Mother India/ Mother Ireland: gendered dialogues of nationalism and colonialism

In this comparative analysis of the anticolonial movements in India and Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, we explore the complexities of the connections between gender, nationalism, and colonialism. We engage with feminist theories of nationalism and suggest that women's involvement in nationalism has been complex and diverse. In this article, we highlight the political negotiations through which women colluded, confronted, and challenged nationalism.
Nationalist discourses constructed the symbolic roles of men and women, which best served the nationalist project as well as inverted the British colonial imagery of the “feminized” nations. The most popular imagery was of the desexualized national images of “Mother India” and “Mother Ireland”. However, we suggest that some women successfully negotiated these symbols to carve political spaces for themselves during the anticolonial movement. Nationalist conflicts brought about a blurring of the boundaries between public and private, home and battlefield, the domestic sphere became a site of resistance, confrontation, and politicization of women's consciousness. We also suggest that women's active negotiation continued in post-Independence India and Ireland.