Enabling Decolonised Feminist Critiques
EPW, Vol - XLVIII No. 32, August 10, 2013
Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman:A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought by Esha Niyogi De (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2011; pp xxvii + 246, Rs 745.
Sushumna Kannan (sushumnaa@gmail.com) is affiliated to the San Diego State University, US and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India.
A host of popular as well as scholarly discourses today endorse some or the other version of liberalism. Even as most of us are caught quite unescapably in the spectrum of tradition and modernity, judging and being judged, what we are primarily debating it seems, is simply, our version of liberalism. And it would not be wrong to say that liberalism in numerous discourses today is seen as a kind of autonomy. It is in this context that the book under review draws our attention to indigenous works (literature) located in the colonial period and cultural works (dance-drama, films) produced by activist-thinkers in the postcolonial period that recast the limitations of liberalism. In doing this, the book allows us a brief glimpse into the psyche of precolonial India and helps us understand colonial India – as an active player – even when under the empire’s influence. Through the latter, it widens the scope for a critique of postcolonial and feminist theory, challenging postcolonial theories that cast the colonised as hopelessly conquered. The preface provides the theoretical context and the introduction enables a good understanding of the chapters. The book is divided into two parts and has five chapters including the conclusion.
De begins by telling us that the book began thus:
…from a perplexity that would nag my reading of certain cultural works produced by activist thinkers in India. The works invoked the Enlightenment vocabulary of individual autonomy while elaborating the concepts in ways that did not fully accord with the common understanding. I noted this anomalous practice especially in works which focused on gender, women and sexuality (p vii).
Commonly, says De “we have come to associate such core concepts of liberalism as autonomy and free choice with separatist and territorial notions of the human being.” In contrast to this she sees that “indigenous works…departed from this model in at least two ways” (p viii). “…they invoked autonomy to challenge the separation of people, bodies, societies into unequal groups…” and they selectively recast Enlightenment language “such that the ‘individuals’ they imagined were not completely bounded and separated from others and the world” (p viii). To argue this and “develop a critical apparatus to justify such accounts” De looks at the works of Monomohini Dasi, Binodini Dasi, Rabindranath Tagore, Manjusri-Chaki-Sircar and Aparna Sen. Her question is: “in what specific ways the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self enters, alters, or indigenises within textualisations of gender justice in modern cultures related to Bengal”.
De’s terms “activist thinkers”, “non-western activists” and “indigenous activist individuals” can be initially very confusing although she provides a definition for activism. The unique themes she invokes in reading the activists, however, sustain the interest of the reader: the filial order, the inconsistency within feminism in claiming a liberal conception of the self while also critiquing it, the nature of the changed sense of personhood in mid-19th century or humanist Indian thought, residual non-subjective traditions from precolonial India and so on. In taking on scholars who argue that all agency under the empire is suspect, De asks “how do we explain that many histories of intellectual and social movements have improved some material and conceptual conditions for women and the marginalised, in modern India and elsewhere in the world?” (p xvi).
Filial Order and Agency
Chapter one “Ownership on Sexual Margins: Bodies, National Media, and Autobiography” looks at Monomohini Dasi who “pleads for the institution of physical exams for the male customers of prostitutes” (p 52) and at Binodini Dasi, who claimed her legal autonomy even as she pawned her body, so that her theatrical “family” could look forward to more autonomy of its own. The argument is that their agency emerged divergently. Recognising the filial as important has not been common to historians; in making it a criterion for analysis De is definitely productive. Recall, for instance, Sarojini Naidu’s metaphors in her political speeches, of “setting the house right” and being a daughter of the nation. But De’s understanding of the filial order is that it places the male higher in the hierarchy. Is this accurate? Although in most feminist analyses this would be considered so, a different view could be in order. For instance, texts that endorse the filial order assign different roles to the three sexes and each is asked to fulfill duties and responsibilities. It is also possible to read the filial order as granting women equality in the light that her household activities were worthy ofmoksha, the highest aim of human life as per the tradition that housed it.
De demonstrates how Binodini Dasi is enabled by the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Contract Act and asks for a contract. The point is that, narrative moments such as these “dismantle the dominant filiative or paternalistic national order of family life” (p 71). Through her literary choices, Binodini Dasi is seen as “attentive to some of those indigenous practices of autonomy vis-à-vis community which emerge from different personal struggles for survival amidst uneven change” (p 72). Thus, Binodini Dasi not only emerges as agentic, she is also communicating and building communities in unexpected ways as she engages with enlightenment vocabulary. De’s conclusions on agency do not locate subversion alone, but allow for greater complexity. De recognises another key issue – where does the agency of the activist scholar come from? Thus the discussion of agency is nuanced and students of history will find this relevant.
Throughout the book, De notes the usage of traditional concepts such as self-advaita monism and bhakti. Her recognition of spirituality and the agency arising from it furthers that of Dipesh Chakrabarthy and is novel, but it could have been pursued more fully so that her analysis may have explained another figure from the period, Rashasundari Devi, who taught herself to read, to read the Chaitanya Bhagabat. De reads the Manusmriti as an authoritative text that codifies Hindu law prescribing women to be chaste and submissive. However, scholars have argued that this text is not authoritative and does not represent law. De could have responded to such scholars; she could reassess this aspect of her thesis, which is in reality, an assumption that affects the identification of change with the onset of modernity.
In Chapter Two, “Nation and Individuation: Manhood and the Aesthetics of Female Desire”, De reads Tagore as an aesthetic activist who developed an aesthetic response to European civil society by offering contesting desires and imaginations. In his woman-centred works, Tagore does not merely reject the nationalist themes of motherhood but engages with them to produce a wide array of characters that is every woman and also human. De situates Tagore’s version of humanism in opposition to “postcolonial models which take the anti-Enlightenment position to be a solid foundation for all readings of the Indian modern self”. This ensures that the theoretical inconsistencies that could have resulted from viewing modern institutions as exclusively detrimental are avoided. This also does not rule out, as far as I can see, an interesting thesis of “continuation” of history from precolonial preoccupations. While distinguishing Tagore’s notion of reform from that of Vivekananda’s, De is able to nuance the picture; she points out the differences in Vivekananda’s speeches in India and the West. De also contrasts Saratchandra Chatterjee, characterising him as a Hindu/Victorian nationalist writer, to Tagore’s character Malati from Ordinary Girl who “wants to be represented as a woman on the path to success…such that she is able to compete with her liberated European rivals” (p 89).Chitrangada, another work of Tagore is read to conclude that the work “refuses to reduce personal autonomy to atomism” (p 104). In retaining the different paths that Tagore’s different women characters follow, once shaking the filiative order and once engaging with it through humanism, De says she practises a “realistic textual approach” that does not reduce texts into singular and linear strands.
Chapter Three “Autonomy as Reproductive Labour: The Neoliberal Woman and the Visual Networks of Empire” begins with an analysis of Amra (We), a telefilm to show that “Amra is one among the large number of feminist stories in circulation today which finds no conflict between a woman’s autonomy and her feminine roles as a self-sacrificing homemaker and a (son’s) mother” (p 117). Core enlightenment concepts of personhood and autonomy are seen as extending themselves into the unlikely roles of motherhood and the feminine self-sacrificing woman.
Canons of Womanhood
Examining the relationship between canons and hegemony, De concludes that “two contradictory canons of Indian womanhood – the woman with choice and the woman with familial obligations – are currently gathering aesthetic capital amidst Indians worldwide” (p 119). She views the contradiction as “opposite poles of the sexual division of labour under the neoliberal global market” (p 121) that although being the product of a local imagination intersects with the located histories of empire and liberation. Through an analysis of one adaptation of Tagore’s Raktakarabi(Red Oleanders) staged in the US, De touches themes of immigrant life, identity, sexuality and individualism, recording their trajectories and changes. She then reads Chandalika, a Kuchipudi dance drama, compares it with Tagore’s portrayals of the desiring woman to conclude that it resolves the conflict that Tagore produces.
Chapter Four “Agency under Networks: Belonging and Privacy in Feminist Visual Culture”, in the context of “a person’s range of choices…curiously homogenised” (p 151) asks if the visual images that uphold this make the indigenous activist-intellectual “refuse the humanist ethic of choice in favour, say, of a non-subjective ethic of self-surrender drawn from the indigenous past?” De answers in the negative citing that “the comparatively fluid non-subjective selves of precapitalist Indian society are unavailable today in their form – that is unmediated by some variety or another of modern self-reflexivity” (p 152). While this is largely true, not all historians would accept that every look at texts from India’s past has to necessarily suffer from anachronism.
De, next, points out the two-fold agenda for feminist intellectuals, especially since they are faced with the “deployment of ‘Hindu’ values by communal and misogynist nationalists” (p 152) which is mapped through an analysis ofChandalika. First, they must choose life-paths unmediated by neo-liberal patriarchal canons of feminine choice and then break apart available beguiling yet mortified imagery of women’s self-development such that the gendered contradictions beneath are exposed.
In contrast to Tagore, we are told, today’s feminists articulate women’s agency through the practical activities they engage in and critically think through the social frameworks that have been defined since the inception of anti-colonial modernity. De chooses to show how the work of Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar break out of the specular gaze on women’s autonomy. Manjusri dialectically interweaves
the humanist relationship of an autonomous self with community into the pre-modern Hindu conception of ‘dividual’ personhood, which assumes that the person is both psychologically and biologically open to nature and the cosmos” (p 156).
De’s reading seems to assert that the pre-colonial notion herein, is employed at the service of a feminist agenda. Instead, it could very well be the other way round. That is, De may be under-estimating the potential held in precolonial, non-pure, non-subjective traditions. In this context, we could say that the book does not address works on gender and religion that address some of the issues, by neither reducing the traditions nor their understanding to those who use them. Some of De’s arguments appear to be justifications provided for feminism in retrospect, this is also her stated aim, yes, but they could be attributions of feminist intentions while indeed they are merely cultural responses mired inevitably in responding to, the contemporary “nature and cosmos” so to speak. The project of rescuing feminism takes up more of her energy, instead of which she could have expanded the scope of her project. A transcultural process similar to that of Sircar’s is noted in Aparna Sen’s films as well. The chapter concludes by calling for an awareness of “enabling teleologies of our political economy” that “can reroute humane alternatives and recolonise autonomy” (p196).
Enlightenment Critiques
While De’s portrayal of cultural activists as “not perfect but rather conflicted transhistorical thinkers” is very agreeable, her insistence that “None other than this speculative idea of autonomous worth can enable the fight for sexual justice within heterosexual and patriarchal frameworks” could meet with disagreement. Especially since she maintains that “indigenous activist-intellectuals” cannot but invest in the Enlightenment’s gendered ethic of the autonomous person. The disagreement could take the following form: delineating an indigenous response to Enlightenment ideas is valuable, but at the same time, a critique of enlightenment ideas in their own context as well as elsewhere is necessary. For instance, enlightenment ideas incorporated many aspects of the west’s historical developments; they were in response to Christianity and its interaction with pagan traditions. Hence, how such ideas merit an indigenous response in a different cultural context and how those are agentic in the true sense are questions that need to be pursued some more.
Also, in order to more fully delink the idea of the autonomous individual from the Western Empire, a more textured and layered history of the west may need to be written. In fact, the thinkers that postcolonial thought depends heavily upon are Foucault and Derrida, who provide a critique of the philosophical trajectories of the west while viewing each of its aspects as linked to and manifest in others. Recall Foucault’s works on the prison, the hospital, the church and so on.
De’s book will immediately appeal to those scholars who have believed in the independence of the arguments of a Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar or Ambedkar and visualise a multiplicity of responses from the colonised to the coloniser: collaboration, resistance, rejection, acceptance, awe, shock, intrigue and so on. Like Javeed Alam, who argues in India: Living with Modernity, that modernity can be separated from its tangled history to be used for bringing about a socially just society, De views autonomy as a precious tool we must never forego.
Link to review
The review was posted on Facebook by the EPW and people liked it and shared it even! :)
Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman:A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought by Esha Niyogi De (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2011; pp xxvii + 246, Rs 745.
Sushumna Kannan (sushumnaa@gmail.com) is affiliated to the San Diego State University, US and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India.
A host of popular as well as scholarly discourses today endorse some or the other version of liberalism. Even as most of us are caught quite unescapably in the spectrum of tradition and modernity, judging and being judged, what we are primarily debating it seems, is simply, our version of liberalism. And it would not be wrong to say that liberalism in numerous discourses today is seen as a kind of autonomy. It is in this context that the book under review draws our attention to indigenous works (literature) located in the colonial period and cultural works (dance-drama, films) produced by activist-thinkers in the postcolonial period that recast the limitations of liberalism. In doing this, the book allows us a brief glimpse into the psyche of precolonial India and helps us understand colonial India – as an active player – even when under the empire’s influence. Through the latter, it widens the scope for a critique of postcolonial and feminist theory, challenging postcolonial theories that cast the colonised as hopelessly conquered. The preface provides the theoretical context and the introduction enables a good understanding of the chapters. The book is divided into two parts and has five chapters including the conclusion.
De begins by telling us that the book began thus:
…from a perplexity that would nag my reading of certain cultural works produced by activist thinkers in India. The works invoked the Enlightenment vocabulary of individual autonomy while elaborating the concepts in ways that did not fully accord with the common understanding. I noted this anomalous practice especially in works which focused on gender, women and sexuality (p vii).
Commonly, says De “we have come to associate such core concepts of liberalism as autonomy and free choice with separatist and territorial notions of the human being.” In contrast to this she sees that “indigenous works…departed from this model in at least two ways” (p viii). “…they invoked autonomy to challenge the separation of people, bodies, societies into unequal groups…” and they selectively recast Enlightenment language “such that the ‘individuals’ they imagined were not completely bounded and separated from others and the world” (p viii). To argue this and “develop a critical apparatus to justify such accounts” De looks at the works of Monomohini Dasi, Binodini Dasi, Rabindranath Tagore, Manjusri-Chaki-Sircar and Aparna Sen. Her question is: “in what specific ways the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self enters, alters, or indigenises within textualisations of gender justice in modern cultures related to Bengal”.
De’s terms “activist thinkers”, “non-western activists” and “indigenous activist individuals” can be initially very confusing although she provides a definition for activism. The unique themes she invokes in reading the activists, however, sustain the interest of the reader: the filial order, the inconsistency within feminism in claiming a liberal conception of the self while also critiquing it, the nature of the changed sense of personhood in mid-19th century or humanist Indian thought, residual non-subjective traditions from precolonial India and so on. In taking on scholars who argue that all agency under the empire is suspect, De asks “how do we explain that many histories of intellectual and social movements have improved some material and conceptual conditions for women and the marginalised, in modern India and elsewhere in the world?” (p xvi).
Filial Order and Agency
Chapter one “Ownership on Sexual Margins: Bodies, National Media, and Autobiography” looks at Monomohini Dasi who “pleads for the institution of physical exams for the male customers of prostitutes” (p 52) and at Binodini Dasi, who claimed her legal autonomy even as she pawned her body, so that her theatrical “family” could look forward to more autonomy of its own. The argument is that their agency emerged divergently. Recognising the filial as important has not been common to historians; in making it a criterion for analysis De is definitely productive. Recall, for instance, Sarojini Naidu’s metaphors in her political speeches, of “setting the house right” and being a daughter of the nation. But De’s understanding of the filial order is that it places the male higher in the hierarchy. Is this accurate? Although in most feminist analyses this would be considered so, a different view could be in order. For instance, texts that endorse the filial order assign different roles to the three sexes and each is asked to fulfill duties and responsibilities. It is also possible to read the filial order as granting women equality in the light that her household activities were worthy ofmoksha, the highest aim of human life as per the tradition that housed it.
De demonstrates how Binodini Dasi is enabled by the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Contract Act and asks for a contract. The point is that, narrative moments such as these “dismantle the dominant filiative or paternalistic national order of family life” (p 71). Through her literary choices, Binodini Dasi is seen as “attentive to some of those indigenous practices of autonomy vis-à-vis community which emerge from different personal struggles for survival amidst uneven change” (p 72). Thus, Binodini Dasi not only emerges as agentic, she is also communicating and building communities in unexpected ways as she engages with enlightenment vocabulary. De’s conclusions on agency do not locate subversion alone, but allow for greater complexity. De recognises another key issue – where does the agency of the activist scholar come from? Thus the discussion of agency is nuanced and students of history will find this relevant.
Throughout the book, De notes the usage of traditional concepts such as self-advaita monism and bhakti. Her recognition of spirituality and the agency arising from it furthers that of Dipesh Chakrabarthy and is novel, but it could have been pursued more fully so that her analysis may have explained another figure from the period, Rashasundari Devi, who taught herself to read, to read the Chaitanya Bhagabat. De reads the Manusmriti as an authoritative text that codifies Hindu law prescribing women to be chaste and submissive. However, scholars have argued that this text is not authoritative and does not represent law. De could have responded to such scholars; she could reassess this aspect of her thesis, which is in reality, an assumption that affects the identification of change with the onset of modernity.
In Chapter Two, “Nation and Individuation: Manhood and the Aesthetics of Female Desire”, De reads Tagore as an aesthetic activist who developed an aesthetic response to European civil society by offering contesting desires and imaginations. In his woman-centred works, Tagore does not merely reject the nationalist themes of motherhood but engages with them to produce a wide array of characters that is every woman and also human. De situates Tagore’s version of humanism in opposition to “postcolonial models which take the anti-Enlightenment position to be a solid foundation for all readings of the Indian modern self”. This ensures that the theoretical inconsistencies that could have resulted from viewing modern institutions as exclusively detrimental are avoided. This also does not rule out, as far as I can see, an interesting thesis of “continuation” of history from precolonial preoccupations. While distinguishing Tagore’s notion of reform from that of Vivekananda’s, De is able to nuance the picture; she points out the differences in Vivekananda’s speeches in India and the West. De also contrasts Saratchandra Chatterjee, characterising him as a Hindu/Victorian nationalist writer, to Tagore’s character Malati from Ordinary Girl who “wants to be represented as a woman on the path to success…such that she is able to compete with her liberated European rivals” (p 89).Chitrangada, another work of Tagore is read to conclude that the work “refuses to reduce personal autonomy to atomism” (p 104). In retaining the different paths that Tagore’s different women characters follow, once shaking the filiative order and once engaging with it through humanism, De says she practises a “realistic textual approach” that does not reduce texts into singular and linear strands.
Chapter Three “Autonomy as Reproductive Labour: The Neoliberal Woman and the Visual Networks of Empire” begins with an analysis of Amra (We), a telefilm to show that “Amra is one among the large number of feminist stories in circulation today which finds no conflict between a woman’s autonomy and her feminine roles as a self-sacrificing homemaker and a (son’s) mother” (p 117). Core enlightenment concepts of personhood and autonomy are seen as extending themselves into the unlikely roles of motherhood and the feminine self-sacrificing woman.
Canons of Womanhood
Examining the relationship between canons and hegemony, De concludes that “two contradictory canons of Indian womanhood – the woman with choice and the woman with familial obligations – are currently gathering aesthetic capital amidst Indians worldwide” (p 119). She views the contradiction as “opposite poles of the sexual division of labour under the neoliberal global market” (p 121) that although being the product of a local imagination intersects with the located histories of empire and liberation. Through an analysis of one adaptation of Tagore’s Raktakarabi(Red Oleanders) staged in the US, De touches themes of immigrant life, identity, sexuality and individualism, recording their trajectories and changes. She then reads Chandalika, a Kuchipudi dance drama, compares it with Tagore’s portrayals of the desiring woman to conclude that it resolves the conflict that Tagore produces.
Chapter Four “Agency under Networks: Belonging and Privacy in Feminist Visual Culture”, in the context of “a person’s range of choices…curiously homogenised” (p 151) asks if the visual images that uphold this make the indigenous activist-intellectual “refuse the humanist ethic of choice in favour, say, of a non-subjective ethic of self-surrender drawn from the indigenous past?” De answers in the negative citing that “the comparatively fluid non-subjective selves of precapitalist Indian society are unavailable today in their form – that is unmediated by some variety or another of modern self-reflexivity” (p 152). While this is largely true, not all historians would accept that every look at texts from India’s past has to necessarily suffer from anachronism.
De, next, points out the two-fold agenda for feminist intellectuals, especially since they are faced with the “deployment of ‘Hindu’ values by communal and misogynist nationalists” (p 152) which is mapped through an analysis ofChandalika. First, they must choose life-paths unmediated by neo-liberal patriarchal canons of feminine choice and then break apart available beguiling yet mortified imagery of women’s self-development such that the gendered contradictions beneath are exposed.
In contrast to Tagore, we are told, today’s feminists articulate women’s agency through the practical activities they engage in and critically think through the social frameworks that have been defined since the inception of anti-colonial modernity. De chooses to show how the work of Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar break out of the specular gaze on women’s autonomy. Manjusri dialectically interweaves
the humanist relationship of an autonomous self with community into the pre-modern Hindu conception of ‘dividual’ personhood, which assumes that the person is both psychologically and biologically open to nature and the cosmos” (p 156).
De’s reading seems to assert that the pre-colonial notion herein, is employed at the service of a feminist agenda. Instead, it could very well be the other way round. That is, De may be under-estimating the potential held in precolonial, non-pure, non-subjective traditions. In this context, we could say that the book does not address works on gender and religion that address some of the issues, by neither reducing the traditions nor their understanding to those who use them. Some of De’s arguments appear to be justifications provided for feminism in retrospect, this is also her stated aim, yes, but they could be attributions of feminist intentions while indeed they are merely cultural responses mired inevitably in responding to, the contemporary “nature and cosmos” so to speak. The project of rescuing feminism takes up more of her energy, instead of which she could have expanded the scope of her project. A transcultural process similar to that of Sircar’s is noted in Aparna Sen’s films as well. The chapter concludes by calling for an awareness of “enabling teleologies of our political economy” that “can reroute humane alternatives and recolonise autonomy” (p196).
Enlightenment Critiques
While De’s portrayal of cultural activists as “not perfect but rather conflicted transhistorical thinkers” is very agreeable, her insistence that “None other than this speculative idea of autonomous worth can enable the fight for sexual justice within heterosexual and patriarchal frameworks” could meet with disagreement. Especially since she maintains that “indigenous activist-intellectuals” cannot but invest in the Enlightenment’s gendered ethic of the autonomous person. The disagreement could take the following form: delineating an indigenous response to Enlightenment ideas is valuable, but at the same time, a critique of enlightenment ideas in their own context as well as elsewhere is necessary. For instance, enlightenment ideas incorporated many aspects of the west’s historical developments; they were in response to Christianity and its interaction with pagan traditions. Hence, how such ideas merit an indigenous response in a different cultural context and how those are agentic in the true sense are questions that need to be pursued some more.
Also, in order to more fully delink the idea of the autonomous individual from the Western Empire, a more textured and layered history of the west may need to be written. In fact, the thinkers that postcolonial thought depends heavily upon are Foucault and Derrida, who provide a critique of the philosophical trajectories of the west while viewing each of its aspects as linked to and manifest in others. Recall Foucault’s works on the prison, the hospital, the church and so on.
De’s book will immediately appeal to those scholars who have believed in the independence of the arguments of a Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar or Ambedkar and visualise a multiplicity of responses from the colonised to the coloniser: collaboration, resistance, rejection, acceptance, awe, shock, intrigue and so on. Like Javeed Alam, who argues in India: Living with Modernity, that modernity can be separated from its tangled history to be used for bringing about a socially just society, De views autonomy as a precious tool we must never forego.
Link to review
The review was posted on Facebook by the EPW and people liked it and shared it even! :)
Comments