This is Part II of a twentieth-anniversary retrospective on Mrinalini Sinha’s Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. See Part I, a review by Susan Pedersen, here.
In the late 1920s, argues Mrinalini Sinha, Indian feminists found a brief opening for a collective political agency as women. Sinha traces this opening to the global controversy over Mother India (1927), the American journalist Katherine Mayo’s polemic against gender relations in Indian society. Mayo intended to undermine Indian claims to self-rule. Instead, the ensuing controversy undermined the foundations of the British administration of India, allowing Indian feminists to tie their demands for social reform to an expansive vision of universal rights. Why did this brief opening emerge—and then get foreclosed? What does the Mayo controversy reveal about gender and the writing of global history? And how, from the asymmetries of colonial society, did Indian feminists argue for the universality of rights? Sinha discusses these questions, among others, in conversation with one of the Blog’s Primary Editors.
Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa (MSW): In your book, the global controversy over Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927) reaches an unexpected end: a brief opening for women’s “collective political agency” in the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act, the first piece of social reform legislation to apply to all religious communities. You draw a striking contrast to the 1829 Bengal Sati Regulation that banned the immolation of Hindu widows. If women were the “grounds” for debate between male nationalists and liberal imperialists in 1829, as Lata Mani argues, a century later they had become “both the subjects and the objects” of social reform (p. 152–53).
The problem of agency—what it is, whether it can be recovered—persists within and beyond feminist historiography. As you have recently observed, 1980s–90s feminist scholarship demonstrated that gender was not peripheral to politics, but constitutive of it; still, it raised the question of how women could engage in politics at all if nationalist discourse fixed them as symbols, as Partha Chatterjee argues, of an inner, spiritual, domestic sphere. How did you work through this impasse? What do the Indian feminists’ efforts to be recognized as women, not as symbols of religious communities, reveal about the limits and possibilities of agency?
Mrinalini Sinha (MS): There was this very neat hundred-year difference between 1829—which is often seen as the beginnings of the women’s question and social reform discourse in colonial India, as Lata Mani so brilliantly discusses—and 1929, which I see as a different kind of beginning for a public discourse of Indian feminism. I liked that you picked up on that analogy, but also on the question of agency and the 1980s–90s moment of feminist scholarship that framed my thinking about the book. You mentioned the important work that people like Partha Chatterjee do in this moment. His essay on the nationalist resolution of the woman question appeared in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s classic volume Recasting Women (1989), a manifesto for a new feminist historiography, and produced both very influential critiques from feminist scholars and incredibly productive lines of inquiry.
I would like to put Specters somewhere in between these two responses to his essay. In a recent piece for Chatterjee’s retirement, I discussed the unfulfilled trajectory of the brief convergence of his work and feminist historiography. His formulation—that nineteenth-century Indian nationalists “resolved” the women’s question by relegating it to an inner, spiritual sphere wherein they claimed autonomy, while conceding to Western dominance in the outer, material sphere—extended what some feminist scholars had been saying about nationalism’s relationship to the women’s question. On one level, his was a very useful way of giving gender politics a real salience in the broader politics of nationalism. But it conceived of this relationship as somewhat static and unidirectional. There was this line from Chatterjee that particularly provoked me—I quote it in Specters—where he argues that the real creativity of women’s politics in India could not be found in the outer, public sphere; that to find it, one would need to turn to the inner sphere. I found that claim intuitively problematic, because it meant dismissing a whole area of women’s public politics as simply derivative of the West—that just like male nationalists conceded the outer sphere to the West, Indian women who mobilized publicly were simply derivative of Western feminists.
Here is where my larger point about agency comes out. If you think of agency just as a response, it is a banal question: of course, everybody responds in one way or another to their circumstances. But when and why do these responses begin to convert, challenge, or modify existing scripts? That happens in particular conjunctures when contradictions become difficult to contain or different scripts compete with each other to create the possibilities for new combinations and fractures in the status quo—in short, to make change thinkable. That’s what the Mayo controversy, in all its dimensions, allowed me to reconstruct. It brought the existing scripts for women to a crisis point, and it was in that crisis point that Indian feminists did something new through public politics. They forged a very different kind of agency for women—not as symbols of a community, but as women qua women—that challenged the existing symbiotic relationship between the women’s question and Indian nationalism, reformulating both in interesting ways. This is the challenge, originality, and creativity of their alternative formulation.
My argument about Indian women’s collective agency was also coming out of a moment in global feminist historiography where scholars were questioning the givenness of the category of “woman.” I did not start with the assumption that women were a pre-determined collective simply waiting to be mobilized; I set about interrogating how such a collective could come into being. In the Mayo controversy, the agency of women in India lay in creating this collective that was, at least in its aspiration, self-consciously constituted as beyond caste, class, region, and religion. The circumstances of its creation were very different from those in, say, France or even Britain. In a post-French Revolution context, the claims for the universal rights of man perforce made revolutionaries address the differences between men along the lines of class and, more ambiguously, of race. But this expansion of rights coincided with a naturalization of gender differences and an exclusion of women; “woman” emerged as a leftover or excluded category in this struggle for universal rights. In colonial India, the collective of women was not pre-given. Universal rights would have to emerge against the British regime’s recognition of the rights of discrete communities, which subsumed women as the symbols or the inner core of their identity. In an essay drawing on Specters, I double down on the argument: that the novel agency of Indian feminists was to ground universal rights on the idea of women as a constituency of their own.
MSW: You argue that Mother India marked a rupture from the longer history of Orientalist discourse that cast the “‘horrors’ of India as timeless ‘facts’” (p. 23). It strikes me that this language of facts is central to your reinterpretation of the controversy. Eschewing the familiar binary of the mystical East versus the materialistic West, Mayo pitched Mother India as a “public health report” on the material realities of Hindu gender relations. As you observe, her critics accepted her facts but reversed her interpretation, arguing that the ill-treatment of women was not inherent to Indian society but the political outcome of British rule (p. 109–10). How did Mayo’s facts become a battleground for competing articulations of the social and the political—and how did this contention transform the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and colonial power?
MS: I’m glad you picked up on this, because I have a feeling this point about facts and interpretation, or Orientalist knowledge and colonial power, may have gotten lost. In thinking about how Orientalism, in Edward Said’s broad sense of the term, worked through claims of empirical knowledge, I was definitely drawing upon scholars like Bernard Cohn on colonial investigative modalities, David Ludden on Orientalist empiricism, and Arjun Appadurai on numbers in the colonial imaginary. Facts and numbers were important instruments of knowledge, allowing British administrators to objectify what they saw as an indigenous reality by measuring all manners of things: castes, “tribes,” forests, revenue, and so on. But facts were also part of what Ludden calls a larger colonial imaginary—the idea or fantasy that with concrete facts and numbers, the British could control indigenous reality. These impulses were certainly part of Mayo’s presentation of Mother India as a “public health report.”
Scholars have studied how several forms of anti-colonialism selectively appropriated Orientalist knowledge, especially the contrast between a mystical East stuck in the past and a fact-loving, modernizing West. For example, Indian nationalists often used this contrast but reversed its valence, so the mysticism of the East was not a sign of backwardness but of spiritual superiority over the West. The Mayo controversy poses arguably a deeper challenge to Orientalist knowledge. Mayo’s critics were not simply reversing the binary of East and West that underwrote Orientalist knowledge. They were also actively challenging it by questioning the epistemological authority of facts. As they showed, numbers and facts don’t mean anything by themselves: what matters is to what use these are put. That is why Mayo’s critics could simultaneously accept her facts and reject her interpretation of them. They had brought into view the interpretive frameworks that give facts their meaning.
Mayo’s American context also allowed me to triangulate this interwar moment with the rising power of the United States and the global ambitions of American social science research. The latter belongs broadly within an existing tradition of Orientalist empiricism. But it also brings a new professionalism associated with American rivals to Britain’s global hegemony—including the Rockefeller Foundation, which plays a critical role in supporting Mayo’s endeavors. A lot of Progressive-era reforms in the United States depended on this social-scientific research, and it also became a tool the United States used in its own imperial enterprise. This debate over facts and interpretation allows me to get at both the overturning of an Orientalist, empiricist knowledge formation that belonged to the era of British high imperialism in the nineteenth century, and at new modes of social science research coming out of the United States in the twentieth century. These overlapping and competing interests make the Mayo controversy ripe for reconfiguring the erstwhile relationship between Orientalist knowledge and colonial power.
MSW: No single national or imperial context can explain how an American journalist known for her writings on the Philippines catalyzed a restructuring of the social and the political in British India. In the two decades since the publication of Specters, interest in the global circulation of texts and ideas has surged; so, too, has skepticism about whether such accounts efface the limits of these circuits and underlying social, economic, and political structures. The “imperial social formation,” your heuristic for the role of imperialism in “assembling different societies into a system of interdependencies and interconnections” with “uneven effects,” seems to me to carry an enduring relevance for these debates (p. 17). How did you arrive at this approach? Might the Mayo controversy offer an occasion to revisit the role of gender in global history?
MS: The heuristic of an imperial social formation was something I first developed in Colonial Masculinity. My initial training as a graduate student in India was in international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University at the height of what is called the dependency school and world systems theory—something I then found quite productive. When I came to the United States and switched disciplines to become a historian, I began to see the limits of these previous approaches, particularly their cookie-cutter model and the absence of any real indigenous agency. Then, in the middle of graduate school, I encountered the Saidian intervention and what would later develop into postcolonial scholarship. The heuristic was born out of my interest in, and dissatisfaction with, these two paradigms: world systems theory, with its procrustean approach to the world, and the post-Orientalism or postcolonial scholarship, with its distrust of larger global narratives. The imperial social formation allowed me to do a number of things: on the one hand, to bring the economic, the political, and the socio-cultural together, and, on the other, to account for historical contingencies and local details while remaining committed to placing them within a totality. It is in Specters that I really break this down. The “imperial” was not just a story about the metropole and periphery, but about shifting relations of power as the United States played an increasing role in the British–Indian equation. The “social” was a way to engage the insights of the so-called cultural turn of contemporary historiography alongside the political and economic concerns that had animated an earlier social history. And the “formation” was a way to focus on the contingent historical conjunctures that made this global system.
So, here was one trajectory for the development of that heuristic. Another was the growing popularity of an area of study identified as “global history,” distinct from the erstwhile world history in which I had trained. While global history created new openings, I often found this scholarship flattening the unevenness of power, which the world history scholarship, despite its other drawbacks, did not. The imperial social formation was an attempt to claim for the contributions of an earlier world history a place in global history. I was interested in unevenness, which manifested, in Specters, in how certain arguments resonated beyond their local context, while others did not. This is something that I am only now recognizing after you raised the question. Consider the role of the Self-Respect Movement, which was an anti-caste initiative led by E. V. R. Naicker (Periyar) in southern India, during the controversy. Their position, published in their journal, Kudi Arasu, stands out for welcoming Mayo’s account as factual and useful for opening the eyes of Indians to caste- and gender-based oppression, but for refusing, unlike Mayo, to absolve the British government of responsibility for perpetuating these problems. Now, that particular stand resonated in southern India, but it didn’t resonate in the same way even in northern India, and it certainly lost its nuance when it was translated in the American context. This wasn’t because a caste critique did not translate in the American context—Mayo, in fact, made an aborted effort to capitalize on the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar’s differences with M. K. Gandhi at the 1930s Round Table Conferences in London. But the non-Brahminical Self-Respect Movement’s position on Mother India had limited resonance for Mayo. The lumpiness or unevenness of the different local, regional, and national contexts continued to bear on what was a global controversy.
Indeed, one of the casualties of the scaling up from national histories, or from social history, to global histories, is that issues of gender, race, and caste are often left behind—they become identified only with the local or the national scale. My attempt in this book was to say that these issues, which an earlier social history had brought into view, could be scaled up to the global. It was a very deliberate effort to bring social issues, especially the politics of gender, into a global historical narrative.
Indian women, I am suggesting, were claiming a universality of rights out of the particularity of their circumstances, just as the enslaved had done in Haiti. This is not an argument for untranslatability or cultural uniqueness—my culture, my tradition. It is an argument for universality from historical difference—my claim for rights arises out of the circumstances of my subjection.
MSW: I want to pick up on your analysis of feminist political thought within this global context. In the Western liberal discourse of individual rights, Joan Scott has diagnosed a paradox: women have to simultaneously affirm and deny their similarity to men to claim rights. You’ve argued that the paradox of Indian feminism was different. In a colonial society that recognized the rights of communities over “their” women, not the rights of individuals, women had to simultaneously avow and disavow their membership in communities to gain collective recognition as women (p. 197–98). Thus, you revisit Sarojini Naidu’s claim in her 1930 presidential address to the All-India Women’s Conference that she is “not a feminist” in the sense of her Western counterparts—this was not a narrow cultural parochialism, you argue, but a conviction that Indian women’s cross-communal unity could offer a new basis for universal rights (p. 205). How do you situate such statements in the history of political thought? To revisit one of the most striking points from your introduction (p. 16): how does recognizing the particularity of the Western paradox recover the possible universality of rights?
MS: This was something I was not fully satisfied I had been able to address sufficiently in the book. I did an essay entitled “A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?” after I wrote Specters,where I made the argument that the kind of feminism that emerges in the Indian case isn’t culturally unique; it is historically different. In a way, this goes back to your first question about agency. I suggested to you that these women exercised agency in creating something new not just in the inner sphere, but in the outer sphere: it is there that they make a claim for universal rights in the name of women. That famous quote from Sarojini Naidu has often been the explanation for a cultural relativist argument about Indian women—that India is different from the West, so the Indian case goes against the universality of feminism. I was trying to thread the needle. If I were to take feminism as an argument about the universality of rights, then Indian and Western feminisms arrived at this argument differently because of the contexts in which they developed. But this historical difference does not go against the universal ambition of their claims.
In one sense, if you follow the postcolonial position in works by Partha Chatterjee or Dipesh Chakrabarty, then the language of rights, especially citizenship rights, is European. It can be domesticated, maybe modified, in the Indian context, but remains by and large derivative; it’s in the addas (informal meeting spaces) and the inner sphere that the originality of Indian politics is to be found. But if you follow a world history argument, the discourse of universal rights and citizenship was universalized precisely in the efforts of non-Europeans. Here lie the contributions of world history often forgotten by the post-1990s global history. The early Caribbean school of world history pioneered by C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Sidney Mintz, among others, had already argued for the precocity of the Caribbean experience in the development of the modern world. For James, the idea of universal rights was made universal not in the French Revolution, but in the struggle of the Black Jacobins in Haiti. This argument, later picked up by scholars such as Laurent Dubois and Susan Buck-Morss, demonstrates that the genealogy of universal rights isn’t purely Western; this idea comes to India via France and Haiti. It also builds on nascent Indian traditions. Indian women, I am suggesting, were claiming a universality of rights out of the particularity of their circumstances, just as the enslaved had done in Haiti. This is not an argument for untranslatability or cultural uniqueness—my culture, my tradition. It is an argument for universality from historical difference—my claim for rights arises out of the circumstances of my subjection. For these women, those circumstances were the construction of women as symbols of communities rather than as individuals in their own right. Therein lies the basis for their claim to universal rights.
I think that’s a point that is too often forgotten. There’s certainly been a lot of incredible work done on early twentieth-century Indian feminists since Specters, but one of the problems I see is that these studies can still unquestioningly frame the contradictions of Indian feminism through a Western feminist framework. Take the otherwise excellent book by Annie Devenish, Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, which reclaims Indian feminist contributions from the early days of the Republic, a period that was once seen as a lull in women’s activism. Devenish frames their dilemma largely in terms derivative of Western feminist debates—should women claim equality with, or difference from, men? I would suggest that the Indian debates about the nature of women’s rights have a very different genealogy and a very different set of stakes, based precisely on their interwar conditions of emergence.
But like the French feminists Scott studies, the Indian feminists cannot escape the paradox of their conditions of emergence: in this case, between a conception of the individual as separate from the community and of the individual as part of a community. They try to inhabit this space by distinguishing between largely ascriptive communities—such as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or various caste communities—and women as a political constituency that is chosen. Thus, the early feminists were committed to a Uniform Civil Code to put an end to the colonial-era regime of separate personal laws for each religious community for matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. After independence, they had to settle for only a Hindu Code, which was itself subject to massive opposition from conservative Hindu forces. In later decades, the demand for a Uniform Civil Code, which began its life as part of a social reform agenda, was appropriated by certain Hindu groups for a majoritarian political agenda directed against Muslims. Indian feminists would be forced to choose—to stick to their original demand for a Uniform Civil Code or to modify it. I am suggesting that just as the dilemma of woman as equal to, or different from, men persisted for the Western feminists, the dilemma of women as apart from, or part of, communities persisted for Indian feminists. In other words, this was an impossible choice.
MSW: If 1929 marked an opening for women’s collective agency, 1935 marked its foreclosure. Through a painstaking archival reconstruction, you demonstrate how the debates leading up to the 1935 Government of India Act, India’s last colonial constitution, wrenched the social from the political once more. Nationalists invoked the language of universal rights to undermine the claims of other minorities; the British government reserved seats for women in provincial legislatures only within separate communal electorates, returning their social reform agenda to religious communities. Feminists such as Jahanara Shahnawaz, Radhabai Subbarayon, Muthulakshmi Reddi, and Amrit Kaur confronted a series of impossible choices, pressed to embrace the language of abstract rights while their constituency unraveled along the lines of religion, caste, and class. [1] The result, ironically, looked a great deal like the paradox of Western feminism. How do you account for this foreclosure’s contingency—that there were other possibilities at every stage—but also its retroactivity—that 1935 obscured the very framework through which we could understand 1929?
MS: This is a difficulty that I do want to address—its retroactivity, as you so aptly put it. If you think of titles of some of the scholarship on Indian feminists, they echo the retroactive filter of the Western paradigm. For example, there is an excellent article by Jana Everett, “All the Women Were Hindu and All the Muslims Were Men,” which evokes the title of a very famous African-American feminist text, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Everett was trying to address the dilemma for Muslim feminists in the Indian context through an analogy with the dilemma for Black feminists in the United States.
After that moment of foreclosure in 1935, we do see a certain marginalization of Muslim women and also Dalit women, albeit in different ways. But the reasons for this are very different. If you reconstruct the history of American feminism, there were certainly Black women there from the very beginning, but it was easier to see figures like Sojourner Truth as dealing with gender plus race, and to think of them as somehow less central than women who were focused solely on gender. The intersection of gender and race, and the contributions of minoritized women, would be recognized later as an afterthought. In the Indian context, however, to even create a political constituency of women as both the subjects and objects of rights, early Indian feminists needed to confront and overcome the existing idea of women as symbols of discrete communities—Hindu, Muslim, Brahmin, and so on. When Indian feminism marginalized women who were not Hindu or upper-caste after 1935, it was for different reasons: women’s claims came to be pitted against the rival claims of minoritized communities. Because the end results were similar, it was easy to retroactively misinterpret the Indian story through an American lens. But it is important to get that story right—both for understanding the past, and for understanding the present conflicts and contradictions.
Here is where the question of contingency becomes significant. I would not want to suggest that the foreclosure of 1935 was in any way predetermined. It was the way the British constitutional debates about political representation for women and other Indian communities unfolded, the sides that different groups ended up taking, that left many of these early Indian feminists advocating for positions that were turned against them. But their efforts at constituting women as a collective across communities don’t completely disappear—this is where contingency matters. There’s a very interesting book by Achyut Chetan, Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic, on the women involved in the writing of the Indian Constitution. In some ways, it’s a parallel project to mine set in a later period, in that Chetan wants to recover feminist political thought, and not simply assume that because these women were often elites and relatives of better-known male politicians, they had nothing of their own to contribute. This was what many thought of this earlier generation after the 1970s advent of a “second wave” of feminist activism in India; and it was also reflected in much of the historiography that has only recently begun to re-evaluate these women’s contributions.
Chetan’s book reveals the persistence of many themes from that earlier moment. As I argue in Specters, early Indian feminists did not base the universality of their demands on some abstract liberal construction of the individual. Rather, they did so from a position I called an agonistic liberal universalism, which develops alongside liberal individualism and looks superficially like it, but is not quite the same. You see this in the basis of women’s support for a Uniform Civil Code during the Constituent Assembly debates. That support doesn’t go anywhere at that time, because it is pitted as a threat to the rights of minoritized religious communities in the wake of the Partition of the subcontinent; but the agonistic liberal universalism on which that demand rests has little to do with the abstract individual of liberal thought. The claim to universality also emerges in these women’s argument for the right to marriage, specifically the right to interfaith marriage. This again goes nowhere in the Constituent Assembly. But it resonates in our own times, given the ongoing movement against interfaith couples—what has been termed “love jihads”—premised on the view that women themselves have no agency in marriage.
Contingency allows us to see that there was a particular resolution or foreclosure at one moment, but all the political possibilities it engendered didn’t simply disappear. They emerge in different forms at different moments, even if we don’t see them triumphant at all times. There is an interesting tension between recognizing both the contingency of the foreclosure and the way in which that foreclosure produces a misreading and misinterpretation of the possibilities that were also once created. This prevents such possibilities from remaining a continuing resource for political thought and, as I would suggest, for political practices in our times.
MSW: I would like to close our retrospective on Specters by turning to your recent retrospective on gender and colonialism. Feminist historiography, you observe, has never fully been incorporated into a historiographical “turn.” On one level, this accounts for its relative marginality—why the 1980s–90s scholarship by Lata Mani, Kumari Jayawardena, Uma Chakravarti, Tanika Sarkar, and others has not received the same retrospectives as contemporaneous developments like Subaltern Studies. On another level, this explains the enduringness of its contributions—unlike a “turn,” there is no moment of closure, leaving open the possibility of renewal. I wonder if something similar might be said of the interwar Indian feminists, whose contributions, after 1935, were at once ubiquitous and invisible. You describe 1935 as “a historical turn that need not have been” (p. 197). Was this “turn” a definitive closure? In post-independence debates over rights, might we find the specters of interwar Indian feminism?
MS: This is where that 1980s moment of feminist scholarship, which was very formative for my own intellectual coming of age, is significant. Something I take away from Sangari and Vaid’s introduction to Recasting Women was how their call for a new feminist historiography was framed by a search for answers to present-day questions. One question that animated them was the unexpected revival of the glorification of sati (widow-immolation). The famous case of Roop Kanwar, an eighteen-year-old widow who burnt to death on her husband’s funeral pyre in 1987, brought sati back on the public radar. In some quarters, her death was glorified as “true decolonization” and the continued legal ban on sati was associated with the perpetuation of a colonial mindset. This context was partly what prompted these scholars to ask new questions of the colonial past.
Specters was likewise inspired by questions that had arisen in the present. The fact that the book ends with a foreclosure might suggest that my interest was ina moment of failure. But I thought of that foreclosure—or failure, if you will—as a resource from which to learn. Gender had again become a flashpoint in Indian politics, whether in the fear that under the cover of gender justice, some Hindu groups were using the Uniform Civil Code as a stick to beat Muslims, or that political quotas (“reservation”) for women in Parliament would become dominated by upper-caste, Hindu, and urban women at the expense of both men and women from minoritized communities. We were still framing the dilemmas these issues posed for Indian feminists through language we inherited from Anglo-American feminism. In Specters, I tried to show that there was a longer history in India to women being pitted as a constituency against other minoritized groups. The interwar period revealed that there were other possibilities for addressing women’s issues in universal terms beyond the majoritarian framing, and that the subsequent foreclosure of these possibilities was neither inevitable nor permanent.
My point, in effect, is that our misdiagnosis of that earlier moment prevented us from seeing it as a resource for the present. I completely agree with you that the forces unleashed in the Mother India controversy do not disappear. They continue to offer lessons. I see them resonate in the recent debate about whether or not “intersectionality,” a term that emerged out of a very particular African-American legal context, is a useful analytical tool in the Indian context. I don’t believe this question can be resolved a priori: the utility of the concept would depend upon its particular usage. But I do think it is possible to think creatively about the Indian context without either retreating into a relativist claim about the incompatibility of Indian feminism with feminisms elsewhere or shoehorning the peculiarities of the Indian context into seemingly universalist categories borrowed from elsewhere. Retrieving the agonistic liberal universalism of interwar Indian feminists is one attempt to straddle this divide—to universalize feminist thought in a way that is attentive to local specificities.
MSW: If I am understanding correctly, then, it is precisely by treating interwar Indian feminists as political thinkers in their own right—not as peripheral to the development of political thought—that you can make this argument about universality.
MS: Yes—a lot of things become clearer as other people engage with one’s work. Your generous engagement has given me the opportunity to refine so much of what I was trying to do in the book. I am a firm believer that intellectual work happens in dialogue and collaboration. This was true of Specters, which was written in dialogue, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, with the work of many scholars; it continues to be true after the publication of the book. There was a very early review of Specters that Susan Pedersen wrote and shared with me. [2] It went unpublished at the time, but as a review it really helped me clarify the ways in which I was thinking. She was probably the first one—and I at least haven’t seen anyone else pick this up—who saw the book as borne out of the intersection of world systems theory and postcolonial scholarship that were part of my intellectual inheritances. That is so true in retrospect, but it was not obvious to me until Pedersen brought it up. Some of your questions also made me revisit the other intellectual inheritances that I was working through in Specters. Thank you.
[1] Sometimes anglicized differently—Reddy instead of Reddi, Subbarayan instead of Subbarayon, (Begum) Jehan Ara Shah Nawaz instead of Jahanara Shahnawaz.
[2] Pedersen’s review, written in 2006, has been published as Part I of this retrospective.
Mrinalini Sinha is the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan specializing in modern South Asia and the British empire. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity and Specters of Mother India, which received the Albion Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association, and the co-editor of Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India and a forthcoming two-volume Cambridge History of the Modern Indian Subcontinent. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources.
Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa is a Fellow by Examination and Rhodes Scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, where her doctoral project traces the construction of India as mystical and spiritual between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Her article, “Indian Feminists and Orientalist Fantasies,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Featured image: “The Other Roundtable,” drawing by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa depicting five of the interwar Indian feminists discussed in Specters. From left to right, Sarojini Naidu, Radhabai Subbarayon, Muthulakshmi Reddi, Amrit Kaur, and Jahanara Shahnawaz.