Abstract:Colonial discourse establishes its legitimacy through the configuration of unprivileged groups, especially women, as the victims of the Indian traditional society, which actually constitutes a new challenge for nationalists because they will have to face the entanglement of indigenous tradition, colonial modernity and national cultural identity. To deal with the challenge, Indian nationalist elites split culture into a series of dichotomies, such as material vs. spiritual, home vs. world, men vs. women,so as to resist the dominant colonial culture and thus maintain their national cultural identity. But the dichotomies actually negate all the possibility of interference from outside into women issues in India, which actually reinforces the roles of men as lawmakers of women's behavior principles, and further strengthens the patriarchic hegemony in Indian society.
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