Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samitis in Colonial Assam

This book is the first comprehensive effort to recover the forgotten histories of the highly impactful women’s association, the Assam Mahila Samiti (AMS, 1926 cont.), and the life and times of its founding Secretary Chandraprava Saikiani (1901–72), who was a celebrated writer, mobilizer and publisher despite being an unwed mother and from a ‘lower’ caste.  

The book traverses the individual and collective journeys of Saikiani and the mahila samitis from the 1920s to the 1950s in conversation/contestation with parallel tribal-caste and literary associations, anti-colonial movements and international ideological paradigms such as the Bolshevik revolution. Locating crucial archival documents such as the controversy surrounding the AMS’s serving of a legal notice to a groom in 1934 to stop a child marriage, the book argues how women’s collectives may transform and orchestrate a veritable gendered public, resistant to both native patriarchy and sometimes to colonial authority.  

The book makes significant methodological interventions in interdisciplinary studies through the careful interweaving of print sources with handwritten minutes of early mahila samiti meetings, performative spaces such as women’s singing of naam kirtan, women’s weaving and women’s memory (recorded as part of a digital archive of the mahila samitis in Assam). It provides insights into issues related to history and memory, literary studies, nascent vernacular publics in South Asia and women’s studies. 

About the speaker

Dr Hemjyoti Medhi is Associate Professor, Department of English, Tezpur University, Assam, India. She coordinated a project with support from the Sephis Programme, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, to digitally preserve documents and memories of select mahila samitis in Assam and has worked towards the spread of these stories through exhibition, media, and a short film Xeito Monot Assey (That, I Remember).Her recent monograph is titled Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samitis in Colonial Assam (Oxford University Press).