Feminism, Imperialism and Orientalism: the challenge of the ...

FEMINISM, IMPERIALISM AND ORIENTALISM
Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1998
Feminism, Imperialism and Orientalism:
the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’
JOANNA LIDDLE & SHIRIN RAI
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT This article examines the content and process of imperialist
discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American
women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key
exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it
demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time with
different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first
case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of
civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of
global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images
occurred within the context of each author’s social relations with the subject,
the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be
produced through the author’s representation of the human subjects of whom
she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author’s
uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the
audience through the author’s failure to challenge established cognitive
structures in the reader.
Introduction
This article has two main aims. First, it examines how aspects of imperialist
discourse on the colonised woman were taken up in Western women’s
writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, and reproduced in the ‘second
wave’ of the movement within the context of the changing power relations
between the imperial powers and the former colonies. Second, it identifies
some of the discursive practices which have produced imperialist images of
the colonised woman, and shows how these practices take place within the
social relations of authorship in the field of women’s studies. In both cases
we are looking at the importance of the historical for the contemporary: in
the case of imperialist discourse, we show how certain aspects of the content
were reproduced with different but parallel effects in the changed political
circumstances; in the case of discursive practice, we show how the process
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of creating written images occurred within the context of the author’s social
relations with the subject, with the reader, and with other authors. Our hope
is to promote a genuinely international feminist dialogue by providing some
analytical tools for recognising, deconstructing and ultimately undermining
both the content and the process of imperialist discourse.
To conduct this analysis, we critically examine the texts of two Western
women authors of different generations who have written about Indian
women. These are Katherine Mayo writing in the 1920s, and Mary Daly
writing from the 1970s to the present. Both are American women with
specific political agendas informed by different historical contexts and
intellectual paradigms and, interestingly, in different ways reinforcing rather
than challenging the dominant discourses. The particular works we focus on
do not stand alone, but are connected in that Daly was heavily influenced by
Mayo, and Daly’s text builds upon Mayo’s. The two texts are further linked
by the history of the relations between the East and the West, yet both leave
the relationship unchallenged: the historical context of imperialism which
allowed for the construction of the ‘Indian woman’ remains
unproblematised.
The writers have been chosen for three reasons. First, the historical
relationship between the authors enables us to trace some of the variations
and some of the continuities of discourse between the earlier and the later
writer. Second, each author had an important influence on public ideas at
the time of writing, as will be elaborated in the sections on each author.
Third, the lasting reputation of each writer has been maintained in three
different continents, since Katherine Mayo is still well known in India,
whereas Mary Daly is perhaps best known in Britain and the USA. This
provides a particular focus of interest for readers from the three different
areas of the world, enabling us to follow the movement of discourse across
time and place in a way that is relevant to an international audience. While
Mayo has been the subject of a recent historiographical critique by Mrinalini
Sinha [1], our analysis is distinct in linking the historical to the
contemporary, showing how features of Mayo’s discourse were subsequently
taken up by Daly and reproduced within a set of authorial relations which
create Western culture and ‘first world’ feminism as superior to their Indian
counterparts.
Having analysed the content of the discourses and their political
impact, we conclude by identifying some of the processes by which the
discourses are produced within the social relations of authorship, referring
to three sets of authorial relationship: between the author and the human
subjects of whom she writes, between the author and the readers for whom
she writes, and between the author and the other writers on whom she
draws. We aim to show first, how an orientalist discourse can be produced
through the author’s representation of her human subjects; second, how this
discourse can be reproduced through the author’s uncritical use of earlier
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writers; and third, how the discourse can be activated in the audience
through the author’s failure to challenge established cognitive structures in
the reader.
Imperialism and Orientalism
No analysis of the relationship between East and West can take place
without reference to imperialism. Imperialism is important, not only as an
economic, political and social context in which cultures and peoples
encountered each other, but also to understand the imbalance of power that
has defined much of this contact. It is also the context in which knowledges
emerged that ‘explained’ Eastern reality to the West, and in which these
countries found a place in the international systems of power. As Robert
Young has said: “that history lives on ... its effects are operating now”.[2]
This can be witnessed in the contemporary agendas for debate on
development.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of any relationship that is
defined by a significant imbalance of power is how the narrative of one is
given legitimacy over the narrative of the other. The possession of greater
power generally invests the knowledges of the more powerful with a greater
authority than those of the powerless, and this authority facilitates the
creation of universalised images of both the powerful and the powerless.
Edward Said’s path-breaking book identified such an exercise of power in
the context of imperialism as ‘orientalism’, an approach which enabled the
West to come to terms with the East, and at the same time to construct the
West’s identity in contrast or opposition to that of the East.[3] Said argued
that the ‘political doctrine’ of orientalism [4] has resulted in a powerful
consensus and created a universal imagination concerning the Orient that
has spanned many generations in the West.[5]
The historical image that the orientalists created for the Orient was a
complex one, overlaying the ‘lost glory’ of ancient cultures with a negative
image of decline. This recreated history both explained the fall of oriental
cultures and legitimised continued colonial rule.[6] Historians, novelists,
artists, linguists, travellers, administrators and others cooperated in the
creation of this image of the East, supported by the political and material
resources made available to them within the colonial context. The imbalance
of power that characterised the image affected and continues to affect the
representation of ‘the Orient’ today.
We should emphasise at this point that we do not equate the ‘Orient’
of colonial times with the Third World of today. The ‘Orient’ was and
continues to be a historically rooted construction linked primarily to
colonialism, and both the structures of imperialism and the forms of
orientalist discourse varied over different historical periods and in different
geographical locations.[7] Nevertheless, we will argue that certain aspects of
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the orientalist discourse on India have retained a hold on the Western
imagination as expressed in certain contemporary women’s studies writings.
The art historian John MacKenzie has pointed out that Said’s view of
orientalism is overgeneralised and “inadequately rooted in the ... complexity
of different forms of imperialism and varieties of economic and political
relationship”.[8] Thus, the term orientalism needs to be made specific to
particular cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Our analysis will
examine the contribution of two North American authors and will show how
these writings can be understood within their respective political contexts.
Antoinette Burton has suggested that the empire did not only happen ‘out
there’ in the colony but at home too, and that the relationship between the
empire and the mother country was dialectic not dichotomous.[9] We
suggest that the way imperialist relations were conducted between India and
Britain was also important for the USA, Britain’s major imperial competitor,
implying that the empire was not only created in the colony and the mother
country but also in the countries of the competing imperial powers. Gayatri
Spivak [10] and Robert Young [11] have discussed how Western writings on
the Orient tell us more about the authors and the political contexts in which
they wrote than about the Orient itself. We will identify what the work of
Katherine Mayo and Mary Daly has to say about their own political concerns
and the place of Western women in global politics.
Orientalism and the Indian Woman
Two images of India that are recognisable to people today in both Britain
and the USA are those of poverty and mystery. What ‘sells’ a country like
India to the West, as seen in tourism advertisements for example, is its
‘exotic culture’ in the context of its economic poverty. In her exoticism and
her misery, the ‘Indian woman’ has embodied the subcontinent itself:
attracting and repelling at the same time, she is as absent in the
construction of her image as India has been. As Said says: “in discussions of
the orient, the orient is all absence, whereas one feels the orientalist and
what he [sic] says as presence”.[12] Said’s quote is significant because, as
Billie Melman has shown, although he uses examples of the construction of
women in literature as descriptive illustrations of orientalist discourses, he
does not incorporate an analysis of gender into his conceptual approach.[13]
Liddle & Joshi, for example, show how gender formed one of the pillars on
which imperialism was built, and that the divisions of gender mediated the
structure of imperialism [14]; and Sangari & Vaid demonstrate that both the
coloniser and the colonised used the image of Indian women and the notion
of Indian tradition in relation to gender to contain political and cultural
change in both Britain and India.[15]
Although this orientalist discourse was largely constructed by men,
Western women also contributed to it. Sara Mills has argued that their voice
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was distinctive, lacking the authority of the male coloniser, and “therefore
not straightforwardly orientalist in the way Said has described it”.[16] We
would suggest, however, that the secluded woman was the one subject in
which Western women had a more legitimate knowledge and were accorded
greater authority than Western men, because of their ability to penetrate
beyond the purdah. Many of the texts produced by Western women writers,
such as Flora Shaw [17] who wrote for The Times, painted a picture of
Indian women which was so pathetic, so oppressed and victimised, that they
incensed many sections of British society, including not only conservatives
and committed imperialists, but also socialists like the Webbs [18], who
supported Indian nationalism, and ‘first wave’ feminists like Eleanor
Rathbone [19], who was induced to write her own critique of child marriage
[20] upon reading Katherine Mayo’s Mother India.
It is important to recognise that significant differences of approach can
be identified between the wide range of Western female authors writing
about Indian women, showing, as Chaudhuri & Strobel put it, a “complex
dynamic of complicity and resistance” rather than a simple or
straightforward form of orientalism.[21] Reina Lewis points out that
women’s orientalism was not “either simply supportive or simply
oppositional”, it was also “partial, fragmented and contradictory”, and often
produced less degrading forms of representation of the orientalised
other.[22] Antoinette Burton, however, has suggested that feminist writing
in particular depicted Indian women as “enslaved, degraded and in need of
salvation”.[23] Burton shows that feminist journals of the early twentieth
century, including Women’s Suffrage Journal and Votes for Women,
maintained a regular diet of articles on Indian women which produced this
image in such a formulaic way that a certain Mrs Chapman “feared the
public would weary from too frequent repetition of the story”.[24] Although
there were exceptions, most feminists believed that the empire demonstrated
the superiority of the white race.[25]
Ramusack identifies the approach of most Western feminists of the
time as “maternal imperialists”, including those who supported Indian
nationalism but still believed that the colonial government improved the
condition of women.[26] As Jayawardena [27] makes clear, they saw Indian
women as their special burden, and saw themselves as the agents of
progress and civilisation.[28] The subject Indian woman in a decaying
colonised society was the model of everything they were struggling against
and was thus the measure of Western feminists’ own progress. British
feminists saw Britain as the centre of both democracy and feminism, and
when they claimed political rights they also claimed the right to participate
in the empire, seeing female influence as crucial for the empire’s
preservation.[29] They sought power for themselves in the imperial project,
and used the opportunities and privileges of empire as a means of resisting
patriarchal constraints and creating their own independence.[30] This was
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done by reproducing the formulaic image of the oppressed Indian woman
regardless of class, education, region, language, religion or caste, even when
Indian women were creating their own social reformist and women’s
movements.[31] And despite the real strides that Indian women have made
since independence, they are still routinely cast in Western scholarship and
the media as victims, as objects of state policy, or more generally as simply
oppressed.
In examining the process by which a unitary image is produced,
Chandra Mohanty [32] argues that orientalist power is exercised in discourse
when the homogenised and monolithic representation of the Third World
woman is contrasted with Western feminism’s self-representation. The
impact is to rob Third World women of their historical and political agency,
as Western feminists become “the true ‘subjects’ of this counter-history
[while] third world women ... never rise above the debilitating generality of
their ‘object’ status”.[33] Mohanty’s analysis is valuable for understanding
how power is exercised within the authorial relationship between the writer
and the subject, and we draw upon her work in our critique of the two
writers. Mills [34] and Lewis [35] point out that it is also necessary to
consider how the image is received by the audience. We suggest further that
in examining the transition of ideas and images over time, it is important to
include an examination of the writer’s relationship with other authors. We
will therefore examine the relationship of the author with her human
subjects, with other authors, and with the reader.
We wish to make it clear that the question at issue here is not the
oppressiveness of child marriage, suttee, and other patriarchal abuses
against women in India, but the political effects of how India, Indian culture
and Indian women are represented. We should also emphasise that Western
feminism is not a homogeneous discourse, and orientalism is by no means
universal. Nor are Indian women writers by definition excluded from the
criticism.[36] Following Mohanty, our aim is not to make “a culturalist
argument about ethnocentrism” but to “uncover how ethnocentric
universalism is produced in certain analyses”.[37]
In the following two sections, we examine the writing of Katherine
Mayo and Mary Daly. The analysis of the content of each writer’s text will
take place within these two sections, followed by a final section analysing
the process by which the discourse is produced within the social relations of
authorship.
Katherine Mayo’s ‘Child Bride’
In 1927 Katherine Mayo published her book Mother India [38] based on a
visit towards the end of 1925–early 1926. To set the political context, the
book was published in the same year that the British Government appointed
the Simon Commission to investigate Indian demands for self-government,
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and 3 years before Gandhi launched the civil disobedience campaigns as a
response to Britain’s refusal to grant dominion status. It was also the year
that the All India Women’s Conference was set up, the largest and most
influential of the Indian women’s movement organisations, and 10 years
after the Women’s Indian Association had been established when Indian
women had first demanded the vote. Women in India were not only active in
resistance against the British Raj at that time but were also organising
campaigns against purdah, dowry, child marriage and the conditions of
widowhood, and in favour of women’s education and female suffrage.
Although women from all sections of Indian society were active in the
nationalist movement, those involved in women’s movement activities were
largely middle class, and the issues they took up were therefore middle-class
issues.[39]
Mayo’s book needs to be seen in the context of global politics in the
early twentieth century. Up to the start of the First World War Britain was
the dominant global power [40], but the USA had from the nineteenth
century been in the process of becoming an imperial power in its own
right.[41] From 1914 to 1945 Britain still maintained the largest empire [42]
but her power was in decline. The USA, meanwhile, established first her
equality with Britain and then global dominance as the two world wars
enriched the US economy and weakened her European competitors.[43]
Before 1914 Britain was “the centre of the world economic system”, but
after 1914 this position was taken by the USA.[44] From the late nineteenth
century onwards the USA had been moving into the Pacific [45] and had
seized the islands of Hawaii, Wake, Guam and the Philippines to form a
naval and refuelling route across the Pacific in a drive to dominate the
China market. The forcible opening of Japan by the USA in the nineteenth
century was similarly motivated by the desire to use Japan as a coaling
station on the route to China.[46] US expansionist activity in the western
Pacific increased from 1900 on, while the Monroe Doctrine, claiming for the
USA the exclusive right to intervene in the American continent, was
increasingly respected by the European powers as the USA gained in
power.[47] Thus, the USA looked on the Americas and the Pacific as its
spheres of influence.[48] But although the USA was in the ascendant during
the inter-war years, several challenges threatened US power in the 1920s,
including the rise of communism, especially the 1917 Russian revolution,
Japan’s attempt to enter the power group, especially in the sphere of the
Pacific, and the global economic depression and threat to capitalism of
which the USA was the epicentre.[49] These threats encouraged the Western
powers to cooperate together to bolster the global system of imperialism.
The early part of the twentieth century also saw the rise of nationalist
feelings in the colonies. From 1905 the nationalist movements in India and
Egypt had a degree of mass support, and the First World War undermined
colonialism to an unprecedented extent. The fall of the Tsarist empire in
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1917 was followed in 1921 by Irish independence, the transformation of
Egypt from a British protectorate to a semi-independent state in 1922
(though still under British control), and the mass campaign of
non-cooperation in India called by Gandhi and the Indian National
Congress.[50]
It is in this context of the Western powers’ competition for global
dominance, the internal and external threats to the world imperialist system
inducing cooperation among the Western powers, and the challenges to
imperial authority from the colonies of both the United Kingdom and the
USA, that we can understand Mayo’s decision to write Isles of Fear: the
truth about the Philippines in 1925 and Mother India in 1927, since both
books argued that Britain and the USA shared a common responsibility for
the ‘backward’ peoples of the colonies and must resist native demands for
independence. As Sinha [51] has outlined, Mayo was a member of the
patriotic Society of Mayflower Descendants and was already famous for
writing propagandist books in the USA. Her interest in India was sparked by
a Senate bill on Indian citizenship rights in the USA, and the British
parliamentary debate on the Simon Commission to investigate political
reform in India as a response to nationalist agitation. Mayo undertook her
trip to India for the specific purpose of writing the book.[52] Her status not
only as a woman but as an American gave to Mother India a legitimacy and
an authority which did not attach to British authors, and therefore
heightened the book’s influence on the British public and British media. As
evidence of this legitimacy, in the second-hand copy of Mother India from
which this critique is being written, Iain Dunbar, its first owner, has noted:
“Written by an American, and therefore a third party, Britain emerges
favourably and Swaraj and Co are depicted in their true light”. It was this
third party status and therefore ostensible neutrality, together with Mayo’s
attempt to stiffen the backbone of the British and US empires at a time
when both were facing serious challenge, which explains the book’s
popularity even in an outlet like the Fabian New Statesman and Nation.
Mother India provoked a great stir in India and Britain, but of very different
kinds. A review of Mother India in the New Statesman expressed vitriolic
sentiments against Indian nationalism, and declared:
The book is a tremendous frontal attack upon the whole social system of
India in all its aspects, and by implication one of the most powerful
defences of the British Raj that has ever been written. ... All who know
anything of India are aware ... of the prime evils of Hinduism, of the
horrors of the child marriage system, of the universality of sexual vice in
its most extravagant forms ... of the filthy personal habits of even the
most highly educated classes – which, like the degradation of Hindu
women, are unequalled even amongst the most primitive African or
Australian savages. ... Miss Mayo makes the claim for Swaraj [self-rule]
seem nonsense, and the will to grant it almost a crime.[53]
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It was Mayo’s book which focused British outrage at the problem of child
marriage, leading to the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act, a means of
satisfying public opinion in the United Kingdom without seriously tackling
the problem of child marriage in India.[54] In contrast to the fervent
welcome the book received in Britain, however, in India it produced
universal criticism.[55] Amongst Indian women, the subject of a large
portion of the book, it created a lasting mental scar which, even today,
remains in the consciousness of Indian women exploring the relationship
between themselves and the British Empire. For example, in 1989 Gita
Mehta published the novel Raj, in which Katherine Mayo is referred to by
the heroine as “clearly mad, but the British believe every word she
writes”.[56]
Mother India documents the failings of Indian civilisation in order to
establish that:
Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying
power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of
life-vigour itself – all are traits that truly characterise the Indian not only
of today, but of long-past history.[57]
and that “The British administration of India, be it good, bad or indifferent,
has nothing whatever to do with” [58] these conditions. Mayo’s central
argument is that India’s political subjugation and “slave mentality” is
attributable to the biological deterioration of the Indian stock:
The whole pyramid of the Indian’s woes, material and spiritual ... rests
upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, his manner of
getting into the world and his sex-life thenceforward.[59]
This is the reason “why they are poor and sick and dying and why their
hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of
Government”.[60] The weakening of the stock was caused, among other
factors, by child marriage, premature consummation and pregnancy,
destructive methods of midwifery, excessive child-bearing, purdah, child
widowhood, prostitution, sexual recklessness and venereal disease, lack of
education especially for women [61] and irrational systems of medicine.[62]
Educated Indians did nothing about these conditions except to “curse the
one power which, however little to their liking, is doing practically all of
whatever is done for the comfort of sad old Mother India”.[63] Mayo
exonerates this “one power” – the British colonial state – from responsibility
for the paucity of education in India [64] and refutes Britain’s economic
exploitation of India on the grounds that Britain’s commercial interests in
the colony were solely for India’s benefit.[65] No statistics, evidence or
research is referred to in substantiation of any of her assertions on Indian
mothers [66], Indian midwives [67], Indian children [68] or Indian men.[69]
The racism of such writing becomes explicit where Mayo contends that
Indian habits and attitudes are a danger, not just to themselves but to the
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rest of the world [70], and contrasts the culture of the “Anglo-Saxon”, which
leads him into “the full glory of manhood”, with that of the Indian, which
produces “broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients”.[71] The peoples of
the East, whether colonised by Britain or the USA, were equally incapable of
self-rule: “between the Filipino who had no history, and the Hindu” whose
history was too old to be of any use, “there was little to choose” since
neither of them was able “to grasp the spirit of democracy” [72]; for the idea
of representing a constituency is “too gauzy a figment, too abstract a theory,
too non-oriental a conception, to figure as an influence in their minds”
(emphasis added).[73] On the contrary:
The [Indian] masses have, as a whole, little ambition to raise or to change
actual living conditions. ... They are content with their mud huts. Given
windows and chimneys, they stop them up. ... Given ample space, they
crowd in a closet. Rather than work harder for more food, they prefer
their ancient measure of leisure and just enough food for the day.[74]
Mayo criticises, quite rightly, the customs and practices which have made
child marriage a religious necessity, and details some of the horrific effects
on women and girls, including examples of child sexual abuse. But in doing
so she presents Indian women as universally weak, passive victims of the
barbaric Indian male, and as too backward and ignorant to find any means
to resist their oppression.
This characterisation of Indian culture and people as uniformly
uncivilised and barbarous, and of Indian women as backward and lost in
darkness, is based upon the reduction of Indian women to the status of
victims. Nowhere in the book is there reference to the Indian women’s
movement, and its campaigns against women’s oppression. Mayo discusses
the visit of the Secretary of State for India in 1917 to discuss Indian political
representation, but she does not mention Sarojini Naidu’s women’s
delegation to demand the franchise, nor that the demand was ignored in the
Secretary of State’s report, rejected in the subsequent franchise report, and
excluded from the 1919 Government of India Act, which only permitted the
Provincial Assemblies to drop the exclusion clause if they so wished.[75] In
fact, she rewrites history to suggest that Britain’s exclusion of female
suffrage from the Act is more democratic than its inclusion, since it will
allow the Indian Provincial Assemblies to decide on female suffrage for
themselves.[76] This is a spurious argument because all the major political
groupings had already testified in support of women’s suffrage [77], as had
the representatives of Indian women. The well-known figures in the Indian
women’s movement, such as Sarojini Naidu or Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya,
predominantly from the middle class, but from all the regions and religions
of India, explicitly rejected both oppressive patriarchal social practices and
the image of women as helpless victims.
Mayo is able to present a unitary, reductionist view of Indian women
by refusing to allow the subjects to represent themselves. Almost two-thirds
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