Citation

Das A, Sen Chaudhuri R. History Compass 2007; 5(5): 1483-1499.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00455.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A review of the secondary literature on the way nationalist thought in colonial India conceived ‘woman’ shows three broad strands. One is the perspective of the history of art, which studies the genealogy of the iconic symbolisation of women. The remaining stands have similar objects of knowledge (the nationalist representation of women in terms of the debi) but differ in their foci of attention. The first is concerned with the (role of the) woman in nationalist thought and how ‘real’ women had responded to that construction. The other focuses on the processes of nation building in the colony to reach its gendered aspects. We finally make a case for a synthesis of these through a few instances.