Sagar

This paper examines Bengali domestic manuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in order to explore the mistress-servant relationship in colonial Calcutta. The articulation of Bengali middle-class male cultural identity was predicated on a redefinition of their women who were carefully distinguished from members of lower socio-economic groups. The Bengali male construction of a moral universe, centered around the home and family, reinforced gender and class boundaries in a hierarchical power relationship.

This paper investigates the place of women in the movement to reform widows' lives in nineteenth century Maharashtra. Beginning with a brief account of colonialist and nationalist debates over the state of Hindu women, it examines the autobiographical writings of two widows, Parvati Athavale and Pandita Ramabai, in order to understand how they strategically forge resisting spaces within a public discourse about them.

The educational paradigms in India have been closely associated with the colonial project. They were superimposed from British educational models current in the eighteenth century, and have been enshrined in the various historical textbooks. This paper presents an analysis of aspects of the appropriation and application of these pedagogical models in post-independence India . It concludes with a discussion of the controversy that arose in the representation of history and the production of textbooks during the Janata government in the late seventies.

TRANSLATION

Sadeq Hedayat, "Sampige" in Neveshtehha-ye Parakandeh-ye Sadeq Hedayat, ed. Hasan Qa'emiyab

BOOK REVIEW

Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames, editors, Emotions in Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy

The "women's question" occupied a central place in the reform agenda of Bengali reformers and intellectuals of nineteenth century India. The fame of early Bengali reformers such as Rammohun Roy and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar rested on their effort to abolish such practices as immolation of widows, legalization of widow-remarriage, and abolition of Kulin polygamy, to name only a few. While scholars in the field of gender/women's studies in India, owing to the abundance of written sources, heavily concentrate on Bengali women, they sharply differ on the issues of the nineteenth century "women's question." They are perplexed by the fact that, despite a considerable interest in women's issues during the nineteenth century, there was a sudden drop of "women's question" at the turn of the century, until it practically disappeared from the reformer-nationalist's agenda at the beginning of the twentieth.

Scholars such as Sumit Sarkar and Ghulam Murshid tried to analyze the situation by explaining the problematic relationship between Indian nationalsim and the "women's question." They cited various reasons as to why the Bengali middle-class reformers ceased to address women's issues in their overt political agenda and to initiate further measures to improve the condition of Indian women towards the close of the nineteenth century. [1] Partha Chatterjee, however, contends that Indian nationalism had in fact resolved the "women's question" by situating it within an inner domain of sovereignty in the domestic realm far removed from the arena of political contest with the coloial state[2] I concur with the latter view: far from dropping the "women's question" from their agenda, the reformer-nationalists in effect became more deeply engaged in a process of cultural construction that both included women and strengthened the existing patriarchal caste-class bias. But it is difficult to support the contention that the nationalists had "resolved" women's issues if one takes into consideration a growing body of didactic and popular literature specifically addressed to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, as Tanika Sarkar has pointed out, the "convoluted critical exercise" of the nineteenth century Bengali intelligentsia, which questioned problems of power within indigenous customs and tradition as well as within colonial connection, "posed more questions and doubts to its own convictions than resolutions of issues relating to its women." [3]

By closely examining the Bengali house-keeping and advise manuals, this essay will demonstrate the middle-class ideologues' continuing anxiety with the role and position of women in the Bengali society. I will focus on the relationship between Bengali middle-class women and servants, a hitherto unexplored area in colonial history, in order to reveal how the articulation of Bengali middle-class male's cultural identity was predicated on the definition of its women, who were carefully distinguished from members of lower socio-economic group. In analyzing the discourse that developed around these two unequal social groups, I will discuss how the Bengali male's construction of a moral universe centered around the home and the family reinforced gender and class boundaries in a hierarchical dependent power relationship in middle-class households of Calcutta.

Bengal, harboring the seat of the British imperial capital in the city of Calcutta until 1911, was the first province in India to have a forced encounter with Western modernity. This shaped Bengali culture in unique ways. The colonial government's critique of Indian society, and particularly of the position of women within it, generated a sense of crisis among the English-educated urban professionals, thebhadralok or the Bengali middle-class "respectable gentleman." In the course of the nineteenth century, they responded not just by initiating reforms to uplift the condition of women, but also by envisioning a new role for them. The Bengali intelligentsia felt that the "respectable gentleman's" identity could only be vindicated in the eyes of the British colonizers through the way the new "reformed" middle-class positioned its women within its social sphere.[4 ] The outcome was an urgency on the part of the middle-class males not only to control but also to define the behavior of women, the ]bhadramahila , their counterpart. The "new woman" thus subjected to a "new patriarchy" became an inmate of a new cultural world centered around the home and their identity was defined on a principle of difference.[5 ] The concern with a reformed domesticity in both popular and prescriptive literature, as well as the repeated production and publication thereof at short intervals and with wide circulation, were symptomatic of the fact that women's issues, far from being resolved, were actually very much alive in Bengali middle-class mind.

EXPLORING THE WORLD OF MANUALS

From the close of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth, in addition to the reformist moralist literature on family that included discussion on women by prominent leaders and nationalists, normative texts in the form of domestic economy manuals specifically addressed to women and mostly published in popular Calcutta presses, came to flood the urban market. A new genre in popular Bengali print culture, normative texts or domestic economy manuals were a cultural production of the middle-class which came to constitute its women by carefully distancing them from other social classes. Informed by a changing notion of domesticity, the manual writers charted out the role of the ideal Bengali housewife, the "new woman,"[6 ] by issueing instructions to new brides to become a "good wife" and a "wise mother." Although indigenous in origin they showed a striking resemblance to British domestic economy manuals which started coming out in England in the 1820s. [7] They had a strong didactic tone, and, unlike the religious instructions such as ]Manu Samhita which codified women's status in Indian society, these tracts were secular in nature, and thus held true for any married woman irrespective of religion and caste.[8] They were written mostly by Bengali middle-class men of different religions, and their directed audience was the new Bengali ]bhadramahilas, whose roles and obligations they prescribed in these manuals. For instance, we hardly notice any difference in tone between Mohammad Mosharaf Hossein's Yuvatir Atmakatha (1931), a Bengali Muslim's work giving out varied instructions on domestic responsibilities, health, hygiene, love, beauty, child-care and sex, and a Bengali Hindu Nandalal Mukhopadhyaya's Swami-Stree (1931) which also, more or less, conveyed the same message.[9] Echoing the same middle-class sentiment, a few of them were authored by women. Subarnaprabha Shom's ]Sati-Suhrid (1917) and Bou (1923) and Uma Debi's Balika Jivana (1927) are examples.[10]

While all these texts were printed, they came out in different formats. Some of them took the form of clear-cut instructions (e.g. Satishchandra Chakravarty's Lalana] Suhrid 1887 B.S., Dineshchandra Sen's Grihasree 1925 B.S., Anandachandra Sen Gupta's Grihinir Kartavya n.d. and Jananir Kartavya 1920, Ishan Chandra Basu's NariNeeti 1901 and Stri-dige'r Prati Upadesha 1877), while others were written as dialogues between father and daughter (e.g. Ambika Charan Gupta's Grihastha Jivana Amulya Jnan-Bhandar 1880 ), letters between a husband and a wife (Atulchandra Sen's Swamir Patra 1926) or in the form of a long poem enunciating the role of a new bride (Mohammad Mosharaf Hossein's Yuvatir Atmakatha 1931). The core content of all these works was how a new wife ought to behave with her in-laws' family. They underscored the difference that marked the transition in a woman's life---from her very intimate parent's home to a new locale and environment of her in-laws' household, where she had to learn a new set of behavioral rules acceptable to the groom and his family, as well as to internalize the virtues of an "ideal" housewife or sugrihini .

These works strongly captured the uneasiness of the Bengali middle class with its own position and that of its women, and also pointed to a state of transition that the middle class was undergoing---a transition not just in ideological terms, as well as in spatial and temporal terms. An effort to translate the newly evolved ideology into reality was evident from the middle-class male's insistence that specific norms be followed by its members, particularly women. The very tone and the predominantly male authorship of the discourse clearly established "man" as the patriarch, according to whose formulations the show was to run in the middle-class home. It was the "new" middle-class man who wascreating a new world around the family, and his counterpart, the "new" woman, played a central role in it.

The process of transition that the middle class was undergoing can be best seen from the emphasis placed on the new and the young as opposed to the old and the traditional. The new women that these texts were addressing were invariably the new brides entering into wedlock with middle-class men, not their mothers, who in reality held the highest position among women in a multi-generational extended family. While the texts upheld the virtues of the older and stressed the values of the traditional, their objective was nevertheless focused on how to structure a new family and ensure its smooth functioning according to a given set of newly evolved ideals. The familial set-up they envisioned was a patriarchal multi-generational extended household and not a nuclear family comprised by husband, wife and children as was common in the West. The role of the young housewife was considered pivotal. The young woman entering into wedlock with a middle-class man became the crucial mobilizer on whose performance the success of the family and the nation depended. As a bride or a daughter-in-law, she had to satisfy and look after the specific needs of every member of the husband's family. As a successful mother she was expected to bring up her son in such a way that he grew up to be an ideal member of a civil society--- a responsible citizen prepared to serve the nation. This new woman, in her performative and ideological role as an ideal wife and a perfect mother, was segregated from various social groups.[11]

The articulation of the role of the house-wife as the mistress of the urban bourgeois families was not something unique to India or Bengal. The same process had taken place in England, France, the United States, Japan and other parts of the world which had witnessed the birth of a new middle-class. [12 ] As already indicated, the Bengali domestic economy manuals in their textual forms were similar to those of England, and emerged from the concern of the male ideologues with the deficiencies of Bengali women in the science of domestic economy. In this enterprise, the English/European home often provided an ideal model, but at the same time its structure and ]modus operandi were modified according to Indian reformist principles. Instead of envisioning a nuclear family, the ideologues transposed the elements of the traditional patrilocal, patrilinear Indian joint family into the new urban locale. The new woman in late nineteenth century Bengal, in spite of being the center of the public discourse on family, still had to operate within the family hierarchy, where her primary obligation was deferential behavior towards every in-law, in addition to raising the children she bore. She remained subject to a highly stratified patriarchy and was in actuality accorded little power.

The Bengali middle-class discourse on woman and family was highly polarized along gender and class lines. It was a discourse predicated on differential sex/gender roles, inhabiting different social space (domestic/private versus public/communal) and commanding authority over different spheres of activity. It was also a discourse that divided the world into different hierarchical groups based on caste, class and socio-economic status. The new housewives of middle-class families were placed under the ultimate authority of the males and were relegated to the domestic sphere as their exclusive domain. While the mother-in-law and other senior in-laws commanded the junior wife, it was only with respect to the servants and the children that the younger wife was assigned a superior position. Though not connected by blood ties, servants came to constitute an integral part of the Bengali household. They were situated at the lowest rung of the family hierarchy, subordinate even to the housewife.

THE "NEW WOMAN" AND THE SERVANT QUESTION

Control of servants has often been an important theme in the construction of bourgeois domesticity. In England, France, and their colonies, servants in middle-class writing represent the "other"---the lower classes and different races. They are potential sources of "misguided reason," "sexual arousal," and "moral deviance" which could subvert middle-class values.[13 ] The "servant question" assumed particular importance in Bengal in the early nationalists' attempt to reform and re-visualize women's role and reformulate a new urban domesticity. Servants frequently appeared in debates concerning the ideals of the Bengali housewife, and their actual employment in the new Indian middle-class families was often seen as a negative influence of Western culture on Bengali middle-class women. The numerous references to servants in prescriptive literature and the discussion of mistress-domestic relationship created a discursive space in which widely divergent meanings of modernity, progress and nation were fought out. The attempt of the Indian middle class to contest the received bourgeois models of domesticity from the West, and its search for essences, origins and authenticities in the Indian past, was manifested in a rather ambiguous discourse that agonized over the Bengali housewife's employment of servants. The ideological exercise of the middle class was not to dismiss the "modern" that represented the West, but to make it different so that it remained consistent with the nationalist project. [14]

In Bengali middle-class writing servants received the most exhaustive treatment in the advice manuals. They devoted entire chapters to instructiions for women on how to behave with servants. The manual writers frequently used the servants to situate, explain, and even denounce the new housewives. By presenting servants as subaltern to the new woman, the texts established the rank of the new housewife in the family hierarchy. Manual writers carefully distanced the housewives from the servants by spelling out the household division of labor and maintaining distinction in the nature of work to be performed by these two individual members. Servants fulfilled the dual purpose of establishing middle-class hegemony and paternalism in the families while at the same time becoming crucial determinants of the ]sugrihini's character and status.

More importantly, the servant-associated issues expressed in the manuals reveal the contradiction in Bengali middle-class ideas and beliefs, particularly with reference to the West. The extensive code of behavior towards servants that the ideologues laid down for Bengali women urged the new woman to adopt a maternal attitude towards the domestics and treat them as family members (parivar-barga). While the steady stream of references to domestics and the prescription of maternalistic behavior towards them imply the acceptability of hiring domestic help in colonial Bengal, the employment of servants in new middle-class homes was viewed with suspicion by the same authors. Hiring of servants by the housewife became one of the gravest concerns of the Bengali writers. They describe it as a negative development brought about by modern Western education. Women who employ servants are viewed as victims of some supposed Westernization that breeds laziness and prompts them to disregard their economic and moral standards. Employment of domestics, therefore, becomes an important criterion distinguishing the "modern" woman from her thrifty, hard-working traditional counterpart.

Instructions on proper behavior towards servants was not confined to the house-keeping manuals. Many women's journals, such as Bamabodhini Patrika, Antahpur, Mahila and Paricharika, published during the same period, adopt an equally didactic tone and echo sentiments similar to those of the manuals.[15 ] This new awareness about servants also extends to the religious discourse of the reformist Brahmos. [16 ] In ]The New Samhita or the Sacred Laws of the Aryans of the New Dispensation (1889), the famous Brahmo leader Keshabchandra Sen notes thirty-four points in a separate chapter dealing with proper treatment of servants.[17] This somewhat excessive concern with appropriate behavior towards servants, missing in the literature of the previous period, indicates a rising middle-class consciousness towards subaltern members of the family. It also hints that servants were a phenomenon new to the urban political-economy, itself important to the rising middle class.

The servants did not make a sudden appearance in the colonial economy of Calcutta. As their numbers increased gradually, they were perceived in a new way by the colonial middle class. Census data provides information on how far domestic service became a popular urban occupation in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Calcutta. From the 1880s onward, there was an increase in the employment of lower-class women as household servants. Moreover, the employment of servants became a status-symbol for the ]bhadralok families in Calcutta.[18 ] From the first decade of the twentieth century, domestic service accounted for over 70 per cent of women workers in modern services. The 1931 census shows that women were pushed out of industrial employment, and domestic service became the only important non-agricultural occupation for them.[19 ] In fact, as Borthwick has pointed out, one important element of social change, not caused by women, but closely affecting them, was the increased employment of servants in the middle-class Bengali households of Calcutta.[20 ]

The increased employment of servants in middle-class homes in Calcutta may explain the multiple references to servants in the moralistic discourse on women. But if one looks at the manuals as a cultural production prompted by the desire of the Bengali middle class to train its women in domestic science shaped after the British model, one might argue that the indigenous writers modified the ideas received from the West so as to make them amenable to its own nationalist project. The growing concern with servants was a characteristic of the nineteenth century British manuals. They not only devoted more space to servants than did the Indian manuals, they dealt with different issues. The British manuals elaborated on the services of the different categories of servants and quite often issued instructions directly for the servants. In contrast, the Bengali manuals exhorted the role and responsibility of the mistress alone and urged for a humane behavior with the domestics.

Echoing the writers of the British domestic economy manuals, which frequently complained of the British women's lack of training in becoming a "good housewife," a "worthy spouse" and a "respectable mother," the Indian ideologues presupposed an absence of certain norms of conduct and behavior among the new generation of Indian women.[21] They tried to overcome this by imposing and redefining new domestic values. With a strong paternalistic tone, the young house-wife was told how to behave with the servants. In ]Grihinir Kartavya Anandachandra Sen Gupta writes:

The servants too, are a part of the family. Unable to feed themselves they submit to us and receive minimum wages in return. A sympathetic housewife affectionately serves them food and never says harsh words to them because of their low birth. You (Housewife) must love the servants as if they are your adopted children. You must always try to alleviate their sufferings. If they ever fail to obey you, or commit any crime, you punish them with a touch of affection. If you win their hearts with love, the servants will willingly do everything you want them to do. Love works more than wages. Compelled by love many servants are even sacrificing their lives for their masters.[22 ]

Ambikacharan Gupta's ]Grihastha-Jivana Amulya Jnan-Bhandar (1887) also resonates with a similar sentiment:

After our kin servants rank next in the family with whom we have a close interaction. We are bound to behave well with the servants who get paid to obey our orders and look after our (physical) well-being. It is true that we pay them wages in return of their labor and provide them with food and clothing. Yet it is indeed unfair to behave sternly with them and use unkind words. Whether you are a chief or a subordinate, a lord or a servant, everyone has a sense of self-respect according to one's own status. To honor that self-respect we should watch our words and mind our behavior. . .[23]

What delineation of the status of the servants vis-a-vis the middle class of colonial Calcutta could be more explicit? The desire of the Bengali intelligentsia to extend paternal authority over the entire family, including the servants, may explain the phenomenon of imposing upon their women and the lower socio-economic groups the bourgeois values of self-identity, self-respect and self-assertion. The new awareness of the dignity of labor that fostered "humanistic" behavior towards the servants reveals the crystallization of class identity that empowered the middle class to be charitable and protective towards those who were in a subordinate position. It was a way of extending their moral universe that tended to include not only members from their own stratum but also those outside of them, particularly those below them. Viewed in the wider context of nationalism, one might argue that the Bengali middle class, while seeking to mobilize mass support against the colonial state, was involved in the much deeper struggle to establish their hegemony over those classes who remained outside their immediate social sphere and control. [24]

Indeed, the attempt to integrate servants into the family did not eradicate either the caste-class distinction or the socio-cultural hierarchy that separated the two groups. The gulf between the master/mistress and the servant continued, as the latter was situated at the receiving end, always to be looked after, and directed towards "meaningful" and "worthwhile" activities. By assigning the servants to the position of children, they were denied the status of a mature adult. They were considered incapable of taking responsibility, and always susceptible to potential slippage---committing crime, bypassing orders or engaging in some other forms of wrongful activity. Thus the servant remained an object to be controlled, disciplined, and punished, but with temperance and love, under the aegis of middle-class paternal authority. [25]

Treatment of servants as children, as "half-grown, senseless" adults also characterized the master-servant relationship in England and France. As a French manual writer described, "The domestic is, like the child, essentially an imitator, and rarely would one find a virtuous domestic in the home of a mean master." [26] In the Indian context, this child-like image of the servant was strongly invoked by the English writers, Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner who, in their immensely popular house-keeping manual for Anglo-Indian (British) women residing in India, wrote: "The Indian servant is a child in everything save age, and should be treated as a child; that is to say, kindly, but with greatest firmness." [27] Through the rest of her work Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner showed their readers many instances of "what absolute children" Indian servants were. Though not as overtly dismissive as Steel and Gardiner, Indian manual writers also displayed a similar attitude towards servants.

What went hand in hand with paternalism was a growing recognition that the middle class thrived on the labor of the lower socio-economic groups from which came the servants. The all-out effort of the ideologues to create a mythic family free from exploitation and discrimination could not avoid the question of their women's behavior towards the serving class. A palpable difference in the nature of relationship between the mistress and the servants was drawn by contrasting the "servants in the past" with "servants of to-day." No one has more clearly chalked out the difference than Dineshchandra Sen, who wrote in ]Grihasree (1917):

Servants are like wheels of the household-chariot. The housewife has to ensure that these wheels run smoothly. In the past many housewives used to look upon the servants as their own children,---used to look after their meals, about their well beings; and they also used to put up with their whims and demands---as a result, once a servant or a maid took up a job in a house, he/she would spent the rest of his/her life there.[28 ]

This is to be contrasted with his portrayal of servants of his generation and their treatment by their employers:

But now we cannot forget that our servants are getting paid, and by law (contract)] they are bound to do whatever we ask them to do. We do not have any other relationship with them. We are the masters and they are the slaves. In the big households of the city, employers do not even care to address servants with any respect. Instead of calling them by their first name which establishes some level of intimacy, they now call the servants "bearer." Servants put up with the contempt and hatred inherent in this kind of behavior because they are allured by the excessive scope of theft that lies in these big households.[29 ]

These passages indicate the growing commoditization of domestic service, service that could be bought by paying money wages to the servants in lieu of their labor. On one hand, there was a tacit celebration of the pride of the new monied community that could hire labor to maintain its class status. On the other, this money-power was condemned and despised; it was denounced as the cash nexus that drove a wedge between the "servants of to-day" and their employers, the nexus that had transformed a paternalistic relationship to a contractual one. It was in order to arrest a process vitiated by money-power---the growing commercialization of the relationship between the master/mistress and the servants---that a reformed, humanistic code of behavior towards servants was developed. Nonetheless, a contradiction in middle-class attitudes is evident: Dinesh Sen, while disparaging the newly evolved middle-class culture, displayed his skepticism and condescension by "essentializing" or stereotyping the nature of the servants by alluding to their propensity to theft.

Strongly echoing the same sentiment as Dinesh Sen, Prasannamayi Debi, the wife of the famous Brahmo leader Sibnath Sastri, musing over the "golden" past , notes in her writing that there was no dearth of domestic workers in the large wealthy families. Five to six maids and two to three servants helped in the kitchen. But it was the daily responsibility of the housewife to look after the meals of sons-daughters, nephews-nieces, sons-in law, brothers-in law, other relatives, including the servants. Reflecting on the order in which meals were served, she notes that new brides would always eat after every one else had eaten. She writes:

Even the servants used to eat before the (junior) brides ate. But nobody felt insulted or got angry with that. . . .At that time the relationship between the servant and the master was like that of the master (]guru) and the disciple, the king and the subject, the father and the son. It is as a result of the foreign influence (of the alien civilization) that servants are treated nowadays like slaves. The master and the mistress and even their five year old children do not hesitate to insult and abuse the servants all the time. Because of these reasons, the family members do whatever they feel like and the servants too, derive satisfaction in stealing the master's property.[30]

Even Indira Devi-Chaudhurani, who notes in her memoir that the maids in the Thakur family enjoyed so much power that they were the ones who went to select the brides, had similar comments on the waning influence of servants in modern life. She remarks that, in her time, the servants' loyalty "nd allegiance to the masters had probably declined. She writes: "They do not work for more than one to two years. And if the employer and the domestic do not stay together for long, they do not develop any far reaching ties." [31]

In a similar vein, another author comments on modern society:

Even in the recent past servants were considered a part of the family. The demarcation between the rich and the poor has not yet become so distinct. Old servants were looked upon as respectable elderly guardians in the family; Many of the domestic rules and particularly cooking were largely conducted according to their choice and discretion. In many families, the servants while leaving for their agricultural activities, instructed the housewives on the items to be cooked for that particular day. The brides did not even dare to override their advice. [32]

The reflections of these writers strongly suggest a process of steady transformation---the worsening of the relationship between the employer and the domestic and the marginalization of the latter in the rapidly growing middle-class culture. Characteristically, they all put the blame on the "new age"---the "modern times"---ushered in by the alien influence of colonial rule. Significantly, allusions to theft and betrayal associated with servants vividly capture the ambivalence of the Bengali middle class. They point to an attitude of condescension and skepticism towards members of lower socio-economic groups. In the new middle-class construction of domesticity, although servants are considered a part of the family, they remain "distant companions" bound to the employers by contract or law in return of a wage. [33] As the contemporaneous authors were arguing, this contractual relationship between the employer and the servant was steadily replacing the "pre-modern" feudalistic bond of the patron and the client. In this transformed relational configuration, the housewife is given more power over the servant in the sense that she is now entrusted with the responsibility of making servants work and execute orders. The manuals no longer uphold the past, where there were instances of servants commanding authority over young brides. [34] Instead, manual writers claim that a servant's efficiency and competence depend on the behavior and guidance of a good housewife. If a servant were to steal or disobey, or quarrel, it would be fault of the wife. The mistress-servant relationship would involve a socialization of both. While the mistress was taught to give orders and supervise work, the servant was trained to do good work through contact with middle-class values. [35] As Banalata Debi, editor of a leading woman's journal, categorically states: "A woman is the mistress of the household. If there are hundreds of maids and servants to work in a family but the mistress herself is not very efficient in domestic chores, that family can never succeed." [36]

In fact, the mistress-servant relationship was part of the overarching concern for women's education---the kind of education they should receive, its good and bad effects, and how far that stimulated or mitigated the threat of imminent Westernization. Although the education advocated by the ideologues had strong nationalist overtones, it ironically resonated with the same anxiety as that of the nineteenth century British middle class. It indicated a strong allegiance to Victorian ideology and its emphasis on puritan work ethic. It emphasized that the housewife was required to display as much domestic skill as would be necessary if she had to perform all of the domestic chores herself. The insistence on submission to a new work discipline was concerned with efficiency in housekeeping that privileged some kinds of work over others. Cooking and child-rearing were professed to be the two most important components of women's domestic responsibilities; the efficiency and orderliness of the home rested on them. It was again with respect to these two fields that the question of servants were frequently raised. Muktakeshi Debi, writing in the popular woman's journal ]Antahpur, strongly advocated the notion that cooking and child-rearing were the two principal responsibilities of women. She also complained in a tone of despair that those two activities were increasingly relegated to the domestic servants by "modern" women.[37]

The emerging notion of woman's work can also be gleaned from a tract called ]Swamir Patra (1926) by Atul Chandra Sen, in which a husband through a series of letters instructs his wife on her domestic responsibilities. The husband upholds the performance of domestic chores as the most significant part of a woman's education. He writes:

Cooking is the most important of all domestic work. Nowadays women belonging to wealthy families have abandoned cooking. It has been the vogue now to employ Brahmin cooks in those families. Many think that employing a Brahmin cook is something to be proud of. Moreover, many housewives boast about the fact that they do not have to do the cooking because they have a servant. But it was not something to be proud of, one should feel ashamed of it.[38 ]

The author argues that the secret of being a good housewife is hard work. He claims that women move out to the cities with their husbands and become weak, falling prey to many diseases because of a lack of physical work. When women lived in villages and performed all domestic work themselves, they enjoyed good health. [39] Some authors, while clearly making the distinction between women of "respectable" (]bhadra) middle-class background and those belonging to the working-class, argue that, despite socio-economic differences, there should not be any disparity in matters of physical labor. One author maintains that although there is a qualitative difference in the nature of jobs to be performed by members of each group, physical labor is important to self- reliance.[40 ]

Another tract called ]Ramani Darpan (n.d.) by Rajanikanta Chattopadhyay also promotes a home-centric woman's education. It exhibits dual pulls: on the one hand, it instructs women to behave well and adopt maternalistic behavior towards servants. On the other, it insists that girls learn to perform all household jobs so that they might live without domestics.[41] But this stress both on work culture and on less dependence on domestics for middle-class women is almost always accompanied by the invocation of negative stereotypes concerning the servants and maids: they are unclean, uneducated and untrustworthy. They must therefore be controlled, disciplined and ordered.

Strident criticism was heaped on women who entrusted the responsibility of child-rearing to domestic help. Ishanchandra Basu in ]Jananir Kartavya (1920) states:

Bad company of servants corrupts one's characters. In many cases we see that children are deprived of the good company of a noble mother. The reason however, is that the mother cannot make time to look after the children either due to pressure from domestic work or because of her own desire for comfort and happiness. So, she restores all responsibilities of child rearing on the maids. Many mothers do not realize that the very act of entrusting the responsibility of bringing up a child to an uneducated, depraved servant corrupts the character of a child. That is why a Western Pundit has said---"if you entrust the responsibility of bringing up your child to a servant, you will soon acquire two servants instead of one." [42]

One is surprised to find this contempt and hatred displayed towards servants by the same author who in ]Grihinir Kartavya idealizes the "noble" servant and prescribes an ethical code of conduct to be followed by them (cited above). This kind of negative characterization of menial workers is not unusual; it is a paradox that marks most didactic writings of the period. Characteristically, a text on women's education, while warning a mother to guard her children from the bad company of servants, would invariably advise the women to adopt a benevolent and protective attitude towards the servants. [43] In other instances, the disdain for domestic maids in wealthy families runs counter to the lived reality of those autobiographers whose childhood recollections are filled with pleasant memories of domestics who brought them up.

The works of the famous Brahmo reformer Sibnath Sastri are a poignant example of the ambivalence that contradicts the lived experience of the Bengali middle class. In his autobiography, Sibnath muses over the memory of a maid called Chinta Dasi, to whom he developed a strong attachment as a child. [44 ]

The great cyclone and flood of 1833 had destroyed the lives of thousands and washed away many villages. Many clung to the floating thatch of their cottages and thus saved their lives. In such a way came a girl, Chinta, to our village. She sought refuge in our house and my grandfather, out of pity engaged her as a domestic servant. . . . Chinta was the nurse of my cousins and became my nurse when I was brought to Majilpur from Changripota. She was the ruler of the household and we did not regard her as a servant, but called her by the honorific term "Didi" (i.e. an elder sister). The work did not exist for her which she did not or could not do. She husked rice, hewed wood, milked cows and at times caught fish for us. She guarded our interest so jealously that nobody dared to do us any harm. She was such a healthy and robust woman that she easily walked the good distance of eighteen or nineteen miles to run on errands to our relations in neighbouring villages. [45]

Consistent with his earlier experience, later in his life Sibnath in ]Grihadharma stresses the welfare of the servants as one of the foremost preoccupations of the housewife. This paternalistic tone towards servants was soon altered, and his own childhood experience undermined, as he outlines his ideas on child-rearing. Sharing the fear of the other reformers, Sibnath's emphasis on the role of the "respectable" middle-class mother in bringing up her children. It is based on a characteristic denigration of the servant class and their misdemeanor. Urging the mother to take care of her own child, the service of the nurse-maid is put into serious question: "Will the selfish servants, who only care for money, will feel the same pain (as the mother) on seeing my sick child? Or will the child's smiling face make them as happy (as the mother)?" [46]

His anxiety seems to emanate from the experiences of children suffering in the hands of their care-takers (baby-sitters) in England. He describes how British society was plagued by the inability of the working-class mothers to look after their children. This is how he formulates the problem:

Many mothers leave their children to the care of senseless servants to enjoy their leisure hours and to have uninterrupted sleep at night. This kind of life-style in other civilized parts of the world such as England is causing disaster. This is affecting lower-class people in particular. Many women among the lower classes work in the factory all day. They arrange with elderly female neighbors to look after their children and pay for their children's milk. But taking care of those children was a kind of business for these elderly women and they try to make profit out of it. If the mother had fed the child four times, they would feed only twice; they would mix lots of water with the milk and feed that diluted drink. If the children cried, they would give them some kind of medication with opium and put them to sleep. . . . The Indian mothers have always served as the progenitor, the midwife, the cook and the maid. By God's will, let them enjoy such responsibilities. I hate those education and civilization that entrust small children to the care of others. [47]

The comparison with England perhaps helps Sibnath to drive home the gravity and enormity of the problem.

By capturing middle-class contradictions and ambiguities, the manuals thus succeeded in strengthening the emerging class-caste difference between the employers and the servants in colonial Calcutta. Moreover, the differences often took the form of ruthless behavior towards the domestics. As Satishchandra Chakrabarty, the author of ]Lalana-Suhrid (1902), a very popular advise manual, writes:

I just want to say that do not talk much with the servants. Do not be over-expressive. If they commit any wrong, punish them. If you are indulgent with them and do not rectify their wrongs, they will not be afraid of committing the same offense next time. Be affectionate to the faithful servants. Be kind to them and help them if you can. If the nature and character of a servant are found to be unsatisfactory, it is unwise to keep them at your house. It is also not wise to be exceedingly nice with the servants. You must always keep an eye on the servants and the moment you find something wrong with them, you must drive them out of the house. Even if s/he does something good, do not praise in front of him/her. The servants on many occasions talk a lot without any obvious reason; it is irrelevant to answer all they say. What we ought to remember while behaving with servants is that: we must condemn the evil and nurture the good. [48]

The commentary bears ample witness to the hegemonizing effort of the Bengali middle-class male to create a new domestic order where he becomes both the observer and doer, the arbiter and dispenser of justice and freedom. The urge to control and coerce, discipline and punish are spelled out by casting identities in the oppositional terms of dominant versus subordinate groups. To solidify its own privileged position, the middle class created a world-view that segregated the society into masculine and feminine, working-class and middle (upper)-class, private and public, spiritual and material, so on and so forth.]

CONCLUSION

As Leonore Davidoff has argued with respect to the English middle class, Bengali middle-class males were actively engaged in creating hierarchical ranks in society. [49] The cult of domesticity professed by the Bengali middle class rested firmly on double standards which helped to bring out differences in caste, class and social status between the newly conceived "new woman" and their immediate inferiors, the servants. The negative stereotypes of the servants and the elevated status of the new housewife were deliberately cast in terms of opposites to assure the dominance and power of the middle-class woman over the subalterns working in their closest proximity. The opposition also ensured that real women could only approximate the identity and destiny they had been given without any real hope of ever fully attaining them. People who were furthest away from the center of decision-making were given correspondingly lower positions in society, and were portrayed as powerless and degraded but with the potential of threatening and polluting those who were in positions of power to exploit their labor and their persons. The emerging life-style of the middle class was predicated on a new division of labor in the middle-class homes. While the wife and the mother were entrusted with the responsibility of meeting the emotional demands of the husband and children and efficient management of home, there was a continued effort to shift the manual work, specifically the dirtier, heavier tasks to the domestic servants.

The manuals and prescriptive writings which became the vehicles of articulating middle-class identity, thus captured its ambivalence, particularly with regard to the lower-class population. The newly constructed discourse on the employer-servant relationship exhibited two contradictory tendencies. On one level, the awakening of the "bourgeois self", with its emphasis on piety and reform, led to an attempt to "humanize" the menial class by bringing them under the paternal authority of the Bengali male. On a more subtle level, however, the crystallization of the ]bhadralok/bhadramahila identity and values, strengthened the caste-class differences and revealed an attempt to control, coerce, and thwart the subaltern population. The signs of skepticism, condescention and the commoditization of the servant-class as evident in the discourse, indicate the effort to create boundaries along lines of caste, class and gender. The outright condemnation and stereotyping of the servants along with the simultaneous prescription for moralistic behavior towards the same, was not only paradoxical but also served to reinforce the hierarchy and power that the Bengali middle class wanted to impose on the subordinate social groups. By tracing the changing attitude and behavior of the Bengali middle class towards domestics, my paper has identified the colonial roots of a process of transition that estranged domestics from their employers. It is a process that initiated the transformation of the servants from once being permanent members in the affluent urban households of Calcutta to being "outsiders" in the course of the twentieth century.

The foregoing discussion of the Bengali advice manuals and their emphasis on mistress-servant relationship highlights the Bengali middle-class males' ongoing attempt to establish control over their women by imposing on them an ethical code of conduct. By transposing the "women's question" ino the private realm of the domestic, middle-class ideologues might have resisted the encroachment of colonial power, but they were neither at ease with women's issues nor completely shielded from colonial influence. The anxiety over women's behavior as reflected in the above tracts reflects the centrality of women and familial networks to Bengali middle-class men's rise to class-status and public prominence. At the same time, there are broader issues within which the nationalist ideologues located the "women's question." These ideologues were evidently struggling to come to grips with such forces as nationalism, community, progress, and modernity, issues important in the social and cultural landscape of late colonial Bengal. It was at the nexus of many troubled and contradictory thoughts, within a discourse constructed around notions of East versus West, tradition versus modernity, private versus public, and spiritual versus material, all of which were engendered by the encounter between Europe and the colonial world, that the ideologues situated the sugrihini or the ideal housewife.

Autobiography, Widows and the Place of Women in Nineteenth Century Hindu Social Reform

Rachel Meyer

In this paper, I examine the role played by women in the Hindu social reform movement of nineteenth century India, specifically looking at the location of women's autobiographical writing in the crusade to improve widow's lives, through education and remarriage, in Maharashtra. In the colonial period, Indian women faced critiques directed at them from outside their culture as well as from within their communities. [50] When confronted with the dual pressure of colonialist criticism and Hindu nationalist appeals for a new and improved femininity, women produced their own creative responses; their stances were neither fully accommodating nor totally resistant. In their writings, women employed many discursive strategies to negotiate space for maneuver. Though there were no neutral, autonomous stances from which women could struggle, they managed to secure alternative visions and values through a manipulation and inversion of the terms of discourse already set. Women's autobiographies illustrate "fragments of self-fashioning"[51] ---distinct from the western colonialist censure of the Hindu home and the masculine appeals of Hindu social reformers.

This paper is divided into four sections. In the first two parts, I give a brief account of the social context of colonial India and the development of colonialist and nationalist debates over the Hindu widow. In the third section, I discuss the genre of autobiography as a new medium of communication that played a decisive role in the development of community identity in nineteenth century India. [52] Here, I delineate the differences between western and Indian autobiographies, the distinction between the life stories of men and those of women, and outline my approach to autobiography as a coded text which requires interpretation. In the last part of this paper, I draw from two autobiographical works written by women involved in the movement to educate widows in Maharashta. By examining these writings, I introduce some of the textual maneuvers used by women to open up ambiguous and resisting spaces within the Hindu social reform movement.]

SOCIAL CONTEXT

A colonial idea of civilization culminated in early nineteenth century India in a complete censure of Indian, and more specifically Hindu, domestic life. The focus of this critique quickly centered on the status of women within Indian society. [53] For the British, a long list of atrocities against `oppressed' Indian women exemplified the degenerate and barbaric social customs of Indian people. "By assuming a position of sympathy with the unfree and oppressed womanhood of India, the colonial mind was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman into a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition." [54] The emerging Hindu middle class, predominantly upper-caste, felt accountable to this charge and focused on ways to reformulate a domestic life that would be consonant with a modern Indian society. In order to accomplish this task, a trend arose within the Hindu community to better the situation of women. [55]

In her article, "Widows, Education and Social Change in Twentieth Century Banaras," Nita Kumar, borrowing from Tagore, aptly describes the widespread view of Hindu society's deteriorated state, for which women were primarily held accountable:

The metaphors of decay, moral crisis, failure, darkness, death, falsity, waste, Tagor's vision: 'a thousand permanent evils with their eyes ever growing tentacles and amasses under the spell of inertia and age, creeping through the myriad cracks of the crumbling edifice of Hindu society. . . . the shores of Hinduism lay wasted' [56]

According to the new middle class, a lack of knowledge and education made Hindu women uncivilized, lazy, quarrelsome and therefore bad for domestic happiness. [57] The degenerate condition of the home, unhealthy practices which lead to illness, women's superstitions, ]bratas and other feminine rituals signified, reinforced and confirmed the deplorable state of women.[58 ] In relation to the Bengali social reform movement, Karlekar discusses how the ]Anthapur, or women's domain within the home, exemplified the dilapidated condition of Hindu family life. The small suffocating rooms, lack of adequate ventilation, and dirty corners exhibited the dank and dreary condition of family and community. Without improvement these conditions led to a sickness that seeped out of the women's areas into the larger community. "The downfall of womanhood was sure to bring with it the downfall of manhood. There was an urgent need, to rescue both from poverty, ignorance and backwardness."[59 ]

Pandita Ramabai, in her work ]The High-Caste Hindu Woman, also gives a similar description of the women's quarters.

Closely confined to the four walls of their house, deprived throughout their lives of the opportunity to breathe healthy fresh air, or to drink in the wholesome sunshine, they become weaker and weaker from generation to generation, their physical statures dwarfed, their spirits crushed under the weight of social prejudices and superstitions. . . .Thus fettered . . . they grow to be selfish slaves to their petty individual interests, indifferent to the welfare of their own immediate neighbors much less to their nation's well-being.[60 ]

Ramabai directly links the deprived, unhealthy environment of women's place in the home to the health and welfare of the nation itself. The concern over the condition of women lead to the evolution of a new femininity that became an essential part of the emerging Hindu nationalist struggle. Nationalist reformers believed that the British were powerful because they were disciplined and orderly in every aspect of their lives. [61] This was made possible by the education of British women who brought the virtues of discipline into the home. The critical task to improve Indian women would instill a necessary discipline and order within the home.

However, the call for a reformed Hindu woman emerged in a dialectical process between two cultures. Even though Indians felt answerable to colonial criticism, the social reform movement drew its strength from a belief in some fundamental moral and Hindu religious values, and the need to reaffirm the validity of certain unchanging values that were distinct from western interpretations. [62] Therefore, it was believed that women's education should prepare them for their"natural" role in life, and would be formulated from within the Hindu tradition. Parvati Athavale demonstrates this sentiment when she discusses the preferred areas of instruction for girls:

As, women, therefore are the mothers-to-be of this country it is necessary to give them an education suited to their special domestic life. Such an education should include the first principles in medical care, care of children, cooking, care of garden, how to keep a house clean, the purchase and care of food, singing, and religious and moral instruction, and such like important subjects. [63]

It was maintained that a western education would impair the feminine qualities of women; western educated girls became demanding, disrespectful of their parents' wishes and made slaves of their husbands. Education for girls was to be distinct from boys and would be consonant with their position, roles and duties as housewives, wives, and mothers.

Within British and Indian debates, much of the discourse on women's position was emancipationist, in that it spoke the language of "freedom". But Indians reinterpreted the concept of freedom. In the west, freedom for women was conceived of as a material liberation from men and the ability to work outside the home. In contrast, within the Hindu community, independence from men did not indicate freedom at all, but the worst kind of slavery. In her autobiography, ]My Story: The Autobiography of a Hindu Widow (1930), Parvati Athavale draws out the different conceptions of freedom between India and the west.

If freedom from servitude meant freedom from men and a life of independence from them, then that freedom is unnatural, impossible, disastrous, and opposed to the laws of right living . . .[women's] freedom can best be accomplished by cooperating with men. In order to escape servitude to their husband, they must not accept the servitude of outside employment. Our sisters in this country must learn a lesson from the sorrowful condition of European women who have obtained their material liberty.[64 ]

The purpose was to restore the Hindu faith and family to its original purity that entailed a natural unity between men and women, this could not be achieved by duplicating a western way of life, where there was "a strife between men and women".[65]

In nineteenth century India, the fate of women and the fate of the emerging nation became inextricably intertwined. [66] In his book ]Religious Nationalism (1994), van der Veer points to the continued importance of women's condition as a prevalent metaphor for family, community and nation, where the "nation is one's family writ large." [67] Gail Minault also demonstrates this process within the nineteenth century Islamic religious and social reform movement, where the maintenance and control of women became the means through which to uphold community strength and purity. [68] The "women's question" was central to men's preoccupations as they defended and strengthened their culture from within during a struggle with the West. In the next section, I discuss how the Hindu widow became a specific locus of concern and salient symbol for the need to regenerate and maintain traditional values in national struggles.]

REFORMING THE LIVES OF WIDOWS

For the British, it was the Hindu widow, and in particular the sati, or the Hindu widow who joins her husband in death by committing self-immolation on his funeral pyre, who came to epitomize the pitiable state of Indian women. Lata Mani (1989) has demonstrated how a colonial preoccupation with the sati culminated in an effort to make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary sati. This was accomplished through "the constitution of official knowledge" about sati that was grounded in a scriptural-based form of Hinduism. The subject of sati set the perimeters of debate for a concept of tradition within colonial India, where "women became emblematic of tradition, and the reworking of tradition was largely conducted through debating the rights and status of women in society."[69 ] O'Hanlon (1991) demonstrates that the question of shastric derivation continued to play an important function in later debates over widow remarriage.

By 1818, the main features of the discourse on ]sati had already taken shape and Bengali social reformer Rammohan Roy had started to write on the topic of sati.[70] Although there was agreement about the terms of the discussion on Hindu widows, where women came to stand for "tradition", subtle distinctions developed within the movement. Mani demonstrates that though Rammohan Roy was grounded in a discourse of scripture, he had also developed a sophisticated interpretation of women's status in society in relation to women's property rights and "male domination," in a manner distinct from colonialist interpretations of sati.[71]

Malavika Karlekar (1991), in her book Voices from Within, on Indian women's personal narratives in colonial Bengal, also delineates materialist reasons for sati based on the harsh imposition of patriarchal control over women. She writes that when a man died "his widows often mere infants, were condemned to a life of celibacy, exploitation and extreme hardship. With their heads shaven, denied spicy food and stitched clothing, these girls often lived lives which were much harder than those of servants and other menials."[72 ] By contrast, ]sati became a way to escape the hardships of widowed life and a means of securing social status and distinction for virtue.

Once sati was abolished in 1829, it seemed logical that widows should be permitted to remarry; given the prevalence of child marriages and the common practice of old men marrying young girls, many widows' marriages had not been consummated.[73 ] The young age of many widows made the condition of life they were subjected to even more tragic. In Bengal, Pandit Vidyasagar (1820-1901) made a significant contribution to the cause of widows with the publication of two pamphlets in January and October 1855, that aided the passing of the Widow Remarriage Act (1856). [74] In 1856, when the remarriage of widows was legally sanctioned. As Rammohan Roy attempted to locate a scriptural basis for abolishing the practice of ]sati, similarly Vidyasagar worked to establish the shastric validity of widow remarriage, setting the parameter of the debate within Hindu society for many decades.[75 ]

However, remarriage for widows was also defended on moral grounds. [76] A contradictory position developed where women, who in one moment embodied a glorious tradition that must be preserved, were at other times represented as sexually promiscuous and unable to control their sexual desires. It was believed that such a lack of control over their desires lead women to commit vices like adultery and feoticide. "Moral Hygiene" was a decisive motivation in the movement to permit widow remarriages. [77] Rosaline O'Hanlon exposes the patriarchal desire to control women's sexuality that was an important element in the call for moral order. "The remarriage of widows seemed one means of limiting forms of immorality, with its concern for public respectability and its emphasis on regulation by male seniors in the community, it entailed a very much greater degree of masculine control over women and their social and sexual behavior." [78] Rather than expressing a deep sympathy for the condition of widows' lives social reformers worried for the honor of family and community and attempted to gain more rigid control over women's lives.

As I have discussed earlier in this paper, much of the reform movement focused on the education of women. In western India, Mahadav Govind Ranade and Maharshi Karve took a definitive stand on the education of widows and the education of women more generally. Though there were many others who fought for reform in western India, I mention these two specifically because of their relationship to and influence on the women whose life stories I discuss in the last sections of my paper.

Mahadav Govind Ranade founded a school for girls in 1881 in Pune which was immediately attacked by the orthodox party, who saw it as threatening to traditional Hindu values. He was also an advocate for widow remarriage. Despite his strong convictions on this topic, however, he did not marry a widow after the death of his first wife. In his book, ]The Oppressive Present (1994), Sudhir Chandra discusses Ranade's second marriage in the context of the dichotomy between the beliefs and the practice of the advocates of social reform. Chundra reveals the contradictions and ambiguities in Ranade's attitude toward the widow remarriage issue. When Ranade lost his first wife at the end of 1873 it was expected that he would live by his principles, as a prominent member of the Widow Remarriage Association, and take a widow as his second bride. However, due to his father's strict orthodox beliefs, and Ranade's filial devotion, he instead married a child of eleven, Ramabai Ranade. Ranade's family was also opposed to the education of his young bride, however, she was able to obtain an education under the tutelage of Ranade. After his death Ramabai wrote and started to take her own active role in the movement to better women's lives. During her lifetime, she became a very close friend of Pandita Ramabai Saraswati, discussed below.

Maharshi Karve also believed that educating women provided the most effective path to social reform. His original determination to bring about change in the social status of widows broadened into a lifelong concern for women's education. He became an organizer of reform associations for widow remarriage and educational institutions for women. In 1896, he established the Hindu Widows' Home in Pune for schooling young widows. Unlike Ranade, when Karve became a widower he married a young `virgin' widow, Anandibai Karve. When she moved to Bombay, her husband encouraged her to receive her education at Pandita Ramabai Saraswati's Sharda Sadan. Karve also had a great deal of influence over his wife's sister, Parvati Athavale, also a widow, who considered him as her guru. Parvati Athavale devoted much of her life to working at and raising money for the Widow's Home that Karve established.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In nineteenth century India many new forms of communication emerged which played an important role in the development of community identity and cohesion.[79 ] This time witnessed the sudden flourishing of many new narrative forms that would help express a new "modern" self. Among these was the autobiography. "The modern individual . . . whose political/public life is lived in citizenship, is also supposed to have an interiorized `private' self that . . . pours out incessantly in diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels." [80] However, Indian autobiographies, in contrast to their western counterparts, are notable for their public nature and their focus on community. "The facts of social history and the development of new cultural norms for the collective life of the nation, rather then the exploration of individuality and the inner workings of personality constitute the overwhelming bulk of the material of these life stories." [81]

In India, autobiographies written by women constituted a literary genre distinct from those written by men. Women's autobiographical writings did not require the author to express her interior `self' or examine the development of her personality. Instead the genre required the writer to tell her, mainly women, readers how the everyday lives of women had changed through the narration of her relationship to her extended family. These autobiographies are primarily other-oriented. Chatterjee traces the roots of men's autobiographies to the ]carita literature of the classical and medieval eras in which the life of kings and saints were recorded.[82 ] In contrast, women's life stories can be described as ]smritikatha, or life stories from memory.[83 ]

Much of what has been written about women's autobiography has taken the approach that these writings reconstruct a `social reality', an authentic picture of the time. [84] Following O'Hanlon (1991) and Chandra (1994), I instead look at these writings as narrative or discursive strategies, which need to be decoded and interpreted in order to understand their placement within the social debates of the time. In women's writing, we can discover how women appropriate, negotiate and invert the signs and symbols in a public discourse about them. They offer an alternative perspective on the role of women in nineteenth century India, revealing the cultural assumptions, social codes and ambiguities inherent in masculine reflections on reform for widows.

My paper draws upon the life stories of two women, both of whom became widowed at a young age. Both also belonged to the emergent middle-class, upper-caste community, cultivated ties to the social reform movement and took pioneering roles in the movement to reform widow's lives. These women are Pandita Ramabai Saraswati and Parvatibai Athavale. Although both of these women belonged to the new `respectable' class, and therefore reflect the predominant notions of upper-caste and middle-class Hindu femininity, they use very different techniques as they position themselves within reform debates and confront constructions of woman as the "ultimate carrier of tradition." [85]

Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale employ many different textual strategies in their writings to strengthen and legitimatize their position, taking ambiguous and sometimes contradictory stances on the changing gender relations of colonial India. In some instances, we find both women using reported speech to gain an acquired authority in their writing. In these moments, they incorporate someone else's speech to say what they cannot, often times that of a male family member, young widow or other credible person. In other places, as in the writings of Rammohan Roy and Vidyasagar, they derive evidence for many of their assertions from the shastras in order to authorize and secure their position in a "pure" and ancient form of Hinduism. I have drawn such examples from these writings earlier in my paper demonstrating at least partial conformity with aspects of popular debate on women. They also safely and shrewdly position themselves in socially acceptable roles taking on saintly, self-sacrificing personas in order to gain community respect. By operating within the social and cultural spaces available to them, and manipulating symbols of the austere, virtuous woman, who in the absence of a husband, choose to adopt a lifestyle of service to community, society and nation, these women were able to work toward changing society.[86 ]

Even though they maneuvered within the set spaces and spoke through the terms already established by men, Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale were not necessarily in full agreement with the gender roles and categories fixed by male reformers. At times they agreed with male social reformers, and used similar discursive tactics, but at other times we find that these women maintained a distinction from their male peers, revealing masculine hypocrisy through various "techniques of mockery." [87] When these female writers negotiate spaces to enter the public debates about their roles and positions in society, they sometimes reproduce images of woman as a sign of tradition, then, at other times they invert the gender codes and categories. But through these various strategies, these women manage to reveal the incongruencies in male discourse: the celebration of women as the essential link to a `golden age' and the simultaneous abhorrence of women as the source of all evil in society. And they further expose male hypocrisy as true source of social denigration.]

PANDITA RAMABAI

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati was one of the first Indian woman to propagate education for women in western India. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a liberal, progressive man who encouraged his daughter's education in Sanskrit at a young age despite the widely held belief that such an education was improper for young girls. Her mother taught her at home from the time she was eight years old. Later, the Brahmo reformer, Keshub Chandra Sen, advised her to read the Vedas. In Calcutta, she gave a series of lectures on the emancipation of women, basing her pleas on the ancient scriptures and epics, a strategy paralleled in the work other male reformers. She defied orthodox society when she married Biped Behave, a friend of her brother and a man of her own choice. Unfortunately, within two years of her marriage, he died leaving her a widow at twenty-four, and the mother of a baby girl. In 1882, Ramabai Saraswati returned to Pune, and was welcomed by Ranade, among other reformers.

Ramabai Saraswati was also the first woman to establish a women's association in western India, the Arya Mahila Samaj, on May 1, 1882.[88 ] The aims of the Samaj were: "(1) to work for the deliverance of women from the evil practices (e.g. child marriage, the bondage of ignorance, etc. ) which by tradition and custom have come down to India from the past; and (2) to work for the removal of the present deplorable condition of women in respect of religion, morality, etc. and their uplift." [89] She opened Sharda Sadan, a school for girls at which Karve's second wife, received her education.

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati authored many works during her life, in both the Marathi and English languages. In this paper, I briefly examine ]The High-Caste Hindu Widow (1981), a book that Ramabai Saraswati wrote as an appeal to American women. She hoped to inform western women on the plight of women in India, in order to compel her readers to give assistance to "the widows and destitute women of India." It is not a purely autobiographical work in that it does not dwell on the specific details of her life. However, she draws on many stories from her life, filling her writing with many of her own memories and experiences as an Indian woman. Of the two compositions that I analyze, Pandita Ramabai's work takes the most revolutionary, unorthodox stance.

Although there are instances when Pandita Ramabai uses Hindu religious scriptures to discuss the condition of women in a uncritical, straightforward way, much of the attention she devotes to these spiritual texts is directed toward a refutation of them. She believes that they render a limiting, biased and unjust portrayal of women. In The High Caste Hindu Women (1981), the Laws of Manu most often meet with Ramabai's assault:

Those who diligently and impartially read Sanskrit literature in the original, cannot fail to recognize the law-giver Manu as one of those hundreds who have done their best to make woman a hateful being in the world's eye To employ her in housekeeping and kindred occupations is thought to be the only means of keeping her out of mischief, the blessed enjoyment of literary culture being denied her. She is forbidden to read the sacred scriptures, she has no right to pronounce a single syllable out of them. To appease her uncultivated, low kind of desire by giving her ornaments to adorn her person, and by giving her dainty food together with occasional bow which costs nothing, are the highest honors to which a Hindu woman is entitled. She, the loving mother of the nation, the devoted wife, the tender sister and affectionate daughter is never fit for independence.[90 ]

In this passage, Ramabai unleashes her attack on men themselves, holding them accountable for the very ignorance and backwardness that they critique in women. She takes representations of a female nature constructed by men and argues that they are more applicable to men's conduct rather than women's.

In another instance, she again turns the tables on male critics, inverting gender codes and even putting into question the very notion of a `golden age'. After listing women's common `misdeeds' and the corresponding punishments that Manu advocates for `wayward' women, she goes on to show how men are not held equally accountable for their own behavior and immoral conduct. Women, who themselves are accused of being morally impoverished and contagious, are forced to

remain with and revere their husband as a god, even though he be `destitute of virtue, seek pleasure elsewhere, or be devoid of good qualities, addicted to evil passion, fond of liquors or diseased. . . . now the woman is in no better condition than of old. True, the husband cannot as in the olden age, take her wherever she may be found and drag her in the house, but his absolute power over her person has not suffered in the least. [91]

She uncovers the double-standard and hypocrisy embedded in the signification of women and in the concept of a previous golden age where gender relations were believed to be equitable and harmonious. She revels the terms of the discourse, both in scripture and in the current time as advantageous only to men.

In the end of her book, Ramabai turns to the topic of widowhood. She describes how Indian society subjects widows to a life of poverty, deprivation and community hatred. Initially she follows earlier debates, arguing that ]sati, the self-immolation of widows on their deceased husband's pyre, was "a custom invented by the priesthood."[92 ] However, she proceeds to turn the topic of ]sati into a critique of male reformers, who having taken the widows only means of escaping her miserable life by outlawing the practice of sati, have not made moves to improve her existence in society. "Now that the Suttee-rite, partly by the will of the people and partly by the law of the empire, is prohibited, many good people feel easy in their minds, thinking that the Hindu widow has been delivered from the hand of her terrible fate; but little do they realize the true state of affairs." [93 }The abolition of ]sati was not the liberation of Indian women, but actually a form of further control and repression for women: "the poor helpless high-caste widow with the one chance of ending her miseries in the Suttee rite taken away from her, remains as in past ages with no one to help her."[94 ] In a truly scathing critique of the reform movement she argues that the rite of ]sati, the major obsession in colonialist and nationalist movement to protect Hindu widows, was insignificant and fleeting in comparison to the suffering that living widows faced in their daily existence. "The momentary agony of suffocation in the flames are nothing compared to her lot as a widow."[95 ]

By moving back and forth, slipping in and out of the terms of discourse, sometimes accepting them and other times inverting them, Ramabai is able to write from ambiguous and resisting spaces. Though she is not able to maintain an autonomous sphere of resistance, she manages to lay bare and take apart many of the gender codes taken as essential truths in public debates about women.]

PARVATI ATHAVALE

Parvati Athavale was born in 1870, one of eleven brothers and sisters. She was married rather late, at age eleven, after her mother overhead criticism from neighbors. Sadly, she was widowed at twenty-six, the mother of a seven year old son. She began her education at the encouragement of her brother-in-law, Maharshi Karve, and sister, Anandibai Karve. Much of her autobiography, My Story: The Autobiography of a Hindu Widow (1930), deals with the first years of her education; her initial reluctance and difficulties, and her eventual successes. After, completing her studies she began teaching at Prof. Karve's Widow's Home near Pune. She soon took the task to collect funds for the home, traveling throughout the country, raising a great deal of money for the institution.

Although both Ramabai and Athavale position themselves in socially acceptable ways that enable them to retain the respect in society and find spaces for action (Ramabai took on the role of `Saraswati Devi' the goddess of learning), this strategy comes through most clearly in Parvati Athavale's writing. She explicitly discusses how she took on the role of a doing service for community. "Instead of being of use to one family only, I determined to spend my life in service for widows. And having once for all settled this question, I started on the path of its fulfillment. . . . And for this purpose I decided to give my whole life to the service of the Widow's Home."[96 ] By taking on the role of doing service for her country, "determined to work for the betterment of [her] motherland" and remaining chaste, she was able to earn a great deal of money for the Widow's Home.

In her autobiography, Parvati Athavale employs reported speech to argue for the natural ideals of Hindu womanhood as a primary reason for allowing child-widow remarriage. She inserts her father's words into her writing in order to state the benefits and blessings of widow remarriage. Being an open-minded man he encouraged Karve to marry his other daughter, also a widow and called Baya by her family. After they were married, she gave birth to a son. Parvati Athavale writes of her father's reaction to seeing his grandson, and, through embedding his speech about this meeting, underscores the spiritual blessings gained from widow remarriage:

Our father was full of delight on seeing the little boy. He took the baby on his lap and tears of joy flowed from his eyes. Said he, `How wonderful are the deeds of God Ram. It is by His grace that Baya has this beautiful jewel of a boy. It is a wicked custom to prevent child-widow remarriage, thereby depriving our country of those who might become pillars of the strength to her. [97]

In this way, Parvati Athavale is able to evoke the ideals of Indian womanhood, her nurturing strengths and her essential desire for the love of a family as an argument for allowing the remarriage of child widows. She is thus able to borrow the authority of her father, a man whom she has already described at the beginning of her account as pious, well-respected and well-liked within his community, despite his progressive ideals.

Parvati Athavale applies this approach again when she castigates the custom of shaving widows' heads, a particular concern of hers that she mentions repeatedly in her work. On this occasion she summarizes the sentiment of widows towards this shameful practice:

I have had many conver]sations with widows and I still continue to have them. There reply [to having their hair shaven] in substance is, "Who knows who was the damn author of the custom of shaving widow's heads. It is not even mentioned in the Ramayana or Mahabharat. We do not know whether the custom existed in the Vedic period. We learn from men that it is found in the Laws of Manu. But no one seems to consider that those laws are suitable for the present."[98 ]

Because the sentiments come via another `voice', the collective voice of widows, she is able to use stronger language and back up her opinion that the practice of shaving widows heads is wrong, because many other widows agree that there is no rational or scriptural justification for it.

She also evokes the issue of tonsuring widows to expose the insincerity of male social reformers. In addition to relaying the jokes and insults directed at widows from their family members, she dwells specifically on the inconvenience and shame widows endure when they are forced to go to barbers to be shaven.

Men are not now ashamed to shave themselves, and I cannot understand why, if their widows must be shaven, they must be shaved by barbers. But I suppose these so-called Social Reformers have so much to do for their country that they have no time for even a kind word or two of sympathy for their aged sisters, and if they haven't time for that, they can hardly find time to shave them. [99]

Like Ramabai, Athavale uncovers the hypocritical concern for widows discussed in the public domain that does not translate into a sincere concern for the true material condition of women. She reprimands male reformers for their lack of concern for the widows suffering in their own homes. Furthermore, this quote demonstrates how Parvati Athavale maintains an overt distinction between her beliefs and those of male reformers. Throughout her writing, she continually refers to "those social reformers", a strategy that successfully expresses her desire to remain separate from them and their beliefs.

Although Parvati is more conservative than Ramabai Saraswati, more established, as she herself says, in the "old ways",[100] she is able to disclose the contradictions inherent in male concern for women's condition and successfully opens a space to enter into the debates about the Hindu widow.]

CONCLUSION

During the colonial period woman became a signifier of the state of Indian culture---the "woman question" acted as a measure of the condition of the Hindu community within both colonialist and nationalist discourse. In much of the public discussion about the Hindu community and the emerging Indian nation, women were seen to be a sign of the times, but were not portrayed as agents themselves.[101] My paper has attempted to show some of the ways women responded to colonialist and nationalist representations and significations in their own autobiographical writings, to elucidate how they entered into the movement to reform widows lives in western India and uncovered the contradictions of popular debates as they inverted and blurred gender categories.

Pervasive Pedagogical Paradigms

Yvette C. Rosser

The evolution of education in India is characterized by opposing tensions. From Macaulay's Minute in 1835 came the idea of producing a cadre of native administrators, the now infamous "nation of clerks," who would be Indian by race, but English in tastes, morals and intellect. To cultivate this appreciation of English culture and customs, the colonial curriculum stressed English law and literature. This paradigm was designed to create a cultured elite, steeped in Western values and loyal to the crown. It produced, as well, nationalist political leaders, who incorporated Western ideas into their own philosophical and political perspectives, and then used these critical skills against the imperialist system that had hoped to co-opt them. Though these intellectual leaders of Indian nationalism and revivalism drew heavily from indigenous sources, most of the pedagogical models and the teleological imperatives were, ironically, superimposed from the colonial system.

The emphasis on elite English education, and its displacement from traditional instructional models, resulted in a break with the everyday experiences of the "illiterate masses," and thus reified the gap between the classes. The educated elites' perception of "the uneducated population as an object of moral improvement"[102 ]is mirrored in the Utilitarian, Evangelical, Victorian educational models. Though British rule was cast off with relish, the educational models inherited from the colonizers continue to create paradoxical curricular paradigms in post-independence India.

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the origins of educational policies during the colonial period. I also briefly trace their appropriation and application by the nationalist movement and the persistence of these pedagogical paradigms in post-independence India. This discussion is situated within a critique of textbook-centered instruction. At the end of this paper I discuss a controversy that arose in the representation of history and the production of textbooks during the Janata government in the late seventies. The central question driving the writing of this paper asks, "Can a modern/traditional multi-ethnic political nation-state such as India, build a democratic entity through the schools, using textbooks as resources?" This paper thus will discuss the influences of colonialism and nationalism on curriculum and textbook design in India, and offer a conclusion that raises more questions than answers. ]

THE IRONIES OF MODERNITY

Drawing from the educational theories and practices contemporary in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, education in colonial India was designed to reflect the post-Enlightenment belief in reason, humanism, and liberalism that stressed the creation of an ordered civil society which guarded the rights of property and capital and imparted moral values to the population, specifically the upper classes. These ideals were supported by a centralized curriculum which depended on predetermined textbooks for its dissemination. In order to understand the conditions which shaped educational conventions, the origins of the pedagogical paradigms need to be mentioned, and their application, in the Indian milieu, historicized.

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain, when print technology merged with new imperatives for centralized education, the textbook became a "basic instrument for the organization of curricula and teaching in national school systems."[103 ] By the middle of the nineteenth century, the content of curricular materials was by and large centralized. Debate had begun in earnest among the ruling elites regarding the need for mass elementary education as a method to create good citizens among the general population. [104] As education became seen as a tool for social engineering, theories for teacher training replaced the personalized, scholarship-based patterns of earlier centuries. The move to teach large numbers of students simultaneously, and the imperative to impart cultural norms, created the need for standardized textbooks.

Prior to the nineteenth century, "teachers worked with individuals or small groups. . . . schools [had] collections of texts. . . . [T]eachers would use these books adventitiously to organize programs of instruction for individual students." [105] A parallel can be drawn between this classical European system of pedagogy and the educational practices in ancient India. Gandhi's statement at Chatham House, London, in October 1931, criticizes the effect of the English educational system on traditional learning, "India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago . . . because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out." [106] Gandhi accused his colonizers of destroying the "beautiful tree" of the indigenous system of village schools by digging up the roots and leaving them exposed. He claimed that the British had made education too expensive for the common man and that they had not supported the traditional village schoolmaster.

Education, in the course of the nineteenth century, acquired a pedagogical imperative focused on the civilizing project. The curriculum became more controlled and standardized, centered around a required text, usually outside the individual teacher's power to decide. Simultaneous with the adoption of textbook-directed education was a decline in the status of the teacher. [107] Textbook-driven models give the impression that schools can simply hand the prescribed materials to an adult, who will teach by rote and recitation, utilizing the questions at the back of each chapter, the answers to which are often included in a teacher's guide. By definition, this presupposes that the subject can be encapsulated and thus taught by an arbitrary individual or untrained moderator. [108] This under-valuation of the teaching profession in turn legitimates under-paying teachers who are considered to be on the same professional level as clerks, their jobs often seen as simply administering records, distributing textbooks, and monitoring tests.

Textbook-centered curriculum models present the subject matter from one point of view, suggesting that there are no others. It assumes that the process of teaching is mechanical, and suggests that students are all the same. It places, as well, too much authority in the hands of ideologues who want to ensure that the subject is presented from their point of view. In addition, the orientation and representation of the material tends to change according to the vagaries of current educational theory, which is often dictated by non-scholastic forces. Textbooks present themselves as ideologically and politically neutral, which they are not. This construct denies the teacher, let alone the students, the power to choose what is appropriate for the particular class. The most sacredly enshrined component of the educational experience becomes the student's ability to pass a standardized text. Often the teacher's job security depends on how well the students can recall and reproduce strings of facts. If textbooks are the primary source from which all information pertinent to evaluation is obtained, the necessity for the teacher to "cover" all the prescribed material therein lends an ironic twist to the emphasis on ]facts as received knowledge which often cover or obfuscate the processes of the learning experience.

This unsatisfactory model predominates not only in India, past and present, but is still the usual method of instruction in most contemporary schools, East and West. With the advent of mass education, textbooks were seen as a way to keep large roomfuls of students on-task. This, in turn, promoted the production of textbooks by a profit-motivated publishing industry or by government-funded agencies. Teacher training became a matter of classroom management. Along with the decline in the status of educators, the personalized instruction of the earlier periods was lost to mass, centrally-generated educational paradigms that persist through the centuries.

In India, as in the West, the centralized system of education undermined the teacher's authority over curriculum.[109 ]This model obliged teachers to keep large groups of children orderly and to maintain daily records of attendance, expenditures, and test results. As their status declined dramatically, teachers faced financial loss, particularly when student performance during inspection became a criterion for financial grants. Teachers, as a rule, made a salary ten times less than the often intimidating inspecting officers. By 1918, it was apparent that, "Authority, while ceasing to examine the pupil, [was] increasingly bent on examining the teacher." [110] Teaching had become the "maintaining of accurate registers and records [and] sticking to the given order of lessons [from] whichever textbook had been prescribed." [111]

Even though this form of education, characterized by the teleology of modernity and so essential to the civilizing project, disrupted, or uprooted, the indigenous systems, it fell, paradoxically, on fertile soil. In both Hindu and Muslim schools, the preferred method of learning was rote memorization. Since both religions believe their respective holy books to be the revealed word of God, the exact syllabic reproduction of the words is essential. Traditionally, students at Madrassahs and Islamic-centered educational institutions were made to memorize long passages from the Qu'ran and from Persian literature, little of which they could actually understand. Similarly, students in Brahmanical schools memorized Sanskrit texts verbatim as an integral component of the learning experience. This call-and-response technique was ubiquitous and firmly established in the pedagogical practices of the subcontinent prior to the arrival of the Raj. W.D. Arnold, Director of Public Instruction in Punjab during 1857-58, found that the local people agreed upon "what constituted education," and that was "to read fluently and if possible to say by heart a series of Persian works of which the meaning was not understood by the vast majority, and of which the meaning, when understood, was for the most part little calculated to edify the [general population]." [112] Reverential recitation of hieratic literature provided a context in which rote learning experiences, using English literature, could flourish.

The colonial educational system was even more dramatically divorced from the realities of the Indian milieu. Indigenous knowledge came to be viewed as deficient; it had led to the current depraved condition of the Indian people. Orientalists and Indologists saw Indic civilization as the cradle of Europe, but they surmised that the rise of "superstitious and irrational" practices had caused India to stagnate and regress. English-style education was promoted by Utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and his father James, who wanted to create a class of Indians, well-educated in western ideas and sentiment, who would spread their influence to the rest of India. [113]

REPRESENTATIONS, POWER RELATIONS AND SUBLIMINAL COERCION

As early as 1776, Adam Smith criticized the East India Company, arguing that the preservation of British interests in India had given rise to additional responsibilities.[114 ] Krishna Kumar notes ironically:

A commercial institution was thus made to become a colonial state and to change its rhetoric from profit for itself into service for the empire. . . . It implied the creation of a new order in the colony, a civil society among the natives. The ethos, the rules and the symbols of the new order had to be constructed, in a manner that would not disturb the ongoing commercial enterprise. . . . Within it, coercion had to be replaced by socialization. [115]

A primary method employed to achieve this goal was education. Aristocrats viewed the uneducated lower classes as illiterate, irrational, poor, dangerous, and a possible threat to their economic dominance. Education was considered necessary to ensure civil order and guarantee the rights of property. [116]

This civilizing hypothesis in the colonial context did not go unchallenged. Edmund Burke, among others of the bourgeoisie, argued that the fierce American desire for independence would never have succeeded had it not "been led by a determined educated class." [117] Steeped in John Locke and post-Reformation Humanism, the Americans could not but rebel against their colonial masters. Many British feared the same from their Indians subjects, if provided with the tools of rationalism. Such was their faith in the power of contemporary English education. General Cornwallis, who had recently tasted defeat during the America revolution, took up his next assignment as India's Governor-General, determined to consolidate the empire. Cornwallis's famous predecessor, Warren Hastings, "who himself was fully conversant with Bengali and Persian languages, contributed his share to the progress of education." [118] Hastings, a product of the Orientalist tradition, was concerned with discovering the missing links of civilization, and respected Indian customs and traditions. He did not share the Evangelical and Utilitarian viewpoint that promoted a "glorious vision of English education as the grand medium of transmitting the civilization and culture of Europe to a decadent Asiatic Society like India." [119] Instead, Hastings worked to help establish the Calcutta Madrassah in 1781, "based on the age-old Mohammedan system of teaching Arabic and Persian." [120]

In 1792, an Orientalist scholar, Jonathan Duncan, founded the Sanskrit College of Benares. In a letter to Cornwallis, Duncan defended the school, stating that the purpose of the institution was the "preservation and cultivation of the [indigenous] Laws, Literature, and Religion . . . .[in order to] endear our Government to the native Hindoos." [121] The mandate for Orientalist education was to use the languages of the elite to educate Hindus and Moslems in their own laws and traditions. Early colonialists such as Hastings, were "deeply interested in the civilization of the sub-continent. Wishing to govern in harmony with the tradition of the people, he recruited [Sir William Jones] the first of a long series of British scholars to study the ancient laws of India." [122] These scholars were more intent on bringing Indian learning to Europe than on bringing European learning to the subcontinent.

Though the first English school had been established in Madras as early as 1673, it was meant to serve the Anglo-Indian population and the educational needs of the Company's employees. [123] By the end of the eighteenth century, several institutes of higher learning had been established for the native populations in Bengal, Bombay and Benares and other locales. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, colonial networks were firmly entrenched and imperialists' concerns centered around methods of maintaining British dominance. In 1811, the Governor General, Lord Minto, (Gilbert Elliot) wrote that the depraved and corrupt condition of the people of India was related to the lack of education, "Little doubt can be entertained that the prevalence of the crimes of perjury and forgery. . . is in a great measure ascribable, both in the Mohomedans and Hindoos, to the want of due instruction in the moral and religious tenets of their respective faiths." [124] When the Charter for the East India Company was renewed in 1813, "a modest provision was made for the expenditure on institutions of learning." [125] The Euro-centric influence of Evangelists, such as Charles Grant and T.B. Macaulay, initially contrasted with the mandates of Utilitarians such as James Mill, whose ]History of British India, first published in 1818, was immensely influential.

"The Utilitarians were interested in teaching the sciences, history, and philosophy, not literature and poetry."[126 ] They were impatient with the Orientalists' indigenized approach to education, which had been designed during the early years of England's consolidation of power in order to avoid alienating the local inhabitants. Missionary work, in fact, had at times been discouraged because it caused distrust among the "natives." Mill did not give much credence to "the wishy-washy theories of acculturation by an English literary cult, a view that was much favored by the Evangelists and Macaulayists." [127] Evangelism, which equated social progress with Christianity, espoused a form of "European education in alliance with the doctrine of Christianity, [which would communicate] to the colonies the superior morals and knowledge of Europe, would destroy the basis of their old beliefs and pave the way for conversion to Christianity." [128] All of these theories of education for India stressed educating the propertied members of society. The laboring classes were not seen as individuals; they were simply the "mass" of undifferentiated laborers, in India as in England.

Orientalist scholarship gradually lost its sway over colonial policy-making, and ideas of conserving indigenous traditions in India were replaced by the "imperial urge to govern them and 'civilize' them according to British ideas." [129] The push to educate elite Indians in English gradually gained momentum. The idea was to educate a select group of the landed class who would then translate English law, poetry and literature into the native tongues, creating a trickle-down educational effect. European learning could thereby be appreciated by the masses and assist in their acquiescence and submission to the rule of what they would undoubtedly recognize as a technologically and morally superior civilization.

The Charter Act of 1833 opened the way for Indians to join the civil service. "From then on, every student was assumed to be aspiring for civil services as the Indian Civil servant was perceived as the heart of the small civil society." [130] State spending on education was justified on these grounds. Education for the sake of learning was less important than as a source of ethical uplift and the creation of a cheap labor pool for the colonial administration. Regardless, many Indians who were educated in the British system, felt a "new and positive self-image." The tiny fraction of educated elites, from whom loyalty and morality was supposed to trickle down to the masses, soon became nationalists with another vision for India.

By 1857, the Orientalist orientation had given ground to the Anglicized Utilitarian position which promoted the study of English literature and eschewed the use of indigenous texts and knowledge. [131] In this way, "the cosmopolitan and intellectual curiosity of the eighteenth century Enlightenment [gave way to the] messianism of the nineteenth century." [132] Ironically, it was the "vast body of knowledge, [from the Orientalists] and the stereotypes emanating from it, that were used by the Anglicist to attack the native culture." Ultimately, both orientations contributed to the colonial enterprise which, by rejecting indigenous models, "created a deep conflict between education and knowledge." [133] The ironies inherent in the English educational program thus brought its validity into question. Aspiring parents who wanted to gain socially and financially under the prevailing conditions, sent their sons to English schools in hopes that they would secure employment with the burgeoning bureaucracy, yet they feared the very system that offered them promises of prestige, precisely because English education was seen as divorced from Indian mores. Walsh notes in her study of children in British India that "the greatest fear of parents, particularly in the early years of the nineteenth century, was that their children would convert to Christianity." [134]

The worst fears of the imperialists, namely that English education would create a class of dissident intellectuals who would question the authority of their masters, gradually emerged and subverted the Anglicizing project. Though the British continued to look down on the intellectual abilities of the "brown babus" as imitative and superficial, and though most of those educated in the English system were in many ways disassociated from their indigenous milieu, the grand scheme of totalizing acculturation could not stem the nationalist tide. Modernist leaders such as Ram Mohan Roy whole-heartedly embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment, and, influenced by Unitarian thought, sought to implement social reform. Traditionalists like Dayananda Saraswati promoted orthodox Vedic concepts in response to those imposed by the colonizers, while utilizing their own pedagogical paradigms in promoting mass education. Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in order to counteract evangelical missionary rhetoric and the perceived threat of continuing Islamic conversions; he utilized print technology and established educational institutions with a centrally mandated curriculum. Educators among the Islamic elite such as the two main figures in the founding of the Deoband school, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, also played important roles.][135] In the academic institution they established in Deoband in 1867, they did away with the personalized "teaching style that had been used for centuries. . . . Students enrolled in the school studied a defined curriculum with annual examinations."[136 ] Though the ]hadiith was central to the educational content, the organizational form was "adopted from the English model of education."[137 ] Mahatma Gandhi[138] forced the imperialists' hand, demanding that they live up to their own ideals of rationalism[139] and the rights of man. Through his populist appeal, he mobilized a mass movement. All of these intellectuals, disenchanted with the discrepancies between ideas inculcated from British education and their hypocritical, imperialist application in India, sought to educate their countrymen in hopes of creating an anti-colonial, nationalist[140] mandate. ]

SHIBBOLITHS AND PLATITUDES

Today there are over a million primary schools in India. After fifty years of independence, the paradigms inherited from the colonial system persist. The "iceberg-like submergence of English education in the socio-cultural milieu of India"[141] continues to reflect the pedagogical imperatives of the colonial educational system. Whether education is conducted in English or in the vernaculars, the acculturating project predominates. The roots of this legacy are so firmly implanted in Indian education that uprooting them would "demolish many a native undergrowth nourished by the spreading roots of the flowering tree." However, the tools are available to recreate the orchard without destroying it. The waters of objectivity can nourish an examination of the essentializing models upon which various interpretations of the past are based. Weeding out narrowly defined curriculum materials and colonially-derived methods and models will allow more light to shine onto the grassroots of the Indian educational system.

The complexities of Indian society preclude a simplistic solution. Unfortunately, the strict adherence to the history-as-fact approach has created an either/or perspective of the past which divides the country into opposing camps. The very notion that history can be represented from a uni-vocal perspective is the paradigm that needs to be uprooted. Long before independence, nationalists recognized that education was one of the primary tools for building national integration. Unfortunately, its implementation often created discontinuity and displacement.

Through a series of Five Year Plans, the government of India has developed schemes for directing social uplift through the educational system, which was "assigned a pivotal role in the development process." [142] The first Five Year Plan, instituted in 1951, emphasized the need for expanding universal elementary education as well as for the reform of institutes of higher education. The second Five Year Plan focused on secondary education whereas the third and fourth Five Year Plans emphasized the need to train manpower and the relevance of education in the socio-economic sphere. The fifth Five Year Plan (1974-7) floundered, disrupted by a change in the central government; the short lived rule of the Janata coalition created a controversy discussed in the following section of this paper. The other Five Year Plans, 1980 through 1997, emphasize life-long learning and "making available the educational services to the socially deprived sections of society." [143 ] A vocational orientation in secondary education was also stressed in the later Five Year Plans. Though many advances have been made since independence, these well-intentioned goals remain largely unsatisfied, as almost half the population of India, particularly in the rural settings, continues to lag behind in literacy. Political changes in recent years have given rise to much soul searching concerning the efficacy of education as a means to achieve national integration, social upliftment, and economic opportunity.]

THE FACADE OF OBJECTIVITY (THE JANATA TEXTBOOK CONTROVERSY)

Authoritarian moves made by Indira Gandhi created disaffection within the democratic polity; she was thus roundly voted out of office in 1977. At the beginning of the Janata coalition government's brief tenure, a controversy arose over the representation of the historical record in prescribed history textbooks. Historians, commissioned by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, had, since the sixties, written textbooks which were subsequently distributed from the center to the states. The new coalition government, however, in the process of contesting the policies of the Congress Party, questioned the content of the government-sponsored history curriculum.

Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph offer an in-depth analysis of the ensuing public debate in their article, "The Textbook Controversy in India, 1977-79."[144 ] They question the ]ad hoc process by which public policy is determined in India, claiming, "It is more of a loose aggregate of spontaneous decisions than a body of coherent doctrine expressing intent and subject to policy choice and guidance." [145 ] The most interesting point raised by the Rudolphs questions the very reasoning through which "both Congress and the Janata governments assumed they could and should intervene in a tutelary and patrimonial manner on behalf of their very different world-views and priorities." [146]

A divide exists in modern India between the Marxist/secularists and the Hindu-oriented historians. The secularists, who for decades enjoyed the support of the ruling Congress party, considered their work as the legacy of Nehru's secular cultural policy which "denied the relevance of religion to a national political identity." A strong mandate prevailed within the Congress party to promote an "aggressive left secularism in institutional arrangement, ideological formulations, and scholarship." [147] The establishment and support of Jawaharlal Nehru University reflected these perspectives. Historical texts produced during this period emphasized the socio-economic variables as central to their historical narrations. They down-played religious motivations, considering them to be communalistic[148] and divisive.

The Janata government, led by Morarji Desai, objected to this interpretation of "medieval" Indian history, often referred to as the "Muslim period." They felt that the "pseudo-secularist" representation of history denigrated Indic civilization and whitewashed the Muslim record of a "thousand years of conquest." Among the critics was R.C. Majumdar, a historian who held that religion was an essential element in the composition of India's past and that Hindus and Muslims had always constituted separate communities. [149] In his book, ]Glimpses of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century, Majumdar emphasizes the sharp divide that characterized inter-religious relationships:

A fundamental and basic difference between the two communities was apparent even to the casual observer. Religious and socia