Abstract
Using the idea of a border as a method, this chapter examines three late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century literary and news stories that narrate the ‘New Woman’ as a signifier that destabilizes established meanings of femininity within India. Gulnari (Partap Sharma’s Days of the Turban, 1986) breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of different castes and faiths. Akhila (Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupѐ, 2001), a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, breaks conservative Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behaviour when she decides to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories of the Park Street rape case (2012), Suzette Jordan—a single, working mother—challenged a number of norms when she was gang raped: her right to be out late, to accept drinks at a bar, and get a ride home without being raped. These women’s choices serve as flashpoints within a nation, problematizing its self-definition as modern.
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Notes
- 1.
I am using the term ‘speech-act’ in a specific way. As part of a theory introduced by J.L. Austin and developed by J.R. Searle, it is concerned with the ways in which words are used to present information as well as carry out actions. It privileges external over internal contexts of utterances. Applied to fictional and news stories, statements made by characters, narrators, and the author express the socio-political agendas of their contexts. These texts then ‘act’ within their contexts to reveal relations between gender and nationalism.
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By the late 1880s, a few women started graduating from universities and medical schools. These numbers increased very slowly through the first half of the twentieth century. Alice Clark (2016) refers to the 1961 Census to point out that 14 years after Indian independence, only 2.9 per cent of urban women were educated to matriculate level or above, a category which totalled 1.02 million. The distribution of urban women workers who were matriculates and above working in services was 85.44 per cent.
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For example, Nav Nirman in Gujarat, Chatra Yuva Sangarssh in Bihar, the Chipko Movement in Uttarakhand, and the Kerala Fishworker’s Movement focused dominantly on gender. Women visibly participated in the General Railway Strike of 1974, Bombay Textile Strike of 1981, and the APIKO movement of Karnataka.
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Sharma’s treatment of Gulnari must be read against the advances and retreats on gender issues through the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, in 1979–80, the Mathura rape case sparked widespread national protests that forced crucial changes in the Evidence Act, Criminal Procedure Code, and the Indian Penal Code. However, in 1986 the Muslim Women’s Act deprived divorced Muslim women of alimony. In 1987, Roop Kanwar was burnt to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, in an act of sati despite its illegal status. Behind this act were contentious property disputes between Kanwar and her in-laws.
- 7.
I am referring to news coverage by standard English language dailies like The Times of India, The Statesman, Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, The Hindu, and Live Mint, the BBC, and many others. Suzette’s story has been culled from such coverage.
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I lean on Dattatreyan’s (2015) analysis of how rap musician Hard Kaur creates, through her image as an assertive, strong, and humorous Desi woman, a globally diffuse national community—involving youth in India and in the UK, Canada, and USA—who are also inspired to assert these values.
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Ghosh, N. (2018). ‘(New) Woman’ as a Flashpoint Within the Nation: The Border as Method in Tales of Modernity. In: Hussein, N. (eds) Rethinking New Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_2
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