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Journal of Women's History 14.4 (2003) 188-195



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Rethinking Boundaries:
Feminism and (Inter)Nationalism in Early-Twentieth-Century India

Sanjam Ahluwalia


This essay interrogates the boundaries within which we locate our historical narratives to suggest a move towards interconnected histories. I argue for the need to rethink the interactions among feminisms and their relationships to imperial and national politics. Drawing upon my research on the history of birth control in colonial India from 1871 to 1946, this essay demonstrates connections among the birth control movements in India, Britain, and the United States. 1 Recent feminist scholarship has moved toward such interconnected histories and dismantled the idea of hegemony of the nation as a historical category. Furthermore, feminists scholars have demonstrated that intellectual and social movements are interactive and evolve across national boundaries, thus linking international, national, and local politics, and "public" as well as "private" concerns. 2 Emphasis on interconnected histories also permits us to recognize how complex historical agencies operate within non-Western societies, and challenges the ubiquitous all-knowing Western subject. Within Indian historiography, this move will enable feminist historians to rescue the past from metanarratives of nationalism and from that of its other, communalism, making room for alternative narratives.

To challenge the dominant metanarratives that restrict our understanding of feminist history, however, the move toward interconnected histories is insufficient. We must also take seriously alternative imaginings, even if they sit uncomfortably with our own ideas or politics. Voices from the local fringes of Jaunpur, a tribal block in the Tehri Gaharwal district of Uttar Pradesh, allowed me to recognize the elitist assumptions that have shaped and continue to shape the project of determining and policing fertility behaviors. Moreover, Jaunpuri women's voices expanded my range of sources, allowing me to construct a more inclusive narrative for the history of birth control in India and elsewhere.

I focus on the discourse of birth control to investigate the history of gender politics and its intersection with the emergence of the middle-class-dominated nationalist politics in colonial India. My research has shown me the limitations of trying to understand the discourse of birth control in colonial India in isolation from birth control movements in Britain and the United States. Therefore, I examine the dialogue between Indian birth control activists and their British and American counterparts to understand [End Page 188] the interconnected workings of power locally, nationally, and globally. Focusing on dialogues among Indian activists and their cohorts in Britain and United States has allowed me to foreground the interlocking dimensions of global birth control politics. I argue for the need to comprehend birth control politics in the early twentieth century as what historian Adele E. Clarke has called a "shared commitment of multiple worlds and individuals to the production of new knowledge." 3

The issue of sources is important for historians trying to restore subaltern/marginal social groups to accounts of the past. In my own work, I began with traditional colonial state records and elite writings and then went on to do ethnographic fieldwork. Among the elite writings I examined were the records of such Western women birth control advocates as Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Edith How-Martyn, Eileen Palmer, and Margaret Cousins. Among elite Indian men, Gopaljee Ahluwalia, A. P. Pillay, N. S. Phadke, and Radhakamal Mukherjee ardently supported birth control. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Rani Lakshmi Rajwade, Begum Hamid Ali, and Lakshmi Menon were leading Indian middle-class women supporters of birth control who debated the issue within their organizations— the Women's India Association (WIA) and All-India Women's Conference (AIWC). 4 Together, writings of these Western and Indian advocates are important sources for reconstructing the debates among elites on birth control, a subject that remains largely unexamined in Indian historio-graphy.

The writings of Western birth control advocates allowed me to highlight cross-border interactions. For example, on the one hand, Sanger visited India and tried to "convert" Mahatma Gandhi into a supporter of birth control. Stopes, on the other hand, wrote scathingly about Gandhi's views against...

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