| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Lata Mani. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 246. Cloth $47.00, paper $18.00.

Scholars of India, Indian women, and postcolonialism who have been engaging with Lata Mani's work since her essay "Contentious Traditions" was published in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid's collection, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (1989), will greet this book with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for an old friend who reappears in transformed, if recognizable, guise. Those unfamiliar with the trajectory of her thesis will recognize it as an example of colonial discourse analysis at its most self-declaratory, sophisticated, and accomplished. Using debates about sati in colonial India as her point of departure, Mani makes a series of arguments not simply about the role that discourses of modernity and tradition played in early nineteenth-century India but also about the long ideological shadow those debates have cast over colonial and nationalist historiographies. In doing so, she stakes a claim for an anti-imperialist, feminist history: one that acknowledges the dialectic relationship between past and present and that takes discourse seriously as a site of knowledge, an archive where the "socio-economic and political relations of colonial domination" (p. 4) can be both historicized and contested. . . .

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