Content area
Full text
Each of these essays engages two major questions: 1) How do we retrieve the voices and historical experiences of those subjects not found in the official written record; and 2) What investigative tools and frames of reference should we use for doing Indian women's history? These are questions motivated not only by the limitations each author has faced while doing work in the "traditional" archive, but also by their historical locations and their relationships to late-twentieth-century feminism, both in the United States and in South Asia. Geraldine Forbes and Barbara Ramusack are scholars who have lived through the new social, women's, feminist, and cultural history "turns." Sanjam Ahluwalia arrived on the scene as a witness to the accomplishments of those trends in the past quarter century and the quarrels set in motion by them -- though her ongoing involvement in feminist politics has been equally foundational to her academic work. The evidence and conclusions each author offers here represent an ongoing dialogue with History (capital H). From their reflections we can glean some of the methodological challenges to the business of "history as usual" that are possible, desirable, and perhaps impossible as well under the aegis of women's and feminist history. Pressing upon all the essays is, equally, a concern, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, about the dangers of replicating presumptively Western historical narratives, expectations, and procedures in the process of researching and writing Indian history. Among the issues raised by these papers as a whole is the question of what counts as an archive and what the politics of various forms of recovery are and should be in the context of globalization and the push for transnational history at the beginning of a new millennium. Geraldine Forbes tells the story of how the romance of Indian women's history drew her into a life's work of research and commitment to expanding the archival base upon which those of us who have come after her depend. Although she is perhaps too modest to cast it in these terms, what we have in her essay is a remarkable glimpse into the story of how her Cambridge volume, The History of Women in India, came to be written -- which should put to rest all notions that such projects...