Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233

Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’
Gender & History, Vol.11 No.3 November 1999, pp. 445–460.

Giving Masculinity a History: Some

Contributions from the Historiography of
Colonial India
MRINALINI SINHA

Contemporary historiography, especially in North American, European and

Australian history, now includes a fairly respectable body of literature on
men and masculinity.1 At its best, this scholarship has gone well beyond the
limitations of ‘sex-role theory’, and the sex-role socialisation of men, to
make important and valuable contributions to the recognition of gender as
a ‘useful category of historical analysis’.2 Yet the new interest in ‘mascu-
linity’ and the related development of ‘men’s studies’ and the ‘men’s move-
ment’ has also produced a certain wariness within feminist scholarship, the
latter being of course the main inspiration for the critical attention to
gendered identities. After having pioneered the call to study constructions
of masculinity as much as of femininity, however, many feminist scholars
have now become more cautious in response to some trends within the
new scholarship, sensing a potential evasion of the central feminist
problematic: the gendered organisation of power.3 It may still be necessary
to be reminded of the question that R. W. Connell, whose own pioneering
work on gender and masculinity consistently refuses such evasions, asks in
connection with a recent collection of essays on masculinity: What, exactly,
is involved in writing a history of masculinity?4 I invoke this double legacy
of the scholarship on men and masculinity to reflect on the potential
contribution that the historiography of colonial India offers to the study of
masculinity.
Until recently, the urgent task for women’s history, as well as for gender
studies and feminist scholarship more generally, was to make the history of
women ‘visible’.5 It soon became apparent, however, that in many ways it
is men who have no history. To be sure, almost the entire corpus of his-
torical scholarship that does not specifically allude to ‘women’ is, and
always has been, about the doings of men. Yet, in the sense that Michael
Kimmel suggests, these have not been histories of men as men.6 For, accord-
ing to Kimmel, to write the histories of men as men would require at the
least an examination of how the construction and experience of manhood
has informed the course and meanings of the activities of men. It would
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
446 Gender and History

also require an examination of the ways in which the meanings of man-

hood and masculinity have differed across different groups and classes and
changed over the course of history, and a critical analysis of the ways in
which the pursuit of an always-elusive ideal of masculinity has animated
some of the central events of history. It is in this sense, then, that he argues
that men and masculinity were until recently barely visible in history.
The emergence of masculinity as a category of historical analysis, how-
ever, occupies a somewhat paradoxical position in the gendered mode of
analyses that have gained currency in the contemporary historiography of
colonial India. The scholarship on gender in colonial India has by and large
been about women.7 Both social histories of gender relations in colonial
India and discursive analyses of the gendered constructions of colonialism
and nationalism have tended to focus on women. Yet this scholarship as a
whole – notwithstanding the variety of its theoretical and methodological
orientations – has also contributed to giving the history of masculinity in
colonial India a certain visibility.8 On the one hand, therefore, there remains
a relative dearth of scholarship on men and masculinities in colonial India.
On the other hand, however, the existing scholarship on gender has served
to denaturalise the history of men and masculinities in significant ways.
This paradoxical situation, I want to suggest, is not a sign of weakness. Rather,
it holds enormous potential for developing adequately contextualised his-
tories of masculinity in which masculinity itself is understood as constituted
by, as well as constitutive of, a wide set of social relations. Masculinity, seen
thus, traverses multiple axes of race, caste, class, sexuality, religion, and
ethnicity. Masculinity, that is to say, cannot be confined solely within its
supposedly ‘proper’ domain of male–female relations. The contribution of
the historiography of colonial India, then, is significant precisely as an
example of what would be involved in writing a history of masculinity.
There are several ways, indeed, in which the existing historiography of
colonial India provides fertile ground for further explorations of the history
of masculinity. At the most obvious level, the historiography of colonial
India forces a reconsideration of the seeming embodiments of what Ed
Cohen has referred to as the ‘“imaginary” mappings’ of bodily difference
(i.e. ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’).9 In other words, it makes consider-
ations of power central to the assignment of qualitative attributes to bodily
signifiers of difference. The context for this problematising of gendered
categories comes of course from the peculiar investment of colonial power
in India in the cult of manliness and masculinity. Historians of Victorian
and Edwardian Britain have already charted the shifting ‘cult of manliness’
in Britain and its particular articulation with British imperialism.10 This has
meant that the impact of such bastions of male culture as the Victorian
public schools and the ‘clubland’ and of the ideals of Victorian manliness,
athleticism, and militarism, has featured centrally in studies of British or
Anglo-Indian society in India, especially in accounts of the colonial Indian
bureaucracy and the Indian Army.11 On the Indian side, moreover, scholars
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Giving Masculinity a History 447

have explored an equivalent elite male culture among the rajas and maha-
rajas of Princely India and in such institutions as Mayo College and Doon
School, initially founded under colonial auspices for the socialisation of
the sons of the Indian aristocracy in appropriate ‘manly’ behaviour.12 Of
greater significance, perhaps, have been studies of the ubiquity of the
colonialist stereotype of ‘effeminacy’ and of the development after the
revolt of 1857 of an elaborate colonialist ethnography of ‘martial’ and ‘non-
martial’ races in India for the purposes of reorganising the recruitment of
Indians to the Indian Army. The contrasts in imperialist thinking between
the so-called ‘manly’ peoples of the Punjab and the North-West Frontier
Provinces and the ‘effeminate’ peoples of Bengal and the more ‘settled’
regions of British India, or between virile Muslims and effeminate Hindus,
have long been known to scholars of colonial India. At its best, this scholar-
ship has shed light on such things as the exercise of bureaucratic control in
colonial India through the recruitment of men of different regions, reli-
gions, castes and classes into various colonial institutions and the impli-
cations of the internalisation of ideas about effeminacy by a certain class of
Indians.13 Although much of this scholarship, like the early accounts of the
cult of manliness in metropolitan British society, has not been concerned
with gender ideology per se, it has nevertheless served to clear the ground
for a more profound troubling of gendered categories. This subsequent
scholarship has achieved a fuller articulation of masculinity with relations
of power.
In recent years, especially in the wake of Edward Said’s pathbreaking
work on the discursive constructions of imperial power, the gendering of
imperial power has received considerable attention.14 Although Said
himself made only passing references to such things as the eroticisation of
the ‘Orient’ as female and to the feminisation of the colonised male in
relation to the colonising male in colonial discourse, he inspired a gener-
ation of scholars to explore the specifically gendered implications of colonial
discourse. In the particular context of the British in India, moreover, the
gendered investments of colonial discourse have been further elaborated
and modified to render masculinity in particular more visible. So in The
Rhetoric of English India, for example, Sara Suleri complicates the familiar
trope in colonial discourse of heterosexual rape – the figuration of the
colonised country as a woman raped by the coloniser – by way of the more
complex dynamics of a ‘deferred homosexual decorum’.15 For Suleri, then,
an underlying script of homosocial eroticism – figured in the encounter
between hypermasculinised British men and effeminate Indian men –
subtended British colonial discourse in India and relegated women, both
British and Indian, to the peripheries of an exchange essentially ‘between
men’.16 The most influential elaboration of the implications of the hyper-
masculinist discourse of British Orientalism in India, however, comes from
the pioneering work of Ashis Nandy on the psychology of colonialism.
Nandy focuses on what he calls a ‘language of homology between the
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448 Gender and History

sexual and the political’ in colonial culture.17 Nandy suggests that the
rigid dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine that was part of
the gender ideologies of the post-Enlightenment West was manifested in the
hypermasculinity of British imperial ideology in India, which reshaped the
more fluid and diffuse gender identities in Indian tradition. For the mascu-
linised ethos of aggressive-but-gentlemanly competition among the British
was accepted by much of the nineteenth-century Indian male elite, accord-
ing to Nandy, who took the existence of British domination as proof of a
masculine superiority that they should emulate. Thus Nandy identifies M. K.
Gandhi’s profound challenge to British colonialism as lying precisely in
his refusal to accept the inherent superiority of a ‘masculinity’ that was
increasingly equated with rationality, materialism, and physical strength.18
While various aspects of the binary that Nandy constructs between ‘Western’
and ‘traditional’ Indian masculinity remain problematic, his work has inspired
much of the subsequent literary and historical work on the construction and
reconstruction of masculinity in colonial India.19
What the scholarship in the wake of Nandy has demonstrated is pre-
cisely the centrality of questions of power to any history of masculinity.
Much of this scholarship has, not surprisingly, focused on the Bengali Hindu
bhadralok (elite or respectable class) that, throughout the nineteenth century,
was perhaps most noted for its peculiarly symbiotic relationship with the
colonial British elite.20 In the case of Bengal, moreover, there was a par-
ticularly physical dimension to the Bengali bhadralok’s self-perception of
effeteness that was manifested in the flowering of the new physical culture
of akharas (gymnasia) in the nineteenth century and in the later masculinist
subculture of secret terrorist societies in the early twentieth century.21 There
was also a certain pointed dimension to the masculine anxieties that
plagued the leading nineteenth-century male figures among the Bengali
bhadralok, who developed elaborate and creative responses to the per-
ceived crisis of masculinity. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee tried in his writings
to respond to Bengali effeminacy (the Bharata Kalanka or the Indian
Stigma) by reconstructing the iconic figure of Krishna, cleansed of his famed
qualities of sensuality and playfulness, and thus sublimated into a new
representation of masculinity defined by love of action and rational self-
control.22 Ramakrishna Paramhansa defiantly and ambivalently appropri-
ated representations both of the masculine and the feminine in his own
self-presentation, a response that prefigured Gandhi’s construction of his
persona as both father and mother to his disciples.23 Swami Vivekananda
aggressively advocated a masculinised Bengali and Hindu identity that com-
bined Hindu spirituality with the ‘Western’ emphasis on physical strength
to create his own brand of a superior Indian/Hindu spiritual masculinity.24
This ‘redemptive pedagogy of manliness’ in Bengal, indeed, is the focus of
a new book by Indira Chowdhury in which she examines the creation and
re-creation of masculinity in a network of institutions from the Hindu Mela
of the 1870s to the popular songs of the Swadeshi movement of 1905.25
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Giving Masculinity a History 449

This internalisation of effeminacy, as various scholars have shown, was

itself part of a new hegemonising project that assured the dominance of a
predominantly elite, upper caste, and Hindu masculinity in the process of
remasculinisation.26 The sense of ‘effeminacy’, of course, has characterised
other social groups in varying degrees and for a variety of reasons in dif-
ferent historical periods; so, for example, effeminacy emerged as part of the
self-perception of Parsis in post-independent India partly in response to a
perceived sense of decline in their status from the colonial period.27 The
larger point, indeed, is that the scholarship on masculinity in the colonial
context has helped lay the ground for histories of masculinity that go beyond
the mere tracking of changing historical and cultural perceptions of mascu-
linity. It suggests, in fact, that histories of masculinity can be – and, indeed,
should be – more fundamentally about relations of power: a network vari-
ously criss-crossed by hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality.
At a second level, and following in many ways from the first, the histori-
ography of colonial India also makes visible both the relational construc-
tion of masculinity and the anxieties percolating within its norms. This has
been an important implication, for example, of much of the scholarship on
the gendered construction of national and communal identities in India.
Hence Partha Chatterjee, one of the most influential theorists of official
nationalism in India, identifies an elaborate gendered dichotomy between
an inner/spiritual and outer/material world as crucial to the construction of
national identity in India.28 Given the ‘constitutive contradictions’ of a belated
nationalism under conditions of colonialism, he suggests, Indian national-
ists located their own autonomous identity in the inner/spiritual world
while conceding superiority to the West in the outer/material world. The
discursive strategies of Indian nationalism, having acknowledged its own
surrender and impotence in the ‘outer’ world of men, thus invested the figure
of the Indian Woman with the burden of an authentic Indian identity.29
Henceforth, indeed, the terms for the emancipation and self-emancipation
of women were set within the parameters of a new and improved national-
ist patriarchy. One implication to be drawn from this gendered analysis of
nationalism is that the consequent nationalist investment in the recon-
stitution of the Indian home and of Indian domesticity was as much about
an ambivalence in the construction of masculinity as about a normative
construction of femininity.
The context for the relational construction of masculine identities is fur-
ther expanded in the work of Sumit Sarkar, who looks beyond the binary of
coloniser and colonised to illuminate the masculine anxieties of lower-
middle-class men in nineteenth-century Bengal. His analysis of the construc-
tion of masculinity in the context of the confinement of a majority of the
Bengali middle-class males to the slavery of chakri, or petty clerical work
under the particular conditions of the colonial political economy in Bengal,
raises interesting questions about the relationship of masculinity to work
and to specific forms of property relations.30 His study of lower-middle-class
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450 Gender and History

men’s culture against the background of chakri, and against the supposedly
debilitating attractions associated with kanchan (gold) and kamini (women),
offers a picture of a colonial middle class that is much more internally
divided in terms of status than has been commonly assumed. What these
different contexts for the construction of masculinity reveal, however, is
precisely the extent to which masculine identities are constructed in rela-
tionship to men of other communities no less than to women.
The new interest in masculinity has been most marked, perhaps, in the
scholarship on the gendered politics of communalism (religious sectarian-
ism) in colonial as well as contemporary India. One context for this interest
is provided by the reconfiguration of gendered politics in the current
ascendancy of the Hindu Right in contemporary India.31 So, for example,
the rhetoric that accompanied the demolition by right-wing Hindu com-
munalist groups of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in 1992, on the ostensible
ground of reclaiming Ram Janmabhumi (the birthplace of Ram), appealed
both to a remasculinised figure of Ram (the hero of the eponymous Indian
epic Ramayana) as Hindu saviour and to an infantilised Ram lalla or ‘baby
Ram’ (evoking women’s maternal protection).32 This marked a broader shift
in the image of the Hindu Right in contemporary India from disillusioned
young men with ‘khaki shorts and saffron flags’ to assertive women in saffron
robes spouting hate-filled speech.33 For the militant Hindu organisations of
late colonial India, which drew mainly from the ranks of urban teenage
boys ‘not yet corrupted and made timid by family concerns, university
students and lower middle classes such as shopkeepers and clerks’, had
been associated with a very different kind of hypermasculinist rhetoric in
which women’s own agency was considered marginal at best.34 The study
of communal riots, both before and during the eventual Partition of the
subcontinent in 1947, has demonstrated both the ways in which women’s
actual bodies were the sites for demarcating and violating the boundaries
of communities and the ways in which the men of rival communities were
constructed as the rapists and abductors of hapless women.35 So, also, the
examination of the gendered rhetoric of communalism has revealed the
significance of such notions as those of male honour and shame, as well as
of calls for male revenge and for tests of manhood, in keeping the fires of
Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communalisms burning.36 The hypermasculinist
rhetoric of Hindu communalism, furthermore, reconstructed the ‘virility’ of
the Hindu not just in relation to women and to men of ‘other’ communities,
but also against men who, although defined as part of the same com-
munity, were held responsible for its decline and emasculation. Hence, as
Gyanendra Pandey notes, ever since the 1940s militant Hindu organisa-
tions have periodically raised the question: ‘How Mahatma Gandhi with
his “feminine” charkha (spinning wheel) can possibly be considered the
“Father of the Nation”?’37 What this scholarship amply demonstrates is that
masculinity is constructed neither in isolation from the full dynamics of
social relations nor on the basis of a self-evident foundation. In this sense,
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Giving Masculinity a History 451

then, it suggests that masculinity cannot be adequately studied in terms of

the self-contained history of any particular group.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the knowledge about masculinity
that emerges from the scholarship on shifting gender relations in colonial
India serves as a timely reminder that masculinity needs to be examined
not just in the context of cultural representations but also in the context of
material and ideological arrangements.38 Just a few examples must suffice
here. The work of Tanika Sarkar on nineteenth-century Bengal is suggestive
in positing Hindu domesticity – constructed as a space of love and affec-
tion, and of the wife’s willing surrender to the husband – as a central site
for Hindu male identity in colonial India, given that his access to rights in
the colonial public sphere remained limited. Having allowed himself to be
colonised and having surrendered his autonomy to the West, the Hindu
male now constructed a vision of Hindu domesticity in which the ‘chaste
body of the Hindu woman’ carried the burden of marking the difference of
the Hindu from the West. The crucial point for Sarkar, as her analysis of
debates over such practices as child marriage and premature sexual
intercourse demonstrates, is precisely the particular domestic arrangements
that this construction of masculinity sustained.39 Similarly, when Uma
Chakravarti examines the reconstitution of ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’ in
nineteenth-century western India under pressure from the processes of
caste contestation, class-formation, and the emergence of nationalism, her
interest is in the ideological and material practices that sustain, and are
sustained by, issues of gender.40 Yet another context for masculinity as a
material and ideological arrangement is suggested in Padma Anagol-McGinn’s
study of that peculiar pattern of public sexual harassment of women by
men that is today known in both official and popular discourse in India as
‘Eve teasing’. The skewed urbanisation of colonial India – which resulted in
a preponderance of men in the cities as the result of a pattern of recruiting
migrant male labour for mills and industries that necessitated leaving
behind females in rural areas – provides the historical context in which
Anagol-McGinn locates her study of the phenomenon of Eve-teasing.41
What this scholarship on gender relations in colonial India strongly sug-
gests is that the project of ‘recasting men’, like the argument that Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid make about ‘recasting women’, cannot be ab-
stracted from an entire range of social arrangements and their cumulative
material and ideological effects.42
What I have been suggesting so far, then, is that there is much to build
upon, despite a relative absence of histories devoted specifically to the
exploration of masculinity, from the ways in which masculinity has been
made visible in the scholarship on gender in colonial India. From here,
indeed, there are several possible directions in which a scholarship expli-
citly about masculinity may proceed. One direction is best represented in
Rosalind O’Hanlon’s essay ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History:
The Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad’, on the political culture of late
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452 Gender and History

pre-colonial India.43 Here O’Hanlon examines the gendered culture of

the ‘codes of martial bravery and correct manly behaviour’44 as they were
used to cement alliances between rulers and their clients and between
mercenary leaders and their warbands in the politically volatile context of
the relative decline of Mughal power in north India and the rise of numer-
ous regional power-holders. O’Hanlon suggests that the norms of military
masculinity, once so successfully deployed by the Mughal rulers to recruit
elite supporters, gradually declined as rival models of military masculinity
emerged to challenge the Mughal model. She establishes the centrality of
a Mughal ‘imperial masculinity’ – a code that was both shared and com-
peted over by rival political elites – in the working of the eighteenth-century
political system in north India. The terms of this ‘imperial masculinity’, as
O’Hanlon’s analysis of a Mughal military servant’s manipulation of its
codes suggests, were defined in a variety of contexts: the contrast be-
tween the simple and manly world of the soldier, on the one hand, and the
‘womanly realm of the harem’ and the ‘luxurious world of the court’, on
the other;45 the ethos of fighting contests between warriors at court; the
courtly ethos of recreational hunting and animal fights; and, of course,
the experience of the battlefield itself.46 The codes of ‘imperial mas-
culinity’, she suggests, defined ‘what it meant to be a man [in the political
elite] in 18th century north India at the level of individual identity and
experience’.47
The direction taken by O’Hanlon’s richly contextualised study of the
gendered culture of eighteenth-century north Indian politics – and, in par-
ticular, of masculinity – is one that constructs a scholarship about mascu-
linity around a history of men as gendered beings. O’Hanlon, indeed,
defines masculinity as ‘that aspect of a man’s social being which is gen-
dered: which defines him as a man and links him to other men, and
conditions other aspects of his identity, such as of class, occupation, race,
and ethnicity’.48 Working with this definition, her analysis succeeds not
only in looking at a familiar aspect of eighteenth-century north Indian
politics in a new light – political diplomacy, alliances, and negotiations –
but also in reconsidering the nature and implications of the gendered
articulation of British colonial power later in the century. This latter con-
sideration, as O’Hanlon herself points out, is the broader implication of her
study. First, as she suggests, her study of ‘imperial masculinity’ in pre-colonial
India makes clear that British colonial culture was certainly not the first to
deploy masculinity as a form of power and may, indeed, have built on
earlier such deployments of masculinity. Her challenge here is directed
quite explicitly at Nandy’s claim that martial Kshatriya traditions were a
relatively minor part of pre-colonial culture in India until they were inflated
by the hypermasculinist culture of British colonial rule. The supposed break
between the fluid gender identities of pre-colonial India and the rigid gender
identities introduced under the British may, indeed, be in need of some
qualification. Second, since the shared codes of imperial masculinity were
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Giving Masculinity a History 453

defined primarily in an ‘outdoor world of the contest, the game, the hunt,
and the battlefield’ – and explicitly against the ‘indoor realms of court,
household and harem’ – they provided a space that brought men together
in ‘contests about and in recognition of commonalities of gender that often
transcended other forms of cultural difference’.49 The decline of this world
of imperial masculinity – especially its integrative potential for the Hindu
or Muslim, Rajput, Maratha or Pathan to compete within a broadly shared
code of martial masculinity – had implications for the redrawing of sectional
and communal boundaries in India. Finally, with the contraction of oppor-
tunities for the expression of this imperial masculinity under British rule,
the indoor realm of household and family acquired greater significance
in the social world in India. This had important implications both for
women and for the nature of the transformation of gender relations under
colonial rule.
What O’Hanlon’s approach demonstrates, indeed, is precisely what can
be achieved by filling out the history of men as gendered beings in late pre-
colonial as in colonial India. There remain, indeed, vast areas of scholar-
ship in which the history of men as gendered beings has scarcely begun to
be made visible: in working-class culture; in the construction of sexualities;
in subaltern politics; in social movements; and in popular culture, to name
only a few.50 Yet, as Judith Allen suggests in a different context, one tendency
of such an approach might be to assume, rather than explain, the ‘relation-
ship between male bodies (men) and historical forms of masculinity’.
Hence manifestations of masculinity (and femininity) can always already
be found in the ‘home’, ‘the workplace’, ‘the neighbourhood’, and so on.51
While providing illustrations of a certain masculinity (and a certain femi-
ninity), such an approach may not exhaust the political efficacy or ideological
significance of masculinity. It risks assuming an underlying continuity of
real women [and real men], above whose constant bodies changing aerial
descriptions dance’.52
A second direction for explorations of masculinity is represented in my
own work Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’
Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century.53 One aim of this work is to bring
together the existing scholarship on masculinity in colonial India with the
gender-studies scholarship concerned more explicitly with providing gen-
dered modes of analysis of colonialism and nationalism. In so doing, I bring
to an exploration of masculinity many of the traditional concerns of a
feminist-inspired scholarship on the implications of the gendered organ-
isation of social relations in colonial Indian society. Another aim of my
work is to bring a historical-materialist approach to the analysis of colonial
masculinity that posits the entire imperial social formation as the unit of its
analysis. The heuristic model of an imperial social formation for the study
of colonial masculinity is meant to enable the following: first, to bring
together the formation of ‘English’ masculinity and ‘Bengali’ effeminacy
within the same field of analysis by examining their mutual constitution in
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454 Gender and History

the historical contingencies of specific practices of colonial rule; and second,

to explore the resulting ‘colonial masculinity’ as the product of the medi-
ations of various contradictions both between coloniser and colonised and
within each group arising out of the divisions of gender, caste, class, status,
religious and provincial identities. I thus reject the tendency to overlook the
ways in which the colonial encounter itself produced both the hyper-
masculinist rhetoric of the colonial British elite and its corollary: the dis-
tinction, as elaborated and given new meaning by a racialising colonial
ethnography, between a ‘manly’ and ‘effeminate’ native elite. British hyper-
masculinity, then, is understood not as constituted within Britain itself and
then merely transplanted to India as the basis for distinguishing between
‘manly’ and ‘unmanly’ native races. I see British masculinity, no less than
native masculinity, as shaped by the contingent practices of colonial rule.
In other words, ‘masculinity’ in my analysis acquires its meaning only in
specific practices: it has no a priori context or origin.
The direction represented by Colonial Masculinity, then, is one that
entails a dislodging of masculinity from its privileged grounding in (the
biologically sexed bodies of) ‘real men’. For giving priority to this context
– even when such an approach acknowledges interconnections with other
axes of power – does not render sufficiently problematic the always mediated
relationship between male bodies and masculinity. In this sense, the book
neither attempts to provide a single definition of colonial masculinity nor
seeks to exhaust all the possible terrains for the articulation of colonial
masculinity. Rather, the term ‘colonial masculinity’ here quite specifically
encapsulates the overdetermined terrain for the encounters between the
colonial British elite and the Bengali Hindu middle class at a specific
historical moment in the imperial social formation of the late nineteenth
century. The implication of this approach is that the meaning of masculinity
itself is derived from the specific power relations that it is deployed to
reproduce in particular historical contexts. This second direction for the
scholarship on masculinity, then, is based on a more radical problematising
of masculinity as such. The meaning of ‘masculinity’ studied thus is con-
stituted in practices that cover the full range of social relations.
From a certain reading of its contribution, then, the historiography of
colonial India holds crucial implications for the broader scholarship on
masculinity. For the real contribution of this historiography, to paraphrase
Joan Scott in a different context, may well lie in more than just establishing
that masculinity was an important issue in history: for it has also laid the
foundation for giving masculinity itself a history.54 One implication of recog-
nising the multiple social relations that were reproduced by the politics of
masculinity in colonial India, indeed, is to be compelled to think beyond
an easy equation between men and masculinity.55 This means that there is
no domain where masculinity necessarily or naturally belongs, no foun-
dation or anchor that could allow one to trace the progress of a continuous,
albeit changing, relation between men and masculinity. Lacking any secure
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Giving Masculinity a History 455

ground for masculinity, then, a history of masculinity still to come may find
that the unit of analysis most adequate to its study is the social as defined
in the broadest of terms. If masculinity and maleness are delinked, then the
domain of ‘masculinity’ need no longer be confined to histories of men as
gendered beings. It can be opened up, instead, to historical analyses of its
rhetorical and ideological efficacy in underwriting various arrangements of
power. Herein may lie the most radical implication of the historiography of
colonial India: the realisation that there may be no proper or predetermined
subject for a history of masculinity.

Notes

1. The recent literature on men and masculinity is too numerous to name. For
reviews of some of this recent scholarship, see J. Hearn, ‘Review: Men and Masculinity
or Mostly Boy’s Own Papers’, Theory, Culture and Society, 6 (1987), pp. 665–89; Lisa
Cody, ‘This Sex Which Seems to Have Won: The Emergence of Masculinity as a Cat-
egory of Historical Analysis’, Radical History Review, 61 (1995), pp. 175–83; Michael
Roper et al., ‘Recent Books on Masculinity’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990),
pp. 184–92; David H. Morgan, ‘Men Made Manifest: Histories and Masculinities’,
Gender and History, 1 (1989), pp. 87–91; R. W. Connell, ‘Book Review’, Signs, 19 (1993),
pp. 280–85; James Eli Adams et al., ‘Recent Works on Masculinity: A Forum’, Victorian
Studies, 36 (1993), pp. 207–26; Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Telling Stories about Men’, The Socio-
logical Review, 44 (1996), pp. 746–57; Victoria Thompson, ‘Sexuality: Another Useful
Category of Analysis in European History’, Journal of Women’s History, 9 (1998),
pp. 211–19; James A. Hammerton, ‘Forgotten People? Marriage and Masculine Identities
in Britain’, Journal of Family History, 22 (1997), pp. 110–17. See also Judith Allen,
‘Discussion: Mundane Men: Historians, Masculinity and Masculinism’, Historical
Studies, 22 (1987), pp. 617–28; John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do with
Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38
(1994), pp. 179–202; and Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and
the Politics of Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800,
ed. M. Roper and J. Tosh (Routledge, London, 1991), pp. 1–24.
2. The reference, of course, is to Joan Wallach Scott’s pathbreaking essay, ‘Gender:
A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986),
pp. 1053–75; reprinted in Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University
Press, New York: 1988), pp. 28–50.
3. For some examples of the issues at stake, see Caroline Ramazanoglu, ‘What Can
You Do with a Man? Feminism and the Critical Appraisal of Masculinity’, Women’s
Studies International Forum, 15 (1992), pp. 339–50; Diane Richardson and Victoria
Robinson, ‘Theorizing Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Masculinity: The Politics
of Naming’, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 1 (1994), pp. 11–27; Christine
Griffin and Joyce E. Canaan, ‘The New Men’s Studies: Part of the Problem or Part of the
Solution?’, in Men, Masculinities and Social Theory, ed. Jeff Hearn and David Morgan
(Unwin Hyman, London, 1990); and Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Facts of Fatherhood’,
and the response by Sara Riddick, ‘Thinking about Fathers’, in Conflicts in Feminism,
ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (Routledge, New York, 1990), pp. 205–21,
and pp. 222–33.
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456 Gender and History

4. See Connell, ‘Book Review’, p. 282. For Connell’s own pioneering work in the
field, see Gender and Power: Society, The Person and Sexual Politics (Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1987); and Masculinities (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995).
For another reassessment of ‘masculinity’ studies, see Jeff Hearn, ‘Is Masculinity Dead?
A Critique of the Concept of Masculinity/Masculinities’, in Understanding
Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas, ed. Mairtin Mac An Ghaill (Open
University Press, Buckingham, 1996), pp. 202–17.
5. See the title of a book that was an early pioneer in the modern field of women’s
history, Claudia Koonz and Renate Bridenthal (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in
European History (Houghton Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1977).
6. Michael Kimmel, ‘Invisible Masculinity: Examining Masculinity in Relation to
History and the Social Sciences’, Society, 30 (1993), pp. 28–36.
7. For overviews of the historiography on women and gender in India, see Barbara
Ramusack, ‘From Symbol to Diversity: The Historical Literature on Women in India’,
South Asia Research, 10 (1990), pp. 139–57; and Tanika Sarkar, ‘Women’s Histories and
Feminist Writings in India: A Review and A Caution’, Plenary Address to the Seventh
Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, June 1996.
8. For two contrasting theoretical approaches as manifested in the historiography of
women and gender relations in India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral
of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, History
Workshop Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 1–33; and Tanika Sarkar, ‘Rhetoric Against Age of
Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child-Wife’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 4 September 1993, pp. 1869–78. For contrasting examples of the con-
temporary historiographical debate in the study of colonial India, see Partha Chatterjee,
The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1993); and Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Oxford University Press,
New Delhi, 1997).
9. The phrase is from Ed Cohen in Adams et al., ‘Recent Works on Masculinity:
A Forum’, p. 218.
10. For some examples, see David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four
Studies on a Victorian Ideal (John Murray, London, 1961); J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s
Universe: The Development of the English Public School in the Late Nineteenth Century
(Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., New York, 1977); Norman Vance, The Sinews
of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious
Thought (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985); J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in
the Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1981); Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden Powell and the Origins of the
Boy Scout Movement (Collins, London, 1986); H. John Field, Toward a Programme of
Imperial Life: The British Empire at the Turn of the Century (Greenwood Press, New
Haven, CT, 1982); and Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and
Imaging of Masculinities (Routledge, London and New York, 1994).
11. For classic statements of the ethos of such institutions, see Leonard Woolf,
Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911 (Hogarth Press, London, 1967);
Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1974); and
Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India: The Guardians (Jonathan Cape, London,
1954). For more critical analyses of its implications, see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex
and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics (Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, London, 1980); Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British
Imperialism in India (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967); and Lewis D. Wurgaft,
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Giving Masculinity a History 457

The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, CT, 1983).
12. See, for example, J. A. Mangan, ‘Eton in India: The Imperial Diffusion of a Victorian
Educational Elite’, History of Education, 7 (1978), pp. 105–18. Also, Mady Martyn, Martyn
Sahib: The Story of John Martyn of Doon School (Dass Media, New Delhi, 1985).
13. For some examples, see John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical
Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Past and Present, 86 (1980),
pp. 121–48; David Omissi, ‘“Martial Races”: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India,
1858–1939’, War and Society, 9 (1991), pp. 1–27; and his The Sepoy and the Raj: The
Indian Army, 1660–1940 (Macmillan, Houndshill, Hampshire, 1994); and David Arnold,
‘Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary,
1859–1947’, in Subaltern Studies 4: Writing on South Asian History and Society, ed.
R. Guha (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1985), pp. 1–53.
14. See E. Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, New York, 1978).
15. S. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1992).
16. The reference here is to Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s pioneering book, Between
Men: English Literature and Homosexual Desire (Columbia University Press, New York,
1985).
17. A. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism
(Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1983).
18. The ambivalence of Gandhi’s attitude towards masculinity has, of course,
attracted the attention of scholars other than Nandy; see Erik H. Erickson, Gandhi’s
Truth (Norton, New York, 1969); Susanne Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph, The Modernity
of Tradition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967); Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations:
Explorations of Indian Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990). For an
interesting analysis of Gandhi’s attitude towards sexuality in this context, see Joseph
S. Alter, ‘Celibacy, Sexuality and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North
India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (1994), pp. 45–66, and ‘Gandhi’s Body, Gandhi’s
Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperialism of Public Health’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 55 (1996), pp. 301–22.
19. For my critique of Nandy’s binary of ‘Western’ and ‘traditional’ Indian concep-
tions of masculinity, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman
and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 1995; reprinted Kali for Women Press, New Delhi, 1998), Introduction.
20. For examples, see, Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness’; Sinha, Colonial
Masculinity; Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘The Effeminate and the Masculine:
Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Colonial Bengal’, in The Concept of Race in
South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1995), pp. 282–303;
and The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial
Bengal (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998). For a discussion of the colonial
politics of masculinity outside Bengal, see M. S. S. Pandian, ‘Gendered Negotiations:
Hunting and Colonialism in the Late 19th Century Nilgiris’, in Social Reform, Sexuality
and the State, ed. Patricia Uberoi (Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1996), pp. 239–64.
21. Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness’.
22. See Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Krishnacharita: The Construction of the Figure of
Krishna in the Work of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’, in The Unhappy Conscious-
ness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in
India (Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1995). See also Rachel R. Van Meter, ‘Bankim
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458 Gender and History

Chandra’s View of the Role of Bengal in Indian Civilization’, in Bengal Regional Identity,
ed. D. Kopf (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1969), pp. 61–72; and Partha
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Zed,
London, 1986), ch. 3.
23. See Sumit Sarkar, ‘“Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti ”: Ramakrishna and His Times’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, pp. 1543–66; and Partha Chatterjee, ‘A Reli-
gion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class’, in Subaltern
Studies 7: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey
(Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1993), pp. 40–68. For an interesting discussion of
androgyny in cultural traditions in India, see Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Sexual Meta-
phors and Animal Symbols in Indian Mythology (Motilalbanarsidas, New Delhi, 1980).
24. See Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History, ch. 5.
25. See Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History, p. 21.
26. See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; and Chowdury, The Frail Hero and Virile History.
27. See T. M. Luhrman, ‘The Good Parsi: The Postcolonial Feminization of a Colonial
Elite’, Man, 29 (1994), pp. 333–57; and The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in
a Postcolonial Society (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996). For an account
of the construction of masculinity by a nineteenth-century Parsi in London in the
context of social reforms for women, Indian nationalism, and British imperialism, see
Antoinette Burton, ‘A “Pilgrim Reformer” at the Heart of Empire: Behramji Malabari in
Late-Victorian London’, Gender and History, 8 (1996), pp. 175–96.
28. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; The Nation
and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1993); and ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in
Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid
(Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1989), pp. 233–53.
29. I explore the implications of this discourse on the particular construction of the
gendered citizen-subject in India in my forthcoming book Refashioning Mother India:
The Advent of a Nationalist ‘Indian’ Modernity in Late Colonial India.
30. See Sarkar, ‘“Kaliyuga”, “Chakri ”, and “Bhakti ”’; and in his Writing Social
History, pp. 282–357.
31. For an interesting discussion of the politics of masculinity in this context, see
Rustom Bharucha, ‘Dismantling Men? Crisis of Male Identity in “Father, Son and Holy
War”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1 July 1995, pp. 1610–16.
32. See Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram’, in
Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed. Gyanendra Pandey
(Viking, New Delhi, 1993), pp. 74–107. For a history of the Babri Masjid-Ram
Janmabhumi dispute, see S. Gopal (ed.), Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-
Ram Janmabhumi Issue (Viking, New Delhi, 1991).
33. The phrase is from Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique
of the Hindu Right (Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1993). For the new visibility of
women, and the invocation of women’s agency and gender equality in the politics of
the Hindu Right, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika
Samiti and Ram Janmabhoomi Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31 August
1991, pp. 2057–662; Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (eds) Women and the Hindu
Right (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1995); Kumkum Sangari, ‘Consent, Agency and the
Rhetorics of Incitement’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1 May 1993, pp. 867–82;
Ratna Kapur and Brenda Crossman, ‘Communalizing Gender/Engendering Community:
Women, Legal Discourse and Saffron Agenda’, Economic and Political Weekly,
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Giving Masculinity a History 459

24 April 1993, pp. Ws. 35—Ws. 44; Paula Bacchetta, ‘All our Goddesses Are Armed:
Religion, Resistance and Revenge in the Life of Hindu Nationalist Women’, Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars, 25 (1993), pp. 38–52; and Sucheta Majumdar, ‘Women on
the March: Right-Wing Mobilization in Contemporary India’, Feminist Review, 49
(1995), pp. 1–28.
34. See Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, p. 24. For the hypermasculinist
discourse of militant Hindu organizations in late colonial India, see Gyanendra Pandey,
‘Hindus and Others: The Militant Hindu Construction’, Economic and Political Weekly,
28 December 1991, pp. 2997–3009.
35. See, for example, Papiya Ghosh, ‘The Virile and the Chaste in Community and
Nation Making: Bihar 1920s to 1940s’, Social Scientist, 22 (1994), pp. 80–89.
36. The ideas of ‘male honour’, as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin have argued,
were also evident in the paternalist attitude of secular nationalism; see R. Menon and
K. Bhasisn, ‘Abducted Women, the State and Questions of Honour: Three Perspectives
on the Recovery Operation in Post Partition India’, in Embodied Violence: Com-
munalizing Women’s Sexuality in South Asia, ed. Kumari Jayawardena and Malthi de
Alwis (Zed, London, 1996), pp. 1–31. For a discussion of the image of the raped woman
in fuelling masculinist revenge in communalist violence, also see Veena Das, Mirrors
of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors (Oxford University Press, New Delhi,
1990), pp. 1–36.
37. G. Pandey, ‘Hindus and Others’, p. 3005.
38. I am drawing here from Uma Chakravarti’s critique of gender analyses that reduce
gender to a representational phenomenon rather than examine gender as a material and
ideological arrangement; see Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times
of Pandita Ramabai (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1998).
39. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Hindu Wife and the Hindu Nation: Domesticity and
Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, Studies in History, 8 (1992), pp. 213–35;
‘Rhetoric Against Age of Consent’; and also ‘Talking About Scandals: Religion,
Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, Studies in History, 13 (1997),
pp. 63–95.
40. Chakravarti, Rewriting History. For the concept of ‘brahmanical patriarchy’, see
also her ‘Conceptualizing Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class,
and State’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 April 1993, pp. 579–85.
41. See Padma Anagol-McGinn, ‘Sexual Harassment in India: A Case Study of Eve-
Teasing in Historical Perspective’, in Rethinking Sexual Harassment, ed. Clare Brant and
Yun Lee Too (Pluto Press, London, 1994), pp. 220–34. For an account of the contemporary
menace of Eve-teasing, see Deepti Priya, ‘Challenging a Masculinist Culture: Women’s
Protest in St Stephen’s College’, Manushi, 28 (1985), pp. 32–5. For an example of the
gendered imbalance created by the pattern of labour recruitment in the jute industry in
colonial India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, Bengal,
1890–1940 (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1989).
42. See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Recasting Women: An Introduction’, in
Recasting Women, ed. Sangari and Vaid, pp. 1–26.
43. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 4 (1997), pp. 1–19. Of note also is her forth-
coming book, cited in the above essay, Masculinity Between Empires: Gender and Power
in North India, c. 1750–1850.
44. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, p. 5.
45. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, p. 11.
46. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, p. 10.
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460 Gender and History

47. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, p. 7.

48. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, p. 3.
49. O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity’, pp. 16–17.
50. For some examples, see Joseph Alter, ‘Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and
Militant Hinduism’, Modern Asian Studies, 28 (1994), pp. 557–88; David Hardiman,
‘Community, Patriarchy, Honour: Raghu Bhanagre’s Revolt’, Journal of Peasant Studies,
23 (1995), pp. 88–130; Poonam Arora, ‘Devdas: Indian Cinema’s Emasculated Hero,
Sado-Masochism and Colonialism’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 30 (1995),
pp. 261–70; and Ashwini Sharma, ‘Blood Sweat and Tears: Amitabh Bachchan; Urban
Demi-God’, in You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, ed. Pat Kirkham and J. Thumim
(St Martin’s Press, New York, 1993), pp. 167–80.
51. See J. Allen, ‘Discussion: Mundane Men’. I find the distinction that Allen
makes here useful; I read her against the grain, however, in not subscribing to an
‘analytics of origin: sex, sexual distinctions, and sexual politics in history’ for studies of
masculinity.
52. Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in
History (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988), p. 7. See also Judith Butler,
Gender and Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, New York,
1990).
53. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
54. See J. Scott, ‘Book Review’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 1329–30.
55. For one example of the theoretical challenge to the ‘naturalised’ relation between
men and masculinity, see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University,
Durham, 1998); and ‘Annamarie Jagose Interviews Judith Halberstam, “Masculinity
without Men”’, Genders, 29 (1999).

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.