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of Naregal’s own evocative questions: about the kinds of literate practices, aesthetic
norms, and modes of transmission and circulation that shaped these vernacular
publics.
This is a cutting edge, complex and multi-directional book. For this reason, a
simpler organizational style within each chapter would also have been of benefit.
While in some places a deeper, more grounded analysis of literate practice could
be desired, nonetheless, in laying out a critical new terrain of study, and in posing
highly nuanced questions about the nature of colonial transformations in the literate
sphere, this is an important book both for scholars of Western India, and for anyone
interested in the transformations of knowledge and its social formations under
colonialism.

Rachel Sturman
University of Michigan

TANIKA SARKAR, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural
Nationalism, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001, pp. viii + 290, Rs 575.

In eight of the nine essays written over a period of eight years, Tanika Sarkar
looks at the development of Hindu cultural nationalism against the backdrop of
nineteenth-century Bengal. It is the middle class that she focuses on, a class that
acts ’always in response to, in reaction against, or together with, people who are
Muslim, low castes, peasants and labourers and the colonial ruling classes’ (p. 2).
Her particular interest is the women of this category-though at times her more
general interest in the class as a whole takes over. Sarkar’s basic leitmotif is firmly
imprinted through the pages-the colonial experience is not to be viewed in terms
of ’the two grand and stagnant narratives’ of domination and resistance alone;
there were many other nuances to relationships and encounters that need to be
examined. If Edward Said is dismissed, James Scott is hardly mentioned though
’everydayness’ is present in many of the resistances she describes.
With dexterity and impressive use of vernacular sources, Sarkar unravels the
development of a public sphere, of discourse and the use of the press to lobby for
causes. Positing in a certain manner was almost sure to bring forth a response
from others-in short, the genre of the debate had been born as a part of the
middle-class search for identity, an identity that juggled the liberal reformist with
the Hindu revivalist persona. The author’s position is particularly interesting as it
calls into question the somewhat naive belief in the emancipatory influence of
the Bengal renaissance. Here, her well-argued chapters on Bankimchandra Chatto-
padhyay make interesting reading as Sarkar describes the gradual supplanting of
the liberal by the authoritarian spirit. It is almost as though the changes in Bankim’s
worldview became a metaphor for changes in middle-class Bengali perspectives.
In the first chapter, ’Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Domesticity and Nationalism
in Nineteenth-century Bengal’, Sarkar shows how the Bengali intelligentsia was

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involved in a complicated process of interrogating power relationships in the

context of indigenous customs and traditions. Gender relations naturally occupied
a considerable amount of emotional space in this process where not only the

emergent print media but also the rich oral and artistic traditions, the new Calcutta
theatre and later, the numerous associations were involved. The household became
the focus of this interrogation, and conjugality the relationship primarily under
the microscope. The married woman was viewed as a moral agent, one who had
to carry forth the message of the shastras: ’the male body, having passed through
the grind of Western education, office, routine, and forced urbanization, having
been marked with the loss of traditional sports and martial activities was supposedly
remade in an attenuated, emasculated form by colonialism’ (p. 43).
Herein lies the rub: women’s own writings, a small but influential counter-
tradition in folklore and, at a more formal, public level, important debates and
legislation focusing on conjugality indicate that the conjugal bond and the power
nexus implicit in it were no longer sacrosanct. In ’Talking about Scandals’, Sarkar
discusses at length the murder of Elokeshi by her husband, Nobinchandra Banerji;
Elokeshi was punished for her liaison with Madhavchandra Giri of Tarakeswar, a
powerful mohunt of this important Saivite pilgrimage spot. Elokeshi had violates
the very basis of Hindu marriage and the expectations of a good wife; however, in
the 1870s, her husband could no longer get away with what in an earlier age may
have been regarded as an appropriate display of machismo. Sarkar etches in inter-
esting detail the changing ambience-the emergence of the public sphere that
appropriated the right to debate and discuss what might earlier have been verily
brushed under the carpet, and of a colonial legal regime treading somewhat cau-
tiously into the domestic sphere. This was also a time when the Permanent Settle-
ment had created a class of complacent landlords and when urbanization and the
growing salariat brought into question the old relationship between the rentier
and the tenant. All this of course had to be seen in a space recently sullied and
torn asunder by the events of 1857 and after. In an interesting observation on the
aftermath of the Elokeshi case, Sarkar points out that pilgrimage, so far a legitimate
form of activity for purdahnashin women, now exercised the patriarchal mind in
an alarming manner.

However, actual journey was not necessary to threaten the patriarchal edifice:
an

Rashsundari (or Rassundari) Debi managed this from within the folds of her sari
as she pored over the leaves of the Chaitanya Bhagawat. Amar Jiban ( 1876), the
first autobiography by a Bengali woman, describes in detail an upper-caste Hindu
woman’s life; while she evokes images of a caged bird, one who had been plucked
from her mother’s lap when a mere fledgling, Rashsundari also questions the
authority of a dominant worldview that denied her the right to express herself. Of
course, as Sarkar points out, the late nineteenth century provided a context, a
venue and a medium for this remarkable woman.

The theme of remarkable women is picked up by the novels of Bankimchandra

Chattopadhyay. In Chapters IV and V, Sarkar explores this influential author’s
writings where invariably gender relations and the role of the woman have to be

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viewed against the backdrop of his wider political message. She traces the changes
in his thinking. In his earlier work, an admiration of the older, educated woman
fitted in with a dissection of conjugality and various traumas associated with it.
His powerful essay ’Samya’ (Equality) critiqued the oppressive stranglehold of
the landed elite. But, in a few years, after his debate with Rev. Hastie (who merci-
lessly criticized Hinduism), a strange obscurantism set in. While Sarkar returns to
this point more than once, she does not really explain why Bankim’s worldview
changed so radically though she does mention the three major influences in his
intellectual life: reformism, guilt about notions of loyalty, and Hindu revivalism.
Clearly, contradictions between the first and the second resulted in his opting for
a revivalist agenda in his later writings. For instance, in ’Prachina 0 Nabina’ (The
Old-fashioned and Modem Woman), he criticizes the reformist notion of the com-
panionate marriage with a rare perspicacity, viewing it as using women instru-
mentally. Again, in keeping with the revivalist notion of sati as redemptive, he
not only glorifies the event but also sees ’an eroticization of this spectacle of vio-
lent death’ (p. 159). Here, the revivalist influence subdues the reformist and grows
with time. Sarkar’s analysis of Bande Mataram in Chapter VIII is instructive,
particularly where she traces the transmutation of the benevolent Durga into the
awesome Kali; as she shows, this iconography was to have a sustained role to

play in the following century and the various strands of the freedom/nationalist
struggle.
The Hindu woman, her body, its future as a wife and bearer of offspring and
then later in widowhood, preoccupied the Bengali middle class for the better part
of the nineteenth century. It was ’held to be pure and unmarked, loyal, and sub-
servient to the discipline of the shastras alone’ (p. 202). The great concern over
the purity and chastity of the Hindu woman’s body was also responsible for a
number of significant legislations-Sati Regulation XVII of 1829, Hindu Widows
Remarriage Act, 1856, and the Age of Consent Act, 1891. Tanika Sarkar is parti-
cularly interested in the Age of Consent Act and deals with issues and debates
arising around it at some length in two chapters. The impact of the Rukmabai
case of 1887 in Maharashtra where a child wife refused to cohabit with her husband
on a number of grounds, and the death in 1890 of Phulmonee, a Bengali girl of
ten or eleven, after she was raped by her husband Hari Maiti, resulted in the
reformist press publishing reports of similar incidents from all over the country.
But as Phulmonee was above ten years of age, under existing legal provisions,
Hari Maiti was not guilty; in the ensuing furore, much depended on definitions of
puberty. As Sarkar points out, consent was viewed as a purely biological category,
where the body was regarded as ready for penetration. It had little to do with the
quotidian understanding of the word implying an act of free will. While the author
is right in underlining that the act was a misnomer, one wonders whether in fact
there was any scope for compatibility-sexual, emotional or mental-in the uni-
verse under consideration, that is, that of barely pubertal Hindu girls. It is in this
context then, that the against-the-grain writings, the subterranean voices of those
like Rashsundari gather strength. But though these were few and far between,

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they brought agency into an ambience mired with notions of victimhood and
suffering, complicity and surrender.
Sarkar’s useful, cogently argued and well-researched collection of essays could
have done without the last chapter on Sadhvi Rithambhara and the malevolent
rhetoric of the late twentieth century: it can be viewed as hardly more than a filler
by the conscientious reader who has just journeyed through a vibrant yet patri-
archal, authoritarian nineteenth- century Bengal. Some subtle editing would have
taken care of repetitions-almost to the word-that appear in a number of chapters.
Vide the quote from Bankimchandra on pages 43 and 158-59 and Sarkar’s views
on the emasculated Hindu male (pp. 43 and 202). Also an index would have been
most helpful; as well as a little more care in referencing (often the name of the
publisher is missing), spelling of names-both Chattopadhyaya (p. 135 onwards)
and Chattopadhyay (p. 257, fn. 25) being used for Bankimchandra, and use
of important indigenous terms: surely it is jauhar vrat and not Jawahar vrat
(p. 265)! These editorial quibbles apart, Sarkar’s collection is commendable,
particularly as it furthers the ’poco’ debate on victimhood versus agency, reflex
action versus a well-thought out independent agenda and helps contextualize the
present in a past rich in dialogue, dissent and an evolved public sphere.

Malavika Karlekar
Centre for Women’s Development Studies
New Delhi

SANJOY BHATTACHARYA, Propaganda and Information in Eastern India 1939-45:

A Necessary Weapon of War, Richmond, Surrey, Curzon Press, 2001, pp. xiv +
242, Price not stated.

The analysis of state-generated propaganda in modern Indian history is rare. The

only study which comes to mind is Milton Israel’s Communications and Power:
Propaganda and the Press in Indian Nationalist Struggle. But the problem with
Israel’s book, as rightly pointed out by Sanjoy Bhattacharya, is that he makes no
’

distinction between the ’Information Control’ measures of the Raj during peace
and war. Bhattacharya’s monograph (an updated version of his SOAS Ph.D.)
attempts to portray the special techniques initiated by the British colonial state in
conducting Information Warfare during World War II.
World War II being a Total War involved the mass mobilization of human and
economic resources. Thus, due to the wartime mobilization of the colonial state,
Indians faced great economic hardships. Bhattacharya’s argument is that economic
scarcities in villages and towns offered fertile ground for the various political
parties to sow the seeds of disaffection among Indians against the Raj. The Raj
attempted to combat the loss of legitimacy among the populace by resorting to
’target-specific’ counter-propaganda. The Raj’s officials tried to convey messages
about the positive effect of rationing and the government’s attempts to prevent

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