Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China

Seth, Sanjay

doi:10.1017/s0021911812002215

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…Respectability, a cultural imbrication of class, nation and gender, its authority underpinned by nationalist constructs of home and family, continues to shape everyday experiences of women in Delhi (Belliappa 2013;Seth 2013;Chatterjee 2006). As a result, I argue that the body's intentions must be monitored and its capacities guarded.…”

Section: Delhi's Enclosures: Neo-liberalism and Cultural Nationalism mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defying Delhi’s enclosures: strategies for managing a difficult city

Butcher

2017

Gender, Place & Culture

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Reflecting wider debates on the city as a site of coercion and opportunity, Delhi is marked by the coordinates of both cultural nationalism and neo-liberal aspiration. The former positions the city as a site of cultural pollution, at times claiming 'western lifestyles' have contributed to gendered assault. In juxtaposition, Delhi's neo-liberal landscape positions the female body as a valued commodity, iconic of 'globalised living', embedded in discourses of autonomy and modernity. This paper will argue that these entangled cultural constructs have created a city of threat and discomfort that problematizes women's access, be it for livelihood or leisure, enclosing women within coordinates not of their making. Yet rather than acquiesce to this urban topology, the agency of the single, middle-aged, middle-class women in this ethnographic study extends our understanding of the agonistic relationships within urban space, and the capacity to negotiate them using practices of avoidance, deception, adaptation, defiance, and care, at times creating their own enclosures in the process that enabled access to the city. Age and class as well as gendered expectations impacted on the available resources and outcomes of these negotiations, revealing the diverse possibilities of urban living that can enable pockets of social and political flourishing even within a difficult city.

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Section: Delhi's Enclosures: Neo-liberalism and Cultural Nationalism mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defying Delhi’s enclosures: strategies for managing a difficult city

Butcher

2017

Gender, Place & Culture

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“…The particularly long engagement anti-colonial elites with England and British ideas about modernity and civilization led to a nationalism that accepted the idea that the status of women was a marker of modernity. Thus, women had to be reshaped to become simultaneously modern and able to sustain Indian culture (Seth, 2013). The burden of embodying the nation falls upon women.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion, nationalism, and gender: Perspective from South Asia

Deo

2020

Asian Journal of Comparative Politics

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Religious mobilization often takes the form of engagement with “the woman question”: how should women as carriers of culture comport themselves? This article shows that many of the debates over the role of women and religion in South Asia are misunderstood when they are seen as instances of religious fundamentalism. Rather, the theoretical framework to make sense of public religion and gender debates should be through the lens of postcolonial nationalism. The creation and consolidation of the nation is what is at stake—not the creation of the religious community as such. In order to make this argument, the article offers both a review of the literature on secularism and gender as well as short case studies from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These three former British colonies have each struggled to arrive at a secular settlement and often the contestation over the place of religion has centered on the rules and roles of women in these societies.

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“…These nationalist elites neither accepted European claims to superiority in all areas, nor did they seek to become mirror images of their rulers. As Partha Chatterjee has powerfully and influentially argued, the anti-colonial nationalist project was one to become modern-yet-different, and 'culture' became an increasingly common term for thinking and designating the difference that was to be 'preserved' even as it was being constituted and defined (Chatterjee, 1986(Chatterjee, , 1993; see also Seth, 2013b). Thus in nineteenth century China, reformers urging changes that would allow China to resist western depredations made a distinction between 'essence' and 'utility' (ti-yong); Chinese essence was to be preserved, while knowledges and practices from the West needed to be learned and freely borrowed.…”

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confidence: 99%

Knowledge, progress and the knowledge of progress

Seth

2022

The Sociological Review

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Modern societies, and the modern knowledge that was seen to be both an emblem and a precipitating cause of their modernity, have long been seen as marking a great historical advance. Modernity, we have been assured, by the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, is not only different from premodernity and contemporary nonmodern societies, these differences are also signs of intellectual, moral and material progress. In recent times, however, there have been a chorus of criticisms of the core presumptions that undergird modern knowledge. Such criticisms are sufficiently widespread and intellectually serious that the superiority and universality of modern western Reason, which could previously be taken for granted, now have to be argued for. Such defences of the universality of modern knowledge invariably draw on Kant and/or Hegel, as in the case of the two contemporary defenders of modern western knowledge, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, whose arguments this article will outline and evaluate. It argues that neither convincingly shows that there are transhistorical and transcultural standards by which we can uphold the superiority and universality of modern knowledge, and concludes that there are no grounds to cleave to the idea of ‘progress’.

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Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China

Cited by 15 publications

References 35 publications

Defying Delhi’s enclosures: strategies for managing a difficult city

Defying Delhi’s enclosures: strategies for managing a difficult city

Religion, nationalism, and gender: Perspective from South Asia

Knowledge, progress and the knowledge of progress

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