The book ‘Making the Woman’ analyses emotions, attitudes, cultural practices, rituals, social norms, entertainment, and alternative sexualities in early modern India

Comprising four illustrative parts, this anthology analyses emotions, attitudes, cultural practices, rituals, social norms, entertainment, and alternative sexualities in early modern India.

Discussions on gender often trigger an intense debate about whether it is tied to biology or is a social construct. Gender identity is neither inscribed nor natural; it is not fixed or one-dimensional. It draws its sustenance from the dominant social and cultural discourse. Feminist theorist Judith Butler describes gender as discursively constructed and sustained. It is a daily activity that constructs gender within social norms and cultural practices. Given this, oversimplified and stereotypical male-female binaries wither considerably, and unfamiliar alternative sexualities surface recurrently. It is daunting task to narrate the tormented and occasionally tantalizing tale of the making of the woman by mapping the complex terrain of patriarchal society in 18th and 19th century India.

It assumes even greater importance as gender has been central to India’s experience of alien rule and cultural subjugation. During the colonial period, Indian women were made objects of derision and humiliation. Can a close analysis of unfree and oppressed womanhood vividly depicted through the private and the public worlds, the normative way of life, sexuality outside marriage, and through narratives of femininity, remove our blinkers about gendered social construction?

It is daunting task to narrate the tormented and occasionally tantalizing tale of the making of the woman by mapping the complex terrain of patriarchal society in 18th and 19th century India.

All this is skillfully articulated in Making the Woman; Discourses of Gender in the 18th-19th Century India by Sutapa Dutta and Shivangini Tandon. The anthology tries to understand the notion of womanhood in the stifling social settings entrenched in the binaries that constituted India’s material and spiritual life in that period. For Dutta and Tandon, the question of gender identity goes well beyond the political struggle for empowerment and can redefine the much-revered notion of womanhood in Indian culture that often underpins hierarchy and patriarchy.

Far from producing a mushy chronicle of the existential travails of women, this anthology, comprising four illustrative parts, goes beyond essentialism and social constructs. It comprises an assortment of well-researched articles that seek to analyze the emotions, attitudes, cultural practices, rituals, social norms, popular means of entertainment, and freedom of sexual expressions, the nurturing of the libido, sexuality outside marriage, and alternative sexualities. To a reasonable extent, it provides a rich, refreshing and multifaceted exploration of the representation of women and gender relations against the backdrop of early modernity’s socio-cultural and feudal power structure.

At the outset, the editors state: “This collection critically examines and questions the notions and formations of women and gender binaries which have been historically shaped by multiple and competing actors, practices, institutions and discourses in 18th and 19th century India.” The obliteration of women from history is not the result entirely of social practices and prejudices. It occurred due to the absence of women’s presence.

This anthology has done a commendable job in distinguishing gender identity from biological sex in 18th and 19th century India

Part One includes two articles that analyze the display and performative dimensions of gender in the public domain in Kashmir and Oudh. Shazia Malik’s paper, interrogating the Colonial Categorization of Female Dancers:

The Case of Hafizas in Kashmir studies how society punished any deviance from fixed gender roles. The Hafizas, an old community of women artists engaged in reciting mystic compositions, was held in high esteem. However, the colonial power labelled them prostitutes and they came to be ridiculed. Malik explains how regressive Victorian notions of morality were forced upon non-conforming female public entertainers.

Wajid Ali Shah’s much-maligned harem was not a site of unbridled voluptuousness but the epicenter of political control. Tara Sami Dutt documents this through a close reading of a manuscript, Ishqnama, written at the behest of the ruler of Oudh. The manuscript, carrying 103 paintings and a long narrative poem, projects authority and highlights women’s political, personal and religious roles.

The second part of the volume, entitled Questioning the Normative, includes four intriguing readings of subjects that include masculine norms in Mughal society, Dalit counter histories of 1857, gender and tribal identity, and the iconicity in Indian goddesses. Riya Gupta puts forward a perceptive and well-informed debate on the ideal norms of manliness discussed in the exhortative text, Mirzanama. Bringing in the Western idea of the gentleman into this essay would perhaps have made it even more rewarding. Gupta has also highlighted the contribution of Dalit women such as Avanti Bai, Jhalkari Bai, Mahabiri Devi and Uda Devi to the First War of Independence.

Nilanjana Mukherjee astutely locates Kali within nationalist iconography and discusses how the colonial power denigrated the goddess, the most enigmatic and forceful personification of female power in the Shakti tradition. Their view transformed Kali into a radical other.

In the third section entitled The Problematic Others, articles by Tanya Burman and Noble Shrivastava turn the reader’s attention to the tawaifs or courtesans of Lucknow and Delhi, and explain how they upended gender norms. Lubna Irfan deftly maps out the multiple and equally significant terrains of the castrated man, the Khwajasara, in the social spatial setup of Mughal India. The last section, comprising three articles, traces the narratives of feminity in literary texts written in Tamil, Bengali and Assamese.

In sum, this anthology has done a commendable job in distinguishing gender identity from biological sex in 18th and 19th century India.

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"