The Burden of Empire: The Impact of Colonial Masculinity on Armed anti-Colonial Resistance in India

Shriya Dasgupta, Purdue University

Examining how Victorian ideologies operated as a mechanism of political and cultural suppression in colonial Bengal in the late 19th-early 20th century, this study argues that while the British Empire constructed and imposed racialized ideas of gender on Bengalis drawing on Victorian ideas of masculinity, the anticolonial revolutionaries’ attempt to reclaim a masculine voice replicated the same gendered notions perpetrated by the very Empire they sought to overthrow. The study demonstrates that the socio-economic factors that gave rise to the fear of emasculation in Victorian Britain followed by the industrial revolution, also led to the gendered construction of society in colonial Bengal as a result of the deindustrialization of the colony. Scholars such as Partha Chatterjee argue that when bhadralok men (upper-caste, upper-class educated Bengalis) lost control over the outside world, they shifted focus inwards in an attempt to control the domestic life . The British constructed a stark opposition between the ‘manly Englishman’ (embodying vigor, strength, athleticism, self-control, and discipline) and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ (constructed as bookish and lacking the necessary martial prowess for self-governance) . This racialized ideal of manliness, tied to notions of being the superior and virile race, served as one of the key social justifications for British presence in India. Moreover, the colonies itself served as a crucial site for remasculinization for British men, resolving domestic anxieties prevalent during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods regarding effeminization . The Indian armed revolutionaries responded by engaging in muscular nationalism, a counterstrategy promoting physical culture and ‘man-making education’ to assert indigenous virility. This counter-masculinity involved strict bodily discipline, including enforcing celibacy (brahmacharya) to conserve vital fluids and linking individual male strength to national vitality , reflecting anxieties about degeneration of the nation- almost all of which played out earlier in England as well.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 72. Intimate Rule: Gender, Marriage, and the Colonial State