Public reasoning as moral duty: Hindi women's journals and nationalist discourse (1910--1930)

The dissertation provides a detailed study of the first Hindi women's periodicals edited by women in the United Provinces and investigates how topics such as domesticity, concepts of dharma, nationalist thought and language politics fed into the nationalist discourse of the times. Women's periodicals constituted a new sector in the rising publishing industry of the early twentieth century. They were not only a source of information for women and in women's own words, but also a distinct literary genre that interacted with other literary genres at a crucial historical conjuncture of forming a national Hindi language and literary canon.; The genre of the periodical enabled an increasing number of elite and middle-class women to participate in processes of knowledge production, dissemination and contestation. It became a medium to think in new idioms, communicate with strangers and identify collectively across local forms of social connectedness. I argue that Hindi women's periodicals functioned as a discursive field of nationalist and feminist identity formation and created a critical public in which women and men could negotiate prevailing models of Indian womanhood and redefine gender roles and responsibilities as they crystallized in the colonial context. These debates were held in a language that was projected as the national language of the nation-to-be. In the process, Indian nationalism turned out to be of paradoxical nature, enabling women to speak out for their rights in an enlarged public sphere and, at the same time, functioning as a constraining discourse that stigmatized women as bearers of tradition and relegated them to the domestic sphere.; The dissertation places particular emphasis on the participatory facet of women's periodicals: Eminent and lesser-known authors of the Hindi literary and political scene as well as a large number of subscribers jointly contributed to the making of a women's journal. In politicizing women's issues and making them part of public political discourses, women joined men in the struggle against colonial rule and at the same time led the foundation for an Indian women's movement as part of a political agenda, claiming that women's liberation and political emancipation were a precondition for political independence.