University of Tulsa

Tangled Histories: Indian Feminism and Anglo-American Feminist Criticism Author(s): Ania Loomba Reviewed work(s): Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 271-278 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463929 . Accessed: 19/11/2011 15:23
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Tangled Histories: Indian Feminism and Anglo-American Feminist Criticism

Ania Loomba
University of Tulsa

What does Anglo-American feminist criticism look like from the outside? I thought it would be a lot easier to respond to the subject of this forum than it has actually been. Neither "Anglo-American feminist criticism" nor "Indian women" are homogeneous terms, and their interactions have been enormously varied. I realised, with increasing frustration, that even to indicate some of the parameters within which these terms function would be to attempt a summary of the relationship between gender, colonialism, and nationalism in India! My own contradictions as an Indian woman who teaches English literature, and the historical circumstances within which these contradictions were engendered, may together help to outline some of the complex contexts that structure the relationship between Anglo-American feminism and feminists in India. My responses to Western feminist criticism fluctuate with my movements in and out of my country. In India, I am shaped by a political ethos where the terms "Indian" and "Western" are often made to signify a series of binary opposites: authenticity and false consciousness, "real people" and "upper class," indigenous and colonised. While such a dichotomy was obviously shaped during nationalist struggles, it has increasingly been invoked in contemporary India too for defining "the nation" in ways that exclude certain class, gender, or caste positions and interests. It has especially grave repercussions for feminist thought and movements in India, which are constantly called upon to demonstrate their genuine Indian-ness and therefore their relevance for the lives of"real Indian women." This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing per se, but the fact is that a huge variety of feminists are invariably chastised for being influenced by Western modes of thought, a charge that was (and still is) also levelled against Marxists. It is easy to imagine why entrenched patriarchal traditions would seek to marginalise women's movements by calling them un-Indian. In fact, such a rhetoric seeks to disguise the indigenous roots of women's protest in India. This is not to argue that Western women's thinking or organisations have not influenced Indian feminists. Cross-fertilisations have been crucial to

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feminist struggles everywhere. But, given the history of colonial rule, the burden of authenticity has been especially heavy for women's activists in India. Hence, at a very basic structural level, apart from the dynamics of any actual contact, their relationship to Anglo-American feminism is conflictual. Let me briefly digress into this history. Women were not wholly excluded in the process of defining an Indian nation: they were central to the battles between colonial and nationalist forces during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Feminist historians of India have begun to explore the multiple ways in which women became a crucial site for the political and cultural struggles between British colonialists and Indian nationalists. Each of these groups claimed to liberate women from the bondage of the other. Hence both focussed on female-centred reforms, and the issues of child marriage, widow remarriage, female education, and widow immolation became central during the second half of the Raj. The "new woman" constructed by nationalist discourses at this time was educated, accomplished, even politically active, but always acted for the health of her family, community, culture, and religion rather than for herself-in short, she was an accommodative ideal, which sought to deflect the radical potential of the re-definitions of womanhood that surfaced during this period. The nationalist movement was also a struggle to represent, create, or recover a culture and a selfhood that had been systematically repressed and eroded during colonial rule. Women became emblematic of this territory: ironically, but paradigmatically, their own selfhood and culture were rewritten as synonymous with that of the larger community. In the process, entire traditions of female expression and communication were delegitimized. Nationalist and colonialist patriarchal thought ironically collaborated in repressing deviant femininity. As several critics have pointed out, "tradition" and "modernity" as well as "India" and "the West" were being debated via the question of Indian womanhood. For women this was a very contradictory situation. Nationalist reformers encouraged women's education and a certain redefinition of the family, not unlike the way Humanists did during the English Renaissance. Women were invited to use their education only to become more efficient homemakers, better wives and mothers; they reacted, as indeed they had in early modern England, in a variety of ways-many of them creatively using their education to protest against existing norms. The relationship of colonised people to colonial education is necessarily conflictual and has historically been both debilitating and enabling. I have been trying to indicate how in the case of women, this relationship becomes even more tortuous. Recently, a pathbreaking anthology of Indian women's writing has been published.' Along with several other recent translations and collections of women's fiction,

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this anthology has made it easier for readers in English to glimpse the astonishing variety of women's voices before, during, and after colonial rule, and to unravel Indian women's responses to colonialism, to Western feminism, and to their own local traditions. Feminists everywhere have had to confront the question of their negotiations with national political discourses. Such a legacy shaped both the left and the women's movements in India. The Indian left did consistently concern itself with "the woman's question," but only in Engelian terms, and like left movements elsewhere, it systematically subordinated gender to class. But added to this was the indigenous heritage I've outlined above, so that even though Marxists were themselves accused of being aliens on Indian soil, they in turn treated any unwarranted focus on gender as practically a conspiracy by Western feminists to lure their Indian sisters away from the Indian working class! I grew up and became politically conscious within the Indian left, which was hugely enabling in many ways but which also shaped my personal and social attitudes to gender issues so that not only did I genuinely believe that "the"revolution would be followed by women's emancipation but I was quite blind to women's issues in the world I lived in, and indeed in my own life. I remember how bitterly Michele Barrett's Womens Oppression Today was criticised for departing from Marxist principles. Ironically, years later when as a graduate student I read systematically through feminist writings, Barrett appeared at the extreme left of the ideological spectrum! I would like to acknowledge how important her book was for me in trying to bridge the gap between orthodox Marxism and feminism. In this context, British feminists were more meaningful for me than American ones, because in the British context too, there had been a long history of leftwing movements. During the early seventies, there was a mushrooming of women's groups outside of the left-sponsored women's organisations. In India, the hostility between them and the women's movements attached to left parties paralleled similar divisions in the history of Western women's movements; in addition, an Indian/Western dichotomy was mapped onto them. Hence independent groups were not only accused of being middle-class, essentialist, and divisive but also of being Western in their orientation, and thereby divorced from the Indian realities: poverty, underdevelopment, and capitalistlneo-colonial exploitation. The reverse charges were that leftoriented women's movements subordinated gender to other concerns, thereby ignoring the actualities of Indian women's lives: rape, domestic violence, and harassment. In practice, such divisions were often negotiated, if not bridged, in a fairly unique manner. Women's groups across the political spectrum have worked together to launch, since the late seventies, major campaigns against dowry murders, rape, widow immolation, and domestic

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violence on the one hand, and against price-rise, police brutality, and state apathy on the other. What is significant, for my purposes, is that there is great pressure on all these groups to be "indigenous." A certain crossing over of positions and rhetoric is evident over the last two decades: despite their avowed devaluation of issues of gender and sexuality, left organisations have to deal with them in their day-to-day functioning. On the other hand, some women activists who defined their own positions to a large extent in opposition to the left and by creatively using some of the strategies and insights developed by Western women's liberation movements now refuse to call themselves "feminists" and themselves denounce Western feminism as neo-imperialist or, at the very least, misguided. So we see women activists across a wide political spectrum, and who may otherwise be bitter opponents, concurring in suggesting that "feminism" is a term irrelevant for the fight for women's rights in India. Two qualifications are immediately in order. Firstly, such an "antifeminism" rhetoric belies the actual gender politics of these individuals and groups, who are engaged in a variety of ways in fighting women's oppression. Secondly, this attitude is, in part, an inevitable reaction to and critique of the imperialist and ethnocentric underpinnings of much AngloAmerican feminist discourse. But, unfortunately, it resurrects a new version of an East/West divide and therefore often simplifies the politics of both Indian and Anglo-American feminism. It ignores, for example, the critiques of black or other women of colour, or indeed the work of a great many women of all colours that has articulated the relationships between gender, sexuality, class, nation, race, and culture. However, if in India the differences between varieties of Western feminism are often flattened out, when I travel to the West, either literally or critically, I find my sense of my own cultural difference is pushed to reaction by the ethnocentrism that still pervades a lot of feminist literary criticism. It is in fact very difficult to stop being a kind of nativist when one faces hostility or ignorance or patronising gestures from one's "sisters."A special problem here is the conflation of the positions or struggles of non-white women within the Western world with those of women of the so-called "third world"-a problem that, it seems to me, is perhaps more acute in the United States than in Britain. Multiculturalism has created spaces for "minority" cultures but has also invited them to melt into the pot so that "Indian" means "Indian-American," i.e., Indians who live in America (not to be confused further with "Native American"!). This is obviously a result of both a lack of concern with the rest of the world and a vast cultural diversity within the country, but it usually implies that the critiques of dominant Anglo-American feminism rest entirely on the shoulders of non-white American women, and "the third world woman" is an entity that is largely notional, whose heterogeneity and contexts are blurred

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even within "correct" circles. This may sound too sharp, and I constantly realise that I am in the danger of erasing the very nuances within "AngloAmerican criticism" that I think are glossed over in India. One specific area within feminist work in which we can see the results of the East/West divide is the question of sexuality, which remains relatively unexplored and untackled in India, and is regarded by a majority of feminist organisations as an issue not relevant to Indian feminism. Even those who in private think that the issue is crucial have not really acknowledged that in their political practice, and it is only in the last five years that some breakthrough is visible. Even as recent scholarship in India has significantly rewritten Indian history in ways that are both challenging and enabling, even as it has begun to consider gender as a major analytical framework in assessments of colonialism, nationalisms, postcolonial governance, religious controversies, left-wing movements, and peasant struggles, it is still uneasy or reluctant to discuss either sexuality or female subjectivity, except to point out the difficulties that accompany their recovery. The hesitation of feminist historians, activists, literary critics, and cultural analysts in this regard is surprising and at apparent odds with the fairly long history of women's political activism and with the recent spurt of feminist research in the country. I think that there are several reasons for this. Firstly, Indian culture was represented, both by Orientalist and nationalist commentators, as celebrating instead of repressing sexuality in general, and deifying instead of demonising female sexuality in particular. These assumptions creep even into work otherwise critical of Orientalism, nationalism, and their patriarchal nexus. The presence of strong matrilineal traditions in various parts of the country, some of which persist today, the space accorded to female energy and power in Hindu mythologies and various local cultures in India, and the possibilites of female bonding offered by segregation of the sexes further confuse the issue: they have variously persuaded even (some) feminists of the liberating redemptive aspects of "Indian" as opposed to Western culture, a view that has been detrimental to research on how female sexuality is represented, controlled, repressed, and managed by these intellectual and cultural traditions. Secondly, in a not-so-surprising continuance of nationalist or left-wing paradigms, to be Indian is to be more concerned with, say, poverty, than, say, sexuality. Even though in practice, women's movements of all hues have had to deal with the congruence of the sexual and the economic, their rhetoric still reflects the belief that grass roots realities in India are so harsh that the issues of sexuality, sexual orientation, and subjectivity are diversionary issues. Despite this, there has been, in very recent years, an increase in the number of women's activists who are raising these issues in practice and beginning to articulate their experiences. But in general, a division between

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what is consideredlegitimate,authentic, and reallyworthwhileand what is or regardedas superfluous merely fashionable is frequentlyarticulated in terms of a divide between poverty and sexuality-the latter also being concern. This attitudeis furtherentrenchedby the dismissedas a "Western" fact that sexualityand subjectivityhave dominantlybeen addressedin the Even as these have been enorWest within psychoanalyticalframeworks. mously enabling for and central to feminist concerns, they have also been cultural notoriouslyproblematicfor those who arecommittedto addressing difference, class, and ethnicity, and to inter-relatingthe social with the subjective. As Michele Barrett sums up in a recent review,"in feminist psychoanalysis,as elsewherein Westernfeminism at the moment, there is far more interest in literatureand culture than in society and politics.... which (andthe) issueof race and ethnicity is a vexedone for psychoanalysis, is a theoreticalmodel that has centeredon issuesof genderand marginalized other differentiations and identificationsthat are also of evident social and I political interest."2 think this is partof the reasonwhy Indianfeministsare Personally, waryof Westerntheoreticalmodelsfor the discussionof sexuality. I find a writerlike JacquelineRose, who insists that psychoanalysis useful is for addressingthe questions of ideology or political culture, extremely salutaryin this regard.A relateddifficultylies in a growingscepticismabout to the relevanceof poststructuralism Indian intellectuals and in the suspicion that ideas such as the fragmentationof subjectivity,heterogeneityof power,and multiplicityof identities are detrimentalto both an analysisof the world and social change and are, in fact, the latest form of Western intellectual hegemony designed to prevent marginalisedsubjectsfrom refashioning their worlds.The workof those Anglo-Americanfeministswho addressthese problems,like Cora Kaplanor HazelCarby,has a much wider appeal for Indian feminists. So far I have been conflating Western feminism and feminist literary criticism. The formerevokes American radicalfeminists of the 1960s and '70s and their ratheressentialisttheoreticalmodels,which arestill the stick with which all Anglo-American feminsm is occasionally beaten. I rememberan incident at a seminaron feminismheld at a constituent college of the Universityof Delhi where I was invited to talk. BecauseI wastalking I aboutfeminist criticismand historiography, chose to give severalexamples from the area I know best-the English Renaissance. The speaker who followed me cited this as proof of my alienation from India. She berated Western feminism by invoking the caricatureof the bra-burningactivist. She also moved on to cite, as a counter-ideal,MahadeviAkka, one of the early women poet-saintsof India. One of the students intervenedby saying could hardlybe a realissuein a countrywherethe that althoughbra-burning majority of the women did not even wear bras, surely the point of the

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agitation in America wasboth contextuallyrelevantand of symbolicvalue. As was, ironically,the fact that Mahadevi Akka had reportedly walked naked, covered by her long hair alone. I rememberfeeling that if undergraduatestudentshad resistedbeing drawninto futile oppositions,therewas hope. I do not wantto implythat there arenot realdifferencesat stake.And, after all, a meaningfuldialogue is possible only if both sides listen to each other: in a forum like this, for example, it might be worth including what Indianfeminism(amongothers)looks like in the West.There is still a global imbalance,in materialand ideologicalterms, in which feminist criticismis deeply implicated.While Indian feministshave certainlybeen indebted to their Westernsisters, it is not easy to ignore,not just the presentconfigurations of power, but its long history. British feminists of the nineteenth centuryinvokedsisterhoodonly to contributeto the notion of a passiveand victimised Indian woman. They offered a gendered version of the white man'sburdenin colonial India wherebythey wouldrepresent,fightfor,and liberate Indian women from Indian patriarchy.In spite of this, the first women's organisations in India drew active support from some British
feminists.

feminist literarycriticismhas had a fairlypositive impact, I Contemporary think, within a differentspherein India, that is, Englishliteraryeducation, which has had a colonialist as well as patriarchalhistory,and which is still widely prevalentall over the country.It is perhapsnot surprisingthat the colleges are majorityof those who teach and studyEnglishin undergraduate women. Today,there is a growingnumberof critiquesof the ideology and institutional politics of English literaturein the Indian classroom,most of which have been made possible by anti-colonialist as well as feminist criticism.3 Some of the most trenchant work in this regardhas been by Indian women teachers who are doublyalienated from the English literary canon, and who have creatively and critically interacted with AngloAmerican feminist criticism. Such interaction has also been useful for historiansand culturalcritics of India. But in interactingand learningthey have also implicitly and explicitly advancedcritiquesof Westernfeminism and of the continuing inequalitiesthat still structureour lives. I realise that I have written far more aboutfeminists in India than about "Anglo-Americanfeminist criticism,"a term with which I am rather uncomfortableand which I wouldhave liked to unpacksince it contains work that I admireand have learnt from as well as work that I feel impelled to resist. It is also wrong to read it as synonymouswith "Westernfeminist as criticism" I have done in this essay,if only becauseFrenchfeministshave and been so influential in the last fifteen years. Both "Anglo-American" "Western" somehow evoke white, essentialist, and hegemonic brands of feminism. When I use these terms, I do not think of Asian or Caribbean

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women in England, or Hispanic or African-American women in America, and I suspect such an omission would be true of many feminists in India. It may be that we need to redefine the term, or perhaps the term itself has outlived its usefulness. NOTES 1 Susie Tharuand K. Lalita,eds., Women in The Writing India,2 vols. (NewYork: FeministPress, 1991, 1993; New Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991, 1993). 2 Michele and Barrett,"Psychoanalysis Feminism:A BritishSociologist'sView," Signs, 17, No. 2 (1992), 456, 465. 3 See, for example, Lola Chatterji, ed., Woman ImageText(New Delhi: Trianka, Rulein 1986);GauriViswanathan,The Masksof Conquest: Literary Studyand British India(New York:Columbia UniversityPress, 1989); RajeswariSunder Rajan, ed., The Lie of the Land:English Studiesin India(New Delhi: Oxford University Literary Press, 1991); Svati Joshi, ed., Rethinking English:Essays in Literature, Language, (New Delhi: Trianka,1991);and SusieTharu,ed., Teaching Literature, History special and issueof TheJournal English Foreign 7 of Languages, Noes. and 8 (Juneand December
1991).

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