Debates on Domesticity and the Position of Women in Late Colonial India

Tracing the genealogy of domesticity from India’s precolonial past, this essay problematizes the recent emphasis on the link between women and domesticity in late colonial India. Based on a review of the growing literature in the field, it considers the newly evolved notions of colonial domesticity as a moment of [re]consideration rather than a break with the past. The discursive formation of the new ideas of domesticity under colonial regime transcended the private-public and often national boundaries, indicating an overlap where the most intimate details of the ‘private’, personal life were not only discussed and debated for public consumption but were also articulated in response to imperial and international concerns. This paper argues that domesticity as a new cultural logic became the motor of change for both the British and the colonized subjects and it particularly empowered women by giving them agency in the late colonial period. In conclusion, this paper signals the importance of children, childhood, fatherhood, and masculinity as critical components of domesticity, which are yet to be broached by South Asian historians. Recent literature on gender historiography suggests that neither women nor domesticity are uniform and universalizing categories bound by an interminable and unchanging relationship. 1 Problematizing the often-emphasized link between women and domesticity in colonial India, this essay proposes to dismantle the supposedly direct and stable connection between the two. Tracing the genealogy of domesticity from India’s precolonial past, it explores the relationship between women and domesticity and signals the need to expand the field to include men and children. Women, men, and children as historical subjects constitute and are constituted by emerging and hierarchical notions of domesticity that was particularly manifest in the nineteenth and twentieth-century India under British colonial rule. Domesticity as a new cultural construct was not an originary moment created by India’s encounter with the West, but has a long genealogy continuing from the precolonial past. 2 Based on a review of the growing literature in the field, this paper considers the newly evolved notions of colonial domesticity as a moment of [re]consideration rather than a break with the past. As recent scholarship suggests the discursive formation of the new ideas of domesticity under colonial regime transcended private-public and often national boundaries, indicating an overlap where the most intimate details of ‘private’, personal life were not only discussed and debated for public consumption via the rapid proliferation of the print media but were also articulated in response to imperial and international concerns. This paper argues that domesticity as a new cultural logic became the motor of change for both the British and the colonized subjects and it particularly empowered women by giving them agency in the late colonial period. While bulk of our sources will be drawn from colonial Bengal, significant examples from other states will be presented to render a complicated pan-Indian picture.