Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India

Abstract

This paper investigates the late colonial origins of Home Science in British India. It deals most intensively with the institutionalization of Home Science in Madras Presidency and attends to the roles played by both the colonial state and Indian women's organizations in its establishment. Though the focus is on Madras because the efforts of those based there influenced the later course of Home Science education, the activities of Madras educators, policy makers and reformers are also situated within a wider frame of transregional and imperial relations forged through reform projects, missionization, travel and education.

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

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“…Partha Chatterjee () has made the argument that nationalist discourse in India located women in the interior space of the home: territorialising both in the service of an incipient national community. Attention to the history of women’s education suggests that this was reinforced, and indeed the modern albeit quintessentially Indian home imagined and materialised through women’s studies curricula (Hancock ), and the cultivation of domesticity in the women’s hostel (Krishnan ). Since independence, preoccupations among policy‐makers with women developing the “wrong” attachments that might detract from desirable national futures—often in language that explicitly associates the “correct” emotional education of women with national development—has justified enclosure and surveillance in hostels (Krishnan ).…”

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“…As B. Meenu explains the situation, "while in the popular narrative about social reform, reformers and traditionalists appeared to be on the opposite sides of the battle when it came to widow remarriage, the reality was that 'the two sides in this dispute were not always clearly defined' " [Meenu 2017, 253]. The "woman's question" was indeed the "litmus test" for the reform sympathetic Indians, for the vast majority of whom the rising of the former was an infringement of their private territory, which was associated with the home [Hancock 2001;Chatterjee 1989]. Madhaviah definitely went beyond this majority not only by supporting the widow remarriage case, but also by putting this question to a higher degree.…”