Early Women’s Writing, the Mahila Samitis, and the Naam Kirtan Space

Abstract Chapter 2, titled ‘Early Women’s Writing, the Mahila Samitis and the Naam Kirtan Space’, enters a different milieu in the mobilization of women. Despite the prevalence of caste and gender hierarchy, women have had a sustained presence in the vibrant practice of naam kirtan (community singing of prayer songs) in the Vaishnava tradition in Assam since the sixteenth century. Both early women writers in Assam and leaders in the mahila samitis sourced and reinvented the naam kirtan space as a mode to validate self-expression in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, albeit in somewhat different ways. While scholars have established women’s education and social reform movements as being intrinsic to women’s socio-political mobilization in India, this chapter extends these connections to include earlier forms of expressive traditions such as the naam kirtan. The centrality of naam kirtan in such diverse sites allows us to explore writing practices, colonial education, access to print culture, publication, and political mobilization as interconnected trajectories. New political equations and liberal agendas of women’s claims to the nascent public were being rehearsed and shaped in a complex and dynamic relationship with available traditional practices. Practices around the naam kirtan, therefore, offer us a vital thread to connect diverse disciplinary borders of women’s writing, political mobilization, and the public sphere. The chapter also raises methodological questions about what constitutes sources in feminist research and historiography.