Introduction: The Anatomy of an Event

Abstract

This book tells a story with many twists and turns. It furnishes the narrative of a small episode that cascaded through a global network of social structures and public spheres to produce big effects: the ‘‘tipping point’’ for an important historical transformation in the period between the two world wars. The episode at the center of this book is a massive international controversy that raged across three continents with great intensity in the 1920s. Even before Salman Rushdie’sThe Satanic Verses (1988) or Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), there was Katherine Mayo’sMother India (1927).Mayo was an American journalist who with the help of British officials and powerful social groups in the United States wrote what became one of the most sensational exposés on India. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially as they affected the position of women, whose roots Mayo traced to an inherently backward Hindu culture. The title of the book, which was meant to evoke popular nationalist representations of the nation as mother, signaled Mayo’s overtly political intervention. The social backwardness of India, according to Mayo, made Indians unfit for political self-government. The political case presented inMother India contributed inmaking it an instant international cause célèbre. The controversy it generated drew in an impressive international cast of characters from legislators and leading political figures to social reformers, women activists, journalists, writers, artists, doctors, and several ordinary men andwomenwho attended public debates and participated in public protests against the book. The sheer scope of the controversy over Mother India provides a glimpse of its international ramifications.Mother Indiawent into numerous reprints as well as multiple editions in the United States, Britain, and India. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Hebrew, as well as into several Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu. By 1955, the original American publisher ofMother India, Harcourt Brace and Company, reported having sold 395,678 copies of the book. The book