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

主题和研究问题的声明：这个项目将提出明确的问题：什么样的文化抵抗空间是在殖民地孟加拉妇女？主流印度民族主义是一个男性主义项目（Chatterjee，1994），试图以战略方式包括和排除妇女，规范她们进入公共场所（Sarkar，1984; Ramaswamy，2010）。19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，她们将是“现代”的，同时表现出“传统”的民族主义特征（Chatterjee，2007年）。在这段时间里，农村传统被积极地政治化，以动员村庄和妇女。这个项目将探讨由城市，高种姓的孟加拉男子作为一个有意识的努力，包括妇女，并入侵农村传播的母亲女神的民族主义邪教。它将研究宗教，民间戏剧和godheads在精英民族主义小册子中的使用，包括小册子，杂志文章和城市戏剧，以及类似的民间传统，如Jatra（乡村戏剧），以了解上层民族主义如何慢慢同质化下层文化的抵抗，将他们卷入民族主义的梦想（Guha和Spivak，1988）。我的项目将填补学术界的空白，这些学术界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为少数民族的抵抗表达编码空间的话语中的问题。它将认为，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包括妇女，而且还包括农村;这个项目不仅将研究男性主导的民族主义梦想如何使妇女的地位成为问题，少数人通过编码他们可以获得的文化表达空间来进行抵抗，但也通过查看女性创作和消费的文本来了解女性如何参与这一霸权（福布斯1996年）。因此，它将提出一个进一步的问题：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，并确定主流印度民族主义对妇女可访问的空间。

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.