Marxist Feminisms in India: The Visceral Materialism of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai

This essay draws from a larger project where I think with a remarkable pair of leading Muslim feminist activists and authors in the Marxist anti-colonial movements in India, charting a critical pre-history to the Bandung moment of the 1960s and an important genealogy of transnational feminist thought. Rashid Jahan and her student, Ismat Chughtai, were a part of a new prominent young generation of Muslim Marxist intellectuals and anti-colonial activist authors who wrote and published widely in India from the 1930s through the 1950s. These writers adopted soviet socialist realism as their formal aesthetic, infused with their experiments in Urdu literary forms, while equally influenced by European modernism and the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud. Both feminist figures are known for their incendiary gender critiques of both colonialism and the Indian Muslim orthodoxy. Much of their literature was banned, and Ismat Chughtai is now perhaps most well-known for the obscenity charges waged against her in the 1940s by the colonial government for the homoerotic content of her literature.¹ This article centers the feminist literature of Jahan and Chughtai for their phenomenological approaches to their internationalist imaginaries of decolonization. 

By centering these feminist visions of decolonization, I seek to challenge the field of postcolonial and transnational studies to shift a traditional focus on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence and power and account, as well, for how habits of mind are secured in the habituated responses of the body. Simultaneously, I attend to a gap in affect studies by making available postcolonial feminist modes of theorizing gendered and racialized affect through the historical materialities that produce them. In this essay I take disgust as a case study and think its role in the violent class and gendered discipline of “taste,” propriety, and morality in late colonial India. As Parama Roy writes, “Colonial politics often spoke in an indisputably visceral tongue … [and] manifested itself very signally in the production of new forms of appetite, new notions of health and hygiene and new modes of disgust.”² Both Jahan and Chughtai’s writings reveal a feminist investment in a phenomenology of disgust as the site of anti-colonial critique. More precisely, it is how this innate reflex becomes subjected to the layered social disciplinary mechanisms (colonial, pre-colonial, as well as anti-colonial “progressive” and nationalist institutions) that provides their object of aesthetic inquiry. Both Jahan and Chughtai stage a powerful feminist critique of colonial technologies of hygiene, cleanliness, purity, and sexual propriety in their literature, as the fashioning of disgust becomes integral to the production of the “modern” Muslim woman and the question of the potential citizen subject hangs in the balance of an emergent Indian nationhood.³

By mining the aesthetics of disgust in these writings, I seek to uncover an undertheorized dimension of a global Marxist aesthetic that emerged with particular force during the era of decolonization. These feminist writings constitute a renewed engagement with materialist articulations of the revolutionary consciousness that were so central to the anticolonial literatures of this era. That I turn to the unlikely source of Marxist literature to explore questions of feminist affect is, in some sense, a central point of this project. This study conjugates the contemporary interest in affect with Marxian theories of consciousness, most often dismissed as naïve or passé in postcolonial debates. In what follows, I work through a short story by Rashid Jahan, one I have been thinking with in the classroom and in my own research, through an attentiveness to its visceral aesthetics. In thinking with Jahan, I employ a reading practice that involves what Ann  has described as an immersive reading that focuses “the sensation and feeling as the register of historical experience.”⁴ This, further, involves a crucial “slowing down,” as Cvetkovich emphasizes, “so as to be able to immerse [oneself] in detail … turning the ordinary into scenes of surprise.”⁵ Lingering in the corporeal dramas of this sparse short story, I demonstrate how Jahan’s feminist literature opens up a materialism that makes inextricable the historical and political conditions of colonial modernity from the affective forms and visceral reflexes that they produce.⁶

I approach the aesthetics of affect and embodiment within these writings as particularly saturated nodes of historical and representational predicament in a decolonizing world. My readings draw on and extend the modes of inquiry opened up by the feminist and queer theory branch of affect studies and new materialisms for how they give name and form to the affects of late capitalism and their role in violent regimes of normative desire.However, affect studies has largely failed to establish within postcolonial studies the traction it has gained in Western gender and sexuality studies. We may attribute this gap to the difficulty of theorizing the conditions of racialization and colonialism through the lens of affect, which has largely relied on Western archives and has often slipped into universalizing abstractions of gendered experience. As Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel write, “Affect, in however generative a guise, turns into a transposable logic or schema traipsing along from the United States to elsewhere.”⁷ Such theories of affect risk eliding the historical and sociological specificities of the subject under the conditions of colonialism, as well as the epistemological assumptions underlying the theory of affect. Grounded in its challenge to universalizing tendencies of theory and criticismhowever, , transnational and postcolonial feminist studies defined itself from its inception as a project of decolonizing knowledge production. What happens to our theories of affect when we shift our aesthetic focus to the colonial context, to non-Western literary and linguistic traditions, and to the era of decolonization rather than the aesthetics of late capitalism in the West that have tended to dominate affect studies archives? How do we study affect in a way that is attentive to geopolitical difference?

Jahan and Chughtai’s writings attunes us to how specific geo-histories produce particular affective forms in gendered sensibilities under colonialism. They emerge out of an array of colonial and pre- and postcolonial institutions, from colonial civilizing regimes of hygiene and taste (disgust), colonial experiments in medicine and gynecology, Brahmanical codes of purity and pollution (touch and untouchability), and the politicizing of Islamic spiritual practices under erasure by Hindu majoritarianism. I turn to these authors because, if our political and scholarly practices are aimed at dismantling colonial regimes of thought, we must be able to engage the embodied sites in which these enduring ideologies continue to operate. As brilliant socialist feminist voices in a global movement for decolonization, Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai envisioned revolution as not simply a transformation of social consciousness, but as a deeply embodied revolution that would be predicated on the possibility, to borrow Jennifer Fleissner’s articulation, of making the female body mean differently.⁸

Rashid Jahan and her work provide a critical window into the history and culture of Indo-Soviet collaborations which gave rise to a prominent anti-colonial Muslim intelligentsia active in India during the era of decolonization. As such, Jahan’s writings reflect the rich cross-traffic of aesthetics and ideas that emerged out of this internationalist moment, and expand our transnational feminist archives and methods.⁹ Jahan’s activism was wide-ranging – she offered women’s healthcare in lower caste and class communities, educated women in reproductive health and marriage rape in sweepers colonies, held adult education classes, ran her own gynecological medical practice, participated in trade union rallies and protest marches, wrote articles for her political magazine, Chingari, and authored and orchestrated political street theater.¹⁰ Jahan was a doctor, an accomplished journalist, a short-story writer, and a playwright. She also wrote and directed her own theater and radio plays, and adapted the stories of Chekov, Gorky, James Joyce, and Premchand for radio. Rashid Jahan was one of few women to join the communist party of India in the 1930s; she, in fact, chose to be buried in Moscow, where she spent her final days; her epitaph reads: “Communist. Doctor. Writer.”¹¹

Infamously, Jahan was the sole woman among a group of Urdu writers who, in 1933, published an incendiary collection of short stories called Angarey (“burning coals”), which staged a Marxist and feminist critique of both the Islamic orthodoxy and the colonial government in India. The publication created such backlash in Muslim communities that the colonial government banned it and had all copies burned. Testifying to the enduring controversy of Jahan’s legacy, in 2004 Alighar Muslim University banned a proposed observance of Rashid Jahan’s centenary, fearing it would provoke political agitation. Recent translations of Jahan’s fiction offer rich accounts of her remarkable life and biography, and detail her work as a dedicated feminist and activist, community doctor, and writer. Jahan was a prominent figure among the generation of anti-colonial Marxist authors and activists in India who have often been dismissed as naively adopting the Soviet socialist protocols of representing the peasant, or subaltern, as the object of revolutionary art. As Priyamvada Gopal writes, “the dismissal of the Progressive legacy in some influential quarters resonates with a wider disavowal of Marxism within literary theory and postcolonial studies as ‘economistic’ or ‘deterministic,’ their literature marked by accusations of ‘political orthodoxy and aesthetic tyranny.'”¹² However, Jahan’s feminist literature provides a far more incisive mobilization of the subaltern consciousness than previously understood.¹³

What little has been written on Rashid Jahan centers on her sparse but remarkable short story, “Woh,” (“that one”) which depicts an encounter between a young female doctor and a prostitute in her clinic who suffers from a venereal disease.¹⁴ Jahan centers “Woh” on the gendered subaltern figure of the prostitute. A young middle class woman, newly graduated from college working at a women’s school, narrates that story; she closely resembles Jahan, who herself was a part of a generation of middle-class Muslim women trained in Western gynecology by the British colonial government. The story takes place in the modernizing gendered spaces of the women’s school and hospital in Northern India, which were fraught and transformational sites of colonial modernity and projects of modernization. As Rakshanda Jalil, writes, “The action in ‘Woh’ takes place in a newly-opened space, a public space, where women from different social classes meet, an encounter that was inconceivable even a decade earlier.”¹⁵ One day, the narrator encounters a woman, who she finds out is a prostitute when she comes to the clinic for treatment. The prostitute’s face has become so disfigured as a result of venereal disease that the others working in the clinic recoil in disgust when they see her; they refuse to touch the chair she sits on, and repeatedly curse her repulsive and depraved presence: “I first met her at the hospital. … She had come there for treatment. … Seeing her the other women turned away. Even the doctor’s eyes strained shut in disgust. I felt repulsed too, but somehow managed to look straight at her and smile. She smiled back, or at least I thought she tried to – it was difficult to tell … she had no nose. Two raw, gaping holes stood in its place. She had also lost one of her eyes. To see with the one she had to crane her neck around.”¹⁶

Jahan then heightens the grotesque depiction with this detail: “often the two raw holes in her face were running.”¹⁷

Later, this nameless, faceless woman, referred to by the others in disgust as “that one”(woh), finds the narrator at her workplace, a women’s school. When that one arrives, the narrator holds back her revulsion and offers her a seat. That one presents the narrator with a flower. The narrator again holds back her disgust at the mere touch of the flower and tucks it behind her ear. Her revulsion here is not simply directed at the disfigured woman’s appearance, but further emerges from the terrifying prospect of contact – the fear of proximity and “pollution” with this subaltern figure. A daily ritual begins: That one visits the narrator at the school, says nothing, and presents her with a flower, which the narrator tucks behind her ear, holding back her revulsion. Gopal astutely reads these ritual encounters as “an inverted romance with [the narrator’s] own emotional existence at the centre … there is only a hint of irony here as the narrative draws on the high sentimental rhetoric of the ‘afsana’ or romantic short story that was especially popular with a female readership.”¹⁸ This intimate daily ritual between that one and the narrator, however, brings the narrator to a state of panic and crisis, for the women that work at the school become increasingly agitated and indignant regarding that one’s debauched presence. The unrelenting presence of the subaltern figure in the story thrusts the narrator into a stream of self-reflection and speculation: “I felt awkward and humiliated, I was being made into an object of humiliation in school. Still, whenever she placed a flower before me, I would tuck it into my hair and her face would once again crease into that horrifying smile. Why does she stare at me like this? Who is she? What has she been? Where did she come from? How has she become like this?”

And then another perplexing detail: “There she sat, just gazing at me with that crooked eye and that ghastly noseless face,” the narrator declares, “Sometimes I thought I saw her eye fill.What was passing through her mind?”¹⁹ The privileged gaze here is thus inverted; the entire scenario so brilliantly turned “inside out.” For, what is highlighted over and over again in the grotesque imagery of the subaltern figure is that we quite literally “see” her insides, but have no access to her interiority.²⁰ This frustrates the narrator, making impossible the grounds for feminist empathy, and at the same time granting an unwanted access to the nameless woman’s biological “insides.” Instead, we are offered this raw topography of the unbounded woman’s body: its horrific openings to the world. The woman’s bodily fluids run and fill and ooze, untethered, as it were, to the emotive reflexes that they index. The narrator can only speculate that she sees the prostitute’s eye “fill,” as she is looking to read this somatic reflex as a gateway into the woman’s emotive state or consciousness. All soma, no psyche.

In Jahan’s short story, “Woh” the narrator is oriented to the figure of the prostitute in a clever logic of inversion, a literal and figurative turning inside out. With the erosion of the subaltern subject’s face, Jahan denies any idealized revolutionary feminist interface between the narrator and “that one.” Jahan centers the narrative crisis on the young and naively idealistic doctor struggling to find compassion amidst her revulsion for the nameless, faceless prostitute. Framed by an ironic self-criticism of the narrator’s own naïve aspirations as feminist activist and reformer, the story thus centers on her unlearning of her privilege and political optimism. Priyamvada Gopal argues, the story ought to be read as a reflection and auto-critique surrounding the failure or limits of empathy and women’s solidarity across class boundaries: “The liberal – and Gandhian – fiction of reciprocity and mutual understanding across class boundaries within the emergent nation is one that the narrative participates in even as it recognizes its impossibility under the circumstances.”²¹ Jahan’s critique also echoes Gayatri Spivak’s famous intervention into the Marxist projects of recuperating the agency of the subaltern, one that redefines the subaltern not as an identity, but as the very cusp or “limit of representation,” in the words of David Lloyd.²² The figure of the subaltern in these scenarios of forced intimacy comes into view as a predicament that calls for an ethics of progressive readings and practices of feminist solidarity that are “attentive to the aporetic structure of ‘knowing’ in the encounter with the other,” in the words of Rosalind Morris.²³ But I also want to ask what it means that we are forced to “read” the female subaltern subject, not simply through her effacement and her opacity, but through her grotesque disfigurement, the hollow cavities of her face, and the viscous fluids running out of her face. Indeed, against any easy experience of empathy or even pity for the subaltern, the reader becomes implicated in this theater of revulsion.

Here I seek to foreground the role of touch and intimacy in inciting the disgust of Jahan’s story, the deep anxieties set into action by the unbounded body of the prostitute in these modernizing spaces as India decolonizes. The aversive force of this disgust operates through an entanglement of visual and tactile registers: “No-body would sit in the chair she used. I don’t blame them,” the narrator tells us, “It wasn’t their fault. She looked so revolting. I couldn’t bring myself to touch the chair either.”²⁴ Fear of intimacy with the subaltern frames the feminist politics of this short story, and is here amplified by the affective idiom of disgust, focused here through the anxious prospect of touch. As German phenomenologist, Aurel Kolnai, tells us, the central feature of disgust is the proximity and bodily intimacy of the disgusting object, for it is the threat of contact with the dangerous substance that triggers the aversive response.²⁵ The disgust directed at the prostitute, and the fear of intimacy that underwrites it, is further heightened by the prospect of contact with the bodily fluids leaking out of her unbounded body. However, what exactly is the nature of the threat that this leaking and oozing body poses? For this, I would argue, is the site of Jahan’s political critique, as she foregrounds this deeply classed disgust as a conditioned emotive logic of sexual discipline and shame under layered colonial and nationalist regimes.

The fear of intimacy inscribed within the disgust of the unbounded subaltern body, in fact, becomes particularly heightened in a fascinating way by the ending of the short story. The story concludes with the nameless woman blowing her nose and wiping her fingers on the wall, amplifying the revulsion already associated with the liquids of her interiors, oozing, and running out of her face. Suggestively, it is the sweeper woman who works in the school who loses all control and begins senselessly beating the woman: “You bastard you whore, who do you think you are? Yesterday you were loitering at the street corner, and today as your flesh falls rotting apart, you parade here like a lady!”²⁶ I am particularly interested in the mucus on the wall as that which insights the sweeper woman’s seemingly uncontrollable moment of physical aggression directed towards the prostitute.Delhi: nlimited, 2014.ted by niversity Press 2012Bodies in the 19th lonial. 2005ated”kins at the intersections erg of erotic tex What is the nature of this disgust, this knee-jerk, “gut” reaction, to which we become witness, and perhaps also experience? Delhi: nlimited, 2014.ted by niversity Press 2012Bodies in the 19th lonial. 2005ated”kins at the intersections erg of erotic texTo invoke a phenomenological register, how is the sweeper woman, inscribed within this precarious caste and class position, “moved” to violence in and through this disgust and the disgusting object? What does it mean that Jahan mobilizes this disgust to invite us into a politics of intimacy with the subaltern that refuses the (feminist) promise of empathy?

What is so provocative about this sparse story is that the disgust that sets the sweeper woman upon the unbounded body of the prostitute invokes a series of metonymic logics that traffic between the physical and social reflexes, inflected by logics of class, caste, and gender propriety. Furthermore, the disgust directed at the nameless woman’s physicality – the gaping holes and the liquids oozing out of them, all come to stand in for a moral disgust directed towards her life of prostitution. When teaching this story, for example, I ask my students their interpretation of the final violent climax. In discussing their responses, it becomes particularly difficult to disentangle the grotesque physicality of the subaltern as object of visceral disgust from implications of caste and practices of untouchability, the life of prostitution and the specter of venereal disease, and the labor of sex work as object of moral disgust. As Sara Ahmed writes, “feelings of disgust stick more to some bodies than others, such that they become disgusting, as if their presence is what makes ‘us sick.'”²⁷ This leads us to question: what is the relationship between the moral disgust and the visceral reflex, how does one get folded into the other? And what is the nature of this fear of intimacy with the subaltern that drives the sweeper woman (paradoxically) to violent contact with the disgusting object?

The difficulty of these questions speaks to a series of problematics highlighted by Mary John in her push to center the place of social stigma within a Marxist Feminist framework in India. Taking the examples of caste and sex work in India, John writes, “… it is not enough to offer a gender or class analysis of women’s paid and unpaid work, certainly not in the Indian context. … A labour theory of value stands in conflict with caste-structured society where public labour represents not value but stigma and humiliation. Caste-based labour is degraded labour and cannot be valorised like value-producing labour.”²⁸ A series of layered and imbricated logics of caste, sexuality, class, power, and alterity are set into crises by these scenes of prohibited touching or “impossible” intimacy (to borrow from Anupama Rao on caste), against the restructuring of these gendered public spaces in late colonial India.²⁹ Jahan’s visceral inquiries into the nature of these “stigmas” (here lodged in reflexes of disgust) may be usefully understood as surfacing what Aniket Jaaware terms “the sociality of touch,” articulating the ways in which social regulations on touching and not touching fundamentally organize social hierarchies (extending an analytic of caste to class structures, for example).³⁰

However, within Jahan’s feminist phenomenology I also want to suggest that the fluids of the female body play a key role in the metonymic transactions between physical and moral disgust: the unspeakable, leaking bodily fluids that recall the sexual fluids of the prostitute’s body, invoking both the prostitute’s social depravity and exploitation, her sex work. And here, I must admit, I am reading Jahan’s very sparse story through the writings of her student, Ismat Chughtai. Chughtai’s literature is saturated with these kinds of depictions of the unspeakable textures of the female body. Chughtai, however, invokes these metonymic logics of female bodily texture, its stickiness and viscosity, and takes it to its erotic conclusions. It is how the very materiality of the female body becomes the heightened object of violent moral regimes of disgust and corporeal control in late colonial India that provides the historical frame of Chughtai and Jahan’s stories. As Sara Ahmed writes on disgust, “It is not that an object we might encounter is inherently disgusting, rather, an object becomes disgusting through its contact with other objects that have already, as it were, been designated as disgusting before the encounter has taken place … While disgust involves such a metonymic slide, it does not move freely: it sticks to that which is near it, it clings.”³¹ My interest in Jahan and Chughtai’s aesthetics of disgust derives from the way female bodily textures move the body, what the body is moved to do – how, in other words, these unspeakable bodily textures activate and animate visceral impulses of aversion, desire, aggression. This become key to excavating disgust as a powerful aversive reflex that secures moralizing regimes and power relations through the cultivation of “taste,” hygiene, and gendered propriety.

Jahan’s student, Ismat Chughtai’s further opens up a feminist critique of the traditional phenomenology of disgust by centering the codes of erotic texture produced out of histories of colonial hygiene and the civilizing mission in late colonial India, as she shifts her narrative focus from the subaltern subject of traditional socialist realism to the middle class Muslim woman of Northern India. Kolnai, who diverged from Freud’s theory of disgust as a repression of desire, repeatedly returned to his preoccupation with emotion’s internal paradox: as opposed to other aversive reflexes (reflexes designed to protect the body from harmful substances) such as fear, which causes us to flee from the dangerous object in front of us, disgust paradoxically causes us to dwell on the material and sensory aspects of the object that disgusts us. For Kolnai, disgust is more aesthetically determined that other aversive reflexes, which causes us to “focus on the quality of the object as presented to our senses.”³² As Ahmed puts it, “disgust is fascinated with the texture and qualities of what is felt to be disgusting.”³³ Chughtai’s aesthetics of female sexual fluids – its stickiness and gooeyness – amplifies what is subtle in Jahan’s renderings of the disgusting – the “running” and “oozing” and “filling” of the fluids that highlight its texture, in an idiom of excess, both sensual and sexual, disgusting and erotic. In so doing, Chughtai has taught me a great deal about how to read the refusals and silences of her mentor’s aesthetics.

In amplifying the sensory aesthetics of disgust in their feminist writings, Chughtai and Jahan locate the threat of female sexuality in the viscosity that serves as the object of repulsion.³⁴ As Kolnai writes “the principle feature of the disgusting” is its “somehow obtrusive clinging to the subject … its shameless and unrestrained forcing itself upon us.”³⁵ If the principle feature of disgust is its proximity with the disgusting object (the prospect of contact), the stickiness of female bodily fluid (here, code for sexual fluid) poses a particular kind of bodily threat of intimacy with the object. Revising Kolnai through Chughtai and Jahan’s feminist phenomenology, what is brought to light is how the viscous properties of female bodily fluid, the gooey, oozy, textural properties of sensory excess, the sticky mucus smeared and clinging so defiantly to the wall – so seamlessly slides into a classed social discourse of moral excess, a caste and gendered discourse of shame and humiliation. How it is, in other words, that a texture becomes shameless, improper, or is registered viscerally as threat.

It is precisely this embodied translation – the tactile register of a texture into a discourse of shame – that Chughtai and Jahan’s prose works to estrange and politicize. As Parama Roy writes, “soul making and body shaping, physiology and epistemology were intimately conjugated” in the colonial fashioning of taste, in the project of making “heathens human,” borrowing Gayatri Spivak’s formulation.³⁶ The metonymic translation of bodily fluids to social discourse, however, is not simply a property of discourse or narrative. Rather, the visceral nature of disgust involves a transaction between the habits of mind and the habituated reflexes of the body. Jahan and Chughtai interrogate these gendered discourses of postcolonial modernity at the brink of an emerging Indian nationalism as constructed moral ideologies of the state, but more importantly, deeply gendered visceral logics of power and exploitation that are naturalized and endure in the (post)colonized body.

The phenomenology of Jahan’s aesthetics reveals her political preoccupations with the Freudian drives and aggressions, the attractions and repulsions set off when bodies inscribed in interlocking logics of alterity are brought into proximity. In working through Jahan’s short story here, I have sought to amplify the corporeal and psycho-somatic dramas that narrate these scenes of intimacy and replace a predictable rendering of subaltern interiority or feminist empathy. To posit a politics of intimacy over empathy as Jahan does here, I want to argue, is to center the vitality of our visceral archives and the energetic life of our emotions within these complex scenes of power and difference which cannot be wholly explained by the logics of the mind or language.³⁷

The narrator of “Woh” cannot de-activate her own instinctive revulsion in the face of the prostitute, regardless of her enlightened feminist consciousness. In light of the grotesque bodily fluids of the prostitute, from the leaking of the viscera to the mucus on the wall, the disgust it insights in the narrator (and by proxy) reader challenges us to disaggregate and interrogate the conflation and slippage between the moral discourse of disgust with the physiological reflex. In so doing, Jahan turns our attention to where the innate reflex of disgust is shaped by the social and historical forces than naturalize the threat of the other. In this reading of her short story, I propose that Jahan asks us to reimagine the emotional labor of a Marxist and internationalist feminist practice – to account for the visceral logics in which colonial relations of power are inscribed. For, such an embodied logic cannot be simply overturned through an intellectual or even emotive exercise in feminist “empathy.”³⁸ Decolonization here, and the project of feminist solidarity, then, calls for an epistemological overhaul that cannot simply be attained through an exercise in empathy, but calls for some other kind of affective labor altogether.

The Marxist aesthetics of Jahan and Chughtai thus pose an important challenge to our theories of postcolonial and transnational feminism, which have largely focused on the discursive and ideological contours of violence and power. Disciplinary regimes of disgust, in these writings, confound easy distinctions or relations between thought and feeling, habits of mind and the habituated reflexes of the body. Jahan and Chughtai take on the project of decolonization at the site where the innate or intuitive is subjected to the social and political. Any endeavor to think these dimensions of decolonization will necessitate an engagement with not only the discursive practices of empire, but also how habits of mind are secured by emotive ones.

This essay also begins the work of charting an alternative feminist genealogy of affect that counters, for example, Frantz Fanon’s canonized and masculinist writings on colonial affect.³⁹ In contrast, Jahan and Chughtai draw forth theories of decolonization, as a transformation of consciousness, as always contingent on the radical reconstitution of normative gendered subjectivities, precisely because gender provided the grounds of colonial subjection through corporeal refashioning. As Ann Stoler writes, “colonial authority rested on educating the proper distribution of sentiments and desires.”⁴⁰ Thus “domains of the intimate… are strategic for exploring two related but often discretely understood sources of colonial control: one that works through the requisition of bodies … and a second that molds new “structures of feeling’” – new habits of heart and mind that enable those categories of difference and subject formation.”⁴¹ The aesthetics of Jahan and Chughtai emerge from their sustained interest in gendered processes of affective and corporeal fashioning in their fiction, through which gendered habits of thought and feeling sediment in caste and classed sensibility, and thus provides the site of their revolutionary undoing.

While Stoler locates the workings of colonial power in the ordering and reordering of intimate spaces to explore how the macropolitics of imperialism play out in the microeconomies of the everyday, the feminist inquiries of this essay go further to take seriously Parama Roy’s provocative charge that the violence of colonization involved the “somatizing” of subjects, invoking the trafficking in the life of the mind and the life of the bodily, culture and biology, “epistemology and physiology.”⁴² These writers’ feminist poetics highlight the colonial context as a crucial testing ground for visceral regimes of modern gender subjection, instrumentalized in the name of civilizational and racial difference, while also foregrounding the endurance of pre-colonial institutions (of caste and gender, for example) within postcolonial (nationalist) imaginaries. This is a powerful multivalent critique that is a defining characteristic of their internationalist vision of decolonization. This materialist understanding of the radical re-shaping and re-constitution of bodily life becomes indispensable to a study of colonial and racialized affect and the possibilities of its transformation or decolonization.

This tradition of feminist materialism opens up a set of questions imperative to the critique of postcolonial nationalisms, as well as their recruitment of transnational and diasporic communities. How does the nation-state, in its various colonial and postcolonial configurations, gain complicity from its gendered subjects? How are these conditions of “consciousness,” these “structures of feeling,” locked in the automatic reflexes of the body under modern regimes of subjection? How are colonial traumas and their structures of feeling inherited, their emotive genres passed down through generations? I turn to the internationalist feminist thought of the decolonizing world of the 1930s through the 1960s, because, as I argue, these very questions were at the center of the artistic experiments on national liberation, albeit in poetic and aesthetic registers of feeling that we have yet to fully understand. 

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Jalil, Rakshanda. A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan. India: Women Unlimited, 2014.

———. Liking Progress, Loving Change. A History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu. India: Women Unlimited, 2012.

Jaaware, Aniket, Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. New York:Fordham University Press, 2019.

John, Mary. “The Woman Question Reflections on Feminism and Marxism.” Economic and Political Weekly, December 16, 2017.

Khanna, Neetu. “Experiments in Subaltern Intimacy: Rashid Jahan’s Feminist Phenomenology.” Postcolonial Text, volume 13 number 4 (2018).

Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Kolnai, Aurel. On Disgust, edited by Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago and La Salle. IL: Open Court, 2004.

Lloyd, David. “Representation’s Coup.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (2014): 1–29.

Loomba, Ania. Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism and Feminism in India. New York: Routledge: 2019.

Morris, Rosalind. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Geeta Patel’s “Homely Housewives Run Amok: Lesbians in Marital Fixes.” Public Culture, Volume 16, Number 1 (Winter 2004): 131–157.

Pedwell, Carolyn and Ann Whitehead. “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Theory.” Feminist Theory, Volume 13, no. 2 (2012).

Rao, Anupama. Foreword to Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching by Aniket Jaaware, vii. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Haunted by Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

1. For excellent analyses of the homoerotics of Chughtai’s writing, see Gayatri Gopinath’s “The Transnational Trajectories of Fire and ‘The Quilt'” in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures; Geeta Patel’s “Homely Housewives Run Amok: Lesbians in Marital Fixes”; and Priyamvada Gopal’s “Habitations of Womanhood: Ismat Chughtai’s secret history of modernity” in Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. [↩]
2. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 7–8. [↩]
3. As Priyamvada Gopal characterizes the Marxist or “Progressive” Urdu writing circles of this era of which Jahan and Chughtai were a part: “English-educated, fluently bilingual colonial subjects strongly committed to anti-colonialism; members of relatively elite social groupings invested in a variety of Marxist and socialist projects; littérateurs who were devoted to the literary craft while urgently concerned with social and political transformation; and, last but not least, Muslims who were engaged in a critique of Islamist orthodoxy even as Hindu majoritarianism threatened to exclude Muslim communities from the life of the Indian nation.” Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India (New York: Routledge), 7. See Sumangala Damodaran’ The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the Indian People’s Theater Association, and Rakshanda Jalil’s Liking Progress, Loving Change: A History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu for some recent work on gender within the Progressive Urdu literary circles of the 1930s-60s. [↩]
4. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 11. [↩]
5. Cvetkovich, Depression, 11. [↩]
6. Jahan and Chughtai’s aesthetics of affect emerge from the dense internationalist cross-traffic of philosophies and aesthetics: the hybridizing of European modernisms with Soviet realisms and Urdu literary forms, and of Western philosophical traditions (from existentialism to psychoanalysis) with Sufi metaphysics and indigenous religious performance genres. The visceral as a materialist logic of decolonization invokes both the historical materialism, the Marxism of the movement, and the materialist traditions thinking through the energetic life of bodily matter: Freudian psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the monism attributed to Spinoza. See Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). [↩]
7. Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, eds., “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (2016): 156. [↩]
8. Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 278. [↩]
9. See also Ania Loomba’s recent book, Revolutionary Desires: Women Communism, and Feminism in India, which seeks to recuperate the understudied lives of women within the radical communist and nationalist movements in India from the 1920s-1960s. As Loomba writes, “While the relationship between communism and nationalism has been widely examined, as has that between feminism and nationalism, the intersections between Marxism and feminism, especially as they were experienced by women and embodied in their lives, have barely begun to be explored.” Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women Communism, and Feminism in India (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2. [↩]
10. See Rakshanda Jalil, A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan (Women Unlimited, 2014). [↩]
11. Rakshanda Jalil, A Rebel and Her Cause, ix [↩]
12. Gopal, “Habitations of Womanhood,” 4. [↩]
13. See Neetu Khanna’s “Experiments in Subaltern Intimacy: Rashid Jahan’s Feminist Phenomenology” Postcolonial Text, volume 13 number 4 (2018) for a fuller articulation of this argument. [↩]
14. The short story is anthologized in Tharu and Lalita’s (eds.) Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. To the Present, and discussed at great length in Gopal’s Literary Radicalism in India. [↩]
15. Rakshanda Jalil, A Rebel and Her Cause, 92. [↩]
16. Rashid Jahan, “That One” in Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. To the Present., eds. Susie Tharu and Ke Lalita (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New, 1993), 119. [↩]
17. Jahan, “That One,” 119. [↩]
18. Gopal, “Habitations of Womanhood,” 44. [↩]
19. Jahan, “That One,” 120. [↩]
20. For an astute discussion of Jahan’s use of the Urdu word “andar” (inside) in this short story, see Priyamvada Gopal, “Gender, Modernity, and the Politics of Space: Rashid Jahan ‘Angareywali'” in Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (New York: Routledge, 2005). [↩]
21. Gopal, “Habitations of Womanhood,” 46. [↩]
22. As Lloyd writes, “The subaltern marks the limit of the nation-state’s capacity for representation, if, indeed, it marks a limit to representation in every way, the problem of the representation of the subaltern leads postcolonial theory into a virtual aporia with regard to thinking practical alternatives to nationalist notions of decolonization.” David Lloyd, “Representation’s Coup.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (2014): 4. [↩]
23. Rosalind Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 9. [↩]
24. Jahan, “That One,” 120. Emphasis mine. [↩]
25. Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, eds. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago and La Salle. IL: Open Court, 2004). [↩]
26. Jahan, “That One,” 121. [↩]
27. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, second edition(New York: Routledge, 2015), 92. [↩]
28. Mary John, “The Woman Question Reflections on Feminism and Marxism,” Economic and Political Weekly, December 16, 2017, 5–7. [↩]
29. As Anupama Rao asks in her foreword to Aniket Jaaware’s book, Practicing Caste, “How are forms of agonistic intimacy generated by the archaic and somewhat anarchic facticity of touch? How do they take form and shape as that (impossible) intimacy we apprehend as caste?” Anupama Rao, “Foreword” in Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching by Aniket Jaaware (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). viii. [↩]
30. Like Jahan in some sense, Jaaware seeks to estrange the sociological givens of caste and class in India (or as he puts it, come to caste “ignorantly”) by turning to a phenomenological study of the social regulations of touch and intimacy, as he attempts to think more broadly and globally about the ethics and “sociality” of bringing near, keeping distant, touching and not touching. See Aniket Jaaware, Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (New York:Fordham University Press, 2019). [↩]
31. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 87 (my emphasis). [↩]
32. Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, 9. [↩]
33. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 84. [↩]
34. For the full elaboration of the argument, see Neetu Khanna, “Compulsion,” in The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). [↩]
35. Kolnai, On Disgust, 41. [↩]
36. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 7. [↩]
37. In my larger project I draw out the ways in which Ismat Chughtai and Rashid Jahan’s Marxist materialisms resonate with “new materialist” ontologies that understand our experience of and interactions with the vitality of matter as lively, productive, and self-organizing, independent of the mind’s capacity to act upon it. Here I am drawing on Jane Bennett’s new materialist notion of the “vitality” of matter, which dislocates Cartesian understanding that sees all matter (bodily and environmental) as instrumental to the mind (as the source of all action and agency). See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). [↩]
38. Carolyn Pedwell and Whitehead, Ann, eds., “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Theory,” Feminist Theory volume 13 no. 2 (2012). For a rich discussion of the pitfalls and possibilities of feminist empathy, see the special issue of Feminist Theory, “Affecting Feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory,” edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Ann Whitehead. [↩]
39. Here I am thinking specifically about Frantz Fanon’s masculinist and Manichean formulations of affect in his essays in Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. For more on this argument, see Neetu Khanna’s The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, especially the coda, “Explosion.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967); Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963); Khanna, “Explosion,” The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. [↩]
40. Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 2. [↩]
41. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 2. [↩]
42. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 7. [↩]