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Muslim Women in Bengal Mahua Sarkar. Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xi + 338 pp. $24.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-4234-2. Reviewed by Elora Shehabuddin Published on H-Asia (September, 2011) Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) “‘Why should Muslim women have to do what “correct the problem of invisibility/silence of Mus‐ Hindu women did?’ [Mumtaz] exclaimed indig‐ lim women by recovering them” as to “under‐ nantly. ‘Just because they [Muslim women] did stand the discursive and material contexts that not always attend school does not mean that they have historically produced Muslim women as vic‐ were all backward!’” (p. 169). This excerpt from timized, invisible, and/or mute,” with particular one of Mahua Sarkar’s interviews in her book, attention to the “nation-centredness” of the disci‐ Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Produc‐ pline of history and the celebration of certain ing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal, kinds of agency by liberal feminism (pp. 1-2). She is a perfect example of the biases that have critiques much of the recent and growing scholar‐ plagued histories of late colonial Bengal and ship on Muslim women in colonial India for, frst, against which Sarkar pits her own book. Her deep assuming, rather than exploring, “the fact of Mus‐ reflections on this exchange, to Mumtaz’s re‐ lim women’s difference” and, second, for treating sponse to what Sarkar belatedly realizes was a the Muslim experience in late colonial Bengal as “naïve and poorly thought-out question,” are, in merely a paler, lagging version of the dominant turn, a beautiful example of the critical thought‐ Hindu version. The result, she argues, has been a fulness with which Sarkar approaches her prima‐ manufactured blindness to Muslim women’s own ry sources, be they early twentieth-century peri‐ writings and thoughts on what was of concern to odicals or interview subjects. them. In other words, because they were not seen Visible Histories, Disappearing Women sets as being as concerned with all the same issues out to examine how Muslim women have been that consumed Hindu reformers of their time, produced “as invisible and oppressed/backward they were seen as not being as interested in re‐ in the written history of late colonial Bengal.” So‐ forms at the same time. Moreover, their very ciologist Mahua Sarkar’s goal is not so much to “backwardness” helped to define the Hindu wom‐ H-Net Reviews en as “modern” and “progressive,” in a direct ap‐ larger sociopolitical setting of postcolonial India-- plication of the Orientalist paradigm (p. 16). and the “necessarily ‘partial’ and ‘situated’” na‐ Drawing on critical feminist scholarship and ture of the knowledge that can emerge from such historical sociological scholarship as well as im‐ memories (p. 135). pressive archival research and oral histories, the In her analysis of the interviews, Sarkar book comprises four substantive chapters, repre‐ warns that her focus is the pre-Partition period senting four “discursive sites or contexts”: colo‐ and that readers seeking more information about nial attitudes towards “native consorts”; Hindu the postcolonial period are likely to be frustrated (nationalist) discourse; the writings of Muslim (p. 139). In the end, however, while the con‐ men and women in late colonial Bengal; and the straints of space and time are understandable, “private memories” of Bengali Muslim women her decision not to engage in a discussion of the born in the early twentieth century (pp. 20-21). In different contexts of politics and society in West each of these four contexts, Sarkar painstakingly Bengal and Bangladesh since 1947 is more than examines how the invisibility of Muslim women about scope. I believe it affects her very assump‐ was produced, but without trying at the same tions about what has been underresearched, what time to recover Muslim women’s voices or agency. needs to be redressed, and what is at stake. Early As she states very clearly, hers is not a project of in the book, Sarkar laments the representations of recuperation of “unmediated subaltern truths” or Muslim women in “post-independence India,” in a of narratives of the “previously marginalized” “Hindu-dominated nation-state” (pp. 23, 25), and that are invariably assumed to be critiques of the in her conclusion discusses recent high-profile in‐ “dominant order” (p. 135). Rather, as she demon‐ cidents involving Muslim women in modern India strates in the outstanding fourth chapter, it is nec‐ such as the Shah Bano case and the Gujarat essary “to interrogate how different conceptions pogroms. This ultimately renders the book an In‐ of selves and groups are produced in the frst dia-centered book and while the author’s inten‐ place and to what ends” (p. 135). tion was indeed to read the past from the vantage Chapter 4 examines “the often vexed but point of India today, it would have been enlight‐ close linkages between public constructions and ening, in a book about Bengal, to even briefly con‐ private reminiscences,” by focusing on the oral sider the role of (East) Bengali nationalism in the histories of fve Muslim women who lived in Cal‐ experiences, narrative strategies, and memories cutta or Dhaka in the mid twentieth century, as of Muslim women in a “Muslim-dominated” East well as conversations with three other Muslim Pakistan and then Bangladesh, in which Muslim women and seven Hindu women (p. 134). women’s “nondominant/subaltern” status is Through her analysis of these frst-hand accounts, markedly (though not diametrically) different (p. especially those of the Muslim women “that 23). would typically remain invisible to normative his‐ Sarkar’s fne and thought-provoking book torical accounts, [Sarkar] interrogate[s] both the should fnd pride of place in graduate courses on conventional ways in which Muslim women are South Asian history as well as feminist interdisci‐ represented in contemporary India and what plinary methodologies. In a course specializing on qualifies as history” (p. 195). Sarkar writes with gender in South Asian history, it could be read sensitivity about the narrative strategies involved very productively alongside, and occasionally in these oral histories, the role of the “dialogic against, the Feminist Press’s 1988 book that intro‐ contexts”--the immediate interaction with a U.S.- duced Begum Rokeya to a large U.S. readership; based scholar perceived as Hindu, as well as the Sonia Nishat Amin’s 1996 book on Muslim women 2 H-Net Reviews in colonial Bengal; and translated excerpts from the Bengali text Zanana Mahfil (named after the women’s page of the famed Saogat periodical), the frst compilation, to my knowledge, of selected writings of a variety of Bengali Muslim women of the early twentieth century.[1] Sarkar’s own inter‐ views in particular add to this earlier scholarship by giving us access to the narrated memories of women who, while all educated and middle-class, were (with the exception of the late poet and ac‐ tivist Sufia Kamal) not public figures. Note [1]. Rokeya Hossain, Sultana’s Dream (New York: CUNY/The Feminist Press, 1988); Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876-1939 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Shaheen Akhtar and Moushumi Bhowmik, eds., Zanana Mahfil: Bangali Musulman Lekhikader Nirbachito Rochona, 1904-1938 [Selected works of Bengali Muslim women writers, 1904-1938] (Cal‐ cutta: Stree, 1998). If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-asia Citation: Elora Shehabuddin. Review of Sarkar, Mahua. Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. September, 2011. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30873 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.
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