Bhadramahilas and activists: gender, class, and political involvement in late colonial Bengal (c. 1920s-1940s)

Abstract

This thesis explores the subjectivities of activists and politically conscious bhadramahilas, or Bengali middle-class educated ‘gentlewomen’, during the last decades of British rule, as emerging from their own writings. It argues that the bhadramahila identity – usually identified with passivity and derivativeness – and activism were not mutually exclusive categories; rather, they gave life to a broad spectrum of diverse subjectivities that historiography has failed to fully grasp. Scholarship has often depicted Indian women acting assertively as either docile subjects of their male guardians, or shocking yet circumscribed exceptions to otherwise respected gendered norms. By advancing new methodological and interpretative perspectives on the articulation of Bengali women’s political selves, this dissertation explores how these actors variously navigated, challenged, and reflected on their selfhoods as produced by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and caste. From the political associations of the late 1920s, to the revolutionary movement of the 1930s and the communist movement of the early 1940s, Bengali women displayed progressively bolder and less derivative forms of agency in the public sphere. This was often paired with a calculated attention at maintaining ‘respectability’, thus producing complex subjectivities. This dissertation studies both prominent activists, like Latika Ghose, Bina Das, and Manikuntala Sen, and non-activist women, such as the Indian memsahib Mrs. Ghoshal, through their writings, while also drawing in their immediate formative environment, associations, and networks of support. It analyses their activities and political sentiments in the light of their wider interactions with the nationalist, revolutionary and communist politics, as well as amongst themselves. In the process it is possible to see their framed subjectivities in contestation with the ways in which political roles for women were being defined in contemporary discourses. In this study, such subjectivities are understood as different iterations of the ‘bhadramahila and activist’ spectrum, thus showing how female activists progressively carved a space for themselves as women in the public sphere.

Date of Award	31 Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Jesus Chairez-Garza (Co Supervisor) & Anindita Ghosh (Main Supervisor)