This volume is a result of a conference organized by Anindita Ghosh in Manchester in Summer 2004. The contributors to the volume, Padma Anagol, Geraldine Forbes, Tanika Sarkar, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Clare Anderson, Nita Verma Prasad and Anindita Ghosh, attempt to explore ways in which “women … imaginatively scrutinize and critique the social world that they experience, and give voice to it in subversive expressive traditions or actions” (p. 2).

Ghosh begins the Introduction by pointing out how Indian women have been “silenced doubly” in the colonial context (p. 1). The colonial state justified its rule by drawing up an image of the weak and vulnerable Indian women in need of rescuing from their oppressive tradition. Then from the late nineteenth century onwards, nationalists constructed women as the repositories of Indian culture and tradition on which their identity was based. In both renderings, “women emerge as unresisting, inert, and passive objects of defining discourses, as people without any control over their lives”, and when they are seen to be assertive, they are “either participants in larger mass struggles under the tutelage of their male peers…, or unusual eruptions within a conventional social fabric” (p. 2).

The present volume is intended to challenge such existing images of women in colonial India “by offering a backdrop of ‘invisible’ but consistent gendered resistance against which to map the more well-known outbursts of the organized radical feminist movement, or of outstanding female public figures” (p. 4). For this purpose, it takes up the project of looking at “everyday resistance”, following the works of Haynes and Prakash (1992) and Scott (1985),Footnote ¹ and extends this notion to look into the multiplicity of power relations, highlighting not just resistance but also the active complicity of the subordinated within the structures of their own domination (p. 6, emphasis in the original). For instance, “[w]omen who dissent do not always emerge only as ‘victims’, but often as ‘perpetrators’ in upholding repressive orders” (p. 7). Ghosh is thus well aware of the complexities in analyzing women's resistance, where not only hierarchies of gender but also caste, class and colonialism must be taken into consideration.

Anagol, in her article, “From the Symbolic to the Open: Women's Resistance in Colonial Maharashtra”, puts forward three “modes of resistance” – “symbolic resistance”, “assertion” and “open resistance” – as categories of analysis. Acts of symbolic resistance took place through the media of the novel, short story, folk song and play. Anagol takes up a play written in 1912 by the first Maharashtrian woman playwright, Girijabai Kelkar, which depicts a story of women forming a smooth running society after being expelled by the king of the realm while men who are left make a mess of everything. Anagol argues that this kind of symbolic reversal of gender roles “possessed the potential to effect changes in society by forcing people to think and act” (p. 35). Assertion, the second mode of resistance, is shown by Anagol to be instances of women asserting their rights to property, inheritance, remarriage, divorce, education and so on by taking recourse to the colonial judicial apparatus. Open resistance, the third mode, refers to violent acts by desperate women killing their husbands, co-wives and children. Anagol argues that an important factor in all three modes of resistance is the women's “intention”. She says, “Consciousness is … part and parcel of women's resistance, and the purposefulness of their actions is expected to have an impact” (p. 56). In the cases she presents, we can indeed see that the resisting women intended to bring about changes in their condition. However, not all actions have intentions and there must have also been some unintended consequences that Anagol does not touch upon. Her analyses would have been enriched and the complexities made more apparent if such accounts were included.

Forbes takes an innovative approach to the issue of women's visibility in historical sources in her article, “Small Acts of Rebellion: Women Tell Their Photographs”, by dealing with visual materials instead of text documents. Her sources are extensive interviews and private collections of photographs of “new women” (p. 61) who were active in social reform and political organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. The life history accounts presented by Forbes of three women – Krishnabai Rau Nimbkar (b. 1906), Kalyani Mukherjee Mallik (b. 1903) and Latika Ghosh (b. 1902) – are indeed valuable contributions to the historical studies of elite Indian women of that time. Forbes's actual interaction and conversation with the women about the photographs elicited responses which would have been otherwise left unsaid and buried in individual memories. For example, Krishnabai and Kalyani told Forbes that they tried to look unattractive as marital candidates when their photographs were being taken (p. 66, p. 69). These are indeed precious statements about the women's “small acts of rebellion”, and bring the women's conditions to life.

Sarkar's article, “Wicked Widows: Law and Faith in Nineteenth-century Public Sphere Debates”, discusses the controversies incited by a law enacted in 1856 overturning the prohibition against the remarriage of Hindu widows. Sarkar challenges Sangari and Vaid's notion that patriarchy in colonial India was recast along Western lines by tracing the “powerful politics of Hindu orthodoxy, chauvinism, and status-quoism that continued to pervade the colonial era”.Footnote ² She argues that although under colonialism “the campaign and the law fractured the older ethical convictions” (p. 87), the orthodoxy later succeeded in reformulating the patriarchal structure through the rhetoric of love. The orthodoxy took up the notion of love as the basis for marriage, in the same way as the reformers, and came to represent widowhood as “viraha, the trope of classical literature which lyricizes the longing for an absent lover”. A widow remarrying in this “new rhetorical environment” would be declaring that her first marriage was not a loving relationship. This reformulation of patriarchy by the orthodoxy “outwitted” the reformist law for remarriage, as “custom and scripture survived” (p. 115). Sarkar describes the complex interplay between reform and orthodoxy, but it is rather difficult to decipher women's voices from her article as it predominantly focuses on the discussions among male intellectuals.

“Subtle Subversions and Presumptuous Interventions: Reforming Women's Health in Bhopal State in the Early Twentieth Century” by Lambert-Hurley deals with the hitherto neglected area of women's health reforms, particularly of Muslim women in colonial India, by focusing on the princely state of Bhopal in the early twentieth century. She gives interesting accounts of how “women were taking charge of their own health and … their bodies by learning basic medicine, becoming practitioners, and even teaching others” (p. 119). She points out that we cannot “simply valorise women's resistance” because elite Muslim women were “involved in a hegemonic enterprise by which they sought to inculcate each other and less privileged women with their own reformist ideas about childbirth, childcare, and sanitation” (p. 138). This is a very important insight into how women become active agents in upholding hegemonic orders. What would be of further interest is to investigate the reactions of the “less privileged women” and how they interpreted the reformist ideas and practices.

Anderson's article, “Gender, Subalternity, and Silence: Recovering Convict Women's Experiences from Histories of Transportation, c. 1780–1857” looks at historical sources on the transportation of Indian convict women to penal settlements in Mauritius and different parts of Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, and discusses the significance of convict women being written about in colonial reports without their voices appearing in them. Anderson takes up the convict women's “exchange of sexual services for cash or other goods” (p. 160) and discusses how this kind of exchange can be seen both from the point of view of women's exploitation by men, and from the perspective of women acting in ways to get what they want. Although such interpretation is controversial (and Anderson herself acknowledges it to be problematic) since there is the risk of underestimating the sexual abuse of women by men under unequal power relationships, we have a glimpse of a potential here of seeing how women actively took part in and played a agentative role in gender politics.

“The Litigious Widow: Inheritance Disputes in Colonial North India, 1875–1911” by Prasad argues that “[c]ontrary to the notion that colonial courts were ‘for men only’ … between 1875 and 1911, a significant number of widows came before the Allahabad High Court … in order to secure their rights over their late husbands' estates” (p. 166). Prasad points out that the widows “displayed a bold sense of ownership and entitlement towards their late husband's estates” and “to protect these rights, they felt entitled to use the courts in a free and unencumbered fashion” (pp. 167–68). She gives examples of court cases where the women knew the judicial system well and were clearly capable of manipulating it for their own ends. However, she also points out that the widows were “hardly self-conscious resisters” as they “achieved only tiny gains, perhaps because their ‘resistance’ was expressed only through the tiny cracks within the overarching structures of patriarchy and colonialism” (p. 190, emphasis in the original). This is an important point since it brings into perspective the significance of the widows' litigations within the context of the hegemonic colonial judiciary system. That is to say, rather than straightforwardly celebrating women's resistance, Prasad shows that the widows perpetrated the existing system by becoming part of it and actively manipulating it.

The final article by Ghosh, “A World of Their Very Own: Religion, Pain, and Subversion in Bengali Homes in the Nineteenth Century”, offers a refreshing alternative to the existing literature on women's antahpur (secluded inner courtyard inhabited by women) culture, which assumes that it is something “from which all women sought emancipation”. Ghosh argues instead that the inner courtyards of nineteenth-century Bengali homes were a “female haven of comfort and solace on the one hand, and gendered solidarity and struggle on the other” (p. 191). Of particular interest is her analysis of the antahpur as a space of “the bodily withdrawal of women from an oppressive environment into an unassailable spiritual sanctuary” (p. 215), when the seclusion of women is usually talked about in terms of enforcing male privilege. Women's direct and intimate communion with God through prayers, songs and rituals in this space led to “forging of an imagined alternative existence” (p. 216) where they were free from their worldly roles as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. Here we see that the agency exercised by women in this space had the potential of creating another view of life which nullified both the hegemonic patriarchal order, and at the same time the colonial order which tried to reform the antahpur by promoting women's education and literacy to save them from superstition and backwardness. There is a danger, however, inherent in Ghosh's positive evaluation of antahpur culture. Celebrating the existence of an autonomous feminine sphere can lead to giving values associated with women a timeless and overarching foundation, which in turn could lead to legitimization of position and status of women in the hegemonic order.

The strength of the present volume lies in the richness of the historical data and the unique modes of analyses presented by each of the contributors. Anagol's depiction of the work of a female playwright in early twentieth-century Maharashtra (pp. 29–36), Forbes's photographic evidence from around the same periods in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta (pp. 58–82), Sarkar's and Prasad's detailed accounts of court cases involving widows and discourses about them in the nineteenth century (pp. 83–115; pp. 161–90), Lambert-Hurley's portrayal of elite Muslim women in Bhopal in the early twentieth century (pp. 116–38), Anderson's examination of female convicts in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century (pp. 139–60), and Ghosh's presentation of nineteenth-century Bengali women's songs (pp. 191–221) are all highly commendable in that they demonstrate new fields of investigation and historical sources for future research to uncover hitherto silenced voices and to look into the complexity of gender politics.

Overall, the volume is an important contribution to the study of women in colonial South Asia. The individual articles are faithful to the theme of the project of rethinking women's everyday resistance. Questions remain, however, as to what extent the everyday resistance by the women concerned in fact transformed the hegemonic colonial and patriarchal order. Although Ghosh says in the Introduction that “‘everyday’ and ‘small’ (even failed) rebellions are shown as complementing larger meta-narratives of more successful women's movements” (p. 20), we only get hints of how the acts of women in each article were linked to larger contexts of change. The volume would have been more engaging if the contributors had more explicitly brought out the wider implications and consequences of women's agency in their respective accounts.