Reviews for Hindu Wife and Hindu Nation Gender Religion and the Prehistory of Indian Nationalism

The average rating for Hindu Wife and Hindu Nation Gender Religion and the Prehistory of Indian Nationalism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-10 00:00:00 Tanya Cornale “Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation” is structured into chapters around specific themes, a wide range of essays that paints a vivid and polemical picture of the late nineteenth century Bengali public sphere. Sarkar makes a comprehensive study of literary texts—religious history, autobiographies, nationalist literature— the law and the scandals and the public opinion surrounding the issues, including theatre which capitalized on these sensational events. Together, these essays demonstrate the centrality of gender in shaping the political discourse around community identity and cultural nationalism. For the development of Hindu nationalism, Hindu women were in a strategic position in the context of community, religion and nation. Following the discriminatory policies in the 1870s and racial hatred from the colonial government, the militant Hindu revivalist-nationalists valorised the Hindu home as the domain of residual freedom. The preservation of the Brahmanical norms and customs became all the more important because the autonomy of the Hindu man was colonised by an alien culture and education. The Hindu woman’s body became a deeply politicized matter— only her submission to the rigid norms would signify past freedom and the promise of future nationhood. Sarkar argues that it was in the domestic realm that both liberal-reformers and revivalist-nationalists could rule within colonialism and that shaped the rhetoric and techniques of political mobilisation and agitation. "Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation" makes it impossible to view women as mere symbolic registers of national, cultural traditions but as the object of public debate, legislation and ideological formations. The most interesting chapters were the ones on the age of consent debates and conjugality in colonial Bengal. The British government was equally complicit in preserving the regressive practices. The colonial state maintained their hegemony by promising that the entire sphere of belief, religious observance and domestic practices, like marriage or personal laws of the native communities, would be codified according to the religious norms and customs of their scriptures. Sarkar then shifts her attention from the colonial period to raise questions about contemporary Hindutva movement, a result of the continuous historical evolution of cultural nationalism. It’s impossible to reproduce Sarkar’s multi-layered argument that makes a nuanced analysis of both local events and broader historical processes in this short space for a review. Sarkar's argument pertains to (undivided) Bengal's cultural and political life and apart from the last chapter, there's no mention of Hindutva's history and influence in other states, for instance, the rise of Shiv Sena and the emergence of cultural nationalism through the Sons of Soil doctrine in Maharashtra. Regardless, "Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation" is a well researched work on a significant period of Indian history and I know I’ll keep coming back to this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-21 00:00:00 Martin Pustulka Foundational