Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, eds. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 2008. vii + 550 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22049-3; $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35269-9.
Reviewed by Sushumna Kannan (Centre for the study of culture and society)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Reader on Social Reform
Women and Social Reform in Modern India is a two-part book that contains twenty-eight essays. The first part presents research in the field of social reform with twenty-three essays; the second part allows five texts from the period to speak. The introduction discusses the common lopsided textbook view of social reform and questions this view while pointing to work that shows another approach. Reform in the textbook view, the editors write, has always been about upper castes, women, and customs but never about lower castes, Muslims, or the limitations law places on reform.
The introduction raises many questions and emphasizes the need for more research. Some of its questions are made possible by the work that is to be found in the book while others are proposed by the editors. The introduction's open-endedness allows readers to access the essays on their own terms. Its balanced view comes across in the following statement: "The vast majority of girls--like their male counterparts--were deprived of literacy because of dire poverty" (p.4). I see this statement as balanced because much of the social sciences in India invariably carry an assumption that precolonial India was necessarily patriarchal, both intentionally and effectually; and ironically almost exactly patriarchal in the way the British deemed us to be, nothing more, nothing less.
The introduction, however, is not fully informative or facilitative and carries assumptions. For instance, the editors write: "We need to know ... what exactly was written about reforms in the newspapers, novels, and tracts, how the matter was performed in public theatre, how public opinion was formed, pluralized, made contradictory and fractured, swerving people away, finally, from the rule of prescriptive texts and commands that may have been diverse but which, certainly, were authoritative and compelling" (p. 2). There is a loose notion of "performance" involved here that is unexplained, and a student of social reform will be puzzled at the hinting of an idea of reality and representation that is not fully spelled out. The above sentence also subscribes to a version of social constructionism that sees the "social" as though it were an agent separate from the phenomenon talked about, but also as simply unidentifiable or too intricately connected to the phenomena. Then again, the role of prescriptive texts and commands is seen as authoritative and compelling while this role is actually seriously contested by an increasing number of scholars who wonder what exact effects and roles texts played in precolonial India. But instead of presenting this as a debate, and as a problem for history, wherein competing theories are placed alongside each other for comparison and discussion, the book simply avoids the debate. What one finds here is simply many interesting questions and then a quick resolution of what is still an ongoing debate. There is an evident apathy toward identifying scholars with different views and theories and setting up a conversation among them.