Description
Book SynopsisExamines how Muslim women came to represented as invisible, backward, and victimized in the written history of late colonial Bengal. This title argues that their near-invisibility, except as victims, in normative histories of India was central to the consolidation of national identity in the colonial period and beyond.
Trade Review“Seeking to correct erstwhile celebratory representations of Muslim women,
Visible Histories neither extols the virtues of Muslim womanhood in the late colonial period of Bengal, nor does it seek to redress for their untold stories.
Visible Histories’ contribution to colonial historiography is more nuanced.” - Anita Anantharam,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History“Mahua Sarkar’s . . . original and stimulating study. . . . Sarkar also seeks to enlarge notions of women’s ‘agency’ beyond those privileged by liberal feminists.” - Barbara D. Metcalf,
Journal of Women’s History“By engaging with existing scholarship, Sarkar draws eclectically on a range of disciplines: sociology, anthropology, history, feminist and gender studies. The book represents historical sociology at its cutting edge by bringing intellectual history into the post-colonial present.” -
Durba Ghosh,
Social History“. . . Mahua Sarkar’s project . . . marks indeed a welcome and important intervention in postcolonial Indian historiography.” -
Rochona Majumdar,
Economic & Political Weekly“
Visible Histories, Disappearing Women is an analytically insightful, genuinely original work that breaks new ground in South Asian history, gender and women’s studies, postcolonial theory, and historical sociology. One of its strengths is Mahua Sarkar’s insistence that history as a discipline and feminism as a politics have disappeared the Muslim woman as a subject.”—
Antoinette Burton, editor of
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History“Mahua Sarkar’s insightful study of Bengali Muslim women’s writings and oral testimonies is not a simple project of reclaiming the history of marginalized subjects. The point of her thoughtful and penetrating analysis is to illuminate the structures of representation—in both official histories and popular memories—that produce the specific ways in which the figure of the Muslim woman becomes visible. Sarkar exposes the nation-centered focus and the liberal-feminist politics that have shaped the specific marginalization of Muslim women in accounts of late colonial Bengal. Hers is ultimately a passionate and nuanced call for a re-orientation of existing scholarship with far-reaching implications for the contours both of historiography and of contemporary politics.”—
Mrinalini Sinha, author of
Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire“Mahua Sarkar’s project . . . marks indeed a welcome and important intervention in postcolonial Indian historiography.” -- Rochona Majumdar * Economic and Political Weekly *
“By engaging with existing scholarship, Sarkar draws eclectically on a range of disciplines: sociology, anthropology, history, feminist and gender studies. The book represents historical sociology at its cutting edge by bringing intellectual history into the post-colonial present.” -- Durba Ghosh * Social History *
“Mahua Sarkar’s . . . original and stimulating study. . . . Sarkar also seeks to enlarge notions of women’s ‘agency’ beyond those privileged by liberal feminists.” -- Barbara D. Metcalf * Journal of Women's History *
“Seeking to correct erstwhile celebratory representations of Muslim women,
Visible Histories neither extols the virtues of Muslim womanhood in the late colonial period of Bengal, nor does it seek to redress for their untold stories.
Visible Histories’ contribution to colonial historiography is more nuanced.” -- Anita Anantharam * Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Writing Difference 1
1. The Colonial Cast: The Merchant, the Soldier, the "Writer" (Clerk), Their Lovers, and the Trouble with "Native Women's" Histories 27
2. The Politics of (In)visibility: Muslim Women in (Hindu) Nationalist Discourse 48
3. Negotiating Modernity: The Social Production of Muslim-ness in Late Colonial Bengal 78
4. Difference in Memory 133
Conclusion: Connections 196
Notes 205
Bibliography 287
Index 331
