A historical analysis of a book-inspired controversy that in its dimensions rivalled Hernnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and brought forth a new political collectivity in India's women.

About the Series ix
Acknowledgements xi
Note on Nomenclature and Transliteration xv
Introduction: The Anatomy of an Event 1
1. A Transitional Moment: The Dynamics of an Interwar Imperial Social Formation 23
2. Unpredictable Outcome: The Trajectory of a Transatlantic Intervention 66
3. Ironic Reversal: The Rhetoric of “Facts” in the Controversy over Mother India 109
4. Refashioning Mother India: The Sarda Act and Women’s Collective Agency 152
5. Ambiguous Aftermath: Political Consolidation on the Eve of the Second World War 197
Epilogue: History, Memory, Event 248
Notes 255
Bibliography 336
Index 361

Mrinalini Sinha is Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century and the editor of Mother India: Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text.