Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women's Magazines in Colonial India, 1890-1940

Abstract

This article examines women's magazines published in colonial India from the 1890s to the 1940s. Focusing on texts in the Tamil language, the author argues that these magazines developed a paradigm of emotion in which a discourse of love, affection, and pleasure prompted radical critiques of women's oppression. This study calls attention to Tamil women's print culture, an area that historians have neglected. As the author suggests, this culture of print is part of a broader history of middle-class identity as it developed under the conditions of colonial modernity. That is, in redefining emotion, women's writing also redefined the female subject. The texts developed new notions of subjective interiority that displaced such conventional identity markers as kinship or caste. These shifts both resonated with developments in metropolitan contexts and reflected their specifically colonial conditions of production.

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