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The Desired ‘One’: Thinking the Woman in the Nation
Author(s) -
Das Anirban,
Sen Chaudhuri Ritu
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00455.x
Subject(s) - nationalism , representation (politics) , perspective (graphical) , colonialism , gender studies , psychology , aesthetics , sociology , epistemology , history , political science , art , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence , law , archaeology , politics
A review of the secondary literature on the way nationalist thought in colonial India conceived ‘woman’ shows three broad strands. One is the perspective of the history of art, which studies the genealogy of the iconic symbolisation of women. The remaining stands have similar objects of knowledge (the nationalist representation of women in terms of the debi ) but differ in their foci of attention. The first is concerned with the (role of the) woman in nationalist thought and how ‘real’ women had responded to that construction. The other focuses on the processes of nation building in the colony to reach its gendered aspects. We finally make a case for a synthesis of these through a few instances.