SACRED SUBJECTS: GENDER AND NATION IN SOUTH ASIAN FICTION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Krupa Kirit Shandilya August 2009 © 2009 Krupa Kirit Shandilya SACRED SUBJECTS: GENDER AND NATION IN SOUTH ASIAN FICTION Krupa Kirit Shandilya, Ph. D. Cornell University 2009 My dissertation, Sacred Subjects: Gender and Nation in South Asian Literature, intervenes in the ongoing debates in postcolonial and feminist studies about the mapping of woman onto nation. There has been a tendency to read the land as female in both colonial and postcolonial discourse. As feminist scholars like Anne McClintock have shown, such a mapping places the burden of representing the nation onto the gendered subject. My dissertation argues that fiction in Bengali, Urdu and English undoes this mapping by creating non-normative gendered figures implicated in the sacred, who counteract the paternalistic figurations of gender present in imperialist and nationalist discourse. My introductory chapter argues that the non-normative gendered figures of this fiction have been repressed by the nation-state in order to create a homogenous entity called the “nation.” My second chapter argues that late-nineteenth century Bengali domestic fiction, namely Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnakanta’s Will and The Poison Tree, Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali and Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Charitraheen and Srikanta, challenges the notion of the exploited Hindu widow who needs to be rescued from her plight, by creating the widow as an empowered character who usurps wifely devotion or satita, implicated in Hindu devotional practices, to create a space for herself within her society. My third chapter analyzes the Urdu novel, namely Mohammed Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada and Premchand’s Sevasadan and argues that the courtesans of these novels usurp modesty and service, borne from Islamic and Hindu codes of conduct for veiled women, to re-instate themselves within respectable society. My fourth chapter continues these analyses to consider a contemporary novel, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, which destabilizes the gendering of the nation by rewriting the passive, religious, feminine, Indian nation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as a heterogeneous, complicated space that defies narrativization. My final chapter reflects on the discourse of liberal secularism and argues that it subsumes the agency of subjects implicated in the sacred. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Krupa Shandilya has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and the University of Rochester. Her interests are feminist theory, postcolonial theory and South Asian literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee whose support and guidance made this dissertation possible; Liz Deloughrey, who patiently read draft after draft of my dissertation and has been both a mentor and a friend to me; Durba Ghosh, whose encouragement and faith in me enabled me to push on when the going was tough; Biodun Jeyifo, for his detailed comments and feedback on my work. I would also like to thank my family for their support, especially ben whose unconditional love has always held me afloat. In addition, I would also like to thank my dear friends who have stood by me through this long and arduous process. Jay, for sharing my passion in books from the age of ten, Karan, for setting me on this path, Mikey, for his gentle kindness and unconditional affection, Namu, for making me laugh away the blues, Mukti, for holding my hand (metaphorically and literally) through the cold Ithaca winters, Sowm, for dragging me out of the library for necessary tea breaks and gossip sessions, Shital, for her intellectual companionship and emotional support, Bilal, for making Ithaca home for me, Hamza, for his intellectual and emotional nourishment and his love and faith in me and Taimoor, who has been my pillar of strength. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments iv Chapter 1: Gender, Nation, Translation and the Sacred: Towards a 1 Methodology for Comparative Literature Chapter 2: Between Home and the World: Devotion and the Widow in Late 28 Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Bengali fiction Chapter 3: Inside Purdah/ Outside Purdah: The Veil and the Courtesan in 69 Mirza Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada and Premchand’s Sevasadan Chapter 4: The Sacred and the Secular: Spirituality, Aesthetics and Politics 118 in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games Chapter 5: Sacred Subjects: Writing the Sacred in the Secular State 154 Gender, Nation, Translation and the Sacred: Towards a Methodology for Comparative Literature On one of my forays in Cornell’s Kroch Library, I chanced upon Rabindranath Tagore’s Nashtanir [The Broken Nest] (1901), a short novella about a young woman, Charulata, confined in a stifling marriage to an older man. As I was gripped in this heartbreaking tale of passion and unfulfilled desire, it suddenly dawned on me that here was a woman whose desires did not seem to fit into any nationalist or imperialist theorization of the nation. In my class on Indian historiography, I had recently read Partha Chatterjee’s theory that the late-nineteenth century Bengali woman was configured as “spiritual” by the Bengali nationalist movement, and that women who did not fit into this framework were cast as Anglicized. Charulata’s frustrated sexual passion was far from spiritual, and her burning desire to break free of her marriage could not be framed as a proto-feminist attempt at “modernity” either. How, then, did Charulata’s story fit into the narrative of the nation? In the years that followed, this question continued to haunt me. This project is an attempt to answer this question through a broader framework: how does the nation account for the gendered subject whose narrative does not fit within nationalist or imperialist accounts of the nation? In the process of trying to answer this question, I came across literary texts in both Bengali and Urdu, which told stories of women whose lives were deeply implicated in the sacred and were therefore never heard in imperialist or nationalist discourse. I came to realize then, that contemporary theoretical understandings of the South Asian nation had been formulated largely through “secular”1 readings of texts in English2 or through “canonical”3 texts in other 1 See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Habitations of Modernity. In Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that there “are parts of society that remain opaque to the theoretical gaze of the modern analyst” (Chakrabarty 45) because the modern analyst is confined to thinking through “secular” systems of knowledge, which occlude alternative modes of being that are implicated in the “sacred.” 1 South Asian languages. In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls for a “new comparative literature” (18) that will embrace languages outside of the Euro-American tradition and pay close attention to the textures and histories of words that get obliterated in translations. As Spivak argues in her introduction, work on literatures in South Asian languages other than English has emerged primarily from Area Studies departments, while English departments have focused primarily on Anglophone literature of the colonial/postcolonial period. Taking my cue from Spivak, I explore articulations of gender in Bengali and Urdu literature of the late-nineteenth early twentieth century and argue that a study of these texts destabilizes contemporaneous theoretical mappings of gender with nation. I juxtapose my analyses of these texts with a study of two texts from the English literary tradition to suggest that the English literary tradition destabilizes the gendering of the nation as feminine thereby offering a wholly different frame through which we can understand the mapping of gender onto nation. This dissertation is thus committed to the task of destabilizing notions of the nation by recovering marginalized articulations of gender in literary texts in Bengali, Urdu and English as they are implicated in notions of the sacred. As anthropologist Talal Asad argues in Formations of the Secular the secular has come to be associated with the exertion of liberal, humanist agency and the sacred 2 While there have been a slew of books on Indian writing, I will gesture to two books that are exemplary of the trend to focus primarily on Indian writing in English, namely, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992) and Meenakshi Mukherjee’s The Perishable Empire (2000). In her book, Suleri examines the way in which colonial and postcolonial writers writing in English, such as E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, have explored their experiences of India. On the other hand, Mukherjee’s book does examine vernacular traditions, but only insofar as they relate to English language texts of the same period. Neither writer thinks about vernacular traditions as worth examining in and of itself, and therefore the understanding of the nation that these scholarly texts produce is necessarily limited to a very specific cultural formulation. 3 While Bankimchandra’s Bengali masterpiece, Anandamath (1882), a fictional depiction of the Sanyasi rebellion was read and theorized as the nascent voice of Indian nationalism, Bankimchandra’s domestic fiction fell by the way side. Similarly, Partition narratives in Urdu were read in the context of the nation-state’s rupture, and Urdu novels that focused on the problems of North Indian society were relatively neglected. 2 with coercion. This understanding has become so hegemonic that it has become impossible to understand the notion of agency outside the framework of the secular. Asad urges us to look beyond this frame and suggests that we should not assume “that a proper understanding of agency requires us to place it within the framework of a secular history of freedom from all coercive control” (Asad 72-73) since there are expressions of agency that stem from the sacred, which do not map onto this framework.