Feminist Historiography, Subaltern Studies, and the Politics of History in Modern India

The significant advances of Indian feminist scholarship, though sometimes overshadowed by the Subaltern Studies project, have powerfully challenged triumphalist nationalist narratives by exposing their masculine agendas. Seminal works like the essay collection Recasting Women (1990), edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, revolutionized the field by analyzing how Indian womanhood was constructed as a nationalist discourse. Scholars such as Mrinalini Sinha demonstrated that both British colonial reformers and Indian nationalists—whether liberal or revivalist—instrumentally championed women's issues to legitimize their own authority and masculinity. This scholarship revealed a reconfigured patriarchy in the colonial era, blending Victorian ideals with Hindu notions of sacrifice to confine women to a newly idealized domestic sphere, a process further analyzed by Tanika Sarkar in the context of religious revivalism.

While sharing the Subalternist critique of elitist historiography, feminist scholars noted the project's initial neglect of gender. Despite early criticism from Gayatri Spivak, substantive engagement with women's history only emerged in later volumes of Subaltern Studies. Feminist historiography had already pioneered techniques of deconstructing texts for patriarchal tropes and expanding source materials. Furthermore, feminists questioned the postmodernist and postcolonial tendencies within Subaltern Studies that could defend harmful traditions in the name of cultural authenticity, highlighting a tension between rejecting Enlightenment humanism and combating oppressive practices like sati.

Beyond theoretical debates, feminist historiography produced groundbreaking empirical work, notably on the Partition of India. Urvashi Butalia’sThe Other Side of Silence (1998) recovered marginalized voices, offering a harrowing "history from below" that diverged from high-political accounts. However, the field continues to grapple with integrating minority Dalit, Muslim, and tribal women's experiences and overcoming the limitations of the colonial tripartite periodization. The deeply political nature of this scholarship was underscored by events like the 2002 Godhra violence, which starkly illustrated how women's identities are violently enmeshed within communal politics.

The historical profession itself became a battleground with the rise of Hindu militancy or Hindutva. The Babri Masjid controversy epitomized this conflict, where Hindutva ideologues deployed spurious historical claims and selectively used postmodern relativism to argue for a narrative of ancient Hindu victimhood. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held power, it attempted to institutionalize this communal historiography through state-controlled educational and research bodies, challenging the secular mainstream historiography upheld by professional academics. This created a vast gulf between academic history and a popular historical consciousness saturated with communal myths disseminated through vernacular tracts and partisan school curricula.

Confronted by these challenges, mainstream historians engaged in profound self-reflexivity, questioning the adequacy of secular frameworks, the enduring colonial/anti-colonial binary, and the risks of relativistic philosophies. The strength of modern Indian historiography lies in this critical awareness and its move toward acknowledging multiple narratives. New research areas—environmental history, demographic studies, and sophisticated regional histories—are expanding the analytical horizon beyond entrenched debates. Thus, while contests over the past remain fiercely political, the field demonstrates a resilient pluralism, continuously refining its methods and frameworks to capture the immense complexity of the Indian historical experience.