[Discussion] Book review: Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism

[Gonul Pultar]

	*Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judy Whitehead, eds.* /Of 
Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and 
Nationalism//. /Anthropological Horizons Series. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press, 2001. xii + 244 pp. Bibliography. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 
08-0204380-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 08-0208192-4.

Reviewed by *Lisa Pollard*, Department of History, The University of 
North Carolina, Wilmington.
Published by H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/> 
(September, 2003)


*Of Legs and Land Grants*

This eclectic volume, edited by a sociologist, an anthropologist, and an 
education faculty member, aims to add "legs" to the study of colonialism 
and post-colonialism. The chapters in Of Property and Propriety 
historicize the struggle between feminism, "the woman question," 
imperialism, and nationalism in a number of contexts, uncovering and 
highlighting the multitude of voices through which struggles against 
patriarchal states--both colonial and indigenous--have been articulated. 
The book thus gives alternatives to a tendency in colonial and 
post-colonial studies to view male and female nationalists' response to 
colonial discourse about women and the nation as monolithic, and as 
arising simply in reaction to colonial rule.

Indeed, the introduction to Of Property and Propriety, by editors Himani 
Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab, and Judith Whitehead, suggests that the 
collective's major critique of post-colonial studies lies in its 
reliance on linguistic opposition and, concomitantly, the largely 
symbolic analyses produced through binary-linguistic approaches. Thus 
the case studies included in the book situate struggles against 
states--both colonial and indigenous--historically, in such contexts as 
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, Kurdistan, and Finland, 
and eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century India. The result is 
a volume of case studies that illustrates how the unequal economic, 
social, and gender relations within colonized societies resulted in an 
array of nationalist and feminist narratives. The text also offers an 
enormously useful comparison of the interactions between white Europeans 
and the non-white peoples they colonized to the intra-national struggles 
of Europeans themselves. Historical analysis of land ownership, 
inheritance, marriage, divorce, reproductive rights, morals, propriety, 
and literature illustrate that the construction of nationalism in the 
countries under study has never been a straightforward struggle of "us 
versus them": the real strength of this volume lies in its concrete 
illustrations of how historically multifaceted and contested the 
national "self" has been.

The volume's opening essay, "Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of 
Subaltern Studies and the 'Resolution of the Women's Question'" by 
Himani Bannerji, is less an historical account of colonialism than a 
critique of colonial studies theory. In particular, Bannerji takes on 
the theoretical products of the Subaltern school and, within it, Partha 
Chatarjee, whose work on India under colonial rule did much to initiate 
a generation of inquiries into nationalism and the various forms of "the 
woman question" that it produced. Bannerji's essential point of 
contention with Chatarjee lies in what she sees as his failure to draw 
clear distinctions between the ways in which colonialists and indigenous 
nationalists viewed moral propriety and "the woman question." Bannerji's 
agenda is certainly in keeping with the book's greater project. But, 
because the chapter does not conclude with any real intimations about 
the historical "legs" promised in the book's introduction, or how to get 
to them, it reads as a kind of war between two theories, hers and 
Chatarjee's. While it does much to dehistoricize the "woman question," 
it offers few suggestions for how to historicize it. Such a critique of 
the chapter notwithstanding, it does provide an excellent overview of 
the historiography of colonial and post-colonial studies, and would 
serve as an excellent introductory read for graduate students or others 
new to the field.

The promised "legs" are delivered in the subsequent chapters. Multiple 
strains of nationalism, the different sexes who articulated them, the 
various languages in which they were expressed, and the multiplicity of 
venues in which they found their audience are taken up in Dana Hearne's 
"Contesting Positions in Nationalist Ideologies in pre-Independence 
Ireland" and Shrazad Mojab's "Conflicting Loyalties: Nationalism and 
Gender Relations in Kurdistan." Both authors are careful not to conflate 
nationalist and feminist movements into monolithic bodies; rather, they 
carefully illustrate the various strains in both movements, explicating 
their cooperative and competing agendas. Hearne's chapter provides an 
excellent overview of modern Irish history, its feminist and workers' 
movements, and concludes that a multiplicity of nationalisms were 
sidelined and silenced by the triumph of conservative, Catholic, 
patriarchal state nationalism there after World War I. Hearne also 
illustrates the legacy of activism, stating that while feminist and 
workers' challenges to the nationalism of the church, the South, and the 
clan were not successful, they did provide a "potentially 
transformative" vision of national liberation (p. 86).

Likewise, Mojab explains that Kurdish nationalism (Kurdiyati) must be 
seen as a conglomeration of movements, contested and manipulated by the 
various states--Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Soviet--into which 
Kurdistan has been absorbed. She illustrates the extent to which Kurdish 
women, their manners and morals, became the property of the longed-for 
Kurdish state in the newspapers and journals in which Kurdish identity 
was articulated in the early decades of the twentieth century. Mojab's 
piece also offers evidence of how states use women's behavior to 
categorize Kurdish-ness in places like Iran, where the role of women is 
often used to distinguish between tribal and urban, democratic and feudal.

Judith Whitehead's "Measuring Women's Value: Continuity and Change in 
the Regulation of Prostitution in Madras Presidency" carefully teases 
apart the role of the British from that of local Brahmins in regulating 
the practices of devadasis, or temple dancers. Indeed, Whitehead claims 
that the criminalization of devadasis must be seen as an intersection of 
Victorian and Brahmanical morals (both dictated that women's sexuality 
was only proper within the context of a conjugal family), and changes in 
patrilocal inheritance practices. In the nineteenth century, many 
devadasis, who were matrilineal and non-monogamous, were awarded land 
grants that could be inherited by daughters. These practices worked 
against British notions of property and propriety, and flew in the face 
of growing pressure on land in South India, the increased impoverishment 
of rural families, and the resulting need to appropriate women's 
property. Common to both discourses was the idea that women's sexuality, 
as well as their property, belonged to the community, and could be 
measured to make claims about the community's failures or successes.

Similarly, in "Wifehood, Widowhood, and Adultery: Female Sexuality, 
Surveillance and the State in Eighteenth-Century Maharastra," Uma 
Chakravarti draws attention to "the state and other social institutions" 
in the pre-colonial period in order to illustrate the extent to which 
women's behavior was used to shape community values prior to the advent 
of the British colonial state and the spread of Christian missionary 
activity (p. 223). Chakravarti's chapter traces the rise of a 
"Brahmanya-raj" under the Peshwas in the Poona Deccan region, claiming 
that Brahmana power--as expressed through a monopoly on rituals, and an 
expansion of land and administrative control--allowed the Peshwai to 
expand state power. The burden of the "Brahmanya-raj" often fell on 
women, as upper-caste behavior was often indicated by women's morals and 
sexuality. The state took pains to create and uphold laws about 
upper-caste women's dowries, the legitimacy of wives, widowhood, the age 
of marriage and re-marriage, the tonsure of widows, and the imprisonment 
and enslavement of those who did not conform. The regulation of women's 
behavior thus empowered the state, and made the boundaries between 
castes more rigid, privileging the brahmanya and legitimizing their 
claims to the highest ritual and administrative positions.

Finally, Kaarina Kailo offers a post-colonial reading of Finnish history 
in her "Gender and Ethnic Overlap/p in the Finnish Kalevala." She argues 
that in the Kalevala (a collection of Finnish folktales), compiled 
during the nineteenth century, women and the Sami (or Lapp) peoples of 
northern Finland have been "othered" in order to create Finnish national 
ideals. To create neat national and cultural boundaries between Russia 
and Scandinavia, "the Finns, the former 'subalterns,' incorporated the 
strategies of other nations to raise their self-esteem" (p. 188). In the 
Kalevala, the Finns cast the Sami as primitive and amoral to justify 
taking their land, and women as a currency of exchange between men to 
create a national, masculine identity. The result, according to Kailo's 
reading of the text, has been the creation of "static fictions about 
national character, male and female spheres and qualities, and the 
nature of all others.... It creates the essentialist woman, native and 
other" (pp. 210-211).

The strength of the volume lies not so much in its topic--the role of 
gender and class in imperialism and nationalism--but rather in the 
problematizing of imperialism and nationalism that results from the 
collection's case studies. The analyses of texts, laws, administrative 
systems, unions, educational systems, inheritance practices, and penal 
practices--to name just a few--contained within do much to ground the 
study of relations between colonizer and colonized, and to complicate 
the relationship between the two. The methodologies employed be each of 
the authors, and the conclusions they reach, provide an excellent read, 
as well as models for further inquiries.