Gender and Nationalism

The January 2023 number of Samyukta attempts to read the protracted relationship between the nation and gender in the Indian subcontinent,  in the period stretching from the nineteenth century to the recent past. The key assumption here is that nationalist discourse anywhere in the world is gendered; particularly so in the Indian subcontinent. We wish to examine how the differential power relations between men and women were played out in this vast region from the 1850’s when the collective life of the populace was/is under both threat and rapprochement. 

Scholars are invited to present their views in agreement with or against this hypothesis, with supporting evidence. It can be a revisiting of the brutal massacre at Jallianwala Bagh or a reading of state intervention and militarism that erased thousands from the face of the earth in Sree Lanka or a critical commentary on the energetic resistance staged by women recently against the naked power of the state in Shaheen Bagh. The idea of the nation looms large behind all these confrontations. A close reading of such instances show us that the women participants are not ‘feminists’ fighting for equal rights with men. They are active players in movements to define citizenship and claim the rights of both men and women who inhabit a particular stretch of land. 

Narratives like these take us to the front line of struggles for freedom in the broadest sense of the term. We strongly feel the need to revisit his-story from this perspective in the interests of feminist historiography. We would therefore like to include papers that look beyond the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion. We also do not insist on any theoretical analysis; would rather prefer to leave it to the scholar to decide how s/he would prefer to structure the paper.Gender and Nationalism Call for papers