In 1907, Conrad wrote to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, that 'the public mind runs on questions of war and peace and labour'. He adds that he plans 'to treat those subjects ... from a modern point of view' (Letters, III, pp. 439- 40). These matters had become his subject already, however, when he wrote Nostromo four years earlier, and they continued to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Labour relations had figured largely in his fiction even earlier, since 1897 when The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and other sea stories presented sea-captains like Allistoun, and Marlow in Africa, managing their sometimes mutinous subaltern officers and crews. Nostromo is the first to introduce the other, equally 'modern', topic of 'war and peace', which for Conrad turns out to mean revolution and its consequences in a post-colonial world.

Readers for generations have related Nostromo to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869). The Russian novel may not have been a deliberate model, yet similarities abound: the vast compass of history the two novels re-enact, the celebration of a nation's repulse of an invading army, and the multiple plots and family histories that centre on the making of marriages and the reasons for their success or failure.

Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is a rich, vivid, layered, paradoxical, and problematic novella or long tale; a mixture of oblique autobiography, traveller's yarn, adventure story, psychological odyssey, political satire, symbolic prose-poem, black comedy, spiritual melodrama, and sceptical meditation. It has proved to be 'ahead of its times': an exceptionally proleptic text. First published in 1899 as a serial in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, it became extensively influential during subsequent decades, and reached a zenith of critical acclaim in the period 1950-75. During the final quarter of the twentieth century, however, while its influence became even more pervasive, the tale was vigorously assailed on political grounds by various feminist critics and by some left-wing and Third World commentators. In this essay, I discuss the novella's changing fortunes in 'the whirligig of time' (Feste's phrase from Twelfth Night) and argue that even now it retains some capacity to criticize its critics.

The phrase ‘ahead of its times’ first needs defence. What put it ahead of them was that it was intelligently of them: Conrad addressed issues of the day with such alert adroitness and ambiguity that he anticipated many twentieth-century preoccupations.

Among the earliest women's memoirs from the nineteenth century are stories of a passionate desire to learn to read. Rassundari Devi, born c. 1809, taught herself to read by stealing precious moments from her housework and the responsibilities of caring for twelve children. Later, she described her craving for knowledge:

Rashsundari's progress was slow but she learned to read, to write, and finally wrote about her own experiences.

Haimabati Sen (c. 1866–1932), born a half-century later, recalled her childhood in khulna District of East Bengal:

In 1917 Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu announced the British government's intention of including more Indians in the governing process. To learn more about Indian and European opinion, Montagu and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, planned a tour of India to listen to the views of individuals and groups. Hearing of the proposed tour, Saraladevi Chaudhurani applied for an appointment for members of the Bharat Stri Mahamandal to discuss women's educational needs. Members of the newly formed Women's Indian Association in Madras also requested an audience. Officials informed both groups that only deputations on political subjects were welcome so Mrs. Margaret Cousins sent a new application. She requested an audience for women to present their political demands. On December 15, 1917, Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), an Indian poetess and long-time Congress worker, led an all-India delegation of prominent women to meet with Montagu and Chelmsford. Members of this delegation presented an address documenting the awakening of Indian women to their civic responsibilities. They wanted women to have the status of ‘people’ in a self-governing nation within the Empire. With this deputation, Indian women began their struggle to secure for themselves political and civil rights.

When these women asked for the vote, they claimed they spoke for all women. In the nineteenth century, British officials expressed their concern for ‘Indian women’ and in that earlier time would have been delighted with such a claim. But the British now defined their ‘civilizing mission’ differently. After World War I British critics of Indian society complained that middleclass Indians had no sympathy for the customs and traditions of the rural masses.

The source used for writing this book include official government records, newspapers, collected speeches and writings, reports and minutes, memoirs and autobiographies, oral histories, personal letters, diaries, and songs, as well as monographs and articles with Indian women as their subject. It is particularly significant to note that women’s history is being written now and gender is fast becoming as much a tool of analysis as class, caste, and race. Articles and books are published daily offering new and fresh insights about women's lives and how gender shapes and is shaped by the wider social and political context.

The critical year for the historyof Indian woman was I975. Between I975 andI979 thirtybookson womenwere published,as many as the total produced over the previousseveral decades. A bibliographyof workson Indian womenin English publishedin I976 incorporated 8oo references; four years later CarolSakala's Womenof South Asia: A Guideto Resources (Millwood, N.Y., Kraus International Publications,I98o) registered 4,627 entries, and the literaturehas continuedto proliferate.Unfortunately the new literatureon Indian women and questions related to gender in India is not readily available. Much of it is publishedin newer, and sometimes inaccessiblejournals, pre­ sented at conferences, or published in collected works.

The educational experiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a ‘new woman’ with interests that went beyond the household. Lado Rani Zutshi, the mother of Manmohini Sahgal, was educated at home by tutors. Manmohini wrote about her mother:

For the first time in India's history women began to communicate with women outside their families and local communities. On the one hand there was a small group of women who shared English as a common language. This made possible communication across language barriers. On the other hand, there were growing numbers of women literate in the vernaculars which enabled them to learn about women's issues in the new women' s journals. Both groups, marginalized by more traditional society, sought the companionship of women like themselves. Encouraged by their male guardians to ‘move with the times’ they joined the new clubs and associations formed for women. From small local clubs and women's auxiliaries of the Indian National Congress and the National Social Conference came a variety of organizations and associations that reflected women's concerns. By the eve of Independence in 1947 a coalition of national women's organizations could rightfully claim it was the second most representative body in India.

By the mid-1940s the all-India women's organizations had lost their hegemony. For almost two decades the women's organizations spoke for all Indian women. They demanded the trappings of ‘modern life’: education, health care, protective legislation, and civil and political rights within the framework of a social feminist ideology that constructed women as socially and psychologically different from men. They acknowledged India's special problems, especially child marriage, purdah, and the oppression of widows, and agreed that these practices made reform doubly hard. But in their view two things gave reform its impetus. First, these customs had not existed in India's ‘golden age.’ Second, as Indian women, they were blessed with a legacy of goddesses and heroines who willingly sacrificed themselves for husbands and families. This habit of sacrifice was now valorized as worthy of extension to civil society and the nation. These organizations had been nurtured by two opposing forces: nationalist aspirations and colonial domination. Their vision of modernized women threatened neither the patriarchy of the British rulers nor the patriarchy of Indian nationalists.

The ideology of the women's organizations was too Hindu, too middle-class, and too urban to appeal to or adequately represent all Indian women. An informal survey completed in 1932 estimated that 90 percent of Indian women were wage-earners and only ‘married women among the well-to-do families and those of higher social standing do not work for wages.’ Muslim women, unless they could agree to a secular-Hindu national project, were not adequately represented. Urban and rural working women took part in patriotic demonstrations but they were never fully integrated into the women's organizations.

Helena Dutt, a Bengali revolutionary, said ‘[we] were like caged tigers’ in explaining how she and other girls her age leapt into education and politics. Women more conservative than Helena and her friends were told ‘the house is on fire’ and they should come out of the burning house and help put out the fire. From liberal homes and conservative families, urban centers and rural districts, women - single and married, young and old - came forward and joined the struggle against colonial rule. Though their total numbers were small, their involvement was extremely important. Women's participation called into question the British right to rule, legitimized the Indian nationalist movement and won for activist women, at least for a time, the approval of Indian men.

Politics completely altered the goals and activities of organized women. Education, social reform and women's rights appealed to some progressive women, but the movement to rid the country of its foreign rulers attracted people from all classes, communities, and ideological persuasions. Nationalist leaders deliberately cultivated linkages with peasants, workers, and women's organizations to demonstrate mass support for their position. Women were amazed to find political participation approved of by men who wanted their wives to behave in the home like the perfect wives in religious texts. Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal, a freedom fighter jailed in Lahore in 1930, wrote about a woman who joined a demonstration and was arrested while her husband was at work. He sent word to the jail that she could not return home after her release. Manmohini's mother, Lado Rani Zutshi, intervened on behalf of the woman.

Rammohun Roy's (1772–1833) name is usually listed first among those of nineteenth-century reformers concerned with improving women's status. Historians have called him the ‘father of modern India,’ a ‘champion of women's rights,’ and a feminist. But his personal relationships with women were far from ideal. He was married three times, at age nine, ten, and twenty-one years. His first wife died soon after the marriage, another died in 1826 and one outlived him. There is no evidence that he looked to his wives for companionship; in fact, there were rumors that his adopted son, Rajaram, was the child of his Muslim mistress. After Rammohun's father's death he argued with his mother, Tarini Devi, and in anger left the family home with his wives and children. The relationship deteriorated even further when Tarini Devi encouraged a nephew to challenge Rammohun's right to ancestral property. The suit began in 1817. Among the court records is an unused document showing that Rammohun was prepared to argue, in front of a judge, that his mother hated him, desired his worldly ruin, and would have even ‘welcomed his death.’ Rammohun had developed a set of questions to be asked of his mother if she were called as a witness. He planned to ask if she was so angry at him for refusing to worship her idols that she would lie under oath to destroy him. Rammohun admitted he admired his mother's strength and independence yet he was willing to publicly humiliate her. Examined from this perspective Rammohun seems less than an ideal champion of women's rights. Where were women's voices?

Dr. Haimabati Sen, a medical doctor in charge of the women's hospital in Chinsurah, described her daily routine in 1895:

The labor of women like Dr. Haimabati Sen, as a medical professional and wife and mother, has largely been hidden from history. Memoirs rarely offer such rich detail about women's work. Unfortunately, our sources on women's work in the nineteenth and even much of the twentieth century are vague and unanalytical. The dearth of reliable data presents a serious challenge for historians attempting to probe the consequences of colonial rule for laboring women.

The first historical accounts of Indian women date from the nineteenth century and are a product of the colonial experience. These accounts tell of an ancient time when women were held in high esteem followed by a long period when their status declined. Then Europeans came on the scene. The foreign rulers, according to these narratives, introduced new ideas about women's roles and capabilities and these ideas were adopted by enlightened Indians. Until recently the history of women in British India has been recounted in this way, that is, as a slow but progressive march towards ‘modernity’ following a long period of stagnation and decline. Both British missionaries and those Indian reformers who welcomed the opportunity to put forth a critique of their own society hypothesized a ‘golden age’ followed by centuries of corruption and betrayal. Salvation came in the guise of European forms of governing, technology, and values. This way of writing about the past, particularly as linear movement through time toward a specific goal, was a hallmark of European history.

Both European-inspired histories and the Indian texts they cited shared a belief in a unique female nature. Indian texts essentialized women as devoted and self-sacrificing, yet occasionally rebellious and dangerous. Texts on religion, law, politics, and education carried different pronouncements for men depending on caste, class, age, and religious sect. In contrast, women's differences were overshadowed by their biological characteristics and the subordinate, supportive roles they were destined to play. Historians were equally essentialist in their portrayal of Indian women. Occasionally Indian texts and historical narratives singled out one woman for special attention but usually this was because her accomplishments were significant by male standards.

On August 14, 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence from British rule. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, president of the All-India Women's Organization in 1946, remembered that time:

On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi died from an assassin's bullet. Within a year women active in the major women's organizations had lost their dream of a unified country and their beloved leader.

India and Pakistan constructed themselves differently, India as a secular, democratic nation and Pakistan as a religious, authoritarian nation. This chapter will focus only on India and will attempt to draw out the historical roots of problems and issues of Indian women in the period following Independence. Specifically, it will consider women's political role, the relationship of women to the modern economy, and the new women's movement.

WOMEN'S STATUS IN POST-INDEPENDENCA INDIA

The Indian Constitution declared equality a fundamental right. This document also guaranteed equal protection of the law, equal opportunities in public employment, and prohibited discrimination in public places. The Hindu Code, passed as separate Acts between 1955 and 1956, rewrote for Hindus the laws of marriage and divorce, adoption, and inheritance. Adult suffrage added women to the electoral roles and political parties pledged their commitment to women's issues.

Francis Bacon's natural philosophy may be viewed as a single philosophy with two aspects or as two philosophies each with its own peculiar character. Either way it is useful to acknowledge that there is a doubleness to his philosophical enterprise: on the one hand, Bacon's philosophy offers itself to us as a program for constructing a body of scientific knowledge that was supposed to yield immense practical benefits and so release the human race from material privation. On the other hand, it manifests itself as a rather strange corpus of speculative science. In its first guise Bacon's philosophy shows itself as a set of methodological recommendations together with a bold analysis of their implications for existing attitudes to knowledge and the institutions of knowledge.

Posterity has been remarkably generous to Bacon. Yet this generosity has taken the form of a protracted debate and has been largely disguised under the cloak of a culturally tacit certitude. We are faced with that debate from the very moment we are intent to gauge Bacon's technical influence on the ensuing philosophical reflection and in particular in that field in which Bacon is most commonly remembered, namely the epistemological discussion which fills so large a period of Western speculation in the modern age. It is not for nothing that Bacon hails his own Novum organum as a new logic and saw himself as a legislator and discoverer of sorts. But, as will be shown, the exact tenor and merit of Bacon's purported discoveries is open to much dispute. Unshakably certain, on the other hand, is that the ethos he infused into modern science as something inherently related to social development remains by and large a substantial part of our categorial framework.

In 1775, it was an open question whether Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean would follow the thirteen continental colonies into independence. The tropical colonies were integral elements in an economic system that linked them with the North American mainland; to a large extent, they shared common cultural and political traditions. As McCusker and Menard comment, “The economies of the mainland and the islands were so tightly intertwined that full understanding of development in one is impossible without an appreciation of developments in the other.” At the same time, the Caribbean colonies possessed characteristics that distinguished them from the English settlements to the north; it was these features that determined their unique political and economic future.

The principal distinguishing characteristics of the British West Indian colonial economy were its monocultural focus and dependence on external trade, the dominance of large-scale plantations and involuntary labor systems, the drain of wealth associated with a high ratio of absentee proprietorship, and the role of the servile population in the internal market. Why these features occurred in exaggerated form in the Caribbean rather than in other regions of the Atlantic system is an important question for debate. The British colonies in the Caribbean were subject to an imperial policy common to all of that state’s territories, and the colonizing stock of “settlers” was essentially the same for all of the regions occupied by the British before the middle of the seventeenth century, the formative stage of settlement. Thus, the role of (imperial) cultural and political factors in engendering British West Indian distinctiveness is likely to have been insignificant.

It is a historical fact that Bacon's philosophy is contemporaneous with the birth of modem thought. But it is also a fact that modem thought has developed in a way which does not accord with the idea that Bacon gave of the new science. Of course, we can praise the Chancellor's sense of reformation, his critique of false sciences, his comments on academic institutions and the politics of science; we can even say, as the French Encyclopedists did, that he was the herald of experimental philosophy. But the fact remains that the Baconian concept of science, as an inductive science, has nothing to do with and even contradicts today's form of science. As far as the method of science is concerned (and by method we mean the rules and formal processes of knowledge, and not only a general sense of experience), Bacon's instauratio went to a dead end, as early as the first progress of science in the seventeenth century.

THE SEPARATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

A longstanding commonplace in Bacon scholarship has been the notion that the Baconian advancement of learning depends upon a strict separation of divinity and natural philosophy. In a number of memorable passages Bacon indeed warns his readers of the dire consequences of confusing divinity with natural science: to combine them, he says, is to confound them. This is supposedly what Plato and the scholastics did, and what Bacon explicitly designs the new learning to overcome. Even the acceptable hybrid “divine philosophy,”when it is “commixed together”with natural philosophy, leads to “an heretical religion, and an imaginary and fabulous philosophy” (111, 350). According to this emphatic strand of Baconian doctrine, religion that joins with the study of nature is in danger of becoming atheistic, or an enthusiastic rival of the true church. Natural philosophy that traffics unwisely with divinity collapses into idolatry or fakery.