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"This is no ordinary history of a text; with impressive scholarship and historical imagination, Mrinalini Sinha reads the controversy surrounding the publication of Katherine Mayo's book as a fascinating chapter in the interwar history of colonialism. Placing the 'legend of "Mother India"' in its appropriate global context, she offers a probing analysis of the social transformations that it drew upon and shaped. Questions of the empire and imperial legitimacy, the nation and its others, and feminism and citizenship emerge as issues thrown open by the historical location and reception of Mayo's book. This is a work of vital importance to the study of the colonial genealogy of the modern world."--Gyan Prakash, author of "Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India"

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SPECTERS OF Mother India

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

About the Series.......................................................................................ixAcknowledgments........................................................................................xiNote on Nomenclature and Transliteration...............................................................xvIntroduction: The Anatomy of an Event..................................................................11. A Transitional Moment: The Dynamics of an Interwar Imperial Social Formation........................232. Unpredictable Outcome: The Trajectory of a Transatlantic Intervention...............................663. Ironic Reversal: The Rhetoric of "Facts" in the Controversy over Mother India.......................1094. Refashioning Mother India: The Sarda Act and Women's Collective Agency..............................1525. Ambiguous Aftermath: Political Consolidation on the Eve of the Second World War.....................197Epilogue: History, Memory, Event.......................................................................248Notes..................................................................................................255Bibliography...........................................................................................336Index..................................................................................................361

Chapter One

The preface of a 1970 British reprint of Katherine Mayo's famous book Mother India, originally published in 1927, begins by describing the book as a "grimly factual and harrowing picture of India." "For this," as the preface concludes, "is India as it truly was-and as parts of it still are-in all its helplessness, hopelessness and horror." It would seem easy enough, in the wake of the vast body of scholarship that has followed on Edward Said's pathbreaking book Orientalism (1978), to account for the staying power of Mother India simply in terms of a continuous history of colonial knowledge and power: a history that produced, and has since apparently sustained, the "horrors" of India as timeless "facts." I hope to undertake in this book a more challenging, but also more productive, task. Precisely in the face of the supposedly seamless logic of such "facts," I aim to recall that, in the context of the historical conjuncture of the 1920s, the debate over Mother India represented a moment of ideological discontinuity. It marked a sharp and significant break: an episode in, and a catalyst of, the remaking of an empire in the early twentieth century.

The "facts" of Mother India, as conveyed in the overheated prose of a U.S. author and journalist, were widely debated and appropriated within competing imperial and nationalist narratives. However, the rehashing of this imperial-nationalist debate alone does not capture the far-reaching dynamics of the controversy. The ideological mobilization of the book by imperialists and nationalists was necessarily selective, emphasizing only certain elements of its operation in multiple social processes (from U.S. immigration policies to anti-Brahmin political mobilization in India) that included different discursive fields (from law to racial theory). The surface content of the controversy, therefore, does not exhaust the full range of its effects. The recognition of this discrepancy-the gap, that is, between the book's imperialist and nationalist mobilization, on the one hand, and the multiple fields of its operation, on the other-helps to open up the controversy to an analysis of its internal tensions and contradictions.

The network of public spheres in which the struggle over Mother India occurred was from the outset global: a configuration that demands far more in the way of historical understanding than the supposedly seamless logic of imperialism or nationalism. The contours of the controversy, with diverging local appropriations and generic realignments on three separate continents, highlight its significance as a barometer of global instability. The worldwide social processes and the manifold discursive fields of the first half of the twentieth century produced the ideological vulnerability of Mayo's initial intervention to reappropriations whose sheer multiplicity illustrates the working of a global dynamics: there structuring of the interwar imperial social formation. The meaning of Mayo's intervention did not come from the familiar imperialist-nationalist conflict. Rather, and more importantly, its meaning came from the global dynamics of the interwar period that produced a transitional political event.

AN EXPANDED FRAMEWORK

Scholarly as well as popular interest in Mayo's Mother India is sustained in large part by the sheer passion that the book once generated and, perhaps, still continues to generate by its rival uses in imperialist and nationalist discourses. The initial scholarly engagements with the book, which often felt compelled to take sides on the reliability of Mayo's account, reached their peak in the 1970s with the publication of Manoranjan Jha's pioneering work on the political affiliations of Mayo's project. Jha demonstrated what many of Mayo's contemporaries had long suspected: the extent of Mayo's involvement with British officials responsible for propaganda on behalf of colonial rule in India. Yet questions about the nature of Mayo's project were not put to rest so easily. An influential second-wave feminist scholarship in the United States made its own attempt in the 1970s to rehabilitate Mayo and Mother India. Here Mayo was resurrected as a feminist precursor concerned with women's issues internationally. The colonial amnesia of this move, which tried briefly to provide Mayo with progressive feminist credentials, was itself quickly subject to withering critiques. These critiques coincided with a post-Orientalism scholarship that was alert to the continuing legacy of colonial discourse in First World feminist scholarship. As a result, the imperialist and racist underpinnings of Mayo's argument about India and Indian women are now much harder to escape.

This interest in Mother India has helped to expose Mayo's project, but it has not helped to explain the full ramifications of the controversy that erupted with such intensity l'entre deux guerres. The popular and scholarly engagements with Mother India have tended to present the opposition between imperialism and nationalism as seamless and unchanging. This underestimates the turbulence of the decade that produced the Mayo controversy. Several critics also point to the continued popularity of Mother India, especially in the United States, where fascination with Mayo's "facts" about India has enjoyed a long history, as evidence for the lasting hold of colonial knowledge and power. However, this emphasis on continuity comes at the cost of eliding crucial transformations of imperialism in the twentieth century. Surely the abiding popularity of Mayo's Mother India in the United States is no coincidence. In the 1950s, as Harold Isaacs observes, Mother India was second only to the works of Rudyard Kipling in the United States as the most popular source of information about India. India thus ranked at the very bottom in a survey of American perceptions of...