Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire

Radical Perspectives

by Mrinalini Sinha

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, India, Academic, Grad School, World History

392 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2006

Reviews

[Becca w · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so so good. Main takeaways are historical contingency, it’s a strategy of state domination to sever to rhetorically sever the political and the social

[Jecca Namakkal · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most amazing books I've ever read. Sinha addresses the effects of colonial discourse on a global scale, while argung that Indian women used debates over their sexuality to argue for individual rights. I reference it at least three times a week in various converstaions.

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Women's movements in the interwar period during the interwar years is not my field, expertise, or region; however, Sinha's monograph is a useful example of thinking through structure, agency, and contingency in a nuanced way. Her idea of "imperial social formation" is useful and I argue, is an example of World-Systems Theory.

"'Imperial social formation' is my preferred term for describing the modern society that we have inherited around the world, and is meant to reframe the traditional concept by drawing attention to the following points: (1) the historical role of imperialism in assembling different societies into a system of interdependencies and interconnections; and (2) the uneven effects produced by the simultaneous connections and distinctive constitution of societies in a globally articulated imperial system. My choice of terms is thus meant to emphasize the systemic operation of imperialism without reducing its effects to the static product of a central organizing element of society or the invariant manifestation of a fixed totality.51 (17)

And:

“Finally, I also use the term “imperial social formation” to foreground particular historical situations and the specificity of historical conjunctures within a globally articulated imperial structure. The term thus combines a focus on the particularity and contingency of specific historical events with a concept of structures.” (18)

Got me thinking of a heuristic to think through concrete historical events in our current age of monopoly-finance capital (since her book looked roughly at 1927-1940). Not taking time to come up with a pithy neologism.

[Blessy Abraham · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important addition for those interested in the history of the organization of the Indian women's movement, especially after the release of the controversial book 'Mother India,' by Katherine Mayo in 1927. The book looks at how women as a collective political group emerge against the earlier recasting of women as upholders of community honor. However, a deeper engagement with women leaders who were active in labour struggles and women activists from the lower castes, with respect to upper caste elite organizations of WIA, NCWI and AIWC, would have been interesting to observe. Nevertheless, I found it to be a very important reading in understanding the growth and development of the women's movement during the heydays of the mainstream nationalist movement under the Indian National Congress.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1927, Katherine Mayo published Mother India, a book-length piece of character assassination against Indian self-government. The controversy over Mayo's book occurred within and shaped a changing balance of forces. After the First World War, the increased prominence of the United States in world affairs contributed to making Britain particularly sensitive to American opinion. Nationalists in India also had a wave of changes in the government of the empire's other holdings to look to, such as the British response to the Easter Rising in Ireland. Within India, a variety of movements arose or intensified during the late 1920s. Ties beyond India's border - and ultimately the British Empire's as well - made Indian movements players on a global field.
Mayo made claims about the treatment and status of women central to her charge that India was not ready for self-government. Mayo's claims unwittingly ended up supporting calls for Indian self-determination, however, in that the India Mayo excoriated was under British government. Indian nationalists argued that conditions in India were not an indictment of Indians but of the colonial government. The answer to the problems Mayo noted was not continuing but rather ending British rule
Nationalist reframing of Mayo's claims is not Sinha's sole concern. Sinha criticizes Indian nationalists as well as - though not as much as - the British. Specters underscores that the Mayo controversy involved new possibilities for Indian women, some of which were not fulfilled by the success of nationalist movements.
Prior to the Mayo controversy India was largely organized politically around communities. Colonial authorities had essentially made a deal with conservative religious and traditional authorities to leave women's issues in these authorities' hands, in exchange for some level of loyalty. Nationalist movements largely shared the impulse to keep women from political agency.
During the Mayo controversy women's political activity surged. A major outcome in the aftermath of Mother India was the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929. Women were instrumental in the creation and passage of this act. The particular manner in which women participated in this change matters: women appealed not to communities but to individual rights, thus creating a cross-community constituency of women.
Attention to the Mayo controversy shows that the path followed by Indian national liberation movements was a contingent and ambivalent affair. While in the end nationalists close some of the space women opened for themselves, this closure was not foreordained. Here Sinha builds on and contributes to the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others from the Subaltern Studies circle. She take a stance critical of colonialism while both historicizing Indian nationalism and challenging nationalist history and memory.
Sinha stresses that the alternatives present in the Mayo controversy offer potential political lessons in the present. While this portion of the book is not always completely clear, dealing with questions like the foundations of political rights and alternative conceptions thereof, it is refreshing to read a historical work unashamedly expressing political concerns in the present. The point that "historical method pries open a range of political possibilities from the historical sedimentation resulting from dominant cultural practices" is an important argument for the continuing relevance of history beyond scholarship for its own sake. (251.)
The primary shortcoming in Specters is the treatment of class. Sinha admits to the class biases and background of the Indian women's movement, and notes the occasional instances when the movement did address lower class issues such as women's wages. Still, Sinha does not integrate class fully into her perspective. She treats women as a political constituency forged across real divisions. This is a reasonable, perhaps even laudable perspective. But Sinha implies that women qua women had certain interests in common in such a way that does not treat their differences as central to their interests as women. This subtly undermines important point that constituencies – and by implication interests – are not so much found as made. This also bears on the present political lessons Sinha believes can be drawn from the Mayo affair. The implicit lessons of Specters privilege gender identity over class position, or at the very least separate the two.
Nonetheless, Sinha's book remains an impressive piece of scholarship which can speak to multiple bodies of work. Literary scholars might profit from her reading and contextualization of Mayo's book. Political historians can take her work as an exemplar of how to link social policy with a broader cultural and social context. All historians interested in moving beyond nation-centered history can learn from the way Sinha treats an event spanning the United States, Britain, and India.

[Ayesha Nusrat · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Specters of Mother India" by Mrinalini Sinha is an enriched narrative and a radical biography of Katherine Mayo’s hugely controversial Mother India and its checkered afterlife in socio-political debates, both in India and abroad. Scholars interested in post- and anti-colonial events and issues, in the history and contribution of the women’s movement in India, in early twentieth-century transnational feminist networks and organizations, will all find this book a rewarding read.

[Benemint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clever and theoretically tuned work. The introduction was the most brilliant, it ties all the strings together under the Mayo's controversy. I hoped to depart from there and move beyond the controversy itself in later chapters so I got a little tired afterwards when that pivot never changes up to epilogue.