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

主题陈述和研究问题：这个项目将提出一个明确的问题：孟加拉殖民地的妇女有哪些文化抵抗的空间？主流印度民族主义是一个男性主义项目（Chatterjee, 1994），它试图以战略方式包容和排斥女性，规范她们进入公共空间（Sarkar 1984,Ramaswamy 2010）。十九世纪末，印度的民族主义话语越来越集中在“新女性”的地位上，她们是“现代的”，同时又表现出一种“传统的”民族主义特征（Chatterjee,2007）。在此期间，农村传统被积极政治化，以动员村庄和妇女。这个项目将探索由城市、上层种姓的孟加拉男性宣传的民族主义崇拜，作为一种有意识的努力，包括女性，并入侵农村。它将研究宗教、民间戏剧和神灵在精英民族主义小册子、杂志文章和城市戏剧中的使用，以及类似的民间传统，如Jatra（乡村戏剧），以了解上层阶级的民族主义是如何慢慢地将下层社会的抵抗文化同质化的，并将它们吞没在民族主义的梦想中（Guha和Spivak， 1988）。我的项目将填补学术界忽视城乡反殖民抵抗冲突的空白，以及精英民族主义者在寻求为少数民族的抵抗表达编码空间时所产生的问题。它认为，通过将民间戏剧政治化，城市上层阶级的民族主义者不仅试图将女性纳入其中，还试图将农村纳入其中；迄今为止，与民族主义斗争和国家形成无关的少数民族。这个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，女性是抵抗运动中的少数群体，通过对她们可用的文化表达空间进行编码，还将研究女性如何通过查看女性撰写和消费的文本参与到这种霸权的折叠中（福布斯1996）。因此，它将提出一个进一步的问题：精英民族主义者如何围绕民族主义塑造话语，以规范少数民族的文化表达空间？为了回答这个问题，它将研究城市和农村的抵抗文化，并定位主流印度民族主义对妇女开放的空间。

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.