On Thursday night, Professor Inderpal Grewal, chair of the women's, gender and sexuality department at Yale University, gave a lecture titled "Bureaucracy and Masculinity in India after Independence" as part of the Soli Sorabjee Lecture Series in South Asian Studies. Grewal discussed how masculinity and patriarchy are seen in the history of Indian bureaucracy.
She is currently researching the memoirs of Indian bureaucrats who joined the British civil service and continued in the Indian bureaucracy after India gained independence in 1947 and was partitioned into India and Pakistan, including Dharma Vira, H.M. Patel and S. Bhoothalingam.

Grewal said the literary content of the memoirs, the accompanying photographs, the subjects of the memoirs and the people who compiled the memoirs, usually the subjects' relatives, create a snapshot of Indian history.

"These memoirs have often been read simply as archives of historical information. I'm trying to understand how that moment of national significance is produced through the genre of the memoir," Grewal said.

The bureaucrats were part of a group of powerful men, the "ruling class," who were viewed by some as incongruous after India gained a democratic government. In the Indian Civil Service, as the bureaucracy was called prior to independence from Britain in 1947, these men served as lawyers, doctors, teachers and government officials. They became part of the "powerful patriarchy that governed India after independence," Grewal said. New opportunities and jobs were available to the bureaucrats after independence, who became "technocrats, management experts, bankers and finance workers and workers in industrial technology," as Grewal explained.

The characteristics these "national elites" tried to embody were "reason, rationality, and objectivity," as it said in one of the memoirs. The memoirs are rarely personal accounts and do not usually include information or photographs of the bureaucrats' wives and children, instead focusing on their work for the government. The exception to this is the memoir of one bureaucrat that was compiled by his daughter, and therefore includes more family-oriented photographs. The rest of the memoirs, however, focus on "key moments in national history, and include reflections on governance," Grewal said.

Grewal says the bureaucrats' memoirs are "narratives of how they learned to govern," and that they "provide lessons for younger generations of administrators." They contain insights into two areas of gender: the legal world and the family, through what they include, as well as what is left out. The bureaucracy was changing at the time that these memoirs were written, and later this group of elite men was broadened to include women, which connects to Grewal's feminist research.

This research differs from her studies on women and feminism, but is related as it deals with the theme of gender. "Because I've done feminist research for so long, I'm fascinated by thinking about masculinities and patriarchies," Grewal said. "How is a patriarchy formed by all sorts of masculinities that work together? How does governance become a masculine endeavor?"

Grewal has written and contributed to numerous publications dealing with feminist and gender-related themes, including Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel, and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, according to the Yale University website.

The lecture series, sponsored by the South Asian Studies Program and the Brandeis-India Initiative which focuses on themes of justice, began in 2009 and is named after the former attorney general of India. Past lectures have featured authors and professors from institutions including Harvard University, Trinity College and the University of Delhi, as well as Sorabjee himself.

Grewal's lecture drew undergraduate and graduate students interested in Global and South Asian studies. "India is a really important country in terms of international relations, and the way Indian bureaucracy works is important to the way India works, not just Indian government but also Indian business," Mitch Mankin '16 said.
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