Catalyst for change
RUMINA SETHI
SPECTERS OF MOTHER INDIA - The Global Restructuring of an Empire: Mrinalini Sinha; Duke University Press, Durham, U.S., Zubaan, K-92, First Floor, Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi-110016. Rs. 595.
The title of Mrinalini Sinha's book is self-explanatory: this is an analysis of Katherine Mayo's famous Mother India. Rushdie's Satanic Verses is perhaps closest to Mother India in terms of causing an international furore upon its publication. While Katherine Mayo insisted on India's backwardness through her narration, her critics cited chapter and verse about India's new laws against evil social practices such as child marriage. During the chequered history of colonialism in India, Mother India evidently encapsulated the controversies replete in a moment of social change.
Public versus private
In the decades before India's Independence, the imminent sovereignty of the nation has been frequently compared to the ownership of one's home. Since the material world, however insignificant and treacherous, related to the outer or the world (bahir) that had been subordinated by the coloniser, it was important to make the inner world (ghar) autonomous.
Women, especially mothers, who were unaffected by the material world, began to represent the sovereignty, and consequent spirituality, of the home. As far as the private sphere of the household is concerned, women were thus stereotypically appropriated by the patriarchal binaries of the world and the home that had been used to distinguish the West from the East. A woman's function of child bearing and subsequent rearing linked to the wider concept of nation-as-mother is often evoked through the concept of `Mother India'.
The controversy
Mrinalini Sinha's book locates the trope of Indian motherhood from the Government of India Act of 1919 to the Government of India Act of 1935. The former Act began the process of passing on governmental responsibility to the Indians in areas such as education, health and local self-government. The latter coincided with the rising nationalist fervour in India coinciding with the end of colonial rule. Sinha traces the Mother India controversies between this time span and comments judiciously on the political struggles of women, peasants, workers and tribals who were otherwise ignored in the "larger" interests of the nation state.
So what was the controversy? Numerous researches on Indian feminism and the politics of the representation of women have, by now, provided us with several points of view. When Mayo's Mother India was published, it became a representative text of certain `facts' about India, summarised retrospectively in its 1970s preface: "For this is India as it truly was — and as parts of it still are — in all its helplessness, hopelessness and horror." Perhaps no other book of that time combined in itself the various streams of nationalism, imperialism, feminism and their often contradictory and ambiguous ideologies.
Yet no other book has also lent itself so easily to attacks from anti-orientalists, who spurred by Said's monumental work in the 1970s, would sharply condemn the "grimly factual and harrowing picture of India" presented by Mayo that was being taken as a popular source of information about the country. Whereas the novel was earlier a handbook used for strengthening the colonial hold over India, it later became an active source of fashioning U.S. foreign policy towards India. Mayo was thus held largely culpable of safeguarding the view that India was unfit to govern itself.
Social reform
The women's question in 19th century agendas of social reform was particularly linked with the publication of Mother India. Always a product of male interests, the issue of women and their piteous status was a sign of India's social backwardness. Yet, for the Hindus, the belief in a glorious past where women were ostensibly worshipped like goddesses could not be easily squashed. Such was the climate into which Mother India was received.
No less rousing was the reception of Mehboob Khan's later film, `Mother India', at once the companion and the critique of its infamous literary predecessor. Although the film imbues women with some aspects of `shakti', it also falls in line with the pre-existing homogeneous configurations of women as goddesses and mothers.
Sinha reveals how the subversive nature of social reform generated by male agendas and representations hardly contributed to the resolution of the women's question. She writes: "The possibilities briefly available in the controversy over Mother India were subsequently stifled as the collective agency of women was reoriented to usher a unitary national political imagination whose abstract citizen by default was Hindu, upper-caste and male."
Although the focus of Mrinalini Sinha's book is narrow — the controversy surrounding the publication of Mother India and its effect on the future of British policy in India — its conception is titanic encapsulating the forces of imperialism, nationalism and social reform in its ambit, evinced through much scholarship emerging out of some 80 pages of endnotes. Her concerns are noteworthy, no doubt, and her research painstaking, but her writing style is somewhat turgid and obscure and might appear forbidding to a new entrant in the area of third world gender studies.
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