Women and Right-Wing Movements - Indian Experiences - PDF Version 1
Women and Right-Wing Movements - Indian Experiences - PDF Version 1
Women and Right-Wing Movements - Indian Experiences - PDF Version 1
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Introductory Remarks
logic, we know —
but necessary because the cream of the Indian
intelligentsia seemed to abdicate that logic and to use the demo-
lition of the mosque as a stick to beat the secularists with, rather
than turning it against the Sangh 'combine' (the Baratiya Janata
Party, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, and the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad — BJP, RSS,VHP).
The left and secular women's organisations, as well as civil
liberties groups, were a resource of unforgettable strength and
hope in those days. No paralysis of will or action, no sudden
upsurge of intellectually fashionable and politically convenient
self doubt there, but a suspension of their normal schedule of
activities and concerns, and all hands to the firefighting activity.
The total strength they have built up among women in slums,
factory belts or rural organisations was mobilised entirely and
sustainedly to hold back the forces of the right from their bases.
Without that history of hope and faith we probably would
not have had the courage to explore the theme of women and the
Hindu right. Because, for the first time in our history, have so
many women participated so prominently on the side of the
right. Radha Kumar has written about the anguish that feminists
experienced when they came face-to-face with women marching
in support of widow immolation. The editors of this volume
1
it was used
service to their religion. Here, in a curious inversion,
mosque) from distant parts who came to
for the destroyers of the
witness and celebrate the demolition of an old mosque seemed
to cruelly mock our convictions, our tools of analysis.
We need to understand what we are faced with. For we do
have before us a large-scale movement among women of the
right who bring with them an informed consent and agency, a
militant activism. If they are imbued with false consciousness
then that is something that includes their men as well and if they
are complicit with a movement that will ultimately constrain
themselves as women, then history is replete with examples of
women's movements that foreground issues other than or even
antithetical to women's interests. Feminist convictions are not
given or inherent in women, after all.
That, then, was not what we set out to prove or disprove. We
needed to identify the social bases of the women's contingent,
the domestic ideology and gender notions as well as the larger
social interests with which they have been moblised, the chang-
ing forms of their mobilisation and activism over time and space,
the directions into which such activism was going to lead both in
terms of gender politics and the politics of the Hindu right in
general. We had a great problem here, because even after the
growth of the Hindutva movement the politics of the right in
India have not received focused attention or analysis. We have
had, in recent years, a growing interest in theorising the commu-
nity as a concept in political and cultural theory and we have had
writings on the purely discursive aspects of communal literature
or audio-visual propaganda. However, since these are not an-
chored in a concrete understanding of the history and politics of
the right as a palpable, historical, force, they have not clarified
our notions of a specific and vital political formation. Nor would
identifying the caste /class base and interests of this formation, a
necessary but, after all, a relatively simple task, exhaust the
historical function and political purpose of the movement.
Since the study of the Indian right has not really got off the
ground so far, and the study of its women's component is practi-
cally non-existent, we could not follow clear, known paths of
enquiry. We decided, therefore, to tackle the more circumscribed,
bounded phenomenon of the gender ideology and women's
activism within the Hindu right as well as to see what this right
Introductory Remarks 5
II
Notes
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for
Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990, Delhi, Kali, 1993.
Tanika Sarkar, 'The Crucible that Moulds/ The Pioneer, 23 December 1992;
'The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtra Sevika Samiti and
Ramjanmabhoomi Movement/ in Economic and Political Weekly, 31 August,
1991 and others; Urvashi Butalia, Community, State and Women's Agency:
'
KUMKUM ROY
remove any outside influence and /or collaborate with their men
in such an endeavour, they will automatically be freed from the
bonds of patriarchal restraints. Externalising the problem also
provides for a certain respite from confrontations within what is
defined as Hindu society, as such confrontations can then be
viewed as irrelevant and counter-productive. I would suggest
that while such an understanding may have initially been pro-
jected by masculinist, patriarchal, authority figures, it evidently
strikes a chord among women as well. It provides an escape for
those opposed to patriarchal oppression, who are spared the
discomfort and unease of confronting an enemy who is close in
more senses than one. Instead, they can attack an alien, outside
force with undiluted vigour and with little or no sense of guilt.
That the agenda is clearly persuasive is evident from the
mobilisation and active participation of women in the activities
of the Sangh Varivax (family) before, during, and after the de-
struction of the Babri Masjid.
At another level, somewhat less obviously, an attempt is
II
Ill
The differences between women and men are, however, not the
only ones of significance — as important are the bases on which
women are differentiated from one another. These differences
are systematically elaborated in the Manusmrti, but figure in the
22 Kiimkum Roy
IV
The problems inherent in such attempts to appropriate the past
are probably nowhere as evident as in the case of justifications
offered for a gendered societal order. The traditions we have
examined are virtually unanimous in recognising that a certain
degree of structuring is required in order to contain and control
what is implicitly or explicitly understood to be the nature of
women.
What exactly are the elements which constitute this problem-
atic nature? To start with, there is the question of intellectual
inferiority — an undisciplined mind and a slightly woolly brain.
This assessment of womankind is incidentally, attributed to Indra
(Rg Veda VIII.33.17). The implications of this are worked out
much later in the Maunusmrti, which discusses the possibility of
interrogating women witnesses during legal disputes. In the
ultimate analysis, we are told that the evidence proferred by
even a number of pure women should not be accepted, owing to
the instability of their intellect (stribiddhi asthiratvat, Manusmrti
VIII.77). Small wonder then, that kings are cautioned against
confiding in women, those eternal betrayers of secrets (Manusmrti
VII.150).
As if inferiority were not enough, women are, by nature,
hostile towards those who know better. In fact, exorcising the
hostility of the wife, in particular, is a constant theme. The
marriage hymn in the Rg Veda, for instance, includes a prayer to
ensure that the bride will not be of fearsome eye, or a destroyer
of her husband (Rg Veda X.85.44, aghoracaksu, apatighni). Besides,
chants were employed in marriage rituals to ensure that the
bride did not destroy her husband, offspring, cattle or the house-
hold (Sankhayana Grhya Sutra 1.18.3). The bride was also sub-
jected to tests to determine her 'true' nature (Apastamba Grhya
Sutra III.3.16) and rituals were recommended to ensure that the
wife did not retort (Aitareya Brahmana 111.12.12,13).
26 Kumkum Roy
for sacrifices —
the avoidance of women being grouped with the
avoidance of meat, and not telling lies (Apastamba Srauta Sutra
XXII.3.16). In this context, menstruating women were regarded
as especially polluting (Brjadaranyaka Upanisad VlA.13,Manusmrti
V.84).
It is obvious that the nature of women, thus constructed, and
the specific norms envisaged for women, feed into one another,
reinforcing a more or less consistent logical structure of gender
relations. Current reappropriations of such constructions by vo-
taries of Hindutva, however, do not explicitly recognise this
connection. Thus, the specific understanding of women's nature,
which provides the underpinnings for much else, is not denied,
but, to an extent obscured. This may be partly owing to a certain
reluctance to make explicit notions of sexuality, which are viewed
as somewhat indecent, especially in the context of what is pur-
portedly a 'high' tradition. What is substituted instead are expla-
nations or justifications for gendered norms in terms of external
threats. These are conceived in terms of alternative belief sys-
tems, such as Buddhism, or in terms of foreign invasions. Gen-
der stratification is then perceived as a response to such
aggressions. And of course, the fact that Muslims /Islam have
been systematically depicted as posing a threat at both levels,
results in a logical extension whereby an anti-patriarchal agenda
can be converted and diverted into a communal, specifically
anti-Muslim campaign.
At another level, the fact that the underlying assumptions of
what is identified as the 'Hindu' tradition remain beyond ques-
tion implies that these can be drawn upon as and when required.
These constitute, as it were, an unspecified reserve of patriarchal
values.
What we find then is a combination of not necessarily mutu-
ally consistent logics. On the one hand, we have the argument of
antiquity,whereby everything old and 'Hindu' is automatically
On the other hand, anything which appears blatantly
sanctified.
discriminatory by present standards (as for instance the denial
of the initiation or upanayana to women Manusmrti) is
in the
explained away we have
in terms of external factors. Besides, as
seen, the appropriation of the past is selective. What is more, the
criteria underlying choices are implicit rather than explicit. This
means that the grounds for selection can be shifted almost im-
28 Kumkum Roy
Agashe, R ed., 1977 Aitareya Brahmana, Part II, 3rd edition, Poona.
1979 Aitasreya Brahmana Part 1, 3rd edition, Poona
Garbe, R ed., Apastamba srauta sutra 1882 Vol 1, Calcutta.
1885 Apastamba srauta sutra. Vol II, Calcutta.
1902 Apastamba srauta sutra Vol III, Calcutta.
Jha, G Manu-SmrtL Vol I, Calcutta.
ed., 1932.
PURSHOTTAM AGARWAL
II
observes :
He further writes:
Book, one Lord, one priestly class and the notions of 'kufr'
and 'kafir' (Arabic words), believers and non-believers,
etc. This has happened over the last 30 or 40 years
essentially. Earlier, even in the late nineteenth century
'Hinduism' was not trying to turn itself into an organised
religion. And that is why the logic of numbers acquires a
certain potency now. This logic of numbers was not
important in the nineteenth century. 9
Ill
IV
In spite of the symbolism of the female body, rape is a morally
abhorrent act to all traditional world-views.At the very least, it
is also a matter of great embarrassment. Even if there is a recog-
not only for the purpose of refuting this delusion, but also
It is
VI
As pointed out earlier, the attempt here is to draw lessons for the
present. Where Savarkar's writings are concerned, the proper
lessons were drawn so well that admirers and followers could
establish unmistakable links between discourses of the past and
the present. As Savarkar's hagiographer Dhananjaya Keer re-
marks,
for the Greek, Saka, Huna and other invaders, who came
pouring in down the plains of the Punjab, had political
domination of this country as their sole objective. Bar-
ring this political aim their raids had never been occa-
46 Purshottam Agarwal
have been tolerant and virtuous all along and have actually
suffered because of this. This makes it possible to justify even the
ruthless persecution of the Buddhists at the hands of the Hindu
king Pushy amitra as a just punishment for their hereditary dis-
loyalty to the fatherland and not see it as religious persecution at
all.
VII
Notes on legends
1 Draupadi, according to the Mahabharata, one of the most revered and feared
texts of the Hindus, was the shared wife of five Pandava brothers (so called
after their father Pandu). The eldest of the Pandavas, Yudhisthir, was called
Dharmaraj (morality personified) and was very fond of the game of dice. It
was while playing dice with his villanous cousin, Duryodhana, that he
gambled away not only his kingdom, but also Draupadi. She was saved from
the ordeal of being publicly disrobed by Lord Krishna.
Draupadi represents the courage to question blind orthodoxy and the
claims of moral superiority made by the elders and divines. Many times in
the story she is rebuked for this. Her friendship with Krishna is fairly
unconventional in terms of the kinds of relationships that were 'sanctioned'.
2. Padmini, according to Rajput bardic legend, was the most beautiful and
noble of women, queen consort of the king of Chittor. Allaudin Khilji (1296-
1316 AD) of the Delhi sultunate invaded Chittor in order to take Padmini by
force or deceit. Padmini committed sati in order to guard her honour and
died on the pyre of her husband. This legendary account is not confirmed by
chronicles or other historical evidence.
3. The mythical figures of Sita and Savitri are generally supposed to symbolise
the virtues of an ideal woman, most important of which is total identifica-
tion with the explicit and implicit wishes of the husband.
56 Purshottam Agarwal
Notes
1
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London, Pelican Books, 1975, p. 138.
2
Begum Anis Kidwai, Azadi ki Chaon Mein (Hindi), Delhi, National Book
Trust, 1990. pp. 156-7 and p.338.
3
The construction of woman as a symbol of national honour and sovereignity
of the state becomes very clear in the Indian state's response to the problems
of women abducted during the partition riots of 1947. The government's
policies were formulated with a view to retrieving the 'national honour' and
not with the perspective of woman as an individual who could have a say in
her own destiny. For a detailed and well researched treatment of this see:
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin 'Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Abduction
of Women during Patrition,' Review of Women Studies, Economic and Political
Weekly, April 24, 1993.
4
Asghar Ali Engineer, 'Bastion of Communal Amity Crumbles,' Economic and
Political Weekly, February 1993, p. 263.
5
Jan Bremen, 'Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Surat,' Economic and Political Weekly,
April 17, 1993, p. 741.
6
Sudhir Chandra, 'Of Communal Consciousness and Communal Violence:
Impressions from Post-Riot Surat' Economic and Political Weekly, September
11, 1993, p. 1883.
7
Ibid, p. 1883.
8
G P Deshpande, 'Polity and Culture in the Wake of Ayodhya', Economic and
Political Weekly, February 6, 1993, p. 219.
9
Ibid.
10
According to Dayananda Saraswati, such books are akin to 'food contami-
nated with poison' and ought to be discarded. See his Satyartha Prakasha
(Hindi), Delhi, Dayanand Sansthan, 1974, p. 52.
11
Kenneth W- Jones, Arya-Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab,
Delhi, Manohar Publishers, 1976, p. 125.
12
Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, Penguin, New
Delhi, 1990, p.l.
13
Sudhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1982, p. 87.
Josh, 'Women and Sexuality in the Discourse of Communalism
14
Bhagwan
and Communal Violence,' paper presented at a seminar on 'The Problem of
Violence' at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, September 9-
13, 1991. Mimeograph, p. 6.
15
Kenneth W Jones, The New Cambridge History of India: Socio-Religious Reform
Movements in British India, Delhi, Orient Longman, 1989, pp. 44-45.
16
Urvashi Butalia, 'Community, State and Gender: On Women's Agency dur-
ing Partition' Review of Women Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, April 24,
1993.
17
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu ? (sixth edition),
Delhi, Bharti Sahitya Sadan, 1989, p. 4.
18
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, The Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, p. 124,
Delhi, Rajdhani Granthagar, 1971, 'A word in confidence' (translator's note).
19
Ibid, p. 124.
Savarkar, Sura t and Draupadi 57
20
Dhamanjay Keer, Veer Savarkar, Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1966, p. 539.
21
Bhagwanjosh, op.cit. p. 7.
22
Vie Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, p. 71.
23
Ibid, p. 104.
24
Ibid, p. 85.
25
Ibid, p. 131.
26
Ibid, p. 141.
27
Ibid, pp. 129-30.
28
Ibid, p. 146.
29
Ibid, p. 167.
30
Ibid, p. 169.
31
Ibid, p. 181.
32
Ibid, pp. 174-75.
33
Ibid, p. 176.
34
Ibid, p. 177.
35
Ibid, p. 178.
36
Ibid, p. 180.
37
Ibid, p. 181.
38
Ibid, p. 461.
39
The Indian War of Independence 1857, Delhi, Rajdhani Granthagar, 1986, p.
456.
Muslims and Hindus
Men and Women
Communal Stereotypes and the Partition of India"
URVASHI BUTALIA
This paper grows out of a study I have been engaged in for some
years now. Begun as an oral history of partition, the study has
grown in many different directions. One of these is the question
of the experiences of women and
an exploration of the many
inter-layered meanings and nuances of what one might call the
gender question at the time of partition. Until recently, little
attention has been paid to this question: rather, it has been
assumed that partition was in many ways, a gender neutral
process. Recent work by historians and others has proved this
1
* I am grateful to Uma Chakravarli and Tanika Sarkar for their helpful comments
on this essay. Much of the work here would not have been possible without the
generous research assistance of Subhadra Sanyal.
Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women 59
ments and discussions about the Muslim state (i.e. Pakistan) and
its subjects (i.e. Muslim men), the Indian state (defined as secular
but often understood to mean Hindu) and its subjects (Hindu
and Sikh men) were conducted with a sub-text, the body of the
Hindu woman. Why did it become so important to define and
fix such an identity? And why did the question of the Hindu
woman's body, her sexuality become so important for two
such different entities as the state and the RSS?
1947 was a complex moment in Indian history: a time of
euphoria and achievement, a time at which Indians could con-
gratulate themselves at having gained indpendence, but also a
time of violence, loss, mass deaths, uprooting and communal-
on the reconstitution of Urdu writing
ism. In an insightful article
and publishing after partition Aijaz Ahmed reminds us that 1947
was a moment of triumph not only for anti-colonial nationalism
but also for communalism. In its consequences therefore, he
says, it became the source of further communalisation of the
politics that emerged on both sides. 3
Ahmed adds that the reconstruction of partition history has
tended to pose nationalism and communalism as entirely dis-
tinct, the former being associated purely with the creation of
Pakistan, 'as if Indian nationalism itself was some pristine thing
unsullied by the many compromises and adjustments it had
made, with both the Hindu and Muslim
at different junctures,
communalists'. 4 What actually happened, he points out, was that
with the principal strains of Muslim communalism being con-
tained so to speak, in the shape of a state outside India, and 'on
the strength of the monumental bitterness unleashed by the
Partition, Hindu communalism could itself gain unprecedented
respectability. Thus it was that many of its precepts became part
of the general common sense and some of its positions were
gradually adopted, in whatever mystified forms, even by sec-
5
tions of the liberal, secular, intelligentsia/
What were the consequences of this increased communalisation
for women and how were they implicated in it? How did the
ideas put forward by Hindu communalists gain acceptance vis a
vis women? On the Indian side, when many communal
memory, and communalism itself
stereotypes passed into public
gained unprecedented respectability, what sort of stereotypes
became the staple of public memory? This question becomes
Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women 61
II
say that his daughter. aged 13 years, has been kept by one.
. . . .
III
— —
ance hitherto important which has, in the moment of crisis,
rendered the Hindu male incapable of protecting his women.
This is why then, the call to arms, to fight and retaliate in the
language of the Muslim state.
In a similar vein we are told by one writer that:
has run the gauntlet of conquest and bondage, she has been
wrought upon by fear, persuasion and temptation to fling away
her old faith and choose another but she refused to part with her
religion which is her soul.' 24
In this homily there is a lesson too for those abducted women
who have so readily fallen prey, or chosen to accept the religion
of the 'other'. If Hindu women are thus 'good' mothers, the very
real fact of their cohabitation —enforced, perhaps even volun-
70 Urvashi Butalia
children, she was the Deity and we her devotees. She was sa-
cred. To go out was to go to foreign, impure, barbaric lands and
so a purification on return was necessary.' 25 Another article
quotes Ram as saying to his brother: 'O Lakshman, this golden
Lanka doth not please my heart. The Mother, the country of our
birth, is sweeter than the joys of heaven itself.' 26
In sharp contrast to the image of the Hindu mother is that of
the Muslim woman who appears only infrequently in these
pages. In an article entitled 'Life in Sind', Hoondraj Kriplani
bewails the fact that Hindus are being abused and insulted at
every step: 'Even in your own house you are not safe. Muslim
women would enter your house on the pretext of enquiring
whether you have anything to sell. And after a few minutes they
will tell you that they have come to stay. You cannot drive them
out, for you dare neither touch them nor get them removed by
anyone else. .
.' He goes on to add an ingenious warning to his
.
Hindu brothers: 'You may persist for two or three days in living
with them, but then, of course, there is the real danger of these
Muslim women crying aloud at night. And then where do you
stand?' 27 At another point, in a regular column entitled
'Indraprastha Calling' we are told, in a question and answer
exchange (albeit in a tongue-in-cheek fashion) that a Muslim
woman was known to have given birth to cartridges 28 !
The pages of the Organiser are rich in this kind of rhetoric and
concern and are no more than what one would expect from an
overtly communal journal of this kind. This brief sketch will, I
hope, suffice to point to some of the major strands of thinking on
the question of women. I want now to turn to some of the
debates that took place in parliament on the issue of the recovery
of abducted women and to see what kinds of echoes we find here
for the thoughts and ideas we have met in the Organiser.
Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women 71
IV
surate with the gravity of the situation, not only because that
was the right thing to do 'by our sisters' but also because India
had (in the manner of the Organiser) a 'tradition'. 'Even now/ he
said, 'the Ramayana and Mahabharata are revered. For the sake
of one woman who was taken away by Ravana the whole nation
took up arms and went to war. And here there are thousands
and the way in which they have been treated Our sisters
from Kashmir were actually sold in the bazars and whatnot was
done to them.' M He went on to add that when there was a
dispute with South Africa the Indian government had reacted by
merely imposing sanctions, a clear sign of its weakness, when
much stronger action was were other criticisms
called for. There
and a suggestion that restoration of Hindu and Sikh women
abducted in Pakistan should have formed part of the Ceasefire
Agreement. 31
As with the Organiser, the Ramayana and Mahabharata pro-
vided important reference points here too, as did the call to
'open war if need be' 32 to get back Hindu women. Another MP
asserted:
ally active and lustful. Its women are not to be trusted for they
can draw unsuspecting Hindu men into their net. India, the
Hindu nation, by contrast, is seen as secular, tolerant, rational,
civilised, modernising, yet rooted firmly in tradition. The hid-
den or absent referrent, whose 'absent presence' (if one may use
such an expression) informs and underlies much of the discus-
sion, is the abducted Indian (read Hindu) woman. She is the one
whose loss, through abduction, causes concern. It is this and her
violation, through rape, that reflects on the weakness and emas-
culation of Indian men, and, in the eyes of some, the Indian state.
And it is the suggestion that she may actually wish to stay with
her abductor/ rapist or that she may not wish to return to her
family/husband, that she may actually exercise agency on her
own behalf, that becomes unacceptable. The sexual chaos that
this very real possibility represents, the 'unleashing' of women's
sexuality that it can suggest, is something unsanctionable, both
for Indian men, and for the Indian state. The Central Recovery
—
caring parent, concerned for the fate, and future, of its citizens. It
is this concern that makes it necessary to recover the mothers of
as this proved yet again that Pakistan was a nation built on the
'predatory desire for Hindu property and Hindu women.'
In the India of the nineties, the images of raped and abducted
Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women 77
Today there is no such space for the state to assume this role
because there are too many other preoccupations, and in 'real'
terms the issue does not exist. There are no abducted women to
recover. Their abduction at partition has entered the realm of
'myth' in a way that they can be pulled out and deployed with
ease. How can the state then deal with myth, with belief, with
intangibles ? And if the state cannot, what can small groups do ?
It is the work of such groups that can and does provide the
VI
What purpose is served, one may well ask, by the above exami-
nation ? Is have
the exercise merely an academic one, or does it
women have formed the subtext and also the overt motivation
for the violence that is visited upon minority communities, and
in specific ways, on minority women. A matter of concern is the
very real circumstance that in every such instance of violence,
whether it is Bhagalpur, or Khurja, or Surat or Bombay, there is
very little outrage or outcry from people we might loosely define
as 'liberal' or even broadly 'secular'. Indeed, the only people
who seem to act, respond, take up issues, are civil liberties, anti-
communal and women's groups. The 'inability' to respond to the
agenda being set by the Hindu right on the part of secular and
liberal people has been critiqued as the failure of secularism in
India. This critique has also been very eloquently and effectively
countered, so I shall not go into it here.
Instead, I would like to suggest that not enough attention has
been paid to the highly selective and manipulative process by
which myths and stereotypes about the marauding and libidi-
nous Muslim, the innocent and motherlike Hindu woman, the
tolerant Hindu man, have entered and entrenched themselves in
public memory and consciousness. The construction of this pic-
ture leaves out many things, not least of which is the fact that
rape and abduction took place on both sides, as did violations of
women's rights. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men were equally
guilty. I think we need also to remind ourselves of where such
manipulation wishes to place and fix women, and how impor-
tant it is to counter such manipulation if we are to preserve any
of the precious few gains the women's movement has made in
the last few decades. In other words, the meaning, for someone
like me, of such an excercise, does not lie only in a search for
patterns and motivations, but in providing an understanding
from which informed action can take place within the women's
movement.
Notes
Although earlier histories and documentation of partition, such as Kirpal
Singh's Partition of the Punjab and Satya Rai's The Partition of India, make
mention of the experiences of women and children, they do not focus on
these in any special way. More recently, my own larger work 'Community,
Stateand Women's Agency: Women's Experiences during Partition' in Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly, Review of Women Studies, April 1993, and a
somewhat extended version of this article in Oxford Literary Review, Janu-
ary 1995, has examined this question. It has also been looked at by Ritu
80 Urvashi Butalia
Menon and Kamla Bhasin in their 'Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: The State
and Women during Partition' also in the same issue of Economic and Political
Weekly, and, most recently, Veena Das has also looked at women, drawing
largely on the research done by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin.
Just as the story of women's experiences during partition has not received
much attention from historians, so also, the history of partition has,by and
large, been mainly a constitutional what one might call 'history
history, or
from above'. It is only now that it is becoming clear that one needs to re-
examine partition not only for gender but for other experiences. My own
larger work looks at untouchables, children, and others on the fringes of
society.
2
See articles cited above.
3
Aijaz Ahmed, 'Some Reflections on Urdu', Seminar 359, July 1989, 25.
4
ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
See my essay 'Listening, for a Change: Oral narratives of Partition/ paper
presented at a seminar on Northern India and Independence, Nehru Memo-
rial Museum and December 1993, and also Urvashi Butalia, ed.,
Library,
'Memories of Partition', Seminar 420, August 1994.
7
Kamlaben Pate/, Mool se Ukdhe Hue (Hindi), Bombay 1990. Anis Kidwai,
Azadi ki Chaon Mein (Hindi) Delhi, 1989.
8
The first disturbances took place in Punjab in March 1947 when a number of
Sikh majority villages in Rawalpindi district came under attack. Thus it was
assumed that the beginning of March could therefore be taken as a sort of cut
off date: all Hindu and Sikh women found to be living with Muslim men
after that date could be assumed to have been abducted.
9
U Bhaskar.Rao, Tlie Story of Rehabilitation, Delhi, Publications Division, 1967,
p. 30.
10
Central Recovery Organisation, Non Muslim Abducted Women and Children in
Pakistan and Pakistan Side of the Cease Pire Line of Jammu and Kashmir State,
Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, 1952. Till this time, the
names of abducted people had not been made public out of consideration for
the families. This was the first time that such a list was actually being
released.
11
Kirpal Singh, The Partition of the Punjab, Publications Bureau, Punjab Uni-
versity, Patiala, 1972, p. 171.
12
Ibid.
13
Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act, 1949.
14
All the above examples are from Kirpal Singh, op. cit. pp. 170-71.
15
Rao, op. cit. p. 35.
16
Organiser, 10 July 1947. A great deal of detailed work on the RSS and the
Organiser has been done by Paola Bacchetta. See, particularly her 'Commu-
nal Property /Sexual Property: On Representation of Muslim Women in a
Hindu Nationalist Discourse/ in Zoya Hasan, ed., Forging Identities: Gender,
Communities and the State, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1994.
17
Organiser, 10 July, 1947.
18
Organiser, 10 July, 1947.
19
Organiser, December 14, 1949.
Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women 81
20
Organiser, December 14, 1949.
21
Organiser, November 30, 1949.
22
Organiser, 10 July 1947.
23
Organiser, 13 November, 1948.
24
Organiser, 25 Setpember, 1947.
25
Organiser, 19 August 1948.
26
Organiser, 5 August 1948.
27
Organiser, 18 December, 1947.
28
Organiser, 23 October 1947.
29
India: Legislative Assembly Debates 1949, p. 709. All subsequent references
to the Legislative Assembly Debates are from the same year.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid, p. 718.
33
Ibid, p. 752.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid, p. 764.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid, p. 716.
38
Sumati Ramaswamy, 'En/gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Iden-
tity,} in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1993, vol 35 (4) 713.
39
Kumkum Roy, 'Where Women are Goddesses, the Gods Rejoice' in this
volume.
40
P K Dutta et al, 'Understanding Communal Violence: Nizamuddin Riots,'
Economic and Political Weekly, November 10, 1990.
Communalising Gender
Engendering Community
Women, Legal Discourse and the Saffron Agenda
Introduction
The discourse of democracy and fundamental rights have be-
come powerful weapons in the hand of the Hindu right to
further their Hindutva campaign. Secularism, in their hands, has
become a way of challenging the identity of minority communi-
ties. Equality has become an implement for reinforcing domi-
nant Hindu norms, and attacking the 'Other' for violating these
norms. In this paper, we explore the way in which these concepts
of secularism and equality have become the site of a contest for
meaning, as the Hindu right seeks to redefine these concepts in
accordance with Hindutva's vision of the relationship between
religion and politics and of the role of women in Indian society.
This redefinition is part of a much broader campaign. The
Hindu right isengaged in a discursive struggle, that is, in a
contest over the way in which individuals understand the world
around them. Hindutva represents a particular set of beliefs and
categories; it is a way of giving meaning to the world and of
organising social institutions. The Hindutva campaign is also
ideological, that is, it is related to the social, economic, and
political conditions of contemporary India, and to the legitima-
tion of social and political power. It is part of a contest over the
dominant or hegemonic way of understanding the world, and of
establishing an understanding that contributes to the legitima-
tion of social power and inequality.
Hindutva is not, at least not yet, an ideologically dominant
Communalising Gender, Engendering Community 83
vision of Hindutva.
could mean that religions should be equal in result, i.e., the law
may have to treat them differently to ensure that they are treated
equally. 14
Both of these approaches to secularism have been subject to
criticism.The first approach to secularism the wall of separa- —
—
tion between religion and politics has been rejected in India as
Western, hostile to religion and thus inappropriate in the Indian
context. While there are certainly some important limitations to
this approach to secularism, particularly in the context of India,
—
gues that it is only on the spiritual plane that it can be said that
allmen are equal. 'It is in this sense, the same spirit being
immanent in all, that men are equal. Equality is applicable only
on the plane of the Supreme Spirit. But on the physical plane the
same spirit manifest itself in a wondrous variety of diversities
and disparities.' 38
Golwalkar argues that 'disparity is an indivisible part of na-
ture and we have to live with it', and concludes that harmony,
not equality, should be the organising principle. 38
A similar emphasis on harmony is echoed by contemporary
RSS leaders. HV Seshadri writes:
The principle of equality propounded by Hinduism en-
visages an round harmonious synthesis
all All mem-
bers of a family mete out equal treatment to each other
and they also perform different rules. It is possible be-
cause they love each other and they live in harmony. The
body of man itself has different organs which perform
diverse functions but a harmonious order prevails among
them. Hence the Hindutva and RSS primarily lay an
emphasis on harmonious order. 40
law has the power to decide which gender differences are rel-
evant in which context. Legal discourse both reflects and recon-
stitutes particular understandings of gender difference. Within
the framework of Hindu communalist discourse, the aim is to
deploy this definitional power to reconstitute a traditional and
Communalising Gender, Engendering Community 101
alternative —
Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code are —
based on treating women differently from men. Women are
different from men and need to be protected from men. The
discourse of equality is at one and same time being used to
reinforce the idea that all women are or should be the same, but
women are not and should not be the same as men. It is being
102 Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman
who may work outside of the home, a woman who is strong and
powerful, inside her family, and her community— is still a woman
constituted through traditional discourses of matri shakti, as
mother and wife; and of Sita, as chaste, pure and loyal. The new
Hindu woman is strong but she , is strong in restoring the glories
of an ancient past, a past which, as reconstructed through com-
munal discourses, accords a particular role for women in the
family, and in society: dutiful wives, and self-sacrificing moth-
ers. Any additional roles that women may perform are ancillary
to these. Indeed, women's work and education are seen as a
means of strengthening their roles in the family.
In this communalist discourse, although women are seen as
different from men there is a strong emphasis that they should
not be weak. Rather, the Hindu right seeks to reconstitute women
as strong. The RSS policy takes a strong stand against violence
against women, including organising women to defend them-
selves. A strong Hindu woman is seen as essential for the consti-
tution of a strong Hindu society, since women are responsible
for raising the new generation, with appropriate values and
discipline. Strong Hindu women are to be important conduits of
a strongHindu culture. This constitution of the identity of the
Hindu woman is an essential part of the process of constituting a
new definition of nation and Hindu identity a nation and iden- —
tity that is both 'traditional' and modern.
The construction of Muslim women's identity is similarly
constituted through multiple discourses within the Hindu right.
However, as we have begun to see, within Hindutva, the Muslim
woman is constituted in very different terms. The construction
of the Muslim woman sits in sharp contrast to the Hindu
woman—she is the oppressed and subservient 'Other'. 69 This
Muslim woman is also the product of a paradoxical mix of
traditional and modern discourses. But, unlike the Hindu woman,
she is neither respected as mother, nor is she the subject of rights.
Saving Muslim women from their oppression becomes the justi-
fication for not respecting the practices and beliefs of the Muslim
community, and indeed, the basis for subordinating this com-
munity to Hindu rule. Muslim women and in turn the Muslim
community are constituted as the antithesis, as the binary oppo-
sition of Hindu women, and the Hindu community. Muslim
women are what Hindu women are not. Moreover, this opposi-
Communalising Gender, Engendering Community 107
—
tion is a hierarchical one Hindu is dominant and superior,
Muslim is subordinate and inferior. Through this construction of
the Muslim woman as 'Other', the Muslim community as a
whole is judged and subordinated.
The strategy is strikingly similar to the discursive strategies of
British colonialism, justifying its rule through the subordinated
position of Indian women. 70 Muslim women in Hindu commu-
nalist discourse, like Indian women in British colonial discourse,
are defined in opposition and subordination to women in the
dominant group. The product of this Hindu fundamentalist dis-
course of equality and secularism is a somewhat contradictory
—
image Muslim women are different, but they should be the
same. The unstated norm or reference point against which these
women are measured is the Hindu woman, the unstated norm
against which the Muslim community is measured, the Hindu
community. By making Muslim women the same, they would in
effect be 'de-Muslimised', i.e., they would no longer be consti-
tuted through the discourses of their community. And in turn,
their community could no longer be constituted through the
discourses of gender. This discursive strategy of the Hindu right
is skilfully constructed to strike at the heart of identity — the
intersection of community and gender. Further, as in colonial-
ism, this strategy operates to deflect attention from the subordi-
nated condition of women
within the dominant community. In
the context of Hindu fundamentalism, attention is turned away
from the subordination of women within Hindu culture. Rather
than considering the oppression of women within their own
community, this fundamentalist discourse attempts to refocus
attention on the harm done to women within the Muslim custom
of iddat and mehr.
Conclusion
In this article, we have attempted to illustrate the extent to which
legal discourse, specifically, the concepts of secularism and equal-
ity have become the sites of contested meanings, as the Hindu
right seeks to redefine these concepts in accordance with its
Notes
Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambudha Sen,
Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right Delhi, Orient Longman,
,
1993, p.2.
There is considerable debate about whether the current phase of Hindu
communalism can be accurately characterised as 'fundamentalism'. More
specifically, there are questions about the relationship between revivalism
and fundamentalism, and whether fundamentalism is applicable to
Hinduism. See James Warner Bjorkman, ed., Fundamentalism, Revivalists and
Violence in South Asia, Delhi, Manohar, 1988. As recent literature has begun
to explore, fundamentalism has become a phenomenon that eludes any
simple or self- evident definition, and important work has begun to be done
on identifying and examining the features of fundamentalism in historically
and materially specific contexts. See generally, Linoel Kaplan, ed., Studies in
Religious Fundamentalism, London, MacMillan Press, 1987; also Bronislaw
Misztal and Anson Shupe, eds., Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective:
Communalising Gender, Engendering Community 113
See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics,London, Verso, 1985, on the democratic potential for new social
movements created by the principles of equality and liberty. See Alan Hunt
'Rights and Social Movements' 17 Journal of Law and Society 309 ,1991,; Amy
Bartholomew and Alan Hunt 'What's Wrong with Rights?' 9 Law and Inequal-
ity 1, 1990, arguing on the counter-hegemonic potential of rights discourse.
For a different view, warning that both progressive and reactionary social
movements can be mobilised through rights discourse, see Judy Fudge,
114 Ratna Kaput and Brenda Cossman
9
The term 'secular' was not inserted in the Constitution by the Constituent
Assembly, although there had been considerable discussion and agreement
regarding the secular nature of the Indian state. 'Secular' was inserted into
the Indian Constitution by the 42nd amendment passed in 1976.
10
It has been argued that Nehru favoured this approach to secularism. See
universal Hindu ideas can uphold all the modern secular and democratic
values.' (no page numbers)
27
Upadhyaya argues that the problem lies in the failure to define secularism
as the separation of religion and politics. 'This has created a situation in
which even openly communal individuals and groupings have hijacked the
appellation of secularism to justify their own positions, and in this sense,
lead to the absence of any real secular advance'. Upadhyaya op.cit., p.4.
28
For a more detailed discussion of the competing approaches to secularism,
and the way in which Hindu communalists have sought to deploy the
discourse of secularism to advance their Hindurva agenda, see R Kapur and
B Cossman 'More Than a Matter of Words: Secularism (s) and the Challenge
of Hindurva' The Thatched Patio, vol.6, No.l, January/ February 1993.
29
For a detailed discussion of these competing models of equality, and the
ways in which these approaches have informed Indian Constitutional law,
see Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman 'On Women, Equality and the Consti-
tution: Through the Looking Glass of Feminism' 1, 1993, 1 NLSJ.
30
See Abdul Aziz v. Bombay, A 1954 SC 321; Kerala v N M
Thomas, (1976) SCR
906; Shamsher Singh v. State, A 1970 P.&H. 372.
31
These special measures are sometimes understood as part of equality, and
other times, cast as necessary exceptions to equality. See Kapur and Cossman,
'Women Equality and the Constitution,' op.cit.
32
This debate over competing visions of equality was recently the subject of
with the Mandal Commission, and reservations for
political controversy
scheduled and backward castes. Debates over the meaning of equality raged
in the media. On one side, it was argued that reservations violated equality -
that equality required that everyone be treated equally. On the other side, it
was argued that reservations were fundamental to equality —that equality
required disadvantaged groups to be treated differently. These debates
highlighted the contested meanings of equality as a political and legal concept
Communalising Gender, Engendering Community 117
in Indian society. Indeed, the political paralysis brought about by the Mandal
Commission illustrates how deeply divisive and controversial the competing
concepts of equality remain in contemporary political and social life.
Punjab, A 1972 P.&H. 117; Shahdad v. Mobd Abdullah, A 1967 J&K 120;
Soumithri Vishnu Union of India, A 1985 SC 1618; Thamsi Goundan v.
v.
Kanni Ammal A 1952 Mad. 529; Mt. Choki v. State of Rajasthan, A 1972 Raj
10. For the sameness approach see C B Muthamma v. Union of India and
others, A 1979 SC 1868. The corrective approach has had only a marginal
influence: Partap Singh v. Union of India A 1985 SC 1695. See generally
Kapur and Cossman, and especially 'Women, Equality and the Constitu-
tion', op.cit.
A policy statement from the BJP National Executive Meeting, January 1986,
Chandigarh, states 'The Bhartiya Janata Party urges the. Government to so
. .
conduct itself that no citizen gets any feeling that he is discriminated against,
or unfavourably treated.'
See for example, H V Seshadri, The Way, Delhi, Suruchi Prakashan, 1991,
speaking (on p-5) of the majority Hindu community, who states, 'Give us
also the rights which are now enjoyed by others. Apply the principle of
equality before the law to all. Stop discrimination against us.' See also
Seshadri 'Strange Political Diction', Organiser, February 4, 1990; Balasaheb
Deoras frequently invokes the same rhetoric of equal treatment and equality
before the law. For a typical example, see BharatBhoomi is Hindu Bhoomi'.
'
Address of RSS chief Shri Balasaheb Deoras, Organiser, October 14, 1990.
36
M S Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Banglore, Vikrama Prakashan, 1966, p. 16.
37
Ibid.,p.l8.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid .p.p. 19-20.
M Seshadri further develops this analogy of family: 'The young child in the
family holds the parents and his elders in high regard, but the elders do not
treat the child as low. Similarly, there can be inequality on the basis of
intelligence and wisdom. But the Hindu view point does not allow to treat
them as higher or lower classes'. Sheshadri, op.cit. p. 113.
Ibid.p.115.
It is important to recognise that there is no clearly uniform position within
Hindutva discourse, but rather an array of positions ranging from the more
progressive to the more fundamentalist. For example while some of the
more authoritarian statements from RSS ideologues such as Hedgewar and
Sarvarkar appeal to the laws of Manu, just as contemporary sants and
sadhus within the BJP agitate for a return to Manu, moderates within the
BJP, as well as the women's wing of the BJP and the RSS deny any support
for such a reinstatement. See for example Vajpayee's interview in Sunday
Magazine February, 1993, and Tanika Sarkar's work on women in the RSS,
'The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ram
Janmabhoomi Movement', 26:35 Economic and Political Weekly, August 31,
1991, 2057-62. In our discussion, we draw from a broad range of at times
contradictory statements, in an attempt to discover the common threads that
run through these divergent positions.
118 Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman
43
'Our Commitments' op.cit., p-25. For a discussion of this matri shakti identity
for women in RSS ideology, see Ish Mishra The Women's Question' in
Communal Ideologies: A Study in Swayam Sevak Sangh
the Ideologies ofRashtriya
and Jamaat-E- Islami', Delhi, Centre for Women's Development Studies, n.d.
44
To a somewhat lesser extent, Hindu fundamentalists also offer women a
renunciatory mode of existence, which allows women to escape from the
domesticity that has been available to them. It is this renunciatory mode that
has created the possibility for women such as Uma Bharati and Sadhvi
Rithambhara to occupy such a high profile position within the Hindu right.
Ata more community based level, the Rashtrasevika Samiti the —
—
women's wing of the RSS provides intellectual and spiritual training for
women, thus both affirming their religiosity, and providing them access to a
world of knowledge and spirituality from which they have been excluded. It
is, however, important to recognise that the Samiti is careful to ensure that
the power of the family to make decisions regarding its members, particu-
larly regarding its female members, remains unthreatened, and the decision
for a woman to marry trumps her own decision to participate in the Samiti.
Thus the renunciatory mode does not completely escape the role of women
as matri shakti. For an excellent discussion of women in the Rashtrasevika
Samiti, see Tanika Sarkar, See also Basu et al, op.cit., pp. 41-44, 78-87.
45
'Women Ram Bhakts Make History', Dashak ke Jharokhe Main, Delhi, Mahila
Morcha, BJP, 1991, p.112. See also the following statement by P K Roy,
'Operation Ayodhya' inNation's Hope '. It look them (karsevaks) six days to
. .
—
'Women's Equality Miles to March' Organiser, September 1, 1985, p.7 re-
garding the position of the BJP Mahila Morcha on equality.
47
'Women's Decade: Mahila Morcha Response' in Dashak ke Jharokhe Mein,
p. 120 Mridula Sinha, in 'Women's Equality - Miles to March' writes: 'In spite
of all this glorious background the Indian woman today has to fight a
sustained and long-drawn battle to achieve the goal of complete equality.
This can be fulfilled not by blind imitations of the modes and techniques of
struggles adopted by the so-called liberated women of the west.' Ibid. A
similar, though more extreme position is found in the writings of RSS ideo-
logues. K R Malkani, in The RSS Story, Delhi, Impex India, 1980, argues that
'the position of women is better in India than anywhere else in the world'.
On p.175 he writes that the RSS . .
.'
would consider women's libber's as the
worst enemies of woman kind'.
48
Our Five Commitments, op.cit., p.18.
49
In this respect, the BJP can be seen to be appealing toand reinforcing the
dominant familial ideology, which has traditionally constituted women as
wives and mothers, in and through the family. For a discussion of familial
ideology, see Michelle Barrett Women's Oppression Today, London and New
Communal ising Gender, Engendering Community 119
York, Verso, 1988, and Michelle Barrett and Mary Macintosh The Anti Social
Family, London and New York, 1991.
50 Sunday Times of India, January
'Wooing the Half that Matters' The 21, 1991,
14-15, p.15
51
Dashak Ke Jharoke Main op.cit, p.3.
52
Ibid.,p-4.
53
Our Five Commitments, op.cit, states 'Another sure way of producing secu-
rity for women is to enlarge the employment in areas and sectors that suit
them most.' Policy statements include a concern with women's employ-
ment. While there is little elaboration as to what these areas might be,
another document provides that women should be primary school teachers:
'Our Commitments' op.cit., p.25. The Mahila Morcha, on the other hand, has
stated that training for women should not be confined to such traditional
areas as sewing and toy-making, but rather should 'be expanded to cover
areas like light engineering': Dashak ke Jharokhe Main, op.cit., p. 121. See also
'BJP Mahila Morcha Decries Rising Crime Against Women' Organiser, Sep-
tember 15, 1985, p.14.
54
Sinha, op.cit, p.5.
55
Ibid.
56
Sinha writes 'It is a tragedy that in the eyes of the law, the concept of Indian
womanhood is They are Hindu women, Muslim women, and
non-existent.
Christian women The emancipation of the Indian women will remain a
. . .
far off cry as long as a Uniform Civil Code is not passed.' Ibid. The BJP
Mahila Morcha has repeatedly campaigned in favour of a UCC 'so as to
equally cover all Indian women', 'BJP Mahila Morcha Decreis Crimes Against
Women', op.cit, p.14.
57
"The National Executive [of the BJP] regards this move to amend section 125
CrPC as retrograde, anti-women and a surrender to obscurantism and
bigotry". BJP National Executive Meeting, Chandigarh, 1986, op.cit.
58
See in particular A Parker, M
Russo, D Sommer and P Yaeger, eds., National-
isms and Sexualities 1992, New York, Routledge
60
See Martini Chatterjee, 'Strident Sadhus: Contours of a Hindu Rashtra',
Frontline, p.4. See also an interview in Frontline, July 30,
January 16-29,
1993,p. 28, inwhich Swami Nischalanando identified 'the Hindu Code,
family planning, the Sati Act' as three areas in which the government has
unduly interfered in religious matters since Independence, and which must
be undone.
61
As quoted by Sherna Gandhi; 'Status of Women: The Other Casualty', Sun-
day Observer, February, 21-27, 1993.
62
Swami Muktanand Saraswati for
Chatterjee, 'Strident Sadhus' op.cit., p.5.
example was quoted as should be no laws regarding mar-
stating: 'There
riage. Today, a Hindu can marry only one woman while a man can have five
wives. Why should a law be there? If a man wants to have 25 wives, let him'.
63
Many 'traditional' discourses are as much a product of colonialism as are the
'modern' discourses of liberalism. For example, notwithstanding the British
colonialist policy of non-intervention in the personal affairs of the various
communities, the extent to which personal laws were the product of a
complex history of intervention, codification and reform of customs and
120 Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman
practices is well documented: see Archana Parashar Women and Family law
Reform In India, Uniform Civil Code and Gender Equality, Delhi, Sage Publica-
tions, 1992.
64
See Tanika Sarkar, op.cit., 2062.
65
See Patrika, October 12, 1987, New Delhi. See also Indu Prakash Singh and
Renuka, 'Sati: The patri-politics', paper presented at The Status of Widows,
Abandoned and Destitute Women in India' Workshop, April 22-24, 1988 pp.
2-3, criticising the notion that sati is a voluntary act.
66
Tanika Sarkar, op.cit., 2062; see also Basu et al, op.cit., pp 84-87.
67
See Caplan op.cit., on the extent to which, as he states on p. 5 'fundamental-
ism must be seen as quintessentially modern in the sense that it constitutes a
response to events and conditions in the present.' See also Misztal and
Shupe, op.cit.
See for example Romila Thapar 'Imagined Communities' Modern Asian Stud-
ies 23:2 (1989), 209-31.
Himani Banerji observes that the images of Muslim women in Hindutva
demonstrate the ultimate version of contempt for women. Muslim women
are portrayed as 'ignorant and superstitious slaves of Muslim men', who
'breed like rabbits, and are incapable of knowledge or spirituality'. See
'Women Against Communalism', Sanchetana, February 1991, (Calcutta) 2-3.
Laura Nader, 'Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women', Cul-
tural Dynamics 3, 1989; Lata Mani 'Contentious Traditions: The Debate on
Sati in Colonial India' in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid eds. Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History , Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 88-127.
The Frying Pan or the Fire?*
mate claim to protection from the state: not just the women, but
the communities they belong to.
To elaborate while the predicament of
this point a little,
minority women and dalit womenmuch the same, they are
is
A little later, he forces her to kneel and say her prayers and
derives great pleasure in sexually assaulting her while she re-
cites the prayer.
The threat to the community is defined as the threat to the
chastity of women community /caste and
of the the threat is
and class interests. The patriarchal state can be seen, then, not as
the manifestation of a patriarchal essence, but as the centre of a
reverberating set of power relations and political processes in
which patriarchy then connects the state, family violence, reli-
gious fundamentalism, and caste chauvinism.
The spaces in religion and ritual that were traditionally
women's spaces have now been appropriated by communal
mass organisations. Festivals which upto this point were cel-
ebrated within the local community and the extended family,
and were primarily the responsibility of women, and provided
avenues for their cultural expression, have now been taken over
by communal forces and celebrated with the aggressive use of
technology and mass mobilisation. The celebration itself ceases
to be one of a particular deity or occasion. It is a celebration of
the community's capacity to aggress. This inevitably fuels a riot.
As increasing numbers of men get recruited into these
organisations, they are killed, hurt, or arrested and the responsi-
bility for ensuring the survival of the family fallseven more on
women.
While women are the most vulnerable in a riot situation, we
also see that women often share the communalised conscious-
ness that targets them. We come across women hiding bodies of
riot victims, sheltering rioters and participating actively in com-
munal propaganda. Our experience in the women's movement
has shown that women have very definite interests in caste and
community. They experience the negation and insecurities that
communities and caste groups feel, and derive power and strength
from belonging to these groups. The new communal phase, as
Tanika Sarkar argues, 'enables the woman's self constitutions as
10
active political subject in dangerously unprecedented ways'.
For women who feel the need for religious involvement, and
especially those whose men are involved in these organisations,
this provides an opportunity to draw themselves out of a restric-
tive domestic space into a vast and virile environment. During
communal riots in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad for instance, and
in caste riots, women have played an active part marching and
shielding rioters from the police. This seems to typify a general
trend among the upper caste Hindus. 11 The underside of their
The Frying Pan or the Fire? 133
Notes
1
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 'Desecration', in Out of India: Selected Short Stories,
John Murray, 1986, p.279.
2
The category of rape includes every act of sexual aggression on women.
3
A R Desai, 'Caste Violence in post Partition Indian Union', in A R Desai (ed),
Repression and Resistance in India,Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1990.
4
Rajni Kothari 'State and Statelessness in Our Time', Economic and Political
Weekly, vol.XXVI, nos. 11 & 12, Annual number 1991 pp.553-58.
5
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, 'From Fractured Compromise to Democratic Consen-
sus: Planning and Political Economy in Post Colonial India', Economic and
Political Weekly, vol.XXVI, nos. 11 & 12 Annual Number, 1991.
,
6
See note 4 above.
7
Romila Thapar, 'A Historical Perspective on the Story of Rama', in Sarvepalli
Gopal (ed), Anatomy of a Confrontation: the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue,
The Frying Pan or the Fire? 135
New Delhi, Penguin, 1991, pp. 141-61. The discussion at this point draws
heavily from this article.
8
See Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, 'Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian
State and Abduction of Women During Partition', Economic and Political
Weekly, XXVIII 17, April 24, 1993, pp. WS2-WS11.
9
R W Connell, Gender and Power; Society, The Person and Sexual Politics, Polity
Press,Cambridge, 1987, p.130.
10
Tanika Sarkar, 'The Women as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and
Ram Janmabhoomi Movement', Economic and Political Weekly, XXVI, 35, Au-
gust 31, 1991.
11
Urvashi Butalia, 'Community, State and Gender: On Women's Agency Dur-
ing Partition', Economic and Political Weekly, XXVIII: 17, April 24, 1993, pp.
WS12-WS-24.
12
Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, 'Caste and Gender: Under-
standing the Dynamic of Power and Violence', Economic and Political Weekly,
September 14, 1991.
Redefining the Agenda of the Women's
Movement within a Secular Framework
FLA VIA AGNES
during the period when the city grew into an industrial capital it
became increasingly cosmopolitan, with the migrants providing
the necessary dynamism for the growth and expansion of the
city. It was also its openness to migrants that made Bombay so
sons was an obvious one. Why had this happened? And when?
Where did they go wrong? Did the venom of communalism
spread overnight? If not, was there any way in which they, as
secular-minded people or groups, had consciously or uncon-
sciously participated in this process? The riots affected different
social movements in different ways. Since my work has prima-
rily been within the women's movement, I will pose the ques-
tions within its confines.
the soil theory propagated by the Shiv Sena had also managed to
carve out a special niche for women. As mothers of these sons of
the soil the women were given a special role and responsibility:
they had to defend their sons when the latter were arrested, and
bring them up to be brave and loyal to the soil.
Through a systematic hate campaign the Shiv Sena was able
to whip up communal tensions among their women cadres. The
image of the modern Hindu woman which was constructed
while advocating the communal Hindu ideology was not that of
and docile domestic being but a new
a traditional subservient
modern Durga, the destroyer of evil, an angry and rebellious
woman. This construction of the modern Hindu woman closely
resembled the Indian construction of the new 'feminist' woman.
This new woman could come out on the streets with as much
ease as the men from the community to avenge their wrongs-.
And in this action she had the blessings of the party and commu-
nity leaders.Hence women found this role not only exciting but
also more comfortable than one which involved protesting
against a violent husband or a rapist from within the commu-
nity. In this latter role, they would not have the protective
mantle of the party nor the blessings of community elders.
Through a process of selection, Hindu communal forces
usurped the external usages popularised by the feminist move-
ment such as protest marches and road blocks (which are con-
trary to the conservative domestic role of the traditional Hindu
woman) while at the same time rejecting the movement's ideo-
Redefining the Agenda of the Women's Movement 141
logical stance. The irony lay in the fact that the communal parties
were able to mobilise women far more easily using the image of
the modern Durga than the movement which had popularised
these forms in the first place.
what was even more distressing was that women from commu-
nal organisations mouthed slogans coined by the women's move-
ment 'Hum Bharat Ki Nari Hain; Phool Nahin Chingari Hain(We
are the women of India, not delicate flowers but smouldering
embers) while leading demonstrations during the riots or while
the Babri Masjid was being torn down.
woman loses not only her right to maintenance but has to face
humiliation and social stigma as a 'mistress'. So much is at stake
for the woman that it is not an uncommon sight at the family
court in Bombay for two women, who are vying with each other
for the status of wife, to come to blows. Only the Hindu Mar-
riage Act permits such scope for ambiguity regarding the
solemnisation of marriage. Under other laws the officiating priest
has to provide the necessary document by way of a nikah nama or
he is required to register the marriage with the Registrar of
Births, Deaths and Marriages.
In criminal prosecutions for bigamy under Section 494 of the
Indian Penal Code, years of litigation fail to end in a conviction
for the errant man because courts have adopted a rigid view that
only saptapadi and vivahahoma are valid marriage ceremonies. 28
If, in the case of a second marriage it cannot be proved that these
ceremonies have taken place, the courts will hold the second mar-
riage to be invalid even though the couple have been living as
husband and wife and the community has accepted them. 29 Hence
the progressive sounding provision of monogamy has not only
turned out to be a mockery but has in fact proved to be more
detrimental to women than the uncodified Hindu law which
recongnised the rights of wives in polygamous marraiages. 30
The constitution of coparcenary concepts within the Hindu
Succession Act denied equal property rights and the right to the
ancestral home and property to women. 31 Daughters had equal
rights only in the self-earned property of their fathers. This
provision made it easy for men to turn their self-earned property
into a joint property and deny women equal property rights.
While introducing the provision of property rights to women in
Parliament, this lacuna was pointed out to appease the Hindu
revivalists who had vehemently opposed the provison granting
property rights to women. 32 Some southern states like Tamil
Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have tried to rectify such
discrimination to women through state amendments. 33
146 Flavia Agnes
well known. Although out of the 200,000 kar sevaks who went to
Ayodhya for the destruction of the Babri Masjid 55,000 were
women, their role was mainly behind the curtain, cooking and
feeding their male counterparts. 37
However, as large numbers of women enter the public arena
under the banner of communal forces, the older and conserva-
tive notions about women's role and status in society will give
way to a struggle for equality within the organisational struc-
ture. This can be seen from the recent rebellion among a group of
BJP women MPs on behalf of Uma Bharati who had had sexist
insultand abuse heaped on her by a party member. Newspapers
have reported rumblings of discontent in the Manila Morcha of
the BJP which is demanding a broader representation within the
organisation. Even the most conservative Hindu organisation,
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) imparts physical train-
ing with a special accent on the martial arts to its women mem-
bers, the Rashtra Sevikas.
Indicating this shift in the party's attitude to the women's
question, Mridula Sinha stated in an interview that women lead-
ers areworking on a perspective paper on 'BJP and Women'. She
added that it is important that women know their rights and
only education and independence will enable women to have
condemned the Muslim
access to these rights. 38 Further, she
Women's Act backward step. According to her, the BJP has
as a
never discouraged women from standing for elections. During
the 1989 elections the BJP fielded the highest number of women
that is, per cent as compared to the 4.5 per cent by the
5.5.
Congress and 3.3 per cent by the Janata Dal. 39
Even the Shiv Sena has been taking a more active interest in
women's issues in recent times. In a case where a minor domestic
worker was repeatedly raped by her employer (which resulted
in pregnancy), the issue came into public attention when a Shiv
Sena MLA raised it in the state legislature. The Shiv Sena has
also been reporting rape cases, at times even more promptly
than some newspapers. For instance, a case of gang rape of a
teenager which occurred on 17 November was reported in
Samna,\he mouthpiece of Shiv Sena, on 18 November and the
same news item appeared in the Times of India five days later on
23 November, 1993. The Hindi version of the same paper Dopahar
ki Samna also carried a sensitive and informative report
—
All of this did not mean any improvement for women within
the home: those who threw stones at the Muslim men and
helped in the violence and looting, would nonetheless have to
approach women's organsations for help in problems of domes-
tic violence etc., in peacetime.
With the Muslim community the equation was in reverse.
Community leaders who were fighting for legitimacy and a right
to a dignified existence in a riot-torn situation, became allies of
women activists in anti-communal fora. But at that moment
women did not dare to question them on their views on the Shah
Bano judgment or the triple talaq ( divorce). And even as activists
were being welcomed with open arms during peace rallies they
were apprehensive that riot time allies might become peace time
adversaries. The same men may deny activists access to the
women of their community once 'normalcy returned, for 7
after
all, then their (the activists') work would be 'threatening'.
that the women's movement will have to find its allies. Since
political parties can no longer be rated simplistically as being pro
or anti women, alliances will have to be formed keeping in mind
other parameters — secularism versus communalism, imposi-
tion of majority will upon the minority and commitment to the
154 Flavia Agnes
Notes
1
Jim Masselos, 'The City as Represented in Crowd Action', Economic and
Political Weekly January 1993, Vol 38, no 5, p.182 .
2
For a detailed account of the Bombay riots see two articles titled 'The Winter
of Discontent' (pp. 12-42)and 'A City at War With Its self (p.43-108) by
Clarence Fernandez &
Naresh Fernandes in Dilip Padgaonkar, ed., When
Bombay Burned Delhi, Times of India publications, 1993.
3
Forum Against Oppression of Women, Bombay; Stree Sangharsh, Delhi;
Stree Shakti Sanghatana, Hyderabad; Sachetana, Calcutta.
4
Saheli, Delhi; Vimochana, Banglore; Women's Centre, Bombay; Ahmedabad
Women's Action Forum (A WAG), Ahmedabad.
5
Flavia Agnes 'Protecting Women Against Violence?' Economic and Political
,
Nishan Party.
11
During its early days (in the late seventies) the Shiv Sena popularised the
slogan 'Amchi Mumbai, Marathi Mumbai' (Our Bombay, Marathi Bombay).
This slogan apparently expressed the growing dissatisfaction of the Marathi
middle class youth against 'outsiders' — mainly south Indians and Muslims
who were alleged to have been responsible for the growing unemployment
of 'Maharashtrian' youth. The Sena urged these 'sons of the soil' to take up
arms against the outsiders. It is this population of disgruntled Maharashtrian
youth that forms the backbone of the Sena in Bombay today.
12
When Doordarshan started a programme of late-night screenings of English
classics, the women's wing of the BJP and Shiv Sena stormed the Doordarshan
premises demanding a ban on these films on the grounds that they corrupt
the minds of young children. The portrayal of women's desire was termed as
obscene by these women. Interestingly though, there was no protest from
them against films such as Pati Parmeshwar, Suhagan and others which show
women in subordinate roles. Soon after the riots the same women's groups
led a demonstration against a film sponsored by the National Film Develop-
ment Corporation (NFDC), Dharavi, in which Shabana Azmi was in the lead.
They succeeded in stopping its screening. This time the reasoning was that
Shabana Azmi was 'anti-national'.
13
See Seema Sinha, 'SS-BJP "Emergency" on Bollywood Resented', Indian Ex-
press, 12 May 1993. Some of the conditions accepted by the Film Makers
Combine are:
1. Any member of the film industry who is not a member of the political
party should not criticise or condemn Hindus-involved in the Ayodhya
movement or maha aratis.
2. In case such persons do want to criticise then they should officialy join
a political party of their choice and then exercise their right to criticise
the Hindu movement.
3. No new films should be launched with artistes whose nationalist cre-
dentials are under suspicion.
4. Artistes shown in nude pictures, magazines and the like will be banned
from starring in films by the FMC.
14
Article 44 of the Constitution states. 'The State shall endeavour to secure for
its citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India. Although
Later, through a Letters Patent issued under the Royal Seal in 1861, the High
Courts in the Presidency towns of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were
conferred the jurisdiction over matrimonial matters. It was under this power
that the Indian Divorce Act was passed in 1869.
17
Heera Nawaz, 'Section 10 of the Indian Divorce Act —
Need for Amend-
ment', The Lawyers Vol.3, 1988, No. 10 ,14.
18
Joint Women's Programme, 'Christian Women Demand Reform', Manushi,
No. 33, 1986, 34
19
Law Commission of India. 90th Report on The Grounds of Divorce Among
Christians in India, S.10 Indian Divorce Act, 1989, 1983.
20
Shikhare 'Talaq Mukti Morcha in Maharashtra', Manushi No.32, 1986, 23
,
21
Mohd. Ahmd Khan V Shah Bano Begum AIR 1985 SC 945;
22
The Muslim Women's Act excluded a divorced Muslim woman from the
purview of the beneficial social legislation under Section 125 of the Criminal
Procedure Code of 1973 which provides for maintenance of wives, children
and parents.
23
Articles 25-28 of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion.
24
To give an example in State of Bombay vs. Narasu Appa Mali AIR 1952
Bom. 84 it was contended that banning polygamy among Hindus violated
the provision of equality under article 15 (1) of the Constitution.
25
—
'Law: Is a Father Natural Guardian Hindu Guardianship Act Challenged',
Manushi No.35, 1986, 33; Smt. Madhu Bala vs. Arun Khanna—AIR 1987
Delhi 81 reported in 'Natural Mother as the Custodian of Her Child', The
Lawyers Vol. 4, No. 10, 1989, 17; Shamona Khanna 'Challenging the Unequal
,
reported in 'Hazir Hai', The Laywers, Vol.2, No.ll, 1987, 23. The cases are
pending in the Supreme Court.
27
Section 21 (A) of Special Marriage Act, 1954, Instituted by the Marriage
Laws (Amendment) Act 1976 (68 of 1976) Section 22 (with effect from 27
May, 1976)
28
Section 7 (1) & (2) of Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. The saptapadi marriage is
performed by the bride and bridegroom taking seven steps round the nup-
tial fire. A Hindu marriage is deemed to be solemnised on completion of the
seventh step, as per case law on this issue. A vivahoma is the chanting of
specific hymns, at the nuptial fire, by the officiating priest.
29
Bhau Rao v. State of Maharashtra AIR 1965 SC 1964; S. Varadarajan v. State
of Madras AIR 1965 SC 1564; Priyalatha vs. Suresh AIR 1971 SC 1153.
Redefining the Agenda of the Women's Movement 157
30
Anupama Pradhan v. Sultan Pradhan 1991 Cri. L.J.3216
31
Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956; See P M
Bhakshi, 'Partition
Rights of Female Hiers' The Lawyers Vol.3 No.43, 1988, 14.
32
Archana Parashar, Women and Family Law Reform in India, Delhi, Sage Publi-
cations, 1992, p. 128.
33
Heera Nawaz, 'Equal Property Rights to Women in Karnataka,' vol.3 No 6,
1988, 16.
34
Section 8 (c) of the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act 1956.
35
Section 6 (a) & (b) of Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956.
36
Section 24 & 25 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. See also Shamona Khanna,
'Padmasini's Quest for Justice' The Lawyers, February 1992,25. Also note that
the 1988 amendment Marriage & Divorce Act, 1936 has granted
to the Parsi
Parsi men the right of maintenance under Sections 39 and 40 of the Act
37
Diva Arora ,The Telegraph, 27 December, 1992.
38
Tanika Sarkar ,'The Crucible that Moulds,' Pioneer, 23 December 1992.
39
Manira Alva, 'Women's Issues: The Primary Party positions', May, 1993.
40
The Hindi Tabloid Dopahar ka Samana dated 18 November, 1993 pp.1 and 4
41
Meena Menon 'Tyagi Slams Door on Battered Women' in Times of India, 28
October, 1992 and 'Pact on Definition Arrived - Mental Torture of Women'
Times of India, 6 November, 1992.
42
Madhu Kishwar, 'Safety is Indivisible - The Warning from Bombay Riots',
Manushi No.74-75 P.2.
43
Interviews Muslim women in a documentary by Madhsree Dutta titled T
Live in Behrampada' (1993).
44
Flavia Agnes 'Behrampada - A Besieged Basti', Manushi No. 74-75, 8.
45
Sharmila Joshi, 'Women as Messengers of Peace', Independent 10 March,
1993.
46
Kalpana Sharma 'Can Gender Unity Override Communal Hostility?' The
Hindu, 7 March, 1993.
47
Sunday Observer, 31 January, 1993.
48
— —
'The Bombay Riots the Myths and Realities A Report', by Lokshahi Hak
Sanghatana and Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Bombay,
March 1993 p.87.
49
Ibid.p 10.
50
Thiswas discussed by Dr Vivek Monteiro of the Centre for Indian Trade
Unions (CITU, affiliated to the Communist Party of India, Marxist) and
Meena Menon of the Indian Federation of Trade Unions (IFT, affiliated to the
Communist Party of India, Marxist Lenninist) at a seminar in Bombay (Feb-
ruary 1993) in a panel discussion entitled 'The Nation, State and Indian
Identity.' It was substantiated by veteran trade unionist Bagaram Tulpule
who chaired this session.
51
'The Bombay Riots — the Myths and Realities— A Report,' p. 6
Feminism Inverted
The Gendered Imagery and Real Women
of Hindu Nationalism*
AMRITA BASU
Sadhvi Rithambara
Vijayraje Scindia
and reactive. Given the realities of economic and political life, the
BJP cannot plausibly allege that Muslims dominate Hindus today.
But it can justify Hindu violence by pointing to the sexually
predatory Muslim male and the vulnerable Hindu woman.
164 Amrita Basu
he would not give her the time. For weeks she sat by the
gate and watched his car come and go; he would not
even look in her direction. Finally she lay down on the
road in front of the gate and said that she would rather,
be killed by his car than sit there unnoticed. In the end
the CM saw her and helped her.
BJP, stated:
You greeted me with the slogan 'Dr Joshi, we are with you/
But I would change the slogan to say: 'Mahila shakti,
(woman power) we are with you in struggle!' for the
struggle should begin with you. In India, as in other parts
of the world, women face discrimination ... I have been
inspired by my mother who struggled a lot with her in-
laws . . . Mother struggled for 84 years to put an end to out-
dated traditions in her in-laws' home . . . That's why I am
telling you to struggle too . . . Please forgive me for saying
that you have to change yourselves, for women forget their
own sufferings when they become mothers-in-law. Many
homes celebrate when a boy is born and grieve when a girl
is born . . .you have to change all of this . .
it has taken. The Uniform Civil Code that the BJP envisages
wives and mothers.' Mohini Garg, the all India secretary of the
BJP women's organisation echoed her thoughts: 'We want to
encourage our members not to think in terms of individual
rights but in terms of responsibility to the nation.' 12 Set against
the statements of Atal Behari Vajpayee are those of KR Malkani,
another top-ranking BJP national leader, who extols the elevated
position of women in Indian society and concludes that women's
primary responsibilities are to their families. 13
If in some respects the BJP seeks to strengthen the family, it
she told a reporter from the Indian Express. 15 The vendetta against
Bharati may have reflected resentments on the part of the en-
trenched upper caste male leadership of the party at the meteoric
rise of a lower caste woman.
Conclusion
Are there Uma and Vijayraje
Bharatis, Sadhvi Rithambaras
Scindias in other religious nationalistmovements or do they
emerge from the unique circumstances of Hindu nationalism?
What significance do these models of female leadership have for
'ordinary' Hindu women?
It is difficult to hazard any generalisations about the extent to
the honour of our elders, sisters, mothers, and sons. 'We cannot
auction our nation's honour in the market of party polities', she
cries out in a cassette recording. In a sweeping gesture she links
commercialisation, the commodification of labour, and sexual
exploitation. The antidote to this evil is intense political
engagement combined with asceticism, which renounces material
possessions, sexuality and physical labour.
In her exhortations against corruption, immorality, material-
ism and modernity, Rithambara speaks the language of religious
fundamentalism. However, the movement that has supported
— —
her rise and that she has helped generate is not fundamental-
ist. Rather its political expediency has enabled Hindu national-
the notion that women are inherently weak and passive; they
are often dangerous because they are powerful and vindic-
tive. The varied personalities of female deities in Hinduism
may inspire a range of female persona in political life. While
men dominate organised religious worship, women orches-
observance within the home. Indeed, religious
trate religious
observance has always allowed women considerable opportu-
nity to express their subjectivities as women. Hinduism also
enables renunciation, which may be especially liberating for
women since it allows a rare opportunity for escaping domi-
nation by parents, husbands, and in-laws.
The acceptance by Hindu men of women's political activism
may be related to their belief that we are experiencing a period of
chaos that has both religious and political underpinnings. The
political uncertainty associated with the breakdown of the Con-
gress party provides evidence that we have entered the chaotic
age of kaliyuga in which normative restraints on social conven-
tions can be relaxed. Paradoxically, Hindu nationalists have
helped bring about the chaos of which they speak.
Women may be especially well situated to restoring harmony
because of their liminality. In patriarchal, patrilineal societies
like India, women are considered outsiders to the nuclear fam-
ily; similarly their class status is indeterminate until they marry,
. . . who
can never be communal,are today be-
Hindus,
ing branded communal. They [Muslims] murder with
impunity .And people are silent. But we are defamed
when we cry out in pain!
Uma Bharati adds: "
What makes the logic of the Hindu women who have framed
thisappeal so chilling is that it is wholly self-serving: not only
does it respond to their deep sense of injur}- but it also provides
the pretext for their activism. The constitution of the identities of
Rithambara, Scindia, Bharati and their countless Hindu sisters is
enabled, in other words, by the thrill of wringing imaginary
lemons to destrov real human life.
180 Amrita Basu
Notes
1
The term communalism chauvinism deriving from
refers to partisanship or
religious identity; communal between members of different
conflict occurs
religious communities, most often Hindus and Muslims. The term is mis-
leading because of its assumption that such prejudice and conflict is reli-
gious in nature. However, I use the term in part to differentiate Hindu
nationalism or communalism from relgious fundamentalism with which it
is often confused.
2
See Amrita Chhachhi, 'Forced Identities: The State, Communalism, Funda-
mentalism and Women in India,' in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and
the State, Philadelphia,Temple University Press, 1990; Madhu Kishwar/Nature
of Women's Mobilization in Rural India: An Exploratory Essay,' Economic
and Political Weekly, December 24-31, 1988, 2745-63; for a somewhat different
analysis, Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the
New York, ME Sharpe, 1993; and Vandana Shiva,
Socialist Tradition in India,
Staying Alive:Women, Ecology and Development, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989.
3
Personal interview, Uma Bharati, December 1991. All subsequent quotes
(not attributed to her cassettes) are from here.
4
The term 'BJP combine' refers to the BJP and its affiliates, the RSS and the
VHP, and their affiliates.
5
Susan Wadley, 'Woman and the Hindu Tradition,' Signs, Vol 3,1, 1977, 113-25.
6
Slavoj Zizek, 'Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead/ New Left Review, No
183, 1990, 54.
7
Interview, P Nagarjuna, Sunday Chronicle, May 5, 1991.
8
Personal interview, Prema Rao (pseudonym), Kotah, Rajasthan, 1991.
9
I visited a locality in the BHEL industrial township of Bhopal in January
1993 where the residents described a woman who was a municipal council-
lor and a BJP member. A few weeks earlier she had rushed to the scene of a
riot and goaded Hindu male youth into further violence against Muslims.
See also, Madhu Kishwar, 'Safety is The Warning from Bombay
Indivisible:
Riots,' Kalpana Shah, Smita Shah and Neha Shah, 'The Nightmare of Surat,'
Manushi, 74-75, 1993.
10
See Dipankar Guha, 'Communalism and Fundamentalism: Some Thoughts
on the Nature of Ethnic Politics in India,' Economic and Political Weekly, Vol
XXVI, Nos 11-12, March 1991, 573-82.
11
Personal interview, Mridula Sinha, 1991, New Delhi. All other statements
are based on this interview.
12
Personal interview, Mohini Garg, 1991.
13
Malkani made this statement to a group of women journalists and activists
in New Delhi. It was reported in The Times of India, February 15, 1992.
14
Personal interview, Acharya Giri Raj Kishore, 1992.
15
Indian Express, Feburary 19, 1992.
16
See Lata Mani, 'Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial
India,' in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays
in Colonial History, New Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989.
17
This translation of a cassette by Uma Bharati appears in Madhu Kishwar, 'In
Defence of Our Dharma,' Manushi, No 60, 1990, 4.
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses
Family and Organisation in Hindutva Politics
TANIKA SARKAR
II
politics also emerged, pitted against the colonial state and its
allies —a predominantly European class of industrial capitalists.
Women were prominent occasionally as union organisers and as
working class militants. 5 In the early thirties the revolutionary
terrorists of Bengal began to invite women cadres into their ranks
as full-scale comrades in arms, rather than as mere providers of
logistic support. The women of the Hindu right, therefore, had a
wide array of political alternatives, of models of activism to choose
from. The decision to stick to the politics of the right was, there-
fore, not exercised in a vacuum but it was an informed choice. It
is important to recuperate this counterpoint, since any choice
choice that are associated with the word 'volunteer' are notably
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses 185
cal schedule has always been followed by both the RSS and the
Samiti. There are regular physical training programmes for
women, with a special focus on the martial
including prac-
arts,
tice in shooting. RSS-run schools, similarly, teach exactly the
same course to their boys and girls. When the Samiti was first
established, it was certainly most unusual, if not a transgression,
for respectable women go through such exercises. The only
to
parallel in those times would have been with the terrorist women
of Bengal. Those women, however, were prepared to leave home
while the Samiti originally had no plan of direct political action.
Lakshmibai Kelkar, the founder of the Samiti, was keen that
her girls must have strong, trained bodies. The aspiration seems
curious, given the fact that it was put to no active or public use
for a long time to come. We shall see later that the cult of the
strong physique came to include an extra meaning for women,
over and above that inscribed within the organisation by the
founders. At the same time, body-centred practices for women
have old and varied meanings and values within different cur-
rents of Hindu patriarchy. A variety of physical rites and rituals
meant to preserve her virtue and family welfare are taken to
constitute nearly the entirety of prescribed religious activity for
Hindu woman. Late nineteenth century Hindu revival-
the pious
from whom the RSS drew much inspiration,
ist-nationalists,
added another meaning to such practices. The Hindu woman's
body, hemmed in with scriptural ritual, was imagined as a pure
space that escaped the transformative effects of colonisation,
whereas the Hindu man, seduced by the operations of western
power and knowledge, had surrendered himself and had lost his
autonomy. The woman's body, having passed through the grid
of Hindu ritual exercises, therefore alone remained, for these
Hindus, the site of an existent freedom as well as the future
nation. 9
The Samiti has preserved the accumulated meanings but trans-
formed the essential rituals. The symbolic function of ritual has
been interpreted literally with the mystical notion of female
virtue and power materialistically translated as sheer physical
strength. Possibly the influence of contemporary eugenics was at
work; a healthy feminine body would bear strong children. From
the turn of the century, many high-born militant Hindus have
been anxiously preoccupied with the supposedly higher fertility
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses 187
Ill
The RSS response to the political crisis of the thirties might seem
inappropriate, given the limited base that they could command.
Surely, women of their milieu, of their families, did not require
immediate attention and organisational investment formally,
since their consent to RSS politics was more secure than that of
any other category? The investment would seem blatantly un-
economic unless we have a precise and careful understanding of
its broader strategy and political vision.
ing.
The mother is pivotal to the RSS scheme of mobilising its own
family. Golwalkar also advised her to make 'useful contacts
among the women folk within the neighbourhood and carry out
programmes which would inculcate our cherished ideas among
them and their children/ 14 Mothers, then, are political creatures
and agents and we will not grasp the deeply political import of
this agenda unless we are clear about the directly political and
not merely ideological significance of everyday relations, per-
sonal disposition and habits, of domestic ritual and practice
within the RSS scheme for hegemony, and the full significance of
the much used and key term 'samskaras' in the Sangh vocabulary.
The mother is to instil habits of deference, of obedience, of
respect for the RSS version of patriotism. She should scramble
the child's earliest notions of history, mythology and patriotism
through moral lessons about 'faith in Dharma and pride in our
history', and instructions about 'tirthas and temples'. The impor-
tance of learning them in earliest infancy when critical faculties
are not aroused, of learning them through stories whose format
demands a suspension of questioning and passive listening is
enormous. As to how important the lessons in Dharma and
history, pilgrimages and temples lumped together are, should be
evident in the success of the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign which
pitted a Muslim king against the sacred figure of Ram, and
insisted that the destruction of the Babri Mosque was not only a
religious but also a patriotic duty. One cannot learn these lessons
too young.
IV
In a bitterly ironic inversion of women's former invisibility in the
domain of public violence, large numbers of women have been
extremely active and visible, not only in the rallies and cam-
paigns but even in the actual episodes of violent attacks against
190 Tanika Sarkar
is a limb [of our body], our ornament ... it is the 'chakra' of Lord
Krishna) All kar sevikas were bursting with speech with argu- —
—
ments and descriptions each had an accent very distinctively
her own. Within a hitherto limited social and geographical scope
then, the Ramjanmabhoomi movement seems to have enabled
major breakthroughs in women's political self-activisation,
unwitnessed in earlier communal upsurges. 15
In a curious way the present movement inverts the usual
pattern of symbolisation within national and earlier communal
movements. So far, in both, the fetishised sacred or love object to
be recuperated had been a feminine figure the cow, the ab- —
ducted Hindu woman, the motherland. When we interviewed
B L Sharma secretary of the VHP Indraprastha unit in April
1990, he had woven an entire anti-Muslim tirade around the
figure of the repeatedly raped or threatened Hindu woman. The
Sanatan Dharmi and Arya Samajist office-bearers extended the
image into that of a perpetually exposed and endangered moth-
erland. 16 Here, however, the occupied 'janmabhoomi' belongs
specially to amale deity, and women are being pressed into
and restore it to him, to bring back honour to
action to liberate
Ram. Ram's army of monkeys and squirrels has now acquired a
new combatant and Sita's sex is coming to the rescue of Ram
an inversion of the epic narrative pattern where Ram and his
192 Tanika Sarkar
army had to rescue Sita. The reversal of roles equips the commu-
nal woman with a new and empowering self-image. The woman
has stepped out of a purely iconic status to take up an active
position as a militant.
In this context, the very careful and significant handling of the
Ram lalla (infant Ram) image acquires a new meaning. Stalls in
Ayodhya sell a large number of stickers and posters depicting a
chubby infant baring his pink gums in a toothless smile. Local
legend has it that in 1949, just before the deity miraculously
mosque, a police constable had found
reinstalled itself within the
a dark and lovely child playing by himself in that corner: the
homeless baby had come back home to claim his patrimony. The
VHP video-cassette produced by Dr J K Jain, Bhaye Prakat Kripala,
reproduces the event over a long time, with the child within the
mosque displaying himself in a variety of 'cute' poses and even-
tually stringing a bow. We must remember that the Ramayana
and the Ramkathas resonate with the many losses of Ram: he
loses his kingdom, his father, he is a figure bathed in tears, a
reason, perhaps, why the common man and woman can identify
more with him than with other mythical heroes. The entire series
of deprivations has now been collapsed into the shape of that
irresistible human— the deprived male
idol On top of infant.
that,within the mosque and next to the main deity, an icon of is
VI
The Rashtrasevika Samiti has kept a remarkably low public
profile through the six decades of its existence. Even though it is
one of the oldest women's organisations in the country, its total
membership is about a lakh now and is largely restricted to
traditional RSS and BJP bases —
Maharashtra, Karnataka, and
Andhra Pradesh. The Delhi wing was formed in 1960 and now
includes about 2,000 members. Shakhas (a local branch in the
RSS, where members and recruits meet for education and train-
ing) are located almost entirely in middle class areas: Karolbagh,
Patel Nagar, Janakpuri, Naraina Vihar, R K Puram, Lajpat Nagar,
and Kamla Nagar. Volunteers come from enterprising trading
families or from middle-ranking government service back-
grounds. The VHP Manila Mandal, which started operating in
Delhi from the 1980s, has about 500 members. The two mass
fronts of the VHP —
the 3ajrang Dal and the Durga Vahini are —
strictly segregated. 17
194 Tanika Sarkar
VII
members that I talked to had male relatives in the RSS. In fact the
striking ease and self-confidence that animate the very vocal
participation of even junior office-bearers in a discussion with
their elders may partly be explained by the status of their male
relatives within the Sangh. This might carry greater importance
than the order of ranking within the Samiti itself.
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses 197
VIII
Somewhat like the Sangh, but much more emphatically so, the
Samiti leaves alone charity or social welfare work and has no
interest in union activities. Numerical expansion or extensive
mobilisation has not, then, so far been the primary concern
which explains their low growth rate. It is an intensive physical
and ideological training-centre out of which a small group of
hand-picked cadres is regularly selected and sent out to circulate
among the affiliated organisations and movements.
This kind of intensive mobilisation works best during its
initial, formative phase within a 'same class' situation where
her to drop shakha work for the first few years after marriage,
until her status in her new home is firmly established and her
Samiti friends are accepted by the entire family. If, however, the
in-laws still discourage a connection with the old shakha, she is
again not advised to assert her choice. Her old Samiti members,
of the local branch, keep in close touch with her and her family.
She is given a few easy exercises that may be done even within a
fairly crowded home and she is told to teach them to women
relatives in the new family. She is also advised to establish
herself as an ideal counsellor and arbiter to enable her to infor-
mally discuss the ideas she received during her shakha days or
which her Samiti members have kept her attuned to. One can see
how useful such a loose and informal network would be in
inculcating notions of 'Hindutva' and Hindu rashtra over a long
period of time, and then, swiftly linking them up with a particu-
lar agitation which would find a ready support base without any
direct and immediately organisational investment.
Gradually, the woman's reputation as a dependable adviser
and friend in need will spread to the women in the neighbourhood
and enlarge and stabilise a circle of dependents and listeners.
For the women within the kinship network and the immediate
neighbourhood, the presence of such a woman ensures an infor-
mal forum for the discussion of general topics. In this way she
fills up a crucial gap and appeases a very real hunger for serious
male's lust and the Hindu male's cowardice), the official text
overlays that version by the more amorphous aim of 'Hindutva
jagaran'.
The self-definitions of the Samiti place primary emphasis on
physical courage, on a trained, hardened female body. The Sangh
agrees with its supreme importance and then goes on to list
jagaran.'
The compulsion becomes clearer when we con-
force of the
sider the milieu from which the Samiti mobilises its cadres. As
we have seen earlier, sevikas come from upwardly-mobile, trad-
ing or middle ranking service sectors, which are fertile breeding
grounds for dowry murders. Women's organisations deal with
huge numbers of divorce or maintenance suits at this social
level. They are familiar with the violence and oppression that
flourish against women here. In the large northern cities, if not in
the small towns so far, education and professional opportunities
for women have come late but they have come in big way. Nor
are families opposed to women's employment, since they are a,
valuable source of extra income. Thrust into public and mixed
spaces for the first time, women encounter all the time, new
women's movement can resist and change it. It does not equate
the women's movement in India with the Hindu movement.
Whereas the earlier article I have referred to, was highly critical
of the international women's movement as allegedly being shaped
by a corrupt, westernised modernity, the latter legitimises them.
Yet another article, 'Parivartit Parivesh Me Bharatiya Nari', is
extremely critical of Indian men for obstructing the entry of
women into politics. Entering politics is described as a condition
of protecting women's rights. A basic conflict of gender interests
is seen to underlie social divisions of other kinds, and communal
Conclusion
One important way of looking at women's relationship to the
right —
and it is a way that the RSS itself prefers to project — has
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses 209
ture and the shopping arcades, seek out things that are specially
meant for themselves. Older ways of feminine domesticity and
patriarchal control face new strains —
the more so, since the new
consumerism is largely the basis of the new middle class pros-
perity and self-advancement. And the Sangh parivar is, above all,
based on this middle class.
At this moment it becomes imperative to recover and articu-
late explicitly the submerged patriarchal norms. The televised
version of the Ramayana epic which was made to coincide with
the building up of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, restated the
older codes of patriarchal command through the irresistible,
erotic appeal of the self-abnegating figure of Sita. Also, now that
themovement has transcended the boundaries of carefully trained
Samitis and RSS families, and encompasses much of the urban
middle class which, despite its support, is insufficiently indoctri-
nated in the broader RSS samskaras, controls need to be spelt out
precisely. More of its women are joining white-collar jobs and
that has the threat that they may succumb to the more militant
varieties of trade union politics. A broader normative disciplin-
ing is a safeguard against that.
The language in which the Hindu right restates its patriarchal
purposes points to a larger imperative. The assertion of the
greater dignity, even sacrality of the chaste and good Hindu
woman covertly substitutes for, and ultimately displaces, a de-
mand for equal rights. The Hindu right depends on a seemingly
radical contestation of 'modern secularism', a critique of moder-
nity that opposes the liberal theories of rights that it considers an
alien and alienating colonising influence. In their place it tries to
claim the existence of 'traditional' notions of community obliga-
tions and mutuality. The claim can establish itself through a
suppression of the historical realities of caste and gender asym-
metries. The non-historicised. claim of a sustaining, nurturant
Hindu community and tradition is then used to undercut radical
attacks on Hindu gender and social hierarchies, of demands for
equal rights and affirmative action. However, it does not fron-
tally oppose these demands since that will demystify the notion
of a nurturant Hindu community. It will also reduce eventually
the potential mass base of the right which cannot hope to ride a
v
Ram wave' for ever. It therefore concentrates attack on the
notion of equal rights on different grounds. It denounces its
214 Tanika Sarkar
Notes
1
Left political observers seem to be reluctant to focus on aspects which do not
relate to the material and class base of political formation. It is a curious
reluctance, since Marx, in his historical writings, analysed the practice and
character of decisive political actors with great care and insight.
2
A telling example will be Gyan Pandey. His focus on a rather undifferentiated
and monolithic colonial discourse and its nationalist derivatives completely
ignores the Indian right as a participant in the making of communalism.
3
From the early nineties Indian journalism produced an impressive corpus on
the BJP.
4
Tapan Basu et al, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right,
Delhi, Disha Books, 1993.
5
See Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, An Illustrated Account of the Women's
Movement and Feminism in India, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1993.
6
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, Delhi, Macmillan, 1983.
7
M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Bangalore, Vikrama Prakashan, 1980.
8
See Purushottam Aggarwal's article in this volume.
9
Tanika Sarkar, 'Rhetoric against the Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial
Reason and the Death of a Child Wife,' in Economic and Political Weekly, 4
September, 1993.
10
PK Datta, 'Dying Hindus: Production of Hindu Communal Commonsense
in Early 20thCentury Bengal' in Economic and Political Weekly, 19 June 1993.
11
See Claudia Koonz, 'Mothers in Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany,' in
Beidenthal and Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History.
12
Golwalkar, op. cit.
13
For my interviews with office-bearers, see "The Woman as Communal Sub-
ject: Rashtra Sevika Samiti and Ramjanmabhoomi Movement' in Economic
and Political Weekly, 31 August 1991.
14
Golwalkar, op cit.
I am indebted to P'K. Datta for the taped interviews.
15
16
P K Datta et al, 'Understanding Communal Violence: Nizamuddin Riots,' in
Economic and Political Weekly, 10 November, 1990.
17
Interview with office-bearers of Rashtra Sevika Samiti in December 1991
and January 1992.
18
Interviews with office bearers of Janwadi Mahila Samiti in December 1990.
Heroic Women, Mother Goddesses 215
Interviews with Samiti and VHP Mahila Mandal office bearers in January
1991.
:i
The Women as Communal Subject, op. cit.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Interview with her family members at Khurja, March 1991.
25
'The Woman as Communal Subject', op. cit.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
P.K. Datta's interview with kar sevikas at Ayodhya, op cit.
31
Anita et al, see article in this volume.
I am indebted to Dr Zoya Hasan for this observation.
Hindu Nationalism and
the Construction of Woman
The Shiv Sena Organises Women in Bombay 1
SIKATA BANERJEE
this hit the headlines the next day, even my wife told me
'I should offer you bangles now What are we? In our
7
.
7
own country Hindus are being burnt and everybody got
Hindu Nationalism and the Construction of Woman 217
down into the street and the situation went out of con-
trol. Thousands of women also came down. They were
so hostile. So hostile. 8
women. 9
This paper focuses on the feminisation of violence in Bombay
and its implications for female activism. Violent feminine action,
are as wife and mother. This phenomenon signals that the poli-
tics of Hindutva is creating a social niche for women that chal-
lenges the notion of female emancipation Indian feminists have
been trying to disseminate in India. They view the Shiv Sena's
successful mobilisation of women as a direct threat to their
efforts as it only offers a limited sense of emancipation and
ignores the larger issue of patriarchal oppression. 12 1 realise the
term 'feminism' includes a vast array of theoretical perspectives
that range from Marxist feminism to Postmodern feminism. 13
However, all would agree that the role of women in the family 14
underlies the complex structure of patriarchy. Women must
transcend their roles in the private realm as wives and mothers
to achieve any sort of liberation. In contrast, the Shiv Sena has
introduced a notion of female power that glorifies women's roles
as wives and mothers.
This paper will not judge whether the Shiv Sena's view of
emancipation is 'false' or whether the feminist perspective yields
The Shiv Sena's success in mobilising women is
'true' liberation.
of concern because in the name of Hindutva women have com-
mitted violent acts that implicate them in the death of over a
thousand people in Bombay. If feminists (or others) wish to
challenge the Sena's successful mobilisation of women, a close
analysis of its political practices and the context within which
they play out is in order.
Theoretical framework
Many political scientists have pondered the answer to the ques-
tion Ted Gurr posed so succinctly: Why (do) Men Rebel? or in
this case: Why (do) Women Rebel or Organise? 15
27
The failure of the 1982-83 labour strike, which was a last
ditch effort by the textile workers who formed a majority of the
222 Sikata Banerjee
to touch him but after the riots for whatever reason, the
army decided to arrest him. At that time thousands of
women, at twelve o'clock in the night, at one call came out
and slepton the road so the military jeep could not enter
This is a sense of belonging (to) a collectivity 37
women. Women enjoy this freedom and at the same time are not
faced with the alienating battle against the entrenched mores of
society.
In these times of extreme cynicism becomes tempting to end
it
Conclusion
Materialist and /or structural explanations fail to interrogate the
role of constructed identity in political mobilisation since they
assume identity is immutable and hence of little theoretical inter-
est. By adopting a feminist concern with the construction of
woman, I highlighted the Shiv Sena's vision of woman and the
implications of this ideal for female mobilisation. But a focus on
the creation of identity does not necessarily imply a rejection of
material and structural factors. Indeed, the impact of the Sena's
image of woman was buttressed by structural factors such as
grassroots contact, provision of economic benefits and focus on a
homogeneous mass base.
230 Sikata Banerjee
Notes
The researchfor this paper was made possible by a grant from the Shastri
Indo-Canadian Institute.
This is a Sanskrit word which loosely translated means 'Hinduness'. How-
ever, in India it has become synonymous with militant Hindu nationalism
which claims that the only true India is Hindu and minorities (read Mus-
lims) can live in India only if they accept Hindu cultural dominance .
The Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian People's Party, is a national party
espousing an ideology of Hindu nationalism.
Times of India, January 15, 1993
A small apartment building.
Notice how the Shiv Sena leader makes an explicit dichotomy between 'Us'
(Hindu) and 'Them' (Muslim).
This observation implies that the Hindu men have become weak like women,
(hence the offer of bangles) and have failed to protect Hindu lives.
Personal interview, Pramod Navalkar, Shiv Sena leader, April 20, 1993.
Teesta Setalvad, 'Giving the Riots a Human Face,' Telegraph, April 5, 1993,
Ekta, Report of Communal Riots in fogeshwari East, December, 1990, January,
1991.
The Shiv Sena terrorises Bombay by extorting protection money from small
businessmen, and participating in many criminal activities. The city police
do not care to prevent this as they are either involved in such activities or
fear Shiv Sena retaliation.
See Madhu Kishwar, 'Religion at the Service of Nationalism: An Analysis of
Sangh Parivar Politics,' in Manushi. no. 76, May-June, 1993. Also, Madhu
Kishwar, 'Safety is Indivisible: The Warning from the Bombay Riots,' and
Flavia Agnes, 'Behrampada —A Beseiged Basti,' Manushi. January-April,
1993; Amrita Chhachhi, 'The State, Religious Fundamentalism and Women:
Trends in South Asia', in Economic and Political Weekly, March 18, 1989. See
Tanika Sarkar, 'Women's Agency Within Authoritarian Communalism: The
Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ramjanambhoomi,' in Gyanendra Pandey ed v
Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today. New Delhi: Viking
Press, 1993.
It would be impossible to cite all the work on Indian feminism in all its
richness and variety. However, see Maria Mies, Indian Women and Patriarchy:
Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working Women, Concept Publishing
Co. New Delhi, 1980 and The Lace Makers ofNarsapur: Indian Housewives tious
Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India/ Cultural Critique, Fall, 1987
for interesting theoretical work on the construction of 'woman' in India
within western and colonial discourses.
I realise the notion of 'family' is contested as Indian feminists have protested
few) because their role in the domestic arena subjects them to the power of
husbands, sons or fathers. Further, even Marxist feminists would argue that
the position of women in the domestic arena makes them vulnerable to
capitalist exploitation which is linked to patriarchy.
15
See Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel Princeton University Press, Princeton,
N.J., 1970.
16
Irefer to works such as Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolution, New York
Cambridge University Press, 1979., Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revo-
lution, Reading, Mass, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1978., Jeffrey Paige,
Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underde-
veloped World, New York, The Free Press, 1975. Also, in the Indian context see
Leslie Caiman, Protest in Democratic India, Boulder, Westview Press, 1985.
17
James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia, New York and London, Yale University Press, 1976.
11
See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, New Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1983, and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered. New Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1988, for two excellent analyses of this reconstruction of
Hinduism.
19
Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's
Liberation Movement, New York, Random House, 1970.
20
Donna Harraway, 'A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science Technology, and So-
cialist Feminism in the 1980s,' in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism and
35
This interpretation is common within folk culture. But for a scholarly look at
Hindu symbolism, see Alain Danielou, The Gods of India: Hindu Polytheism,
New York, Inner Traditions International, 1985.
36
See Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1971 which argues that small, homogenous, groups are a pre-
condition for successful collective action.
37
Madhusree Datta, personal interview.
38
Shenaz Shaikh, Founder of Awaz E Nisvan, personal interview, March 21,
1993.
39
My emphasis.
40
Madhushree Datta, personal interview.
The Woman Shiv Sainik
and her Sister Swayamsevika
TEESTA SETALVAD
did. They were looking for a place where they could get
together with other boys in exciting activities. I don't
was the main reason boys joined
think the political factor
. we weren't fully conscious of what we were doing
. .
Notes
1
Teesta Setalvad, 'Women Jump Feet First into the Communal Mainstream/
The Sunday Observer, January 3-9, 1993.
2
Hundreds of women Shiv Sainiks 'gheraoed' and assaulted lawyer M P
Vashi, for challenging the inflammatory mobilisation by Shiv Sena candi-
dates during elections.
3
Sucheta Mazumdar, Tor Rama and Hindutva: Women and Right Wing
Mobilisation in Contemporary India/ COSAW Bulletin, Vol. 8, 1994.
4
Illustrated Weekly of India, October 1992.
5
Interviews held by this author in the course of research and documentation
about the riots.
6
Extensive interviews with Ammu Abraham, Secretary, Women's Centre,
and many other grassroots feminists.
7
Ibid.
8
The author wrote a column on this subject in the Gujarathi daily Samkaleen
during the year 1986-87.
9
Women's Centre records and through accounts of its Committee members,
especially Ammu Abraham.
10
Jaywanti Mehta in an interview with Teesta Setalvad.
11
Three leading Swayamsevikas (who requeseted anonymity) in an interview
with Teesta Setalvad.
12
JA Curran, Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the RSS, Interna-
tional Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1951.
13
William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, Chicago, Quardrangle
Books, 1965.
14
Jaywanti Mehta in an interview with Teesta Setalvad.
15
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, 'Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: State and
the Abduction of Women During Partition/ Economic and Political Weekly,
II
It must be pointed out here that, unlike the VHP, the Samiti's
Women, Hindutva and the Politics of Caste 253
activities are not socially and culturally integrated into the life of
the local community. 8 The VHP's broad Hindu religious and
cultural appeal has won it easy adherents while the Samiti's
strictand disciplined notions of patriotism and nationalism have
not been able to enthuse the 'ordinarily religious' woman. Of
course, like the VHP, the Samiti works in tandem with religious
and cultural organisations but it has proved to be a less attractive
option for women than the VHP.
It remains to be seen how and through what means the
explicitly communal content of the Hindutva combine's political,
social and cultural posturings is encoded as a gender issue.
Tanika Sarkar has pointed to 'the very careful and significant
handling of the baby Ramalala image' in Ayodhya discourses.
She observes that Ram as puranic hero is remembered in the
shadow of his various losses. He loses his father, mother, his
brothers, his kingdom, his wife . 'An entire series of
. .
Ill
interpreted to mean
deprivation and, secondly, Tamil brahmins
who, like upper castes elsewhere, claimed descent from Aryans
in the early modern period now see themselves as the 'jews').
What is the gendering of the terms of
of significance here is
IV
In contemporary Tamil Nadu, the non-brahmin /Dra vidian
movement lives not so much in the political practice of the
parties that have grown out of it as it does in the historically
evolved commonsense of the Tamil people. It was this
commonsense that mediated perceptions of Mandal and Masjid
in the Tamil country and proved a deterrent to violent and
paranoiac reactions as were witnessed elsewhere in the country.
Salient aspects of this commonsense include: a critical relationship
with brahminical Hinduism; Tamil cultural pride; opposition to
Hindi; notions of social justice, particularly in relation to caste
determined deprivations. This commonsense has, of course, not
remained unchanged. Some of its features have been altered,
others re-interpreted but at no time in the past has the non-
brahmin legacy suffered such mutations as have come to afflict it
7
at the current historical conjuncture. In fact, it would be no
exaggeration to say non-brahmin commensense stands in danger
of being fractured, of being split at its heart today.
Recently in the Tamil Nadu Assembly while
State Legislative
replying to allegations by an opposition party member that the
AIADMK was dabbling in religion and attempting to forge an
alliance with the BJP, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu,
Jayalalitha, replied that if her popularity was growing it was
because of the steps taken by her to maintain the temples of the
state. She also said that she had received a large number of
laudatory letters on this account. When her attention was drawn
to a speech by E V Ramasamy Periyar where he had attacked
Hinduism, she replied that Tt was natural for parties and persons
to change their view in tune with the times. Just because EVR
Women, Hindutva and the Politics of Caste 259
Notes
Tanika Sarkar, "The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti
and the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement', Economic and Political Weekly, August
31, 1991.
In conversation with V Geetha and TV Jayanthi. Information about
Rashtrasevika Samiti and VHP activities in Tamil Nadu has been put together
out of interviews, informal conversations with women from these
organisations and with BJP activists in Madras as well as occasional
publications of the RSS, BJP and VHP.
Vilakku (lamp) and Saradu (also knows as thali and mangalsutra) signify
auspicious marital status (as we, no doubt, know from our films). Thali exists
as a veritable transcendental signifier in the Tamil cultural universe. Its
power of signification is enormous and a symbol is resonant with such
meanings that even a bad and wayward husband partakes of its sanctity and
is redeemed on that account. Cinema has, further, granted the thali an aura
and an invincibility and it figures as almost a character with a life of its own
in Tamil films.
Writing of the power of ethnic appeal, Stanely J Tambiah, ("The Nation State
in Crisis and the Rise of Ethno-Nationalism', The Thatched Patio, September/
October 1992) notes that ethnic sentiments are experienced through various
socio-cultural practices. These practices comprise 'a whole repertoire of
performative devices and vehicles that are taken from public culture and
popular religion and are deployed in mass participatory politics; such as
processions, borrowing elements from religious pilgrimage, bhakthi ecstasy
and 'holy war' . which glorify one's own kind and demonise the enemy.' It
. .
now on behalf of the Lions Club unit she represented, had joined us in our
preparations for an anti-communal march. To her, the shilanyas procession
was a mere 'religious' event and she obviously did not or would not see it as
a politically and communally volatile act. Nor did she seem to be aware of
the relationship between the shilanyas and the subsequent incidences of
communal violence in Tamil Nadu.
9
Tanika Sarkar, ibid.
10
Hindumitran, September 1992.
11
The Hindutva combine's successes in Kanyakumari district of southern
Tamil Nadu must be, at least partially, attributed to the ubiquity of Christian
fundamentalist propaganda in the area.
12
Hindumitran, September 1992.
13
V Geetha and SV Rajadurai, work in progress.
14
It is significant that assertions of non-brahmin identity in Tamil Nadu have,
the most significant index of their superior status. In the course of the reform
debates that raged in Madras over the Post-Puberty Marriage Bill — the bill
was introduced in the Madras Legislative Council in 1915 — the orthodox
among the brahmins argued that raising the age of marriage for brahmin
women would either increase the number of spinsters in the community or
encourage licentious behaviour amongst women. Whereupon many non-
brahmins among whom pre-puberty marriages were rare, indignantly
wondered whether their daughters were any the less chaste for having
married late!
16
Those of us who have grown up in a brahmin household in Madras carry
memories of voices that used to drop to a whisper while uttering the word
shudra or paraya; of faces that twisted into a grimace while referring to the
'low-caste' origins of many a DMK leader. In most brahmin households,
children grow up thinking of all non-brahmins as crude, coarse and vulgar
and it is an article of faith with most brahmin women that all the terrible
things that are likely to happen to women take place 'out there' and not in
good, brahmin homes. While helping victims of domestic violence regain
their confidence and self-worth some of us have had the experience of
listening to painfully defensive stories that usually ended with, 'How could
this happen in a brahmin household?'.
17
V Geetha and SV Rajadurai, 'Neo-Brahminism: An International Fallacy?',
Women, Hindutva and the Politics of Caste 269
This essay has a history. It will explain how two texts — a diary
of the anti-Mandal agitation in Delhi University kept by a woman
student-activist and the audio-cassette of the Mahaloya, a hymn-
cum-recital celebrating the goddess Durga —
came to inhabit
one story.
The diarist is an upper caste, middle class woman from Ben-
gal, studying at Miranda House, an undergraduate college for
women affiliated to Delhi University. The diary came into our
hands towards the close of 1990, when the agitation was disinte-
grating. It ends on a note of contained disillusion.
For some time we had been interested in the myth of the
Hindu goddess Durga, embodiment of militant energy which is
glorified: goddess as warrior. And particularly its textualisation
in the Mahaloya cassette since it is so popular in Delhi.
Suddenly it seemed urgent to bring the two texts together, to
ture. They describe the style of the senior leader of the Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh whom they interviewed as quiet, deploy-
ing parables. 'There was a striking absence of reference to any
basic text.' 2 These organisations have appropriated the goddess
Durga, evidently in a move to match the warrior god Ram. The
Vishwa Hindu Parishad has named its women's wing the Durga
Vahini (army). Of the six festivals adopted by the Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh the Navaratri festival, which is centred on
the worship of Durga, is one.
The reading together of these two discrete texts, diary and
myth, is thus a happenstance constituted by a moment of his-
tory. It is a reading which is at the same time an intervention.
The Durga myth as it is disseminated in rightist readings pro-
duces the 'true woman' of Hindu tradition. Mythic narrative is
licensed to mix the 'real' with the 'imaginary'. Rational dis-
course keeps the two orders of telling separate. So that when it
suppresses the involvement of the subject in the production of
knowledge as the reality it is complicit with the operations of the
former. Thus secular and religious discourses collaborate to
engender the subject. The subsidiary myths and stereotypes
spawned by this co-habitation exert compelling power over
women in the Academy, neuterising female militancy to secure
consent for patriarchal politics.
The diary, which we scrutinise in section I, is written as an
'objective' account of the agitation. The discourse of objectivity
is institutionalised in the Academy and interpellates a unitary
subject. Weargue that in the act of writing itself, this subject
fractures. Four loose sheets, enclosed in the diary, abruptly in-
terrupt its narrative and instal a resisting subject. Can this resis-
tance be productively directed under mythical sanction? Activists
must be wary of rightist readings of the Durga myth which
masquerade as the right reading. We find that the Mahaloya as it
is popularly received promotes a patriarchal ideology. Section II
students were taken after lengthy discussion lasting well into the
evening/night when women could not be present.* Did the
women resent this? Does the passive voice allow their resent-
ment at marginalisation to remain unexpressed? The entry of
September 3 will say: 'after 25 days of the movement one does
not know its manifesto even if it has been chalked out, one is
. . .
*Thiswas a problem with the Teachers Association too until it was resolved at a
stormy meeting some years ago: the time of voting was fixed at a reasonable hour
and announced in advance.
Resisting Women 277
return to August 24, and break open the silence. They are repro-
duced below in full.
—
people had joined us people from IIT [Indian Institute
of Technology], South Campus, Delhi University etc.
The crowd had really swelled. We had hardly moved a
few paces than we encountered a police barricade. They
just had a rope to make the barricade though the police
and women police were armed. I along with a lot of
others was still under the illusion that the police were
actively supporting us since in the University campus
they seemed quite supportive. I was not scared of the
police as such. After some slogan shouting in the road
near the barricade the decision was taken to try & ap-
proach Parliament through some other road. So the chain
now moved on. We were standing in one file in the
middle of the road. The movement was very slow. When-
ever we saw water taps we wet our dupattas since the
temperature was rising quite steadily.
Roads were inevitably getting blocked because people
formed groups to chat or just sit down. There was one
police jeep around with one driver and two more offi-
cials init. They were trying to clear the road. All of a
ting near us. The chaos really started when the AMCF
[Anti-Mandal Commission Forum] workers bought some
fruits and distributed them in lieu of lunch. Some people
just went mad trying to get hold of those few apples and
bananas. This was presumably the lunch time in the
various offices like PTI [Press Trust of India], Red Cross,
etc. A lot of officers tried doing some charity —
towards
girls only. They wanted to give money or buy some
fruits. We refused politely but firmly. After some time
they got the message, I suppose, since they moved off
and just stood aside to watch the great 'hangama' [show].
The central committee members by now had come to
the decision that just waiting there would not be of any
use so the only recourse was to try and break /cross the
police barricade. Several students went forward and
then all hell broke loose. Everybody was running and
trying to save one's skin. There were police everywhere
firing tear-gas shells and charging ahead with lathis,
[canes] rifles etc. and hitting whoever came in the way-
whether boy or girl. There were no women police any-
where. There were lots of girls who had been sitting
around me but had run inside one of the buildings to
save themselves. I thought I could survive staying where
I was. Moreover my room-mate (whom I had half coaxed
and half bullied into going) was stuck now since people
were running and jumping over us. So the three of us
(my room-mate, Jyotsna and me) just put our heads
down and tried to save ourselves. There was a proper
stampede going on. Suddenly one guy who was himself
running from the police just stood over us and this
stopped people from coming over us. A policemen came
and hit him hard quite a few times. We started scream-
ing at the policeman and this brought him to his senses.
He stopped to look at us for a moment and this gave us a
chance to run and the guy too. We ran inside a building
too but the acrid fumes of the tear-gas were everywhere.
I covered my eyes and nose with the wet dupatta but one
tions of the street but most middle class women still hesitate to
join them and are inhibited in their behaviour there. The diarist
had 'half-coaxed and half bullied' her room-mate into joining.
Significantly the word 'street' does not occur in the diary; it is
always 'the road'. Thus the street is a site where the myths of
rightist discourse ('A woman's place is the home') and their
contestations by feminist discourse are both available, produc-
ing different meanings and mediating practices.
Rightist discourse about women is operative through patriar-
chal stereotypes of the Good Woman which dictate codes of
dress and speech. A woman must be covered ('A woman is
defined by her body'). The diary had made no mention of the
dupatta or veil. The loose sheets note that all women were wear-
ing them irrespective of dress ensemble. The dupatta is part of a
—
particular ensemble of dress the Shalwar-Khameez (shirt and
long pants). The loose sheets specifically state that it was worn
by almost everybody 'irrespective of what [dress ensemble] they
were wearing.' Clearly this signals; the diarist attributes its use
to the heat
—'mainly'. The modifier suggests there may have
— —
been other conservative reasons. Speech codes assign women
to a linguistic space demarcated from that of street language. It
is arguable that the diarist's fury at the police officer's language
'we made the guys go off as well' and from the police 'all the —
girls created an uproar and begged them to get out'.
The relationship with the police demonstrates how the stereo-
type of woman as essentially peace-loving positioned both men
and women. 'They were ready to beat us also but they gave us a
certain amount of time to get out and run'. The diary entry of the
same day recalls that 'the guys were court arrested but the girls
were allowed to go peacefully.' 'There was general chaos while
we (girls) were sitting quietly on one side of the pavement.'
'Several guys who got beaten up tried to throw stones at the
police which agitated the police all the more. We restrained the
guys and made them get out of a side gate.' Policemen were
evidently compelled into some kind of dialogue with the women,
who used their gendered status to protect their male colleagues
'.. they were being beaten. We begged the police to get out.
. . .
they refused and said they wanted to get hold of the guys.
Finally the police went off and we made the guys go off as well.'
But there is a sense of power that permeates this paragraph and
it seems to issue from the successful translation of the stereotype
this?
'. . .When the forces propelling people's actions have not been
theorised as reducing to biology or society, they have been seen
making/ 9 The notion of invest-
as a product of rational decision
ment is proposed as a productive meeting of paradigms.
Holloway draws on Lacanian theory to explain 'the somewhat
anarchic character of desire: desire as a motive force or process
is common to all signification .... Significations are a product
of a person's history and what is expressed or suppressed in
signification is made possible by the availability and hegemony
of discourses.' The diarist's choice of rational objective discourse
is compelled by the hegemony it enjoys in the Academy. But it is
II
Then, in 1958, torrential rains flooded the city and AIR transport,
grounded all over it, was not available to pick up the artists from
their homes and bring them to the studios. In desperation the
police were approached; they gallantly agreed to put their vans
at the disposal of AIR for the purpose. The programme went on
the air on time. But AIR's troubles were not quite over; the artists
were squeamish about returning to their homes in these vans
(Black Marias) in broad daylight since they were used to trans-
port criminals! Eventually, in the fifties, when high quality long
lasting tapes were manufactured, the Mahaloya was recorded on
audiocassette and became available in the market. It is now
widely played at Bengali gatherings at the start of the festival.
How does the Mahaloya process the Durga myth?
Ill
The terms here need attending to for these are the terms of
difference operating in society through which submission to
phallocentricity is effected. If icons represent what are believed
to be the essential features of a deity then what does
Mahisasuramardini's popular oleograph signify? How do her
worshippers decipher this symbol of socially recognised contra-
dictions? How do they know her story?
Mahaloya literally means 'great dwelling'. In the Hindu reli-
gious calender it refers to the amavasya (the 14th night of the dark
phase of the moon when it is darkest) immediately before Durga
Puja. Since 1950 however the word has gradually also come to
mean the special annual broadcast by All India Radio at four in
the morning of this day for most urban Bengalis. This hour-long
broadcast is titled Mahisasuramardini. It comprises of a Bengali
narration which breaks into Sanskrit now and then and songs
sung in Bengali and Sanskrit which we shall call hymns, as these
are formal invocations of the goddess, so as to distinguish them
from the Bengali songs. The Bengali narration is in a male voice
while the songs and the hymns, at times solo, at times a chorus,
use both male and female voices. The icon of the goddess
Mahisasuramardini described earlier, is installed for the annual
religious festival five days from the broadcast. Produced ini-
tially by All India Radio, today the text is also available in the
form of a two-cassette pack, marketed by HMV, one of the
leading recording companies in India as well as the T-series
company usually associated with audio piracy. The text ac-
cepted and by implication endorsed by the state All India —
—
Radio is a government controlled medium as well as the domi-
nating commercial bourgeoisie, is popular and readily available,
shall call the text of the broadcast Mahaloya from now as this is
language, Bengali.
(shankar), the sword (fcflfl/ dez;a), the bow and the arrow (surya)
the discus (vishnu) and the lion (himalya) which carries her to the
battlefield. And so the demon is defeated and the goddess cel-
ebrated as a figure of restitution in the right cause. The middle
class Bengali listeners of the Mahaloya we spoke to in Delhi said
unanimously that the deification of female militancy in the form
of Mashisasuramardini proved that Hinduism as practised in —
—
Bengal at any rate accomodates feminism as it recognises mili-
tant female energy and allows it to erupt in the public space
during states of Emergency.
What is it way? It
that allows the Mahaloya to be read this
uses, as we have two languages, Sanskrit and Bengali, two
said,
modes, narration and songs, and voices, male as well as female.
The meaning of Shakti that is popularly realised depends pre-
cisely on this apparently polyphonic but univocal structure. The
meaning making process is always resident in a specific histori-
cal moment of powered relations and so the goddess' represen-
tation is crafted out of the relation between the two languages,
two modes and the voices. The narrative component in any
ritual attempts to rearticulate values and goals in a culturally
meaningful structure. In this instance it is the sequential plot of
the Bengali narration which becomes the intelligible whole gov-
292 Zakia Pathak and Saswati Sengupta
about female nature. Our purpose has not been to rescue the text
from patriarchy and restore it to the distraught mother but to
prove that knowledge of female nature is textual representation
and therefore constituted in history which allows intervention
and the possibility of change.
In concluding
An opposition has been constructed between the 'elite theory' of
the Academy and the 'real world' of action for social change.
That opposition needs to be problematised if it is to be retained.
As the introductory section of this essay told it, it was our
constitution as historical subjects in the 'real world' post-Hindutva
that plotted two discrete texts, diary and myth, into a single
story. The story narrates how 'real experience' is produced.
Stories are notoriously difficult to end; endings are open or
arbitrary. We end ours with the liturgy of our faith in theory.
Without feminist theory, we could not have got started on our
story. It taught us to valorise women's speech. Our diffidence in
giving so slight a document as a student's diary so much impor-
tance was matched by that of the diarist, expressed as nervous
amusement at the serious uses to which we were putting it. We
would not have had the temerity to give it evidential status had
it not been for the subaltern theory of the fragment. We also
Notes
1
Tapan Basu et al, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, A Critique of the Hindu Right
(Tracts for the Times 1) New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1993.
2
Ibid, p. 38.
3
I borrow this phrase from Valerie Walkerdine in Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity,
Identity and Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 4.
the Body,
4 Jonathan Culler, 'Literary Competence/in Jane Tompkins, ed., Reader Re-
sponse Criticism, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 116.
5
Emile Benveniste, in Hayden White, 'The value of Narrativity in the Repre-
sentation of Reality', in WJT Mitchell, ed., On Narrative, London and Chi-
cago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, 1981 p. 3. Benveniste is distinguishing
histoire and discours, the involvement of the subject. In the former 'Truly
there is no longer a narrator. The events are chronologically recorded as they
appear on the horizon of the story. Mere no one speaks. The events seem to
tell themselves.'
6
Brigitte Berger, 'Multiculturalism and the Modern University.' Special Issue,
No 4, Fall 1993, Boston University Press, p. 521.
7
Brigitte Berger, Ibid.
8
Joan Scott, 'Experience/in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorise
the Political, New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 37.
9
Wendy Holloway, 'Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity,' in
Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit, eds., Knowing Women, Oxford, Pol-
ity Press in association with the Open University, 1992, pp. 250-57.
10
Richard K. Fenn, 'The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Survey,' in Tom
Bottomore, ed., Sociology, the State of the Art, London, Sage, 1992, pp. 101-27.
11
Romila Thapar, 'Communalism and the Historical Legacy,' in K N Pannikar,
ed.,Communalism in India: History, Politics and Culture, Delhi, Manohar, p. 23.
12
In Bengal, married daughters customarily return to the natal home during
Durga Puja and quite often Durga herself is cast in the role of returning
daughter during the festival.
13
Aijaz Ahmed, 'Fascism and National Culture,' Social Scientist, Vol 21, Nos 3
& 4, March/April 1993, p. 34. The power of Sanskrit in high brahminism's
homogenisation of population in belief systems is described. See also, Tho-
mas B. Coburn 'Experiencing the Goddess: Notes on a Text, Gender and
Society,' Manushi, A Journal About Women and Society, No. 80, New Delhi,
Manushi Trust, 1994, pp. 2-10. Coburn argues that Vedic recitation in San-
skrit has never been widely understood by those who hear it.
298 Zakia Pathak and Saswati Sengupta
14
J
the Name of God in Ancient India, North Holland
Gonda, Notes on Names and
PublishingCompany, London/ Amsterdam, 1970, p. 47.
15
Romila Thapar, A History of India, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, p. 103;
Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and
Class in India, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1986, pp. 51-69; David Kinsley, Hindu
Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, Delhi,
Motilal Banarsidass, 1986, pp. 98-115.
16
The hymn read in isolation, e.g. in the Bartoman, does not have anything like
its effect in the Mahaloya. Decontextualised there in the popular reading by
virtue of its language, Sanskrit, its meaning explodes only when the Sanskrit
translation made accessible.
is
17
For instance, Manu Dharma Shastra, 5: 147-49, 9: 14-17.
Report of the Women's Delegation
to Bhopal, Ahmedabad and Surat
General findings
Attacks on women
Women communities have been deeply affected. The
of both
by widows or mothers who have
articulation of their feelings
lost their sons /husbands was in the common language of grief,
whether they were Hindu or Muslim. The insecurity, the fear is
also common. However there is a qualitative difference in the
nature of attacks. The women of the majority community who
we met spoke of their family members being stabbed or killed by
bomb blasts. In residential areas where there was arson and loot,
the women categorically stated that they were not targeted or
physically attacked. There was one case of such an attack re-
ported to us in Bhopal where two members of a family were
reportedly raped although we could not meet the victims.
Attacks on women, including sexual atrocities stripping, rape —
—
and burning, verbal abuse etc., took place more on women
from the minority community. In Bhopal, in two areas of the old
city, the women told us that the mobs shouting 'Bajrang Bali Ki
first asked the women and girl children to leave, demanding that
they hand over the males in the family including children. When
women refused they were physically assaulted, a few were
stripped, at leasttwo were raped. In Ahmedabad where we
found the deepest communal polarisation, filthy sexist slogans
were written on the half-burnt walls of a few minority commu-
nity houses. Women in a camp in the city recalled that they were
surrounded by a group of men who unzipped their trousers and
made obscene gestures. The women were rescued by the police.
The delegation is in no doubt that whereas there may certainly be
unreported instances of sexual attacks on women of the majority com-
munity in these cities, the brunt of such atrocities was borne by women
of the minority community, the worst of such cases being in Surat. We
feel it is important to emphasise this point because we found a concerted
and deliberate attempt in all three cities to ignore or whitewash this
Women's reactions
for "kursi", what have we got to do with it?' When asked what
should be done, most women said 'anything to stop the vio-
lence'. But what? we asked. In four or five meetings including
two in majority community areas they said 'build a hospital or
dharmashala so that both communities can use it.' We found
many instances both in Bhopal and Surat where women of dif-
ferent communities had saved each other.
In Ahmedabad we found a much deeper communal divide,
symbolised by the main road in Bapu Nagar, an area of recurring
riots which is referred to as the 'Hindustan-Pakistan' border. In
many slum areas there had been virtually an exchange of popu-
lation over the last eight years which have seen four major riots.
Here many women of both communities spoke in the language
of the fundamentalists of their respective communities. The most
graphic example of the overriding distrust and suspicion of each
other was when the delegation visited Shahpur, a mixed
neighbourhood where seven children and two women of one
family of Muslims had been trapped inside a house and burnt to
death. About 50 yards away there is a colony of the majority
community. The women here refused at first to discuss the
incident, saying that none of them was present that day. How-
ever later they said, 'It is the Muslims who burnt the house
thinking it belonged to Hindus because it was sold by the Hindu
owners only two months ago. . In fact the house was sold two
.
.'
years ago, and in any case the leader of the mob, a local BJP man,
.
302 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
they do not listen to our problems, they say you are (illiterate)
women what do you know .' Many widowed women of the
. .
in all three cities these payments have been given to only those whose
husband's bodies have been identified. Women who
have been the
most traumatised with their husband's or son's bodies burned
beyond recognition have not received any compensation as there
is no 'direct proof of their husbands /sons being killed. The
women have not even been told what 'proof is required to get
the compensation and therefore many of them are entirely de-
pendent on relief handouts.
Compensation cases are apparently being settled by some relatives of
the women/community leaders and concerned officials. Most of the
women are only partially informed of what has been given, none of
them has signed a receipt, and the majority do not have clear ideas of the
procedures involved. In one widow's case, the compensation has
been used by her adult son who does not live with her, to acquire
an additional autorickshaw. The mother continues to stay in the
relief camp run by a religious group, with her smaller children.
Many cases of compensation to widows and mothers are held up
because the bodies of their dead husbands and sons could not be
identified to the satisfaction of the required procedure.
We met women in Bhopal who were also victims of the Car-
bide explosion and are thus doubly burdened. In Ahmedabad
we met women who had barely recovered from the communal
riots of 1989 only to be targeted again. We saw no evidence that
thegovernment was taking any special care in such cases. On the
contrary in Bhopal we were told that all the sewing centres
where the gas victims were employed have been closed. In
Ahmedabad the women who had been victims two or three
times said not a single official had visited their camp, and no
304 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
pushed their way into the room, the women went silent. Several
men became very vocal and offered information —
which did
not tally with what the Muslim women had told us earlier. Clear
hints not to talk were given by an elderly gentleman and women
clammed up. Clearly they were too scared of the consequences
to even admit to an act of courage which saved members of 'the
other side'. It was the campaign of hate for the last few years
launched by the BJP combine that led to a situation where the
mob committed acts of the most savage violence. The vocal
patriarch, who had treated us to a great deal of sentimental
nostalgia about his excellent relations with Muslims, (but he had
not visited, even once, the bulldozed rubble just behind his
house that had till a few weeks back been a secure Muslim
mohalla) informed us in the end that 'everyone is BJP here'.
We also found ample evidence of the existence of fundamen-
talist Muslim groups particularly in Ahmedabad though their
organisation and network cannot be compared in their reach, to
the communalists of the majority community. In all the three
306 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFM
communal forces, including the state, the media and the women's
movement. These are listed below.
Rumour was used subtly, not only to incite, but also to encour-
age some people would flee their homes and
terror, so that
resistance from either group would be less. In Bhopal, some of
the fleeing was even brought on by officially sponsored evacua-
tion in a few areas. This was followed by arson and looting of
the evacuated homes.
Recommendation 1
Recommendation 2
We, therefore, recommend by an inde-
a careful investigation
pendent organisation, of the played by the housing
real role
societies and other factors in promoting such dangerous reor-
dering of populations, and the techniques being used to widen
communication gaps between them.
Recommendation 3
In our opinion, such mechanisms (mohalla/ward committees) if
they are to be meaningful in today's context must be genuinely
representative of the neighbourhood, and they must be visible
and accountable. The participation of women, youth, as well as
various communities on such bodies would be thus far more
constructive.
Recommendation 4
Pending more permanent arrangements, senior government offi-
cials,flanked by the multiple concerned agencies whose coop-
eration is necessary to complete 'processing' of a case, must hold
special meetings with women affected by the riots and explain to
them in clear terms the procedures necessary, and give them
names of the officers they must reach and so on.
Local women's organisations, educational institutions, and
individuals whose secular and humanitarian credentials are be-
yond dispute can help in making these efforts successful and in
restoring public confidence, in empowering and reassuring the
women who are now in despair; and in identifying potential
leaders from among them for inclusion in the mohalla commit-
tees that we recommend. They do exist: we were able to spot
several even during our short visit.
G. Punishment of criminals
BHOPAL
The joint team of national women's organisations visited Bhopal
on 16 February 19-93. Our specific aim was to meet with and
interview women in the worst affected areas of Bhopal and
record their experiences, sufferings and perceptions of the disas-
ter that befell them in the post-demolition communal frenzy that
engulfed their city for well over ten days.
The areas visited were: Kainchi Chola (Old Bhopal), Kainchi
Chola New Block, Ammunagar, Indiranagar, Rajiv Nagar, Tila
Jamalpur, Ward II, Acharya Narender Dev Nagar and the Work-
ing Women's Hostel situated in the posh colony surrounding the
Circuit House. Some areas were mixed, some largely Muslim
and others mainly Hindu. The team met and spoke to well over
150 women, Hindus and Muslims, in groups, individually, in the
314 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
the memory was of the demolition that the BJP government had
carried out was still fresh: bulldozers had been used to raze
hutments to the ground and nearly 20,000 people (mostly poor
—
and belonging to the minority community among them many
gas victims who were just beginning their life anew) had been
displaced.
* The loss suffered by the majority community by way of
arson and loot was mainly on December 7, and lives were lost
through stabbings. Saroj Kumari's husband Santosh was stabbed
while returning home. Theirs was a court marriage and she
expressed fears that her mother-in-law, who had not approved
of her son's marriage with Saroj, would not allow her to keep the
compensation received. Haridevi's husband Radha Kishan, son
Dev Anand and his uncle Mohandas were killed at Indiranagar
at 11.00 a.m. as they were returning home after closing their
shop. A crowd men had attacked them.
of about 50
* The minority community as a whole was subjected to
Report of Women's Delegation 315
and revenge. To check on the rumour that had even made its
way to the print media, that the girls in the working women's
hostel had been kidnapped, raped and detained in a mosque, the
team visited the hostel, and interviewed the warden and the
girls. They all categorically denied that any such incident had
taken place. The warden said that since the hostel was located in
an elite area where high government officials resided, the secu-
rity was tight and life normal and secure. The girls said they had
walked around the area even during curfew. In this hostel too,
the young residents, like the women in Acharya Narendra Dev
Nagar, roundly declared their objection to building either a
mandir or a masjid at Ayodhya. Their views were expressed in
identical language with the uneducated women of AND Nagar;
l)uild a hospital, a college or something that all groups can use'.
* In the areas where large scale arson and loot had taken place,
servants, the two officials informed the delegation that with the
appointment of a had become 'sub-
judicial enquiry, the matter
judice'. The Commission had already notified dates for submis-
sion of affidavits by all affected parties. No special methods had
been initiated to ensure that such communications reached the
affected women, especially the poor and uneducated ones.
* The Additional Chief Secretary also informed us that joint
eracy, lack of information and other handicaps, and the fact that
their vulnerability is always a central issue in communal riots,
no thought had been given to dealing with them directly. While
we appreciated the Additional Chief Secretary's offer that indi-
vidual cases referred to him would be passed on to concerned
officials for expeditious dealing, it was painful to realise that
despite the frequency of public disorders, and riots in particular,
the governmental system was still so ill-equipped and insensi-
tive to the special needs of women victims of such crises.
AHMED ABAD
In Ahmedabad on February 17, the team visited Gomatipur,
Shastri Nagar,Bapu Nagar, Aman Chowk Camp, Jihwarnagar,
Sah Alam, Millat Nagar, Shahpur and Allah Nagar. Both Hindu
and Muslim women collected in much larger groups in
Ahmedabad and the team was able to meet about 175 women.
The number of women interviewed exceeded 50.
* Ahmedabad has experienced riots repeatedly in the last
decade. The communal divide is much deeper than in many
other places. Over the years communities have been relocated
and ghettoised. Haji Gaffar Ki Chali earlier had a mixed popula-
tion but harijans moved out and now it is entirely a Muslim
318 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
mohalla (area). Bapu Nagar has two very distinct areas where
the two communities face each other with a road in between
referred to locally as the Hindustan-Pakistan border.
The relocation of population along religious /communal /caste
linesposed a whole range of questions. Who decided on this;
was it a deliberate policy, or accidental? Many of the Muslim
women we met were vehement in their rejection and condemna-
tion of this measure. Halima Bi, who lost her mechanic husband
— killed by a boy from the neighbourhood whom she knew —
was vehement that their present plight was a direct consequence
of the fact that harijans had moved out from the mohalla five
years ago. 'They were our neighbours and friends. Many of us
did the same work. The Society [housing society] moved them
out. After that the Hindus started attacking us. Now we do not
speak to the Hindus/
Another was equally vehement: 1 grew up among, and with
harijans in the village, and after I came here. I played with them,
we celebrated all festivals together, Why were we separated and
left isolated? The Society has disrupted our lives — and left us
unprotected/
This mysterious malignant influence — of the Society— which
separated and relocated people over the last few years, turned
out to be that of housing societies. The one referred to by the
women we have quoted is the Santosh Nagar society. For a
working /lower middle class neighbourhood, this building com-
plex is strongly fortified and enclosed by high iron railings and
gates, with a police camp across the road.
We do not know how many such societies there are, how they
are financed, whether they have mushroomed only to make a profit
out of people's craving to own a house, however cramped, or
whether they only represent the standard, much advocated self-
financing solution for urban housing shortages familiar to urban
development specialists. The fact remains that in both Ahmedabad
and Surat women riot victims spoke of these housing societies as
being responsible for causing isolation, suspicion and hostility be-
tween different communities. The most classic (and tragic) case is
possibly that of Bapu Nagar, now divided into several isolated
and hostile groups, living within a stone's throw of each other.
Though a mixed locality, Bapu Nagar is the worst affected
area of the city and deeply polarised. Mukta Behn spoke about
Report of Women's Delegation 319
the death of her son, Nanu, who was shot in Arban Nagar.
Nilima Birendra Roy said she lived in constant fear of stoning
from across the road. She could not sleep at night as she lived
alone, and fearsome noises disturbed her. She was, however,
even more disturbed by reports that 'those people' (i.e. the
Muslims) 'had received far more'. She was obviously referring
to compensation. But had she lost anyone or anything to qualify
for compensation? No. Her two daughters are married and do
not live with her. She had spotted a Bengali in the delegation and
hoped for more sympathy from her, instead of difficult ques-
tions. Kamla Behn, a social worker of the area demanded that
police should force bolt the doors that opened towards their side
of the area.
* Many of the women gathered there perceived the notorious
liquor dealer and Mafia lord, Latif, who was allegedly close to
the Chief Minister as the real mischief-maker in the city. Re-
peated mention by different groups of these high profile political
bosses who are also known to be criminals raised another ques-
tion in our minds. Stereotypes are known to contribute greatly to
racial, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions in other parts of the
world. Has something happening here? Have these
similar been
high profile criminal characters come to symbolise a stereotype
of 'the other' community, especially as they are politically pow-
erful and generally believed to be invulnerable?
* Among the minority community, feelings of insecurity still
before her own eyes. Abida Bibi said that when the stoning
started she and her children were watching television. She tried
to send the children to safety to her brother's house but police
entered and started shooting. They even shot into the house. A
wounded man, Wahid, fell in the doorway. She tried to pick him
up, just then a bullet pierced through her leg. Women of
Gomatipur and Shastrinagar named BJP leader Bansi Maharaj
and his nephew Dinesh as organisers of the attacks. The nexus
between the communalists and social criminals was emphasised
again and again by the women.
* The team did not come across any cases of rape in any of the
said that the house had been burnt by Muslims, mistaking it for a
Hindu house. She also admitted that no one from their own
households had gone to offer condolences afterwards. She her-
self was too preoccupied with her sick husband.
A number of young women were standing by. Their silence
was more eloquent than the older woman's prolonged effort to
justify her own inaction.
Afew other houses were also burnt in the same neigh-
—
bourhood including one where the ill-fated wedding was to
take place, and the one next door, which belonged to the local
BJP leader. Fortunately no one was killed in these. However, the
—
322 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFM
SURAT
The delegation visited Surat on 18 February.
324 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
But later she was also caught, and raped. .my brothers- .
don't worry now you are safe. She gave me clothes and
food and the next day I left with the police.
Zahida Bano said that her mother, her sister, her father and
brother were all dragged outside. Zahida hid herself in a small
toilet at the back of the house with her two younger siblings.
After a few hours she heard a scratching at the door and heard a
faint voice. It was her half-conscious, bleeding mother who had
been hacked and left for dead by her attackers. Zahida pulled
her in, covered her and hid her under the charpoy. Three times a
mob came raging into the house, but in the darkness they missed
her. Later the mob came outside and poured kerosene and set
the house on fire. Zahida says she started screaming for help,
when 'some Hindus' came and found her, the children and her
injured mother and took them away to a house in a neighbouring
area.
A group of five five men and eight children took
women,
shelter in a tiny kitchen. The baby kept screaming till the de-
spairing parents locked her up in a refrigerator (the electricity
was off) for three hours.
These are only a few samples of the horror stories that we
heard. Many of the women said that they had seen police jeeps in
the area, but nowhere did the police intervene. It was only after
the worst was over that the police took the survivors out of the
area. There was only one case where a woman expressed her
gratitude to the police for having saved her child and bringing
him to the camp, where they all moved later.
The case of Vijaynagar symbolises many issues that disturbed
us deeply. Careful planning of the carnage was evident. Non-
Muslim houses had been marked with bold letters and slogans
'Jai Sri Ram', 'Hindu no Makan'. The women said some persons
came to check ration cards a day or two earler that was un- —
doubtedly when the identification was done. Hindu families
—
were 'evacuated' on the 7th most of the women we met in the
evening blandly told us they were 'away'. One exception was
Shanta Behn, a harijan woman who sheltered several fleeing
women. Her husband was away and she paid no heed to the
terror tactics of the rampaging mobs: 'anyone who shelters will
suffer the same she gave the women saris to escape
fate'. Finally,
in. All the saris had been returned, she told us. The housing
326 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFIW
society work was evident here too. Some complexes had the
crescent and the star, others had a Ganesh, Lakshmi or Shiva
etched on the frontage of houses. We found most of the tenants
in thehouses owned by Muslims were Hindus. In one house the
women said they had all been 'away' during those days and
could tell us nothing. However, the desire to talk was strong —
and one middle-aged woman, very anxious to tell us about her
ailments (blood pressure, aches and pains) inadvertently let slip
that she had sent for her daughter and son-in-law to come and
occupy one of the other apartments in the same house which was
now 'vacant'. We
could not help wondering if this had been
done with the owner's consent, or was this the beginning of a
takeover ? Since when had it been vacant anyway?
man rushed in along with four or five young men, and denied
that any such help had been given. They also refused to let us
videotape the discussion. 'Yes some people came, what could we
do? We sent some to a mandir which is under construction, it has
no walls. After half an hour, we went and told them "What is the
use of your staying here as you are unprotected and if they see
you, there are no stairs even for you to come down"/
Muslim women's account
This statement contradicted the
that the 'behnen'had thought of the mandir, but had discarded
the idea as unsafe. Then one of the men also said, 'A man who
gave shelter was killed in Phulysara.' The five women who had
initially agreed to talk to us sat silent throughout this discussion.
Our statements about by the
the feeling of gratitude expressed
victims who had been some sparks of
sheltered brought forth
—
emotion a slight smile, a few glowing eyes, but no voice. By
this time another woman had walked in and had sat down next
to them. After listening to the conversation she said, T am a BJP
worker.' Immediately all the men said, 'We BJP here.' We
are all
asked, 'Does that make you ashamed that you saved Muslims?'
'Itwas not us,' the elderly man said, 'It was the compounder a
few homes away and ... in that area.' We did not have the time
to go look for 'the compounder' but we did conclude that this
was a different kind of fear, the fear of being punished for saving
'the other', punished like the man in Phulysara.
One important made by the Muslim women in the
point
morning and the reluctant men in the evening was that the police
did not come to the area till the 10th, that is, three days after the
mob had burned and looted the 35 homes.
The delegation met a group of women residents of Triveni
Nagar. They said that the propaganda for the municipal corpo-
ration election (scheduled for January) was on. In early Decem-
ber a group of BJP men had come to their homes and after giving
them 'slips', warned them against taking 'slips' from the Con-
gress. These same men came on the 8th of December and assured
the Muslims that no harm would come to them. Ahmedi Begum
said:
328 AIDWA/CWDS/MDS/NFM
officer was badly injured. Rumours were also floated about the
rape of Saurashtrian women. This seemed to be a design to make
a section of the community active participants in the carnage and
devastation that followed.
Interviews with Women
S ANITHA, MANISHA, VASUDHA, KAVITHA
MRIDULA SINHA
Secretary General, BJP Manila Morcha
ASHA SHARMA
Rashtriya Sevika Samiti
KRISHNA SHARMA
Women's Wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad
Q. WJiat is VHP?
the role of the schools run by the
A. During the children's formative years, we concentrate on
Dharmic [religious] studies —
Gay atri mantra, Hanuman chaleesa,
etc. This followed by regular formal education.
is
A. The culture that has prevailed since aeons the way of life —
that followed by the majority. Hindu dharma is not just Hindu
is
Q. Do you follow the same pattern of education for boys and girls?
332 S Anitha, Manisha, Vasudha, Kavitha
who must earn and support his family (while the woman manages
the household), his education more important. This division of
is
labour is natural. [We were told that if a gun and a doll are placed
before two children the male child will pick up the gun while the
Interviews with Women 333
A. Though every woman wants to get married, she does not say
so due to her cultural conditioning. Every father wishes to see
his daughter married and hence be assured of social security.
A. We try and explain to her that her parents have lived longer;
they know what is best for her. We oppose a marriage only if
there is a wide age gap between the bride and the groom. Earlier
on, the child bride and groom grew up together, so there was no
question of incompatibility. Late marriage leads to adjustment
problems. However, in today's context, it [child marriage] is no
longer legally acceptable.
matter with her kith and kin (biradari); legal action should re-
main the last resort.
The family you are born intoand the family you are married
into are predestined. Just as you cannot change your parents
you, also, cannot change your husband.
Q. But the legal system permits divorce. How do you react to that?
A. No, society will not allow it —neither will the man's ego
permit it.
Vasundhara 167
Raje, Savitri 55n.3
Ramjanmabhoomi 7, 97, 159, 173, Secularism 82, 84, 86-92, 95, 108-10,
182, 189, 190-91, 209, 211, 213, 114n.l2, 116n.24,
December
see also 6, 1992; Babri Sengupta, Saswati 8, 270
Masjid; Ayodhya Seshadri, Girija 250-52, 255
Rape: 30-31, 43, 59, 74, 124, 133, 151, Seshadri, H.V. 96
165, 166, 204, 236, 256,263, 300, Setalvad, Teesta 7, 233
332, 335 and morality 32, 52; and Sexuality 26, 29-30, 44, 103, 146,
taboos, 29, 59; and sexual assault, 268n. 14,15 and the Hindu
138, 284, 315; as a political act, woman 60, 256, 293; Draupadi's
31, 39, 79, 307; as a weapon, 54, 39, 54, 55, 263; in the Hindu-
179; conjugal, 335;implicit Muslim relationship 35, 37, 185,
approval of, 31, 39; of minorities, 191; Sociology of 49
122, 179, 315, 322; outrage Shaikh, Shenaz 227
against, 166, 239 Sharma, Krishna 329
Riots 301, 317, 321, 328; Sharma, Asha 329
Ahmedabad, 302-03, 317, 321; Shiv Sena 140-41, 155n.l2, 216, 218,
Bhopal; 190, 306, 313-14; 220, 222-30, 230n.ll
30 77, 79, 130, 131, 136, 153, 216, Singh, V.P. 175, 272
233-34, 79, 130, 131, 136, 153, Singh, Bhagat 193
216, 233-34; compensation, 303, Sita 55n.3, 67, 72, 106, 174, 191, 208,
190, 300-03, 305-06, 322, 328; Sinha, Mridula 98, 146, 172, 242, 329
victims of 299 Swaraj, Sushma 240
Rithambara, Sadhvi 7, 33, 53, 151,
Sahgal, Damyanti 62
Samiti (Rashtra Sevika Samiti) 147, Uniform Civil Code 141, 146, 153,
161, 184-86, 188, 196-207, and 155n.l4, 172, 176, 238, 242;
passim obscenity, and 141
342 Index
Women: abducted, 63-65, 73-74, 76; good, 283; violence against, 77,
and equality, 82- 149, 150, 164-65, 173, 300, 333 see
and literacy, 99;
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