See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/249767116

Kumkum Sangari, Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narrative,

Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika. 1999. 503 pages. Rs. 650 (hb)

Article in Indian Journal of Gender Studies · June 2003

DOI: 10.1177/097152150301000211

CITATION READS

1 3,887

1 author:

Indrani Sen
University of Delhi
23 PUBLICATIONS 94 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Indrani Sen on 30 January 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

(From The Indian Journal of Gender Studies)

Dr. Indrani Sen

Dept of English, Sri Venkateswara College,
University of Delhi

BOOK REVIEW

Kumkum Sangari, Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narrative, Colonial
English. New Delhi:Tulika. 1999. 503 Pages. Rs.650 (hb).
Arguably, among the path-breaking studies on gender in colonial India in the last two decades
has been Recasting Women, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (1989). That collection
of essays, which had marked the coming-of-age of academic interventions in the exploration of
gender and history in India has, in fact, come to assume today some kind of a land-mark status.
Quite apart from that volume’s seminal essays had been its co-authored Introduction, which had
navigated with intellectual rigour the complex inter-faces between history, culture and gender
relations.
It is against this background that one approaches the book under review, which presents a
collection of Sangari’s essays written roughly over the last two decades, some of which have
appeared earlier in different journals and collections. In a sense, the eight essays which make up
this volume essentially trace the trajectory of her shifting interest and engagement over these
many years, from her earlier interest in literary studies to her current preoccupation with issues
relating to gender and culture in colonial India. What, at first glance, is particularly striking about
this volume is its range of issues, its rigorous theorising, as well as the wealth of materials it
draws upon. This is particularly true of the essays which concern themselves with questions
pertaining to gender-categories in nineteenth century colonial India, where the author draws
upon fascinating sources like contemporary newspapers, letters to the press, instruction books,
tracts, text books and journals.

In the short essay ‘Figures for the “unconscious”’ the author seeks to address questions
pertaining to gender and ethnography in two different novels written about a century apart,
namely, R.C. Dutt’s The Last of the Rajputs (1879) and Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy
Biswas (1971). Noting that the common link between these otherwise different texts is their
valorisation of the figure of the indigenous female, she points out that in the later novel
indigenous culture is figured as ‘unspoilt tribal culture’ (p.80), ‘untamed nature’ (p.77), while
adivasi female sexuality is inscribed as ‘assertive’ (p.80), ‘wild and primeval’ (p.80) and the
independence of the indigenous female is contrasted with the effeteness of the middle class
woman. Observing that ‘The tribal here, especially the woman, is dark, inscrutable, a kind of
repository of unrepressed, orgiastic, magical sexuality, therapeutic powers, and the
“unconscious”, and as such a solution for the urban malaise’ (p.79) she goes on to probe the
entangled strands of primitivism, Orientalism, Indian nationalism and ‘inversions of social
subalternity’ present in ‘some puranic and Vaishnav texts’ (p 84), which underlie these
representations. However, although mention is made of the different contexts of the two literary
texts, the essay does not reveal the kind of complex situating and dismantling -- which one has
come to expect from Sangari -- of the tensions and contradictions, the shifts and changes
marking the cultural contexts of the 1870s and the 1960s.

Easily among the most significant of the essays in this volume is “Relating Histories” (which had
earlier appeared in Joshi, 1991). Sophisticated and rigorous, it marks a significant intervention in
the current enquiry into the origins of English literary studies in India. In particular, it seeks to
complicate the formulation on the subject which was presented in Gauri Viswanathan’s
pioneering study, The Masks of Conquest (1989). While the latter had argued that English studies
was an instrument of colonial control, Sangari’s essay suggests that other complexities
undergirded the process. As she unravels the interfaces between the rise of English literature in
early nineteenth century colonial India, the movement for ‘native’ female literacy and the
growth of a gender ideology based on domestication and female morality, she argues that the
concept of English literature was intermeshed with notions of ‘modernity’ and the rise of an
articulate and growing Bengali middle class. The nineteenth century British Orientalist agenda of
promoting the study of Sanskrit helped to install the growth of English studies, aided as it was by
the practical affinities between the two languages, given their common origins. This not only
helped to ease middle-class acceptance of English but as colonial policy led to the gradual
replacing of Persian as the administrative language by Sanskrit and English, it also played into
the colonial privileging of the ‘docile Hindu’ culture in opposition to the ‘aggressive Muslim’.
Sangari further traces the growth of the nineteenth century debates on female literacy in India.
Pointing out that female literacy came to be linked with female morality and the ideology of a
middle-class ‘private sphere’ which was drawn from an English model, she goes on to conclude
that English literature came to be associated with the a-political and the feminine. Hence it
strategically served in furthering the ‘feminine’ ideals of self-containment, non-instrumentality,
moral efficacy, deflected agency and ‘passivity’ – precisely at a time when increased feminist
militancy in metropolitan Britain as well as resistance to colonial rule in India were
interrogating such notions.
The focus of the chapter entitled ‘The Amenities of Domestic life’ is on the agendas relating to
nineteenth century social reform programme and their complex entanglements with the
economics of female domestic labour and consumption. This essay minutely dismantles how the
social, economic and sexual service of certain gendered social categories such as wives, widows,
domestic servants and prostitutes were imbricated in the various aspects of the female literacy
agenda. Scrutinised for this purpose in the essay is a wide range of nineteenth and early twentieth
century texts from the Hindustani belt, printed in the post-1857 period. These include textbooks,
reformist writings, missionary tracts, treatises on women as well as conduct books. The author
argues that the underlying ideological thread uniting this discourse cohered around the felt need
that female education should further the development of proficient female domestic labour.
Textbooks recommended the cultivation of domestic skills and the abjuring of female idleness.
While this discourse was underwritten by the eternising of the institution of marriage, the
management of female sexuality came to be an important preoccupation. This was evident in the
case of wives, and particularly so in the case of widows (seen in the curtailment of their
consumption and the maximisation of their domestic work). However, in both the figures of the
high-caste widow and the prostitute the notion of female labour came to be complicated and
succeeded in marking a shift from its earlier perceived location within a domestic economy to
that of a market economy.

In the hitherto unpublished essay ‘Women against Women’, the author attempts to explore the
interconnections between class-formation, patriarchies, caste-distinctions and religious identities
through an examination of four popular tracts in Hindi and Urdu, printed in the early 1870s in the
United Provinces, namely, Maulvi Nazir Ahmed’s Mir’at ul’- Arus (1869), Pandit Ramprasad
Tiwari’s Ritiratnakar (1872), Munshi Ahmed Husain’s Istri Updesh (1873) and the multi-
authored Chhabili Bhatiyari (1873). Probing the generic intricacies of these texts - oral, written,
Persian, Sanskritic, brahminical, ashraf (genteel Muslim) - Sangari traces the complexities of
their negotiations with caste, class and patriarchy and the processes through which they do/do
not play into a communal paradigm of Muslim/Hindu culture. She further argues that one
common and striking feature that unites these disparate tracts is their embedded misogyny - their
figuration of women as fearing, repressing, punishing, plotting and scheming against ‘other’
women, and goes on to conclude that ‘The regularity with which women were pitted against
women to contain or close their agential possibilities widened into a misogynist discourse that
bonded disparate genres into a singular fraternity’ (pp. 275 – 276).
Perhaps the most timely among the essays in this volume is ‘Consent, Agency, and the Rhetorics
of Incitement’, where Sangari theorises the complexities and contradictions within notions such
as female agency, female resistance as well as the highly complicated terrain of female consent
to patriarchy. Making the extremely crucial differentiation between ‘women’s agency deriving
from consent’ and a ‘politically interventionist feminist agency’ (p.365), she argues that the
former (which she also calls ‘indirect agency’, p.364) can indeed provide one of the greatest
impediments to feminist resistance.
The most pressing danger, she warns, is that this latter often wears the garb of a ‘politically
interventionist feminist agency’ (p.365), since it involves women exercising power over other
women and men. Precisely because it assumes the guise of female assertion and often involves
‘appropriation of the language of feminism’ (p.365), such ‘consent’ or female co-option into
patriarchal power and domination within the inequities of caste, class or religion, is dangerously
misleading since it can be mistaken for feminist intervention. Using this complexly-worked out
theoretical framework, Sangari explores in a variety of texts the workings of what she calls
‘female incitement – women calling upon men to act’ (p.384). For instance, discussing the
Valmiki Ramayana, she suggests that this category of the inciting female, as seen in the figures
of Manthara and Kaikeyi, help to feed into a misogynistic thrust in the epic.
But perhaps even more importantly, the author extends her argument here to the very different
problematic of women and the Hindu right in contemporary India. Focusing upon the strident,
rabble-rousing role of Sadhavi Rithambara, Sangari subjects to minute scrutiny the problematic
of the insertion of women into communal violence. Undoubtedly, among the profoundly
disturbing social phenomena in recent times has been the insertion of women into violence,
especially communal violence – witnessed most recently in the Gujarat riots. Marking what may
be termed as an inversion of traditional gender-roles, has been this growing incidence of female
participation in acts of communal violence. Indeed, in this shift women have moved away from
what has been traditionally perceived as their nurturing, pacifist role, to a communally pro-active
role - a trend that other scholars too, like Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, among others, have
been engaged in examining. Given the deeply troubled present context, the formulations in this
essay are not only timely - but also eerily prophetic, with the author pointing out in the footnotes
that much of this essay was written before the demolition of the Babri masjid.

If one were to make some carping criticism about lacunae in this rich collection it would be
about the presence of the older essays in this volume (two essays on the literary texts of Henry
James and one essay on the ‘marvellous realism’ of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman
Rushdie). Although in the Introduction the author does try to justify their inclusion in this
collection, the fact is that the important interventions on questions related to gender, culture and
history in colonial India do sit rather uncomfortably alongside the somewhat disparate concerns
of the earlier essays.

Moreover, translations also needed to be provided for the numerous extracts in Hindustani, Urdu
and Hindi drawn from text-books, treatises, tracts and other printed matter of the nineteenth
century. One can hope here that the foreign edition being brought out by Anthem Publications
will address this need. But these are minor shortcomings, which do not otherwise detract from
this volume’s going a long way in the theorising of gender in India. Perhaps the greatest
contribution of Politics of the Possible is that it brings together a series of deeply searching,
tightly-argued explorations into the dialectics of gender and society, explorations which are
theoretically rigorous, intellectually stimulating and also politically-engaged.

References

Joshi, S. (ed.) 1991. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History.

New Delhi: Trianka.
Sangari, K and S. Vaid (eds.). 1989. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History.
New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Sarkar, T. and U. Butalia (eds.). 1995. Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays.
New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Viswanathan, G.1989.The Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and Colonial Rule in India.
New York: Columbia University Press.
View publication stats