Developing Powers (Final)
Developing Powers (Final)
Developing Powers (Final)
- Raymond Williams
modernity, and masculinity within the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism and its
discourses of power and gender. To do this I shall begin by exploring the scope of the
terms themselves in their relations to each other. While arguing and demonstrating the
relations between masculinity and power, I make the necessary conceptual distinction
that the discourses and operations of power per se are always socio-historical.
distribution of power and privilege) and the hegemonic masculinities that they
generate and sustain alter constantly, both subtly and dramatically. Within the context
of the Hindu right and my examination of it, discourses of power in the relation to
patriarchies within the historical phenomenon of the rise of the Hindu right, which has
1
through this that the specific kinds of patriarchies, the hegemonic masculinities that
they shore up and the significance of these separately and together, become clearer. In
cognition of the interactive and mutually generative nature of social phenomena and
specifically of the manoeuvres and modus operandi of the Hindu right, I have offered
cultural, social, political and historical; and not just any one of these.
The formation of the nation-state itself, the conditions of its formation and the
relation between modernity and the nation-state have a complex causality in the
context of post-colonial nations (Kaplan et al 1999, Baxi and Parekh 1995)2. While
several scholars have made the links between gender and nation, the reasons why
discourses of nation and nationalism are gendered and sexualized are now being
explored more thoroughly (K Jayawardena 1986, Parker et al 1988, C Enloe 1989, Anthias
& Yuval-Davis: 1989, D Kandiyoti 1991, Sangari and Vaid (eds.) 1989, Z Hasan (ed.) 1994).
This returns us to the original intent of the paper: to demonstrate that the masculinities
by discourses of the past. Because of the sizeable scope of this paper, I have of
Gunder Frank wrote, ‘[d]evelopment meant following step by step in our (American
idealised) footsteps from tradition to modernity. The measure of it all was how fast
the modern sector replaced the traditional one in each dual economy and
society.’(Frank n.d.) Tracing some of the details of what happens in the process of
2
[t]he myth of the neutrality of scientific knowledge and the rationality of economic
that their own ways of knowing and economic, political, and socio-cultural
practices based on these alternative knowledge systems were backward and in need
of modernization.
n.d.)
Benjamin Schwartz (1993), asks the question, ‘What is the center or the heart
of that whole which we call modernity?’ He then proceeds to identify what he sees as
the core issue underlying the question. After agreeing that ‘the scientific revolution
and Max Weber’s notion of the unlimited “rationalization” of every sphere of social,
the philosophic perspectives with which [these] are associated – particularly, the
[…] which has deeply affected every other aspect of modern culture. (1993: 216-7)
What is immediately pertinent is the point Schwartz proceeds to make from here, on
the conceptual location and role of nationalism in this debate. It takes the form of
attempting to locate the formation of the modern idea of the state in relation to that of
3
There can be no doubt that what attracted the eye of many in the non-Western
world to the powerful nation-states of the West was the entirely unprecedented
growth in the wealth and power of these states. Indeed, the fact that they were all
more or less equal entities striving with each other in a battle for ascendancy as
well as the more continuous fact of the inability of others to compete with them in
What Schwartz fails to note is that both such organisation and mobilisation had a
significant gender quotient that was picked up later and critically by feminist thought
in social and political theory, gender studies, development studies and cultural studies
for instance. It is this in the specific context of the evolution of the nation and its
the embattled space of women’s rights and issues as collective issues, both in the
collectivities of women and in that of the larger group of nation, etc. Defining
hand, that the empowering rights would be those that sanctioned the power of the
empowered, and on the other, rather contradictorily, that its very anonymity meant it
sanctioned the extension of those rights to the weak and the disempowered. The
problem of the social organisation of these rights therefore proved enormous, in that,
4
economic discrepancies and inequalities. Cynthia Cockburn notes how the
meant [the] coming out of the enclosed sphere of the patriarchal family into the
more public sphere of the patriarchal firm…. The feudal and the early capitalist
domestic system of manufacture had made the home a far from private place. In a
sense the home became a truly private sphere only once production had left it. The
constitution of "home and work", the "private and public" as we know them was in
engagement at the social, political and economic levels with negotiating the roles,
functions, status and rights of women, within the discourse of rights, and without
losing the power of the universal legitimacy of its claims - however fragmented and
claim to public space, however grudgingly, precisely because the distinction between
public and private, as indicated in Cockburn's statement above, was at best a tenuous
one, given the overwhelming importance of female labour to the new industrial
Reformation was the devolution of power over women from the priest and Church to
the male head of household6, who was accountable more to the state than to the
with the strengthening and spread of the discourse of rights, and with the pressures of
significant aspects of modernisation - the idea of the liberal democratic state based on
5
the sanctity of individual rights, and the technological transformation of life brought
the growth of feminism and the (albeit incomplete) accommodation within these
At its most fundamental level, the rhetoric of development provided the former
colonies with a dignified and distinctive way of obeying the imperative towards a
“always-already” the norm for most modern institutions and ideas, including those
national mission and not only as a world-historical process of the modern era.
(149)
The significance of this lies in the reconstruction of public and private in the target
without the history of feminisms that had struggled to make the new-found ‘modern’
public spaces hospitable to women, through contesting and claiming rights as political
and economic individuals. I have argued elsewhere9 that the absence of this historical
process was not accidental but the consequence of a particular conjunction of colonial
patriarchies with indigenous ones, in their complex power-negotiations, and with the
6
relations under political, social and economic modernisation. It has however had some
the historical legitimacy of women’s rights. Madhu Kishwar, for instance notes that
holds that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests
of the social group, family, or the state. However, in India, despite the cultural
diversity among its various social, caste, and religious groups, there is a pervasive
belief shared equally by men and women that individual rights must be
strengthened not by pitching yourself against or isolating yourself from family and
which is dangerously close to that propounded by the Hindu right, as we shall see
duly.
by this process; and on the other, by the adoption of a political system that enshrines
model of liberal democracy, with its ideological roots in individualism, was adopted
as the form of post-colonial government by the newly independent nation, the rights
Wieringa notes rather despairingly of the concept of gender, it ‘is used in such a
watered down version [in present-day development literature] that women’s issues
have become depoliticized, that sexual oppression has been rendered invisible and
that concern for women’s issues have been reduced to the socio-economic component
of women’s lives.’13 There can be little doubt that this is fundamentally because the
instrumentalist and economistic, without taking account of the social, economic and
cultural history of its target contexts. Yet it is this model that most newly liberated
nations and their states - like India - aspire to as ideal, in their developmental
programmes.
sketched above, the fact that early women’s rights movements emerged in the context
development debates for a very long time, indicates the silent persistence of
masculinist biases through the evolution of these processes. How then does one figure
these masculinist biases? As constructed into the very processes and conditions of
they have a more complex relation than can be captured in cause-effect formulations?
The opening of the possibilities for accommodating women's issues in the public
sphere - in fact, the weakening of the very construct of the public/private divide - all
indicate the extent to which modernisation actually proved enabling for women, and
counter-active to these masculinist biases. Yet there is little doubt that this, in practise,
8
meant a dispersal of masculinism into other spheres of human activity, with a
that these represent, possess, as well as give access to in modernity. How does one
conceptualise this 'new' set of masculinist biases? It is this bias, often referred to in
specifics of this may differ from context to context, and between specific hegemonic
dominance of men – essentially over women, but also over other oppressed men, the
old, the very young, the infirm; and through whatever cross-sections of caste, class or
to the inadequacies of its conceptual and analytical power tend to ignore its primary
case, that of a general – not universal, nor eternal – condition of oppression and
denial of agency, when in fact, it is no more than an initial insight into the bases – the
conditions of possibility, the load of the dice in different situations – of gender and
relations with the specific dynamics of individual hegemonic masculinities. That is,
9
the term ought to be understood as an analytical proposition referring to the
means of protecting its interests, i.e., the extent to which its hegemonic power
expanding its hegemonic status. The most significant gain from such a theoretical
in this sense that one may speak of patriarchy - the hegemonic system itself - not
individual selves, both men and women. Without engaging in two disconnected
realms of analysis, the macro and the micro, and without permitting the collapse of
‘femininity’ to ‘women’, and ‘masculinity’ to ‘men’, per se, it retains the strength of
making them generalisable in terms of the relations that obtain in the material
practices of individual men and women. It follows from this that different masculine
hegemonies may obtain in different times and places, themselves constituted by, and
configurations need not and do not always obtain – or that, even when they do, they
10
Given such an understanding, it is possible to see how patriarchal systems
generate masculinities. With the emergence of new forms of power, new types of
hegemonic femininities20 that correspond to, and are compatible with, these changed
masculinities. This should not imply that these forms of hegemonic masculinity are
necessarily always competitive for they often emerge through dynamic interaction
with extant ones. Hence both the co-operation and the correspondence between forms
(secular) Law21. Even while the forms and even needs may have changed, the interests
insofar as these pertain to the distribution, management and access to power, have not.
It is possible to see how, as new discourses, forms and practices of material power
emerge, and are deployed in challenging existing masculine hegemonies, they are
accommodated into an already changing socius, the hegemonic equations of which are
to suit the new discourses and practices of power. Certainly this helps explain for
instance, the continued masculinisation of political power on the one hand, and
technological power on the other, despite the inroads made into both by women's
movements internationally.
How does one employ such a conceptual framework in the examination of the
Indian case? For convenience, I will begin analysis with a historical glance at the
modernisation in India, and the communities and identities it sought to govern and
11
provide for in this process. Satish Deshpande, commenting on the idea that nations
it is less often noticed that nations have as much if not greater need to invent a
future – a vision of the collective destiny that its members have been elected to
development is that it provides just such a telos, one which allows the ethnos or
politics – two small ruling elites, consisting of an urban, upper-caste, national elite,
and a rural social elite of the dominant peasant castes and rural upper-castes, together
constituted a small middle class22. Pavan Varma lucidly describes the infatuation of
unconsciously worked to dilute this vision through its ceaseless consolidation of its
own hegemonic position and character23. At this point in time, immediately after
independence, it would be fair to say that the dominant nationalism was in fact a
secular one: not so much because of a weakening of religion in the public sphere, as
the preoccupation with nation-building that had fired the imagination of this class,
with the Nehruvian vision of dams (and their metonymic expressiveness of progress,
India'. Not only had the Hindu Right been driven underground and lost substantial
credibility for its role in the assassination of Gandhi; but more pertinently, this
hegemonic class was still dominantly a westward-looking one, seeking the economic
12
fruits of their 'independent' control over industrialisation and technological growth
promised by Nehru.
This hegemonic domination remained in place for almost three decades; yet,
through the period, a gradual process of social change was already under way, largely
due to the state’s affirmative action policies which, though tardily implemented,
allowed the emergence of a new, small but vocal political leadership for the lower-
castes. With the recommendations of the Mandal Commission (on affirmative action
for lower castes) being announced in the early 1980’s, and the weakening hegemony
of the Congress – in its increasing inability to maintain and accommodate the diverse
emergent social groups and claims within its ranks – the stage was set for a more
dramatic set of changes in the social and political fields. Not only did new, locally
elites and of minorities, and indicating an increasing trend towards alliance politics at
both the regional and national levels – they also represented new, economically
empowered groups that clamoured for entry into the middle class in status terms that
refused to acknowledge anymore the old caste affiliations and statuses. The state as
This kind of competitive bidding for state resources leads to a situation where
13
In contrast to modernisation in say, Britain, on the one hand – where the market has
more or less always been a strong force, and dictated the dynamics of modernisation –
and China on the other – where the state extended its strength to authoritarian
Indian state modelled itself as socialist in economic functioning and liberal in political
functioning. This meant that lobbies that emerged politically could dictate terms
economically, with a multiplier effect. Most of these new arrivals to middle class
status were intermediate caste, land-owning peasants, like the beneficiaries of the
Punjab Green Revolution. But as Yogendra Singh notes, their new status was not
agriculture, and the lack of investment in business and industry25. What were desired
This economic anxiety coupled with the sense of arrival into middle class
status created conditions ripe for the emergence of right-wing nationalism in three
ways. Firstly, the new arrivals came - rather paradoxically - with a sense of the failure
wealth for them, it could not sustain the generation of this wealth. Secondly, this new
constituency came into a public sphere that was till recently under the hegemonic
bureaucrats26, and which was dominantly upper-caste. Much as they aspired to the
lifestyles of these societies, there existed another legitimating discourse that they
could lay claim to, in opposition to the vaunted social superiority of the existing elite,
and as critique of it. The Hindu nationalist discourse had already made a renewed
begin taking root in27. Thirdly, part of the process of being accepted by the existing
upper-caste, middle class elite was the indoctrination into its till-now dormant
hegemony of the caste elite. Each of these three phenomena displays the centrality of
the issue of control and power to them, and the readjustments and accommodations
this provoked within the Indian socius, of the existing hegemonies. What remains to
Brahminical Hinduism.
surge to political power of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, has come about: acutely
aware of the numerical minority of its own (upper) class and (upper) caste
as an ideology has been too well documented29 for extended elaboration here. Suffice
it to draw attention to two processes in it. [1] The reliance by colonial authority on
Brahminical authority and sources for the codification of a 'Hindu' personal law that
would apply to all Indians who were not Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, or Parsi.
This meant for instance that, in the crucial question of inheritance of property, even
after various amendments to the original Indian Succession Act of 1865, culminating
splitting of the ideals of masculinity along the lines of power sharing that Louis
15
India31 - the ascetic, Brahminical conception of power, and the warrior, Kshatriyaic
one, and their corresponding codes of masculinity. What matters here is not whether
framing Hindu personal laws - on the issue of the public/private divide and its deep
differently, translated into the common law/ personal law divide, and the differential
construction of masculine hegemonies within each of these new social realms. But
these also demanded different kinds of masculinities as ideals, for the sharing of
power - in the personal realm, on the one hand, and in the public on the other.
Personal laws, created on the deeply gendered issue of how each community could
attitude towards its maintenance, enforcement and command, as the line that defined
and came to distinguish individual communities from each other. Common law
an ascetic tolerance of the other communities that were thus equally defined through
It must be noted however that the personal law/common law divide is at best a
juridical and schematic distinction and can be misleading. While the practices of
gender were and are sought to be controlled through such a distinction, they render it
porous in their very performance32, and form the bases of significant overlaps between
the two kinds of laws. The imperatives of the ‘private sphere’ and its personal laws
16
are frequently carried over into and legitimised in the ‘public sphere’ and by common
law. As intimately associated with the control and determination of the practices of
gender and sexuality, personal laws form the bases of the gender attitudes that
underlie the assembling and the interpretations of common laws. A recent instance of
the practice of ‘Sati’ illustrates the gendered nature of the juridical divide. Although
legally and officially proscribed as criminal, the case of Roop Kanwar who allegedly
committed sati on September 4, 1987, raised an ethical and political storm. Strong
arguments were raised on the right of communities to maintain and perpetuate the
practice of Sati as a religious right, with temples built and rituals performed
worshipping the dead women, in the face of secular feminist anti-Sati protests33.
The several judgements on the case were eventually to exonerate all involved
in the act, interpreting the act itself as voluntary despite substantial evidence to the
contrary. What was noteworthy in the controversy was the aggressive, almost
hysterical defence of the incident and its perpetrators by large sections of the Rajput
community – to which Roop Kanwar belonged – specifically, and the Hindu upper
castes in general. What came to be understood as being at stake was not just the right
women’s bodies and lives. The challenge moreover, was not from another community
but from a different understanding of the nation, community, rights and gender,
derived from the secular public sphere of common law: hence the aggressive
masculinism of the response34, and its vociferous, violent claims on the traditional and
the private.
The quashing of the cases against the accused in this instance, and the
mode of masculinity is in many senses more hegemonic than the directly aggressive
the national community. For instance, judicial protection of the legal rights of
progressive and benefactorial, even as judicial decisions relating to its own women
remain dubious:
The Supreme Court in its judgements in the Mohammed Ahmed Khan versus Shah
Bano Begum ((1985) 2 SCC 556) and the Mary Roy versus State of Kerala ((1986)
2 SCC 209) and their fall out, contrasted to the Supreme Court's April 29, 1992
order in the sati issue dramatise [sic] the women-law-tradition nexus in a political
situation that is blatantly communal. In the former the scales were tilted in favour
of women while in the latter, the court invoked Article 25 [which guarantees the
frictioned the public sphere where common law applied, by claiming the right to
emergence of regional and caste based political constituencies that lay claim to their
share of political and economic - at least in terms of employment - power. But it also
was susceptible to Sanskritisation, and in that the hegemonic demand for ascetic
restraint and toleration as the ideal of masculinity, in the sharing of 'public' power -
particularly since their power over the personal sphere was defined in a common way,
through the common (highly Brahminical) 'Hindu' law applicable to all castes. As
"Sanskritization and westernization" all groups were declared as inferior the family
conception of whom did not agree with that of the dominant groups.'37
In many senses the infamous Shah Bano case catalysed this process of de-
rather inversely, through the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984. (Inversely in the sense that it
was the Sikh identity that was starkly defined as different, and implicitly served to
draw attention to the identity "Hindu".) By the late 1980s then, the type of hegemonic
masculinity that became increasingly preferred was the warrior type, demanded by the
by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, promoting thereby the hegemonic
masculinity of the warrior type as the defining identity of the community. What was
at stake for the Hindu nationalists in doing so was the extension of the ideology of the
personal law realm into the realm of the public - the 'Hinduisation' of the world of
secular relations governed by common law. What was at stake was the capture of state
power itself, and the exercising of its hegemony through the instruments of that
power.
actions), Punyabhumi (holy land) and Mokshabhumi (land of one’s salvation)40. It has
These may be separated into two sets: terms of origin (Matru- and Pitrubhumi) and
organisation of spaces in these terms is less a matter of the ‘secular’ distinction of the
‘public’ and the ‘private’, than of the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’
spaces. A crucial relation is then established between ideas of sacred space – or holy
land – and the space of the nation. An important aspect of this is the weightage given
to Hindu places of worship that are scattered throughout the country: they, defined as
pilgrimage spots, realise in a concrete way the presence of the sacred in the profane.42
The value of this to design a national imagination is borne out in the political practice
of the yatra or pilgrimage, first undertaken by Gandhi, and most effectively used in
recent times by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in mobilizing support for
issues to the realm of the ‘private’, this conception of the nation situates the religious
personal and common realms effectively meaningless. The discourse of rights thus
There is a further distinction that is of some significance, within the other set
of terms: between the motherland and the fatherland. Where the former connotes the
nation-as-mother – productive, fecund, referring to the earth and to origin – the latter
traditional demonisation of Islam by Hindutva and its more recent and intensified
attacks on Christians across the country. In contrast, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are
sought to be incorporated into the Hindu nation, through conceiving of these religious
Of specific importance here is the now hardly examined dupe through which
While the Hindutva is now certainly not alone in its anti-Islam campaign, the
distinctive historical dynamics of Partition and the tension between Hindus and
Muslims in the sub-continent have driven this inclination uniquely. In this context the
tension between Hindus and Sikhs – though similarly fraternal - is different but
one hand differentiate themselves from Hindus and yet concealed their identity by
shaving for instance and ‘blending’ in. A dominant ‘Hindu’ discourse on Khalistan
appropriated the Sikh communities anguish in a gradated move. They accentuated the
Hindu sense of betrayal and by drawing attention to the ‘Hindu-ness’ of the nation,
claimed the violence as appropriate. In the case of the attacks against the Christian
community, a new angle had of necessity to be introduced, given the relative lack of
the Hindu right succeeded in demonising Christians it is necessary to see why the
government shifted the terms of the debate from the (legal) issue of murder to (the
emotive) one of conversion and the implications of such a move for political ethics. If
the Muslims and Sikhs were designated treacherous because of their willingness to
21
break the (maternal) body of the nation, Christians were shown to attack its very
spirit. That Christians have somewhat of a monopoly over education and are
relatively a wealthy community made them a more obligatory target. Thus it was not
just killings and arson that were necessary, but degradation and humiliation – raping
nuns, forcing them to drink urine, the reclamation of these acts as inspired by
stand on the ethics of politics can hardly be underestimated. But what he also
succeeded in doing was ratifying the violence and appropriating the distress of the
Hindu community. It then comes as no surprise that it was the Christian community in
India was conflated with the ‘western’ world, with the Roman Catholic Church and
was thus expected to apologise for its existence within the country. Yet again in this
instance In all cases what was spoken were the ‘new’ foundational terms of the
nation, the terms of national occupancy within it and the retention of these debates
among men even while women’s bodies were central in the ‘realisation’ of these. This
therefore served also to historically invisibilise yet again the terms in which women
community, several other factors are also of interest. The mother organisation of
of economic reform that would effectively increase the economic power of local
business and industry entrepreneurs through protected privatisation. Along with this,
its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made political stability a major
issue, suggesting that the process of economic reform required a consistent and stable
22
government. These two campaigns served to bring large sections of the middle class -
essentially the educated elite - that were earlier less attracted to the idea of a right-
wing nationalist government at the centre, into the folds of the Hindu nationalists,
accompanied the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It permitted the coming to power of
coalition governments headed by the BJP in the mid 1990s, supported mainly by
regional parties that represented regional elites that more or less shared the BJP's
economy towards the benefiting of the coalition elites. It is significant that the call for
I.e., the withdrawal of the state from the production and market sectors also means
that the state will, in the course of time, have fewer jobs to provide, since it is the
market and the needs of private corporations that will determine employment.46
by Hindutva are thus evident in the types of ideal masculinity that are called on to
govern each kind of hegemonic exercise. The process of modernisation that should
have delegitimised personal laws served, instead, to sanction their gendering and to
enforce them. Through the processes of Sanskritisation that it induced and catalysed,
their reorganisation into different but articulated masculine hegemonies, through the
repeated references in public media to the ‘two faces’ of Hindu nationalism in India
One could add to this the kind of lumpen masculinist iconicity of the Shiv Sena chief,
23
Bal Thackeray.) Hindu nationalism’s projection of the Hindu nation as utopia at one
and the desire for progress; its ulteriority however, is in the deliberate insertion of its
the agendas of and for the nation – and desired by the nation. It is this that allows real
projecting issues like ‘political stability’ and nuclearisation as crying needs, and
Even as welfare programs, particularly those affecting rural development like the
subsidised public distribution system, were – and are – being rolled back with a
disparities, there has been a concomitant increase in the social display of wealth, and
of conspicuous consumption, and not just in urban areas. This consumption then
becomes an index both for social power, as well as for ‘progress’ and advancement -
mapping the desire for personal satisfaction through consumption, onto the desire for
the future, advanced nation, the signs of which are ceaselessly generated and
displayed by the advertising industry that incites much of this desire in the first place.
In such disparate conditions of access to the market, it is very easy for generated
‘needs’ to solicit consent to and investment in the new imaginary of the nation, and
more importantly in the economic policies that promise to deliver it – thus further
expanding the hegemonic power of Hindutva’s brand of ‘swadeshi’, along with the
Hindutva’s political hegemony. The masculine ‘load of the dice’ of this phenomenon
city that perhaps more than any other is representative of the speed of the
24
transformation to a consumer life-style) that there has been a sharp increase in
reported ‘dowry deaths’ over the last two years47; and this is only the most visible
evidence of the pressures that this process brings to bear on women. In recognition of
tracked in this paper, the women’s movement in India has striven to accompany
Conclusion
I have tried to sketch the relations that obtain between several rather diverse
processes in the above arguments. I have tried to indicate the ways in which
types of hegemonic masculinities, nevertheless did serve to open out areas and
spheres of experience and functioning for women, in the European context, even if
this was class and race defined and determined liberation. The concern that I wish to
draw attention to through the heterogeneous composition of the nation-state, the terms
of the Hindu right, and the terms on which these have had to deal with the Indian
feminist movement and vice versa, is the differing dynamics which altered this in the
Indian case. One of the reasons for the difference trajectories in the Indian case is
largely because modernisation was understood less as process than as goal; it was an
end that had to be reached irrespective of the consequences of the playing out of its
room for new ones to emerge under the umbrella of the masculine hegemony of those
drawn the figures of hegemonic masculinity and femininity, in lines that are no longer
25
particularly recognisable as either 'western' or 'Indian'; it remains to be seen whether
above seems to imply that this is unlikely, we would do well to heed William's
warning, used as epigraph to this paper. For, as Gramsci himself recognised, all
26
Bibliography
Cora Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem, (eds.) Between Woman and Nation. (London: Duke
27
1
This paper has benefited enormously from discussions with and input from Karen Gabriel. I am also thankful to Radhika
Chopra, Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella for their comments.
2
I shall be discussing issues relating to the problematisation of the modernity project in some detail later in the paper.
3
For a more extended theorisation of the relation between development, modernity and gender see my paper forthcoming in
Cleaver (ed.) 2002.
4
Schwartz notes: 'While it may be true that something like nations, nationalities, or ethnic groups existed before modern
times, it is a fact that [the territorial states of early modern Europe], which witnessed the rise of many other aspects of
modernity, also created the most vividly articulated and full-bodied image of the nation which has ever existed. They
strongly promoted the official vernacular language, fostered the notion of a national high culture, affirmed the idea of the
supreme sovereignty of the secular nation-state, and played a crucial role to the extent that they could in promoting the kind
of early industrial development so much stressed by Ernest Gellner.' (1993: 221) Like with the issue of development, there
is an extensive debate on the modernity of nationalism, with arguments ranged either for the existence of nations – and
therefore of nationalisms – prior to the spread of modernity; or for nationalism as an entirely modern phenomenon,
emerging consequent to the (modern) formation of states that attempted to cohere their subject communities into governable
‘nations’. For a comprehensive overview of this debate see Anthony Smith’s classic Nationalism and Modernism (1998),
though I do not share all of Smith’s views.
5
For discussions of the problems with a public-private divide, among others, also see Nancy Fraser ‘Politics, culture and
the public sphere’ and Chantal Mouffe “Feminism, citizenship and radical democratic Politics’ in Nicholson & Seidman
(eds.) Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Catherine
MacKinnon ‘Feminine, Marxism Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’ in Diana T Meyers (ed.) Feminist Social
Thought: A Reader N York: Routledge 1997.
6
'Feminist Theory: The Private and the Public', Linda J. Nicholson, in Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender
Division, ed. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle (Milton Keynes: Polity, 1992) p. 42. I use 'Church' here not with
reference to any denomination so much as the general representative of sacred authority in Europe.
7
It goes without saying that this trio does not have a necessary relation so much as a contingent, historical relation. They
therefore do not automatically imply each other.
8
Satish Deshpande, ‘After Culture: Renewed Agendas for the Political Economy of India’, in Cultural Dynamics 10(2).
Page references are incorporated parenthetically.
9
See my ‘Nationalism, Masculinity and the Developmental state: Exploring Hindutva Masculinities’, op. cit.
10
Madhu Kishwar, 'Women, Sex and Marriage: Restraint as a Feminine Strategy' in Manushi No. 98, March-April 1997.
Kishwar is known for her strong arguments for an 'indigenous' feminism, that will negotiate with and work within the
demands of the dominant (mainly Hindu) cultural codes.
11
There is now a wealth of documentation of the history of how this rather peculiar political condition came to be in India.
See for instance, among others, Dalmia, Vasudha and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.) Representing Hinduism: The
Constructions of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage, 1995); Pandey, Gyan (ed.) Hindus and
Others: The Question of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1993); Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1997); Vanaik, Achin’s The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularisation
(London: Verso, 1997); van der Veer’s Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1994); Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?
(London: Zed Books, 1986).
12
For an excellent discussion of the relations that obtain between patriarchies and communities, see Kumkum Sangari’s two
part article ‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies’, Economic and Political Weekly,
December 23 and December 30, 1995.
13
Saskia Wieringa, Rethinking gender planning: a critical discussion of the use of the concept of gender. (Working papers
series, ISS) The Hague: ISS, 1998.
14
There are several studies of this, but a useful sketch of the main themes in this issue is provided by Rosalind Gill and
Keith Grint, in their introduction to their edited volume, The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and
Research (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995).
15
For reasons of space, I am not here offering a discussion of the enormous literature on the concept patriarchy. Also, my
use of the term is with specific reference to its relevance for understandings of masculinity. The significance of a
rudimentary understanding of it as the rule of the father for other and different social organisation lies primarily in its
association of masculinity with power. I however use it to signal the organisation of power between men and women and
between these social categories which are crucially intersected by other social formations such as caste as I shall show in
due course.
16
In the discussion that follows I use the Gramscian sense of hegemony as involving both force and consent, and as
demanding the internalisation of hegemonic values and principles by the oppressed or dominated groups, even if resistantly.
See for instance, his ‘Americanism and Fordism’ and ‘State and Civil Society’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed.
and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1996)). In fact, the process of
resisting hegemonies is crucial to their maintenance, as much as it may lead to the possibility of their replacement by
alternative forces striving for hegemonic control.
17
See for instance Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis’ introduction to their edited volume, Woman-Nation-State (London:
Macmillan, 1989) and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997) p. 7
18
As Raymond Williams notes, the concept of hegemony ' sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their
forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living - not only of political and economic
activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth
that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to
most of the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense.' See his Marxism and Literature, Raymond
Williams (Oxford: OUP, 1977), p.110.
19
For a different, very thoughtful and useful theorising of patriarchy, see Sylvia Walby's classic Theorizing Patriarchy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, 1995). My main point of departure from Walby's analysis is in the importance I give to changing
conceptions of masculinity as changes in the subjective engagements with patriarchies, and the effects these have on the
hegemonic operationalising of patriarchies. For all the complexity of Walby's analysis, she tends to theorise patriarchy as an
external, objective system – the weakness of most theories of patriarchy.
20
Understood not as the dominance of the feminine – which would correspond to a ‘feminine hegemony’ – but as the
dominant conceptions of femininity.
21
I refer here not just to the immediately evident move by the Hindutva faction to ‘Hinduise’ the Uniform Civil Code (See
the Economic and Political Weekly Report), but to the frequent superimposition of the values, codes and practices of the
‘private’ realm on the ‘public’ judicial realm as for instance in rape trials.
22
For a compact and incisive examination of these issues, see D L Sheth’s ‘Secularisation of Caste and Making of New
Middle Class’ (Economic and Political Weekly Vol. XXXIV, nos. 34 and 35, pp. 2502-2510), from which I draw for the
immediately following remarks.
23
See his The Great Indian Middle Class (Penguin: New Delhi, 1998).
24
Deshpande, 157. Deshpande goes on to argue that this eventually leads, rather ironically to the failure of development as
ideology.
25
'In a generation or two even a land holding of a size within the ceiling limit permitted by the state…gets fragmented. And
without avenues for mobility to non-agricultural employment the younger generation of peasants finds itself exposed to
unavoidable downward mobility or even pauperization.' (Quoted by Pavan Verma, op.cit., p.116-17)
26
Pranab Bardhan, in The Political Economy of Development on India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), defines three categories
in the middle class, the industrial bourgeoisie, the rich farmers and the professional classes. Here, I have merely opened the
category of professionals to indicate the difference between state-employed bureaucrats and professionals in the public and
private sectors. In this sense, with the inclusion of the rich peasantry, there would be four categories constituting the new
middle class.
27
See Pavan Verma for the same point p. 142.
28
See Tanika Sarkar's ‘Pragmatics of the Hindu Right: Politics of Women’s Organisations’ (Economic and Political Weekly
Vol. XXXIV no. 31) p. 2161. Relatedly, for a good analysis of the role of communication systems, as instruments of
development, in the creation of exclusionary conceptions of communities in India, see Dipankar Sinha’s ‘Indian
Democracy: Exclusion and Communication’ (EPW, Vol. XXXIV No. 32.)
29
See notes 15 and 26 above for some references; but also the writings on this of Gyan Pandey, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika
Sarkar, Urvashi Butalia, Bhagwan Josh, Peter van der Veer, Aijaz Ahmed, Uma Chakravarthy, Christophe Jaffrelot,
Thomas Blom Hansen, Walter Andersen and SD Dalme, etc.
30
See for discussions of this Maria Mies' Indian Women and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working
Women (New Delhi: Concept Publishing House, 1980) and more recently, Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur, Subversive
Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1996)
31
Op.cit. Even if Dumont’s classification has been strongly contested, the point of importance for us is that power was
distributed and not concentrated, socially and discursively.
32
It is interesting to note that Judith Butler shifts to the term ‘heterosexual hegemony’ from the more totalizing
‘heterosexual matrix’, in seeking to establish the fluidity – what she terms the ‘malleability’ – of the practice of gender as
‘performance’ in her later work (See her ‘Gender as Performance: an Interview with Judith Butler’, Peter Osborne and Lynn
Segal. Radical Philosophy, Summer 1994. I am grateful to Filippo and Caroline Osella for drawing my attention to this.)
33
See Ashis Nandy’s ‘Sati in Kalyug: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death’ in his The Savage Freud and Other
Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Delhi: OUP, 1995) for a review of opinions and his own controversial stand on
the issue. For a more secular feminist stand and their overview of the debate, see Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s
‘Institutions, Beliefs and Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan’ in Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi
de Alwis (eds.) Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996)
34
This has been well-recorded by Anand Patwardhan in his documentary film, Pita, Putra aur Dharamyudh (1991).
35
The feminist insistence on say reservations for women or women’s courts has at its heart the insight that the public sphere
is interpenetrated by private prejudices and mores, that being a judge or a legislator as in this particular instance, does not
necessarily neutralise the sex-gender continuum.
36
Susan Abraham, ‘The Deorala Judgement Glorifying Sati’, originally published in The Lawyers Collective. 12(6); June,
1997.p.4-12. Cited here from http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/grhf/SAsia/forums/sati/articles/judgement.html
37
Op.cit. p. 89. She illustrates this process with the telling example of the transformation of the complex patriarchy of the
Nair caste from a matrilineal, matrilocal community to the more mainstream patriarchalism of the upper castes.
38
It may well be asked, Different to whom? For what was shared by all these communities in their personal laws was the
retaining of male control over the sexuality, property and status of women, albeit in different ways. For a discussion of these
issues, see Zoya Hasan's edited volume Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India (New Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1994).
39
See for instance the aggressive rhetoric with which leaders like LK Advani of the Hindutva swore to replace Mandal with
'kamandal' (the ascetic's pot, temporary symbol of a united Hindu identity.
40
M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashan, 1996 [1966]) p. 81. The translations of the
terms are mine.
41
"A Hindu is one who acknowledges Hindustan as his fatherland (pitrubhumi) as well as his holy land (punyabhumi).
Whether he or she is a devotee of sanatan dharma is unimportant. Anyone who is or whose ancestor was Hindu in undivided
India — including someone who was a Hindu but was converted to Islam or Christianity — is also welcome back to the
Hindu fold provided he accepts India as his fatherland-cum-holyland." V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? [1923]
(Delhi: Bharati Sahitya Sadan, 1989)
42
Peter van der Veer works this out to some extent in drawing the relations between cosmologies, sacred spaces, the act of
pilgrimage and private experience, as ‘a ritual construction of self that not only integrates the believers but also places a
symbolic boundary between them and “outsiders”.’ van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994) p. 11.
43
It is absolutely important here to resist the popular and populist Hindutva conflation between Indian Christians and the
Western world.
44
I believe that the view that the Muslims had become old hat and that the Hindu right needed a new target is limited for
two reasons. The first is that, as is clear from the scale of the present animosity toward Muslims, they remain a popular and
attractive target. Second, violence against Christians is not new. What is new is the illegality that the government promoted
through its politically expedient deflection of the issue of murder.
45
See for instance Menon and Bhasin (eds.) Borders and Boundaries (N Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), Urvashi Butalia
and Tanika Sarkar (eds.) Women and the Hindu Right (Delhi: Kalifor Women, 1996).
46
Gail Omvedt makes a similar point in her article on the subject in The Hindu, dated 24 March 2000. While I disagree
substantially with her perception of the current economic reforms as beneficial in the long term, I do agree with her on the
issue of across-the-board reservation, irrespective of class differentials within the backward caste communities.
47
See the ‘Social Issues’ section of Frontline Vol. 16, no. 17 for an extensive coverage of this. See also Sarkar’s
exploration of this issue in fieldwork among Hindutva women social workers, and their belief that women should learn to
tolerate such violence, in her ‘Pragmatics of the Hindu Right’.