REGULATION OF WOMEN'S IDENTITY IN THE COURSE OF NATIONAL FREEDOM STRUGGLE

• Published in: Indian journal of political science 2014-01, Vol.75 (1), p.31-36
• Main Author: Saxena, Chayanika
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0019-5510

A political struggle marking a quest for identity, the Indian national movement was launched on the planks of an imagined golden past and a sense of 'spiritual superiority'. On a dichotomy between the 'material and the spiritual' world that gave the 'culturally subjugated' people of British India an agency; a voice that they hitherto been denied. But while a discourse on nationalism that was steeped in annotations of spiritual superiority came to empower many, its empowerment however, was stopped short of embracing women. While the omission of women from the nationalist front was evidently problematic, their commission was an equally big error. Particularly so, as such commissions came to light in a discourse that has claimed to represent the subalterns, of which women were unquestionably a part. Touted for their spiritual chasteness, a false sense of empowerment that came about with this dichotomy was never problematized. That patriarchy was still regulating women's identity was never recognized. A halo accorded to their identity did not make much difference, for even as the control came to be decorated in spiritual frills, the status of women was elevated to that of goddesses, these attributions were nonetheless determined, allocated and divested by the men, nonetheless. Thus, exploring the re-manufacturing of patriarchy and women's identity in the course of the national movement, this paper will show how the identity of womanhood was recast to bolster the claims of the 'indigenous', 'our own' claims for freedom. And in doing so, the paper will build on the Feminist evaluation of Partha Chatterjee's "National Resolution of the Women's Question".