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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005)

PADMA ANAGAOL'S The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 is a most welcome addition to the growing number of monographs on the history of Indian women in colonial India. Unlike many recently published books on women and gender, Anagol breaks with conventional patterns to put women's feminist consciousness, assertiveness, resistance, and solidarity at the center of the discussion. Focusing on Maharashtrian women in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, Anagol's book has the potential to change the way we think about Indian women in history.

As Anagol points out, historical work on Indian women falls into three main categories: the impact of colonial law and administration on women's lives, the reconstitution of patriarchy, and the work and lives of women who have been left out of the master narrative. Studies of colonial law and the reconstitution of patriarchy lead us to look at institutions that oppressed women, rather than at women themselves. And, while the third category makes women visible and presents their words and deeds, these works focus on individuals with too little attention to the larger context or the audience for their words and activities.

Anagol also faults the methodology that informs these works: methodology borrowed from androcentric history, the Subaltern School, and Western feminist history. Further distortions result from a teleological impetus to work backwards from a post-independence question: why are Indian women oppressed?

Padma Anagol urges historians to focus on women's agency, on women as feminist actors demanding civil, political, and religious rights. This means moving women to the center of the discussion and looking at what they were saying, writing, and doing in relation to dominant discourses in society. Her concern is Maharashtrian women, but Anagol suggests a method of studying women in late colonial India that could be applied to other regions.

This book is divided into five subject chapters with an introduction that discusses historiography and methodology, a concluding chapter on "Indian feminism and Its Legacy," an appendix with biographical notes about a number of women reformers, and an exhaustive bibliography. The five subject chapters are organized thematically: "Christian Women's Discourses and Work," "Hindu Women's Discourses and Work," "Women's Assertion and Resistance," "Women, Crime and Survival Strategies," and "Women's Discourses on Marriage and Marital Rights." Although this arrangement is not entirely satisfactory, it would be difficult to suggest a better way to present the material.

In her chapter on "Christian Women's Discourses and Work," Anagol discusses how Christian converts explained their attraction to Christianity and questioned Hinduism's treatment of women. Both the first generation (e.g., Pandita Ramabai) and the second generation (e.g., Krupabai Khisti) gravitated towards Christianity because it did not define women as inferior to men. In a detailed account of the writings and work of Christian women, Anagol explains the appeal of their message to a wide range of women irrespective of class, caste, religion, and marital status.

In chapter 3, Anagol presents Hindu women as aware of their subordination, but careful about challenging traditional Hinduism. Working with male reformers who wanted to improve the status of women but feared female autonomy, and Western women, these women promoted change within an acceptable framework. For example, Ramabai Ranade employed an "ingenious adaptation of the contemporary discourse on motherhood." (69) Using a variety of sources including women's periodicals, novels, and short stories by Mahar woman, and women's response to the custom of tonsuring widows, Anagol draws attention to women's solidarity as they evoked the concept of stri jati (sisterhood), condemned the sastras, and supported each other.

Chapter 4, on assertion and resistance, demands a reexamination of the colonial state as the hegemonic oppressor of Indian subjects. Anagol demonstrates that Maharashtrian women from all social classes petitioned against laws and injunctions that would limit their right to property and maintenance, and control their sexuality. Looking at court cases, petitions, and newspaper reports, Anagol shows how women fought restrictive measures by adopting children, going to court, publishing their stories, writing role-reversal literature, complaining to the authorities, and defying the law. In some instances, they were merely a nuisance, but in others, they forcefully challenged men's version of society and culture.

In my favourite chapter, Anagol presents the female criminal as an example of violent resistance to patriarchal control. In this rich discussion, the reader learns about women who belonged to "Criminal Tribes" (a new category in 1871), and those charged with killing their husbands or children. Anagol cogently argues that male reformers and colonial authorities colluded in reconstructing infanticide as a crime of sexual transgression committed by unchaste daughters, highly sexed widows, or wayward wives. In shifting the focus from the crime itself to the woman who bore the child, they overlooked evidence implicating others and refused to consider the responsibility of the child's father. Drawing from the petitions of 100 women accused of infanticide, Anagol finds their explanations at odds with those constructed by their accusers. First, it becomes clear that women were often assisted in disposing of their children, and when they did so it was under circumstances of extreme duress.

Addressing marriage and marital rights in chapter 6, Anagol asserts that Hindu men felt threatened by women's appeals to British law and by the end of the century forced legal authorities into a more conservative interpretation of law in matters of gender. Placing the well-known Rukhmabai case in historical context, Anagol informs us that the majority of petitions for the restoration of conjugal rights were filed by women, many of them deserted by husbands who took another wife or simply lost interest. By bringing their complaints to court, abandoned women frequently won what they were looking for – maintenance or alimony. Rukhmabai's case was a departure from the norm in that it was brought by her husband, and developed into a debate about female autonomy. As Hindu men hastened to quote the Sastras and re-inscribe patriarchal control, women supported Rukhmabai, and denounced religious texts. In her discussion of this case and the Age of Consent controversy of 1891, Anagol explains that these legal issues did not pit colonial masters against Indian reformers and traditionalists, but rather triangulated the debate about female autonomy. Rather than seeing the British authorities as masters of the situation, Anagol presents them as under siege by men and women who wanted support for their own agendas.

My summary of Padma Anagol's chapters cannot do justice to the wealth of material included nor to the complexity of her analysis. Her objective was to put women at the center of the narrative and in doing so reveal the "long but hidden tradition of feminist thought and politics." (219) Using a variety of archival documents and theoretical insights from contemporary scholarship on European and Asian history, Anagol convincingly argues that women in Maharashtra were conscious of their oppression and acted in solidarity to fight it. In her view, the much vaunted twentieth century women's movement was pale in comparison with this movement. In hitching their star to the nationalist movement, women settled for less radical goals than they previously held.

The Emergence of Feminism in India is a good read, although repetitious in places and not always clear about the audience for women's writings and the connections between women. In my view, the author exaggerates the differences between Bengal and Maharashtra, differences I believe are more related to historical writing than to the historical record. Anagol faults Meredith Borthwick (1984) for using models developed by historians writing the history of European women, and comments extensively on Partha Chatterjee's assertion that nationalists fashioned a "new woman" controlled by a "new patriarchy." Meanwhile, historians such as Tanika Sarkar and Judith Walsh have complicated the picture of women's complicity with patriarchy. My work, with Tapan Raychaudhuri, on the child-widow/ lady doctor Haimabati Sen, explodes the myth of compliant women inside social reform organizations, while the edited anthology, Talking of Power: Early Writings of Bengal Women (2003), collects the work of a number of women who were not silenced by purdah and feudalism. Using Anagol's methodology and research strategies, I believe historians of Bengal could find more evidence of feminist consciousness and solidarity.

This book is a must-read for those who study colonial history and would be a wonderful book to use in a course on Women/Gender in India. I expect The Emergence of Feminism in India to shift the dominant paradigm on colonialism, nationalism, and gender in India to recognition of women's consciousness, agency, and involvement in the reform agenda.


GERALDINE FORBES State University of New York, Oswego

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