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ABSTRACT
For feminist historiography, polyphonic women's testimonials of resistance struggles present several critical questions, most importantly about the mediating role of the feminist intellectuals who conduct the interviews, translate, edit, write, and analyse the testimonies. The extended editorial commentaries in a collection of testimonies by women who participated in an armed peasant revolt in India from 1945 to 1951 traces and critiques the assumptions and disciplinary agendas the intellectuals bring to their women's history project. We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising (1989) throws light not only on the uneven relations of power, agency, and communication that undergird testimonial production, but also the ideologies of gender and community that stand guard over the self-representation of the testimonial narrators.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984), xviii.
2 Ibid., xx.
3 Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 11.
4 Francesca Denegri, ‘Testimonio and its Discontents’, in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Stephen Hart and Richard Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 228–38.
5 Georg M. Gugelberger, ‘Institutionalization of Transgression: Testimonial Discourse and Beyond’, in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Gugelberger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1.
6 Ibid., 12.
7 Robert Carr, ‘Crossing the First World/Third World Divides: Testimonial, Transnational Feminisms, and the Postmodern Condition’, in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), 157.
8 José Rabasa, ‘Beyond Representation? The Impossibility of the Local (Notes on subaltern Studies in Light of a Rebellion in Tepoztlán, Morelos)’, in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodriguez (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2001), 195.
9 Gareth Williams, ‘The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies’, in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg M. Gugelberger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 239.
10 Stree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We Were Making History’ – Women and the Telangana Uprising (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Henceforth cited as WWMH.
11 Kavita Panjabi, Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Movement Foreword by V. Geetha (New Delhi: Zubaan), 2017; Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women's Testimonios (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006); Sonya Surabi Gupta, ed. Subalternities in India and Latin America: Dalit Autobiographies and the Testimonio (New Delhi: Routledge, 2022).
12 Vasanth Kannabiran and Veena Shatrugna, ‘The Relocation of Political Practice – The Stree Shakti Sanghatana Experience’, Lokayan Bulletin 4, no. 6 (1986): 23–34.
13 P. Sundarayya, Telangana People's Armed Struggle and Its Lessons, 1946–51 (Delhi: Foundation Books, 1996); Sunil K. Sen, Peasant Movements in India: Mid-nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (K. P. Bagchi, 1982). D. N. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India: 1920–1950 (New Delhi: OUP, 1983); Archana Prasad, ‘Making Resistance: Narratives of Communist Led Agrarian Struggles, 1940–55’, in Narratives of Social Movements, ed. Savya Saachi (New York: Routledge, 2014).
14 I. Thirumali, ‘Peasant Class Assertions in Nalgonda and Warangal Districts of Telangana, 1930–1946’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 31, no. 2 (1994): 217–37.
15 Thirumali, ‘Peasant Class Assertions’, 224–5.
16 Ibid., 236.
17 Kerwin Lee Klein, History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 124.
18 Susie Tharu, ‘Oral History, Narrative Strategy, and the Figures of Autobiography’, in Narrative Forms and Transformations, ed. Sudhakar Marathe and Meenakshi Mukherjee (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986), 188.
19 Margaret Randall, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), v.
20 Margaret Randall and Lynda Yantz, eds. Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (Vancouver: New Star, 1981), Ix.
21 Kavita Panjabi, Unclaimed Harvest, xIiv.
22 Ibid., I.
23 Ellen Rooney, ‘Symptomatic Reading is a Problem of Form’, in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2017), 127–52.
24 Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 336.
25 Ibid., 336.
26 Kannabiran and Shatrugna,‘The Relocation of Political Practice’, 32.
27 Arturo Arias, ‘From Peasant to National Symbol’, in Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom, ed. Allen Carey Webb and Stephen Benz (Albany: SUNY, 1996), 36.
28 Ibid., 37.
29 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 287.
30 Ibid., 287.
31 Ibid., 287.
32 John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)’, in De/colonising the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992), 103.
33 John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1999), 72.
34 Claudia Salazar, ‘Not just a Personal History: Women's Testimonios and the Plural Self’, in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991).
35 Doris Sommer, ‘Rigoberta's Secrets’, Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (1991): 23–50.
36 Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 19.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Romita Choudhury
Romita Choudhury teaches at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, feminist historiography, oral history and documentary films. She is currently working on a collection of essays on the discourse of humanitarianism in witness narratives. Additional areas of interest include the culture of healthcare systems, particularly gender and sexuality in public health discourse. Romita has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Guelph (Canada), University of Vigo (Spain), and Nottingham Trent University (UK). Email: [email protected]