Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel / Krupa Shandilya

Intimate Relations The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on page 158. Intimate Relations Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth- Century South Asian Novel Krupa Shandilya northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shandilya, Krupa, author. Title: Intimate relations : social reform and the late nineteenth-century South Asian novel / Krupa Shandilya. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series: Flashpoints Identifiers: LCCN 2016007593 | ISBN 9780810134225 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810134232 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810134249 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Bengali fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Urdu fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Domestic fiction—History and criticism. | Women in literature. | Sex role in literature. Classification: LCC PK1712 .S49 2017 | DDC 891.4430093552—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007593 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4811992. To Corinna Lee, for her friendship and support Contents Acknowledgments ix 1. At Home in the World: Feminist Agency in the Late Nineteenth- Century Social Reform Novel 3 2. Desire, Death, and the Discourse of Sati: Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnakanter Uil and Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali 20 3. Erotic Worship and the Discourse of Rights: Spiritual Feminism in Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Fiction 38 4. On Purdah and Poetry: Social Reform and the Status of Urdu Poetry in Nazir Ahmad’s and Hali’s Fiction 59 5. Poetry, Piety, and Performance: The Politics of Modesty in M. H. Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan Ada and Junun- e- Intezaar 77 6. Toward a Feminist Modernity: The Religious- Erotic Politics of the Modernesque Novel 98 Glossary 113 Notes 117 Bibliography 137 Index 147 Acknowledgments There are many people whose support has made this book possible. First, I am indebted to my graduate school advisors for setting me on this path. I am deeply grateful to Elizabeth DeLoughrey for her wisdom, mentorship, and support over the years. I am indebted to Liz for generously reading many drafts of this book, for her always incisive comments, and for her advice and guidance on all aspects of my career. I thank Durba Ghosh for encouraging me to push on even when the going was tough. Her faith in this intellectual project has been invalu- able for me. This book would not have been possible without Liz and Durba. I would also like to thank Biodun Jeyifo and Elizabeth Anker for their feedback on early drafts of this book. I am grateful to the faculty and staff of the Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Amherst College for their support over the years. I am particularly indebted to Margaret Hunt for help- ing me sharpen and refine the book’s theoretical arguments and for guiding me through the publication process, and to Amrita Basu for her insightful suggestions and her love and generosity over the years. My thanks also to my colleagues in the Five Colleges and elsewhere who read and commented on chapters of this book: Lisa Armstrong, Dipankar Basu, Nusrat Chowdhury, Kavita Datla, Onni Gust, Pinky Hota, Natalie Leger, Hamza Mahmood, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, Johan Matthews, Durba Mitra, Ingrid Nelson, Indira Peterson, Shital ix x ❘ Acknowledgments Pravinchandra, Dwaipayan Sen, Uditi Sen, Priyanka Srivastava, Julia Stephens, and Paola Zamperini. I would like to thank Taimoor Shahid for locating archival materials in Pakistan and for his collaboration on the Urdu translations in this book, and Sreemati Mukherjee for making Bengali a living, vibrant language for me and for her help with the Bengali translations. I am grateful to Ratna Sheth for creating the image that appears on the cover. My heartfelt thanks to my dissertation writing group for their constructive criticism on early drafts of this book and for their emotional and intellectual support: Tsitsi Jaji, Danielle Heard, and Corinna Lee. I thank Crystal Parikh for inviting me to join her writing group, and the other members of the group— Cristina Beltran, Guadalupe Escobar, Joseph Keith, Naomi Schiller, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and Jini Kim Watson— for their very constructive feedback on several chapters of this book. I thank Cornell University and Amherst College for their institu- tional support of this work; the library staff at the Salar Jung Museum Library in Hyderabad for their help with locating materials in Urdu; and Bronwen Bledsoe, the South Asia collections librarian at Cornell University, for her help with locating key archival materials in Urdu and Bengali. I would also like to thank my Amherst College research assistants for all of their help: Alisa Bajramovic, Kyra Ellis Moore, Jes- sica Hendel, Amber Khan, Maia Mares, and Miu Suzuki. I thank my family for their love and support. And I offer my heartfelt thanks to my dear friends who have stood by me through this long and arduous process: Namita Dharia, Sanjay Dharmavaram, Khalid Hadeed, Julie Joosten, Vibha Kagzi, Sowmya Kondapalli, Zeeshan Mahmud, Paolomi Merchant, Bharathi Penneswaran, Harshit Rathi, Sahar Sadjadi, Meredith Sen, Bilal Shahid, Ratna Sheth, Jayati Vora, Sarah Weiger, Michael Wojnowicz, and Amelia Worsley. I am also grateful to Rafe Kinsey for his meticulous attention to detail and his patience, kindness, and warmth. The generosity of many individuals and institutions have gone into making this book. Of course any errors that remain are my own. Intimate Relations chapter 1 At Home in the World Feminist Agency in the Late Nineteenth- Century Social Reform Novel On one of my forays into Cornell’s Kroch Library I found Rabindra- nath Tagore’s Nashtanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), a short novella about a young woman, Charulata, confined in a stifling marriage to an older man.1 Charulata falls in love with Amol, her husband’s young brother, whose intellectual conversation and playful jests provide her with much- needed companionship. When Amol gets married, Charu- lata is heartbroken. Yet, at the end of the novel, she does not leave her husband in search of true love but remains married to him. As I was gripped in this heartbreaking tale of passion and unfulfilled desire, it dawned on me that here was a woman whose desires did not seem to fit into any nationalist or imperialist theorization of the nation. Conservative nationalists would never condone Charulata’s frustrated sexual passion, yet her desire to break free of her marriage could not be framed as a proto- feminist attempt at “modernity” either, for at the end of the novel she reconciles herself to home and hearth. How do we read Charulata’s subjectivity in the context of her own time, when social reform movements attempted to articulate a new definition of Indian womanhood? This book is invested in understanding women’s subjectivities that were both shaped by social reform movements and— in their desires and longings— exceeded their ideological demarcations. I focus pri- marily on social reform movements that negotiate the intimate relations between men and women in Hindu and Muslim society, namely 3 4 ❘ At Home in the World the Widow Remarriage Act in Bengal (1856) and the education of women promoted by the Aligarh movement (1858– 1900). These reform movements were launched in response to colonial criticisms of the low status of Indian women, which the British used as a justification for empire. The reformers countered the British view that Indian women were bound in sexual slavery to Indian men by suggesting that women’s place in the home made them repositories of a unique spiritual culture, uncontaminated by colonialism. Since the conjugal relation most closely resembled the colonial relation, social

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