Gendered Spaces in Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child‐Wife

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Notes

[1] By purdah, I mean the idea and/or institution of seclusion. For examples of various stereotypical colonialist readings of the zenana as justification, see Nair (“Uncovering the Zenana”); Mills (711–712); Singh (114–31); Kent (128).

[2] Priscilla Chapman in Hindoo Female Education (1839; qtd. in Singh 106). Mary Frances Billington wrote in 1885 that the women's home was “architecturally and artistically its meanest part” (qtd. in Grewal 51).

[3] According to Kent, “the zenana missions were deeply invested in [a] vision of mature, educated Indian womanhood” (138).

[4] One confusion results from these writers' tendency to use the term zenana to signify any practices of female gender segregation. In actuality, the zenana was geographically limited to north, northwestern, and eastern India and restricted to certain classes and castes (Rajan 15–39; and Papanek 42–43). For critical work that unsettles facile assumptions of separate spheres for middle‐class men and women in Romantic and early Victorian England, see Davidoff and Hall; Graham‐Brown (515); and Mills (699).

[5] This review and the following ones are included in Satthianadhan's Miscellaneous Writings. Another publication with a primarily Hindu audience, The Hindu, praises the novel's reformist impulses while remaining respectful of Hindu life: “The authoress, though a Christian, shows a singularly accurate knowledge of the social and domestic customs of the Hindus, and is free from any endeavour to present the moral and spiritual effect of the Hindu religion in an unfavourable light….We cannot but consider [the premature death of the author] as a blow to the progress of Indian women” (125).

[6] For the “centrality” of marginal social groups within India's reform movement, see Viswanathan.

[7] For an excellent treatment of the Rakhmabai case and its relation to the 1891 Age of Consent Act, see Anagol‐McGinn.

[8] As Tanika Sarkar notes, marital consent is tied to age (in other words, to biology, the age of sexual maturity), instead of to compatibility or choice (1875).

[9] See Sumit Sarkar (157–59).

[10] Rakhmabai's reply to her husband in 1887 published in The Bombay Gazette (qtd. in Anagol‐McGinn 102).

[11] From “Female Education” in Miscellaneous Writings (16–21). The date of the article's publication is not known.

[12] See Natarajan (82–83); C.H. Heimsath (491–504); and Nair (Women and Law 72–79).

[13] See Chakravarti (76) and Sarkar (162).

[14] For an exposition of the conservative position, see T. Sarkar (1869–78).

[15] I refer to the accounts of Rakhmabai, Yashodabai Joshi, Champubai Madhavrao Nadkarni, Dhakbai Trimbakram Desai, Ahalyabai Morevale, and Krishnabai and Lanibai Dhurandar (see Anagol‐McGinn 104).

[16] Rakhmabai, “Infant Marriage” (Anagol‐McGinn 107).

[17] One woman of the period testified in Arya Bhagini that child wives and their husbands were “too young to know the meaning of love”; Kashibai Kanitkar, a member of the reform group Arya Mahila Samaj, believed almost all marriages were unhappy due to the practice of child marriage (qtd. in Anagol‐McGinn 110, 112–13).

[18] Chakravarti (214).

[19] Perhaps the most famous example occurs in Ramabai Ranade's memoirs, where she outlines the power struggles between women in a multi‐generational family.

[20] See Anagol‐McGinn (108). A similar situation is recounted in works such as Ramabai Ranade's autobiography and S.M. Nikambe's Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife (1895).

[21] Anagol‐McGinn notes how Indian women (including Rakhmabai and Pandita Ramabai) who desired reform turned to British feminists as they lost faith in the government's and in Indian male reformers' commitment to real reform (109–110).

[22] See Anagol‐McGinn (110).

[23] The exclusionary, racist implications of this ideology of high‐caste Hindus as descendents of Aryans (Indo‐Europeans) are noted by Chakravarti (28–29, 40–41). Satthianadhan follows this racialist mode of thinking by mentioning Kamala's fairness many times, where it becomes an index of her beauty and moral superiority.

[24] Chakravarti (50–61).

[25] Chakravarti (79).

[26] See Chandani Lokugé's notes to Satthianadhan's Kamala (159).

[27] Anagol‐McGinn (106). Reformers who were women, however, were less convinced that these women's orthodoxy would prove inveterate. Instead, they saw them as the products of centuries of conditioning that education alone could undo.

[28] In relation to the “burning widow,” Ania Loomba discusses the conjunction of chaste femininity and oppressed victim in “Dead Women Tell No Tales” (242).

[29] One cannot assume a stable set of views held by Indian Christians, as there was no unified or single position. E.M. Jackson has described the Satthianadhan family as oscillating from generation to generation between Westernization and Indianization (320, 322).

[30] See Moore (74, 81).