Beyond Domesticity: Science and the Making of Modern Bengali Women in Colonial Bengal

Suparna Chakraborty, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the centrality of gender in understanding the trajectory of science and modernity in colonial Bengal. Going beyond the role of modern science as “progressive” or “hegemonic,” this dissertation highlights its importance in understanding women’s body, reproductive health, sexuality and domesticity. Such a discourse challenges the nationalist and colonial characterizations of Bengali women as repository of Indian tradition. I demonstrate that the interaction of modern science and colonized Bengali society negate the value-neutral claim of science because gender roles were shaped by the expectations on how men and women engaged with science. It was through the introduction of western science and medicine into the domestic spaces of Indian household that women engaged with modern scientific health care practices. Bengali women’s encounter with modern science created an outcome that was different from the perceived function of science to control the bodies and reproductive practices of colonized women. Equipped with the knowledge of modern science, women did not follow the patterns of social control and conformity envisioned for them. The importance of the scientific discourse in creating a universal project of emancipation was reflected through women’s lived experiences as medical workers and their writings in which they imagined an alternative social structure where women could have multiple roles in an egalitarian society. Recent studies have brought imperialism and western science in one interpretative framework and have established Europeans’ ability to use advances in science, technology and medicine as “tools of empire.” Postcolonial scholarship on the other hand, has argued in favor of rejecting Western science and modernity given its oppressive character and complicity in the imperial project. Such a scholarship has ignored the contribution of western modernity as an important tool of critiquing premodern society. For postcolonial theorists, the modernizing agenda was part of the same discourse that justified Western domination. The postcolonial scholarship has ignored the contribution of western modernity as an important tool of critiquing the premodern society. My project with its focus on the use of western science and medicine by Bengali women challenges such postcolonial arguments. If we look at the subjects of history, the interaction between the colonial state and Indian society was much less straightforward. Often women who wrote about science and were trained as doctors joined the nationalist movement; thus, giving us the political proof of their careful separation of the intellectual project of modernity from the political project of British colonialism. My research explores and highlights the contradictory role of science in the colonies: on the one hand, it was oppressive as current historiography maintains, but on the other hand it empowered the oppressed subjects to emancipate themselves from precolonial norms and traditional moorings.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bhattacharya, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Asian History|Womens studies|Science history|South Asian Studies

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