Bøger af Open Window A Feminist Research Center

This book has selections from the Sharia and Manusmriti; even though these legal texts were written about 400 years apart, uncannily enough, they sound quite similar. There is a section in the Sharia (written post 700 AD) that has rules about how women should cover their bodies during prayers: Issue 797: A woman should cover her entire body while offering prayers, including her head and hair. As a recommended precaution, she should also cover the soles of her feet. It is not necessary for her to cover that part of her face which is washed while performing Wudhu, or the hands up to the wrists, or the upper feet up to the ankles. Nevertheless, in order to ensure that she has covered the obligatory parts of her body adequately, she should also cover a part of the sides of her face as well as lower part of her wrists and the ankles.Similarly, there are many sections in Manusmriti (written around the 2nd-3rd century AD) which codify behaviour for women. -By a girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house. -In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent. -She must not seek to separate herself from her father, husband, or sons; by leaving them she would make both (her own and her husband's) families contemptible. -She must always be cheerful, clever in (the management of her) household affairs, careful in cleaning her utensils, and economical in expenditure. -By a girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house. -She must not seek to separate herself from her father, husband, or sons; by leaving them she would make both (her own and her husband's) families contemptible. -She must always be cheerful, clever in (the management of her) household affairs, careful in cleaning her utensils, and economical in expenditure. The intent of these legal texts - both Islamic and Hindu - was to control all aspects of a woman's behaviour.

Postcolonial theory assumes that European colonization in the last two centuries can be understood within binaries of: colonized-ruler, center-periphery, hegemonic-dominant/ margins, and that these can be the only referential frameworks within which the engagement between the colonial powers and the colonies can be examined. In this process, we tend to erase the pre-colonial pasts, and the heterogeneity which would have been a norm within the colonial societies. In our haste to erase the influence that Islam has had on the Indian psyche, we have arrived at a skewered notion of identity. If we look at the writings of Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), we realize that it was not unusual for educated Hindus to be also trained in Islamic theology. Rammohun's first work, a treatise in Persian (with an Arabic preface), titled Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, or, A Gift to Monotheists was a critique of Hindu idolatory, and was written in an abstruse style, and made use of neo-platonic, Arab logic and philosophy. The causal connection is very interesting; Islamic theology comprises part of Rammohun's education and he simultaneously uses it to critique Islam and Hinduism. Does this imply that most Hindus would have been familiar with an Islamic Other, a fact that was erased from their psyches once the Britishers arrived in India ? As a young man, Rammohun was educated in Bengali, and later Persian as the latter was the official language. We can speculate that his education would have been a model of how many young men would have been educated. He was sent to Patna to learn Arabic, where he was taught from Arabic translations of Euclid and Aristotle, the Koran, and the writings of the Sufis. Subsequently, he studied Sanskrit at Benares. About this period he wrote: In conformity with the usage of my paternal race, and the wish of my father, I studied the Persian and Arabic languages, these being indispensable to those who attached themselves to the courts of the Mohamaden princes, and agreeably to the usage of my maternal relations, I devoted myself to the study of the Sanskrit and the theological works written in it, which contain the body of Hindoo literature, law and religion. He studied in five different languages, namely, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Bengali. The Sanskrit and the Arabic systems of education were very different from each other, but each is seen as indispensable to the other. Rammohun reveals remarkable ease in how he was able to master these two varied systems of knowledge.By the time of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), England had become an increasingly print-oriented society, shifting away from its oral past. This explains Jones' feverish desire to transcribe every manuscript into print, as the process would lend an element of fixity to unstable scribal texts. In an advertisement in The Calcutta Gazette, in 1789, Sir William Jones wrote: The correctness of modern Arabian and Persian Books is truly deplorable, nothing can preserve them in any degree of accuracy but the art of printing; and if Asiatic literature should ever be general, it must diffuse itself, as Greek learning was diffused in Italy after the taking of Constantinople, by mere impressions of the best manuscripts without versions or comments, which future scholars would add at their leisure to future editions: but no printer should engage in so expensive a business without the patronage and the purse of monarchs of states, or society of wealthy individuals or at least without a large public subscription. Jones was extremely conscious of entering a realm of scribal culture in Bengal, and this is reflected in his desire to constantly transfer manuscripts into printed texts. In a way, by transferring written texts into print, his central aim was to codify knowledge, and in the process allow for control of what was disseminated about India.

A central premise of postcolonial theory is that native cultures were completely overwritten by colonial presence, and that European colonizers dictated terms which left little space for natives to maneuver their positions and identitiesWhat we forget is that the natives were negotiating with the European Other, and simultaneously re-examining and rewriting their own epistemic systems. Reading primary texts written by natives allows us a completely different perspective on how colonization took place in the last few centuries. Even if we agree that the hegemonic center had cultural supremacy in dictating terms on how the natives were to be portrayed to the world, it would be foolish to assume that the natives were silent spectators. They might have been peripheral in relation to the West, at that moment, but they were quite central within a Self-native perspective. The question therefore is, why should we, at this moment, care as to how the colonizers perceived the natives and instead, our focus should be on how the natives perceived the Self and the colonizer-Other, and in the process, renegotiated with identities of the Self. One way of doing so would be by examining primary texts and literary works that were written during this time period. And it is keeping this perspective in mind that we examine the writings of Raja Rammohun Roy and his use of the newly emerged realm of print in colonial Calcutta in the early decades of the nineteenth century; doing so will allow us to conclude that postcolonial theory, as a valid analytical tool, is defunct. In many ways, what distinguishes Rammohun from his native contemporaries, who also were participating in the newly established realm of print, is his hyper-critical awareness of the characteristics of print-that mechanically reproduced printed texts could reach across to a large reading audience. Rammohun was fond of print to the point where whatever he thought about and wanted to do found its way into print. Even his theological and social disputes were worked out in print. He reveled in print, dashing off pamphlets to the printers. He enjoyed the publicity that his printed works gave him, by reaching a local and a global readership. The realm of English native print in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century was dominated by the writings of Rammohun Roy, but how was it possible for Rammohun to operate within the newly formed communications circuit that specifically targeted the native readers? How did printing take place in Calcutta, and who were involved? We have a hazy picture of the early years of the "communication circuit" that emerged in Calcutta in the 1780s. We find Hindu natives rubbing shoulders with the Europeans as they joined labor in setting up print foundries and presses, and a new city was established with all the paraphernalia of European civilization-many natives were going to eventually be "suited" and "booted." Ships arrived at the docks loaded with books, consumer items for the colonizers, and a whole lot of material for printing presses; it also came loaded with men who brought intellectual labour. Alongside Hindu and Islamic cultures, a new civilization emerged in India. How do we account for this degree of pluralism and multi-culturalism?EXTRACTS FROM THE BRAHMANICAL MAGAZINE (1821).It is well-known to the whole world, that no people on earth are more tolerant than the Hindoos, who believe all men to be equally within the reach of Divine beneficence, which embraces the good of every religious sect and denomination: therefore it cannot be imagined that my object in publishing this Magazine was to oppose Christianity; but I was influenced by the conviction that persons who travel to a distant country for the purpose of overturning the opinions of its inhabitants and introducing their own, ought to be prepared to demonstrate that the latter are more reasonable than the former.