Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whiteness on the Margins of Native Patriarchy: Race, Caste, Sexuality, and the Agenda of Transnational Studies ShefaliChandra On August 24 of 1884, a Marathi-language article that excavated in voracious detail the sexual practices of white women in India, erupted upon the political scene in Poona City. Published in the conservative Marathi-language weekly, Poona Vaibhav (Glory of Poona1), and simply entitled "Strishikshan," or women's education, the article's primary purpose was to critique the inauguration of the Poona Indian Girls' High School. The school had already provoked strong reactions for its apparently radical agenda of bringing the language of the colonial modern to Indian women.2 The article from the Poona Vaibhav, while setting out to voice its dissension against the new school, immediately veered toward a detailed examination of the sexual practices of Indian and European women. Describing first the conduct of prostitutes in Indian society and then comparing such conduct to the manners and customs of European women in India, the writer boldly documented how the sexual desires of white women far exceeded the standards of sexuality maintained by Indian female prostitutes. Whether it was for the allegation that white female sexuality was nonreproductive, or because it claimed that European women were more sexual than Indian prostitutes, the article could not but elicit comment in the climate of close colonial scrutiny. Instantly the writer of the article, the editor of the newspaper, and certain leaders of Indian society incurred Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 127 128 Shejali Chandra the deep wrath of the colonial state. That the cultural upheaval of the last decades of the nineteenth century was articulated through the politics of sexuality is obvious. What is less evident is that representations of white female sexuality fueled the process by which some Brahman men sought to distinguish themselves from people of other castes as well as those of other Indian religions. In the pages that follow, I argue that some colonized people crafted white female sexuality to propel new regimes of difference within Indian society. Specifying the centrality of racial difference to the engineering of caste power, I track the strategies by which Indian women and men redi rected white racial power through the prism of sexual difference so as to forge differentiations internal to colonial society, specifically that of caste. The manipulation of standards of touchable/untouchable that I discuss here provides vital information both on the malleability of caste in moder nity, as well as the manner by which a certain kind of Brahmanism was beginning to stand in for Hinduism and Indian culture itself.3 The process was supported by the heteronormative inclinations of the colonial state. Noting especially the tacit, somewhat imperceptible, racialized acts and responses recorded in these sources, I seek to explicate how some colo nized subjects sexualized the ostensible power of European culture so as to secure new positions of authority for themselves in Indian society. Striking similarities between caste power and whiteness pervade the history I discuss here. In this context, my use of the term "whiteness" therefore has twin implications: it indicates the manner by which some Indians activated and redirected notions of white power by fixating on female sexuality. Second, and borrowing from U.S. whiteness studies, I indicate the urgent need to shape critical studies of majoritarian sociopo litical formations, specifically that of caste in India. The social formation I seek to historicize here is primarily that of caste, and I propose that U.S. whiteness studies provides important methodological tools for postcolo nial studies invested in denaturalizing the dizzying ascendency of hetero normative caste power in India. The sources I draw upon range from newspaper articles and adminis trative directives, a Marathi-language memoir written by the wife of a prominent social reformer and nationalist in western India, to an English Shefali Chandra 129 language novel by an Indian woman. These works reference dense inter locking social formations, forged through the interaction between print, education, and domesticity in the western Indian cities of Bombay and Poona from 1875 to 1896. Produced at the height of the colonial consolida tion over Indian gender relations, the sources demonstrate that...