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Gandhi's Mira: Debating “Female” Suffering and the Politics of Iconography
- Ritu Varghese, Akshaya K. Rath
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During the first decades of the twentieth century when the Indian freedom struggle movement gained momentum, M. K. Gandhi often evoked Mirabai—the sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint—in his public speeches and voluminous letters. This article demonstrates the degree to which Gandhi's maneuver fundamentally altered Mirabai's image as a national and cultural symbol, and how it prompted the mobilization of women in the larger nationalist movement. Through the process of appropriation, Mirabai's image evolved in the Indian cultural realm from a woman charged with promiscuity into an ideal “chaste” woman. Gandhi's intervention further initiated a moral renaissance parallel to the nationalist current where women transgressed the thresholds of traditional domesticity and became active agents of non-violent resistance—Hindu/spiritual in essence—inspired by Mirabai's suffering and compositions. Gandhi's Mira emerged as a literary-cultural hybrid that circulated in public spheres, as Mirabai became a public icon and a vehicle for women's emancipation alongside national liberation.
5 - Sexualizing Kālā Pāni
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- By Akshaya K. Rath, PhD from the University of Hyderabad
- Edited by Rajeev Kumaramkandath, Sanjay Srivastava, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi
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- Book:
- (Hi)Stories of Desire
- Published online:
- 24 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 06 February 2020, pp 79-95
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Summary
There are two integrated facts about Kālā Pāni that should interest anyone who researches into the history of penal ideas: the Government was too anxious and impatient to populate the islands by any means so that it could control the ocean and the Empire, and it emphatically negotiated with the transported convicts in developing an elaborate convict society while showing its anxiety over its overall governance. Among the numerous steps taken in the initial decades, the requirement for well-behaved convicts and the demand for marriageable women remain so strong that the documents not only interrogate the intellectual and moral continence the British preached so much for but they also indicate, in principle, that the British were as lascivious as their native counterparts who, it was believed, embraced the Kāma Sutra in their everyday life (Ballhatchet 1980; Sen 2004: 2011). On the one hand, the deportation of 1857 mutineers, political prisoners, petty criminals, and hard convicts projects British attitude of developing the Andamans as a regular penal settlement. On the other hand, the transportation of public women, infanticidal mothers, and young female convicts remains another chapter that is relatively less explored (Sen 2011; Ludwig 2013). This chapter explores the repressive history of human copulation in Kālā Pāni, which requires critical investigation. It also projects that the Empire took to its practice a libidinal logic in controlling the population and in patronizing the colonized spaces.
This chapter explores archival sources – historical, cultural, and judicial – and (auto)biographical narratives of colonial subjects imprisoned in the penal settlement of the Andamans. While I argue that the postcolonial Indian nation highly romanticizes the sacrifice of freedom fighters incarcerated in the muchhyped Cellular Jail, I suggest that the contribution of ‘hereditary’ criminals, murderers, and petty offenders – convicted explicitly for the purpose of controlling the ocean and the geographical spaces of the Andamans – remains significant yet less explored. In negating the ‘glorified’ freedom struggle of the First War of Independence, otherwise known as the 1857 Mutiny, I consider the aftermath of prison transportation into purview so as to explore the effect of taming of convicts at Kālā Pāni.