National Identities

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cnid20

Writing gender, writing nation: women's fiction in

post-independence India
by Bharti Arora, New York, Routledge, 2019, x+232 pp., £38.99 (paperback),
ISBN 97 8 036 728 052 9

Navin Sharma & Priyanka Tripathi

To cite this article: Navin Sharma & Priyanka Tripathi (2022) Writing gender, writing
nation: women's fiction in post-independence India, National Identities, 24:5, 559-561, DOI:
10.1080/14608944.2022.2106407

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2022.2106407

Published online: 24 Aug 2022.

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NATIONAL IDENTITIES
2022, VOL. 24, NO. 5, 559–566

BOOK REVIEWS

Writing gender, writing nation: women’s fiction in post-independence India, by

Bharti Arora, New York, Routledge, 2019, x+232 pp., £38.99 (paperback), ISBN 97 8 036
728 052 9

Bharati Arora’s book Writing Gender, Writing Nation formulates a conscientious thesis that pro-
blematises the very principles and values on the basis of which the new nation-state of India
was found. The constitution of India encompasses these values and considers the nation as a
‘sovereign, socialist, democratic, republic’ which ensures ‘justice’, ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘frater-
nity’ for its citizens. Chronicling major events such as the Central Recovery Operation, The
Emergency, the Naxalite Movement, and the Economic Liberalisation that took place in
post-independence India and aligning its reflection with regard to women’s fiction, this
book highlights the ‘need to focus on how the nation gets inscribed when women take to
writing and to telling their stories’ (p. 1). However, in the beginning, Arora makes it abundantly
clear that the choice of only women’s writing does not aim to produce a feminist critique of the
nation and must not be visualised merely from the perspective of feminism as ‘all the texts
written by women need not be feminist’ (p. 24). Rather, it seeks to establish the construct
of the nation as inscribed in their writings and to decode the multiple patriarchies inherent
in the family, community and institutional structures. The recourse to traditional patriarchal
hierarchy in the new nation-state further marginalised the weaker sections of society
instead of empowering them; this is what restrained India from attaining the equality,
liberty and justice for its citizens and its resolution of becoming a welfare state.
Divided thematically into five chapters, the book explores the differences between India’s
projected image in the constitution and the nationalist discourses as an ideal state and how
these ideals are reflected in the feminist historiography of the post-independence history of
India. The first chapter, ‘Women as “Citizens”’, covers the plights and sufferings of women in
the aftermath of the partition of India into two sovereign nation-states. The preamble to
the constitution of India constitutes India as a secular nation, in which Article 15 vowed to
ensure that equal treatment is given to all of its citizens without any discrimination on the
basis of caste, class, sex, religion or place of birth. The author lays out instances of violation
of these democratic values in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950) and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar
Ganga Opar Ganga (1967). Furthermore, it speculates upon ‘The Central Recovery Operation’,
a mutual agreement between the governments of India and Pakistan designed to recover
abducted and displaced women which refused to recognise forced conversions and forced
marriages. If mothers were asked to leave behind their children born in the ‘foreign’ land, preg-
nant ladies were forced to abort. Suddenly, the modern ‘secular’ nation-state turned into a tra-
ditional patriarchal entity with rigid religious morals and recognised these victims as ‘Hindus’
and ‘Muslims’ and forcibly restored its women to their pre-existing gender roles. By branding
citizens as Hindus and Muslims, this modern nation-state counteracted its idea of a secular
nation and ‘articulated itself in the form of gender pathology’ (p. 44). Such decisions did
not even consider rendering any agency or freedom to the recovered people which lead to
the clear ‘violation of every principle of citizenship, fundamental rights and access to
justice’ (p. 43).
In the second chapter, Arora critiques the portrayal of India’s sociopolitical history during
the 1970s and 1980s in Mahashweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974) and Nayantara Sahgal’s
Rich Like Us (1985), which she considers to be ‘significant decades in the contemporary
560 BOOK REVIEWS

socio-political and gendered history of India’ (p. 68). These two novels attempt to traverse the
spaces of autarchy and remind us that this feminist negotiation is designed not merely to
negotiate the rights of women, but instead vouch for the rights of people on the brink.
Both the lawful and the unlawful violence during Emergency and the Naxalite movement
exposed the crumbling ideals of democracy and the welfare state. In their fictions, Mahash-
weta Devi and Nayantara Sahgal reckon and evaluate India during the 1970s and 1980s in
order to ‘evoke the reality of the oppressed sections of society, particularly women, Dalits,
and Tribals who have been systematically ousted from the nation making project’ (p. 69).
The totalitarian control over the state apparatus and its applications to facilitate corrupt pro-
ceedings, the suppression of political dissent and the imposition of the state’s will form the
thematic content of Rich Like Us; Arora’s excerpts from the text establishes an affinity
between an exclusionary attitude towards weak people in decision making processes and
the violent imposition that aggravates patriarchal practices already prevalent in domestic
and communal sites. Writing Gender, Writing Nation foregrounds the special role played by
laws in the newly constituted state of India by setting the tone of resurrected gendered
relations and the roles of the marginalised in this new arrangement. With the emphasis on
the rule of law established on the basis of Article 14 of the constitution, the legislature
became an important site of struggle between reformists and protectionists. In chapter
three, the author scrutinises the impacts of laws pertaining to marriage, divorce, property
rights, inheritance rights and labour laws passed by the parliament of the ‘Swaraj’ and delin-
eates its impact on women and on poor people and tribal members. The author’s detailed
study of Mannu Bhandari’s Aapka Bunty (1971), Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra (1979) and Indira
Goswami’s Shadow of the Dark God (1986) produces enough instances to clarify how the
new nation-state legitimised and strengthened traditional and patriarchal control over the
family, community and nation via the exercise of these laws. The orthodox gendered roles
of women and other marginalised sections were re-established on the basis of these legal nar-
ratives in existing or disguised forms.
In chapter four, Arora presents the paradox underlying the pursuit of the economic devel-
opment of India and the economic sidelining of marginalised people, including women. The
discussion of Alka Saraogi’s Kali Katha: Via Bypass (1998) and Usha K. R’s Monkey Man (2010)
highlight ‘the impact that government policies of liberalisation in pursuit of economic prosper-
ity have had on gender relations’ (p. 135). She further argues that, as a result of this pursuit of
economic prosperity, ‘systematic marginalisation takes place not only of women but of other
sections of society’ (p. 136). She interrogates and investigates the nexus between the capitalist
model of economic development and ‘right wing fanaticism’ in order to unmask ‘the skewed
model of national development, which marginalises the interests of the most vulnerable sec-
tions of society like women, poor, labourers, working class, lower castes, and tribals’ (p. 139).
She warns that this ‘liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation’ of the economy will ‘force
nation-states to systematically abandon their roles as welfare states’ (p. 139).
The concluding chapter takes up two fictional accounts to discuss the lacunas embedded in
the state policies as well as in pre-existing caste, community and institutional structures of the
nation. Through detailed analysis of Bama’s Sangati (2005) and Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight
(2009), it illuminates the fault line within the peripheries of the women’s movement, the Dalit
Movement, and the anti-caste, working class and landless labourer’s movement. Therefore, an
urgency to unite oppressed and marginalised people across class, caste and religion is
expressed in order to puncture the ‘codified structures of patriarchy’ (p. 164) within the inter-
sections of caste, class and community. Thus, the book offers a feminist reading and analysis of
‘modern states, citizenship, nationalism, revolution, and democracy, which are usually deemed
as masculinist projects’ (p. vi). The author not only pitches in favour of plurality and inclusivity
 NATIONAL IDENTITIES 561

but also poses all her arguments in the direction where these two principles become her
underlying strategy or guiding stars. Her selection of women’s fiction, and its diversity in
language and region, ‘does not make this book a representative study in any way’ (p. 200)
but does throw light upon the exercise of multiple patriarchies through nationalist, communal
and gendered discourses.

Funding
This work was supported by University Grants Commission India [(JRF) Ref. No. 190510129679].

Navin Sharma
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India

Priyanka Tripathi
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India
[email protected]
© 2022 Navin Sharma
https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2022.2106407

Latin American adventures in literary journalism, by Pablo Calvi, Pittsburgh,

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, xi + 276 pp., €42.76 (hardcover), ISBN 978 0 822
94565 9

Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism invites the reader to take a journey through
the origins and evolution of narrative journalism in Latin America, interweaving the literary,
journalistic and political roots of the genre. Pablo Calvi traces its genealogy by exploring
the connection among dissimilar authors over the course of slightly more than a century.
Divided into six chapters, the book focuses on the main characters and events that forged
the tradition of regional writing of literary journalism, ‘a key instrument in the development
of the supranational notion of Latin American culture and identity’ (p. 9).
As an associate professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, Calvi combines
the background and analytical skills of an academic researcher with the narrative style of an
experienced long-form journalist. The author moves among the historical, political, literary
and journalistic dominions of the second third of the nineteenth century. His focus on this par-
ticular period allows him to be a privileged observer of the birth of nation-states after the wars
of independence and the founding of urban centres in Latin America. These urban landscapes
were the breeding ground for the mass press that served as a foundation for literary journal-
ism, which Calvi defines as ‘a form that had been forged in periodicals, was meant to have pol-
itical––sometimes pedagogic––impact, presented itself as factual, and frequently resorted to
literary devices’ (p. 3).
Commencing in Chile in the1840s, the book analyses the importance of freedom of the
press as an instrument of democracy, referring to the trial of Francisco Bilbao as a case in
point. The debate among Chilean society after the publication of the Bilbao article entitled
‘Sociabilidad chilena’ (Chilean sociability), an antireligious piece denouncing the ideas
infused during Spanish colonial times, had a direct impact on the development of Latin Amer-
ican journalism up until the end of the century. As Calvi emphasises, the trial not only