Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India by Swapna M. Banerjee (review)

This welcome book carves out a prominent space in the expanding literature on family, selfhood, gender and masculinity in the history of colonial South Asia. Banerjee’s primary provocation for the text was to reinsert the identity of being and “becoming” (19) a father, and invoking the ideological power of fatherhood, back into understandings of the development of Indian nationalism. She places this fathering ideal at the heart of its roots in the Bengali Hindu and Brahmo middle class (or bhadralok ), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On these points, she certainly delivers. She offers us the “first academic history of fatherhood” in this context (3), premised on the compelling notion that Indian masculinity was constituted through efforts to self-fashion a nationalist class of “guru”-like “fathers” (13). Through this new leadership, conceptualised as “fathering” the nation to renewal, generations of freedom fighters could grapple with, and work towards, an India independent of British colonialism, patriarchy and paternalism.