Women's Voices, Men's Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper

Introduction

One of the most striking changes in the study of colonial India's social history over the last two decades lies in the intensified scrutiny directed at the position of women in colonial society and its significance for social reform and nationalist movements.¹Discussion here has extended well beyond conventional 'women's history' approaches to take in gender relations in wider settings: social reform and nationalism; new class, caste, and religious community identities; cultures of the body and martial masculinity; and gender identities within the new print cultures of colonial India.²Nonetheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how colonial social change affected men's experience as men and their gendered responses to challenges posed to older forms of domestic, community, and political authority. This is in part because, as a number of scholars have observed, the study of 'masculinity' presents particular conceptual and evidential difficulties. Conceptual difficulties often accompany the study of social and political arenas where men's activities are not apparently 'gendered' and men appear to be the natural 'ungendered' subjects of history. Difficulties of evidence arise because men rarely explain their own experiences with direct reference to their own or others' identities as men.³

One way past these problems may lie in the development of small-scale and fine-grained studies of a kind that will enable us to look closely at men as historical subjects and agents in their own communities. The present article sets out to do this in the case of the Muslim communities of a small North Indian town during the early decades of the twentieth century. Bijnor was home to a long-running community newspaper, Madinah, whose pages offer us a series of unique insights into how its male editors and contributors thought about themselves as fathers, husbands, heads of households, lovers, workers, and political agents. Readings of male contributions to Madinah reveal curiosity and pleasure, pride in the educational attainments of some Muslim women, anxiety about some of their new public roles, and above all a deep ambivalence about the challenge to older norms and structures of family authority implied in these new relations. Perhaps most interestingly, male contributors to the newspaper sometimes assumed the voices of women in order to represent what they took...