The works of three non-Brahmin educated women from 19th-century western India are read against dominant historiographies of womanhood. It is argued that these women resist being interpreted as evidence of liberal enlightenment thinking in anti-caste social reform, or as regional dissenting voices to incipient nationalist developments that place the spiritual–material binary at the centre of the women’s question. Rather, their works are read as intellectual resources that imagined a new ethic of sociality, using an embodied reason to alter the imagination of the “inner spiritual” by first destabilising it and then reimagining it. The paper locates the invention of the spiritual–material binary outside of anti-colonial motives via these women, making the articulation of a separation between the spiritual and the material untenable.
