front cover of Mother India
Mother India
Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text, Edited and with an Introduction by Mrinalini Sinha
Katherine Mayo
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Mother India, a polemical attack against Indian self-rule written by U.S. historian Katherine Mayo, was met with a storm of controversy when it was published in 1927. The controversy generated still reverberates and thus is still worth revisiting, some fifty years after Indian independence. In responding to Mayo's argument laid out in Mother India, the leaders of the national movement and the independent women's movement in India laid the foundations of an alliance that gave modern Indian nationalism its distinctive character.
Mrinalini's Sinha's edition provides selections of this controversial book and commentary on the Mother India phenomenon. It also reprints a range of responses from Mayo's contemporaries. Sinha's edition works to locate the book and the controversy it incited in the context of U.S. domestic, British Imperial, and Indian nationalist politics. Unlike previous editions, Sinha's examines the history of cultural feminisms and the relations between women's movements in the United States, Britain, and India; the examination of these different movements reveals intriguing insights into the nature of the varied reactions to Mayo's book. The edition includes several formerly obscure contemporary responses to Mother India from representatives of the women's movement and of the anti-caste movement in India.
Intended as a tool for students and teachers alike, this book will be an important text in the field of women's studies, cultural studies, political science, history, and religion, among others.
Mrinalini Sinha is Associate Professor of History, Southern Illinois University. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century.
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front cover of Specters of Mother India
Specters of Mother India
The Global Restructuring of an Empire
Mrinalini Sinha
Duke University Press, 2006
Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents.

Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

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