Mrinalini Sinha

Specters of Mother India : the global restructuring of an empire

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India , an expose written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India , from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India

The ubiquity of the European social club in the European empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been widely recognized in both popular and academic writings on European, and particularly British, imperialism. The “European” ascription of imperial social clubs derived from their predominantly whites-only membership policy in which all elite Europeans, whatever their nationalities, were potentially included. Although each individual club often catered to a very different and distinctive clientele among elite Europeans in the empire, the “clubland” as a whole served as a common ground where elite Europeans could meet as members, or as guests of members, of individual clubs. These clubs, it has been argued, represented an oasis of European culture in the colonies, functioning to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of “home” for Europeans living in an alien land. The popular narrative of the club, as is evident from the account by the official historian of the Bengal Club, one of the oldest social clubs in India, easily oscillated between an understanding of the club as a broadly European cultural institution and as a specifically British one. Either way, the cultural values that it represented were understood as transplanted to the colonies: “It is the practice of European peoples to reproduce as far as possible in their settlements and colonies in other continents the characteristic social features of their natural lives …. For more than a century no institution has been more peculiarly British than the social club.”

Giving masculinity a history: Some contributions from the historiography of colonial India

Contemporary historiography, especially in North American, European and Australian history, now includes a fairly respectable body of literature on men and masculinity. While this literature has produced important contributions to the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis, there has also been some wariness within feminist scholarship on the grounds that the issue of the gendered organisation may be evaded. Reflecting on the question ‘what is involved in writing a history of masculinity?’, this article considers the potential contribution that the historiography of colonial India offers to the study of masculinity

Suffragism and internationalism: The enfranchisement of British and Indian women under an imperial state

The terms of women’s franchise in 1927 in Britain and in India led the Irish feminist, Margaret Cousins, one of the founding members of the leading suffrage organisation of women in India, to make the following comparison: ’Women now have exactly the same voting rights as men in India, unlike in Britain where only women over thirty can vote.’’ Cousins’ comment, of course, carried special resonance because it implied an ironic reversal of a familiar rhetoric of British suffragism. British ’imperial suffragism’, as Antoinette Burton has argued, had depended upon the ubiquitous stereotype of ’the helpless Indian woman’. The image of the ’helpless Indian woman’, according to Burton, was crucial not just for the ’upliftment’ of Indian women per se, but, more crucially, for the emancipation of British women themselves: it provided moral prestige for, and an imperial articulation of, the demand for the vote for British women.’ Yet British suffragism’s imperialist rhetoric of the ’white woman’s burden’ was trumped-ideologically delegitimated-by the enfranchisement of Indian women. What Cousins’ comments gestured towards, indeed, is precisely the contradictory articulation of the enfranchisement of British and Indian women in the imperial context. Since the imperial state, as Nira Yuval-Davis reminds us, ’position[s] different civil societies and nations in very different relations to the same state’, the

Premonitions of the Past

A hundred years ago, on January 9, 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India after approximately two decades of living and working in South Africa. In 2003, the Government of India designated the day of Gandhis return as official Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or Overseas Indian Day. The centenary of Gandhis return was marked at this years thirteenth annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas with appropriate official fanfare. The occasion was also observed in a wide variety of public celebrations, including a full-scale reenactment of the disembarkation from on board the S. S. Arabia of Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, at Apollo Bunder in the Bombay Harbor; and with rallies and functions held all across India (see NDTV 2015; Outlook 2015; see also Roy 2015). These centenary celebrations follow upon more than a decade-long shift in official Indian policy towards overseas Indians, or, in official parlance, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin (see Amrute 2010; Hercog and Siegel 2013; Upadhya 2013; Varadarajan 2014). The policy, at first, was directed mainly towards attracting the wealthy in such places as the United States and the United Kingdom. Even though it now extends to the much larger labor diaspora, both old and new, settled throughout the regions of the world, the focus remains on the rich, whose investments in India are greatly coveted. The embrace of a diasporic and deterritorialized Indian imaginary—anchored, ironically, in the commemorations of Gandhi as the poster boy for the global peripatetic Indian—is a symptom of the changes in the nation-states relationship to global capitalism in these times of accelerated globalization.

Is "Region" Still Good to Think?

This essay responds to the mission statement of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and considers the place of region in the contemporary postnational and post–area studies moment of scholarship. In particular, it examines the possibilities of leveraging further the opening that the journal created between area studies scholarship and the traditional academic disciplines.

Introduction: The Anatomy of an Event

This book tells a story with many twists and turns. It furnishes the narrative of a small episode that cascaded through a global network of social structures and public spheres to produce big effects: the ‘‘tipping point’’ for an important historical transformation in the period between the two world wars. The episode at the center of this book is a massive international controversy that raged across three continents with great intensity in the 1920s. Even before Salman Rushdie’sThe Satanic Verses (1988) or Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), there was Katherine Mayo’sMother India (1927).Mayo was an American journalist who with the help of British officials and powerful social groups in the United States wrote what became one of the most sensational exposés on India. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially as they affected the position of women, whose roots Mayo traced to an inherently backward Hindu culture. The title of the book, which was meant to evoke popular nationalist representations of the nation as mother, signaled Mayo’s overtly political intervention. The social backwardness of India, according to Mayo, made Indians unfit for political self-government. The political case presented inMother India contributed inmaking it an instant international cause célèbre. The controversy it generated drew in an impressive international cast of characters from legislators and leading political figures to social reformers, women activists, journalists, writers, artists, doctors, and several ordinary men andwomenwho attended public debates and participated in public protests against the book. The sheer scope of the controversy over Mother India provides a glimpse of its international ramifications.Mother Indiawent into numerous reprints as well as multiple editions in the United States, Britain, and India. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Hebrew, as well as into several Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu. By 1955, the original American publisher ofMother India, Harcourt Brace and Company, reported having sold 395,678 copies of the book. The book