The Differentials of Gendered Social Capital in Indian Literary-Educational Activism, 1880–1930: Renewing Transnational Approaches

This chapter adopts fresh methodological and theoretical approaches in relation to transnationalism, power, and the work and writings of women actors in South Asian education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I incorporate theoretical approaches from sociology and literary studies, notably gendered social capital, literary activism, and analysis of fiction as sources for understanding the cultural history of women’s education. This chapter deepens the notion of gendered social capital so that it explicitly includes hierarchies of race, caste, and class as analytical differentials. The chapter analyzes how the literary activism of women actors in South Asian education created transnational grids of articulation. Case studies include the transnational trajectories of Ramabai, educational-welfarist writer-activist, and Savitribai and Jyotiba Phule, pioneering Dalit educational activists, the writings of Krupabai Satthianadhan, whose Bildungsromane showed critique of white racist attitudes in the field of education and of contemporary Brahminical society in India.