HAP: Gender Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (1995) · The emerging dynamics between colonial and nationalist policies in the 1880s and 1890s in India is best captured in the logic of colonial masculinity. For colonial masculinity points towards the multiple axes along which power was exercised in colonial India: among or within the colonisers and the colonised as well as between colonisers and colonised. Neither the colonisers nor the colonised represented homogenous groups; there were not only important internal hierarchies of class, gender, and status within each group, but also alliances across various axes that in fact helped fashion the opposition between colonial and nationalist policies · Colonial masculinity reframes, from the perspective of the uneven and contradictory intersection of various axes of power, the dynamics between colonialism and nationalism, on the one hand, and between colonial India and metropolitan British society, on the other . Two assumptions: (1) The categories of the coloniser and colonised are not fixed or self-evident categories: Since the coloniser and colonised themselves were historically constructed categories, the relations between the two were neither fixed not given for all time - but were constantly rearticulated in accordance with the continually changing political and economic imperatives of colonial rule (2) The contours of colonial masculinity were shaped in the context of a social formation that included both Britain and India: This focus on the imperial social formation points not only to the intersection of the imperial with the categories of nation, race, class, gender and sexuality, but also to the essentially uneven and contradictory nature of that intersection · The figures of the 'manly Englishman' and 'effeminate Bengali babu' were produced by, and helped to shape, the shifts in the political economy of colonialism in the late 19th century: the changing imperatives in the strategies of colonial rule as well as the altered conditions for the indigenous elite's collaboration with colonial rule . The expression of Indian discontent in 1857 (the Great Revolt of 1857) was seen as a warning against the radical restructuring of 'traditional' Indian society. The problem of 'educated Indians', though far less dramatic, was an equally important factor in the rethinking of colonial policies in the second half of the century. The colonial administration was faced with the daunting task of accommodating a growing number of Western-educated Indians within the existing colonial administrative and political structures without threatening the exclusive rights and privileges to which generations of colonial officials and non-officials in India had grown accustomed . Revival of the Orientalist perspective: There was a growing acceptance of the view that India could be best governed only through a judicious use of its supposedly indigenous traditions. This shift substituted for a straightforward defence of racial exclusivity a supposedly more 'natural' gender hierarchy between 'manly' and 'unmanly' men · The indigenous elite's own investment in colonial masculinity was shaped by, and shaped, the realignment of the colonial political economy. The changes in