Origin and Site of Gendered Subalternity before the Indian Politics of Modernity of Male Nationalists

The Origin of Feminism as a Cognitive Practice or as a Theory
The question arises as to how it emerged. Here, Spivak performed an interesting study in her essay titled “Three Women’s Text and a Critique on Imperialism” (1985). She talked about many texts including Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Wild Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys. She is looking at all the Victorian, Post-Victorian British Literary Texts within a colonial wording. There, the Imperialistic kind of a world-view is set in certain certified cult classics of feminism.
This cult classic of European feminism Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) is presented as a bildungsroman novel. Jane’s empowerment towards the end of the novel is also observed as a tale of female individualism. But it is the individualism of the European white woman which demands and necessitates, according to Spivak, a violent effacement of the creolized woman, namely Bertha Mason. It requires not just her effacement, but a devastating end for her as well. Bertha Mason dies after the fire incident in her house, and then Jane marries Mr. Rochester.
So Spivak points to one of the cult classics of liberal feminism which may require seeing this axiomatic female liberation of women emancipation and where it has settled itself. From the empowerment of the white middle-class woman to the devaluation of the woman of color, one sees the gendered subaltern hovering again or existing as merely a shadowy presence.
Understanding Spivak’s Double Bind through a Nationalist Rhetoric before Twentieth Century
The more one delves into these narratives; the more one finds that it is an alarming outpour of the immutable subalternity of the colored gendered woman. Another shaking perspective that Spivak has elaborated upon is when she talks about the problematic nexus of post-colonialism with feminism. We can also see how, repeatedly in the colonial state itself, anti-colonial resistance has remained highly skeptical of female emancipation. If we go back to the Indian roots, one comes face to face with the male culturally nationalistic struggle that took over at the beginning of the twentieth century before Gandhi. There are interesting biographies and autobiographies of women who bear testimony to this double bind in which the woman finds herself, also seen as the proposed nationalist rhetoric. It questions the place of a woman and adds on to find how the site of gendered subaltern has been produced, or how has it been constructed by nationalists. 
Muslim Feminist Utopia – Sultana’s Dream (1905)
In 1905, a Muslim feminist reformer from Bengal Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote an interesting utopian feminist story called Sultana’s Dream. Like the writer herself, Sultana is a Muslim woman who wears a veil and has never set foot inside a school. She has taught herself to read and write like Rokeya, who has a secretive tryst with literacy. By making herself scarce from her family members, she has learned to read and write in isolation since it was not an activity she could proudly disclose.  In a foreign land at night, there are only women around her. She questions why women are roaming around feeling so late at night not clad in hijab. She responds that women are busy raising children at home, doing embroidery, and preparing a good meal for their wives and daughters. It is the women who occupy the public space in the country.
This text was written before the European feminist utopians came into the picture. Interestingly, Begum Rokeya introduces female literature and education in her classic, where the three sisters start a school in their house to teach. Rokeya’s dream seems to be bolder where she, through this travesty, is trying to show that women must have equal access to public spaces. This was the pre-nationalist phase from 1910 onwards, especially Indian nationalist rhetoric, which demanded that women must completely sacrifice themselves on the altar of self-sacrifice and surrender to the nationalist question.