Tanika Sarkar

Enfranchised Selves: Women, Culture and Rights in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

The essay identifies previously unnoticed signposts charting the construction of women in nineteenth-century Bengal as autonomous, self-possessed persons, with entitlements to an intellectual life and immunities against physical and sexual death. Out of these claims, the notion of the female citizen would emerge as a coherent and convincing possibility in the next century. This essay focuses on three pieces of colonial legislation, on specific court cases and social reform movements, and finally, on womens self-narrativisation against these developments. Laws resonant in the emergent public sphere weakened the absolute authority of norms, while the multivocal public sphere interrogated the jurisdiction of colonial laws. Thus, neither norms nor laws could claim the hegemony that earlier religious prescriptions had possessed because of the symbiosis between legality and morality. This breakdown of the hegemony of religious precepts and laws thus created a space for womens self-creation as autonomous subjects.

Something like rights? Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow’s consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow’s consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.

special guest contribution: is love without borders possible?

abstractThis article focuses on ‘Love Jihad,’ the neologism that Hindutva, or Hindu Extremism, has invented to incite suspicion and violence against Indian Muslims. I begin with a brief discussion of several characteristics of the Hindutva organisational and ideological apparatus. Then I discuss anti-Love Jihad campaigns as a strategy to assert Hindu extremism in interpersonal relations. I go on to highlight specific episodes of ‘Love Jihad’ attacks by the Hindu Right that have targeted and made a political spectacle of love and marriage across community boundaries. I suggest that Love Jihad campaigns become a mode of producing docile, submissive subjects who will not question regimes of power, be it neoliberalism, religious majoritarianism or social hierarchies and injustice.

Women and the Vote: a world historyJAD ADAMS

[1] Lori D. Ginzberg (2009) Elizabeth Cady Stanton: an American life (New York: Hill & Wang), pp. 41, 69; (2005) Untidy Origins: a story of woman’s rights in antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 7; Lisa Tetrault (2014) The Myth of Seneca Falls: memory and the women’s suffrage movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), pp. 46–47, 120. Also see Corrine M. McConnaughy (2013) The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: a reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press) for an excellent analysis of the role of legislators and party politics. [2] See Wanda A. Hendricks (1995) Ida B. Wells Barnett and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Ed.) One Woman, One Vote: rediscovering the woman suffrage movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press), pp. 263–275.

A Just Measure of Death?: Hindu Ritual and Colonial Law in the Sphere of Widow Immolations

Sarkar’s article looks at the Hindu ritual of widow immolation, which colonial law abolished in 1830. It explores the administration of the ritual before abolition and how, in the process of governance, the widow’s consent emerged as a prominent keyword in colonial bureaucratic discourses. It shows the ramifications of the concept of consent, the problem of establishing it, and the consequences of applying it.

Holy infancy: love and power in a ‘low caste’ sect in Bengal

This article examines a late-eighteenth-century ‘subaltern’ sect within Bengals Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. The sect drew its following from East Bengals upwardly mobile communities of petty traders. They found in Balakdas, a low-caste shudra guru and savant, but one who worked ultimately within the framework of caste hierarchy, a mode of expression for their emerging social and ritual aspirations. Balakdass miraculous deeds in childhood led local brahmans to educate and train him in Sanskrit. He and his brahman guru became the devoted parents of a golden Gopal. Miraculously alive, the infant Krishna demanded their love and nurturance. In order to be able to provide for the child, Balakdas sought worldly advancement. He found it amongst the petty traders who came to constitute his following, and whose gifts went to support and shelter the infant Krishna. These themes as told in Balakdass hagiography are contrasted with the different renderings of holy childhood and vatsalya, loving parental devotion, elsewhere in Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Childhood, the liminal place in caste and class society, thus emerges among these Vaishnava communities as the key narrative site where caste can be transcended, and space created for a shudra to become ‘father’ to the infant Krishna. But childhood is also the unruly place that will eventually be left behind, where socialization into class, caste and gender is initiated. Through a delicate and subtle mobilization of these plural possibilities, these vatsalya dimensions of Gaudiya Vaishnavism manage the simultaneous transcendence and recuperation of social difference.