Charu Gupta, 'Women, Gender and Sexuality: Changing Historiographies of Colonial India-A Bibliographical Essay', Studies in People’s History, 7 (2), 2020: 192-204. (original) (raw)

Drawing on fragmentary examples from women's histories in colonial India, this paper underlines the problems and possibilities in historiographies of modern India. Feminist scholars argue that the three terms-women, gender and sex-have often been used interchangeably. However, the commonsensical term woman is neither a natural category (of non-men) nor a homogeneous community (of sisterhood), for there are historically many ways of being a woman in different times. Further, gender is not merely a natural or biological identity of a person. It is a historical , social and political construction of how to be a man or a woman. Even sex is no longer seen as the biological ground upon which gender is constructed, as sexualities too are socially produced and regulated by dominant discourses, which establish one kind of sexuality as normal and relegate others into the domain of deviance, perversion or criminality. Through selective readings from discourses around women's education and conceptualisation of the modern women in colonial India, the paper reflects on how a gender-sensitive perspective produces a more complex and textured view of historical processes. While patriarchies were recast in more powerful, though subtle ways, they were also subverted, or at least questioned, in colonial India. Feminist historians have underlined the fact that both social reforms and nationalism have had an ambiguous relationship with the gender question. It is also not enough to say that while men fought for Indian independence, women also did. Nor is it sufficient to argue that Indian women have been 'hidden from history' and must now be made visible by remembering their contributions. In order to grasp the role of gender in history adequately, we need to understand the gendering of history itself. It was thus argued in the pioneering anthology Recasting Women that reforms actually re-imprisoned modern women into new cages of male desires. 1 However, much recent work has complicated this argument by recognising the potentialities and possibilities of reformist and nationalist endeavours. After all, this was also a period when caste hierarchies and patriarchies were interrogated and qualified to an extent. Often unintentionally, the changes instituted in these times also paved 1 Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi, 1989. Studies in People's History, 7, 2 (2020): 192-204