Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women's Magazines in Colonial India, 1890-1940

Abstract

This article examines women's magazines published in colonial India from the 1890s to the 1940s. Focusing on texts in the Tamil language, the author argues that these magazines developed a paradigm of emotion in which a discourse of love, affection, and pleasure prompted radical critiques of women's oppression. This study calls attention to Tamil women's print culture, an area that historians have neglected. As the author suggests, this culture of print is part of a broader history of middle-class identity as it developed under the conditions of colonial modernity. That is, in redefining emotion, women's writing also redefined the female subject. The texts developed new notions of subjective interiority that displaced such conventional identity markers as kinship or caste. These shifts both resonated with developments in metropolitan contexts and reflected their specifically colonial conditions of production.

Brought to Life by the Voice

“…In this moralizing discourse, the female body was imagined as available for consumption by virtue of its visibility and always ran the risk of straying into an overly Westernized realm of materialism. By contrast, the female voice was both represented as a "traditional" domain protected from the encroachments of colonialism, materialism, and the West (Majumdar 2008, 191) and associated with the cultivation of interiority by the new idealized middle-class female subject (Sreenivas 2003). The ideological division between the voice and the body was enabled by forms of technological mediation (Weidman 2006).…”

Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia

“…45 This transformation was not merely imposed top-down, by colonial authorities, but it was swiftly grasped and transformed by vernacular paradigms: Mytheli Sreenivas has argued that new notions of emotionality and conjugal pleasure combined with a burgeoning print culture to redefine both female communities and selfhood for middle-class Tamil women in the early twentieth century. 46 Like the following articles, such studies emphasise that transformed imaginaries of emotional life became a core component of emerging discourses of modernity and 'modern dispositions', both for the colonial authorities and new vernacular publics.…”

“The Widow and the Wife”: Debating the ‘Woman Question’ in Muthumeenakshi (1903)

“…This was partly due to the changes that were being brought in the family as a result of the new administrative professions that had opened for the Indian men at this time. What Mytheli Sreenivas (2003) says, in the context of the readership of the Tamil magazines, about the changed circumstances as far as the "new elites" in the Tamil region were concerned can be said to hold true for most parts of India.…”