Feminism Imperialism and Orientalism, The Challenge of The Indian Woman (J. Liddle, S. Rai)
Feminism Imperialism and Orientalism, The Challenge of The Indian Woman (J. Liddle, S. Rai)
Feminism Imperialism and Orientalism, The Challenge of The Indian Woman (J. Liddle, S. Rai)
To cite this article: Joanna Liddle & Shirin Rai (1998) Feminism, imperialism and orientalism:
the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’, Women's History Review, 7:4, 495-520, DOI:
10.1080/09612029800200185
Introduction
This article has two main aims. First, it examines how aspects of imperialist
discourse on the colonised woman were taken up in Western women’s
writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, and reproduced in the ‘second
wave’ of the movement within the context of the changing power relations
between the imperial powers and the former colonies. Second, it identifies
some of the discursive practices which have produced imperialist images of
the colonised woman, and shows how these practices take place within the
social relations of authorship in the field of women’s studies. In both cases
we are looking at the importance of the historical for the contemporary: in
the case of imperialist discourse, we show how certain aspects of the content
were reproduced with different but parallel effects in the changed political
circumstances; in the case of discursive practice, we show how the process
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of creating written images occurred within the context of the author’s social
relations with the subject, with the reader, and with other authors. Our hope
is to promote a genuinely international feminist dialogue by providing some
analytical tools for recognising, deconstructing and ultimately undermining
both the content and the process of imperialist discourse.
To conduct this analysis, we critically examine the texts of two Western
women authors of different generations who have written about Indian
women. These are Katherine Mayo writing in the 1920s, and Mary Daly
writing from the 1970s to the present. Both are American women with
specific political agendas informed by different historical contexts and
intellectual paradigms and, interestingly, in different ways reinforcing rather
than challenging the dominant discourses. The particular works we focus on
do not stand alone, but are connected in that Daly was heavily influenced by
Mayo, and Daly’s text builds upon Mayo’s. The two texts are further linked
by the history of the relations between the East and the West, yet both leave
the relationship unchallenged: the historical context of imperialism which
allowed for the construction of the ‘Indian woman’ remains
unproblematised.
The writers have been chosen for three reasons. First, the historical
relationship between the authors enables us to trace some of the variations
and some of the continuities of discourse between the earlier and the later
writer. Second, each author had an important influence on public ideas at
the time of writing, as will be elaborated in the sections on each author.
Third, the lasting reputation of each writer has been maintained in three
different continents, since Katherine Mayo is still well known in India,
whereas Mary Daly is perhaps best known in Britain and the USA. This
provides a particular focus of interest for readers from the three different
areas of the world, enabling us to follow the movement of discourse across
time and place in a way that is relevant to an international audience. While
Mayo has been the subject of a recent historiographical critique by Mrinalini
Sinha [1], our analysis is distinct in linking the historical to the
contemporary, showing how features of Mayo’s discourse were subsequently
taken up by Daly and reproduced within a set of authorial relations which
create Western culture and ‘first world’ feminism as superior to their Indian
counterparts.
Having analysed the content of the discourses and their political
impact, we conclude by identifying some of the processes by which the
discourses are produced within the social relations of authorship, referring
to three sets of authorial relationship: between the author and the human
subjects of whom she writes, between the author and the readers for whom
she writes, and between the author and the other writers on whom she
draws. We aim to show first, how an orientalist discourse can be produced
through the author’s representation of her human subjects; second, how this
discourse can be reproduced through the author’s uncritical use of earlier
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writers; and third, how the discourse can be activated in the audience
through the author’s failure to challenge established cognitive structures in
the reader.
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was distinctive, lacking the authority of the male coloniser, and “therefore
not straightforwardly orientalist in the way Said has described it”.[16] We
would suggest, however, that the secluded woman was the one subject in
which Western women had a more legitimate knowledge and were accorded
greater authority than Western men, because of their ability to penetrate
beyond the purdah. Many of the texts produced by Western women writers,
such as Flora Shaw [17] who wrote for The Times, painted a picture of
Indian women which was so pathetic, so oppressed and victimised, that they
incensed many sections of British society, including not only conservatives
and committed imperialists, but also socialists like the Webbs [18], who
supported Indian nationalism, and ‘first wave’ feminists like Eleanor
Rathbone [19], who was induced to write her own critique of child marriage
[20] upon reading Katherine Mayo’s Mother India.
It is important to recognise that significant differences of approach can
be identified between the wide range of Western female authors writing
about Indian women, showing, as Chaudhuri & Strobel put it, a “complex
dynamic of complicity and resistance” rather than a simple or
straightforward form of orientalism.[21] Reina Lewis points out that
women’s orientalism was not “either simply supportive or simply
oppositional”, it was also “partial, fragmented and contradictory”, and often
produced less degrading forms of representation of the orientalised
other.[22] Antoinette Burton, however, has suggested that feminist writing
in particular depicted Indian women as “enslaved, degraded and in need of
salvation”.[23] Burton shows that feminist journals of the early twentieth
century, including Women’s Suffrage Journal and Votes for Women,
maintained a regular diet of articles on Indian women which produced this
image in such a formulaic way that a certain Mrs Chapman “feared the
public would weary from too frequent repetition of the story”.[24] Although
there were exceptions, most feminists believed that the empire demonstrated
the superiority of the white race.[25]
Ramusack identifies the approach of most Western feminists of the
time as “maternal imperialists”, including those who supported Indian
nationalism but still believed that the colonial government improved the
condition of women.[26] As Jayawardena [27] makes clear, they saw Indian
women as their special burden, and saw themselves as the agents of
progress and civilisation.[28] The subject Indian woman in a decaying
colonised society was the model of everything they were struggling against
and was thus the measure of Western feminists’ own progress. British
feminists saw Britain as the centre of both democracy and feminism, and
when they claimed political rights they also claimed the right to participate
in the empire, seeing female influence as crucial for the empire’s
preservation.[29] They sought power for themselves in the imperial project,
and used the opportunities and privileges of empire as a means of resisting
patriarchal constraints and creating their own independence.[30] This was
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It was Mayo’s book which focused British outrage at the problem of child
marriage, leading to the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act, a means of
satisfying public opinion in the United Kingdom without seriously tackling
the problem of child marriage in India.[54] In contrast to the fervent
welcome the book received in Britain, however, in India it produced
universal criticism.[55] Amongst Indian women, the subject of a large
portion of the book, it created a lasting mental scar which, even today,
remains in the consciousness of Indian women exploring the relationship
between themselves and the British Empire. For example, in 1989 Gita
Mehta published the novel Raj, in which Katherine Mayo is referred to by
the heroine as “clearly mad, but the British believe every word she
writes”.[56]
Mother India documents the failings of Indian civilisation in order to
establish that:
Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying
power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of
life-vigour itself – all are traits that truly characterise the Indian not only
of today, but of long-past history.[57]
and that “The British administration of India, be it good, bad or indifferent,
has nothing whatever to do with” [58] these conditions. Mayo’s central
argument is that India’s political subjugation and “slave mentality” is
attributable to the biological deterioration of the Indian stock:
The whole pyramid of the Indian’s woes, material and spiritual ... rests
upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, his manner of
getting into the world and his sex-life thenceforward.[59]
This is the reason “why they are poor and sick and dying and why their
hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of
Government”.[60] The weakening of the stock was caused, among other
factors, by child marriage, premature consummation and pregnancy,
destructive methods of midwifery, excessive child-bearing, purdah, child
widowhood, prostitution, sexual recklessness and venereal disease, lack of
education especially for women [61] and irrational systems of medicine.[62]
Educated Indians did nothing about these conditions except to “curse the
one power which, however little to their liking, is doing practically all of
whatever is done for the comfort of sad old Mother India”.[63] Mayo
exonerates this “one power” – the British colonial state – from responsibility
for the paucity of education in India [64] and refutes Britain’s economic
exploitation of India on the grounds that Britain’s commercial interests in
the colony were solely for India’s benefit.[65] No statistics, evidence or
research is referred to in substantiation of any of her assertions on Indian
mothers [66], Indian midwives [67], Indian children [68] or Indian men.[69]
The racism of such writing becomes explicit where Mayo contends that
Indian habits and attitudes are a danger, not just to themselves but to the
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rest of the world [70], and contrasts the culture of the “Anglo-Saxon”, which
leads him into “the full glory of manhood”, with that of the Indian, which
produces “broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients”.[71] The peoples of
the East, whether colonised by Britain or the USA, were equally incapable of
self-rule: “between the Filipino who had no history, and the Hindu” whose
history was too old to be of any use, “there was little to choose” since
neither of them was able “to grasp the spirit of democracy” [72]; for the idea
of representing a constituency is “too gauzy a figment, too abstract a theory,
too non-oriental a conception, to figure as an influence in their minds”
(emphasis added).[73] On the contrary:
The [Indian] masses have, as a whole, little ambition to raise or to change
actual living conditions. ... They are content with their mud huts. Given
windows and chimneys, they stop them up. ... Given ample space, they
crowd in a closet. Rather than work harder for more food, they prefer
their ancient measure of leisure and just enough food for the day.[74]
Mayo criticises, quite rightly, the customs and practices which have made
child marriage a religious necessity, and details some of the horrific effects
on women and girls, including examples of child sexual abuse. But in doing
so she presents Indian women as universally weak, passive victims of the
barbaric Indian male, and as too backward and ignorant to find any means
to resist their oppression.
This characterisation of Indian culture and people as uniformly
uncivilised and barbarous, and of Indian women as backward and lost in
darkness, is based upon the reduction of Indian women to the status of
victims. Nowhere in the book is there reference to the Indian women’s
movement, and its campaigns against women’s oppression. Mayo discusses
the visit of the Secretary of State for India in 1917 to discuss Indian political
representation, but she does not mention Sarojini Naidu’s women’s
delegation to demand the franchise, nor that the demand was ignored in the
Secretary of State’s report, rejected in the subsequent franchise report, and
excluded from the 1919 Government of India Act, which only permitted the
Provincial Assemblies to drop the exclusion clause if they so wished.[75] In
fact, she rewrites history to suggest that Britain’s exclusion of female
suffrage from the Act is more democratic than its inclusion, since it will
allow the Indian Provincial Assemblies to decide on female suffrage for
themselves.[76] This is a spurious argument because all the major political
groupings had already testified in support of women’s suffrage [77], as had
the representatives of Indian women. The well-known figures in the Indian
women’s movement, such as Sarojini Naidu or Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya,
predominantly from the middle class, but from all the regions and religions
of India, explicitly rejected both oppressive patriarchal social practices and
the image of women as helpless victims.
Mayo is able to present a unitary, reductionist view of Indian women
by refusing to allow the subjects to represent themselves. Almost two-thirds
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have ‘second wave’ feminist discourses been able to free themselves from the
influence of orientalism?
Between the time of ‘first wave’ and ‘second wave’ feminism, many
changes occurred not only in the relations between men and women, but
also in the relations between nations. Most of the colonies won their
independence from the colonising powers of the West. A relationship of
power still existed between the post-colonial countries and the former
colonial powers, but of a changed character which did allow some of the
former colonies to develop in competition with the West. The women’s
movements in India, Britain and the USA entered a period of dormancy,
having gained the major part of their demands for the vote and reforms in
the law.
Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism
in 1978 in the USA and 1979 in the United Kingdom, writing at the height
of the ‘second wave’ women’s movement. The book’s influence on feminist
ideas was so great that it was continually reprinted until 1991, when it was
republished.[80] In the 1970s a very different set of global conditions
prevailed. The USA was the dominant global power, counterbalanced by the
Soviet empire, but the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution had destroyed
US hopes of controlling the China market. Japan had shown itself capable of
challenging the Western powers on their own terms, while Europe’s loss of
its colonies was counterbalanced by increasing cooperation among the
European Community states. The Korean War in 1950-53 and the Vietnam
War in 1965-75 were undertaken to prevent the spread of communism, but
the standing of the USA was seriously weakened by the defeat in Vietnam in
1975, the wave of revolutions which spread across Africa, Asia and Latin
America from 1974 to 1979, the oil shocks created by the Oil Producing and
Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the Islamic revolution in Iran in
1979.[81]
At the same time as these revolutionary movements threatened the
global pre-eminence of the USA, various social movements appeared in
North America and Western Europe, including the civil rights movement,
radical student movements, anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and the
‘second wave’ of the women’s movement, emerging partly as a result of the
huge expansion in education since the end of the Second World War [82],
and therefore tied into both the economic success of the West, and the
challenge to and breakdown of that success. The American women’s
movement, and the feminist literature that it produced, must be seen within
this dual context, for in challenging the patriarchal organisation of US
society, the movement also attempted to reassert American superiority by
establishing its own perspective as the dominant form of knowledge over the
women activists who were re-emerging all over the globe.
Gyn/Ecology is valuable for this article because, first, Daly was one of
the earliest ‘second wave’ Western radical feminists to break out of the
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male author, because “He speaks for his sister (who of course is not allowed
to speak for herself)”.[91] Why are Indian women not allowed to speak for
themselves in Daly’s book?
The use of Western sources appears deliberate, and yet inexplicable.
Daly writes:
Closer examination unveils its [suttee’s] connectedness with ‘our’ rituals.
Moreover, the very attempt to examine the ritual and its social context
through the re-sources of Western scholarship demonstrates this
connectedness. For the scholars ... exhibit by their very language their
complicity with the same social order.[92]
Is this a reason for using exclusively Western sources? Could
‘connectedness’ not better be demonstrated by using Western and Indian
sources? Daly explicitly challenges the male version of cultural history on
the grounds that it cannot present a woman-centred picture:
The primary sources of this book are women’s experiences, past and
present. Its secondary sources are male-authored texts from many ‘fields’.
I use the latter ... to expose their limitations, to display and exorcise their
deceptions.[93]
Yet she does not expose the limitations, nor exorcise the deceptions of the
orientalist representation of gender relations by the Western authors. For
example, she quotes Abbe Dubois: “Experience has taught that young Hindu
women do not possess sufficient firmness, and sufficient regard for their
own honour, to resist the ardent solicitations of a seducer”.[94] What
outrages Daly is the blaming of the victim. There is no comment on the
author’s racism, only on his sexism.
Daly anticipates the criticism that, in making connections between
falsely separated reality, she will be accused of “negativity” and “failure to
present the whole picture”. Our criticism is not quite this. It is that some
women are presented as victims whilst a more complex picture is presented
for others. The “failure to present the whole picture” [95] is selective,
coinciding with orientalist stereotypes of the Indian woman. We concur with
Daly’s “constant effort to see the inter-connectedness of things”.[96] Our
criticism is that she fails to see the interconnectedness of gender and
imperialism, of the intimate ways in which imperialism produces the
subordination of women.
We referred earlier to the sole female source used by Daly: this source
is none other than Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. Daly regards Mayo as a
true feminist researcher [97], and presents Mayo’s work uncritically. She
defends her from the attacks of both Western and Indian critics, and advises
feminists to “search out and claim such sisters as Katherine Mayo”.[98]
Could it be that we have misjudged Katherine Mayo?
Let us look at whether or not Katherine Mayo’s approach to women
fits with Daly’s own view of a feminist approach. One of Daly’s major
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process which also takes place in the chapter on Chinese women [111]; the
chapter on African women has been criticised in similar terms by Audre
Lorde.[112] What is emphasised in this portrayal is the strength of
resistance among European and American women, and the power of their
common history of struggle, compared to the absence of resistance among
Indian, Chinese and African women. This image both draws from and feeds
into the hierarchical global positioning of these countries, but in a relocated
context of radical political opposition, the impact of which is to erase the
history of the women’s movement in the non-Western world and to elevate
American women as the leaders of global feminism.
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The second set of authorial social relations refers to that between the
author and the other writers upon whom she draws. In examining the
authorial relationship between Katherine Mayo and Mary Daly, we have
shown how the orientalist discourse is reproduced through the power
exercised by earlier writers used as sources. However, the important feature
of this process is that, although a relationship of power certainly exists
between the author and her source, the more significant relationship lies
hidden within it. For whilst power in the form of discursive influence is
exercised by the source over the author, we would argue that the power of
orientalism is not exercised by one author over the other, but is exchanged
or transferred between them, while the subject of the orientalist discourse
becomes the object of the exchange. We are suggesting, therefore, that the
most significant aspect of this relationship is the exchange of orientalist
power between the author and her source, in the process of which the
Indian woman who forms the subject of the discourse becomes objectified.
Within this exchange, a hierarchy of knowledge is constructed as the
authors confirm and corroborate each other in the production of a
legitimated knowledge, at the same time as eroding the validity of the
subject’s perspective through the process of objectification; in this way, the
two processes of exchange and objectification construct a hierarchy in which
Western feminism is elevated to a position of superiority over Indian
feminist knowledge.
The strength of the authorial relationship between the two writers
whom we have chosen as examples is highlighted rather than undermined
by the differences between them. Half a century separates Daly’s writing
from Mayo’s. Although the two authors come from the same national and
political culture, they are as far removed in political perspective as in
historical time. Living in a post-colonial world and believing that all
patriarchal cultures are barbaric, Daly does not use women’s oppression to
position nations and cultures on a hierarchy of civilisation, as Mayo did.
Unlike Mayo, Daly locates herself in the context of the women’s movement,
and her identification as a feminist is uncontested. Whereas Mayo’s analysis
of Indian women led her to defend imperialism, Daly attempts to place
women at the forefront, and to subvert Western ethnocentrism, by
combining an international perspective with radical feminist analysis. Yet it
is important to recognise that Mary Daly too writes out of her own time.
Daly’s discourse on the Indian woman should not be seen as an aberration
or as a historical vestige of colonial writing with no contemporary relevance.
Daly’s intimate identification with Mayo is a reflection of the hierarchy of
knowledge which still exists between the West and the East, and the low
value ascribed to knowledge produced in the former colonies. Within this
context, Daly’s neglect of Indian, Chinese and African women’s voices means
that, despite her very different political motivations, she is as unable as
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Tutor: Yes, they’ve got all of the problems caused by imperialism to cope
with too.
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Student: No I didn’t mean that, I meant suttee and things like that, we’ve
never had to deal with anything as awful as that.
Student: Yes but the witch-hunts were a much longer time ago than
suttee weren’t they?
In this exchange the student attempts to position European atrocities
against women at a more remote period in history than Indian patriarchal
abuses, suggesting that European men became ‘civilised’ earlier than Indian
men. This helps to maintain the belief that Indian culture is more oppressive
to women than British culture, to blame not men as a sex, but Indian
culture and the Indian people as a national or ‘racial’ group, and to
distinguish British people and British culture from any comparable
barbarity. To prevent this from happening, it is not enough for an author to
point out that she is generalising about patriarchy across cultures; it is also
necessary to counter the process by which orientalist discourses are
activated by statements about women’s oppression in Eastern cultures. What
is happening here is precisely what Mary Daly, for example, claims to be
fighting against, namely the erasure of male responsibility for patriarchal
atrocities. By blaming the ‘race’, men as a group are exonerated.
Responsibility for the oppression of Indian women is attached to both Indian
men through their barbaric practices, and Indian women through their
passivity and acceptance. Above all, women’s oppression in India becomes
defined as a problem of Indianness, as part of the pathology of Indian
culture, and represented as if it can somehow be detached from the problem
of masculinity which is also pertinent in Western cultures. The political
impact of this is to close down consideration of patriarchal relations and to
open up the question of national, ‘racial’ and cultural hierarchy, thus
promoting the orientalist discourse and actively preventing a truly
comparative feminist approach to the question of gender.
Notes
[1] Mrinalini Sinha (1994) Reading Mother India: empire, nation and the female
voice, Journal of Women’s History, 6, pp. 6-44.
[2] Robert Young (1990) White Mythologies: writing history and the West, p.175
(London: Routledge).
[3] Edward Said (1976) Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
[4] Ibid., p. 204.
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