Masculine Nation: Women's Politics: Spaces of Resistance and Nationalist Activism for Indian Women in Colonial Bengal 1900-1930

主题和研究问题陈述：这个项目将提出一个明确的问题：在殖民时期的孟加拉，妇女有哪些文化抵抗的空间？主流印度民族主义是一个男权主义项目(Chatterjee，1994)，它试图以战略的方式包括和接纳妇女，管制她们进入公共场所(Sarkar 1984，Ramaswamy 2010)。在接近19世纪末的印度，民族主义话语越来越多地集中在“新女性”的地位上，她们应该是“现代的”，同时又表现出“传统的”又称民族主义的性格(Chatterjee，2007)。在此期间，农村传统被积极地政治化，以动员村庄和妇女。该项目将探索孟加拉城市上层种姓男子宣扬的对母神的民族主义崇拜，认为这是一种有意识的努力，目的是让妇女参与进来，并入侵乡村。它将研究宗教、民间戏剧和精英民族主义者区域中的神灵的使用，包括小册子、杂志文章和城市戏剧，以及平行的民间传统，如Jatra(乡村戏剧)，以理解上层阶级民族主义如何缓慢地同质化底层抵抗文化，将他们吞噬到民族主义梦想中(Guha和Spivak，1988)。我的项目将填补学术领域的空白，这些空白忽视了城市和农村反殖民抵抗的冲突，以及精英民族主义者试图编码空间以抵抗表达主权主义的话语中的问题。它将论证，通过将民间戏剧政治化，城市上层阶级民族主义者不仅包括女性，还包括农村；迄今为止与民族主义斗争和国家形成无关的少数群体。该项目不仅将研究男性主导的民族主义梦想如何使女性的地位成为问题，通过编码可供她们表达文化的空间来抵制女性，还将研究女性如何通过观察女性创作和消费的文本参与到这个霸权的折叠中(福布斯，1996)。因此，它将提出一个更深层次的问题：精英民族主义者如何塑造围绕民族主义的话语，以规范文化表达的空间？为了回答这个问题，它将研究城市和农村的抵抗文化，并确定主流印度主义为妇女提供的空间。

Statement of topic and Research Questions: This project will ask the explicit question:What spaces of cultural resistance were available to women in colonial Bengal? MainstreamIndian nationalism was a masculinist project (Chatterjee, 1994) that sought to include andexclude women in strategic ways, regulating their entrance into public spaces (Sarkar 1984,Ramaswamy 2010). Nationalist discourse in India, towards the end of the nineteenthcentury, became increasingly centred on the position of the "new woman" who was to be"modern" and at the same time display a "traditional" aka nationalist character (Chatterjee,2007). Rural traditions were actively politicised during this time to mobilise villages andwomen. This project will explore the nationalist cult of the Mother Goddess propagated byurban, upper-caste Bengali men as a conscious effort to include women, and invade thecountryside. It will study the use of religion, folk-theatre and godheads in elite nationalisttracts, including pamphlets, magazine articles and urban theatre, as well as parallel folktraditions such as Jatra (rustic theatre), to understand how upper-class nationalism slowlyhomogenised subaltern cultures of resistance, engulfing them into the nationalistic dream(Guha and Spivak, 1988). My project will fill the void in scholarship that has neglected theconflicts of urban and rural anti-colonial resistance and the problems in the discoursecreated by elite nationalists that sought to encode spaces for resistant articulation of theminorities. It will argue that by politicising folk theatre, urban upper class nationalists soughtto include not just women, but also the countryside; minorities that had been tangential to thenationalist struggle and formation of the nation hitherto.This project will not only study howmale-dominated nationalist dream problematised the position of women, a minority in theresistance by encoding the spaces available to them for cultural articulation but also howwomen participated in this hegemonic fold by looking at texts authored and consumed bywomen (Forbes 1996). It will thus ask a further question: How were elite nationalists shapingthe discourse around nationalism in order to regulate spaces of cultural articulation forminorities? To answer this question, it will study the cultures of resistance, both urban andrural, and locate the spaces accessible (made available) to women by mainstream Indiannationalism.