55

When postcolonial studies began to achieve a certain visibility in the anglophone academy, the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was fairly well established in anglophone feminist thought. Scholars, particularly those working on colonial India, who sought to integrate the insights of postcolonial and feminist studies proved little interested in pursuing questions concerning “sex” Indeed they challenged notions of “universal sisterhood” based on presumed biological similarities of sex among women. Influenced by the politics of multiculturalism and identity in countries such as the United States and Great Britain as well as by the feminist movement in India, feminist scholars emphasized instead the numerous ways in which women ? and, in more recent scholarship, men ? were positioned differently in colonial India according to such criteria as race, class, caste, religion, sexuality, language, nation, and region. This historiographical essay presents a brief overview of the genesis of postcolonial studies and its relations to gender scholarship and historical practice before turning to a presentation of some recent works focusing on the topics of maternity and masculinity in colonial India. It aims at showing how these works have contributed to the elaboration of the concept of gender in articulating it with other relations of power as well as to the dismantling of long-standing oppositions between colony and metropole, Orient and Occident, and tradition and modernity.