![]() ![]() 2 In both perspectives, women emerge as unresisting, inert, and passive objects of defining discourses, as people without any control over their lives. Faced with defeat and humiliation in the political and material world, Indian men constructed their women as the repositories of all that was pure and worthy in their own culture. 1 Later, historians showed how the Indian woman became the site for nationalist constructions of tradition and cultural authenticity in the quest for self-identity from the late nineteenth century onwards. ![]() As has been pointed out, for the colonial state this was part of a strategy to perpetuate domination: helpless and weak Indian women in need of protection provided one moral justification for colonial rule. ![]() Far too often, we see woman as a silent shadow, veiled and mute before her oppressors, and unquestioningly accepting a discourse that endorses her subordination. The overwhelming image of Indian women during the colonial period has been of passivity, of a group silenced doubly-first in nationalist discourses and second in the more recent post-colonial scheme of things. ![]()
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