Author: Himani Bannerji
Publisher: Tulika
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 222
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185229473
Description
This book is a collection of essays written from a Marxist feminist perspective, seeking to make a contribution in the field of historical sociology. The essays read moral regulations and culture in terms of a hegemonic process.
This book is a collection of essays written from a Marxist feminist perspective, seeking to make a contribution in the field of historical sociology. The essays speak of the different ways in which social subjects and their agencies have been constructed and represented in the context of the development of colonial hegemony and socio-cultural formations in India. The book primarily focuses, through four essays, on the constructive proposals for social subjectivities and agencies of Bengali middle-class women by both the indigenous and the colonial elite. The remaining two essays speak of the invention or construction of ‘India’ as an ideological category for ruling, signaling towards a colonially ascribed identity.
The essays capture the fluidity and complexity of subject construction r formation, and read moral regulations and culture in terms of a hegemonic process. They range from middle-class Bengali women’s attempts at self-fashioning, to the colonial ideological reflexes within which their projects are articulated. They both disclose and query the tensions inherent in the processes of indigenous socio-cultural constructions and identity formations, and the reductionism involved in the creation of colonial ‘others’. Patriarchy and gender organization are treated in these essays as more than ‘women’s problems’, as essentially constitutive dimensions of hegemony, no matter aspired to by whom.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Inventing Subjects: An Introduction
Writing ‘India’, Doing ‘Ideology’: William Jones’ Construction of India as an Ideological Category
Beyond the Ruling Category to What Actually Happens : Notes on James Mill’s Historiography in ‘the History of British India’
Age of Consent and Hegemonic Social Reform
Attired in Virtue: Discourse on shame (lajja) and clothing of the Gentlewoman (bhadramahila) in colonial Bengal
Fashioning a Self : Educational Proposals for and by Women in Popular Magazines in Colonial Bengal
Re-Generation: Mothers and Daughters in Bengal’s Literary Space
References
Index