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Ritu Sen Chaudhuri
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, the University of Calcutta
'Woman in a Colonial Public Space: the Performative Icon'
The paper seeks to understand the dynamics of woman's participation in the public space of nationalist ideology in nineteenth century colonial Bengal. It contends that the woman was introduced into this realm of nationalist politics as an icon (Here the icon represents the presence of the goddess. It is neither simply the presence nor a simple representation of the presence. It adds something to the presence while representing it. It is always different and deferred from fully representing the 'presence'. The presence of the icon thus subsumes both the presences of the human woman and the goddess.) Dealing with iconicity as a constitutive moment of reality and the real as embedded in the icon, one may look into the dynamics of how one or more icons act as organizing principles structuring the 'real' woman in a specific setting. The specific here is neither a repetition of the universal nor an 'other' as mirror image of the 'same'. It implicates the maze of real and ideational historicities that cling to the (specific) being of the wo/man in an 'other' setting. The iconic/real binary, which I problematize without wishing it away, has a resemblance to another persistent binary active in many accounts of the (post)colonial setting in Bengal, the religious/secular. In a recent discussion on the limits and enablements of rationalist historiography in India, Dipesh Chakrabarty (Habitations of Modernity 2002) has pointed at the way 'secular histories' have impoverished themselves by ignoring the emotive and the imaginative in everyday religiosities. In the spirit of a critique of this rationalist theorizing, I deal with the category of the 'icon' as bearing within it the weight of the polytheistic imaginary while operating within a secular structure of thinking that marks the colonial public space (Faure, Critical Inquiry 24, 46: 1998). The Devi – the great goddess – (Spivak, Cultural Critique 47: 2001) is displaced from the semantic space where she is a part of the iconographical network of Indic religions into the purportedly secular discursive space of nationalist ideology.
When we speak of the specificity of the agency of the 'iconic woman', we differentiate it from that of the phenomenal woman. But what sort of agency does the 'woman in the body' wield? And in what ways? In my theoretical frame, neither the term 'woman' nor 'body' refers to any biological substratum of corporeality that is common to, and universally marks, all women (Nicholson, Signs Autumn 1994). If the body was the pre-discursive foundation upon which the imaginary figure of the icon is ideologically imputed, iconicity would be a moment of 'false consciousness' that can be erased at will. The universality of the 'woman' in the 'body' would be a normative goal to be attained through that erasure. On the other hand, I do not want to reduce the category of icon – of the mother goddess – to a disembodied metaphor of purity, strength, nurturance, or any such attribute. Instead, I want to look at the category in its specific being that leaves the traces of its presence (marked by a religious polysemicity) in its use as a metaphor for the nation in a secular context. The specificity that the category of icon adds to the 'agency' of the woman does not refer to a total loss of agency; rather it alludes to other/different possibilities of subjectivation – of a beyond-performative reiteration (Butler, Bodies that Matter 1993). We stand to witness how 'theories become dislocated discrepantly when they travel' from the 'universal' to the 'specific', where the specific bears the possibilities of other/multiple universals.
I read the autobiography of Sarala Debi, an active participant in the nationalist public space of nineteenth century Bengal, to understand the processes of assujetisement involved in the performative structure marked by the icon and the universal woman. Assujetisement implies that the universal 'meaning' is reiterated in the 'body'. The 'meaning' needs the embodiment to become itself, to bring its own existence to fruition. At the level of signification, as a set of norms that can be differentiated from its moment of enunciation, it does not occur as embodied. In contrast to this, I view the working of the icon in the Indic imagination as involving an embodied, phenomenal meaning to be re-iterated in the 'real women'. The phenomenality of the 'iconic woman', in this setting, bears within itself a phenomenal part of the goddess of whom (not which, as the goddess is a 'person' not a 'thing') she is an icon. In this way of being in a culture, the universal norm is neither 'universal' (a multiplicity of devis), nor a norm (the devi is not a norm, she is a person); though being a bearer of both a universality and a normativity in the form of the 'Great Devi'. The universal norms of gendering get attenuated or extended, while being reiterated by a body that is twice removed from the self – where the icon stands in between the body and the self-being and knowing of the woman. Here the icon is not a mere metaphor but exerts a presence of its own that shadows the being and the knowing of the woman – that freezes performativity, yet keeps open the possibility of agency beyond the performative.
Bio: Ritu Sen Chaudhuri is a PhD Research Student attached to The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and the University of Calcutta (Department of Sociology) working on the understanding of woman's agency, iconicity and the processes of nation building in the post-colonial setting. The specific focus is on the dynamics of histories, imaginations and religiosities implicated in the figure of the bhadramahila (the new woman) in its changing contours in nineteenth and twentieth century Bengal. She has presented papers on related issues in The Cultural Studies Workshop, 2001 organized by CSSSC, Roskilde University, Denmark and the Centre for Basic Research, Uganda at Puri; in a national seminar on gender, 2002 at the Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta (scheduled to be published as an article in the Seminar proceedings) and participated in the Feminist Theory Seminar Series 2002 organized by the University of Calcutta and From the Margins.
She has also published a co-authored essay (re)cognizable defence? (From the Margins August, 2000), based on investigation and conversations in relation to a case of sexual harrasment; and a review article (forthcoming) on Tanika Sarkar's book Hindu Wife Hindu Nation in From the Margins. Presently Ritu teaches Sociology in the Mahishadal Girls' College, West Bengal but has also worked as guest lecturer in Sociology for various other colleges in Calcutta. Finally, she is attached to a Behavioral Therapy Centre, working for the children of the sex workers in Calcutta. Worked as a field researcher in the STD/HIV Intervention programme for the sex workers in the city of Calcutta, organized by the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Government of India.
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