Stretched Intimacies, Seditious Women: Colonial India and the First World War in the Ghadar Moment

Umaima Miraj, University of Toronto

In 1915, the Special Branch of Delhi Police in colonial India reported to the Special Branch of Punjab Police about women in the river Jumna singing seditious songs about their husbands sent to fight the First World War, a colonial war which was not theirs to fight. In the same year, the Home Department Proceedings indexed the many petitions that women wrote to the British Government, praying for the release of their husbands from imprisonment, whose content was then destroyed by the British. Reading these two unrelated archives together against the backdrop of the war and increasing anti-colonial revolutionary activity in the Ghadar moment in colonial India, I ask: how can we read the effort to reunite the apparently normative family as subversive in this colonial context? In this paper, I build the concept of stretched intimacies to show how intimate relations were stretched and broken up within and across empire and unravel the labor women performed in regaining their intimacies and the site of anti-colonial resistance they created. Moreover, I build on feminist methodological practices to explore how we might explain the gendered destruction of certain archives by reading women’s anti-colonial resistance present in others. Through these theoretical and methodological interventions, I argue that reading these two unrelated archives show how women were implicated in and resisted colonial empire. In our current politico-economic system, where borders, walls, and wars have continued to catastrophically destroy intimacies it is important to trace back this colonial logic but also find hope in the labor and resistance performed by the brave anti-colonial women from whom we can draw lessons for feminist praxis today.

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 Presented in Session 188. Social Movements Across the World