Sanitising Women’s Social Space

Abstract

Moving from the debates around obscenity, and high and low culture within print-which was accessible to a relatively small percentage of the population-let us look now at popular culture, oral narratives and the wider public and social spaces of women in this period. Here too the attempt to cleanse culture of perceived obscenities occupied centre stage. There were debates on theatre and the cinema, on women’s songs, and on women’s participation in Holi and fairs. Critics sought to restrict certain areas of leisure and recreation, especially of women and lower castes, and turn them into a ‘refined’, banal structure. With this reordering of entertainment, a traditional moral conservatism was reconstituted. At the same time, some of these attempts remained at the level of rhetoric and had a limited impact on the ground. This is reflected by the survival of many social practices, though in a substantially changed form.