Dwelling in the Archive Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India

by Burton, Antoinette

• ISBN13: 9780195144253
• ISBN10: 0195144252
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Dwelling in the Archives uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the IndianNational Congress. Her unpublished "Family History" (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India -- thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. CorneliaSorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhiannationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, "Sunlight on Broken Column" represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offeringus new insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.

Author Biography

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois

Table of Contents

Memory Becomes Her: Women, Feminist History, and the Archive	3	(28)
House, Daughter, Nation: Interiority, Architecture, and Historical Imagination in Janaki Majumdar's ``Family History''	31	(34)
Tourism in the Archives: Colonial Modernity and the Zenana in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs	65	(36)
A Girlhood among Ghosts: House, Home, and History in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column	101	(36)
Epilogue: Archive Fever and the Panopticon of History	137	(8)
Notes	145	(34)
Bibliography	179	(19)
Index	198