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...another? Transnational grapple with issues of displacement and race redoubling (as Indians, Asians, Africans, or blacks) in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, where ideas of diversity and multicuhuralism as opposed to difference prevail (Bhabha 1994, 34). How do we read marginal writings with their cultural border crossing, where meanings, as Bhabha claims, are never complete or are "open to cultural translation" (Bhabha, 162-3), especially for Indian women who are negotiating an ambiguous territory, all the while retaining or "dragging" their sense of "Indianness-in-motions" (Appadurai, 10)?
My paper examines the poetics of resistance to gendered identity formations in the texts of women of the South Asian diaspora and their connections to India and Africa. How are racial and ethnic identities constructed within such diasporic spaces in an era of globalization with its transnational cultural flows ? This in turn leads to a discussion of how such constructions impact the gender and national identity formation of diasporic Indian women.
First, however, one has to examine how nationalism constructs the modern Indian woman. Toward that end, this article delves briefly into the history of nationalism in India and the transformation of Indian woman into the "new" woman of modernity. It then looks at the South Asian diaspora in Africa and the West and the resulting cultural production or "work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of the modern subjectivity" (original emphasis in Appadurai, 3). My project considers films as well as fiction because "such media transform the field of mass mediation [by offering] new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds" (Appadurai, 3).
As I examine Indians abroad through their cultural productions, I realize--as a woman of the Indian diaspora first in Burma, then India, and now in the United States--that Indians abroad, in fact, become, in some sense, more "Indian" than Indians in India. When Indians were taken as indentured laborers by the British colonizers to South Africa, they tried to retain their ideas of "Indianness," such as keeping up their languages and religions, in order not to forget. As their ideas of "home" became more and more remote, they found other means of keeping the ideas alive. One of the contributors to the construction of "Indianness," for example, is the Indian cinema, or Hindi films as they are commonly called. This genre is popular in many parts of the world, even with people who do not speak the Hindi language. (1) The ideas of "Indianness" and "Indian womanhood" as traditional and pure is disseminated around the world through the medium of Hindi cinema as well as through oral tradition. In the Indian communities abroad, for example, arranged marriages are still prevalent and many texts show women resisting this practice. They show that transformation and dislocation of gender identities, which are produced in resistance to patriarchal constructions, do take place in such spaces. Transformations, which become possible in the era of globalization, do occur but only in transnational cultural spaces of the First World. Such representations, however, become problematic in terms of postcolonial criticism where Indian women and gay men leave so-called oppressive home cultures for the liberating possibilities of other cultures. I contextualize the authors' communal as well as historical realities in order to understand why some characters appear to be able to transcend nationalism and its cultural constructions of gender identity.
In order to understand how the Indian women are defined in the diaspora, we must first understand the idea of "Indianness" within the Indian context and then examine the idea of Indian woman as it came to be defined during specific moments in history in India and abroad.
Nationalism in colonized India has had a significant impact on gender identity formation. The group that came to redefine the Indian woman based on traditional elements drawn from inherited caste ideologies modified and refined through contact with Western education was the newly emergent middle class. Nationalism deemed it necessary that women should be refashioned; however, at the same time their essential feminine qualities should not be changed. So, on the one hand, women had to be educated so that they would become more suitable for their Western-educated husbands, and, on the other hand, patriarchal control of women's sexuality became an added concern at this time because of women's changing consciousness in response to modernity.
The anxiety that modernization produced in the national consciousness is manifested in the reconstruction of women's identities. Partha Chatterjee, in his important essay "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," discusses how the figure of the Indian woman came to be located at the very center of a national culture defined by indigenous cultural elites (Chatterjee, 233-53). According to Chatterjee, nationalism reconciled the contrary pulls of tradition and modernity through its division of the spiritual and the material. The East was subjugated due to the superiority of the material culture of the West, with its technological and economic institutions and its modern statecraft. The native people, therefore, had to learn those "superior techniques of organizing material life and incorporating them within their own cultures" (237). However, it was in the spiritual domain that the "superior" self-identity of the East, which was believed to be far superior to that of the West, was made manifest. Chatterjee argues that nationalism formulated an ideological framework to cultivate the material techniques of modern Western civilization while "retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the national culture" (238). Furthermore, in the discourse of nationalism, the material/ spiritual distinction could be compressed into the analogous dichotomies of outer/inner, public/private, world/home, while the space from which the colonized resisted colonial domination was the feminine space of the home (239). According to Chatterjee, "the home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual qualities of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality" (243). While the men could be modernized in the public sphere and women could be selectively modernized, the latter "must not, in other words, become essentially westernized ..." (original emphasis in Chatterjee, 243). Thus, one can conclude from Chatterjee's argument that the whole cultural edifice of the nation came to be located, by a series of transformations, in the home and indeed on the physical person of the woman.
My main concern here is to show the position of the "new" woman in nationalist thinking and reconstruction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nationalism created a discursive space for the selective modernization of the domestic sphere and the liberalization of woman's place in it. Tanika Sarkar argues that when the essential values of society came to be embodied in the chaste and virtuous woman, the actual doors of the zenana (domestic space) could be unlocked (Sarkar, 2011).. As long as a woman remained essentially feminine--essentially virtuous--she could be refashioned to suit the need of a changing society (Sarkar, 2014). Thus, the patriarchal control of female sexuality changed from the coercive system of the zenana to the more modern form of contractual and companionate marriage. Therefore, traditional roles were reinscribed as less coercive and more consensual. The ambiguity produced by nationalism can still be seen in cultural representations of modern-day women writers. While the construction of femininity during nationalism was limiting to women in terms of social and economic empowerment, there emerged during this time middle-class women who could become their own agents in defining their subjectivities. This construction allowed the middle-class Indian woman, who was caught between two discursive ideological constructs, to negotiate her identity in conflicted spaces.
I locate my chosen texts in this postcolonial and transnational space from which postcolonial feminists--themselves the bearers of hybrid identities, as they are formed by the oppositional rhetoric and discourse of colonialism and nationalism, modernity and tradition, home and world--translate and negotiate meanings and identities, particularly within the global context of resurgent debates of nationalism in the recent past. For Bhabha, the space...
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