1. In Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, the black woman whitens herself through the sole medium of sexual association with a white man. A black man, on the other hand, while seeking whiteness in the sexual embrace of a white woman, is also capable of other kinds of access—primarily education and the self-culture it makes possible—to whiteness. In “Algeria Unveiled” (in A Dying Colonialism [New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961]) the Algerian woman revolutionary who puts on European garb in order to outwit the guardians of the colonial state is emphatically no mimic—not even a canny and calculating one—of European femininity but a subject who acts with complete spontaneity.

2. Banerjee, “Women’s Popular Culture.” See also Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Street (Calcutta: Seagull Press, 1985).

3. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question.” Note, for instance, how intimately the male nationalist gendered segregation of the home and the world is articulated with Ruskin’s division, in the notorious “Of Queens’ Gardens” section of Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder, 1865) of the Victorian universe into that of “masculine activity” and “sweet ordering.” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent argument about the bhadramahila as an emblem of the difference of Indian modernity does not, despite its considerable cogency, take into account the gendered provenance of bourgeois identity at its point of origin in Europe; the European bourgeois woman was never constituted as identical to her male European counterpart. See his “The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British India,” in Subaltern Studies VIII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. David Arnold and David Hardiman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4. Mrinalini Sinha, “Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (1994): 34.

5. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 116–57.

6. See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Bonding in Difference [an interview with Alfred Arteaga],” in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

7. Karen Leonard, “Aspects of the Nationalist Movement in the Princely States of Hyderabad,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 21, no. 2–3 (1981–1982): 3–9.

8. Arthur Symons, “Introduction,” in The Golden Threshold, by Sarojini Naidu (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 11.

9. Meena Alexander, “Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance,” Economic and Political Weekly, 26 October 1985, 69.

10. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy Blair (London: Quartet Books, 1985).

11. We are told that she knew English well enough to correspond with English friends; see Tara Ali Baig, Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1974).

12. Symons, “Introduction,” 11–12.

13. The gifted Toru Dutt, the daughter of Bengali Christian converts, was educated partially in Europe and England and produced a fairly considerable body of English verse before dying at the age of twenty-one.

14. Edmund Gosse, “Introduction,” in The Bird of Time, by Sarojini Naidu (London: William Heinemann, 1912), 3.

15. Ibid., 4.

16. Ibid., 5.

17. Ibid., 2.

18. Ibid., 6.

19. See, for instance, one of her better-known letters to him: “I am sending for your severest criticism five little poems I wrote last week.…The little Henna Song pleases me very much—Henna is a national and immemorial institution and it is customary for all girls and married women to stain their palm and finger nails and feet with bright red juice of henna leaves. It symbolises gladness and festivity” (Baig, Sarojini Naidu, 22).

20. Spivak, “Bonding in Difference,” 276. Also see her gloss on the pharmakon in “Reading The Satanic Verses,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

21. Among the serious critical considerations of her poetry that were published in her lifetime were James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India (Madras: Ganesh, 1930), in which he praised her poetry generously and perceptively but also castigated her for valorizing the submissiveness of Indian women.

22. P. E. Dustoor, Sarojini Naidu (Mysore: Rao and Raghavan, 1961).

23. Nissim Ezekiel, “On Sarojini Naidu,” Sunday Standard, 11 February 1962, 12. See, too, Ezekiel’s comments quoted in Sisirkumar Ghose, “Salaam for Sarojini: Towards a Revaluation,” in Perspectives on Sarojini Naidu, ed. K. K. Sharma (Ghaziabad, India: Vimal Prakashan, 1989), 210: “Sarojini knew nothing of the literary revolution taking place in English poetry in the twenties and after.”

24. Alexander, “Sarojini Naidu,” 68.

25. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 75.

26. Ibid.,130. It is this successful deployment of the symbolic domain that has guaranteed the longevity of nationalism. For an able analysis of the ways in which Hindu nationalism at the current conjuncture mobilizes some of the idioms of female liberation while holding on to patriarchal privileges, see Tanika Sarkar, “Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses: Family and Organisation in Hindutva Politics,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, ed. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), 181–215.

27. Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993): 61–80.

28. Ibid., 67.

29. Alexander, “Sarojini Naidu,” 69.

30. For a fine account of the production of gendered and high-caste Hindu tradition in the aftermath of Orientalist scholarship, see Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” Recasting Women, 27–87.

31. Naidu, Golden Threshold, 87.

32. Ibid., 46.

33. Sarojini Naidu, Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu, 2d ed. (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1919), 112.

34. See Tanika Sarkar, “Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in 19th Century Bengali Literature,” Economic and Political Weekly, 21 November 1987, 2011–15; Jasodhara Bagchi, “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal,” Economic and Political Weekly, 20–27 October 1990, WS 65–71; Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, “Mother India and Mother Victoria: Motherhood and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” South Asia Research, 12, no. 1 (1992): 20–37; Samita Sen, “Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal,” Gender & History, 5, no. 2 (1993): 231–43; and Sandhya Shetty, “(Dis)figuring the Nation,” differences, 7, no. 3 (1995): 50–79. For a sympathetic, if less attentively feminist, account of the feminization/maternalization of the Indian landscape, see Sudipta Kaviraj’s comments on the nineteenth-century Bengali writings of Bankim in The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Reformation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 114:

35. See Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” for an illustration of the production of the nationalist woman as subject. See, too, Marie-Aimée Helie-Lucas, “Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Struggle,” in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Miriam Cooke and Margot Badran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

36. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1939).

37. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1691.

38. Kumar, History of Doing, 83.

39. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1700. Also see Ketu H. Katrak, “Indian Nationalism, Gandhian ‘Satyagraha,’ and Representations of Female Sexuality,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

40. Manmohan Kaur, Women in India’s Freedom Struggle (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1985), 160–65. See, too, Aruna Asaf Ali, “Women’s Suffrage in India,” and Amrit Kaur, “Women under the New Constitution,” Our Cause: A Symposium by Indian Women, ed. Shyam Kumari Nehru (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1935).

41. Kumar, History of Doing, 88.

42. Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, “Gender and Imperialism in British India,” South Asia Research, 5, no. 2 (1985): 156. There were limits, as we shall see, to male support of nationalist women and their demands on behalf of women. For an account of the sometimes tense relationship between the Congress Party and two of the most prominent of Indian women’s organizations, the Women’s India Association and the All-India Women’s Conference, see Geraldine Forbes, “The Indian Women’s Movement: A Struggle for Women’s Rights or National Liberation?” in The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, ed. Gail Minault (Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books, 1981), 49–82.

43. See, for instance, Indira Gandhi’s refusal of the term as a description of her own political commitments and Madhu Kishwar’s rejection of it as too weighted with Eurocentric baggage. Sarojini’s reluctance to adopt the term as a proximate self-description is understandable in light of the deeply colonialist and racist underpinnings of the feminist work of figures like Eleanor Rathbone, one of the most prominent of those interested in the uplift of Indian women.

44. Sinha, “Reading Mother India,” 21.

45. Naidu, Speeches and Writings, 14.

46. Ibid., 16.

47. Ibid., 78. Note, too, her address as President of the Indian National Congress in 1925, when she assumed, as a representative mother, the voice of Mother India: “I, who have rocked the cradle—I who have sung soft lullabies—I, the emblem of Mother India, am now to kindle the flame of liberty” (Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Congress, Volume 1 (1885–1935) [Bombay: Padma Publications, 1946 (1935)], 130).

48. I should point out that discipleship in this chapter does not carry exactly the same spiritual and erotic charge that it does in the preceding one, though its continuities with religious discipleship can by no means be trivialized.

49. Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966), 76–77 (emphases mine).

50. Margaret Cousins, The Awakening of Asian Womanhood (Madras: Ganesh, 1922), 121–22.

51. Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu, 81.

52. This of course is not to overlook her prison terms (though, significantly, she was always an A-class prisoner, with considerable privileges, including use of her own furniture and other personal items, relatively pleasant accommodations, and freedom to mix with other political prisoners—privileges that Mirabehn, though a white woman, was denied) or her genuine contributions over three decades to the cause of national independence and women’s rights; it is only to note that she, unlike Gandhi and most Gandhians, fully and unabashedly enjoyed material comforts.

53. Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, “Sarojini Naidu: A Sketch,” in Perspectives on Sarojini Naidu. ed. K. K. Sharma (Ghaziabad, India: Vimal Prakashan, 1989), 2. Numerous tales are told of her relish for kababs, biryanis, rasgullas, and the other staples of the gourmet’s table.

54. Robert Bernays, “Naked Faquir” (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), 202.

55. Baig, Sarojini Naidu. M. O. Mathai claims that it was on account of this estrangement that she was not allowed to see her father even as he was dying (Reminiscences of the Nehru Age [New Delhi: Vikas, 1978], 126–27).

56. Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Life and Myself—Dawn Approaching Noon (Bombay: Nalanda Publications, 1948). He does, however, devote considerable space and energy to an account of his meeting in Europe with his much older brother Virendranath (who appears to have left India, never to return, when Harindranath was only a child).

57. Tara Ali Baig, Sarojini Naidu: Portrait of a Patriot (New Delhi: Congress Centenary [1985] Celebrations Committee, 1985), 63.

58. See Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs (Delhi: Navrang, 1986).

59. Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu, 3–8.

60. M. Cousins, Awakening of Asian Womanhood, 119.

61. Bernays, “Naked Faquir,” 105, 106, 161.

62. Beverley Nichols, Verdict on India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), 149.

63. B. R. Nanda, The Two Nehrus (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 230; see also Krishna Hutheesingh, With No Regrets: Krishna Hutheesingh’s Autobiography (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1944).

64. Izzat Yar Khan, Sarojini Naidu: The Poet (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1983), 18, n. 49. See the original in K. A. Abbas, Sarojini Naidu (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980), 66.

65. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, abr. ed., ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 24–25.

66. These are the terms in which Nayantara Sahgal (Nehru’s niece) describes Padmaja Naidu in Prison and Chocolate Cake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 142:

[Padmaja] was a person of indefinable charm who did not belong to—and made no pretense of fitting into—an austere political atmosphere. The bright greens, golds, and purples of her saris were a startling contrast to the sober shades around us. Her bright silks rustled unashamedly amid the subdued whisper of khadi. She always wore flowers in her hair. There was something of the bird of paradise about her, confined, restless, in a glen of sparrows.

[Padmaja] had been an invalid all her life, a fact belied by her gaiety, her gift for swift repartee, and a keen sense of the ridiculous inherited from her mother. Like her mother, too, she was a poet, with a poet’s intensified aesthetic sense. But in addition to this she had a sharp critical faculty, and no jarring note in dress, mood, or conversation escaped her.

67. G. D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir (Bombay: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1968), 7.

68. M. K. Gandhi, Hindi and English in the South, ed. M. P. Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958). Gandhi severely castigated South Indian members of the Congress for their suspicion of Hindi but not of English.

69. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1698.

70. Kumar, History of Doing, 74.

71. Webb Miller, I Found No Peace: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), chap. 16. Also see Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1992 [1951]), chap. 16.

72. M. Kaur, Women in India’s Freedom Struggle.

73. Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1958), 177–78.

74. Mathai, Reminiscences, 126–27.

75. The following provide some of the information for a comparative and gendered account of Indian nationalism: M. Kaur, Women in India’s Freedom Struggle; Usha Bala, Indian Women Freedom Fighters, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1986); B. R. Nanda, ed., Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976); Kamaladevi Chattopadhayay, Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1983); Kumar, History of Doing; Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986); and Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, eds., Women Writing in India, 2 vols. (New York: Feminist Press, 1993 [1991]).

76. My sense of the exemplarity of the “case” has been facilitated by a reading of the following essays: Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Shahbano,” Signs 14, no. 3 (1989): 558–82 [reprinted in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992)]; and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Ameena: Gender, Crisis and National Identity,” Oxford Literary Review 16, nos. 1–2 (1994): 147–76.

77. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1691.

78. My understanding of the politics of banality is informed to some degree by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984). Achille Mbembe, “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture 4, no. 2 (1992): 1–30, has fascinating things to say about the exhibition and carnivalization of power in the (sub-Saharan) postcolony; and it is interesting to speculate what he might say about the spectacle of asceticism rather than excess as commonly understood.

79. M. K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (New York: Dover, 1958).

80. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1695. Combined with this endorsement of khadi was a castigation of fine clothes and jewelry, especially those worn by women: “there is no salvation for India, unless you strip yourselves of this jewelry and silken garments such as women wear and hold it in trust for your countrymen of India” (quoted in Eleanor Morton, The Women in Gandhi’s Life [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953], 118).

81. Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 1754. Some of the parallels with Ramakrishna are too obvious to miss. In The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy has likened the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda association to the Gandhi-Nehru alliance of the high nationalist period. Gandhi’s response to women was less consistently phobic, though also far more limited, than Ramakrishna’ he saw them as desexualized and self-sacrificing mother figures, while for the saint of Dakshineshwar the term woman could stand for a range of possibilities: seducer, mother, goddess, and so forth.

82. M. K. Gandhi, Bapu’s Letters to Mira (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1949), 288.

83. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 157–249.

84. For an elaboration of the incalculable logic of “theft,” see Lott, Love and Theft.

85. Yar Khan, Sarojini Naidu.

86. Baig, Sarojini Naidu: Portrait of a Patriot, 1 (emphasis mine).

87. Quoted in K. R. Ramachandran Nair, Three Indo-Anglian Poets: Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1987), 92.