Sanjay Seth on the Seeming Contradiction in Indian Nationalist Discourse about the "Woman Question"
Indian womanhood now assumed a privileged status in nationalist discourse. Numerous speakers and writers waxed lyrical on the special qualities of the indian (or Hindu) women, whose "clean innocence...simple faith...sweetness and geniality of temper...[and] natural courtesy...are unsurpassed". Tanika Sarkar describes how "woman" was produced as a potent signifier in the course of the elaboration of this discourse: "An icon was constructed of the patriotic subject, the good Hindu woman with her simple dress, her ritually pure conchshell bangles and red vermilion mark, her happy surrender and self immersion in the sansar [domesticity], and her endless bounty and nurture expressed by cooking and feeding. She was charged with an immense aesthetic, cultural and religious load in nationalist writings."
It did not follow that the condition of women and conjugal relations were not to change. On the contrary, strengthening the nation and preparing for the struggles ahead required that middle-class Indian women also had to change; they had to become "modern" and yet remain quintessentially Indian. As Chatterjee argues, the division between spiritual and material, inside and outside, essential and inessential, did not entail a rejection of the West or of modernity: "the nationalist paradigm in fact supplied an ideological principle of selection...not a dismissal of modernity but an attempt to make modernity consistent with the nationalist project". What did follow, if remaking women and domesticity required recapturing and preserving some essential Hinduness or Indianness, was that reforms could not entail modeling Indian women on their Western counterparts, and relatedly, that this project of preservation-cum-transformation could only be undertaken by Indians, not by the colonial state. The seeming contradiction between reforming women's condition and yet maintaining women as markers of an Indian essence was in part bridged...by a discursive move that allowed every change to be labeled a "return" to an originary essence...Where reform of the condition of Indian women was required, it was thus often urged as a return to traditions and customs that had been forsaken. It was not the "Hindu religion" or "native customs" that were the source and cause of women's plight, but rather the decline of these: as Annie Besant put it in the course of urging reform of the practice of child marriage, "I am pleading...for a restoration to women in India of the place that was theirs when India was greatest."
Source: Sanjay Seth, "Nationalism, Modernity, and the 'Woman Question' in India and China", Journal of Asian Studies, 72, 2 (2013): pp. 279-280.