Nineteenth Century Bengali Women's Writings 2008th Edition

About the
Author

Mahua Sarkar is
an associate professor of sociology and a faculty member of the women’s studies
and the Asian and Asian-American studies programs at Binghamton University,
State University of New York.

Introduction

This book
studies the production of Muslim women as invisible and oppressed/backward in
the written history of late colonial Bengal. Unlike in projects of
recuperation, the intent here is not to correct the problem of
invisibility/silence of Muslim women by recovering them as visible/vocal subjects
within the familiar terms of conventional history-a history that denied them
such presence in the first place. Instead, my focus is on understanding the
discursive and material contexts that have historically produced Muslim women
as victimized, invisible, and/or mute. What I seek to make visible in this
project, in other words, is not so much Muslim women but rather the contexts of
their specific (dis) appearances in writing and the ways in which they have
been marginalized and/or made to (dis)appear within both the conventional
(colonial and nationalist) and critical historiography of colonial Bengal.

Feminist
scholars have amply documented the phallocentric tendencies of normative
historiographies that typically ignore women as historical subjects. Recently,
feminists in India have engaged in further reflection about the implicit Hindu
majoritarian biases of not just nationalist/normative histories but even