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On the Question of Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography
Author(s) -
NAIR JANAKI
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0424.1994.tb00196.x
Subject(s) - historiography , agency (philosophy) , citation , sociology , history , law , political science , social science
When Madan Mohan Malaviya, an early ideologue of Hindu nationalism, articulated his opposition to raising the age of consent for marriage in 1928 by citing the sanctions of the sastras (Hindu scriptures), some women of the All India Women’s Conference demanded ‘new sastras’.’ This signified a recognition by the Indian middle-class women’s movement of the need to enter the world of knowledge production, and anticipated by several decades the demand of feminist historians not just for new histories but for a reinvention of the historical archive.2 Feminist historiography, after all, aims to produce not just a ‘new historical subject’ but a critique of the supposedly gender-neutral, but in fact gender-blind, methodologies of the discipline itself. In the past two decades, feminist political activity in India has won vital recognition within the academy. It is therefore particularly appropriate to emphasize at the outset the intensely political nature of the feminist historical challenge that I discuss in this article. A reconceptualization of history that argues ’that every aspect of reality is gendered’3 is necessarily a contestatory act, a political struggle whose retreats and advances must be charted as such. The material conditions of feminist historical production in India are not even remotely comparable to the expanding institutional privileges of women’s studies in Euro-America, yet Indian feminist studies are in large part sustained and nourished by political work outside the academy. In turn, a feminist interpretation of history forms a critical first step in the movement towards feminist social transformation. The feminist critique of the historiography of colonial India has been strongest, especially since epochal changes were telescoped into less than two centuries of colonial rule in India and British domination has had enduring material and ideological consequences. The uses of history for the contemporary women’s movement are clear, but how, in turn, have the insights of contemporary feminism informed the