanitary Utopia? Professional Visions and Public Health in India,’’ South Asia Research 10 (1990): 19–40; and Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medi-

Notes to Chapter 2

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

285

cine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I owe the comparison of public health administration in India and the Philippines to Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. See David Arnold, introduction to Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, 14; and his ‘‘Cholera and Colonialism in British India,’’ Past and Present 113 (1986): 128–31; and ‘‘Cholera Mortality in British India, 1817–1947,’’ in India’s Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease, and Society, ed. Tim Dyson (London: Curzon Press, 1989), 261–84. Also see Sheldon Watts, ‘‘From Rapid Change to Stasis: Official Responses to Cholera in British-Ruled India and Egypt, 1860–c. 1921,’’ Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 321–74. Note by Colonel Graham, November 8, 1925, Home, Political, file 40/1926. See Mayo to Blackett, December 25, 1925, folder 7, Blackett Papers. See note in Public and Judicial Department Records, Main List, part 3, l/p&j/1–12. J. W. Hose to Mayo, November 20, 1925, folder 3, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Also see Hose’s request that Adam, on his way back to India, be exempted from taking the p&o special to India. He was to secure passage, instead, on the SS Rawalpindi from Marseilles (the same ship as Mayo and Newell). See note from Hose, November 11, 1925, l/p&j/12/15. The comment in the Government of India files on Adam’s duties at the India Office simply state: ‘‘it is essential that the nature of Mr. Adam’s duties at the India Office should be kept secret,’’ see Home, Political, file 375, 1924; also l/p&j/12/15. See Mayo to Adam, n.d., folder 181, series 4, box 34, KM Papers.While flattered by Mayo’s private acknowledgment of his tremendous influence, Adam was generous enough to credit the book’s success to her own skillful presentation. See Adam to Mayo, January 1, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. By 1900, for example, 113 of the 223 female medical missionaries in India were from North America; see Catherine N. Cowan, ‘‘Western Women Doctors in an Eastern Land: The Work of Female Medical Missionaries in India, 1870–1947’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1998). For colonial critiques of indigenous practices of obstetrics and gynecology in India, see Sandhya Shetty, ‘‘(Dis)Locating Gender Space and Medical Discourse in Colonial India,’’ Genders 20 (1994): 188–230; and Judy Whitehead, ‘‘Tropical Medicine and Inscriptions of Stigma: The Debate over Katherine Mayo’s Mother India,’’ Canadian Women’s Studies (November 1992): 47–50. For the figure of the dhai in modernizing colonial and indigenous discourses, also see Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘‘Managing Midwifery in India,’’ in Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, ed. Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks (London: German Historical Institute, 1994), 152–72; and Dagmar Engels, ‘‘The Politics of Childbirth: British and Bengali Women in Contest, 1890–1930,’’ in Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History Presented to Professor K. A. Ballhatchet, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 222–46. See Mayo, Mother India, 16, 22, 32, 18. See report of the Calcutta meeting in ‘‘Book by Miss Mayo Rouses Hindu India,’’ New York Times, October 6, 1927, 6. Dhirendra Nath Roy, The Philippines and India (Manila: Oriental Printing, 1930). See the review of the book in Modern Review 50, no. 1 ( July 1931): 55–56. Edward Thompson, ‘‘Mother India,’’ Nation and Athenaeum, July 30, 1927, 581–82. Cited in C. Sorabji to Elena Richmonds, October 6, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. For the expansion in the meaning of imperial trusteeship in the early twentieth century, see Susan Pedersen, ‘‘Modernity and Trusteeship: Tensions of Empire in Britain

286 Notes to Chapter 2

64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

between the Wars,’’ in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (New York: Berg, 2001), 203–20; and Pedersen, ‘‘The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over ‘Child Slavery’ in Hong Kong, 1917–1941,’’ Past and Present 171 (May 2001): 161–202. Rathbone to Mayo, August 24, 1927, folder 37, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. For the influence of Mother India on Rathbone’s career, including her decision to stand for parliamentary elections, see Mary D. Stocks, Eleanor Rathbone: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949); Johanna Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (London: Sage, 1996); and Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminisms in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1989). The most comprehensive discussion of Rathbone in relation to India is found in Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). EFR [Eleanor Rathbone], ‘‘Mother India: Its Claims on the Women’s Movement,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, August 26, 1927, 231–32; and E. F. Rathbone, ‘‘Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’?’’ Hibbert Journal 27, no. 2 ( January 1929): 193– 214, reprinted as a monograph with the same title (London: Constable, 1929). For the largely favorable reviews of Mother India in British feminist journals, see also Time and Tide, August 5, 1927, 724–25; and The Vote, November 4, 1927, 350. See Rathbone’s notes in the margins of her ‘‘A Summary of the More Salient Facts Respecting the Status and Conditions of Indian Women and of Some of the Proposals for Improving and Safeguarding Their Well Being,’’ in file 1, Duchess of Atholl Papers, oioc. House of Commons Debates, January 26, 1931, column 714, quoted in Pedersen, ‘‘Modernity and Trusteeship,’’ 215. For Rathbone’s inevitable confrontation with the colonial state on this question, see her correspondence with secretary of state Wedgwood Benn from 1930 to 1931, folder 2, box 92, Eleanor Rathbone Papers, Women’s Library, London Guildhall University (hereafter cited as ER Papers); also see Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945,’’ in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 119–36. E. F. Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur; An Object Lesson from the Past to the Future (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934). H. N. Brailsford, ‘‘Book Review,’’ New Republic, June 10, 1931, press clippings, series 4, box 40, KM Papers. Quoted in Mayo’s diary entry for October 22, 1925, folder 113, series 2, box 13, KM Papers. See Home, Political, file 35/111, 1924; file 60, 1924; and file 124/1, 1925. Rustomjee had been receiving $4,800 a year from the Government of India and on termination of his services was accorded a $500 pension per annum. For the recognition that Rustomjee was becoming an increasing embarrassment to the British propaganda machinery, see Harry Armstrong, consul general, New York, to Hose, India Office, March 24, 1925; and Angus Fletcher, British Library of Information, New York, to G. H. Thompson, British Embassy, April 9, 1925, fo 115/3009, 1925, fo General Correspondence. Rushbrook Williams, Inside Both Indias, 1914–1938 (Gloucestershire: Earle and Ludlow, n.d.), in RW Papers. See Home, Political, file 35/III, 1924. Mayo to Winterton, February 6, 1927, and Winterton to Mayo, February 23, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Adam had advised Mayo that it would be a ‘‘great mistake’’

Notes to Chapter 2

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

287

to take the manuscript to England for approval. See Adam to Mayo, January 10, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. See Mayo’s comment on Heiser’s approval of the manuscript, Mayo to Winterton, February 6, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers; and diary entry, January 30, 1927, folder 114, series 2, box 12, KM Papers. For Chirol, see Curtis to Mayo, February 18, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Questions about the book were raised in the Central Legislative Assembly in India on September 19 and 20, 1927, Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. 5, session 1 of 1927; and in the British House of Commons on November 14, 1927; see Home, Political, 20/11, 1928. Also see Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Extracts Relating to Indian Affairs, House of Commons (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1927), session 1927, part 9, 706; and Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Extracts Relating to Indian Affairs, House of Lords (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1927), part 4, 184. For the impact of these questions in the British Parliament and the Legislative Assembly in India, see Statesman, November 16, 1927, 8. See Newell to Nicholas Roosevelt, n.d., folder 97, series 1, box 10, KM Papers. Also see Adam to Mayo, January 10, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Also P. W. Wilson, ‘‘India Wants a New Turn in Her Destiny: The Coming of the British Parliamentary Commission and the World-Wide Attention Given to Her Social Conditions Have Stirred Millions,’’ New York Times, January 22, 1928, 4. Birkenhead to the viceroy, July 29, 1926; September 23, 1926; March 10, 1927; May 12, 1927; and June 29, 1927, Confidential Correspondence with Secretary of State on Statutory Commission, June 1926 to April 1929, India Office, Private Office Papers of the Secretary of State, l/po/477, oioc (hereafter cited as l/po). Amrita Bazar Patrika, October 30, 1927, 4. The Indian Daily News reported that the India Office had paid Mayo five thousand pounds and purchased five thousand copies of the book. Cited in Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 5, 1927, 6; and Bengalee, November 6, 1927, 4. Also see ‘‘Charge Mother India Is British Propaganda,’’ New York Times, November 23, 1927, 4. Times, January 14, 1928, in India Office, Information Department Records, L/I/2/10, 44, oioc (hereafter cited as L/I); and New York Times, January 14, 1928, 6. For the involvement of women in pro-imperialist clubs and organizations in the early twentieth century, see Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Leicester University Press, 2000). For Birkenhead’s speech, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 26, 1927, 10. Bengalee, November 18, 1927, 6. Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 29, 1927, 4; and S. K. Dutta to John Simon, December 3, 1927, S. K. Dutta Papers, oioc. Amrita Bazar Patrika, January 1, 1928, 8. For the fallout caused by Mayo’s blunder, see Secretary of State Private Office Papers, Personal Files, Katherine Mayo File, oioc (hereafter cited as Personal Files: KM). Note prepared by the director of public information, September 15, 1927 in Home, Political, file 10/74/1927. When the India Office next wrote to the director of public information in India to extend similar help to an Austrian journalist, Alice Schalek, who had pro-British sympathies, Coatman decided to meet privately with her and warned all government departments to be cautious after the Mayo fracas. Home, Political, file 155/1927.

288 Notes to Chapter 2 87. See letters from MacGregor, India Office, to Stephens, director of public information, Government of India, January 25, 1935, and February 19, 1935, in Personal Files: KM. 88. Times, March 28, 1928, in L/I/2/10, 44. 89. J. J. Cornelius, ‘‘India’s Degradation Laid to British Misrule,’’ Current History, December 27, 1927, 368. 90. There was some public discussion of this connection, but it did not go far; see ‘‘Miss Mayo and the Rockefeller Foundation,’’ letter from B. B. Mundkur to the editor, Nation, November 14, 1928, 521. 91. Carter to Mayo, November 17 and 30, 1925, folder 35, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. For Carter’s years in India, see E. C. Carter, Among Indian Young Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Christians Association, 1904); and K. Mayo, That Damn Y (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920). 92. Field to Mayo, n.d., folder 226, series 4, box 42, KM Papers. 93. Gerald Campbell to Sir Esme Howard, British Embassy, Washington, D.C., March 29, 1928, l/p&j/12/322. For the request to British consular officials and the British Library of Information to help with publicity for the book, see note, May 25, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. 94. Cited in Campbell to Howard, March 29, 1928, l/p&j/12/322. 95. British Consulate General’s Office to Howard, May 15, 1928, l/p&j/12/322. The San Francisco News and the New Orient Society had sponsored the debate. The press too declared Hossain and Pope the victors in the debate; see San Francisco News, May 9, 1928, 6, in press clippings, Syed Hossain Papers Small Collections (22), file 4, nmml. 96. Fletcher to R. T. Peel, India Office, June 20, 1928, l/p&j/12/322. 97. Memo by G. Gasson, New York, n.d., l/p&j/12/322. 98. The comment was made by Ben Misra, a graduate of the University of Washington, at the public meeting in San Francisco on March 27, 1928. See ‘‘Notes on ‘Mother India’ Mass Meeting Held at Scottish Rite Hall on March 27, 1928,’’ prepared by Miss Fallon, enclosure in Campbell to Howard, March 29, 1928, l/p&j/12/322. 99. Hirtzel to Clark, March 21, 1929, l/p&j/12/387. 100. R. H. Hadow, Office of the High Commissioner of the U.K., Ottawa, to B. C. Allen, April 3, 1929, l/p&j/12/387. 101. Hadow to Amery, March 7, 1929, l/p&j/12/387. 102. Foreign Policy Association, India Discussed by Sailendranath Ghose and Edward Thompson, 125th New York Luncheon Discussion, Feb. 15, 1930 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, n.d.); and Foreign Policy Association, India Discussed by Dr. Haridas T. Mazumdar, Miss Cornelia Sorabji, C. F. Andrews, and C. F. Strickland, New York Luncheon Discussion, Nov. 22, 1930 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, n.d.). For Thompson’s complex role, see Manoranjan Jha, Civil Disobedience and After: The American Reaction to Political Developments in India during 1930–35 (Delhi: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1973), 107–8; and for a more favorable assessment, see Mary Lago, ‘‘India’s Prisoner’’: A Biography of Edward John Thompson, 1886–1946 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 103. British die-hards continued to turn to Mayo for help with antinationalist propaganda. See Myers to Mayo, n.d., folder 44, series 1, box 6; January 18, 1932, folder 60, series 1, box 8; Churchill to Mayo, March 9, 1935, folder 74, series 1, box 9; and Sir Mark Martin, secretary, Indian Empire Society, to Mayo, February 18, 1932, folder 61, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. For die-hard British reaction against postwar changes in India, see Carl Bridge, ‘‘Conservatism and Indian Reforms (1929–1939): Towards a Prerequisite Model in Imperial Constitution Making?’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 4, no. 2 (1976):

Notes to Chapter 2

104.

105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

113.

114.

115.

289

177–93; and Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, ‘‘The Christian Imperialism of the Diehard Defenders of the Raj, 1926–1935,’’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18, no. 3 (1990): 342–62. See K. Natarajan, Presidential Address, 40th Indian National Social Conference (Madras, 1927), 19–23. For Natarajan’s extended response to Mayo, see Natarajan, Miss Mayo’s ‘‘Mother India’’: A Rejoinder (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1928). J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, ed. and trans. Henry K. Beauchamp (1821; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). For an account of Dubois’s work, see Jyoti Mohan, ‘‘British and French Ethnographies of India: Dubois and His English Commentators,’’ French Colonial History 5 (2004): 229–46. See Radhika Mongia, ‘‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,’’ Public Culture 11, no. 3 (fall 1999): 527–56; and R. A. Huttenback, ‘‘The British Empire as a ‘White Man’s Country’—Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement,’’ Journal of British Studies 13, no. 1 (1973): 108–37. Emily Lutyens to Mayo, May 19, 1928; and Mayo to Lutyens, May 25, 1928, and June 6, 1928, folder 46, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. See A Bill S. 4505, June 23, 1926, volume 8, Copeland Papers, cited in Raymond Joseph Potter, ‘‘Royal Samuel Copeland, 1868–1938: A Physician in Politics’’ (Ph.D. diss.,Western Reserve University, 1967). Also see Gary R. Hess, ‘‘The ‘Hindu’ in America: Immigration and Naturalization Policies and India, 1917–1946,’’ Pacific Historical Review 38, no. 1 (February 1969): 59–79. Ghose to Mayo, April 20, 1927; Field to Ghose, May 19, 1927; note on prepublication notice, May 22, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. K. Mayo, ‘‘India,’’ Liberty, January 14, 1928, 39. Also Mayo, ‘‘When Asia Knocks at the Door?’’ Standard Union (Brooklyn, N.Y.), June 7, 1927, 14. See scrapbook 1931, folder 211, series 4, box 40, KM Papers. See H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 194, cited in Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘‘Racist Responses to Racism: The Aryan Myth and South Asians in the United States,’’ South Asia Bulletin 9, no. 1 (1989): 47–55. Also see Hess, ‘‘The ‘Hindu’ in America.’’ Mayo’s original article had appeared in the Public Ledger, December 24, 1924, and the New York Evening Post, December 26, 1924. See also Manila Times, February 4, 1925; all in press clippings, folder 175, series 4, box 32, KM Papers. For the controversy, see Catholic Standard and Times, January 3, 1925, and January 10, 1925; also Commonweal, January 17, 1925, 224–25; for the ‘‘disavowal’’ see Public Ledger, January 11, 1925; New York Evening Post, January 17, 1925; and Washington Post, February 15, 1925, in press clippings, folder 174, series 4, box 31, KM Papers. Mortimer to Mayo, n.d., folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Also see criticism of the impact of the ‘‘Tagore-Ghandi-Mukerji’’ [sic] propaganda in the United States in Harvey M. Watts to Mayo, June 14, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. For Tagore’s reception in the United States, see Ranajan Bora, ‘‘Rabindranath Tagore: Cultural Ambassador of India to the U.S.,’’ in Women, Politics and Literature, ed. Clinton B. Seely (East Lansing, Mich.: Asian Studies Center, 1981), 138–45; and Sujit Mukherjee, Pasage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the U.S., 1912–1941 (Calcutta: Bookland, 1964). Mayo, ‘‘India,’’ Liberty, 36. For a discussion of anti-Hindu sentiment in the United States, see Stephen Prothero, ‘‘Mother India’s Scandalous Swamis,’’ in Religions of the United States in Practice, vol. 2, ed. Coleen McDannell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

290 Notes to Chapter 2

116. 117.

118.

119.

120.

121.

122. 123.

124.

125. 126. 127.

128.

129.

Press, 2001), 418–32. Also see Malini Johar Scheuller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). For example, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 23, 1927, 4. Mayo to publishers, February 12, 1928, folder 43, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. The most articulate complaint about the differences between the two editions of Mother India was made by British Labour mp Major Graham Pole; see his ‘‘India in Transition,’’ quoted in Kanji Dwarkadas, India’s Fight for Freedom, 1913–1937: An Eyewitness Story (1960; Bombay: Popular Prakash, 1987), 333–34; also Statesman, September 29, 1927, 18; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 23, 1927, 4. For the concern of the Government of India, see p 1354/29/150, p 198/29/150, and p 1158/ 29/150, in fo 395/429, files 25–124 of 1928, fo News Files. See also Mayo to Nazimova, March 16, 1928, folder 44, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. The play was written by Edgar Allan Woolf based on Mother India; see Field, After Mother India, 195–96. The proposal for retaliation against American citizens in India was raised in the assembly by Gaya Prasad Singh. See Home, Public, file 274/1926, 1926. For the secretary of state’s dispatch of May 19, 1926, see Foreign and Political, External 5 (54)-x, 1927. S. Bose, Mother America: Realities of American Life as Seen by an Indian (Baroda: M. S. Bhat, n.d.), esp. 266. For Saund’s reply to Mayo, see D. S. Saund, My Mother India (Stockton, Calif.: Pacific Coast Khalsa Dewan Society, 1930). For Saund’s later career in the United States, see D. S. Saund, Congressman from India (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960). See S. Mazumdar, ‘‘Racist Responses to Racism’’ and ‘‘The Politics of Religion and National Origin: Rediscovering Hindu Indian Identity in the U.S.,’’ in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, ed. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 223–60. See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2002). Bernard Sexton, ‘‘Gandhi’s Weaponless Revolt in India,’’ Current History Magazine, February 1922, 752, cited in Harnam Singh, ‘‘American Press Opinion about Indian Government and Politics, 1919–1935’’ (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1949), 233. Copeland proposed Bill S.4505 on June 23, 1926, to classify Indians as ‘‘white persons’’; see A Bill S. 4505, Copeland Papers, volume 8, cited in Potter, ‘‘Royal Samuel Copeland, 1868–1938.’’ As Potter points out, Copeland became a critic of the U.S. Immigration Law of 1924 and was already calling for modifications to it in early 1926. See also Foreign and Political 289 (2)-x, 1926. See Nation, May 18, 1927, 545; and Indian Social Reformer, August 6, 1927, 778–79. Quoted in Sailendranath Ghose, ‘‘An Appeal on the Hindu Bill,’’ Forward, July 26, 1927, 5. For the All India Congress Committee’s resolution in support of the Copeland Bill, see Bengalee, November 1, 1927, 3. Kumar Shankar Ray Choudhury tried to raise a question about the bill in the assembly, but it was disallowed; see Foreign and Political, External, 5 (54)-x, 1927. Cited in E. R. Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia.’’ Vijay Prashad has written extensively to document various instances of Indian and African American solidarities; see Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). See Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Also see Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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291

130. See Michelle Mitchell, ‘‘ ‘The Black Man’s Burden’: African-Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood, 1890–1910,’’ International Review of Social History 44 (1999): 77–99; and Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). For anticolonialism and the African American community, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and United States Foreign Affairs, 1935–1966 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937– 1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘‘ ‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,’’ Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1045–77. 131. See David L. Hellwig, ‘‘Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy, 1917–1929,’’ Journal of Negro History 6, no. 6 (summer 1981): 110–27. 132. L. J. Roose, ‘‘British Empire Disintegrating, Says Writer, Urging India to Be Free,’’ Negro World, January 19, 1929, n.p. 133. ‘‘As the Crow Flies,’’ Crisis 24, no. 9 (November 1927): 293. 134. ‘‘The Browsing Reader,’’ Crisis, 36, no. 5 (May 1929): 161, 175. 135. ‘‘Entertain India’s Greatest Woman,’’ Chicago Defender, January 19, 1929, 11; also Negro World, November 3, 1928, 2, and March 9, 1929, 2. 136. Richard L. Sutton to Mayo, September 22, 1930, folder 56, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. 137. Naidu to Gandhi, November 14, 1928, correspondence, Sarojini Naidu, s.n. 15166, Gandhi-Sabarmati Papers, nai. Naidu spoke before ‘‘Negro churches’’ as well as to ‘‘colored women’s’’ clubs in the United States; see Naidu to Padmaja Naidu, December 17, 1928, and January 10, 1929, correspondence with Sarojini Naidu, Padmaja Naidu Papers Small Collections (139), nmml. Also Dr. J. T. Sunderland, ‘‘Mrs. Naidu and Mr. Andrews in America,’’ Modern Review 46, no. 1 ( July 1929): 12–13. 138. Emma Lue Sayers, ‘‘Negro Should Create His Own God Says Hindu,’’ New York Amsterdam News, December 29, 1926, reel 27, series 1, 20, Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File, 1899–1966. 139. Norfolk Journal and Guide, October 22, 1927, reel 27, series 1, 887, Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File, 1899–1966. 140. AJG, ‘‘Color-Baiting America,’’ Negro World, October 29, 1927, 2. 141. C. F. Andrews, ‘‘Indians Abroad,’’ Modern Review 51, no. 5 (May 1932): 556–58. For Andrews’s trip, see also ‘‘The Rising Tide of Bitterness against British Rule in India Is Forcing Crisis, Says Briton,’’ Negro World, February 2, 1929, 2–3. 142. Naidu’s trip to the United States, for example, helped expose the partisan wrangling among expatriate Indians in the United States and eventually led to the official decision of the Congress to disaffiliate the Indian National Congress of America, see fa-3 of 1929, All India Congress Committee Papers (hereafter cited as aicc Papers), nmml. 143. New York Times, December 15, 1931; and Herald Tribune, December 1931; both in press clippings, folder 243, box 46, series 14, KM Papers. 144. Mayo to Villard, December 16, 1931, folder 2555, Villard Papers. 145. While Mayo enjoyed a long correspondence with at least one representative of a local dalit organization in India, her relationship with Ambedkar apparently did not go beyond her single meeting with him in the United States. For Ambedkar’s letter to Mayo, see Ambedkar to Mayo, February 24, 1931, folder 57, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. 146. For a history of the organization, see Jean Jones, The League against Imperialism (London: Socialist History Society, 1996).

292 Notes to Chapter 2 147. The review by Henriette Roland Holst-von der Schalk is cited in Modern Review 43, no. 4 (April 1928): 415–17. 148. Labour Party members like Ellen Wilkinson, Lady Cynthia Mosley, and Marion Phillips were among the many critics of Mother India who participated in conferences to protest the book in London. For the report of the British Commonwealth League women’s conference to protest Mayo’s book, see The Vote, November 4, 1927, 350; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 25, 1927, 4. 149. Executive Committee Minutes of February 13, 1934, March 20, 1934, September 25, 1934, and October 16, 1934, I/10, 1934, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, British Section, Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics (hereafter cited as wil Britain Papers). 150. See Alan Raucher, ‘‘American Anti-imperialists and the Pro-India Movement.’’ Many of those in this group found themselves shut out from the mainstream media, which was reluctant to publish anti-Mayo pieces. See Alice S. Blackwell to J. T. Sunderland, January 31, 1929, box 5, and Ramananda Chatterjee to Sunderland, January 18, 1928, Jabez T. Sunderland Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (hereafter cited as Sunderland Papers); and for a discussion of the difficulties that Sunderland encountered in publishing his anti-Mayo book in the United States, see Paul Teed, ‘‘Race against Memory: Katherine Mayo, Jabez Sunderland and Indian Independence,’’ American Studies 44, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 2003): 35–57. 151. Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, The American Cossack (Harrisburgh: Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor, 1912), cited in G. Ray, ‘‘Contested Legitimacy,’’ 119, 140. For Maurer’s and Thomas’s involvement in the pro-India movement, see Raucher, ‘‘American Anti-Imperialists,’’ 97. 152. The New York Call published an extensive exposé of Justice to All on February 4, 1917, cited in Ray, ‘‘Contested Legitimacy,’’ 217. For Smedley, see Raucher, ‘‘American AntiImperialists,’’ 96; and Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Smedley’s review of Mother India appeared in Modern Review 42 (September 1927): 296– 97. 153. Sanger’s speech at the Tenth Annual Conference of the All India Women’s Conference, quoted in ‘‘Women’s Problems,’’ Amrita Bazar Patrika, December 31, 1935, in Papers Relating to Indian Women, India Conciliation Group Papers, Friends House, London. 154. W. Norman Brown, ‘‘Carbolic Acid for India,’’ Nation, July 13, 1927, 40–41; and S. K. Ratcliffe, ‘‘Impossible India,’’ New Republic, September 21, 1927, 127–28. 155. RB, letter to the editor, ‘‘Hope in ‘Mother India,’ ’’ New York Times, October 19, 1927, 20. I find Lawrence Kimpell’s speculation that the letter was most likely from Baldwin persuasive; see Lawrence Louis Kimpell, ‘‘Katherine Mayo’s India’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, El Paso, 1990), 173 n. 22. Mayo was defended against ‘‘RB’s’’ charges by old-time supporters of hers such as W. W. Keen; see his letter to the editor, ‘‘Physician Attests Truth of Miss Mayo’s Facts,’’ New York Times, October 30, 1927, 6. 156. For a discussion of the positive treatment of Mother India in the mainstream British and U.S. media, see Kimpell, ‘‘Katherine Mayo’s India,’’ especially chapters 3 and 4. 157. Sorabji especially complained of the timidityof the British press in India regarding Mayo’s book. See Sorabji to Richmond, July 10, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. 158. See the views of the ‘‘Ditcher,’’ the name used by Patrick Lovatt, the editor of Capital,

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quoted in J. T. Sunderland, ‘‘Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ Weighed in the Balance, What Is the Verdict?’’ Modern Review 45, no. 1 ( January 1929): 1–6. 159. John Darwin, ‘‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars,’’ Historical Journal 23, no. 3 (1980): 657–79.

3. ironic reversal 1. See M. K. Gandhi, ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report,’’ Young India, September 15, 1927, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 34, no. 452, June–September 1927 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1969), 539–47; see esp. 540, 546. 2. K. Mayo, Mutter Indien, trans. Dr. Dora Muzky (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societas-Drukei, 1929). For the translation of the German preface, see folder 249, series 4, box 46, KM Papers. 3. For the development of American social science, see Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For its impact on the professionalization of social reform, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). The Laura Spellman Fellowship of the Rockefeller Foundation was awarded to an American woman, Ruth Woodsmall, to study the changing status of Muslim women in Asia in 1928. On her visit to India, Woodsmall found her own more professional investigation dogged by the shadow of Mayo’s pseudoscientific research. Woodsmall was also struck by the British government’s unfamiliarity with the techniques of a social scientific survey. See Ruth Woodsmall to Helen Woodsmall Elderidge, March 25, 1929, file 2, box 13c, series 2; and Ruth Woodsmall, collective letter, November 20, 1929, file 23, box 15, series 2, Ruth Woodsmall Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Library, Northampton, Mass. 4. For clippings from the New York Call, see folder 156, series 4, box 25, KM Papers. The highly partisan nature of Mayo’s stories on the Pennsylvania Police Force drew a mixed response from her informants in the Pennsylvania force. The commander of Pennsylvania State Force Troop A was clearly pleased by her partisanship; he wrote to Mayo, ‘‘We are very grateful to you for keeping our skeletons safely stowed away in their respective closets’’; see letter to Mayo, October 29, 1917, folder 14, series 1, box, 2, KM Papers. The Captain of D Troop, however, was more skeptical. He warned of one of Mayo’s more glamorized stories of the force: ‘‘The story is very good, but in places highly colored.You are making the State Policemen too ideal in your stories’’; see letter to Mayo, December 24, 1917, folder 15, series 1, box 2, KM Papers. 5. See George Lumb to Mayo, April 2, 1918, folder 17, series 1, box 3, KM Papers. 6. See H. E. Gaston, ‘‘Review of ‘The Isles of Fear’ by Katherine Mayo,’’ New York World, April 12, 1925, 7, cited in Lawrence Louis Kimpell, ‘‘Katherine Mayo’s India’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, El Paso, 1990), 11. 7. D. R. Williams, The U.S. and the Philippines (New York: Doubleday, 1924), was an inspiration for Mayo’s own book. See folder 139, series 3, box 19, KM Papers; also Williams to Mayo, March 4, 1925, folder 30, series 1, box 4, KM Papers. For the comparison of the two books, see press clipping, Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 1926, in folder 175, series 4, box 13, KM Papers. 8. W. B. Seabrook, ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India,’ ’’ New York Herald Tribune, June 12, 1927, 1.

294 Notes to Chapter 3

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

For similar assessments, see Leon Whipple, ‘‘Review of Mother India,’’ Survey, August 1, 1927, 469; Edgar L. Richardson, ‘‘Diagnosing the Maladies of India,’’ Travel, August 1927, 38; Arthur Pound, ‘‘India, Sick and Sodden,’’ Independent, June 25, 1927, 663. For a survey of some popular British and U.S. responses to the book, see Kimpell, ‘‘Katherine Mayo’s India,’’ especially chapters 3 and 4. Mayo had misquoted Tagore from his essay in Hermann Keyserling’s Book of Marriage (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 112. The essay had first appeared in Bengali in the Prabashi; see C. C. Ghose, letter to editor, Statesman, September 13, 1927, 4. After having misquoted Tagore, Mayo could paint him as a defender of child marriage in India; see Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 46. Mayo subsequently acknowledged her mistake and in later editions of the book diluted some of the criticism of Tagore. See Harry H. Field, After Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 190–94. For Tagore’s response to Mother India, see his letter to editor, Manchester Guardian, October 11, 1927, 11–12; reprinted also as letter to editor, Nation, January 4, 1928, 18. See Mayo, Mother India, 25–26, 28. New York Times, October 16, 1927, 4. Ibid. See M. M. Underhill, ‘‘Mother India?’’ International Review of Missions 16 (October 1927): 611–13, reprinted in ‘‘Mother India’’ by Those Who Know Her Better Than Miss Mayo: A Symposium of Reviews of the Book by Responsible People of Long Residence in India (Liverpool: J. A. Thompson [1928]), 9. See Margaret E. Cousins, ‘‘Miss Mayo’s Cruelty to Mother India,’’ reprinted from National Christian Council of India, Is India a World Menace? A Reply to Miss Mayo and a Warning to American Readers of Her Book—‘‘Mother India’’: A Statement by Americans Resident in India Together with Reviews by M. K. Gandhi et al. (Madras: nms Press, n.d.), 1. Cousins’s review was also published in the Young Men of India and quoted in Modern Review 42, no. 5 (November 1927): 565–66. Underhill, ‘‘Mother India?’’ 612. Ernest Wood, An Englishman Defends Mother India (Madras: Ganesh, 1929), 1. Quoted in Modern Review 42, no. 4 (April 1928): 300. Also see Tarakanath Das’s review of Mother India in The People 7, no. 7 (August 18, 1927), 133. Sorabji to Elena Richmond, October 26, 1927, in Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. Balfour’s letter appeared in the Times of India, October 10, 1927, 8. Balfour’s views were contested by J. D. Jenkins. See letter to editor, Times of India, October 13, 1927, 10; and for Balfour’s response, see letter to editor, Times of India, October 14, 1927, 9. Balfour’s original letter was widely reported in the British and American press as well as reprinted in numerous responses to Mother India. See reports in the Times (London), October 10, 1927, 223; and New York Times, October 11, 1927, 5. Balfour was a leading medical practitioner in India and the coauthor, with Ruth Young, of The Work of Medical Women in India (London: Oxford University Press, 1929). Her views on maternity and infant mortality in India thus carried some weight. Sorabji to Richmond, October 26, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. Rathbone, ‘‘Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’?’’ Hibbert Journal 27, no. 2 ( January 1929); 193–214; also reprinted as Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’? (London: Constable, 1929). Rathbone’s Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934)

Notes to Chapter 3

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

295

departs from Mayo not only in identifying child marriage as both a Hindu and a Muslim problem in India but also in chastising the colonial state for its apathy toward reform. See Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Kamaladevi Chattopadyay et al., eds., The Awakening of Indian Women (Madras: Everyman’s Press, 1939), 9–10. Englishman, August 26, 1927, n.p. For other extreme examples of defensive apologias, see especially Syam Sunder Chakravarty, My Mother’s Picture (An Attempt to Get at the Hindu Spirit in Connection with the Mayo Challenge) (Calcutta: Sanjibani Book Dept., 1929). The Calcutta Town Hall meeting, organized by J. N. Sengupta, the mayor of Calcutta, was one of the largest protest meetings against Mother India. See reports of some of the speeches at the meeting in Forward, September 6, 1927, 5, 7; Bengalee, September 6, 1927, 3; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 6, 1927, 6, 9. For B. C. Pal’s speech, see Sorabji to Richmond, November 11, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers; and also see the report ‘‘Book by Miss Mayo Rouses Hindu India,’’ New York Times, October 6, 1927, 6. Very soon, however, critics were also calling for a stop to the vilification of Western women; see Bengalee, December 14, 1927, 4. For some examples of critics who underscored Mayo’s ‘‘sex complex’’ and recommended that she get married, see Ashoke Chatterjee, ‘‘Mother India,’’ Modern Review 42, no. 3 (September 1927): 345–56; and [S. G. Warty], Sister India: A Critical Examination of and Reasoned Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ by ‘World Citizen’ (Bombay: Sister India Office, 1928), esp. 103–5. See the review by JCB in Modern Review 44, no. 5 (December 1928): 654. Also see the critical review of Shyam Chunder Chakravarty’s My Mother’s Picture in Bombay Chronicle, October 19, 1929, 6. Rangaswamy Iyengar, the secretaryof the Swaraj Party, had proposed proscribing Mother India in India. Several papers, including the Indian Daily Mail, the Indian National Herald, and Amrita Bazar Patrika, objected to the ban; see Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 14, 1927, 4; and August 15, 1927, 3; also Bengalee, August 16, 1927, 5; and Statesman, August 21, 1927, 9. Indian Social Reformer, September 10, 1927, 1. The paper of the Servants of India Society, the Hitavada of Nagpur, carried a detailed review of Mayo’s ‘‘libel’’ on India; see Hitavada, n.d., in file 1, box 2, Agatha Harrison Papers, Friends House, London. Lord Sinha was one of those who decided not to enter the fray even though Mayo had devoted half a chapter to vilifying him anonymously, but sufficiently clearly to identify him; see ‘‘Lord Sinha and Miss Mayo,’’ Indian Social Reformer, March 17, 1928, 450. Cited in CFA [Charles F. Andrews], ‘‘Review of ‘Sister India,’ ’’ Modern Review 42, no. 5 ( June 1928): 710. For Mukerji’s book, see A Son of Mother India Answers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928); and for Andrews, see The True India (1929; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939). Ranga Iyer, Father India (New York: Louis Carrier, 1927; London: Slewyn and Blount, 1927). For the book’s translation into Indian languages, see Phadar Indiya, Hindi translation by Suryadev Singh (Howrah: Double Crown, 1929); and Phadar Indiya, Bengali translation by Bhagavati Charan Som (Howrah: Ghosh Machine Press, 1928). For Iyer’s source, see Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans,The Revolt of Modern Youth (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). See Norman Douglas, How about Europe? (privately printed in Florence by Tipografia

296 Notes to Chapter 3

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

Classica, 1929; London: Chatto and Windus, 1930). The American edition of the book was given a different title, Goodbye to Western Culture: Some Footnotes on East and West (New York: Harper, 1930). For other examples of books that rested on turning the tables on the West, see Colonel Dinshah P. Ghadiali, American Sex Problems (Malaga, N.J.: Spectro-Chrome Institute, 1929). See Consular Reports from Bombay, August 29, 1936, in Earl Robert Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia, 1900–1940’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1955), appendix 4. K. L. Gauba, Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok (Lahore: Times Pub. Co., 1929); and for the American edition, see Gauba, Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amuck (NewYork: C. Kendall, 1929). Not surprisingly, the Modern Review, which favored more serious responses to Mayo, gave the book a scathing review. See KNC, ‘‘Uncle Sham,’’ Modern Review 46, no. 1 ( July 1929): 120; also see N. Yaganeswara Sastry, ‘‘Mr. Gauba’s ‘Uncle Sham,’ ’’ Stri Dharma 12, nos. 11–12 (September–October 1929): 504–9. In this genre, see also John Riddelhi, ‘‘A Step-Son of Mother India’s Aunt Answers: A Parody Investigation of America in Miss Mayo’s Best Manner,’’ Vanity Fair, August 1928, 67, 85, 93–94, 96, reprinted in Stri Dharma 12, no. 1 (November 1928): 13–16. For Gauba’s own elaboration on this joke, see K. L. Gauba, Part I, 4th Session, Recorded April 4, 1970, Oral History Archives, nmml; and K. L. Gauba, ‘‘How I Became a Writer,’’ Indian Book Industry, January 1970, 27–28, in Small Collections: K. L. Gauba, 190 (xxvii), nmml. K. Mayo, ‘‘India,’’ Liberty, January 14, 1928, 38. Samuel McCrea Cavert, ‘‘Is This Mother India?’’ Federal Council Bulletin 10 (December 1927): 30. Numerous others made a similar point; see, for example, Mukerji, A Son of Mother India Answers. See Blanche Watson to Hossain, n.d., Correspondence with Blanche Watson, Syed Hossain Papers Small Collections (22). Another Mayo critic, Lala Lajpat Rai, freely made use of the files of the Crisis for details on lynching in the United States in his own book Unhappy India (Calcutta: Banna, 1928), 105–50. See extract from the Vartman, no. 35, week ending September 3, 1927, in Report on Native Newspapers, North West Provinces and United Provinces, 1924–1927, nai. Chandravati Lakhanpal, Mother India Ka Jawab (Kangri: Gurukul-Yantralaya, 1928; reprint, Lucknow: Ganga Pustakalaya Kariyala, 1929). Ibid., 6–7. Lakhanpal went on to win the Delhi Hindi Sahitya Sammelan award for her subsequent book Striyon Ki Stithi [The Situation of Women] (Lucknow: Shukla Printing Press, 1934). See review by ‘‘G’’ in Modern Review 44, no. 3 (September 1928): 335–36. For other favorable reviews of Lakhanpal’s book, see Bombay Daily Mail, January 14, 1928, in Press Clippings: India, vol. 3, folder 207, series 4, box 37, KM Papers; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, December 11, 1927, 3. Wolsley Haig provided Mayo’s camp with a brief summary of the book. See Haig to Field, June 22, 1928, folder 47, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. See Rai, Unhappy India, chap. 25, 350–71. For translations of Rai’s book, see Dukhi Bharata: Misa Kaitharina Meyo Ki ‘Madar Indiya’ Ka Uttara [in Hindi] (Prayaga: Indiyana Presa, 1928); Duradirsta Indiya, Tamil translation by K. S. Sundaram (Madras: K. S. Muttaya, 1928); and L’Inde Malheureuse, French translation by Mme Marcel Girette (Paris: Les Editions Rieder, 1930). For an indication of the favorable reception of Rai’s book among Mayo’s critics, see the review by RC [Ramananda Chatterjee], Modern Review 48, no. 5 ( June 1928): 713–14.

Notes to Chapter 3

297

45. See W. W. Hunter, The Indian Empire (London: Trubner, 1882). For Gandhi’s clarifications of his reference to Hunter, see Gandhi to Mayo, March 26, 1926; and April 9, 1926, folder 33, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Also see Mayo to Gandhi, March 26, 1926, s.n. 12452, Correspondence Katherine Mayo, Gandhi-Sabarmati Papers. 46. Mayo, ‘‘India,’’ 36. 47. J. J. Cornelius, ‘‘India’s Degradation Laid to British Misrule,’’ Current History 27 (December 1927): 361–68. 48. A. Smedley, ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India,’ ’’ Modern Review 42, no. 3 (September 1927): 296– 99. 49. Quoted in Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘‘Indian Social Reformers and India’s Political and Economic Enemies,’’ Modern Review 42, no. 3 (September 1927): 356–59. 50. K. Natarajan, Miss Mayo’s Mother India: A Rejoinder (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1928), 10. 51. S. K. Dutta’s review in the Student Christian Movement Journal is cited in Amrita Bazar Patrika, January 18, 1928, 4. 52. See diary entry, December 20, 1927, General Correspondence 7, Sir John Simon Papers, oioc. 53. Uma Nehru, Miss Mayo Ki ‘Mother India’ (Sachitra Hindi Anuwad) Jis Me Srimati Uma Nehru likhit Bhumika tathat Paschimi Samajyawad Ke Vishay Me Miss Mayo Se Do Do Bate [A True Hindi Translation of Miss Mayo’s ‘‘Mother India’’ by Mrs. Uma Nehru with a Dialogue between Her and Miss Mayo on Western Civilization] (Allahabad: Hindustan Press, 1928). The book has been commonly abbreviated as Mother India Aur Uska Jawab [Mother India and Its Reply]. 54. Ibid., 25–27. Uma Nehru had been a frequent contributor of articles on women and social reform in the Hindi women’s journal Stri Darpan. See Vir Bharat Talwar, ‘‘Feminist Consciousness in Women’s Journals in Hindi, 1910–1920,’’ in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. K. Sangari and S. Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 204–32. 55. Nehru, Mother India Aur Uska Jawab, 31–47. 56. Ibid., 67–68. 57. Quoted in [Warty], Sister India, 66–68. 58. For the history of this institutional split, see Sita Ram Singh, National and Social Reform in India (Delhi: Ranjit Printers and Publishers, 1968), esp. 23, 42–43, 77–103. 59. Sister India, 72. 60. Ibid., 73. 61. See foreword to Inthiya Matha (Madras: K. S. Muttaya, 1928), iii–vi. I owe the translation of Naidu’s foreword in Tamil to an anonymous translator in Guwahati, Assam. 62. See Va. Ra. [V. Ramaswami Iyengar], Maya Meyo, Allathu, Mayo Vukku Savukkadi [in Tamil] (Madras: Vasan Puttkacalai, 1928), quoted in P. Athiyaman and A. R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘‘Debate: On Gandhi, Mayo and Emilsen,’’ South Asia 12, no. 2 (1989): 87. 63. See translator’s preface to Bharat Mãta, trans. Mirza Abdul Majeed and printed under the supervision of Babu Nizamuddin (Lahore: Patriarch Press, 1928). I owe the translation of Majeed’s Urdu preface to an anonymous translator in Guwahati, Assam. 64. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘‘A Foreign Policy for India,’’ September 13, 1927, file 8, aicc Papers. 65. Kovai A. Ayyamuthu, Meyo Kutru Moyya Poyya (Kanchipuram: Kumaran Printing Press, 1929). The book goes further than most in corroborating even some of the most sensational claims in Mother India, including the charge of the sexual use of young boys by older men. See especially chapter 10, ‘‘Prostitution Found Nowhere,’’ 16–19. I have relied on translations from the Tamil provided by Mr. Ramani Iyer of Madras and an

298 Notes to Chapter 3

66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

anonymous translator in New Delhi. For a discussion of the self-respect movement’s position on Mother India, see also V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998), 396–99. The meetings between Periyar and Gandhi in 1927 took place during the same period as Gandhi was also reading and composing his response to Mother India. These meetings presaged the final break between the two men; for a discussion of their estrangement, see P. Natrajan, ‘‘A Critical Study of Periyar E. V. R.’s Views on Mahatma Gandhi’’ (M.A. thesis, Annamalai University, Annamalainagar, 1984), appendixes 1 and 2, 95–104, Periyar Rationalist Library and Research Centre (prlrc), Chennai. For studies of Periyar, see K. M. Balasubramaniyum, Periyar E. V. Ramasami (Erode: Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institute, 1947); Anita Diehl, Periyar E. V. Ramasami (Bombay: BI Pub., 1978); and Sa Viswanathan, ‘‘The Political Career of E. V. Ramasami Naicker: A Study in the Politics of Tamil Nadu, 1920–1949’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Canberra, Australia, 1973). For Ayyamuthu’s critique of Gandhi’s support for the varnashramadharma, see ‘‘Ways for the Uplift of the Fifth Caste,’’ chapter 25 of Meyo Kutru Moyya Poyya, 66–69. For the history of the self-respect movement, see N. K. Mangalamurugesan, Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu, 1920–1940 (Madurai: Koodal Publishers, 1981); B. S. Chandrababu, Social Protest and Its Impact on Tamil Nadu: With Reference to the Self Respect Movement (from 1920s to 1940s) (Madras: Emerald Publishers, 1993). For the non-Brahmin movement as a whole in south India, see Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); and V. Geetha and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium. See foreword in Ayyamuthu, Meyo Kutru Moyya Poyya, i–iv. Ibid., chap. 28, ‘‘Fault Finder—Our Friend Only,’’ 73–76. Ibid., chap. 29, ‘‘The Difference between Our Country and Others,’’ 76. Ibid., chap. 17, ‘‘Our Folly,’’ esp. 43. Ibid., chap. 18, ‘‘British Rule,’’ 43–46. For Bhagat Ram’s correspondence with Mayo, see folder 42, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. Mayo sent a check for seventy-five rupees made out to the Imperial Bank of India in the name of Bhagat Ram. See enclosure, folder 98, series 1, box 10, KM Papers. Yet Mayo’s and Newell’s attempts to verify the identity of Bhagat Ram from their British informants proved elusive. See Adam to Mayo, January 19, 1928, folder 42, series 1, box 6, KM Papers; also see note by Newell attached to the letter from Newell to Bhagat Ram, November 19, 1930, folder 56, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. Even though Bhagat Ram’s letterhead refers only to the Jiv Daya Parcharak and the Audi Achut Sabha of Ferozepur Cantt, it is possible that he was connected with the Adi Dharm Mandal, founded by Shri Mango Ram in 1926, in Jullundur in the Punjab. The Mandal had a branch in Ferozepur. See R. K. Kshirsagar, Dalit Movement in India and Its Leaders (1857–1956) (New Delhi: MD Publications, 1994), 70–71; also Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). For Mayo’s and her friends’ failed attempts to similarly enlist S. N. Arya of the Non-Brahmin Youth League in Madras, see Field to Hayles (editor of the British paper Madras Mail), n.d., folder 45, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. See the editorial note appended to Bhagat Ram, ‘‘The Hardships of Women in Hinduism,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, August 10, 1928, 219–20. Also see Bhagat Ram, ‘‘Miss Mayo’s ‘Mother India,’ ’’ in the papers of the Duchess of Atholl, an ardent opponent

Notes to Chapter 3

75. 76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

299

of political reforms in India, file 1, Atholl Papers. Bhagat Ram of the Jiv Daya Parcharak was a correspondent also in the journal of the International Alliance for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship; see Jus Suffragi 22, no. 7 (April 1928): 103. He was also a contributor in feminist journals in India; see his ‘‘Women’s Place in the Future Constitution of India,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 9 ( July 1931): 410–12. Also see the letter of Qudrat Allah, Secretary Dawat-I-Islam Aborigines Tract and Book Society, Lucknow, ‘‘Depressed Classes and Miss Mayo,’’ in Pioneer, November 18, 1927, 11. Also cited in J. Coatman, India in 1927– 28 (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publishing Branch, 1928), 4; and Field, After Mother India, 211. See ‘‘Review,’’ Hindu (Education and Literary Supplement), January 22, 1930, 7. See Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia, 1900–1940,’’ 196–208. For studies of missionaries and Christianity in colonial India, see Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). For changes in American missionary attitudes in India from the 1920s, see Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and ‘‘Heathen Lands’’: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s) (New York: Garland, 2000). Flemings and Jones are cited in Singh, Gender, Religion, and ‘‘Heathen Lands,’’ 182–83; also see Eli Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road (New York: Abingdon Press, 1925). See Catherine N. Cowan, ‘‘Western Women Doctors in an Eastern Land: The Work of Female Medical Missionaries in India, 1870–1947’’ (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1998); and Singh, Gender, Religion, and ‘‘Heathen Lands.’’ See Dorothy M. Snedegar, ‘‘The Mother India Controversy (as Illustrative of Certain Missionary Problems)’’ (M.A. thesis, Duke University, 1938). See J. T. Sunderland, India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom (New York: Lewis Copeland, 1929); and John Haynes Holmes, I Speak for Myself (New York: Harper Collins, 1959). Also see J. T. Sunderland, ‘‘Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ Weighed in the Balance, What Is the Verdict?’’ Modern Review 45, no. 1 ( January 1929): 1–6. For Gandhi’s American friends, among whom Holmes was one of the most prominent, see Leonard A. Gordon, ‘‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Dialogues with Americans,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, January 26, 2000, 337–52; and for Sunderland, see Paul Teed, ‘‘Race against Memory: Katherine Mayo, Jabez Sunderland, and Indian Independence,’’ American Studies 44, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 2003): 35–57. See, for example, Lilian Parker, file 1, February 1938, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, cited in Schmidt, ‘‘American Relations with South Asia, 1900–1940,’’ 265. See E. F. E. Wigrim, ‘‘Mother India,’’ Church Overseas, January 1, 1928, 68–70; Missionary Review of the World 53 (December 1927): 869–70; and Reverend Thomas F. McNamara, ‘‘Review of Mother India,’’ Catholic World 126 (October 1927): 353–54. Women’s Christian Advocate, July 21, 1927, press clipping, Scrapbook U.S. and Great Britain, series 4, box 40, KM Papers. Edith M. Craske, Sister India: One Solution of the Problems of ‘Mother India’ (London: Religious Tract Society, 1930). See ‘‘Editorial,’’ Baptist Missionary Review, May 1928, 210–17. See ‘‘Statement of National Christian Council,’’ Indian Social Reformer, October 22, 1927, quoted in K. Natarajan, Miss Mayo’s Mother India (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1928), 111.

300 Notes to Chapter 3 87. National Christian Council Review of India, October 1927, quoted in ‘‘Mother India’’ by Those Who Know Her Better Than Miss K. Mayo, 13. Also see Is India a World Menace? 88. A. H. Clark et al., ‘‘Statement,’’ Hindu, December 17, 1927, quoted in Natarajan, Miss Mayo’s Mother India, 112. The statement was reprinted in Christian Century (Chicago), 45, no. 5 (February 2, 1928), 149; see letter to editor and enclsoure from D. F. McClelland. The signatories included seven of the most prominent American missionaries in India, including Eli Stanley Jones, Frederick B. Fisher, Bishop M. E. Church, Alice B. Van Doren, and others. Also see Alden H. Clark, ‘‘Is India Dying? Reply to Mother India by Katherine Mayo,’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1928, 271–79. 89. H. A. Popley, ‘‘Mother India: A Criticism,’’ part 1, Indian Witness, September 7, 1927, 565– 66; and part 2, September 14, 1927, 586–87; also Popley, ‘‘Mother India,’’ Indian Witness, January 4, 1928, 16. 90. For editorial comments on Mother India, see ‘‘Mother India,’’ Indian Witness, November 2, 1927, 697–98; and ‘‘Mother India Again,’’ Indian Witness, November 16, 1927, 730– 31. 91. Samuel McCrea Cavert, ‘‘Is This Mother India?’’ Federal Council Bulletin 10 (December 1927): 30–31; also see Walter Eugene Clark, ‘‘Caricature,’’ Hound and Horn (March 1928): 266–69. 92. M. M. Underhill, ‘‘Mother India?’’ International Review of Missions 16 (October 1927): 611– 13. 93. CS [Clifford Sharpe], ‘‘India as It Is,’’ New Statesman, July 16, 1927, 448–49. Several letters to the editor followed until the editor was forced to call a stop; see New Statesman, August 13, 1927, 567–68. 94. P.W.Wilson, ‘‘India Is Her Own Worst Enemy,’’ New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1927, 1. For his earlier polemics against Indian self-government, see P. W. Wilson, ‘‘The Unrest in India,’’ World’s Work, March 1922, cited in Harnam Singh, ‘‘American Press Opinion about Indian Government and Politics, 1919–1935’’ (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1949), 242–43. Also see Wilson, ‘‘Miss Miller vs. Miss Mayo,’’ North American Review 225, no. 844 ( June 1928): 707–12. 95. Field, After Mother India, 144. Other friends of Mayo’s were similarly dismayed by the public response of missionaries. See Sorabji to Richmond, October 20, 1927, and November 23, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. 96. Reverend James Smith, ‘‘Letter to the Editor,’’ Times of India, November 1, 1927, 8. Also quoted in Field, After Mother India, 144. 97. See letter from Charles G.Trumbull, editor of the Sunday Science Times, to Mayo, December 10, 1932, folder 147, series 3, box 20, KM Papers. For Mayo’s own article see ‘‘Renegades,’’ Sunday Science Times, January 7, 1933, 3–5. For the report of the Layman’s Foreign Mission’s Inquiry Commission, see box 32, file 1, Ruth Woodsmall Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 98. See Newell to Harcourt, Brace and Co., December 4, 1933, folder 67, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. 99. See Newell to Mr. Rushmore, June 26, 1935, folder 75, series 1, box 8, KM Papers. 100. The phrase is adapted from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,’’ Wedge 7–8 (winter–spring 1985): 121, reprinted as ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 271–316. 101. Adam to Mayo, n.d., folder 181, series 4, box 34, KM Papers. For other correspondence

Notes to Chapter 3

102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

118.

119. 120. 121.

301

on women in India, see Sorabji to Mayo, January 29, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5; and Stanley Reed to Mayo, November 5, 1926, folder 35, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Mary Poovey, ‘‘Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire,’’ in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. M. Jacobus, E. Fox Keller, and S. Shuttelworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), 29. Quoted in ‘‘Miss Mayo Answers ‘Mother India’ Critics,’’ New York Times, October 7, 1927, 5. The phrase was from Miss Muriel Simon, Secretary, Lady Chelmsford League, Punjab, to Mayo, n.d., folder 180, series 4, box 34, KM Papers. Pilcher’s speech was reported in the Statesman, August 12, 1927; for press comments, see Forward, August 16, 1927, 7; Bengalee, September 6, 1927, 3; Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 25, 1927, 3. See report of the defamation suit in Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 6, 1927, 3;Times, September 6, 1927, 11; and Daily Telegraph, September 5, 1927, in L/1/2/9. Also see report of the outcome of the case in Times, July 20, 1928, L/1/2/10. Surendranath Ray Chowdhury filed a second suit against Watson; see Times of India, September 6, 1927, 8. See Dutt, The Mayo-Pilcher Carnival of Slander (Howra: Bengal Law Printing and Pub. House, 1928). L. Basu, ‘‘Tragic Beauty of Indian Widow,’’ Forward, August 21, 1927, 5. S. Nag, quoted in ‘‘Slander against Womanhood,’’ Forward, August 25, 1927, 8. Also see Shanta Nag, Purbasmriti (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1983). Charulata Devi, The Fair Sex of India (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Cottage, 1929). See reports of various meetings in Forward, September 1, 1927, 5; September 7, 1925, 5; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, September 17, 1927, 5. Tagore’s speech at the annual Mahila Samiti meeting in Calcutta, ‘‘Women’s Place in a Nation: Her Creative Genius,’’ urged women to answer Mayo by their actions; see Amrita Bazar Patrika, January 6, 1928, 5. See report of meeting in Times of India, September 12, 1927, 10. Bengalee, September 20, 1927, 4. Forward, September 4, 1927, 4. Major D. Graham Pole, ‘‘India through a U.S.A. Imperialist’s Eyes,’’ Forward, September 6, 1927, 4, 11. For other reports that drew a parallel between the European agitation against Western films and the Bengali agitation against Mother India, see Statesman, August 24, 1927, 7; August 27, 1927, 4; and September 15, 1927, 8; and Bengalee, December 23, 1927, 3. [Warty], Sister India, 143. See report of the Lahore meeting in Amrita Bazar Patrika, December 13, 1927, 10; Mrs. Mirza Ismail presided over a similar protest meeting against Mother India under the auspices of the Mysore Women’s Education Conference; see Indian Social Reformer, December 24, 1927, in Press Clippings, India, vol. 3, folder 207, series 4, box 37, KM Papers. See reports in Forward, September 3, 1927, 6; Bengalee, September 6, 1927, 3; and Bombay Daily Mail, September 5, 1927, in Press Clippings, India, vol. 2, folder 207, series 4, box 37, KM Papers. Forward, September 7, 1927, 5. Quoted in Statesman, January 24, 1928, 6. Also see Hindu, January 24, 1928, in Press Clippings, India, vol. 3, folder 207, series 4, box 37, KM Papers. The article, written by a British doctor who had served in India, was reprinted from the London Times in the Calcutta Statesman, March 30, 1928, 8.

302 Notes to Chapter 3 122. For the exchange, see H. Mayo Das, ‘‘Sister India: Another Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo,’’ Pioneer, April 23, 1928, 19; Patricia Farley, ‘‘Differing Views of Mother India: A Reply to Miss Maya Das,’’ Pioneer, April 30, 1928, 8; Animesh Ch. Ray Chowdhury, ‘‘More Criticism of Mother India,’’ Pioneer, May 2, 1928, 8; Ida Mary Wilmore ‘‘Support for Miss Katherine Mayo,’’ Pioneer, May 5, 1928, 11; H. Maya Das, ‘‘Another Attack on Miss Mayo,’’ Pioneer, May 10, 1928, 5; and H. Maya Das, ‘‘Anti-Mayoism,’’ Pioneer, May 31, 1928, 11. 123. Quoted in Padmini [Sathianandan] Sengupta, The Portrait of an Indian Woman (Calcutta: ymca, 1956), 179–80. 124. See MEC [Margaret Cousins], ‘‘A Protest against ‘Mother India,’ ’’ Stri Dharma 10, no. 11 (September 1927): 162–63, in Forbes Collection; and ‘‘Bharat-Mata’’ [Mother India], Chand, November 1927, 7–16; also Raisaheb P. Raghuprasad Ji Divedi, ‘‘Miss Mayo Ka Pralap’’ [Miss Mayo’s Sorrow], Chand, November 1927, 33–39. 125. Quoted in Forward, September 17, 1927, 5. 126. See Robert Hardy Andrews, A Lamp for India: The Story of Madame Pandit (London: Arthur Baker, 1967), 110–11. Jawaharlal Nehru, Pandit’s brother, had urged her to read the book; see Nehru to Pandit, October 13, 1927, Correspondence Jawaharlal Nehru, Small Collections: Vijaylakshmi Pandit 190 (xxxix), nmml. Similarly Mrs. Raj Dulari Nehru, a relative of the Nehru family, who was visiting Yale University at New Haven, was anxious to register her protest against Mayo; see ‘‘Statements in ‘Mother India’ Claimed Unfair: Mrs. Raj Dulari Nehru Refutes Claims of Miss Mayo in Special Article,’’ New Haven Journal Courier, November 3, 1927, 10. 127. Sushama Tagore, the niece of Tagore, asked awkward questions of Mayo at the New York Town Hall meeting. Newell notes, however, that ‘‘sweet Mr. Ely [Robert Ely of the League for Political Education and sponsor of the event] calls time at just the right moment,’’ see Resume of Discussion, February 14, 1928, folder 245, series 4, box 42, KM Papers. For Sen’s speech at the London protest meeting, see Mrinalini Sen, Knocking at the Door: Lectures and Other Writings (Calcutta: Living Age Press, 1954), 71–80. 128. Stri Dharma 10, no. 12 (October 1927): 178; and Hindu, September 29, 1927, in Press Clippings, India, vol. 2, folder 207, series 4, box 37, KM Papers. 129. Jus Suffragi: The International Women Suffrage News 22 (November 1927): 27; also ( January 1928): 62. 130. See The Vote, November 11, 1927, 358. 131. See Srimati Padmabai Sanjiva Rao, Women’s Views on Indian Problems (Adyar, Madras: Women’s Indian Association, 1927), 1, 16. 132. Quoted in Stri Dharma 10, no. 12 (October 1927): 182. 133. M. Reddi, ‘‘Miss Mayo Condemned,’’ in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 1, S. nos. 78–115; and ‘‘Miss Mayo Answered,’’ in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 3, S. nos. 155–91, Reddi Papers. 134. Reddi, ‘‘Miss Mayo Answered,’’ in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 3, Reddi Papers. 135. Reddi’s threat appeared in the Hindu, February 24, 1928; see ‘‘Social Welfare Measures,’’ 1927–1928, Subject File, file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers; and ‘‘Girl Mother’s Woes: Some Shocking Facts,’’ Swarajya, n.d., in Press Clippings, Subject File: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. It was greeted with spirited response from those who accused her of ‘‘hysterics against orthodoxy’’: see N. Srinivasacharya, vice president of the Brahmana Maha Sabha, to the Hindu, March 7, 1929, 4. 136. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, ‘‘Rani Bhikarini’’ [The Beggar Queen], Masik Mohammadi,

Notes to Chapter 3

137. 138. 139.

140.

141.

142.

143.

144.

145.

303

January–December 1927, reprinted in Rokeya Rachanabali, ed. Abdul Kadir (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1973–1984), 289–92. I owe this reference to Hosina Yasmin Hossain, ‘‘Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, 1880–1932: The Status of Muslim Women in Bengal’’ (Ph.D. diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1996). Quoted in Hosina Yasmin Hossain, ‘‘Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,’’ 207. Ibid. I have also relied on the translation by Shri Amitabha Choudhury, headmaster, Fatasil High School, Guwahati. Sorabji, ‘‘ ‘Mother India’: The Incense of Service; What Sacrifice Can We Make?’’ Englishman, August 31, 1927, 6–9; ‘‘Mother India: A Note of Hope,’’ Englishman, September 1, 1927, enclosures in Sorabji to Richmond, November 5, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 161, CS Papers. During her Indian visit, Mayo had said of Sorabji, ‘‘You are the best thing that has happened to us in India’’; see Sorabji to Richmond, March 3, 1926, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 40, CS Papers. It was not until later, however, that Sorabji would self-consciously describe their collaboration as ‘‘secretive’’ and her own role as that of a ‘‘Scarlet Pimpernel’’; see Sorabji to Mayo, September 1, 1930, folder 55, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. Of one of her stories, for example, Sorabji noted that Mayo had worked over the story and changed the central character from an Indian Christian to a Hindu. See Sorabji to Richmond, July 10, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. Of another story, given to her by a British official, Mayo explained her reason for changing the Muslim name of the protagonist to a Hindu: ‘‘I gave this name [Lachmansingh] to Hashim in order to make a Hindu of him’’; see note to J. C. Pringle, folder 214, series 4, box 42, KM Papers. Whether in public, as in her review in the Englishman, or in private communications, Sorabji was wary of Mayo’s decision to draw political conclusions; see Sorabji to Mayo, September 1, 1927; September 6, 1927, folder 38, series 1, box 5; and June 10, 1928, folder 47, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. Mayo’s continuing lecturing and hectoring also disturbed Sorabji, and Sorabji admitted to being, temporarily at least, quite ‘‘angry with her’’; see Sorabji to Richmond, February 2, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. Iyer, Father India, 72–73. Sorabji considered the remark defamatory; see Sorabji to Richmond, February 2, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Modern Review, had first accused Sorabji of providing Mayo with much of her information. See Bengalee, September 8, 1927, 3; and Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 15, 1927, 5. The letter was drafted by Mrs. P. Chaudhuri to be sent to the president of the International Federation of University Women. Sorabji refused to circulate the letter as the opinion of the fuwi but agreed to it being sent on to the London secretary as Chaudhuri’s personal views; see Sorabji to Richmond, April 18, 1928; and July 19, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. For Sorabji’s fears about Latika Basu’s campaign, see Sorabji to Richmond, April 26, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. See letters from Sorabji to Richmond, August 1, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. Sorabji rejected this invitation. The two rival post–Mother India volumes in question were the following: Evelyn C. Gedge and Mithan Choksi, eds., Women in Modern India: Fifteen Papers by Indian Women Writers (Bombay: D. B. Tarapore-

304 Notes to Chapter 3

146.

147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160.

wala Sons, 1929); and A. R. Caton, ed., The Key of Progress (London: Humphrey Milford, 1930). Later Sorabji was invited to contribute to another volume of essays by Indian women activists on the women’s movement in India, which she accepted; see Sorabji to Richmond, October 28, 1935, and November 11, 1935, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 48, CS Papers. By the 1930s, Sorabji had emerged as a champion of Hindu orthodoxy. She worked behind the scenes for M. K. Acharya, who had been one of the more visible opponents of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929. For Sorabji’s direct opposition to attempts at strengthening the act, see Sorabji’s letter to the Times, August 6, 1936, 6; and for the response from British feminists, see Grace Lankester, letter to editor, Times, August 11, 1936, 8, Correspondence on Parallels between Child Marriage Abolition and Sati, no. 171, CS Papers. For reports of this episode see Bulletin of the Indian Women’s Movement, no. 10 (September 1936): 3. Also see Rathbone’s critical review of Sorabji’s book India Calling that made no secret of the latter’s opposition to social reform efforts; see ER, ‘‘Review of ‘India Calling,’ ’’ Spectator, January 18, 1935, 91–92. For some examples, see G. Sumati Bai, ‘‘Why Divorce?’’ Revolt, January 9, 1930, in Press Clippings 1929–1930, file 1, Reddi Papers; and ‘‘Women in Tamil Land,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 8 ( June 1931): 341–42; ‘‘Revolt and Progress,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 10 (August 1931): 471–72; ‘‘Facts of Marriage—No Fancy of Man,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 11 (September 1931): 515–16; and ‘‘Religion’s Retreat,’’ Stri Dharma 15, no. 9 ( July 1932): 471–80. G. Sumati Bai, Woman Awakened (Madras: Tagore, 1928). Mayo, Volume Two (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), 200. Sumati Bai, Woman Awakened, 44–46. Cited in New India, July 25, 1929, 23. Review by MR, New India, November 9, 1928, 18. For Kanakalakshmi Ammal’s letter, see New India, July 25, 1929, 23. Mayo, Slaves of the Gods (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 237. New India, July 25, 1929, 23. Ibid., 134–37; and Field, After Mother India, 38–48. D. R. Williams of San Francisco, who, like Mayo, was engaged in countering Filipino and Indian nationalist propaganda in the United States, first brought Doherty’s charges to Mayo’s notice. He provided Mayo and Field with a sworn affidavit from her, n.d., folder 50, series 1, box 7; but the story had too many discrepancies; see Field to D. R. Williams, December 3, 1928, folder 50, series 1, box 7, KM Papers. The British ambassador in Washington, D.C., and the Home Department in India aided Annette Doherty, whose husband had been killed in the disturbances in Bombay, for carrying out her anti-Gandhi propaganda in the United States; see Home, Political, 311/195 KW. Mayo, Volume II, 134–37, and appendix 2. For attempts to dismiss the implications of Bose’s critique, see Newell to Battye, February 25, 1928, folder 43, series 6, box 44, KM Papers. See Sorabji to Richmond, March 6, 1929, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 44, CS Papers. For the call of conservative groups for the repeal of the Sheppard-Towner Act, see Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); and Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform. For the ‘‘red scare’’ of the 1920s, see William O’Neill, Feminism in America: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989); and

Notes to Chapter 3

161. 162. 163.

164.

165.

166.

167.

168.

169.

170.

305

Joan M. Jensen, ‘‘All Pink Sisters: The War Department and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s,’’ in Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920–1948, ed. J. Jensen and L. Scharf (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 199–222. See Robinson to Mayo, August 4, 1927, folder 37, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. See press release of Mayo’s speech, January 25, 1928, folder 249, series 4, box 46, KM Papers. For notice of Loomis’s reception for Mayo and Newell at her home in Tuxedo Park, see New York Times, October 17, 1927, 6; for a copy of the resolutions passed at Loomis’s Colony Club meeting on November 27, 1927, see folder 42, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. For Mayo’s and Field’s attempt to get support from the Federated Women’s Club of America and the Daughters of the American Revolution, see Field to Rathbone, October 18, 1927, folder 39; and Mayo to Mrs. Rogers, November 7, 1927, folder 40, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Nothing, however, came of Rathbone’s desire to include Mayo’s ‘‘would-be American helpers’’ on the Committee on Women in India that Rathbone was organizing in London. See Rathbone to Field, November 22, 1927, folder 40, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. For the differences that emerged between Ely and Mayo, see Ely to Mayo, September 15, 1927, folder 38, series 1, box 5; for Adam’s disdain of Ely, see Adam to Mayo, January 27, 1927, folder 36, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. Ely later played host to Sarojini Naidu during Naidu’s trip to the United States to counter Mother India. See Naidu to Padmaja Naidu, March 21, 1929, Correspondence with Sarojini Naidu, Padmaja Naidu Papers Small Collections (139). Syed Hossain debated P. W. Wilson at the meeting of the Westchester County branch of the League of Women Voters; see Press Clippings, file 6, Syed Hossain Papers Small Collections (22). This is how Harvey M. Watts described Mary Winsor, an avowed feminist, who had heckled Mayo at her public appearance on Mother India at the Contemporary Club in Philadelphia. See Watts to Mayo, January 12, 1928, folder 42, series 1, box 6, KM Papers. For Mayo’s handling of her feminist heckler at the club, see the report of the meeting in Philadelphia Record, n.d., Press Clippings, folder 212, series 4, box 41, KM Papers. For Mayo’s opposition to ‘‘feminist’’ arguments of women’s equality, see also her ‘‘Companionate ‘Marriage’ and Marriage: A Message to Girls,’’ Liberty, May 26, 1928, 19–24. For the impact of empire, see Allison L. Sneider, ‘‘The Impact of Empire on the North American Woman Suffrage Movement: Suffrage Racism in an Imperial Context,’’ Women, Gender and History 14 (1994): 14–32; and Kristin Hoganson, ‘‘ ‘As Badly Off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women’s Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,’’ Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 2 (summer 2001): 9–33. In 1928 Mayo was declaring at Copley Plaza in Boston that the ‘‘real underdog[s]’’ in India were women; by 1931 in her radio broadcast on nbc, she insisted the real underdogs were instead the ‘‘untouchables’’; and soon after both these causes were abandoned to exploit the Hindu-Muslim conflict. See Daily Mail, April 8, 1928, folder 45, series 1, box 6; and nbc, ‘‘India,’’ October 27, 1931, folder 147, series 3, box 20, KM Papers. K. Mayo, The Face of Mother India (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935; London: H. Hamilton, 1935). See Stephens, Director of Public Information, Government of India, to H. MacGregor, Information Officer, India Office, January 27, 1936, Personal Files: KM. MacGregor to Mayo, n.d., folder 78, series 1, box 10, KM Papers.

306 Notes to Chapter 4

4. refashioning mother india 1. There is a vast scholarly literature on the abolition of satidaha (widow burning) and its significance for the articulation of the ‘‘woman question’’ in India. See especially the works of Lata Mani, ‘‘Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early NineteenthCentury Bengal,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, April 26, 1986, 32–40; ‘‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,’’ Cultural Critique (fall 1987): 119–56, reprinted in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 88–126; and Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 2. For the Sarda Act and its subsequent amendments, see Tek Chand Sir Bakshi, The Child Marriage Restraint Act (Calcutta: Eastern Law House, 1951); G. K. Kulkarni, The Child Marriage Restraint Act, India Act No. 19 of 1929 with Amendments Up to Date by Act No. 41 of 1949; Act No. 48 of 1952 (Ahmednagar: Kayade Prakashan, 1953); L. S. Sastri, The Child Marriage Restraint Act, revised by S. N. Joshi and P. N. Parikh (1962; Allahabad: Law Book Co., 1972); and R. S. Maurya, Hindu Law: As Amended by the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Act, 1978 (Allahabad: Central Law Agency, n.d.). 3. For a statistical analysis of trends in the age of marriage in India, including the temporary decrease in the age of marriage in the years immediately surrounding the Sarda Act, see S. N. Agarwala, Age at Marriage in India (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1962). The sudden spate of child marriages performed to avoid the Sarda Act received considerable contemporary attention; see, for example, M. Abdul Hakim, Biyer Bajar [Marriage Market] (Bagerhat: Santosh Press, 1930). 4. Telegram from M. Nehru to Congress, Nationalist, Independent, and Central Moslem Parties in the Legislative Assembly, in Press Clippings, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9 (1927–28) and file 10 (1927–30), Reddi Papers. Nehru was at first skeptical because of a potential conflict of interest with a legal case about child marriage with which he was involved; cited in Smrutika: The Story of My Mother as Told by Herself (The Story of Smt. Kamla Bai L. Rau, as Told and Written by Herself in Tamil during 1958–1959), trans. Srimati Indirabai M. Rau (1972) (Pune: Dr. Krishnabai Nimbkar, 1988), 37, f341/125, Forbes Collection; and in Stri Dharma 11, no. 5 (March 1928): 67–69. 5. Quoted in Hindu, September 24, 1929, in Press Clippings, file 9 (1927–30) and file 10 (1927– 30), Reddi Papers. 6. For Gandhi’s wire to members of the Legislative Assembly, see the speech by Mr. Mukhtiar Singh, extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, September 16, 1929, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. For Gandhi’s initial lack of faith in legislation, see Rameshwari Nehru’s recollection of her first encounter with Gandhi as a member of the Government of India’s Age of Consent Committee. See Nehru, ‘‘Gandhiji and Women,’’ in Incidents of Gandhiji’s Life, ed. Chandrashankar Shukla (Bombay: Vora, 1949), 209–14. Gandhi’s attitude toward the relationship between state and society was more complex than the popular perception of his simple repudiation of the state. See Ronald J. Terchek, Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 166–67; and Bhiku Parkeh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1989), 113–21. 7. Quoted in Press Clippings, file 9 (1927–28) and file 10 (1927–30), Reddi Papers. British women’s organizations described it as ‘‘one of the most courageous and momentous legislative acts in the long history of social reform’’ in India; see ‘‘Reform from Within,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, October 4, 1929, 263.

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8. Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘‘Women and Modernity: The Issue of Child Marriage in India,’’ Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1979): 407–19. Also see Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘‘Women’s Organizations and Social Change: The Age-of-Marriage Issue in India,’’ in Women and World Change: Equity Issues in Development, ed. Naomi Black and Ann Baker (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 198–216; and Judy Whitehead, ‘‘Modernising the Motherhood Archetype: Public Health Models and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929,’’ in Social Reform, Sexuality, and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), 187–210. 9. See annual report of aiwc for 1929 in Stri Dharma 13, no. 4 (February 1930): 193–98. This is also how Amrit Kaur, the chair of the subcommittee of the All India Women’s Conference on Child Marriage, described the Sarda Act. See Amrit Kaur, Challenge to Women (Allahabad: New Literature, 1946), 5. Also see the presidential address of the Maharani of Baroda (read by her daughter the Maharani of Cooch Behar) at the annual meeting of the National Council of Women in India, in Annual Report, 1928–29, National Council of Women in India Papers (hereafter cited as ncwi Papers), nmml. The act was recognized at least in some quarters internationally as an achievement of the Indian women’s movement; see Women’s Leader and Common Cause, January 3, 1930, 371. 10. See Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions. This is not to suggest, of course, that women did not contribute to previous debates on social reform legislations.Yet in the debates on the Sarda Act, the contribution of women entered the public discourse in ways that provided it with unprecedented public legitimacy. 11. Partha Chatterjee has most famously elaborated the argument of the demarcation of an ‘‘inner’’/spiritual and ‘‘outer’’/material sphere by nationalist elites in the context of their negotiation of modernity; see his ‘‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,’’ American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 622–33; ‘‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,’’ in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 233–53; and The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 12. The family, as various scholars have demonstrated, was a historical construct that underwent enormous changes in the colonial period; see especially Patricia Uberoi, ed., Family, Kinship, and Marriage in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 13. The phrase is from Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘‘Nationalizing Marriage in Tamil India, 1890s– 1940s’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001). Ritu Bilra provides a discussion of marriage reforms in the context of the management of joint coparcenary kinship; see her ‘‘Hedging Bets: The Politics of Commercial Ethics in Late Colonial India’’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999). Also see Rochona Majumdar, ‘‘Marriage, Modernity, and Sources of the Self: Bengali Women c. 1870–1956’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003). 14. See Whitehead, ‘‘Modernising the Motherhood Archetype.’’ 15. For the impact of the League of Nations’ debates, see Ramusack, ‘‘Women’s Organizations and Social Change.’’ 16. The Government of India, for example, was asked to respond to the Age of Consent Resolution passed at the third session of the League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee on May 2–7, 1927, in Geneva. See Government of India, Home Department, Public Branch, 96/8 1927, nai (hereafter cited as Home, Public); and Home, Judicial, 878/27, 1927.

308 Notes to Chapter 4 17. For a discussion of the consent regulations in relation to the anomaly of the recognition of marital rape as a category in India, see Mrinalini Sinha,Colonial Masculinity: The ‘‘Manly Englishman’’ and the ‘‘Effeminate Bengali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chap. 4. 18. The scholarship on the age-of-consent debates of 1891 is vast: for some examples, see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Dagmar Engels, ‘‘The Age of Consent Act of 1891: Colonial Ideology in Bengal,’’ South Asia Research 3, no. 2 (November 1983): 107–34; Tanika Sarkar, ‘‘Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child Wife,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, September 4, 1993, 1869–78; Meera Kosambi, ‘‘Girl Brides and Socio-legal Change: The Age of Consent Bill (1891) Controversy,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, August 3–10, 1991, 1857–68; and Padma Anagol-McGinn, ‘‘The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives and Participation in the ChildMarriage Controversy in India,’’ South Asia Research 12, no. 2 (November 1992): 100–118. 19. For the more personalized critiques of child marriage made by women, see AnagolMcGinn, ‘‘The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered.’’ 20. Several bills on the age of consent and the age of marriage were introduced at both the central and provincial levels. The initiatives made in the central assembly included the following: Rai Bahadur Bakshi Sohanlal’s Age of Consent Bill in 1922; Hari Singh Gour’s Age of Consent Bill in 1924; and Gour’s Special Marriage Amendment Bills in 1922 and 1923. In 1921, Lala Girdharilal urged government to prohibit marriage below the ages of eleven and fourteen for girls and boys respectively; and again in 1924, Ranglal Jajodia sought to introduce a marriage bill to penalize the marriage of boys below the age of sixteen that was never tabled. By the close of 1927 there were three bills, in the central assembly and in the Bombay and Madras provincial legislatures, for fixing a minimum marriage age for boys and girls; for the background on consent and marriage legislations, see Government of India, Age of Consent Committee Report, 1928–1929 (Calcutta: Government of India Publishing Branch, 1929), 15. The government turned down requests to introduce similar bills in Bengal and in the Central Provinces and Berar; see Home, Judicial, 732/27, 1927. Hari Singh Gour’s proposals to extend the Special Marriages Act (1872) from the Brahmos to all the communities in India raised the more controversial issue of marriage as a civil contract in India; see Home, Judicial, 268/27, 1927; and Home, Judicial, 294, 1927. An earlier such bill by Bhupendra Nath Basu had been defeated in 1911, but reform associations, like the National Social Conference at its December 1927 meeting, adopted the demand of civil marriages for all without restrictions as part of its resolutions; see conference resolutions in Government of India, Legislative Department, Assembly, 3-II/28 A 1928 (hereafter cited as Legislative, Assembly), nai. 21. For the insertion of the new clause in the wia objectives, see Subject Files, file 7, Reddi Papers. For the addition of the abolition of child marriage as one of its objectives, see Hon. Secy., wia, to Home Member, March 9, 1928, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927; also included in file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 22. The wia’s activities in support of raising the age of consent in 1925 were coordinated by Dorothy Jinarajadasa; see Subject Files, file 7, Reddi Papers. Also see reports of its activities in Stri Dharma 8, no. 9 ( July 1925): 132; no. 10 (August 1925): 147–49; and no. 11 (September 1925): 163–66. The Bombay Presidency Women’s Council was also active in coordinating women’s support for Gour’s bill. See Seventh Annual Report, Dec. 1924– Dec. 1925, Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, Maharashtra State Women’s Council Office, Mumbai.

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23. Sorabji to Richmond, March 19, 1925, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 39, CS Papers. 24. Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. See also ‘‘The Age of Consent: A Reform That Will Not Wait,’’ in Press Clippings, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. 25. Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926; and note from A. P. Muddiman, July 11, 1927, Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. 26. For the objections raised by Indian social reformers against the introduction of a distinction between a husband and a stranger in the consent regulations in India, see Indian Social Reformer, February 12, 1927, 373. 27. Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. Muddiman’s decision was widely criticized in the Indian press; see Modern Review 13, no. 4 (October 1927): 485–90. 28. A Mrs. Loveday Cameron from Chester, England, complained that British women in 1925 had too readily accepted Jinarajadasa’s accusations against the Government of India. SeeWomen’s Leader and Common Cause, August 26, 1927, 229.The program of the Birmingham conference lists Latika Basu from India as a featured speaker but makes no mention of Jinarajadasa; see Handbook and Program of Conferences, September 19, 1925, Birmingham, National Council of Women, Great Britain Papers, London Metropolitan Archives, London (hereafter cited as ncw Britain Papers). Jinarajadasa’s complaint was in all probability made to the British Federation of University Women; see October 11, 1925, diary entry 1925, CS Papers. 29. Cited in Sorabji to Richmond, October 13, 1925, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 39, CS Papers. 30. See note from A. P. Muddiman, July 11, 1927; also note from J. C. Crerar, August 8, 1927, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. The notice for Sarda’s bill was given on November 28, 1926; the bill itself was introduced on February 1, 1927. See Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926. 31. The idea was proposed in the note from A. P. Muddiman, July 11, 1927, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. See also note from J. C. Crerar, January 24, 1928, in Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926. 32. See Sarda’s recollection of this encounter in Sarda to K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar Rao, December 31, 1946, Har Bilas Sarda Papers, nmml. For the public relations fiasco and the consequent defense of the government’s position in the Anglo-Indian press, see the editorial defending the ‘‘religious aloofness’’ of government policy, Times of India, September 19, 1927, 8; also see letter of C. V. Vishwanatha Sastri to the editor, Madras Mail, January 20, 1928, in Press Clippings, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. 33. See telegram to secretary of state, February 3, 1928, and his reply of February 15, 1928, in Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926. 34. See note by C. W. Gwynne, Joint Secretary, Home Department, August 21, 1929; and Crerar to Sarda, August 22, 1929, requesting that the bill come into effect only on January 1, 1931, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. 35. The speeches of both proponents and opponents of the Sarda Bill in the Assembly were peppered with references to Mayo’s Mother India; see Government of India, Legislative Assembly Debates, vols. 1–3 (1927, 1928, and 1929). 36. New York Times, February 10, 1928, 13. Several newspapers in Britain, like the Edinburgh Evening News (February 10, 1928), Star (February 10, 1928), and Reynolds Illustrated News (February 12, 1928), gave Mayo sole credit for the measure; see Press Clippings in Great Britain, vol. 2, in folder 207, series 4, box 38, KM Papers. William E. Brown Jr., in the

310 Notes to Chapter 4

37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

Encyclopedia of American Biographies, vol. 30, p. 20, perpetuates this view in his biographical entry on Mayo; see KM Papers. Later scholars, however, may have gone too far in limiting the impact of the book on the Sarda Act; see R. K. Sharma, Nationalism, Social Reform, and Indian Women (Patna: Janaki Prakashan, 1981), 198–212. See ‘‘End of Child Marriage Considered in India’’ and ‘‘Curbing Child Marriage in State of New York,’’ Negro World, September 24, 1927, 2. Mayo warned Rathbone not to be taken in by social legislation; Mayo to Rathbone, n.d., enclosed with Rathbone to Richmond, November 5, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 161, CS Papers. K. Mayo, Volume II (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), 208–9. Sorabji was dismayed by Mayo’s hostility; see Sorabji to Richmond, June 25, 1931, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 46, CS Papers. For Rathbone’s public repudiation of Mayo’s arguments inVolume II, see Eleanor F. Rathbone, Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 94– 95. She also chastised her in private communications; see Rathbone to Mayo, n.d., folder 97, series 1, box 11, KM Papers; Rathbone to Lord Sankey, January 14, 1931, folder 4, box 93, and Rathbone to Lord Lothian, November 29, 1931, folder 7, box 93, ER Papers. Quoted in Stri Dharma 13, no. 3 ( January 1930): 77–78. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the representative of Sanatanist or orthodox Hindus in the Assembly, had supported Sarda’s original bill as it was debated in the Assembly on September 15, 1927; but he recommended that the bill be generalized to other communities in India. The public opinions solicited by the government on the original bill likewise recommended recasting the bill as a penal measure that extended to all communities, as well as removed the clause for the invalidation of marriages in the original bill. The government recast the bill accordingly and presented its recommendations to the Select Committee of the Assembly, which accepted the changes with a few additional modifications. The government felt obliged to support the bill in its revised form, but officials were of the opinion that a combined ‘‘Hindu orthodox and Muslim opposition would in all probability defeat the bill,’’ thus saving the government from having to follow through with the bill. See Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926. See ‘‘Muslim Ladies Defend the Sarda Act,’’ in appendix D of the wia Report, 1930–1931; also see Hamid Ali to Rajwade, September 1, 1930, file 1, installment 4, aiwc Papers; and Amrit Kaur to Private Secretary to Viceroy, file 12, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The petition was originally published in the Tribune in Punjab and also reprinted in Stri Dharma 14, no. 4 (February 1931): 146. Also see the recollections of Masuma Begum, former president of the Anjuman-E-Khawateen, of her support for the Sarda Bill at the Delhi Conference in 1928; ‘‘Both Sweet and Sour,’’ aiwc Diamond Jubilee, 1927–1987, Rameshwari Nehru Centenary Volume (aiwc, 1987), 67–69, aiwc Library, New Delhi. Muslim women supported the bill in articles that appeared in the Muslim press; see Ayesha Ahmed’s essay on child marriage in Saogat, cited in Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 119. Muslim women’s journals like Tahzib-un-Niswan (Lahore) and Nur Jahan (Lahore) were also sympathetic to the bill; see Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 154. See aiwc Report, 1927; Indian Social Reformer, January 15, 1927, 297; and New India, January 25, 1927, 2. For discussion of the resolutions, see Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women’s Struggle: A History of the aiwc, 1927–1990 (Delhi: Manohar, 1990), 8–9.

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45. See letter from M. Cousins to Sarda, December 8, 1927, file 5, series 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 46. See the report on the conference held January 5–8, 1927, in New India, January 25, 1927, 2; and Stri Dharma 10, no. 3 ( January 1927): 33–39. The resolution on the age of marriage was proposed by Jelal Shah, seconded by Rukmani Lakshmipatti, and amended by Hansa Mehta. The initiative for the resolution came from Indian women themselves and not from any ‘‘outsider.’’ It was, as Cousins wrote to Sarda, ‘‘uninfluenced by me or by any westerner’’; see letter from M. Cousins to Sarda, December 8, 1927, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Also see the recollection of this episode in Rukmani Lakshmipatti, ‘‘Women’s Education Conference: Impressions of Poona Conference,’’ New India, January 25, 1927, 2; and her ‘‘Impressions of the Conference,’’ Stri Dharma 10, no. 4 (February 1927): 52; also Hansa Mehta, ‘‘Some Reminiscences of the aiwc,’’ in aiwc: In the Service of the Nation (n.d., n.p.), 63–64, f341/15, Forbes Collection; and Hansa Mehta, Indian Women (Delhi: Butalia, 1981), 63. 47. New India, January 25, 1927, 2. 48. Ibid. 49. For a history of the aiwc, see Basu and Ray, Women’s Struggle. 50. Cousins to Sarda, December 8, 1927, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 51. ‘‘Resolutions Passed and Ratified by the Second Women’s Conference on Education Reform Held at Delhi from 7 to 10 February, 1928,’’ file 1, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Also see ‘‘All India Child Marriage Abolition League: A New Organization,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 6 (April 1928): 16–17. 52. Amrit Kaur of Mandi to Chattopadhyay, July 1, 1928; and Chattopadhyay to Rani Saheba, ‘‘Correspondence with the Rani Saheba of Mandi concerning the Relationship between the Conference and the All India Child Marriage Abolition League, 1928–1929,’’ file 7, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 53. Amrit Kaur to Chattopadhyay; and Chattopadhyay to Rani Saheba, ‘‘Correspondence.’’ Also see Dhanvanthi Rama Rao to Chattopadhyay, March 26, 1928, file 7, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 54. For many of these critiques, see Hansa Mehta, Joint Secretary, Bhagini Samaj to J. Monteath, Secretary to Government of Bombay, Home Department, n.d., Subject Files, file 32, Notes and Papers Relating to the Age of Consent Bill, the Child Marriage Restraint Bill and Hindu Code Bill etc., Hansa Mehta Papers 119 (a), nmml. 55. Ibid. Many women activists saw the Sarda Bill as an intermediate measure before the ‘‘complete and comprehensive measures’’ recommended in the report of the Age of Consent Committee were put into operation; see ‘‘The Age of Consent: A Reform That Will Not Wait,’’ in Press Clippings, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. The threat that the Sarda Act was only the thin end of the wedge is also what most alarmed its orthodox opponents. 56. Hansa Mehta to Secretary to Government of Bombay, Home Department, n.d., Subject Files, file 32, Notes and Papers Relating to the Age of Consent Bill, the Child Marriage Restraint Bill and Hindu Code Bill etc., Hansa Mehta Papers 119 (a). 57. Cited in M. E. Cousins, ‘‘The Women’s Assembly in Delhi: Impressions of the Second All India Women’s Education Conference,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 5 (March 1928): 67–69. 58. The Rani of Mandi headed the deputation to the viceroy, and Indira Bhagawat headed the other two; see aiwc Report, 7–10 February 1928 (Mangalore: Kanara Printing Press, n.d.), 75–77.

312 Notes to Chapter 4 59. See M. Nehru’s speech in extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, September 11, 1929, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. 60. A ‘‘Muslim lady’’ quoted in the aiwc Report, 1928, 79. 61. The government gave the following reason for rejecting the appointment of ‘‘two ladies’’ for the discussion on Gour and Sarda’s bill in the Central Assembly: ‘‘In the present temper of the House there is no probability of the women’s side of the case being overlooked and there would be greater pressure to raise the minimum age than to lower it’’; see note appended to letter from Sir Moropant Joshi to the Viceroy, August 21, 1928, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. The aiwc further asked that half the members of the Age of Consent Committee be women; the wia sent up a list of candidates ‘‘in order of precedence’’ to be nominated to the committee. See Hon. Secy., wia, to Home Member, March 9, 1928, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927; and Hon. Secy. aiwc to Home Member, March 11, 1928, in file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For the demand for women in the Legislative Assembly, see Stri Dharma 10, no. 5 (March 1927): 68–69. 62. The genesis of the committee owed to Crerar’s suggestion that the government should stall on the bills in the Assembly in the wake of the publicity of Mother India; see note from J. C. Crerar, August 8, 1927, in Home, Judicial, 382/27, 1927. The government thus readily supported the last-ditch effort of Acharya and other orthodox Hindus in the Assembly to postpone any consideration of the Sarda Bill until after the report of the Age of Consent Committee. Yet after this further postponement of the Sarda Bill, the government felt obliged to issue a communiqué assuring support for the bill and adequate days for its discussion after the report of the committee was published; see Hindu, January 23, 1929, 6, in Press Clippings, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. 63. See Gour to Chattopadhyay, August 5, 1928, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For the close coordination of propaganda between the legislators and women activists on the bills, also see Gour to Chattopadhyay, July 21, 1928, and August 24, 1927; Sarda to Chattopadhyay, February 3, 1928, and April 27, 1928; Sarda to Rani of Mandi, March 13, 1928; and Cousins to Sarda, December 8, 1927, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Also see Sarda to Reddi, April 30, 1928, Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 9, Reddi Papers. 64. See Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Inner Recess, Outer Spaces: Memoirs (New Delhi: Navrang, 1986), 113. 65. To the surprise and amusement of his colleagues in the Assembly, Acharya supported the initial resolution to send Sarda’s bill to the Select Committee: ‘‘I have had, Sir, many a talk with my good old woman at home; and I do believe that the opinion of my sisters is quite in favor as far as I have inquired, of such a kind of legislation, and that is why I have ventured on this occasion to go so far as to support this bill warmly.’’ See extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. 4, no. 62, September 15, 1927, in Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926. Mayo was especially eager to find out if Mrs. Acharya could possibly have read Mother India in formulating her views on child marriage; see Fields to Hayles, editor of Madras Mail, September 22, 1927; and Sir Basil Blackett to Mayo, September 25, 1927, folder 38, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. 66. See Hamid Ali to Sushama Sen, September 18, 1929, file 2, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 67. See Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Harper and Row, 1977), 152–53.

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68. The league sent letters to the British mps Lady Astor, Duchess of Atholl, Miss S. Lawrence, and Miss Bondfield; see note by ‘‘AK’’ (Amrit Kaur) in Sarda to Rani of Mandi, March 13, 1928, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 69. See the report of these resolutions in Stri Dharma 11, no. 6 (April 1928): 4–5. The wia had earlier managed to get a Mr. Dunnico in the British House of Commons to bring women’s support for Gour’s Age of Consent Bill in India to the secretary of state’s attention; see Home, Judicial, 797/27, 1927. 70. See letter to editor, Times, September 13, 1929, 8. 71. Cousins to Chattopadhyay, Geneva, September 24, 1928, file 6, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 72. Major Hill had raised questions about the low age of marriage in Britain in the House of Commons in March 1927 after the publication of the reports of the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and of the Child Welfare Committee of the Advisory Committee for the Protection and Welfare of Children and Young Persons. However, the home secretary, Sir W. Joynson-Hicks, informed Lady Astor that the subject was ‘‘terribly difficult.’’ The controversy over Mother India and the introduction of a marriage bill in India galvanized British women to take up the question of raising the age of marriage in Britain again; see Women’s Leader and Common Cause, April 8, 1927, 70; April 15, 1927, 83; June 10, 1927, 143; and September 9, 1927, 245.The deputation of women that met the home secretary on November 8, 1927, emphasized that the need for the bill was not so much for ‘‘internal’’ reasons but for the felt need in the current circumstances to set an example for India; see Women’s Leader and Common Cause, November 18, 1927, 328; and January 6, 1928, 385. One correspondent, Helena Normanton, explicitly challenged this rationale for getting a marriage bill passed in Britain; see letter to editor from Normanton and editor’s note, Women’s Leader and Common Cause, January 20, 1928, 406. 73. See extract of Lord Buckmaster’s speech in the House of Lords, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. Also see reports in New India, February 21, 1929, 22; and February 28, 1929, 2; and Women’s Leader and Common Cause, February 22, 1929, 17. 74. See M. Reddi, ‘‘Government’s Attitude toward Women and Its Responsibility in Social Reform Measures,’’ in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 2, Reddi Papers. The theme was also developed in Reddi’s opening address to the conference; see ‘‘Indian National Social Conference 1927: Dr. Muthulakshmi’s Address,’’ Indian Social Reformer, January 14, 1928, 309–14. 75. Quoted in Stri Dharma 11, no. 5 (March 1928): 69–70. 76. ‘‘The Indian States and Women’s Rights,’’ Stri Dharma, March 10, 1927, cited in Modern Review 41, no. 4 (April 1927): 485. 77. For two contrasting accounts of modern state formation in princely India during this period, see Manu Bhagawan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 78. See, for example, Reddi’s response to Rathbone, n.d., Subject Files, file 8, part 2, Reddi Papers. 79. The phrase is from Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,’’ History Workshop Journal 36 (autumn 1993): 1–33. 80. Extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. 4, no. 62, September 15, 1927, in Home, Judicial, 1024/26, 1926.

314 Notes to Chapter 4 81. S. Bhagirathi Ammal, ‘‘Raising of the Age of Marriage,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 6 (April 1928): 12–13. 82. Stri Dharma 14, no. 9 ( July 1931): 398–99. 83. Kudi Arasu, May 11, 1930, quoted in V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998), 413. Also see Miss and Mrs. Kamalakshi, The Ritual of Garuda Sevai’’ [Garuda Sevai Sadangu], Kumaran 9, no. 4 (October–November 1930), in The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History: An Anthology of Self-Respect Literature (1928–1936), edited, introduced, and translated from the Tamil by K. Srilata (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003), 69–71. 84. For Rathbone’s troubled history with Indian feminists, see Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945,’’ in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Margaret Stroebel and Nupur Chaudhury (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 119–36; and Mrinalini Sinha, ‘‘The Lineage of the Indian Modern: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Sarda Act,’’ in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (New York: Routledge, 1999), 207–21. Susan Pedersen provides an excellent reappraisal of Rathbone, situating her engagement with India in the context of a larger career informed by a Victorian liberal conscience. My reading of Rathbone, as will become clear, differs from Pedersen’s in its estimation of the extent to which empire and imperialism informed Rathbone’s politics, including her limited understanding of ‘‘universality’’ and her quintessential imperial dilemma of both rejecting and accepting a politics based on ‘‘difference.’’ See Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). 85. See secret telegram, March 23, 1930, Home, Judicial, 181/1/30, 1930. 86. See Rathbone, Child Marriage, 102–5. Indian women’s organizations, of course, had not forgotten the Sarda Act. Stri Dharma continued to carry a series of articles on the work being done to monitor the Sarda Act, including reports of the wia’s Sarda Act Committee, from November 1931 to January 1932; for a summary of these activities, see Stri Dharma 19, no. 6 ( July–August 1936); also see ‘‘Child Marriage Prevention Pledge,’’ Stri Dharma 15, no. 6 (April 1932): 323; and Hamid Ali to Rathbone, August 21, 1933, folder 9, box 93, ER Papers. 87. See Subject Files: Social Welfare Measures, file 8, part 2, Reddi Papers. Also see ‘‘Miss Rathbone and Sarda Act,’’ Stri Dharma 17, no. 7 (May 1934): 328. For the favorable reception of Rathbone’s book among activist women in India, also see Amrit Kaur to Rathbone, July 5, 1934, folder 12, box 93; Rameshwari Nehru to Rathbone, August 23, 1934, folder 13, box 93; and Lakshmi Menon to Rathbone, September 13, 1934, folder 14, box 93, ER Papers. 88. See Subject Files, file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. 89. See Rathbone to Reddi, September 15, 1933, folder 1, box 92, ER Papers. 90. See Reddi to Rathbone, September 25, 1933, folder 1, box 92, ER Papers. 91. See Denise Riley, ‘‘Am I That Name?’’ Feminism and the Category of ‘‘Women’’ in History (1988; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), esp. 44–66. 92. See wia Report, 1927, 6–8; and wia Report, 1929–30, 3. 93. Annual Report, 1926–27, ncwi Papers. 94. See letter from Sorabji to Richmond, October 9, 1925; November 18, 1925, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 39, CS Papers. Also see Sorabji’s diary entries from August to October 1925, Diary 1925, CS Papers.

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95. See wia Report, 1932–33, 14. The question of whether the wife of a government servant could stand for elections was not yet decided. The finance member, Sir Basil Blackett, wrote to the home member, Sir James Crerar, objecting that Rameshwari Nehru, as the wife of a member of the Finance Department, was intending to stand for election as a Swarajist candidate at the first elections in 1926 in which women were eligible to sit in the legislatures. The need for action was avoided, since the rumor turned out to be untrue; see Home, Public, 496/1926. 96. Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 3, Reddi Papers. Also see Dr. (Mrs.) Malathi Ramnathan, Sister R. S. Subbalakshmi, Social Reformer and Educationist (Bombay: Sukumar Damle, 1989). 97. See Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 2, Reddi Papers. 98. Stri Dharma 11, no. 12 (October 1928): 305. For the perception of a new phase of the women’s movement in India, see AK [Amrit Kaur], ‘‘The Women’s Movement in India,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 4 (February 1933): 177–80. 99. For the history of the Mahila Samitis, see G. S. Dutt, A Woman of India, Being the Life of Saroj Nalini (Founder of the Women’s Institute Movement in India) (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1929), esp. 65; and A. R. Caton, ‘‘Pioneer Work of an Indian Feminist,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, July 12, 1929, 181. 100. Letter from Cousins to Chattopadhyay, September 24, 1928, file 6, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The wia defended the aiwc’s remaining a nonpolitical body to ensure representation from a large cross section of women. See Stri Dharma 14, no. 2 (December 1930): 52–53. 101. The undersecretary of the government of Bombay, Education Department, eventually relented after being assured that the conference was ‘‘nonpolitical.’’ See note, n.d., file 4, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 102. See Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, 110–11. 103. See Standing Committee, Delhi, February 1928, file 16, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 104. See letter from Mrs. V. S. Kunjilapadam to Cousins, December 6, 1927, file 1, reel 28, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 105. Sushama Sen to Cousins, April 25, 1928, file 6, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For the Patna conference, also see diary entries, January 2 and 5, 1929, box 3 (a), series 1, Ruth Woodsmall Papers. 106. aiwc Report, 1929, 51–55. For details of the controversy, see Sushama Sen, Memoirs of an Octogenarian (New Delhi: Hilly Chatterjee and Jai Pradeep Sen, 1971), 327–28. A more perfunctory account of the debate appeared in ‘‘The Third All India Women’s Conference,’’ Stri Dharma 12, no. 3 ( January 1929): 109–29. 107. Cited in Sen, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 327–28. For Chattopadhyay’s views on the need to expand the scope of women’s organizations, see K. Chattopadhyay, ‘‘Women and Politics,’’ New India, September 29, 1928, 5. 108. See file 16, reel 2, aiwc Papers. For the discussion of the change in the conference, also see Hamid Ali, ‘‘The Growth of the Women’s Movement in India,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 10 (August 1931): 466–70. 109. Cited in Sorabji to Richmond, January 9, 1929, and January 16, 1929, in Correspondence and Personal Papers no. 44, CS Papers. 110. Hamid Ali to Chattopadhyay, March 11, 1927, file 1, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers.

316 Notes to Chapter 4 111. See Mehta to Rustomjee, March 21, 1929, and to Jan Huidikoper, chairman of the Standing Committee, March 29, 1929, in Hansa Mehta Papers. 112. Ibid. 113. Sorabji had first proposed the need for trained social workers in her book The Purdahnashin (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1917). She subsequently revived her scheme in response to Mother India; see ‘‘Note on Possibilities Appertaining to a Social Service Institute, or A Clearing House for Social Service by Cornelia Sorabji,’’ folder 192, series 3, box 35, KM Papers. 114. Elena Bruce Richmond proposed Sorabji’s scheme at Rathbone’s conference on Mother India in November 1927; see Sorabji to Richmond, December 7, 1927, Correspondence and Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. Also see Rathbone to Richmond, November 5, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 161, CS Papers; and Rathbone to Mayo, November 22, 1927, folder 40, series 1, box 5, KM Papers. 115. Cited in Sorabji to Richmond, February 21, 1928, Correspondence and Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. 116. Sorabji to Richmond, December 10, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 157, CS Papers; and Sorabji to Richmond, December 13, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42, CS Papers. 117. See obituary in the Times, July 8, 1945, in Correspondence and Personal Papers, 1945, in CS Papers; also Correspondence and Papers concerning Founding of Bengal League of Social Service for Women, 1927–1937, no. 103, CS Papers. 118. For Pennell’s disaffection, see Sorabji to Richmond, November 16, 1927, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 42; and Sorabji to Richmond, January 25, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 43, CS Papers. Pennell brought her scheme to the aiwc; see ‘‘All India Education Fund,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 3 ( January 1928): 35. 119. For notice of the Indo British Mutual Welfare League, see Hannah Sen, ‘‘The Indo British Mutual Welfare League,’’ Stri Dharma 12, no. 3 ( January 1930): 83–85;The Vote, October 4, 1929, 317; and The Vote, October 25, 1929. Richmond proposed Sorabji’s scheme again at Rathbone’s conference on Women in India in October 1929. No long-lasting British support, however, emerged for Sorabji’s league; see Sorabji to Richmond, October 10, 1929; and October 31, 1929, Correspondence and Papers, no. 44, CS Papers. 120. Sorabji to Richmond, December 20, 1928, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 41; and February 14, 1929; May 1, 1929; June 6, 1929; and July 24, 1929, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 44, CS Papers. 121. Contemporaries typically divided the three major national women’s organizations, the wia, the aiwc, and the ncwi, as politically representing the left, center, and right respectively. This was, however, an oversimplification, as members were shared between organizations during this period. The proposed amalgamation of all three organizations was opposed by the aiwc; see Report, Indore, July 1934, file 16, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 122. The committee was the most comprehensive of its kind examining social conditions affecting marriage and consent in India. It produced nine volumes of evidence in which women were well represented; see Home, Judicial, 1026/28, 1928. 123. Government of India, Age of Consent Committee, Evidence, 1928–1929, vol. 7 (Bihar and Orissa, Assam, and Burma) (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1929), 126–35. 124. Cited in Amrita Bazar Patrika, January 8, 1927, 7.

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125. Cited in Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, 89–90. For R. D. Karve’s views on sexuality and birth control in Samaj Swastya, see Sudha Gogate, Status of Women Reflected in Marathi Media (1930–1970): Qualitative Content Analysis of Newspapers and Journals (Pune: Shubhada Saraswat, 1988), 49–50. 126. The argument of the devadasis themselves, whether in support of or against legislative intervention, often reflected a different rationale from that of middle-class women reformers; see S. Anandhi, ‘‘Representing Devadasis: Dasigal Mosavalai as a Radical Text,’’ Economic and Political Weekly 26, nos. 11–12 (March 1991): 739–46. 127. For self-respect marriages, see Periyar E. V. Ramasami, Self-Respect Marriage, trans. A. S. Venu (Periyar Self Respect Propaganda Institute, 1987); and V. Geetha and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, 378–419. 128. For examples of this unevenness, see Radhika Singha, ‘‘Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject,’’ Studies in History 19, no. 1 ( January–June 2003): 87–126; and Radha Kumar, ‘‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 1 (1983): 81–110. 129. For the government’s assessment of Muslim opposition, see note by C. W. Gwynne, November 4, 1929, in Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929; and note, January 23, 1931, in Home, Judicial, 9/31, 1931. For the government’s fear of alienating Muslim opinion, also see Rathbone to Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India, November 8, 1933, folder 6, box 93, ER Papers. 130. See letter from Av. L. Arunachalam Chettiar, vice president of the League of NonBrahmin Youths, to Reddi, March 13, 1928, and enclosure in Subject File, file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. Periyar, as leader of the anticaste self-respect movement, identified Brahminism at stake in the opposition to the Sarda Bill for interfering with the shastras; see Kudi Arasu, December 22, 1929, in Periyar on Women’s Rights, trans. R. Sundaru Raj, ed. K. Veeramani (Madras: Emerald Publishers, 1996), 77. B. R. Ambedkar of the Depressed Classes Institute, Bombay, likewise championed the Sarda Act; see December 6, 1927, file 1024, 1927, Home, Judicial, 1927. 131. Reported in Medina, no. 19 of 1928, week ending April 1928, in Report on Native Newspapers, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1928–31, oioc. 132. Quoted in ‘‘Revolt against Sarda’s Bill,’’ Bombay Chronicle, October 10, 1929, 1. By the final stages of the debate, Acharya was evoking the specter of sexual immorality represented by an army of unmarried women; see Acharya’s speech, extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, September 19, 1929, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. 133. Quoted in Stri Dharma 11, no. 5 (March 1928): 67–69; and Stri Dharma 14, no. 5 (March 1931): 178. For Kamalabai Lakshman Rau’s own account of the deputation, see Smrutika, 34–38, f341/125, Forbes Collection. 134. See undated speech in Subject Files, file 7; also file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. 135. Reddi, ‘‘Child Marriage and Education,’’ Social Service Quarterly, quoted in Modern Review 42, no. 3 (September 1927): 337–38. 136. Kudi Arasu, August 10, 1930, quoted in V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a NonBrahmin Millennium, 393. For the writings of women self-respecters in support of the Sarda Act, also see K. Srilata, The Other Half of the Coconut, 69–71, 73. 137. Extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. 1, no. 2, January 29, 1929, in Home, Judicial, 480/29, 1929. Also see speeches by M. R. Jayakar and Rev. J. C. Chatterjee, extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, September 5, 1929, Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929.

318 Notes to Chapter 4 138. M. K. Acharya, Indian Marriage Systems (Madras: All India Brahman Maha Sabha, 1929). Acharya’s son emphasized the scientific arguments deployed by his father and demanded an apology from Reddi for criticizing his father’s reference to sexual immorality as an argument against the bill. See letter to Reddi, October 20, 1929, Subject File, file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. 139. Home, Judicial, 691/28, 1928. 140. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 3 (Bombay Presidency), 224–29. 141. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 7 (Bihar and Orissa, Assam, and Burma), 126–35. 142. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 4 (Madras Presidency), 146–53. 143. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 4 (Madras Presidency), 299–309. 144. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 7 (Bihar and Orissa, Assam, and Burma), 72–77. 145. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 1 (Punjab, North West Frontier Province, and Delhi), 469– 74. 146. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 7 (Bihar and Orissa, Assam, and Burma), 37–43. 147. Anusuyabai Kale, MLC, Age of Consent Committee, vol. 3 (Bombay Presidency), 597–601. 148. Age of Consent Committee, vol. 4 (Madras Presidency), 97–105. 149. For the Deoband school, see Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruq,The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (London: Asia Pub. House, 1963), esp. 76–77. For Muslim opposition to the act, see Azra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim Women, 1920–1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138–41. 150. See Home, Judicial, 1116/29, 1929; also see ‘‘Muslims and the Sarda Act,’’ in Select Writings and Speeches of Maulana Mohamed Ali, vol. 2, comp. and ed. Afzal Iqbal (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1944), 321–43. The Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Hindi, at its ninth annual session at Amroha, passed a resolution against the act and decided to join the Congress in opposition to British rule. See Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism, 141. 151. For Muhammad Ali’s criticism of the Begum, see Siobhan Lambert Hurley, ‘‘Contesting Seclusion: The Political Emancipation of Muslim Women in Bhopal, 1901–1930’’ (Ph.D. diss., soas, London, 1998), 147. 152. See ‘‘Muslim Ladies Defend the Sarda Act,’’ in appendix D, wia Report, 1930–1931; reprinted in Stri Dharma 14, no. 4 (February 1931): 146. 153. See Stri Dharma 14, no. 5 (March 1931): 185. 154. A division among Muslim members on support for the Sarda Bill was emerging by the end of 1929 in the constituent conferences of the aiwc. In Sindh, for example, a resolution supporting the bill was passed at the Hyderabad conference but was removed from the Shikarpur conference to avoid dissent; see Alice Ward, Hyderabad, Sindh, December 3, 1929, to Rameshwari Nehru, file 8, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Hindu women also found it hard to promote the bill in the face of the opposition from orthodox Hindus; see A. Srinivasagam to Nehru, December 11, 1929, file 8, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 155. The topic for the debate was ‘‘Is social legislation necessary for social progress?’’ in ‘‘Samaj ki Ruprekha’’ [The Framework of Society], January 26, 1928, Speeches and Writings, Rameshwari Nehru Papers, nmml.The majority at the meeting voted in favor of Nehru’s position; also see ‘‘Delhi’s Mahila Samiti,’’ Chand, April 1928, 710–15. The question of using legislation for social reforms was hotly debated in a number of different forums. The students of Isabela Thoburn College for women at Lucknow, for example, were asked to respond to this question; see Student Essays, file 7, series 4, Ruth Woodsmall Papers.

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156. February 5, 1928, Speeches and Writings, Rameshwari Nehru Papers. Later, as secretary of the social section of the aiwc, Nehru made a distinction between social reform work that required legislation and such work that required only propaganda; see Stri Dharma 12, no. 1 (November 1929): 588–90. 157. See Minault, Secluded Scholars, esp. 283–98. 158. See the recollections of this episode in Onilla Chatterjee, ‘‘The Awakening of Indian Womanhood,’’ Stri Dharma 10, no. 4 (February 1927): 51–52; also see note prepared by Khadija Shuffi Tyabji in Papers concerning the Education of Muslim Girls, aiwc, 1927, file 1, Hansa Mehta Papers 119 (a). 159. K. L. Rau, ‘‘The Law of Inheritance and Indian Women,’’ Stri Dharma 10, no. 8 ( June 1927): 117–19. For Rau’s advocacy on this question, also see Smrutika, 33–34, f341/125, Forbes Collection. 160. K. L. Rau, ‘‘The Legal Disabilities of Hindu Women,’’ Stri Dharma 10, no. 10 (August 1927): 147–48. 161. By the 1930s, women’s organizations would begin agitating for a uniform civil code, but both division within the ranks and government initiative would make them settle eventually for a reform of Hindu laws only; for this history, see Jana Matson Everett, Women and Social Change (New Delhi: B. R. Chawla, 1979), 141–89. 162. Meeting of February 5, 1928, Speeches and Writings, Rameshwari Nehru Papers. Encouraged by the support for reforming legislations, Sarda even gave notice for introducing a resolution for a committee to examine the law relating to certain points about the status and rights of women in India, which was immediately rejected by the government; see Home, Judicial, 634/28, 1928; and Home, Judicial, 58/30, 1930. Earlier attempts made by Gour in 1921 to appoint a committee for the codification of Hindu laws affecting women were likewise withdrawn on the government’s recommendation; see Home, Judicial, 818/28, 1928. The demand by women’s organizations for a comprehensive reform of personal laws affecting women was eventually taken up in the 1930s and 1940s with a focus on Hindu laws; see Harold Levy, ‘‘Indian Modernization by Legislation: The Hindu Code Bill’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1973); and Werner F. Menski, Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 163. See the report of the conference in Stri Dharma 4, no. 1 ( January 1921): 2–5. 164. For a report on the Woman’s Day, see Stri Dharma 11, no. 3 ( January 1928): 33–34. The chief secretary to the government of Madras, in his fortnightly report on the political situation, took note of the conference; see Campbell to H. G. Haig, Secretary Government of India, Home Department, January 18, 1928, Home, Political, I, 1928. For the attention in the national press, see Modern Review 13, no. 2 (February 1928): 196–97. 165. For the resolutions passed, see ‘‘The Women’s Charter of Reforms,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 3 ( January 1928): 33. British women saw the charter as a sign of how much the women’s movement in India shared in the goals of the British movement; see Women’s Leader and Common Cause 20, no. 1 (February 1928): 2. 166. The charter was a precursor for reports such as ‘‘Indian Women’s Charter of Rights’’ (1945) and ‘‘Women’s Role in Planned Economy’’ (1947), but the translation of many of these demands into an active campaign remained limited. For the development of the women’s movement in India, see Geraldine H. Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India: Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 167. See ‘‘Madras Women’s Conference: Academic and Barren Resolution—Movement Side-

320 Notes to Chapter 4

168. 169. 170. 171.

172.

173.

174.

175. 176. 177. 178.

179. 180.

181.

Tracked to Futile Paths,’’ in Justice, and other press reports on the resolution in Press Clippings, 1929–30, file 1, Reddi Papers; and Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, parts 2–3, Reddi Papers. Also see N. Subramanya Aiyar, ‘‘The Madras Women’s Conference,’’ Hindu, December 5, 1929, 11. Srimati G. Sumati Bai, ‘‘Why Divorce?’’ Revolt, January 9, 1930, in Press Clippings, 1929– 30, file 1, Reddi Papers. The article was originally published in The People and was reprinted anonymously as ‘‘Gandhi’s Counsel of Perfection,’’ Stri Dharma 12, no. 1 (November 1929): 561–62. Ibid. There were two major lines of attack against the women’s movement: the promotion of disunity in the people and imitation of the West. For two contemporary responses to these charges, see M. Cousins, ‘‘All India Women’s Conference,’’ New India, January 17, 1927, 3; and Anindila Chakrabarti, ‘‘The New Women’s Movement in India,’’ Modern Review 42, no. 6 ( June 1928): 696–98. Sorabji dismissed the women led by Latika Basu and others as ‘‘schoolgirls’’; see Sorabji to Richmond, September 19, 1929, Correspondence and Personal Papers, no. 44, CS Papers. See reports in Stri Dharma 12, nos. 11–12 (September–October 1929): 487–88; and extract, September 4, 1929, in Press Clippings, Subject Files, file 9, Reddi Papers. Some papers carried photographs of the picketers; see Chand, October 1929, 740. Cited in speeches by Acharya and M. S. Sesha Ayyangar, extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, September 4, 1929, in Home, Judicial, 570/29, 1929. For a report on a meeting of Brahmin ladies to protest the bill, see L. D. Srinivasagam, Member Standing Committee, Palamcottah, to Rameshwari Nehru, December 11, 1929, file 8, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The meeting had been organized under the auspices of Lakshmi Ammal; see A. Lakshmipatti’s evidence, Age of Consent Committee, vol. 4 (Madras Presidency), 299–309. Stri Dharma earlier had made fun of women’s protest meetings against the Sarda Bill as ‘‘the result of the maneuvers of a few men who had no courage to face the public’’; see Stri Dharma 10, no. 6 (April 1927): 81. Quoted in New India, November 8, 1928, 6. Speech, n.d., Subject Files, file 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. See Amrit Kaur to Rathbone, folder 12, box 93, ER Papers. The fear of Muslim opposition, in particular, led the government in a confidential letter to local governments, dated April 28, 1930, to seriously consider various amendments that would undercut the principle of the Sarda Act; Home, Judicial, 181/1/30, 1930. Also Home, Judicial, 9/31, 1931. M. K. Gandhi to Amrit Kaur, February 2, 1935, in Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, by M. K. Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Pub. House, 1961), 11. For Rathbone’s sponsorship of the bill, see Rathbone to N. M. Joshi, January 23, 1935; and Joshi to Rathbone, February 8, 1935, folder 15, box 93, ER Papers. While women’s organizations in India supported the amending bill, they still had some reservations about its efficacy; see ‘‘Special Number Supporting Social Reform Bills,’’ Stri Dharma 19, no. 6 ( July–August 1936): 178–80, 185, 188. The age limits were last amended in 1978 as eighteen for girls and twenty-one for boys; see R. S. Maurya, Hindu Law. By 1978, however, the concern had shifted from preventing child marriage per se to checking population growth; see Lotika Sarkar and Usha Ramanathan, ‘‘Collateral Concerns,’’ http://www.India-seminar.com/2002/511/51.

Notes to Chapter 5

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182. The Supreme Court in 2002 heard a petition co-filed by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board on whether the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 makes the Sarda Act invalid for Muslims. See Hindu, July 23, 2002.

5. ambiguous aftermath 1. Great Britain, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, vol. 1 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 53. Sir John Simon acknowledged Eleanor Rathbone’s help in drafting this chapter of his report. See Simon to Rathbone, March 21, 1930, in Miscellaneous Papers 86, Sir John Simon Papers. 2. For this point see Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 3. This argument has been elaborated most notably in Jana Matson Everett, Women and Social Change in India (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1979). The literature on women’s suffrage in India is vast: see especially Geraldine H. Forbes, ‘‘Votes for Women: The Demand for Women’s Franchise in India, 1917–1937,’’ in Symbols of Power: Studies on the Political Status of Women in India, ed. Vina Majumdar (Bombay: Allied Press, 1979), 3–23; Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India: Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 92–120; and Maitreyee Chaudhuri, Indian Women’s Movement: Reform and Revival (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1993), 137–58. For some regional overviews, see Gail Peterson, ‘‘Reserved Seats: Women and the Vote in Bombay,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 1 (1983): 47–65; and Barbara Southard, ‘‘Colonial Politics and Women’s Rights: Women’s Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India, in the 1920s,’’ Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (1993): 397–439; and ‘‘The Bangiya Nari Samaj and the Woman Suffrage Movement,’’ in The Women’s Movement and Colonial Politics in Bengal, 1921–1936, by Barbara Southard (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 70–147. 4. ‘‘Reservation of Seats for Women,’’ Hindu, November 17, 1931, 5; quoted in Forbes, New Cambridge History of India, 107. 5. Some of the arguments in this chapter have been foreshadowed in Mary E. John, ‘‘Alternative Modernities? Reservations and Women’s Movement in 20th Century India,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, October 28, 2000, ws-22–ws-29; and in Mrinalini Sinha, ‘‘Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late-Colonial India,’’ Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (fall 2000): 623–44. 6. The argument has been elaborated in Forbes, ‘‘Votes for Women,’’ 3–23. 7. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1919 (Cmd. 203) IV, ii, 132, quoted in Everett, Women and Social Change in India, 105. 8. ‘‘A Congratulatory Meeting,’’ Stri Dharma 10 ( January 1927): 1; quoted in Forbes, ‘‘Votes for Women,’’ 8. Also see ‘‘A Woman Deputy Speaker,’’Women’s Leader and Common Cause, August 19, 1927, 224. The calls for the nomination of women to the councils came after the first women to stand for elections to the Legislative Councils in 1926, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Hanen Angelo, were defeated as a result of the limited time between the removal of the disability for women to sit in the councils and the upcoming elections. For Reddi’s recollections of her experience as the first woman legislator in British India, see Dr. (Mrs.) Muthulakshmi Reddy [Reddi], My Experiences as a Legislator (Madras: Current Thought Press, 1930); and also see Aparna Basu, ed., The Pathfinder: Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi (New Delhi: aiwc, 1986). 9. See Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 2, Reddi Papers. When the aiwc

322 Notes to Chapter 5

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

requested the home member for the nomination of women to the Central Legislative Assembly during the discussion of the Sarda Bill, it also emphasized the noncommunal nature of its demand. Any woman, the aiwc argued, would do; see letter to home member, March 11, 1928, file 5, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. I am drawing from Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (1983; New Delhi: Macmillan, 1990), 254–348; and Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126–34. For the political ins and outs of the process, see Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 242–306. Also see Richard M. Fontera, ‘‘Cultural Pluralism and Community: The Development of the Government of India Act, 1935’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1964); and Andrew R. Muldoon, ‘‘Making a ‘Modern’ India: British Conservatives, Imperial Culture, and Indian Political Reform, 1924–1935’’ (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1999). Letter to editor, ‘‘Women and Indian Inquiry,’’ Times, December 12, 1927, 12. The nusec had moved a resolution at the Consultative Committee meeting of Women’s Organizations in Britain to call for the appointment of one woman to the commission; seeWomen’s Leader and Common Cause, November 18, 1927, 325, 330. Even though British women’s organizations focused only on British women in their memorandum, they did not rule out the opportunity for the attachment of women in India to the consultative committees appointed by the Simon Commission; see ‘‘The Indian Inquiry,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, December 2, 1927, 343. For the text of the statement, see ‘‘Women’s Protest against the Statutory Commission,’’ Stri Dharma 11, no. 2 (December 1927): 19; also see Reddi, ‘‘Why Do I Side with Boycott?’’ Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, part 2, Reddi Papers. Letter to editor, Women’s Leader and Common Cause, December 27, 1927, 371. Earlier, Normanton had also advised the nusec to set up a roving commission headed by Indian women to investigate the social conditions of women in India as revealed in Mother India; see Normanton’s letter to editor, Women’s Leader and Common Cause, September 16, 1927, 259. Normanton’s challenge prompted at least the National Council of Women, Great Britain, to consider her proposal seriously at its Executive Committee meeting. After discussion, it rejected taking any action so as not to seem to be criticizing the National Council of Women in India; see Meeting of October 10, 1927, 70, Committee Meetings, Reports Executive Committee, Minutes, ncw Britain Papers. Letter to editor, Women’s Leader and Common Cause, June 29, 1928, 171. Letter to editor, Times, December 13, 1927, 14. The letter was later reprinted in the Statesman (Calcutta), December 14, 1927, 12. It provoked its own response from an orthodox ‘‘purdanashin’’ who asserted that educated women in India had little knowledge of the condition of the majority of their orthodox sisters. See Statesman, March 30, 1928, 8. Letter to editor, Statesman, December 13, 1927, 7. For the politics of the nusec in relation to other women’s organizations in Britain, see Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminism in War and Peace, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1989), esp. 92–93. This defense was actually made some years later in response to similar criticisms; see Rathbone to Hamid Ali and Amrit Kaur, February 19, 1934, folder 12, box 93, ER Papers. Also see editor’s note included with the letter to editor, Women’s Leader and Common Cause, June 29, 1928, 171. See Rathbone’s enclosure, ‘‘A Summary of the More Salient Facts Representing the Status and Condition of Indian Women and of Some Proposals for Improving and Safeguard-

Notes to Chapter 5

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

323

ing Their Well-Being,’’ in Correspondence 2, Sir John Simon Papers. Also see letters between Simon and Rathbone, March 11, 21, and 24, 1930, Miscellaneous Papers 86, Sir John Simon Papers. See ‘‘The Old and New Feminism (1925),’’ in Milestones: Presidential Addresses, by Eleanor Rathbone (Liverpool: nusec, n.d.), 25–30. For this debate, see Johanna Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (London: Sage, 1996), esp. chap. 3; Susan Kingsley Kent, ‘‘Gender Reconstruction after the First World War,’’ in British Feminisms in the Twentieth Century, ed. Harold Smith (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 66–83; and Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Pedersen offers a more nuanced reappraisal of Rathbone’s ‘‘new feminism’’; see Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 157–268. See the report in Time and Tide, an organ of the Six Point Group, on the occasion of a debate between Elizabeth Abbott and Rathbone on restrictive legislation for women in industry. Time and Tide, November 4, 1927, 979. See especially Rathbone to the Marquess of Lothian, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India and Chair of the Indian Franchise Committee, 1932, December 24, 1931, folder 7, box 93, ER Papers. Cousins, for example, feared that Naidu threatened the emphasis on women’s affairs by labeling herself a humanist rather than a feminist. See James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950), 450. For the embrace of the label ‘‘feminist’’ for the Indian women’s movement by many of Naidu’s contemporaries, see AK [Amrit Kaur], ‘‘The Women’s Movement in India,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 4 (February 1933): 177–80; and Amrit Kaur, Challenge to Women (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1946), 3. For Naidu’s speech, see aiwc Report, 1930, 19–21; and Stri Dharma 13, no. 4 (February 1930): 136–39. For her earlier repudiation of feminism, see also her interview in London in 1928 quoted in the Indian Social Reformer, October 20, 1928, 7. The reporter, however, was obviously ambivalent about the statement attributed to Naidu on feminism in India. Some British women were also critical of Naidu’s interpretation of feminism as a demand for ‘‘preferential treatment of women.’’ See A. R. Caton, ‘‘A.I.W.C.,’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, February 28, 1930, 29. On Naidu’s views on feminism, also see interview with Sarojini Naidu, March 20, 1931, file 1, box 28, series 4, Ruth Woodsmall Papers. See note, n.d., file 16, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See ‘‘5 December—Ladies Deputation,’’ Indian Quarterly Register 1, nos. 1–2 ( January– June 1929): 54–56. Also see ‘‘Petticoat and Politics: Indian Flapper’s Vote,’’ in Press Clippings, vol. 6, November–December 1928, Sir John Simon Papers. See MEC [Margaret E. Cousins], ‘‘Indian Constitution: Place of Indian Women,’’ Amrita Bazar Patrika, November 30, 1927, 7; and Maya Das, ‘‘Women’s Franchise in India,’’ Statesman, August 25, 1928, 6; and New India, August 25, 1929, 9. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay also wrote that if adult suffrage was not granted, some system to enhance the political strength of women was needed; see Chattopadhyay, ‘‘Women and Politics,’’ New India, September 29, 1928, 5. See wia Report, 1930–31, 3, 8. Also see Minutes, May 14, 1930, Executive Committee Minutes, 1/6, 1930, wil Britain Papers. Agatha Harrison of the wil became the most important liaison between her organization and Indian women’s groups; see Recollections, file 1, box 1, Agatha Harrison Papers.

324 Notes to Chapter 5 30. wia Report, 1930–31, 3. 31. Since the British delegation, as secretary of state for India, Wedgwood Benn, informed Rathbone, was to consist entirely of ‘‘high political plenipotentiaries,’’ there was no room for British women in the delegation. Reported in Rathbone to Lady Mabel Hartog, October 3, 1930, folder 4, box 93, ER Papers. 32. Sorabji to Richmond, September 11, 1930, Correspondence and Private Papers, folder 45, 1930, CS Papers. 33. The London Committee of the wia worked most closely with the wil during this period. For the activities of this committee, see Avabai B.Wadia, ‘‘Some Personal Reminiscences of the aiwc,’’ in aiwc: In the Service of the Nation (Delhi: aiwc, 1980), 69–74. The wil welcomed the women delegates; see Minutes, September 29, 1930, Executive Committee Minutes, 1/6, 1930, wil Britain Papers. The wil made a public statement regretting only the absence of the Congress and of organized women from the conference; see Stri Dharma 14, no. 5 (March 1931): 203. For consultation with Nehru and Rau in drawing up the memorandum, see Shahnawaz to Rajwade, April 14, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For Rau’s and the wil’s help, also see Minutes, November 17, 1930, Executive Committee Minutes, 1/6, 1930, wil Britain Papers. 34. Compare Radhabai Subbarayon and Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, ‘‘Memorandum of the Political Status of Women under a New Constitution,’’ Proceeding of the Sub-committees, part 2, Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference, 12 November 1930–19 January 1931, Sub-committees’ Reports; Conference Resolution; and Prime Minister’s Statement, Cmd. 3722 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), 151, with Rathbone’s group’s ‘‘Memorandum on Certain Questions Affecting the Status and Welfare of Indian Women in the Future Constitution of India (December 1930),’’ in Women’s Leader and Common Cause, December 26, 1930, 352. Dorothy Jinarajadasa, the founder of the wia, was also one of the signatories of Rathbone’s memorandum. 35. See wia Report, 1930–1931, 4. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, for example, had resigned from the aiwc to devote her full time to the political struggle; for calls to bring her back into the conference at the time of the franchise meeting, see Sushama Sen to Rajwade, April 3, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Hansa Mehta, the secretary of the ncwi, was also in prison during this time; see Mehta’s convocation address, ‘‘Role of Women in New India,’’ in Speeches and Writings, no. 11, Hansa Mehta Papers, Miscellaneous Items (119) (a). Chattopadhyay encouraged the aiwc to take a stand on the franchise question now that the Congress was attending the second Round Table Conference; see Chattopadhyay to Rajwade, April 3, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Shah Nawaz, upon her return from the first Round Table Conference in London, commented on the strange irony of her ‘‘adopted’’ sister Chattopadhyay’s being in prison while she was at the conference; see Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography (Lahore: Nigarishat, 1971), 122–23. 36. See Women’s Leader and Common Cause, September 28, 1928, 256. Bhagat Ram, who was a representative of the adi-dravidas, or depressed classes, from the Punjab, also favored separate electorates for women. See Bhagat Ram, in A. R. Caton, ed., The Key of Progress: A Survey of the Status and Condition of Women in India (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 88; also see Bhagat Ram, ‘‘Women’s Place in the Future Constitution of India,’’ Stri Dharma 4, no. 9 ( July 1931): 410–12. 37. See Time and Tide, August 2, 1932, 879; and June 4, 1932, 610. 38. The phrase is from Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 10. Even the ‘‘pro-

Notes to Chapter 5

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

325

equality’’ faction of British feminists, represented by organizations such as the Open Door Council and the Six Point Group, initially joined the Women’s Indian Advisory Council of Britain to support special provisions for Indian women. See report of the meeting between Margaret Corbett-Ashby, the new president of the nusec, and Lothian, on January 7, 1932, in memorandum from the nusec, January 14, 1932, in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49, oioc. Rathbone did not share the objections to communal seats and electorates for women; see Rathbone to R. A. Butler, India Office, October 28, 1932; and Rathbone to Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India, November 1, 1932, folder 6, box 93, ER Papers. I am drawing mainly from Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), 274–305; and Uma Kaura, Muslims and Indian Nationalism: The Emergence of the Demand for India’s Partition, 1928–1940 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977). See Mushirul Hasan, ‘‘Congress Muslims’’ and Indian Nationalism: Dilemma and Decline, 1928–1934, Occasional Papers on History and Society, no. 23, April 1988, nmml. Quoted in Bulletin of the Indian Women’s Movement, no. 1 (May 1934): 3. See ‘‘Round Table Conference,’’ Hindu, December 23, 1930, 9; also Ambedkar and Rao Bahadur R. Srinivasna, ‘‘Scheme of Political Safeguards for the Protection of the Depressed Classes in the Future Constitution of a Self Governing India,’’ Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference, 12 Nov. 1930–19 Jan. 1931: Proceedings of Sub-committees (Part II) Cmd. 3722 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), 146–50. See ‘‘Memorandum on Franchise and Representation of Women in India,’’ file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. I owe this clarification of abstract versus political individualism to Nanette Funk, ‘‘Feminist Critiques of Liberalism: Can They Travel East? Their Relevance in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union,’’ Signs 29, no. 3 (spring 2004): 695–726. Malathi Patwardhan to Reddi, June 4, 1928; and June 15, 1928. For Reddi’s response, see Reddi to Patwardhan, June 8, 1928, in Correspondence with Malathi Patwardhan, Reddi Papers. For the wia’s original memorandum prepared after its meeting on March 4, 1931, see ‘‘Memorandum on the Status of Women in the Future Constitution of India,’’ wia Report, 1930–1931, 8–9; also file 26, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For wia’s early position also see ‘‘Mrs. Subbarayon’s Common Sense,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 5 (March 1931): 182. The meeting included Cousins, Reddi, Chattopadhyay, Rukhmani Lakshmipatti, and Kamalabai L. Rau; for details of the meeting, see Smrutika: The Story of My Mother as Told by Herself (The Story of Smt. Kamala Bai L. Rau as Told and Written by Herself in Tamil during 1958–59), trans. Smt. Indirabai M. Rau (1972) (Pune: Dr. Krishnabai Nimbkar, 1988), esp. 50–53, in f341/125, Forbes Collection. Also see Kamalabai L. Rau to Laxmibai Rajwade, n.d., file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers; and the report of the meeting in Stri Dharma 14, no. 7 (May 1931): 286. See Reddi to Rajwade, April 22, 1931, file 11, reel 1; and Reddi to Rajwade, May 2, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers.The circulation of the memorandum among the Standing Committee members of the aiwc demonstrated that seven of the eight constituencies approved the memorandum, Calcutta being the only one that held out for reserved seats. See Rajwade to Amrit Kaur, August 1, 1931, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See enclosure, file 12, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers; and in Great Britain, Indian

326 Notes to Chapter 5

50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

Round Table Conference (2nd Session) 7 Sept.–1 Dec. 1931, Reports of Committees (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 98–100. See Hansa Mehta, on behalf of the ncwi, to Malini Sukhtankar of the aiwc, March 18, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The aiwc, responding to news of the wia meeting, was also considering calling a meeting on the question; see Rajwade to Sukhtankar, March 9, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Cited in Great Britain, Indian Franchise Committee vol. v: Selections from Memoranda Submitted by Individuals and Oral Evidence [Punjab, Bihar and Orissa, Central Provinces, Assam, North West Frontier Provinces and Delhi] (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 98 (hereafter cited as IFC, vol. v). See ‘‘Memorandum on the Franchise and Representation of Women in the Reformed Indian Constitution,’’ in file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. This is how the publisher of a contemporary volume on the emergence of the Indian women’s movement described it; see publisher’s preface to The Awakening of Asian Womanhood, by Margaret E. Cousins (Madras: Ganesh, 1922). See Shailabala Das to Rajwade, April 5, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Das had been a candidate at open elections thrice and narrowly lost each time; for Das’s views on separate electorates for women, also see Shailabala Das, A Look Before and After (n.p., 1956), 118–19. Amrit Kaur to Rajwade, April 11, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Lalit Kumari et al. to Rajwade, April 14, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Shah Nawaz to Rajwade, April 14, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Shah Nawaz’s change of heart, according to Rathbone, corresponded with the policy of the Muslim League, which had reversed its stand on special concessions for women. Shah Nawaz apparently admitted to Rathbone in confidence that under the current condition of the same property qualifications of the franchise for men and women, Muslim women who had rights to property unlike Hindu women were at an advantage; see Rathbone, ‘‘Addenda Covering Period from Dec. 1930–Dec. 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. See petition in Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, 1927–1932, file 26, Hansa Mehta Papers, Miscellaneous Items (119) (a). The petition echoed Shah Nawaz’s and Subbarayon’s statement in support of their memorandum at the franchise subcommittee of the first Round Table Conference; see Hindu, December 23, 1930, 9. Reddi to Rajwade, August 13, 1931; also Reddi to Rajwade, April 22, 1931, file 11, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Tarabai Maneklal Premchand, honorary secretary of the ncwi, was similarly sympathetic to the memorandum, but she too feared the same kind of response from the provincial councils of the ncwi; see Premchand to Rajwade, February 8, 1932, file 23, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Subbarayon, ‘‘Representation of Women in the Indian Legislature,’’ Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference (2nd Session) 7 Sept.–1 Dec. 1931, Reports of Committees (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 97–98. Subbarayon to Rathbone, April 24, 1931, folder 5, box 93, ER Papers. For a discussion of the dissenting position of Indian women on the suffrage question, see Catherine Candy, ‘‘Competing Transnational Representations of the 1930s Indian Franchise Question,’’ in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Ian Fletcher, Philippa Levine, and Laura Mayhall (London: Routledge, 2000), 191–206. Rathbone to Lothian, January 1, 1932, folder 7, box 93, ER Papers. For the change in the

Notes to Chapter 5

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

327

position of the Muslim League on special franchise qualifications for women, see Ayesha Jalal, ‘‘The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State of Pakistan,’’ in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: Macmillan, 1991), 77–114. See exchange between Sarala Ray, president of the aiwc in 1932, and its honorary organizing secretary, in Rajwade to Ray, February 28, 1932; and Ray to Rajwade, November 14, 1932, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Also see Sushama Sen, Memoirs of an Octogenarian (New Delhi: Hilly Chatterjee and Jai Pradeep Sen, 1971), 356– 67; and Mrs. P. K. Bose, ‘‘Women’s Franchise,’’ Modern Review 54, no. 1 ( July 1933): 88–90. For the separate memorandum of Bengal women, see ‘‘Memorandum on the Franchise of Women,’’ by the women of Bengal (Calcutta: N. Mukherjee Art Press, 1932), in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. The ‘‘provincialism’’ underlying the differences especially struck Mrinalini Sen, who believed that adding to this disagreement on Memorandum I in Bengal was the prejudice that the memorandum reflected the views of mainly Bombay and Madras women to the neglect of women from a more ‘‘backward’’ province like Bengal, where women were among the last to get the right to vote; see Sen to Rajwade, June 25, 1931; and July 27, 1931, file 12, reel 1, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Also see Mrinalini Sen, Knocking at the Door: Lectures and Other Writings (Calcutta: Living Age Press, 1954), 190–93. See ‘‘Notes on Indian Impressions,’’ April 8, 1932, folder 4, box 93, ER Papers; and ‘‘Note, March 27, 1932,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. Mary Pickford to Dorothy Pickford, March 28, 1932, Mary Pickford Papers, oioc. Hamid Ali to Amrit Kaur and Rajwade, January 25, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See Rathbone to Subbarayon, April 19, 1933, folder 5, box 13; and Rathbone to Lady Macpherson, May 5, 1933, folder 13, box 93, ER Papers. Rathbone to Shah Nawaz, January 24, 1933, folder 10, box 93, ER Papers. See Note of Dissent by Reddi et al., Great Britain, Indian Franchise Committee, vol. iv: Selections from Memoranda Submitted by Individuals and Oral Evidence [Madras, Bombay, Bengal, and the U.P.] (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 215–17 (hereafter cited as IFC, vol. iv). The rival memorandums eventually sent to the Joint Select Committee by the Mahila Samiti of Bengal and by the women of Madras were in large part prepared by Rathbone herself; see Sarala Ray to Rathbone, January 26, 1933, folder 9, box 93; Subbarayon to Rathbone, February 6, 1933, folder 5, box 93; and Rathbone to Lothian, June 15, 1933, folder 7, box 93, ER Papers. For reference to Rathbone’s comment, see Shareefah Hamid Ali to Rathbone, October 9, 1932, folder 9, box 92, ER Papers. Also see Rathbone, ‘‘Note, March 27, 1932,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. See enclosure, Subbarayon to Sir Samuel Hoare, September 9, 1932; and Subbarayon to Prime Minister MacDonald, August 23, 1932, in Subbarayon to Rathbone, September 2, 1932; also Subbarayon to Rathbone, September 16, 1933, folder 5, box 93; for Rathbone’s attempts to minimize the award, see Rathbone to Subbarayon, September 2, 1932, folder 5, box 93, ER Papers. Also see Subbarayon’s press statement, August 19, 1932, in folder 5, box 93, ER Papers. Subbarayon had articulated her position on reserved seats for women before the Minorities Committee of the first Round Table Conference precisely to avoid this eventuality; see her ‘‘Explanatory Statement on the Memorandum Circulated to the First Round Table Conference,’’ March 1931, in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. Subbarayon to Rathbone, September 16, 1932, folder 5, box 93, ER Papers.

328 Notes to Chapter 5 74. Gangulee to Rathbone, August 27, 1932, folder 4, box 93, ER Papers. Rathbone fooled some of her Indian correspondents that she too was unhappy about the Communal Award, but her concern was limited merely to ensuring that women, like depressed classes, could also vote in general constituencies. See Rathbone, ‘‘Indian Communal Award,’’ August 17, 1932; and MacDonald to Rathbone, August 27, 1932, folder 4, box 93, ER Papers. Also see Rathbone’s evidence before the Joint Select Committee on the question of women and the communal issue, Great Britain, Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (Session 1932–33), Vol. II C: Minutes of Evidence Given Before the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1934), 1749–1774 (hereafter cited as JC, vol. II C ) 75. See Grace Lankester to Sir Archibald Carter, August 17, 1935; and Carter, ‘‘Notes on Meeting with Ray and Lankester,’’ in ‘‘Women,’’ Indian Delimitation Committee, q/idc/37, oioc. Also see Lankester to Amrit Kaur, August 16, 1935, as enclosure in Circular, September 21, 1935, file 96, reel 8, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 76. See Stri Dharma 14, no. 8 ( June 1931): 332. Individual women, like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Rukhmani Lakshmipatti, also sent in comments along similar lines; see file g-75/1931 and file g-85/1931, aicc Papers. 77. See ‘‘Report of Fundamental Rights Committee,’’ in file g-85/1931, aicc Papers. 78. See ‘‘The Congress Scheme for a Communal Settlement,’’ in Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session) 7th Sept.–1st Dec., 1931, Proceedings, Cmd. 3998 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 64–65; and also see ‘‘The Communal Problem,’’ file g-157/1931, aicc Papers. Not coincidentally, Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Hind threw its lot on the side of the Congress’s struggle against British rule because of its objections to the interference in Muslim personal laws by the Sarda Act; see Tahir Mahmood, Muslim Personal Law: Role of State in the Subcontinent (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977), 52–53; Ziya-ulHasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 60–73; and Azra Asghar Ali, The Emergence of Feminism among Indian Muslim Women, 1920–1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123–67. Also see Iqbal A. Ansari, ‘‘Minorities and the Politics of Constitution Making in India,’’ in Minority Identities and the Nation-State, ed. D. L. Sheth and Gurpreet Mahajan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 113–37. 79. The decision to forgo special provisions, as well as the subsequent opposition to the communal basis for women’s seats, was feared by some to be an encroachment into the ‘‘political’’ as ‘‘bordering on the sphere of party politics.’’ See Rajwade to P. K. Ray, President of the aiwc 1932, February 28, 1932, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers; and also aiwc Report, 1932–1933, 36. 80. See aiwc Report, Madras, 1931–32, 26–27. 81. Rathbone to Mona Hensman, January 9, 1935, folder 13, box 93, ER Papers. Also see Rathbone to Amrit Kaur, May 11, 1935, file 1, installment 4, aiwc Papers. 82. Amrit Kaur to Rathbone, September 3, 1934, folder 12, box 93, ER Papers. My reading of Rathbone’s involvement, as should be clear, differs in emphasis from that of Pedersen; see Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, esp. 241–60. I emphasize more the stakes of Rathbone’s various stands in a politics of imperialism. 83. Stri Dharma 18, no. 2 (December 1934): 43–49. For Amrit Kaur’s evidence before the Lothian Committee, see Amrit Kaur et al., in IFC, vol. v, 92–106; and ‘‘Women’s Evidence before the Lothian Committee,’’ Stri Dharma 15, no. 6 (April 1932): 301–6. The government was so impressed, despite disagreeing with her views, that it wished to co-opt

Notes to Chapter 5

84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

329

Amrit Kaur in place of the other two women delegates to the Round Table Conference; see note by Laithwaite, l/po/6/81 (ii). See ‘‘The Franchise and Women’s Status,’’ in Amrit Kaur, Challenge to Women, 35–49, esp. 41. See letter addressed for circulation, n.d., file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Quoted in Minutes of India Sub-committee, May 28, 1931, file 4/2 India: Minutes and Resolutions, wil Britain Papers. Also see Reddi to Rajwade, May 2, 1931; and the aiwc deputation to the Viceroy on May 28, 1931, in file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. The case for additional women delegates was also pressed on the Congress; see Reddi to Jawaharlal Nehru, n.d., in file g13 of 1931, aicc Papers. For insistence on the autonomy of women’s organizations, also see ‘‘Smt. Saraladevi Chaudhrani’s Speech at Bengal Women’s Congress,’’ Stri Dharma 14, no. 11 (September 1931): 508–11. See Rathbone to Wedgwood Benn, April 16, 1931, folder 2, box 92, ER Papers. Reddi too was not very happy to have Naidu, an avowed Congress woman, as the only representative of the Indian women’s movement at the conference. See Reddi to Rajwade, May 2, 1931, file 14, reel 2, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For the modified group system advocated by women’s organizations, see ‘‘Memorandum from the aiwc’’ to the Joint Secretary, Indian Franchise Committee, February 26, 1932, in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. For the discontent, see Mrs. Kailalash Srivastava to Rajwade, February 7, 1933; and Reddi to Rajwade, February 18, 1933, file 36, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See Shah Nawaz to Amrit Kaur, November 28, 1932, file 34, reel 3; also see Subbarayon, ‘‘Note on Women’s Franchise under the New Constitution,’’ February 1933, in file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers; and ‘‘Women’s Franchise and Third Round Table Conference,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 4 (February 1933): 168–69. For the conference, also see Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference (Third Session), 17 Nov. 1932–24 Dec. 1932, Cmd. 4238 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933). The stakes of this were high: compared to the existing ratio of 1:20 of women to men voters in India, the Lothian Committee proposed a ratio of 1:4.5; the white paper proposals reduced this ratio to 1:10. See Forbes, New Cambridge History of India, 109–10. For the white paper, see Great Britain, Proposals for Indian Constitutional Reform, Cmd. 4268 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933); for its controversial retreat from the Lothian Committee proposals, see ‘‘Indian Women’s Opinion on the White Paper,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 6 (April 1933): 296; and Philip Cox, Beyond the White Paper: A Discussion of the Evidence Presented before the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 105–36. Begum Mohammed Wasim to Rajwade, April 8, 1933, file 34, reel 3; and also see Rameshwari Nehru to Reddi, March, n.d., 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See Rajwade to Standing Committee Members, February 20, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See Minutes of the Joint Meeting in Bombay, March 25–26, 1933, file 4, installment 4, aiwc Papers. Sushama Sen to Rathbone, May 23, 1934, folder 16, box 93, ER Papers; also Sen, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, 358–63. For passage of the bill, also see Bulletin of the Indian Women’s Movement 6 ( July 1935): 1. See Rathbone, ‘‘Addenda Covering the Period from Dec. 1930–Dec. 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49.

330 Notes to Chapter 5 97. See letter from the Equal Rights Committee in Memoranda on Special Subjects–Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/39. 98. For the formation of the Women’s Advisory Council on Indian Questions on September 25, 1931, under Dorothea Layton, see Executive Committee Meeting, July 14, 1931; September 29, 1931; and October 13, 1931, 1/7/1931, wil Britain Papers. Lady Layton and Margaret Corbett-Ashby, the new president of the nusec, met Lothian on January 7, 1932, to present him with the nusec memorandum that was basically in keeping with Rathbone’s proposals; see file II, Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49; and Miscellaneous Papers Belonging to Lord Lothian, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/92. For the formation of Rathbone’s coalition, see folder 11, box 93, ER Papers. 99. See Memorandum to the Joint Select Committee, April 10, 1934, in file no. 1, installment 4, aiwc Papers. Also see ‘‘British Commonwealth League and St. Joan’s Social and Political Alliance,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 1 (August 1933): 487–89; and ‘‘British Women’s Support for the Women’s Demand for Franchise,’’ Stri Dharma 17, no. 7 (May 1934): 308–10. 100. Lady Layton to Amrit Kaur, April 8, 1935, file 1, installment 4, aiwc Papers. 101. Undated circular, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 102. For Cousins’s connections to Paul, see Catherine Candy, ‘‘Margaret Cousins (1878– 1954),’’ in Female Activists: Irish Women and Change, 1900–1960, ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2001), 1–49. 103. Minutes of Joint Meeting in Bombay, March 25–26, 1933, in Circular no. 3, April 1, 1933, file 4, installment 4, aiwc Papers. 104. Ruby Navolkar to Rajwade, April 4, 1933, file 37, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 105. Rajwade to Navolkar, April 9, 1933, file 37, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 106. See wia memorandum, IFC, vol. iv, 206–7. Also see Stri Dharma 15, no. 7 (May 1932): 379–80; and Amrit Kaur to Rathbone, April 2, 1934, folder 12, box 93, ER Papers. 107. See Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference, 12th Nov. 1930–19th Jan. 1931: Subcommittee’s Reports; Conference Resolution; and Prime Minister’s Statement, Cmd. 3772 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office), 58. For a discussion of labor representative N. M. Joshi’s objections, see ‘‘Addenda Covering the Period from Dec. 1930 to Dec. 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49; also see ‘‘Memorandum of All India Depressed Classes Congress,’’ in File IV: Depressed Classes, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/51. 108. See IFC, vol. v, 92–106. 109. See ‘‘Memorandum Sent by Hamid Ali, Amrit Kaur, and Muthulakshmi Reddi, August 9, 1933,’’ in file 10, installment 4, aiwc Papers. Also see ‘‘Women and Joint Select Committee,’’ Stri Dharma 16, no. 11 (September 1933): 556–59; and Evidence by Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Mrs. Hamid Ali to Sub-committee C of the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, 29 July 1933, and the evidence of all three to the full committee on August 2, 1933, in JC, Vol. II C, 1617–22; 2288–2324. 110. See Rajwade to Reddi and Malini Sukhtankar, April 22, 1933, file 37, reel 4; also Sukhtankar to Rajwade, May 17, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. 111. See Great Britain, Report of the Indian Franchise Committee, vol. i (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publishing Branch, 1932), 234 (hereafter cited as IFC, vol. i). Also see ‘‘Memorandum Sent by Hamid Ali, Amrit Kaur, and Muthulakshmi Reddi, August 9, 1933,’’ in file 10, installment 4, aiwc Papers. 112. See Amrit Kaur, Challenge to Women, 43–45. 113. See ‘‘Memorandum on the Franchise of Women,’’ by the women of Bengal (Calcutta:

Notes to Chapter 5

114.

115.

116. 117.

118.

119. 120.

121.

122.

123. 124. 125.

126. 127.

331

N. Mukherjee Art Press, 1932), in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. See East India (Constitutional Reforms): Government of India’s Despatch on Proposals for Constitutional Reform, dated 20th Sept. 1930, Cmd. 3700 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930). ‘‘Explanatory Statement by Mrs. Subborayon on the Memorandum Circulated to the First Round Table Conference, March 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. See ‘‘Addenda Covering the Period from Dec. 1930 to Dec. 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. ‘‘Explanatory Statement by Mrs. Subborayon on the Memorandum Circulated to the First Round Table Conference, March 1931,’’ in File II: Position of Women, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/49. See ‘‘Representation of Women in the Indian Legislature: Memorandum by Mrs. Subbarayon,’’ Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session) 7th Sept., 1931–1st Dec. 1931: Proceedings, Cmd. 3997 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 97–99. Subbarayon was wavering in her position before the conference; see Rajwade to Subbarayon, September 11, 1931, file 12, reel 1; and Rajwade to Amrit Kaur, August 31, 1931, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. ‘‘Note by B. R. Ambedkar,’’ IFC, vol. i, 202–11. See ‘‘Provisions for a Settlement of the Communal Problem, Put Forward Jointly by Muslims, Depressed Classes, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans,’’ in Great Britain, Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session) 7th Sept., 1931–1st Dec., 1931: Proceedings, Cmd. 3997 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 68–73. Quoted in B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (1958; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 315. Also see ‘‘Gandhi and Women in the Second Round Table Conference,’’ Hitavada (February 1934), 4, in file 1, box 2; and Gandhi, ‘‘The Fiction of the Majority,’’ Harijan, October 21, 1939, in file 1, box 1, Agatha Harrison Papers. For Shah Nawaz’s and Naidu’s personal reminiscences of the communal tangle at the conference, see Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter, 132–33; and Naidu to Padmaja and Lilamani Naidu, September 23, 1931, October 8, 1931, and December 1, 1931, in Sarojini Naidu: Selected Letters, 1890s to 1940s, ed. Makarand Parajpape (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996), 248–62. See Great Britain, The Communal Award by His Majesty’s Government Released on 16 August 1932, Cmd. 4147 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932). For background also see Gandhi to MacDonald, August 18, 1932; and Ambedkar to Hoare, August 21, 1932; in Correspondence with M. K. Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar, 1931–1932,Templewood Collections (Sir Samuel Hoare), oioc. See Uma Kaura, Muslims and Indian Nationalism, esp. 79–108. See Subbarayon to Lothian, March 30, 1932; and August 1, 1932; in Miscellaneous Papers Belonging to Lord Lothian, 1931–1932, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/92. I owe this formulation to Kumkum Sangari, ‘‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies,’’ parts 1 and 2, Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 51 (December 23, 1995): 3287–3310; and no. 52 (December 30, 1995): 3381–89. See ‘‘Note by Sir Mohammad Yakub,’’ IFC, vol. i, 193–95. Also see Yakub’s statement on August 1, 1933, before the Joint Committee, JC, Vol. II C, 1499. Cited in ‘‘Memorandum by Assam Provincial Franchise Committee,’’ Great Britain, Indian Franchise Committee 1932, vol. iii, Memoranda Submitted by the Local Governments and

332 Notes to Chapter 5

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134.

135. 136. 137.

138. 139.

140. 141. 142.

Provincial Franchise Committees [Punjab, Bihar and Orissa, Central Provinces, Assam, NorthWest Frontier Province, Coorg, and Ajmer-Merwara] (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 400 (hereafter cited as IFC, vol. iii). Also see ‘‘Analysis by Miss Pickford of the Views Expressed by Women Witnesses and Organizations on the Communalizing of Women’s Seats,’’ in Miscellaneous Papers Belonging to Lord Lothian, 1931–1932, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/92. Minute by Mrs. P. Subbarayon, IFC, vol. i, 199–202. Minute of Dissent, IFC, vol. i, 216. Brief Note, IFC, vol. i, 231–35. See Subbarayon to Lothian, March 30, 1932, in Miscellaneous Papers Belonging to Lord Lothian, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/92. See note by R. A. Butler on Lothian’s letter to Subbarayon drafted June 27, 1933, in Miscellaneous Papers Belonging to Lord Lothian, Indian Franchise Committee, q/ifc/92. Also see ‘‘The Lothian Report,’’ Stri Dharma 15, no. 9 ( July 1932): 465–67; and for disappointment at the communalizing of the women’s seats already hinted at in the report, see Hamid Ali to Rathbone, October 9, 1932, folder 9, box 93, ER Papers. Quoted in ‘‘Statement of the Elected Representatives of the aiwc, wia, and ncwi to the Joint Select Committee,’’ August 1, 1933, file 10, installment 4, aiwc Papers. The declaration, signed by Shah Nawaz, Hamid Ali, Firozuddin, Reddi, Rajwade, Amrit Kaur, Rustomji, Ammu Swaminadan, and others, was widely reprinted in the press; see ‘‘A Joint Declaration on Women’s Franchise,’’ Stri Dharma 15, no. 5 (March 1932): 241–43; Modern Review 51, no. 4 (April 1932): 440; Jus Suffragi: The International Woman Suffrage News 26, no. 8 (May 1932): 92–93; and IFC, vol. v, 90–91. See Rajwade to Amrit Kaur, February 7, 1932, file 34, reel 3; and Rustomjee to Amrit Kaur, February 14, 1932, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 161–77. For the criticism of the Congress for its relative silence on the Communal Award, see ‘‘Communal Award,’’ file no. g-24/1934–36, aicc Papers. Both the aiwc and the Bombay branch of the ncwi issued general appeals against the Communal Award; see Rajwade to Standing Committee members, August 21, 1932, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers; and Central Executive Committee Meeting of the ncwi, September 26, 1932, f344/171, Forbes Collection. The aiwc also appealed to the secretary of state specifically against the extension of separate communal electorates for women; see Appeal to the Secretary of State, January 28, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Shah Nawaz to Rathbone, February 20, 1934, folder 10, box 93, ER Papers; and Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter, 145–49. Shah Nawaz to Rajwade, March 3, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For a parallel argument to accept the Communal Award as the foundation for a common cause based on a ‘‘concert’’ rather than a ‘‘unity’’ of thought, see another Muslim aiwc member, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, ‘‘Bases of Cultural Relationships: The Case for the Communal Award,’’ in Changing India: A Muslim Woman Speaks (Bangalore: Hosali Press, 1940), 56–64. Rajwade to Shah Nawaz, March 5, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. See ‘‘Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Special Franchise Committee of the ncwi, wia, and aiwc March 25–26, 1933,’’ file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Among the opponents were aiwc Muslim stalwarts such as Khadija Begum Firozud-

Notes to Chapter 5

143.

144.

145.

146.

147. 148.

149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154.

155. 156. 157. 158.

333

din, Begum Sakina Mayuzada, Begum Habibullah, Yakub Hassan, and Imtiaz Fatima Begum; see aiwc Annual Report, Lucknow, 1932–1933, 50–55. Ibid., 56. Faiz B.Tyabji, the Muslim president of the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, similarly reminded her organization of the unique harmony created with the absence of any special provisions and proportional representation. See 15th Annual Report, Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, Maharashtra State Women’s Council, Mumbai. For the dissent in the Karachi subcommittee of the Sindh constituency of the aiwc, see Anandi Devi Khemchand to Rajwade, May 31, 1933; and Jan Huidekoper to Rajwade, May 29, 1933, file 36, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. She also recommended a propaganda blitzkrieg, especially foregrounding the view of Muslim women like Begum Mohammed Wasim, in support of joint electorates. See Khemchand to Rajwade, February 28, 1933; file 36, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Reddi to Rajwade, May 4, 1933, file 37, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. For Reddi’s objections to signing Memorandum II, see Circular no. 8, Rajwade to Standing Committee Members, May 13, 1933, file 34, reel 3, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. Reddi to Amrit Kaur, September 9, 1933; and Amrit Kaur to Reddi, September 11, 1933, file 10, installment 4, aiwc Papers. For Ambedkar’s support of the bill, see December 6, 1927, file 1024, 1927, Home, Judicial, 1927; and for Periyar’s support, see Periyar on Women’s Rights, trans. R. Sundaru Raj, ed. K. Veeramani (Madras: Emerald Publishers, 1996), 77. Reddi especially had received support from non-Brahmin and self-respect youth leagues in Madras in her crusade against child marriage at both the national and provincial levels; see, for example, the letter from Av. L. Arunachalam Chettiar, Vice President of the League of Non-Brahmin Youths, to Reddi, March 13, 1928, and enclosure in Subject File, file no. 8, part 1, Reddi Papers. aiwc Report, Madras, 1931–1932, 66–69. Oral Evidence, Amrit Kaur, April 4, 1932, IFC, vol. v, 98. Ibid. Also see Oral Evidence of Mrs. Menon, Lucknow Branch of the aiwc, March 19, 1932, IFC, vol. iv, 757. This went along with the response of women’s organizations to Gandhi’s call to take up the work of removing untouchability; see Stri Dharma 16, no. 2 (December 1933): 70; wia Report, 1932–33, 10; and wia Report, 1933–34, 3–4. The aiwc for the first time at its Calcutta conference from December 27, 1933, to January 4, 1934, welcomed two ‘‘harijan’’ delegates, one from Nagpur and another from Amroati; see M. E. Cousins, ‘‘Impressions of the Women’s Conference at Calcutta,’’ Stri Dharma 17, no. 4 (February 1934): 156–59; also see references to the ‘‘Harijan’’ delegates at the conference in the recollections of Agatha Harrison, f341/143, Forbes Collection; and in Bulletin of the Indian Women’s Movement 12 ( January 1937): 1. Reddi to Rathbone, July 29, 1931, quoted in Pearson, ‘‘Reserved Seats,’’ 56. ‘‘Memorandum of the aiwc,’’ IFC, vol v, 86–90. The aiwc, for example, eventually dropped the telegram of support to Gandhi on his fast against separate electorates for the depressed classes in the Communal Award. See Huidekoper to Rajwade, n.d., file 36, reel 4, installments 1 and 2, aiwc Papers. IFC, vol. i, 201. ‘‘Memorandum submitted by Dr. (Mrs.) Malini Sukhtankar, Honorary Secretary, aiwc,’’ IFC, vol. iv, 449–54; also ‘‘Memorandum of the wia, Bombay Branch,’’ IFC, vol. iv, 447–49. Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter, 145. Begum Shah Nawaz, ‘‘Women’s Movement in India,’’ Indian Paper no. 5, 8th Conference

334 Notes to Epilogue of Institute of Pacific Relations, December 1942, New York, in f341/163, Forbes Collection; and her ‘‘Indian Women and the New Constitution,’’ Asiatic Review 29 ( July 1933): 435–58. Also see Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter, 174. For Shah Nawaz’s compromised position, also see Jalal, ‘‘The Convenience of Subservience.’’ 159. See Shyam Kumar Nehru, ed., Our Cause: A Symposium by Indian Women (Allahabad: Kitabistan [1937]), 1; also see Amrit Kaur, Challenge to Women, 23. The fractured legacy whereby sensitivity to class differences trumped recognition of women’s contradictory relationship to the community produced some strange results; see, for example, the discussion of the report ‘‘Women’s Role in the Planned Economy’’ prepared by the Subcommittee on Women of the National Planning Committee (1938), in Maitrayee Chaudhuri, ‘‘Citizens, Workers and Emblems of Culture: An Analysis of the First Plan Document on Women,’’ in Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), 211–35; and Nirmala Banerjee, ‘‘Whatever Happened to the Dreams of Modernity? The Nehruvian Era and Women’s Position,’’ Economic and Political Weekly, April 25, 1998, ws-2–ws-7. 160. For the lingering impact of Nehru’s famous and off-hand remark about the aiwc, see interview with Renuka Ray, September 6, 1968, Renuka Ray, Oral History Archives.

epilogue 1. Quoted in Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India/Madar Indiya (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 20. Also see Rosie Thomas, ‘‘Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India,’’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 11–30; Sandhya Shetty, ‘‘(Dis)figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor, Metonymy,’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (fall 1995): 50–79; and Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 152–73. 2. Chatterjee, Mother India, 12. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. For the many lives of the image, see Sadan Jha, ‘‘The Life and Times of Bharat Mata: Nationalism as Invented Religion,’’ Manushi 142 (May–June 2004): 34–38. 5. My thinking here has been informed by scholars who have insisted on the fact that the ‘‘nation’’ as the ideological representation of the polity/society nexus was a political statement and should be studied as we would any ideological construct. See especially the review essay by Steven Englund, ‘‘The Ghost of Nation Past,’’ Journal of Modern History 64, no. 2 ( June 1992): 299–320. I am also drawing on scholars who are beginning to demonstrate that the nation, and especially the particular nation-state form, was not necessarily the natural goal of anticolonial struggles; see Frederick Cooper, ‘‘Modernizing Colonialism and the Limits of Empire,’’ Items and Issues: Social Science Research Council 4, no. 4 (fall–winter 2003): 1–9; and also Sugata Bose, ‘‘Post-colonial Histories of South Asia: Some Reflections,’’ Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 133–46. 6. I am loosely paraphrasing from Englund, ‘‘The Ghost of Nation Past,’’ 315–16. 7. See Henry Rousso, ‘‘The Historian: A Site of Memory,’’ in France at War: Vichy and the Historians, ed. Sarah Fishman, Laura Lee Downs, Ioannis Sinanoglou, Leonard V. Smith, and Robert Zaretsky, trans. David Lake (New York: Berg, 2000), 285–302, esp. 285–86; and Pierre Nora, ‘‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’’ trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (spring 1989): 7–24; and for a slightly different translation

Notes to Epilogue

335

see ‘‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History,’’ in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–14. For the elaboration of an author or a book as a site of memory, see Rousso, ‘‘The Historian’’; and also Leonard V. Smith, ‘‘Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-five Years Later,’’ History and Theory 40 (May 2001): 241–60. 8. Here Peter Novick draws on the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs to offer the useful distinction; see Novick,The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 4. 9. For some examples, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); David Blythe, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and for the complex interdependence between memory and history also see the review by Patrick Hutton, ‘‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,’’ History Teacher 33, no. 4 (August 2000); 533–48. For issues arising out of a clash between ‘‘popular’’ and disciplinary history in the context of the controversy over history textbooks in India, see Delhi Historians’ Group, Communalisation of Education: The History Textbook Controversy (New Delhi: Delhi Historians’ Group, 2001); and Safdar Hasmi Memorial Trust, Communalisation of Education: The Assault on History: Press Reportage, Editorials, and Articles (New Delhi: Safdar Hasmi Memorial Trust, 2002). For a discussion of ‘‘hitorians’ history’’ and ‘‘non-disciplinary history,’’ also see Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10. I am drawing here from Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal’s critique of Partha Chatterjee’s important formulation of the ‘‘difference’’ of countercolonial Indian nationalism. See Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122–25; also Bose, ‘‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture,’’ in Nationalism, Democracy, and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–75.

Bibliography

primary sources This section, apart from private papers, governmental and institutional records, newspapers and periodicals, and contemporary publications, contains a list of the principal works by Katherine Mayo and of major contributions to the controversy over Mother India.

Private Papers United States

manuscript and archives division, sterling memorial library, yale university, new haven, connecticut Katherine Mayo Papers

sophia smith collection, smith college, northampton, massachusetts Ruth Woodsmall Papers

houghton library, harvard university, cambridge, massachusetts Oswald Garrison Villard Papers

bentley historical library, university of michigan, ann arbor Jabez T. Sunderland Papers

United Kingdom

centre for south asia studies, cambridge university, cambridge Rushbrook Williams Papers Irene Mott Bose Papers

women’s library, london guildhall university, london Eleanor Rathbone Papers Helena Normanton Papers

friends house, london Agatha Harrison Papers

oriental and india office collection, british library, london Cornelia Sorabji Papers Duchess of Atholl Papers [Katherine Marjory Stewart-Murray] Sir John Simon Papers Sir Basil P. Blackett Papers S. K. Datta Papers

Bibliography Mary Pickford Papers Templewood Collection [Sir Samuel Hoare] Forbes Collection: Publications and Papers Relating to Indian Women and Women’s Studies Collated by Professor Geraldine Hancock Forbes

India

national archives, new delhi Gandhi-Sabarmati Papers

nehru memorial museum and library, new delhi (manuscript division) S. Muthulakshmi Reddi Papers Amrit Kaur Papers Rameshwari Nehru Papers

Small Collections K. L. Gauba Papers Vijaylakshmi Pandit Papers Shyam Kumari Nehru Papers Padmaja Naidu Papers Hansa Mehta Papers Syed Hossain Papers J. T. Sunderland Papers Har Bilas Sarda Papers M. K. Acharya Papers Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Papers Miscellaneous Collections Correspondence of Herabai Tata Oral History Archives S. Ambujammal Hansa Mehta Renuka Ray Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay K. L. Gauba Durgabai Deshmukh Government Records United Kingdom

the national archives, public records office, kew Foreign Office, Embassies and Consulates, U.S.A., News Department Foreign Office, Embassies and Consulates, U.S.A., General Correspondence

oriental and india office collection, british library, london Public and Judicial Department Records Secretary of State for India, Private Office Papers Secretary of State Private Office Papers, Personal Files Information Department Records Political and Secret Department Records

337

338 Bibliography Committees and Commission Files Indian Round Table Conference Indian Franchise Committee Indian Delimitation Committee India

national archives of india, new delhi Home Department Political Branch Home Department Judicial Branch Home Department Public Branch Foreign and Political Department Legislative Department Education, Health, and Land Department

Government Reports and Publications Great Britain East India Constitutional Reforms. Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, Parliamentary Papers (Cmd. 9109). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918. East India Constitutional Reforms. Indian Statutory Commission Statement Published on 8th Nov. by the Governor General of India, Parliamentary Papers (Cmd. 2986). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1927. East India Constitutional Reforms. Government of India’s Despatch on Proposals for Constitutional Reforms, dated 20 Sept. 1930, Parliamentary Papers (Cmd. 3700). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930. Indian Round Table Conference, November 12, 1930–Jan. 19, 1931, Sub-committee Reports, etc., vol. xii (Cmd. 3772). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931. Indian Round Table Conference, November 12, 1930–Jan. 19, 1931, Proceedings (Cmd. 3778). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931. Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session), Sept. 7, 1931–Dec. 1, 1931, Proceedings (Cmd. 3997). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932. Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session), Sept. 7, 1931–Dec. 1, 1931, Proceedings of Federal Structure Committee and Minorities Committee, vol. 1. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932. Indian Round Table Conference (Third Session), Nov. 17, 1932–Dec. 24, 1932, Proceedings (Cmd. 4238). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933. Indian Franchise Committee. Vols. 1–5. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932. The Communal Award by His Majesty’s Government released on 16 August 1932 (Cmd. 4147). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932. Proposals for Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1932–1933, Parliamentary Papers, XX (Cmd. 4268). Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (session 1932–33), Report, vol. 1. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933. Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (session 1933–34), Proceedings, vol. I (Part II), London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1934. Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (session 1933–34), Records, vol. II. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Offic, 1934. Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (session 1932–33), Minutes of Evidence Given

Bibliography

339

Before the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform by Secretary of State for India and His Advisors, vol. IIB. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1934. Parliamentary Debates (Commons and Lords). Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms (session 1932–33), Minutes of Evidence Given Before the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, vol. IIC. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1934.

India Government of India. Reports on News Papers and Periodicals. Government of India, Department of Public Instructions. Quarterly Lists of Catalogue of Books Printed. Government of India. Legislative Assembly Debates. Government of India, Home Department. India in the Years 1917/1918–1934–35. Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publication Branch, 1919–36. Government of India. Age of Consent Committee, Report and Evidence, 1928–1929. Vols. 1–9. Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1929. Institutional and Organizational Records United States

new york public library, new york British Apprentice Club Papers

United Kingdom

women’s library, london guildhall university, london British Common Wealth League, Annual Reports and Conference Reports

london metropolitan archives, london National Council of Women, Great Britain, Papers and Annual Reports

british library of political and economic science, london school of economics, london Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, British Section Papers

friends house, london India Conciliation Group Papers

India

all india women’s conference library, new delhi All India Women’s Conference, Annual Reports and Souvenirs

maharashtra state women’s council, mumbai Bombay Presidency Women’s Council, Annual Reports

theosophical society archives and library, adyar, chennai Women’s Indian Association, Annual Reports and Publications

periyar rationalist library and research centre, chennai Select Publications of the Self-Respect Movement

340 Bibliography nehru memorial museum and library, new delhi All India Women’s Conference and National Council of Women of India Papers All India Congress Committee Papers Bombay Branch, Women’s Indian Association, Annual Reports

Microfilm Collection Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Papers Newspapers and Periodicals United States Atlantic Monthly (Boston) Chicago Defender Crisis (New York) Nation (New York) Negro World (New York) New Republic (New York) New York Times Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File, Microfilm Collection Unity (Chicago) United Kingdom Bulletin of Indian Women’s Movement (Surrey) Daily Mail (London) International Review of Missions (Edinburgh) Jus Suffragi: The International Women’s Suffrage News (London) Manchester Guardian New Statesman (London) The Vote (London) Time and Tide (London) Times (London) Women’s Leader and Common Cause (London) India Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta) Banga Laxmi (Calcutta) Bengalee (Calcutta) Bombay Chronicle Bulletin of National Council of Women in India (Bombay) Chand (Allahabad) Forward (Calcutta) Hindu (Madras) Indian Annual Register (Calcutta) Indian Ladies Magazine (Mausaulipatnam) Indian Social Reformer (Bombay; Madras) Indian Witness (Lucknow) Modern Review (Calcutta) Muslim Outlook (Lahore)

Bibliography

341

New India (Madras) Pioneer (Allahabad) Statesman (Calcutta) Stri Dharma (Madras) Times of India (Bombay)

Personal Accounts Asaf Ali, Aruna. Fragments from the Past: Selected Writings and Speeches of Aruna Asaf Ali. New Delhi: Patriot, 1989. Atholl, Katherine. Working Partnership. London: Arthur Barker, 1958. Bose, Sudhindra. Mother America: Realities of American Life as Seen by an Indian. Baroda: M. S. Bhatt, n.d. Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi. Inner Recesses/Outer Spaces: Memoirs. New Delhi: Navrang, 1986. Chattopadhyaya, Hirendranath. Life and Myself. Vol. 1. Bombay: Nalanda, 1948. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Thy Hand Great Anarch! India, 1921–1952. London: Chatto and Windus, 1987. Cousins, James H., and Margaret E. Cousins. We Two Together. Madras: Ganesh, 1950. Das, Shailabala. A Look Before and After (First Woman Municipal Commissioner of Patna and an Ex-mp). Cuttack, 1956. Dutt, G. S. A Woman of India: Being the Life of Saroj Nalini (Founder of the Women’s Institute Movement in India). 1926. Reprint, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1929. Dutt [Joshi], Kalpana. Chittagong Armoury Raider’s Reminiscences. 1945. Reprint, New Delhi: People’s Pub. House, 1979. Edib, Halidé. Inside India. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937. Gandhi, M. K. Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Ahmedabad: Navajivan House, 1961. Harrison, Irene. Agatha Harrison: An Impression by Her Sister. London: Allen and Unwin, 1956. Her Highness of Bhopal. Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum: An Account of My Life. Translated from the Urdu by C. H. Payne. London: John Murray, 1927. Holmes, John Haynes. I Speak for Myself. New York: Harper Collins, 1959. Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Inside Seclusion: The Avoradhbasini of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Ed. and trans. Roshan Jahan. Dhaka: Bangladesh brac Printers, 1981. Hussain, Iqbalunnisa. Changing India: A Muslim Woman Speaks. Bangalore: Hosali Press, 1940. Ikramullah, Begum Shaista. From Purdah to Parliament. London: Crescent Press, 1963. Karve, Dhondo Keshav. Looking Back. Poona: Hinge Stree-Shikshan Samastha, 1936. Lutyens, Lady Emily. Candles in the Sun. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957. Majumdar, Shudha. Memoirs of an Indian Woman. Ed. Geraldine Forbes. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989. Nanda, Savitri Devi. The City of Two Gateways: The Autobiography of an Indian Girl. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950. Nehru, Jawaharlal. An Autobiography. 1936. Reprint, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Nehru [Hutheesing], Krishna. With No Regrets: An Autobiography. New York: John Day, 1945. Nehru, Rameshwari. Gandhi Is My Star: Speeches and Writings of Smt. Rameshwari Nehru. Ed. Somnath Dhar. Patna: Pustakbhandar, 1950.

342 Bibliography Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi. The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir. New York: Crown Publishers, 1979. Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline. My Part in a Changing World. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. Rama Rau, Dhanvanthi. An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau. London: Harper and Row, 1977. Rathbone, Eleanor. Milestones: Presidential Addresses at the Annual Council Meetings of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. Liverpool: Lee and Nightingale, 1929. Rau, Kamala Bai L. Smrutika: The Story of My Mother as Told By Herself, the Story of Shrimati Kamala Bai L. Rau. Translated from the Tamil by Indirabai Rau. Pune: Dr. Krishnabai Nimbkar, 1988. Reddy, Muthulukshmi. My Experiences as a Legislator. Madras: Current Thought Press, 1930. . Autobiography of Dr. (Mrs.) S. Muthulukshmi Reddy (A Pioneer Woman Legislator). Madras: M. Reddy, 1964. Sahgal, Manmohini Zutshi. An Indian Freedom Fighter Recalls Her Life. Ed. Geraldine Forbes. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Sarda, Har Bilas. Speeches and Writings. Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1935. . Recollections and Reminiscences: Memoirs of Har Bilas Sarda. Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1951. Saund, Dalip Singh. Congressman from India. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960. Sen, Ela. Testament of India. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939. Sen, Mrinalini. Knocking at the Door: Lectures and Other Writings. Calcutta: Living Age Press, 1954. Sen, Sushama. Memoirs of an Octogenarian. Simla: Anjali, 1971. Shahnawaz, Jahan Ara. Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography. Lahore: Nigarishat, 1971. Simon, John Allesbrook. Retrospect: The Memoirs of the Right Hon. Viscount Simon. London: Hutchinson, 1952. Sorabji, Cornelia. India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji. London: Nisbett, 1932. Sunity Devee. The Autobiography of an Indian Princess. London: John Murray, 1921. Tata, Lady. A Book of Remembrance. Bombay: Commercial Printing Press, 1932. Villard, Oswald Garrison. Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Fighting Editor. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939. Viscount Templewood. Nine Troubled Years. London: Collins, 1954.

Other Publications Atholl, the Duchess, and J. C. French. India and the Report of the Joint Select Committee. Southend-on-Sea, Essex: H. F. Lucas, n.d. Bai Sumati, G. Women Awakened. Madras: Tagore, 1928. Balfour, Margaret, and Ruth Young. The Work of Medical Women in India. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Caton, A. R., ed. The Key of Progress. London: Humphrey Milford, 1930. Chattopadhyaya, Kamaladevi, et al., eds. The Awakening of Indian Women. Madras: Everyman’s Press, 1939. . Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom. New Delhi: Abhinav Pubs., 1983. Coupland, Sir Reginald. The Indian Problem, 1833–1935. 1942. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Cousins, Margaret E. The Awakening of Asian Womanhood. Madras: Ganesh, 1922.

Bibliography

343

. What Women Have Gained by the Reforms. Madras, n.d. [1925]. . Indian Womanhood Today. Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1941. Cox, Philip. Beyond the White Paper: A Discussion of the Evidence Presented before the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934. Dwarkadas, Kanji. India’s Fight for Freedom, 1913–1937: An Eyewitness Story. 1960. Reprint, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1987. Foreign Policy Association. India Discussed by Sailendranath Ghose and Edward Thompson, 125th New York Luncheon Discussion, Feb. 15, 1930. New York: Foreign Policy Association, n.d. . India Discussed by Dr. Haridas T. Mazumdar, Miss Cornelia Sorabji, C. F. Andrews and C. F. Strickland, New York Luncheon Discussion, Nov. 22, 1930. New York: Foreign Policy Association, n.d. Gandhi, M. K. To the Women. Karachi: Anand T. Hingorani, 1941. . Women and Social Justice. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1954. . The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1969. Gedge, Evelyn C., and Mithan Choksi. Women in Modern India: Fifteen Papers by Indian Women Writers. Bombay: D. B. Taraporewala Sons, 1929. Hauswirth, Frieda [Mrs. Sarangadhar Das]. Purdah: The Status of Indian Women. London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932. Hocking, W. E. Rethinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after Hundred Years. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932. Holmes, John Haynes. What Gandhi Might Do for America. New York: Community Church, 1931. India League Report. Condition of India: Being the Report of the Delegation Sent to India by the India League in 1932. London: Essential News, 1932. Indian Opposition to Home Rule: Being a Collection of Extracts from Addresses, Memorials and Letters of Indians of Various Castes and Creeds and Belonging to Different Provinces, Protesting against the Grant of Home Rule to India as Demanded by the Congress and Moslem League, Publication No. 2. London [1918]. Kaur, Amrit. Challenge to Women. Allahabad: New Literature, 1946. Lakhanpal, Chandravati. Striyon ki Stithi [The Position of Women]. [In Hindi.] Lucknow: Shukla Printing Press [1934]. Lawrence, Sir Henry. The Indian White Paper: An Address Delivered to the Indian Parliamentary Committee of the Conservative Party at the House of Commons on April 16, 1934. Privately printed for the author, 1934. Mehta, Hansa. Indian Woman. Delhi: Butalia, 1981. Menon, Lakshmi. The Position of Women. Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1944. Mrs. Margaret Cousins: A Short Sketch of Her Life and Work. Madras: Indian Express Branch Press, 1944. Nag, Shanta Devi. Purbasmr˙ iti [in Bengali]. Calcutta: Papyrus, 1982. Natarajan, K. Presidential Address: 40th Indian National Social Conference. Madras, 1927. Nehru, Rameshwari. ‘‘Gandhiji and Women.’’ In Incidents of Gandhiji’s Life, ed. Chandrashankar Shukla, 209–14. Bombay: Vora, 1949. Nehru, Shyam Kumari, ed. Our Cause: A Symposium by Indian Women. Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1938. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. India and the Earthly Paradise. 1926. Reprint, New Delhi: B. R. Pub. Corp., 1985.

344 Bibliography Phadke, N. S. Sex-Problem in India: Being a Plea for a Eugenic Movement in India and a Study of All Theoretical and Practical Questions Pertaining to Eugenics. Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons, 1927. Ramasami, E. V. [Periyar]. Self-Respect Marriages. Trans. A. S. Venu. N.p.: Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institute, 1987. . Periyar on Women’s Rights. Trans. R. Sundaru Raju. 1992. Reprint, Madras: Emerald Publishers, 1996. Rathbone, Eleanor F. Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur. London: Allen and Unwin, 1934. [Reddi, Muthulakshmi]. The Story of a Dedicated Life. Madras: Shakti Karyalayam, 1949. . Mrs Margaret Cousins and Her Work in India. Compiled by One Who Knows. Adyar, Madra: wia, 1956. Roy, Dhirendran Nath. The Philippines and India. Manila: Oriental Printing, 1930. Sarda, Har Bilas. Har Bilas Sarda Commemoration Volume. Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1937. Sengupta [Sathianadan], Padmini. The Portrait of an Indian Woman. Calcutta: ymca, 1956. Sorabji, Cornelia. Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by One of Themselves. London: Harper and Bros., 1908. . The Purdahnashin. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1917. . Susie Sorabji, Christian-Parsee Educator of Western India. London: Oxford University Press, 1932. . India Recalled. London: Nisbet, 1936. The Times. India: The Commission and the Conference: A Reprint of Leading Articles from the ‘Times’ on the Indian Question from the Return of the Statutory Commission to the Close of the Round Table Conference in London. London: Time Publication, 1931.

Principal Works by Katherine Mayo Books Justice to All: The Story of the Pennsylvania State Police. New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1917; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. The Standard Bearers: True Stories of Heroes of Law and Order. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. That Damn Y. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. Mounted Justice: True Stories of the Pennsylvania State Police. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922. The Isles of Fear: The Truth about the Philippines. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925; London: Faber and Gwynne, 1925. Mother India. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927; London: Jonathan Cape, 1927. Mutter Indien. German translation by Dr. Dora Muzky. Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societas-Druckerei, 1929. India Madre. Italian translation by Roberto di Palmarocchi. Firenze: Collezione ‘‘Viaggi ed esplorazioni,’’ 1933. L’Inde avex les Anglais. French translation by Théo Varlet. Paris: Les Documents Bleus Notre Temps, no. 4, 1929. Moder Indien. Swedish translation by Else Kleen and Evert Berggrén. Stockholm, 1929. Moder Indien. Danish translation by Gudrun Gregersen. Kobenhavn, 1930. Moeder Indië. Dutch translation by J. de Gruyter. Amsterdam, 1927. ‘Ima Hodu. Hebrew translation by A. Re’uveni. Tel Aviv: Mitspeh, 1933. Mother India by Miss Mayo. Urdu translation by Mirza Abdul Majeed. Lahore: Patriarch Press, 1928.

Bibliography

345

Mother India. Urdu translation by Muhammad Abdal Rashid Khan. Delhi, 1928. Madar Indiya, ya’ni, Madar-I-Hind Mis Kathrai’n Mayu Ki Mashur Ma’ruf Kitab Madar Indiya Ka Mukammal Salis Urdu Tarjamaj. Urdu translation by Mahbub ‘Alam Munshi. Lahaur: Sapla’i Istaur, n.d. Indiya Mata. [In Tamil.] Madras: K. S. Muttaya, 1928. The Women and Children of India. Pamphlet. New York: Child Welfare Committee of America, 1928. Slaves of the Gods. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929; London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Samigalin Adimaigal, or Camikalin Atimai Kal. Tamil translation by T. A. Natarajan. Conjeevaram: Kumaran Press, 1929. Volume 2. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931; London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. Soldiers What Next! New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. The Face of Mother India. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935; London: H. Hamilton, 1935. George Washington’s Dilemma. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938. White Poison, or Circe’s Children. Book manuscript on international narcotic traffic. Ed. M. Moyca Newell and Nicholas Roosevelt. 1941.

Selected Articles ‘‘Big Mary.’’ Atlantic Monthly, January 1911, 112–17. ‘‘Bushed.’’ Scribner’s, June 1911, 754–61. ‘‘My Law and Thine.’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1912, 239–44. ‘‘Sissa and Bakru.’’ Atlantic Monthly, October 1912, 497–503. ‘‘The Devil-Hen.’’ Scribner’s, December 1913, 756–64. ‘‘The Honor of the Force.’’ Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1918, 12–13. ‘‘Cherry Valley.’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1918, 175–81. ‘‘According to Code.’’ Atlantic Monthly, March 1918, 355–59. ‘‘John G.’’ The Outlook, March 20, 1918, 447–48, 452. ‘‘No Story at All.’’ Atlantic Monthly, April 1918, 507–15. ‘‘The Murder of Sam Howell.’’ The Outlook, April 10, 1918, 584–86. ‘‘Guardians of the Countryside.’’ Country Life, December 1918, 61–63. ‘‘Demobilization and State Police.’’ North American Review, June 1919, 786–94. ‘‘The Hand-Picked Job: An Incident in the Work of the State Police.’’ North American Review, August 1919, 253–64. ‘‘The Hand-Picked Job: An Incident in the Work of the State Police—2.’’ North American Review, September 1919, 367–68. ‘‘While Our Boys Are Marking Time,’’ Ladies’ Home Journal, January 8, 1919, 6–36. ‘‘That Damn Y.’’ North American Review, August 1920, 283–86. ‘‘Quick as God Will Let You!’’ North American Review, July 1921, 83–97. ‘‘A Great Day for the Country.’’ The Outlook, December 7, 1921, 558–60. ‘‘What Is a Filipino?’’ McClure’s Magazine, June 1925, 100–111. ‘‘The Moros.’’ McClure’s Magazine, June 1925, 110–12. ‘‘Alvarez.’’ McClure’s Magazine, June 1925, 116–22. ‘‘When Asia Knocks at the Door?’’ Brooklyn Standard Union, June 7, 1927, 14. ‘‘India.’’ Liberty, January 14, 1928, 35–39. ‘‘Sanitation at the Sword’s Point.’’ Forum, February 1928, 222–28. ‘‘The Widow.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, May 1928, 34–36. ‘‘Companionate ‘Marriage’ and Marriage: A Message to Girls.’’ Liberty, May 26, 1928, 19–24. ‘‘The Two Ranis.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, June 1928, 50–53.

346 Bibliography ‘‘A Slave of the Gods.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, August 1928, 64–65, 158. ‘‘Kindly Flames.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, November 1928, 78–79, 175. ‘‘Child of Mother India.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, April 1929, 92–94. ‘‘The Little Waif of Karma.’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, May 1930, 60–61, 149–50. ‘‘Mahatma Gandhi and India’s ‘Untouchables.’ ’’ Current History, August 1930, 864–70. ‘‘Gandhi’s March Past.’’ Atlantic Monthly, September 1930, 327–33. ‘‘Is Gandhi Sincere?’’ Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, February 1932, 52–54. ‘‘Britain in India as Seen in America.’’ Indian Empire Review, September 1932, 17–20. ‘‘Renegades.’’ Sunday Science Times, January 7, 1933, 3–4.

Broadcasts ‘‘India.’’ Radio broadcast, National Broadcasting Company, October 27, 1931. Typescript in Katherine Mayo Papers, folder 147, series 3, box 20. ‘‘With Lowell Thomas.’’ Radio broadcast, American Broadcasting Company, February 16, 1934. Katherine Mayo Papers, folder 245, series 4, box 46. Principal Publications in the Controversy over Mother India Books and Pamphlets [Abad al-Hamid, Mirza Muhammad]. Bharat Mata M’h Jawab. [In Urdu.] Lahare: ’Abad al-Hamid, 1928. Andrews, C. F. The True India: A Plea for Understanding. 1929. Reprint, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939. Ayyamuttu, Kovai A. Meyo Kurru Meyya, Poyya? [In Tamil.] Kancipuram: Kumaran Accu Nilaiyam, 1929. Britain’s India Record (A Booklet Criticizing the Past British Administration in India in Reply to Mayo’s ‘Mother India’). Bombay: Sister India Office, 1928. Chakravarty, Syam Sunder. My Mother’s Picture (An Attempt to Get at the Hindu Spirit in Connection with the Mayo Challenge). Calcutta: Sanjiboni Book Depot, 1929. Chapman, John Alexander. The Character of India: A Reply to Mother India. Revised and enlarged ed. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1928. . India, Its Character: A Reply to ‘Mother India.’ Oxford: Blackwell, 1928; Calcutta: Art Press, 1928. Cousins, James H. The Path to Peace: An Essay on Cultural Interchange and India’s Contribution Thereat with a Prefatory Note on ‘Mother India.’ Madras: Ganes, 1928. Craske, Edith M. Sister India: One Solution of the Problems of ‘Mother India.’ Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, n.d.; London: Religious Tract Society, 1930. Devi, Charulata. The Fair Sex of India: A Reply to ‘Mother India.’ Calcutta: Ramakrishna Cottage, 1929. Douglas, Norman. Goodbye to Western Culture: Some Footnotes on East and West. 1929. Reprint, New York and London: Harper, 1930. . How about Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West. Florence: privately printed by Tipografia Classica, 1929; London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Dutt, Ramnarayan. The Mayo-Pilcher Carnival of Slander: A Reply to Mayo and Pilcher about Their Alleged Libels. Howra: Bengal Law Printing and Pub. House, 1928. Estep, William. An American Answers Mother India. Excelsior Springs, Mo.: Super Mind Science Pubs., 1929.

Bibliography

347

Field, Harry Hubert. After Mother India: Being An Examination of Mother India, of the First Nine Volumes Written in Reply Thereto, and of Other Criticisms, Together with Certain New Evidence Mostly from Indian Sources. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. Gauba, K. L. Uncle Sham: Being the Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok. Lahore: Times, 1929. Ghadiali, Colonel Dinshah P. American Sex Problems. Malaga, N.J.: Spectro-Chrome Institute, 1929. Hill, Sir Claude H. India, Step-Mother. 1929. Reprint, New Delhi: Inter-India, 1986. [Only indirectly connected to Mayo’s Mother India.] Kar, Upendra Kumar. Visva-Janani Bharat Mata. [In Bengali.] N.p., 1928. Khalsa Diwan Society. The Truth about ‘Mother India’: Answers to an Infamous Slander. Vancouver, Canada: Khalsa Diwan Society, 1928. Krishnamacharya, U. P. The Rationale of Early Marriage System: Miss Mayo Answered (No!). Madras: Noble Press, 1928. . The Rationale of Early Marriage System: Rational, Scientific, Practical, Authoritative and Simply Stated: About Hundred Quotations from Famous European Authorities. [Benares]: Noble Press, 1928. Krishnayya, S. G., ed. What India Thinks of ‘Mother India’: Being Articles and Statements by Some of Her Sons. Boston, 1928. Lakhanpal, Chandravati. Mother India Ka Jawab. [In Hindi.] Kangri: Guruku-Yantralaya Gurkul, 1928; Lucknow: Ganga Pustakalaya Kariyala, 1929. Lajpat, Rai. Unhappy India: Being a Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. Calcutta: Banna, 1928. . Dukhi Bharata: Misa Kaitharina Meyo ki ‘‘Madara Indiya’’ ka uttara. [Hindi translation.] Prayaga: Indiyana Presa, 1928. . Duradirsta Indiya. Tamil translation by K. S. Sundaram. Madras: K. S. Muttayya, 1928. . L’Inde Malheureuse. French translation by Marcel Gerette. Paris: Les Editions Rieder, 1930. Majumdar, Jadunath. Meyogita. [In Bengali.] Calcutta: Sudhir Press, 1928. Minney, R. J. Shiva, or The Future of India. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929. ‘Mother India’ by Those Who Know Her Better Than Miss K. Mayo: A Symposium of Reviews of the Book by Responsible People of Long Residence in India. Liverpool: J. A. Thompson, 1927. Mukerji, Dhan Gopal. A Son of Mother India Answers. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928. Natarajan, K. Miss Mayo’s ‘Mother India’: A Rejoinder. 1927. Reprint, Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1928. National Christian Council of India. Is India a World-Menace? A Reply to Miss Mayo and Warning to American Readers of Her Book ‘Mother India’: A Statement by Americans Resident in India Together with Reviews by M. K. Gandhi et al. Madras: nms Press, n.d. . What India Thinks of ‘Mother India.’ New York, n.d. Nehru, Uma. Miss Mayo Ki ‘Mother India’ (sachitra Hindi anuwad) Jis Me Srimati Uma Nehru likhit ‘Bhumika’ tathat Paschimi Samajyavad Ke Vishay Me Miss Mayo Se Do Do Bate. [In Hindi.] Allahabad: Hindustan Press, 1928. Omkar, Swami. Mother America. Madras: Ganesh, 1929. [Only indirectly addresses Mayo’s Mother India.]

348 Bibliography Pratap, Mahendra. Long Live India: What a Son Has to Say about Mother and Father India. Peiping, China: World Federation, 1932. Ramaswami Sastri, K. S., and A. K. Muni. The Bomb Shell of To-Day (A Criticism of Miss Mayo’s Mother India). Triplicane, Madras: S. Ganesan at the Current Thought Press, 1931. Ranga Iyer, C. S. Father India: A Reply to ‘Mother India.’ New York: Louis Carrier, 1927; London: Selwyn and Blount, 1927.

. Phadar Indiya. Bengali translation by Bhagavati Charan Som. Howrah: Ghosh Machine Press, 1928.

. Phadar Indiya. Hindi translation by Suryadev Singh. Howrah: Double Crown, 1929. Rathbone, Eleanor F. Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’? London: Constable, 1929. Sanjiva Rao, Padmini. Women’s Views on Indian Problems. Madras: Madras Law Journal Press, 1927. Sarolakara, Dattatreya Ganesa. Bharata-Mateci Sreshthata, Arthat, Meyocya Asatya Vidhanance Khandana. [In Marathi.] Mumbai: Bharata Gaurava Granthamala, 1928. Saund, Dalip Singh. My Mother India. Stockton, Calif.: Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society, 1930. Skrine, Francis Henry Bennett. India’s Hope. London: W. Thacker, 1929. [Only indirectly connected to Mayo’s Mother India.] Stephens, Donald Ryder. Mother-in-Law India. London: A. E. Marriott, 1930. [Only indirectly connected to Mayo’s Mother India.] Sunderland, J. T. India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom and Place among the Great Nations. 1928. Reprint, New York: Lewis Copeland, 1929. Thirthulu, Pandit P. S., ed. Meyo Grandta Khandanamu. [In Telugu.] Madras: G. L. Sastri, 1928. Va. Ra. [Ramaswami V. Iyengar]. Maya Mayo Allathu Mayo-Vikku Savukkadi. [In Tamil.] Madras: Vasan Puttkacalai, 1928. Williams, Gertrude Leavenworth (Marvin). Understanding India. New York: Coward-McCann, 1928. [Only indirectly connected to Mayo’s Mother India.] Wilson, Margaret. Daughters of India: A Novel. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1928. Women’s International League. Mother India’s Daughters: The Significance of the Women’s Movement. London: Women’s International League, n.d. [Only indirectly addresses Mayo’s Mother India.] Wood, Ernest. An Englishman Defends Mother India: A Complete Constructive Reply to ‘Mother India.’ 2nd rev. ed. Madras: Ganesh, 1930; New York: Tantrik Press, 1930. World Citizen [S. G. Warty]. Sister India: A Critical Examination of and a Reasoned Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India.’ Bombay: Sister India Office, 1928.

. Miss Meyo-Khandan ‘Mother Indio’ Uttar Turkshudhvivechanatnak. [In Marathi.] Bombay: Karnatak Printing Press, 1928. Zimand, Savel. Living India. New York: Longman’s, Green, 1929. [Only indirectly addresses Mayo’s Mother India.]

Book Reviews, Articles, and Letters to the Editor AJB. ‘‘ ‘Mother India’: Agitation Still Burning.’’ Missionary Review of the World 53 (April 1930): 289–91.

Bibliography

349

Allah, Qudrat. ‘‘Letter to Editor: ‘Depressed Classes and Miss Mayo’.’’ Pioneer, November 18, 1927, 11. Andrews, C. F. ‘‘More Injustice to India.’’ The Nation, June 12, 1929, 714–17. Balfour, M. I. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ Times of India, October 10, 1927, 8. ‘‘Bharat Mata.’’ [In Hindi.] Chand, November 1927, 7–16. Brown, Norman W. ‘‘Carbolic Acid for India.’’ The Nation, July 13, 1927, 40–41. . ‘‘Answering Miss Mayo.’’ The Nation, May 30, 1928, 617. Cavert, Samuel McCrea. ‘‘Is This ‘Mother India’?’’ Federal Council Bulletin, December 1927, 30–31. Chatterjee, Ashoke. ‘‘ ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Modern Review 42, no. 3 (September 1927): 345–56. . ‘‘Miss Mayo’s Latest.’’ Modern Review 47, no. 4 (October 1930): 374–76. Chatterjee, Ramananda. ‘‘Indian Social Reformers and India’s Political and Economic Enemies.’’ Modern Review 13, no. 3 (September 1927): 356–59. Clark, Alden H. ‘‘Is India Dying? A Reply to ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1928, 271–79. Clark, Alden H., et al. ‘‘Statement of American Missionaries Resident in India.’’ Christian Century, February 2, 1928, 146. Clark, Walter Eugene. ‘‘Caricature.’’ Hound and Horn, March 1928, 266–69. Cornelius, John Jesudasan. ‘‘India’s Degradation Laid to British Misrule: Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Current History 27 (December 1927): 361–68. Cousins, Margaret E. ‘‘Letter to Editor,’’ The Irish Statesman, December 3, 1927, 300–301. CS [Clifford Sharp]. ‘‘India as It Is.’’ New Statesman, July 16, 1927, 448–49. Das, Maya. ‘‘ ‘Sister India’: Another Reply to Miss Katherine Mayo.’’ Pioneer, April 23, 1928, 19. Das, Taraknath. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ The People, August 18, 1927, 133. ‘‘Ditcher’’ [Patrick Lowett]. ‘‘Mother India.’’ Capital, September 2, 1927, 8. Divedi, Raisaheb Raghuprasdaji. ‘‘Miss Mayo Ka Pralap’’ [in Hindi]. Chand, November 1927, 33–39. Du Bois, W. E. B. ‘‘As the Crow Flies.’’ The Crisis 24, no. 9 (November 1927): 293. . ‘‘The Browsing Reader.’’ The Crisis 36, no. 5 (May 1929): 161, 175. Dutcher, G. M. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Political Science Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1928): 122–27. Editorial. Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 11, 1927, 4. Editorial. Baptist Missionary Review, May 1928, 210–17. Editorial. Indian Social Reformer, August 20, 1927, 802–8. Editorial. Indian Witness, November 2, 1927, 697–98; and November 16, 1927, 730–31. Editorial. New York Times, October 16, 1927, 4. Editorial. Statesman, August 4, 1927, 2. EFR [Eleanor Rathbone]. ‘‘Mother India: Its Claims on the Women’s Movement.’’ Women’s Leader and Common Cause, August 26, 1927, 231–32. EK. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ The Vote, November 4, 1927, 350. Farley, Patricia. ‘‘Differing Views of Mayo: A Reply to Mrs. Maya Das.’’ Pioneer, April 30, 1928, 8. Gandhi, M. K. ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report.’’ Young India, September 15, 1927. Reprinted in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 34, no. 452, June–September 1927 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1969), 539–47. Ghose, C. C. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ Statesman, September 13, 1927, 4.

350 Bibliography Hamilton, Mary Agnes. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Time and Tide, August 5, 1927, 724–25. Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. ‘‘Rani Bhikarini’’ [in Bengali]. Masik Mohammadi, January– December 1927. Reprinted in Rokeya Rachanabali, ed. Abdul Kadir (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1973–84), 289–92. Hume, Robert E. ‘‘Problems and Progress of India.’’ Yale Review 17, no. 2 ( January 1928): 377–80. ‘‘Indian Womanhood Protest against Miss Mayo’s Book.’’ Jus Suffragi: The International Women’s Suffrage News, November 1927, 27; and January 1928, 62. Johnson, W. E. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ Forum 79, no. 4 (April 1928): 634–36. Keen, W. W. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ New York Times, October 30, 1927, 5. ‘‘The Legend of Mother India.’’ London Times, March 27, 1928, 17d; and March 28, 1928, 17e. JTG. ‘‘Mother India.’’ Manchester Guardian, August 17, 1927, 7. Lewis, Wyndham. ‘‘ ‘Mother India.’ ’’ The Enemy, no. 2 (1927): xiii–xx. ‘‘Lord Sinha and Miss Mayo.’’ Indian Social Reformer, March 17, 1928, 450. Lyons, Norbert. ‘‘A Sex-Ridden Empire.’’ Saturday Review of Literature, August 27, 1927, 66–67. Mallick, Mukudnarayan. ‘‘Miss Mayo Prati’’ [in Bengali]. Masik Basumati, February 1928, 24. McNamara, Rev. Thomas F. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Catholic World, October 1927, 353–54. MEC [Margaret E. Cousins]. ‘‘A Protest against ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Stri Dharma, September 1927, 162–63. Meston, J. ‘‘The Truth about India.’’ Spectator, July 16, 1927, 99. ‘‘Mother India.’’ American Review of Reviews, February 1928, 206–7. Mundkur, B. B. ‘‘Miss Mayo and the Rockefeller Foundation.’’ The Nation, November 14, 1928, 521. Nambiar, A. C. N. ‘‘Miss Mayo and Lenin.’’ The People, May 2, 1929, 233–34. O’Dwyer, M. F. ‘‘Mother India—Swaraj and Social Reform.’’ Fortnightly Review, January 2, 1928, 171–82. Park, Robert E. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ American Journal of Sociology, January 1928, 660–61. Peter, W. W. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ American Journal of Public Health, October 17, 1927, 1063. Petersen, Frederick, and Antoinette Roton Petersen. ‘‘India, Mother of What?’’ Forum, September 1927, 473–75. ‘‘Plague Spots Behind the Purdah.’’ Times Literary Supplement, July 28, 1927, 511. Pole, Major Graham D. ‘‘India through a U.S.A. Imperialist’s Eyes.’’ Forward, September 6, 1927, 4, 11. Popley, Rev. H. A. ‘‘Mother India: A Criticism,’’ parts 1 and 2. Indian Witness, September 7, 1927, 565–66; and September 14, 1927, 586. Pound, Arthur. ‘‘India, Sick and Sodden.’’ The Independent, June 25, 1927, 663. Ram, Bhagat. ‘‘Miss Mayo’s ‘Mother India.’ ’’ In Duchess of Atholl Papers, file 1. Ram, Jan Kothanda. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ The Nation, February 22, 1928, 211. Ratcliffe, S. K. ‘‘Impossible India.’’ New Republic, September 21, 1927, 127–28. Rathbone, Eleanor F. ‘‘Has Katherine Mayo Slandered ‘Mother India’?’’ Hibbert Journal, January 1929, 193–214. RB [Roger Baldwin]. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ New York Times, October 10, 1927, 20. Reddi, Muthulakshmi. ‘‘Miss Mayo Condemned.’’ In Muthulakshmi Reddi Papers, Bound

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Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, s. nos. 78–115; and ‘‘Miss Mayo Answered,’’ in Bound Volume: Speeches and Writings, vol. 2, pt. 3, s. nos. 155–91. ‘‘Review of Mother India.’’ Lancet, September 17, 1927, 612. Richardson, Edgar L. ‘‘Diagnosing the Maladies of India.’’ Travel, August 1927, 38. Riddelhi, John. ‘‘A Step-Son of Mother India’s Aunt Answers: A Parody Investigation of America in Miss Mayo’s Best Manner.’’ Vanity Fair, August 1928, 67, 85, 93–94, 96. Reprinted in Stri Dharma 12, no. 1 (November 1928): 13–16. Rosenthal, A. M. ‘‘ ‘Mother India’ Thirty Years After.’’ Foreign Affairs, July 1957, 620–30. Sapru, Sir Tej Bhadur, Sir Atul Chandra Chatterjee, et al. Letter to Editor [addressed to London Times, August 9, 1927]. Reprinted in Leader, August 19, 1927, 15; and Manchester Guardian, August 19, 1927, 16. Seabrook, W. B. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ New York Herald Tribune, June 12, 1927, 1. Smedley, Agnes. ‘‘Mother India.’’ Modern Review 42, September 1927, 296–99. Smith, Rev. James. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ Times of India, November 11, 1927, 8. Sorabji, Cornelia. ‘‘ ‘Mother India’: The Incense of Service.’’ Englishman, August 31, 1927, 6–9; part 2, Englishman, September 1, 1927. Stanley, Hugh. ‘‘India and Impartiality.’’ The Bookman 68, January 1929, 601–3. Stuart, Dale. ‘‘India and Her Critics.’’ East-West, September–October 1927. Sunderland, J. T. ‘‘Miss Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ Weighed in the Balance: What Is the Verdict?’’ Modern Review 45, no. 1 ( January 1929): 1–6. Tagore, Rabindranath. ‘‘Letter to Editor.’’ Manchester Guardian, October 11, 1927, 11–12. Tagore, Rabindranath, and M. K. Gandhi. ‘‘ ‘Mother India’: A Symposium.’’ Living Age, December 15, 1927, 1083–87. Thompson, Edward. ‘‘ ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Nation and Athenaeum, July 30, 1927, 581–82. Turnbull, H. G. Dalway. ‘‘Miss Mayo and Her Critics.’’ Fortnightly Review, March 1, 1929, 355–69. Underhill, M. M. ‘‘Mother India?’’ International Review of Missions, October 1927, 611–13. Whipple, Leon. ‘‘Review of ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Survey, August 1, 1927, 469. Wigrim, E. F. E. ‘‘ ‘Mother India.’ ’’ Church Overseas, January 1, 1928, 68–70. Wilson, Philip Whitwell. ‘‘India Is Her Own Worst Enemy: Miss Mayo’s Challenging Social Study Arrives at That Conclusion.’’ New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1927, 3:1. . ‘‘Miss Miller vs. Miss Mayo.’’ North American Review, June 1928, 707–12.

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352 Bibliography Arunima, G. There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c1850–1940. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003. Athiyaman, P., and A. R. Venkatachalapathy. ‘‘On Gandhi, Mayo, and Emilsen.’’ South Asia 12, no. 2 (1989): 83–88. Bakshi, S. R. Simon Commission and Indian Nationalism. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1977. Bala, Usha. Bharat Ki Mahilla Svatantrata Senani (1857–1947). [In Hindi.] New Delhi: Bharat Sarkar, Manav Sansodhan Vikas Mantralayal (Shiksha Vibhag), 1988. Balibar, Étienne. ‘‘Ambiguous Universality.’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (1995): 165–87. Bannerjee, Kalyan Kumar. Indian Freedom Movement Revolutionaries in America. Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1969. Bannerji, Himani. Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. London: Anthem Press, 2001. Barrier, N. Gerald. India and America: American Publications on India, 1930–1985. New Delhi: Manohar/aiis, 1986. Basha, Mohammed Zaheer. ‘‘Propaganda as Travelogue: A Study of Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India.’ ’’ In Travel Writing and Empire, ed. Sachidananda Mohanty, 84–99. New Delhi: Katha, 2003. Basu, Aparna, and Bharati Ray. Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990. 1990. Reprint, New Delhi: Manohar, 2003. Bechtel, H. Kenneth. ‘‘Policing the Commonwealth: State Police Development in the United States—with Case Studies of Illinois and Colorado.’’ Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1983. Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘‘Liberalism’s Sacred Cow.’’ In Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum, 79–84. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Bose, Sugata. ‘‘Post-colonial Histories of South Asia: Some Reflections.’’ Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 133–46. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. . ‘‘The Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture.’’ In Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. S. Bose and Ayesha Jalal, 50–75. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bridge, Carl. Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution. New Delhi: Sterling, 1986. Brown, E. Richard. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. 1985. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Brown, Judith M., and William Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 4, The Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brubaker, Roger. ‘‘Ethnicity without Groups.’’ In Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Society, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ain Shola Orloff, 470–92. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

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Index

Acharya, M. K, 166,182, 183–84 Addams, Jane, 37, 149 African Americans: on immigration, 102, 103–4; interest in India, 101–3; ‘‘negro problem,’’ 34; northward migration of, 70; political leaders, 101; on Sarojini Naidu, 103. See also Lynching Age of Consent Committee, 165, 180, 194; witnesses before, 184–86 Ali, Maulana Muhammad, 88, 187–88 Ali, Shareefah Hamid, 160 All India Women’s Conference (aiwc), 49, 112, 247; in Delhi, 163, 164; on depressed classes, 243–45; on developing an agenda, 174–78, 206, 220–22; formation of, 55–57; Muslim members, 187–88, 190, 238–40, 241–42, 245; on Sarda Act, 162–64; on suffrage, 213–15, 217, 219, 225, 227, 229 Ambedkar, B. R., 48, 211; Gandhi and, 42, 105, 234; Mayo and, 150; on women’s representation, 233 Amritsar Massacre, 31, 37, 136 Andrews, C. F., 104–5, 117 Anglo-Saxonism, 39, 69, 70, 94. See also Racism Bai, G. Sumati, 144, 146–47, 192–93 Bolshevism: appeal as radical ideology, 42; fear of, 3, 33, 148, 173; trial of suspected Indian sympathizers, 41 British Dominions Women Citizens’ Union, 53 Broadway: adaptation of Mother India on, 2, 99 Caste: anticaste movements, 21, 23, 48; Brahminical Hinduism, 146; in colonial critiques, 43; and critique of Brahminism, 129–30, 245; defense of privileges of, 45, 115; disaffection of non-Brahmins and dalits with Congress, 54, 182; as identity, 8, 43, 55, 57–58, 199, 243– 47; strategies of liberation, 42; theory of outcastes, 105; treatment of untouchables, 80; women’s movement and, 243–45

Catholicism, critique of, 70, 97 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 52, 149 Chand, 49–50, 140 Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, 57; on aiwc agenda, 176; on British colonialism, 115, 175; as lobbyist, 147 Child marriage: agency for reform of, 155–57; age of marriage in Britain, 167, 313 n. 72; age of marriage in New York, 160; campaign in India against, 63, 83, 141, 145; common explanation for, 143; consent bills, 157–58, 161, 162, 180–81; incidence in India, 152–53; marital rape in, 155; modernizing arguments against, 154–56; separation of marital and non-marital sex, 157–58 Child Marriage Restraint Act (Sarda Act): government opposition to, 82–83, 122, 158–59; impact of Mother India, 158; impact on Age of Marriage Act in Britain, 167; impact on Harijans, 195; inadequacy of, 152–53, 163–65; Mayo’s opposition to, 159–61; non-Brahmin support for, 182; as test case for women’s movement, 163–65; as universally applicable, 9, 21, 152–54, 161, 195–96; women as constituency for, 10, 50, 169–71 Churchill, Winston, 33, 39, 93 Citizenship: alleged European provenance of, 15–16; alternative genealogy of, 10–12, 13– 14; as category of political subjectivity, 54; critique of liberal concept of, 12–13; for Indians in the United States, 34, 94–96, 103–5; liberal and republican traditions of, 222; for nonwhite peoples, 3; as normative, 14, 199, 212, 221, 253; substantive equality of, 219–22; women as models of, 152–54, 161, 197–99, 200, 205, 208, 211, 223, 224, 231 Civil disobedience movements (1930s), 41, 171, 208, 218, 235 Class: as basis for critique of child marriage, 186; as basis for collective mobilization, 60–61; as basis for division in women’s

362 Index Class (continued ) movement, 47, 55–56, 174; bias in women’s movement, 118, 191, 222–23, 226–27, 229–32; and critique of women’s movement, 247; and U.S. labor problems, 69–70, 118; relation between ideology and material interests, 14; women in the formation of, 8, 14, 43 Communal Award: differing views on, 247, 332 n. 139; effect on women, 235–39; objections to, 240 ‘‘Communalism’’: impact on political representation of women, 218–20, 237–40; instabilities of, 59–60; as majoritarianism, 242–43; and religious sectarian riots, 31, 54; as sectarianism, 21, 58–59; women as antidote to, 10, 161, 188–89, 200–212, 246, 247; women’s fear of, 214–16 Communal (proportional) representation: implication for women, 236–37, 238–39, 240–43; as model for women, 208–9, 214, 219; organized women’s response to, 215– 16; as paradigm of governance, 51–52; as political deadlock, 198, 209–12; as political demand, 233–34 Communities: challenges to, 161, 180–96; changing fortunes of, 12, 232–47; collective identity of, 8–9, 44–47, 51; instabilities of, 58–60; mobilization on basis of, 54; political representation of, 209–12, 238; social reform and, 10, 45, 155–56, 172–80; as society’s building blocks, 8, 259–60 n. 26. See also Noninterference ‘‘Congress Muslims,’’ 210–11 Cousins, Margaret E.: critic of colonial state, 167; critic of Mother India, 112–13, 140; pioneer of aiwc, 56, 162, 175; on suffrage, 204, 206 Curtis, Lionel, 36, 71–73, 86. See also Round Table Movement Daughters of American Revolution, 148–49, 178 Depression (Great Depression), 20, 40–41, 201 De Valera, Eamon, 35 ‘‘Divide and rule,’’ 20, 98; as effect of 1919 act, 32; imperialist exploitation of, 42, 87, 121, 123, 126, 150; relation to women, 219, 235 Dominions: clarification of meaning, 30; demand for political status of, 21, 67, 93, 207; as self-governing colonies, 3, 28, 94; status in matrimony, 170; as ‘‘white,’’ 29 Du Bois, W. E. B., 100, 101, 102, 103

Egypt: British rule in, 33; British thinking on, 39; ‘‘independence’’ for, 28; Indian revolutionary activity in, 33; as model for modernization, 32, 189; uprising in, 30 Eugenics, 155, 183. See also Racism Event: collective memory and, 250–52; definition of, 4–5, 19; relation to structures, 18 Facts: alternative interpretation of, 114–30; anomaly of, 109–14, 131–32; of Mother India, 5, 109–13, 117, 121, 127; as timeless, 23 Faridoonji, Hilla Rustomjee, 177, 211, 243 Feminism: criticism of Indian feminists, 171; different paradox of, 12, 196–97; Mayo’s dubious claim to, 24, 149; Naidu’s rejection of, 205; ‘‘new feminism’’ in Britain, 204; as nuisance for Mayo, 149–50; as phase of Indian women’s movement, 174, 214, 247; redbaiting of, 148–49; in Third World, 205 Field, Harry: as Mayo’s secretary, 90, 95–96, 144; on missionaries, 134–35; organization of women’s support for Mother India, 149 Free trade: end of, 40; era of, 27 Friends of Freedom for India, 35, 100, 101, 106–7 Gandhi, M. K., 2, 95, 104, 153; Ambedkar’s differences with, 42, 105, 234; on Communal Award, 240; impact on American women, 36–37; impact on Indian women, 47–48, 208; impact on nationalist movement, 31, 100; Jinnah and, 210; meeting with members of wia, 213, 218, 223; Periyar’s differences with, 127; response to Mother India, 109, 120–21; views on sex, 193; on women’s stand, 234–35 Garvey, Marcus, 101; Negro World, 39, 102, 103, 104, 160 Gender: as category of public identity, 55, 203; in constitution of communities, 8–9, 12, 57–58; in politics, 54, 60–61, 245; as social relations, 43 Gour, Hari Singh, 157, 165, 180 Government of India Act (1919): as postwar reform, 20, 29, 66–67, 90; reception of, 31–32 Government of India Act (1935): impact on women, 50–53, 156, 200; as imperial restructuring, 20–21, 41–42; making of, 201, 225; recognition of women, 197, 218, 226, 238 Hearst, William Randolph, 35; publications of, 36, 85, 104

Index Hindu Citizenship Bill (Copeland Bill), 95, 101 Hindu Conspiracy Case, 34 Hindu Mahasabha, 59–60, 210 Hindustan Ghadar Party, 35 Historiography, 7, 266 n. 62; challenge of ‘‘Third World’’ histories, 15–16, 263–64 n. 47; and conjuncture, 55–65; and ‘‘cultural turn,’’ 17, 264–65 n. 52; global, 25–26, 251–54; of Mother India, 24–25; periodization, 21; and ‘‘political turn,’’ 22, 266–67 n. 65. See also Imperial social formation Hollywood, proposed movie of Mother India, 2 Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat, 142–44 Immigration: anti-Asian, 95, 98; antiimmigrant, 69, 70, 94; Mayo’s attitude to, 70, 94–98, 107; nonwhite, 3, 94; United States policies on, 23, 99, 101, 102 Imperial social formation: as heuristic, 16– 19, 24–26, 253–54; relation to theory of networking, 265–66 n. 57; relation to world systems, 264 n. 51 Indentured labor, 68, 95; and free migration, 95 Indian Franchise Committee (Lothian Committee), 217–18, 224, 225; evidence before, 244, 245; women and, 233–34, 235–38 Indian Freedom Foundation, 96, 100 Indian National Congress, 21, 28; attitude to social reform, 125–26, 171–72; changes in, 31–32, 41, 105; contradictions of, 42, 54; on fundamental rights, 220; on political reform, 207; on political representation, 210, 213, 215, 217, 234, 240; at Round Table Conference, 223–24 Individual: alternative history of, 12–14, 253; apart from collective identity, 10, 186–89, 196, 235; as basis for a new politics, 10–11, 54, 169–70, 181, 190, 201; in claims to property, 58; liberal conception of, 7–8; marriage reform and, 163; from political to abstract, 212, 240; in significance for women, 228 Ireland: delegates from, 38; Dominion status for, 28, 30; ‘‘Irish problem,’’ 34–36, 71; part of English-speaking union, 36; support for Indians, 35–36; uprisings in, 30 Irvin, Lady, 175, 176–78, 179 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali, 210 Joint Parliamentary Committee (Linlithgow Committee), 201, 218, 219; British women and, 227; divided seats and, 238, 246; Indian women and, 225, 226, 229

363

Kaur, Amrit, 195, 215; depressed classes and, 244; difference with Rathbone, 221–22; on suffrage, 222–23, 230–31 Khan, Mehboob, 25–26, 248 Labour Party (British), 33, 67; impact of Mother India on, 88, 106, 138; on self-government, 83, 224 Lakhanpal, Chandravati, 119–20 Laws: as basis for social reforms, 13, 44–45, 156–61; dual colonial system of, 9, 46, 155– 56, 220, 236; modernizing discourse of, 183–89; police as upholders of, 70; women’s debate about, 189–90. See also Liberalism League Against Imperialism, 106, 107 League of Nations: antipathy to, 36; effect on British Empire, 27, 28, 33, 40, 63, 83; and international traffic of women and girls, 155-,56, 167, 195; Mother India and, 73, 76, 78–79 League of Women Voters, 149 Liberalism: agonistic, 13–14, 51, 200–212, 216, 219, 228, 240, 241; classical, 222; colonial reincarnation of, 13, 172; critique of, 12–13; paradox of, 196–97. See also Laws Lynching, 70; as indictment, 103, 117, 118–19; outrage at, 101 MacDonald, Ramsay, 219, 234–35 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 59, 166 Massachusetts Public Interest League, 148 Mayo, Katherine: career, 66, 67, 68–73, 150; and Newell, 69, 149; and Phillipines, 71–72, 74, 76–77; views of Hindus, 1, 68, 73, 79–80, 97–98; and Sarda Act, 159–61;and Villard, 68–69; writing of Mother India, 73, 74–75, 76, 78, 79–82 Mehta, Hansa, 163, 164, 177 Memorandum I, 213–14, 225; on electorate, 238, 239; opposition to, 216, 217, 224 Memorandum II, 225, 226; on class, 229–31; on electorate, 241, 242–43; on wifehood, 228 Missionaries, 43; female, 79; response to Mother India, 130–36 Muslim League, 28; on Mother India, 88; on political representation, 210; on women’s representation, 217, 234; women’s wing of, 246 Naidu, Sarojini, 48; on African Americans, 103; debate with Montagu, 37, 136; response to Mother India, 139–40, 147; at Round

364 Index Naidu, Sarojini (continued ) Table Conference, 224, 234; as universal humanist, 200, 204–5 Natarajan, Kamakeshi, 65, 94, 116, 121–22 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), 69, 70, 101, 118 National Council of Women in India (ncwi), 49; government suspicion of, 173; social reform and, 157; on suffrage, 213–15, 221, 225; on wifehood, 228 National Social Conference, 63–65, 125, 168, 192 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (nusec), 83, 129; on Sarda bill, 167; on Simon Commission, 202–3, 208 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 126, 247 Nehru, Motilal, 88, 153, 165, 210 Nehru, Rameshwari, 180, 189, 191 Nehru, Uma, 120, 122–24 Newell, Moyca: depressed classes and, 129; as domestic partner, 69, 70, 71, 95, 144; missionaries and, 136; on Mother India, 73, 87 Non-Brahmins: challenge to Brahminical Hinduism, 182; as community organization, 64; as movement in Madras and Bombay, 65; movements of dalits and, 54; Non-Brahmin Youth League, 63 Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement, 31, 41; appropriated for domestic relations, 170; end of, 54; women and, 47, 157 Noninterference, 46; crisis of, 81–82; critique of, 121,143, 168–69; impact on social reform, 155–58, 173–78, 186; subject to scrutiny, 77–78, 83, 159 Normanton, Helena, 202, 322 n. 14 Orientalism, 23; post-Orientalism, 24 Patwardhan, Malati, 153, 186, 192 Periyar (E.V. Ramaswami Naicker), 48, 127, 192 Philippines: alleged sexual depravity in, 97; Indian revolutionary activities in, 33; as laboratory for tropical medicine, 75; parallels with India, 73, 81; policy of Filipinization, 38–39, 71–74, 76–77, 111; U.S. rule in, 3, 33, 34, 38, 67 Princes, 20; British India and, 21, 32, 42; as models of progress, 121, 168–69 Propaganda: British apparatus for, 33–38, 85– 86; against child marriage, 163–64, 189–90; by Indian nationalists, 73; Mayo’s official

connections to, 86–94; rival schemes for, 71 Public health: contrast in U.S. and British colonial administrations of, 75, 77–79; international discussion of, 154–55; Mother India as report on, 73, 74, 110; sexuality and, 79–81; U.S. imperialism and, 74–75 Racism: anxieties of, 70; and interracial coalitions, 149; and justice, 100; opposition to, 104–5; in scholarship, 24; and U.S. women’s movement, 150. See also Eugenics; White Rai, Lala Lajpat, 35, 103, 120–21 Rajwade, Lakshmibai, 226, 228, 240–41 Ram, Bhagat, 129 Ramabai, Pandita, 46 Rao, Kamalabai Lakshman, 183, 190 Rathbone, Eleanor F.: Age of Marriage Act in Britain and, 167; on Communal Award, 328 n. 74; on Indian women’s suffrage, 217– 18, 221–22; on Mother India, 83–84, 114, 145, 149; on ‘‘New Feminism,’’ 204; on Simon Commission, 202–3; on social reform, 129, 160, 170–72, 195; views on Indian colleagues, 218, 224; on wifehood, 226–27 Rau, Dhanvanthi Rama, 167, 189, 191, 224 Reddi, Muthulakshmi: critique of government, 168; defender of women’s movement, 195; on ‘‘high politics,’’ 171–72; on Memorandum II, 229–30, 242–43; on Mother India, 141, 142–43; at National Social Conference, 64–65; on nomination to Legislative Council, 200; social crusader, 146, 174, 183, 329 n. 87; on suffrage, 212–13, 216–17 Red scare, 148. See also Bolshevism Rhetorical invention, 26; women and, 42–54, 161, 253 Rights, 12–14, 180–96; declaration at Karachi Congress, 220; individual versus community, 228, 232–47; of sex equality, 223, 226. See also Individual; Liberalism Rockefeller Foundation, 63; as arm of U.S. capitalism, 39, 71, 74, 76; interest in India, 74–76, 78, 86, 89, 91–92, 282 n. 23 Roosevelt, Theodore, 33–34, 69 Round Table (movement), 66, 71, 86, 90. See also Curtis, Lionel Round Table Conferences, 105, 201; political deadlock and, 210–11, 218; women and, 206–7, 208, 223–24, 232 Rukhmabai, 45

Index Sanger, Margaret, 107 Sarda, Har Bilas, 152, 159, 160–61, 165. See also Child Marriage Restraint Act Saroj Nalini Dutt Mahila Samitis, 138, 174, 179 Sati, 152, 161 Second British Empire, 27 Self-government: British reluctance toward, 67; in colonies of settlement, 27; impact of 1935 act, 42; for India, 5, 28–29; as nationalist demand, 8; new legitimacy for, 142; non-self-governing colony, 28; in ‘‘nonwhite’’ colonies, 39, 108; North American support for, 85–94; official policy, 20; as postwar experiment, 3; as ‘‘responsible government,’’ 20, 29, 67; social reform and, 83–84; unfitness for, 1, 38, 62 Self-respect movement, 64, 127–30, 146, 181; and self-respect marriages, 181, 182, 183. See also Caste Sex: and alleged immorality, 96–97, 102, 137, 182; British anxieties about, 138–39; explicit material on, 61–62; Gandhi’s views on, 193; Hindus’ alleged obsession with, 5, 62, 73, 82, 98; and immorality in the United States, 115, 117–18, 119; and Mayo as spinster, 115; nonsexual relations, 48; respectability and, 50, 62, 180–81; Roman Catholicism and, 97; sex workers, 180, 191; sexologists, 183; as thesis of Mother India, 79–80; U.S. anxieties about, 70; women’s inclination for, 112, 137, 249 Shah Nawaz, Jahan Ara, 139, 194; as Muslim, 238–39, 240–41, 246; as Round Table Conference delegate, 207, 215, 224–25, 234 Simon, John, 66–67, 87, 122, 204, 206. See also Statutory Commission Smedley, Agnes, 106–7, 121 Sorabji, Cornelia: on Bengal League of Social Service for Women, 178–80; on marriage reform, 157, 158, 160, 193, 207; on Mother India, 113–14, 144–46, 148; on suffrage, 207 Social movements, 21, 31; anticaste, 64, 243; of workers and peasants, 48 Society: colonial genealogy of, 7–8; relationship with state, 6, 9–10 State: challenge to, 73–84, 121–22, 128–29, 143, 166–69; colonial nature of, 5, 7; comparison of states, 32, 121, 168, 169; metropolitan versus colonial, 167; as modernizer, 152; political calculations of, 45; protection of subjects abroad, 99–100; relations of society and, 7–8, 9–10, 52, 114–15, 123–25; and role

365

for women and marginalized groups, 13, 169–72; as ‘‘trusteeship,’’ 63, 83 Statutory Commission (Simon Commission), 66–67; boycott of, 175, 206, 212; Mother India and, 86–88; women and, 197, 202, 203–4, 208–9 Stri Dharma: on Mother India, 140; as tool for organized women, 188, 190, 193, 200 Subbarayon, Radhabai, 192; Round Table Conference delegate, 207, 232; on suffrage, 217, 219, 233, 237; on women from depressed classes, 245 Suffrage: alternative foundations of, 197–98, 200–201, 204–9; debate on special provisions of, 213–16; demand for universal adult suffrage, 198, 217, 223; experience of British women, 204, 207, 226–27; female enfranchisement in United States, India, and Britain, 3, 63; first suffrage campaign in India, 50–54; government’s rejection of adult, 224; impact on communities of, 51; position of depressed classes on, 211; preferential treatment for, 206, 212–17; property qualifications of, 20, 206; shift in Indian women’s movement on, 209–12 Tata, Hirabai, 52 Tata, Mithan, 52 Thind, Bhagat Singh, 95, 99, 100 ‘‘Third British Empire,’’ 27, 29 Ugra, 61–62 United States: anti-imperialists, 34, 69, 106–7, 149; Britain’s ‘‘special relationship’’ with, 33, 36; commercial interests in India, 39, 71, 74, 75–76, 107; Congress, 35, 38, 100; imperialism, 25, 74–75, 78, 81; pro-imperialists, 33, 34, 71 United States Immigration Act (1924), 101, 102; accusations of British complicity in, 99 Universalism: agonistic liberal version of, 200– 212, 219; alleged European provenance, 15– 16; as ambition of women, 10, 63, 161, 187, 198, 200–201, 235; and anti-racism, 104–5; critiques of, 12–13; for cross-communal solidarity, 246; as Hindu and upper caste, 232, 235, 243–47; for individual rights, 181, 196, 201; in ‘‘Third World’’ feminism, 205 ‘‘Untouchables problem,’’ 172. See also Caste Villard, Oswald Garrison, 68–69, 105, 110, 281 n. 9

366 Index Washington, Booker T., 101, 104 White: Dominions as, 29, 95; Indian claims as, 100–101, 103–5; legal clarification of, 100; versus nonwhite, 3, 36, 39, 93, 94; Statutory Commission as, 87. See also Anglo-Saxonism White Paper, 225, 226 ‘‘Wifehood’’ qualification: in Britain, 204, 207; in India, 226–30. See also Suffrage Wilson, Woodrow: declaration of war aims, 27; Philippine policy of, 38–39 Women: collective agency of, 151, 172, 242–43, 250; as collectivity, 10–11, 14–15, 48–49, 55– 57, 60–61; dalit and poor, 48, 50, 191–92, 244; different foundations for politics of, 202–3; and formation of class, 14, 47; Hindu and Muslim, 55–57; impact of organizations of, 172–80, 200–201, 316 n. 121; as labor leaders, 48; as metaphor of nation, 1, 25–26, 44, 45, 62, 249–50; modern subjectivities of, 47–48, 185; as ‘‘natural’’ collectivity, 202–3, 222–32;

as paradigmatic citizens, 11, 12, 14, 161, 213; position of, 1; respectability of, 50, 62, 191– 92; rights for, 13, 45; as rival to community, 16, 194; as subjects of social reform, 50, 153–54, 169–71; as symbolic essence of community, 8–9, 57–60, 235; in United States, 36, 148–50; ‘‘woman question,’’ 43–54, 82, 136–51. See also Feminism Women’s Day, 191–92 Women’s Indian Association (wia), 49; London Committee of, 207, 212, 213; on Mother India, 140, 141,142; as political organization, 52, 165, 173–75, 202–3, 206–7, 220; pragmatic approach of, 208; on social reform, 157, 158, 191–92; on suffrage, 213, 214–15, 218, 230, 238 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf), 37–38, 106, 149; British section of, 207, 223 Wood, Leonard, 72, 76–77

Mrinalini Sinha is an associate professor of history and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The ‘‘Manly Englishman’’ and the ‘‘Effeminate Bengali’’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995). She is the editor of Selections from Mother India (1998, 2000), and coeditor, with Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott, of Feminisms and Internationalism (1999).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sinha, Mrinalini Specters of Mother India : the global restructuring of an Empire / Mrinalini Sinha. p. cm. — (Radical perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3782-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3795-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. India—Politics and government—1919–1947. 2. Mayo, Katherine, 1868?–1940. Mother India. 3. Women—India—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Imperialism—History— 20th century. I. Title. II. Series. ds480.45.s563 2006 954.03'57—dc22 2006001658