Katherine Mayo's Mother India, published in 1927, may have been the most explosive bit of American journalism to make its mark on the history of British imperialism, Indian nationalism, and interwar feminism. Based on her exposé of some of the horrific conditions under which women in India lived in the early twentieth century—poor sanitation, unsafe childbirth, rampant illiteracy, and malnutrition—Mayo argued that Indians could not be trusted with political autonomy or independence from the British. Her proimperial arguments produced a dramatic backlash from Indian nationalists, feminists, and anti-imperial groups in Britain and the United States.

By carefully reconstructing the Mother India controversy through research conducted in Britain, the United States, and India, historian Mrinalini Sinha argues that the reception, dissemination, and aftermath of the publication of Mother India was a transformative moment. Once the book entered public circulation, it was appropriated, challenged, and criticized by Indian nationalists and social reformers, American, British, and Indian feminists, politicians, writers, as well as a host of mainstream readers who were exposed to reviews and discussions of it in publications such as the Statesman (India), the Manchester Guardian, and the Atlantic Monthly. Sinha calls the controversy a “disruptive and enabling event” (65), one that produced a realignment of different political strategies for those involved in worldwide interwar disputes about self-government, agonistic liberalism, and women's rights.

At first glance, the primary historical narrative of the book appears modest. The interwar years bracket the main developments detailed in the book, with a particular focus on the publication of Mother India in the summer of 1927 and the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in October 1929. Sinha describes the ups and downs of political party conferences, negotiations between different constituencies, legislative debates, and so on, particularly in the latter half of the book when she examines how Indian women and social reformers responded to the charges directed at them by Mayo and how they differed from their British counterparts. The “‘show-me’ readers,” as Sinha calls them (7), will applaud the range of archival material that Sinha has brought to bear on her argument.

Yet underlying the rigorous archival research in this monograph are several important theoretical and methodological innovations. Building on the concept of an “imperial social formation,” which she developed in her first book (Sinha, Colonial Masculinity [Manchester, 1995]), she calls the Mother India controversy a “tipping point” (1), after Malcolm Gladwell's recent best-selling book. This controversy became a diagnostic event in that it highlighted many fissures in the international political landscape: the tensions between anti-imperial liberals and proimperial conservatives, between feminists who disagreed about whether colonial involvement could improve women's lives, between the American and British publics who debated how to understand Mayo's charges, and between American and British leaders who made a peculiar alliance as a new American imperial social formation emerged after the First World War.

The confrontations between these different groups were magnified by the controversy and produced unexpected political positions and aspirations. This part of the argument is understated in the book but is radical in its implications: by using the details of how the controversy spun out across several continents, Sinha suggests that the workings of colonialism were a contingent rather than inevitable process. Her emphasis on contingency pays close attention to historical and national contexts in order to press her larger theoretical observations.

One of the most innovative arguments in this book is about the changing relationship between the “social” sphere and those that are characterized as “political.” Splitting the two spheres, as Partha Chatterjee has argued for colonial India, allowed the agents of the colonial state to construct the rule of colonial difference in which India could never bridge the gap between its own cultural difference and a putatively modern universal polity that included democracy and civil society; in Chatterjee's formulations, this split legitimized British colonial governance (Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993]). Sinha uses this argument to show that the thrust of Mayo's position was that the social ills of Indian society precluded India from becoming a political entity. The separation between the social and the political allowed Mayo to demand that the colonial state carry on ruling India, as Indians did not have the ability to rule themselves, particularly “their” own women.

While the rule of colonial difference has been treated by some scholars as a durable and continuous part of India's development into a postcolonial state, for Sinha, that “rule” was ruptured and reconstituted by the Mother India controversy. Sinha carefully historicizes this and Chatterjee's other well-known arguments to suggest that what has been known as “the woman question” changed within the relationship between the colonial state and its indigenous elites in the interwar years. Indian nationalist opponents quickly seized on Mayo's arguments to question why the colonial state had done so little to improve the condition of Indian women and had resisted social reform. By making the social life of Indians a political issue, Indian nationalists, social reformers, and women's groups were able to puncture the conceit of Mayo's book and create a new logic in which women's rights were seen to be the object of a reform-minded state, rather than the object of their own communities or of a colonial state.

Reversing Mayo's arguments to challenge the colonial state's legitimacy enabled Indian nationalists and feminists to call for social reform of child marriage and the age of consent. Thus, issues that had been kept within the “inner” and “spiritual” domain of the community in the late nineteenth century with the consent of an Indian nationalist patriarchy were brought into the “outer” domain of colonial governmentality.

Questions involving how Hindu and high-caste communities dealt with marriage, inheritance, and child sexuality broke into the realm of state politics as a rights-based discourse emerged in the late 1920s. Indian feminists embraced this new universal language of rights to forge a collective political and legal subjectivity as women and argued that they ought to be offered legislative protections by the state rather than be left to the regulations of caste and religious communities. Through their opposition to Mayo's claims and their support for the Sarda Act, the organized Indian women's movement demonstrated their collective agency and used a political strategy to improve the social status of women in India, thereby breaking down the separation between the political and social that had long existed between nationalist and colonial patriarchies.

This is an extremely well-crafted and tightly argued book about the importance of situating events historically, examining the process of contingency, and following the different iterations and reception of a single event in a range of geographical, cultural, and political domains. A dense historical narrative substantiates ambitious and innovative theoretical claims, and that will make this book an important model of scholarship for years to come.