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

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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.