Mothers and Non‐Mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.