Constructing the “Eastern Woman”: Asianist Ideologies and Activism in the Indian Women’s Movement, 1900–1965

This dissertation introduces an unexplored dimension to both histories of sub-continental Pan-Asianism and the women’s rights movement in India, specifically in terms of introducing a link between the two. Thus far, scholarship about Indic Pan-Asianism tells us that the impetus to imagine and construct a continental civilizational identity came primarily out of the pens of nineteenth century Hindu middle and upper class men with cosmopolitan sensibilities. The question of female engagement in India with transnational issues and concerns has yet to be posed.Outside of South Asia studies ‘Pan-Asianism’ is often understood as an ideology originating in Japan in the late nineteenth century that promoted the unity of the peoples of Asia. Proponents of it often argued for Asian countries to unite in cooperative defence against the growing imperialism of Western powers in the region. In addition to political justifications however, there were also religious and cultural arguments made for unity, as exemplified in the work of scholars such as Okakura Kakuzō Tenshin (1862-1913) who suggested that all Asian cultures were united on the deeper basis of shared “thought inheritances” that centred on a “love for the Ultimate and the Universal”. I examine culturally grounded concepts of Asian civilizational unity prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India, often characterized contemporarily under the category of ‘Asianism’. I have adopted this term from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in this dissertation in order to designate my interest in discourses to do with the idea of Asian unity expressed in India in the period between 1900 and 1965 rather than on ‘Pan-Asianism’ as a military, political or economic doctrine. My object, however, has been to investigate the lesser-known female interlocutors of this kind of imagination.Using archival and print sources, I argue that educated middle and upper class Indian women who came of political age in the first two decades of the twentieth century were active rather than passive negotiators of cultural meaning about Asianness and Asian femininity. In chapter one, I make the argument that in the period between 1900 and 1920, Bengali thinkers and artists in and around the social milieu of the Tagore household created a hyperreal, imagined Asia that performed a number of important cultural labors. The notion of the essentially spiritual character of Asian civilization was developed at this time and an attendant set of qualities such as subjectivity, interiority, selflessness, intuition, peace/passivity and moral beauty were given much discursive attention. The resilience of the spiritual Asia discourse, both in terms of theology as well as in terms of informing a pan-Asian aesthetic had implications for women’s reform. On the one hand, it confined female reformers to seeing women as embodiments of Asia and its “inner” power, but on the other, it also opened up ways for them to claim civic agency and connectivity to women across national lines. In chapter two, I study the ways in which this kind of discursive engagement with an essentialized ‘East’ contributed to the creation of a uniquely inter-Asian ‘frame of reference’ for women’s issues in India, inviting comparison between the status of women’s rights in India and other Asian nations. Examining the Indian Ladies Magazine during its years of publication between 1901 and 1918, I argue that the Indian contributors to the magazine used the colonial trope of civilizational comparison and critique to advance their own cause. They argued for cultural sympathy rather than difference, specifically between Japan and India, and suggested modelling Indian higher education along Japanese lines in terms of curriculum development and institutional management. The third chapter of the dissertation highlights the transition from ideas about ‘Oriental Sisterhood’ to actual encounters between individual women and women’s groups in India and their Southeast Asian counterparts. It suggests that the All-Asia Women’s Conference held in Lahore in 1931 formed the model or blueprint for inter-Asian exchange and consensus making for key women’s rights issues such as marriage, polygamy and divorce. In chapter four, I highlight the ways in which Indian women’s rights activists physically travelled within Southeast Asia in the interwar period and developed common agendas, such as the abolition of polygamy and easy divorce. I focus here on providing a case study of one such individual activist - Shirin Fozdar, the Bombay-born founder of the Singapore Council of Women (SCW), highlighting how her writings demonstrated a preoccupation with women’s rights grounded in Bahá'í ideas of gender equality rather than secular liberal feminism. Using the social networks of international religious organizations I argue that Indian women were able to engage in collaboration and intellectual exchange with Southeast Asian women’s groups. Finally, in the last chapter, I discuss how Fozdar promoted an inter-Asian discourse of bourgeois femininity using the Singaporean print media and was able to instigate cross-border organizing between Singaporean and other Asian women’s groups in the years between 1952 and 1965