Women in India: Gender and Hindu Nationalism

This is one of the most insanely passionate lectures I ever gave... :) about 4 years ago...

Recent literature on the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India suggests two strands of academic work that bring forth two different kinds of theories about the ascendancy of this movement. One set of theories explains this phenomenon as the result of decades of systematic, painstaking, organizational work and imaginative political strategies ; while the second strand interprets Hindu Nationalism in more cultural and historical terms, arguing that the Hindu nationalists could be successful because they were drawing on older reserves of “religious nationalism” that were always central to most forms of Indian nationalism. A third and much contested argument explains the resurgence of this movement in terms of a larger transformation taking place within the practice of democratic politics in India . TB Hansen terms this the strategy of ‘conservative populism’ and argues that Hindu nationalism is successful due to its ability to successfully ‘articulate fractured desires and anxieties in both urban and rural India.’ The use of post-modern notions of Lacanian ‘lack’ and ‘theft of jouissance’, experienced by the Hindu community, enables Hansen to describe the process whereby Hindu nationalists treat the ‘outsider as enemy’ and focus on the process of ‘othering’ Muslims that is especially crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Jaffrelot on the other hand, argues that the Hindu nationalists have used the universalistic language of democracy to further their own particularistic ends and their adherence to democracy does not validate their democratic and secular credentials.

In this session, we will dwell on some issues about the description of gender in Hindu nationalism.

To begin with, there is no singular or one-dimensional understanding of the women’s movement in India. Feminist scholars have motioned towards four phases of what can be called the Indian women’s movement. In the first phase, women were called upon to join hands with the nationalist leaders and fight the colonial empire. The second phase describes the post-1947 scenario where women’s rights took a back-seat to the development of the Nehruvian state that they hoped would address issues of gender inequality. In the third phase, the disbanded women’s movement came together to express a common critique of what they called the benevolent-patriarchal state. The fourth phase includes the decades from the 80’s onwards that have seen grassroots women’s activism against immediate concerns like domestic violence and alcoholism.

Yet Indian feminists are divided about how to classify women’s movement(s) in India – is there one women’s movement or are there a multitude of such movements? Instinct favors the elaboration of women’s activism in India as a collection of many movements – national and subaltern, pervading different spheres of activism and spanning various issues from environmentalism to representation, violence to class structure. There are women from the Indian elite that have aligned themselves with the Western women’s movement and then there are the subaltern women’s movements that are not connected to the elite movement. But here we are more concerned with the place accorded to women in the ideology of the Hindu right.
Undoubtedly, women are crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Women are also viewed by scholars as being positioned in two ways in the Hindutva framework. First, they are seen as helpless victims of a discourse that has shaped who women are and what they should be doing. Second, many Hindu women are seen as active participants in the Right’s ideology.

In this lecture we will try and recover lost ground between both these positions. We will argue that the Hindu right constructs Hindu women differently from the manner in which it constructs women from minority communities, like Muslims. We will focus on the Hindu woman/Muslim woman antagonism which has found its most rabid expression in 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. In a state-supported pogrom against Muslims, most of the casualties were women and children. The assertion of Hindu masculine superiority over the entire Muslim community was done by treating Muslim women as the site where this superiority could be demonstrated through their sexual violation, humiliation and ultimate murder.

But for now, let us focus on our two main readings for this session. Sikata Banerjee seeks to explain women’s involvement with the Hindu right as the result of an incentive framework. She says that the Shiv Sena intricately constructs an incentive structure by combining emotional with economic incentives to attract women’s support for the. This framework places Hindu women in the position of followers of male Shiv Sainiks. However, in doing so Banerjee conceives of such women as incapable of controlling their own decisions and sees them as pawns in a broad discourse of Hindutva or as individuals exercising rational choice. While this is probably not an incorrect argument, we must treat it with some caution.

Explaining women’s rational choice in terms of ‘emotions and economics’ is a rigid framework and ignores the interplay of political events with ideology which also structure ‘choice’. If women respond only to economics and emotion, it seems they lack the capacity to make political judgments based on factors like governmental performance, policies etc - in short, the factors that are used to explain men’s decision making. Banerjee’s argument also fails to give a clear explanation of how women mobilized by the Shiv Sena exercise their power as ‘workers, wives and warriors’ (pp 1221). Further, even after it is clear that women can never exercise actual power in the domain of masculine politics, why do women still continue to support the Shiv Sena?

Differing from Banerjee’s argument is Paola Bacchetta’s argument which does not view women in the Hindu right as mere tools in the hands of the masculine leaders. Instead, Bacchetta treats right-wing women as individuals who participate in this ideology willingly.

Paola Bacchetta brings out the role Hindu women of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti play in the right’s ideology and sees women’s involvement in the hindutva project as an active choice exercised by Hindu women (Bacchetta, 2004). Problematically, we are only going to deal with women’s role in the Hindu right vis-à-vis two right-wing organizations – the RSS and the Shiv Sena. A third group called the Durga Vahini (women’s wing of the VHP) has practically no scholarship that could lend itself for our discussion purposes. So not only, is academic resource on gender and hindutva scarce, what exists is probably insufficient to enable us to understand women’s involvement in a notoriously anti-woman ideology.

Bacchetta notes the manner in which the Sevika Samiti constructs itself in opposition to its masculine counterpart by emphasizing both the masculine and feminine principles. The feminine principle is of course absent in the elaboration of the Rashtriyia Swayamsewak Sangh. Further, she notes how the ‘Swayam’ or ‘self’ is absent from the Sevika Samiti – a crucial signal that women do not see themselves as individuals. Individualism is the preserve of men. Women can only exist as parts of communities and in opposition to the male within these communities.
Perhaps the starting point on any discussion on gender and the Hindu right must necessarily focus on how the Hindu right sees the nation- state. For VD Savarkar and other ideologues of the RSS, the nation is a ‘mother’ , a female entity that must be protected from invaders (Muslims) who are placed in the role of rapists. The inclusion of warring female Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon is again symbolic of the power of the female. But, the female only exists as part of or in opposition to the male. Therefore, a woman can be powerful as a mother, sister and sometimes as a wife; but this power is circumscribed by the masculine domain.

A Hindu woman is portrayed as a reservoir of moral virtue and all things pure. She is systematically desexualized and her sexual role as a wife is underplayed while her role as a mother is deemed sacred due to the procreative process, which is considered divine. This is nothing new. Even during the national movement women were placed in the role of the keepers (never rulers) of the ‘inner domain’ of the family, while men were ‘forced’ to negotiate the ‘world outside this sacred space’. As is revealed by Tagore’s Ghare Bahire (The Home and the World) and Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) women essentially were involved in the national movement as focal points around which the cult of the Mother Goddess was resurrected and yet the women in his novels remained under the overarching control of the male nationalist.

Therefore, when questions of women being empowered are broached the more important issue is to consider in which domain women are looking for empowerment. Even in the family women exercise their power only in terms of rituals and symbols. For instance, they are the executors of auspicious rituals. But when it comes to women’s assertion in the political domain, they are left out due to a number of binding traditional and institutional factors (internal party female representation, etc). The problem then, it seems is twofold – do women join Hindu nationalist groups as an alternative means of entering the political domain; or do they rationalize their choices ‘economically and emotionally’ thinking that this is the closest they can get to empowerment (as Banerjee suggests), without challenging masculine domination over politics?

Going along with Bacchetta’s argument there is little room for doubting the fact that women constitute an extremely conscious and active group in the Hindu right. This assertion gains a political dimension when Hindu women are placed in opposition to Muslim women and the latter are hypersexualised in response to the former’s desexualization. So, Muslim women are presented as baby-factories, prostitutes, suppressed, craving attention from the Hindu male . Hindu women are both chaste and pure and are equated with the nation-state. They constitute an inviolable domain. Muslim virility is to be controlled and one way to emasculate the Muslim is to attack Muslim women. The Muslim woman’s body then becomes the site of violence in a battle between Hindu men against Muslim men. Sexual domination over Muslim women becomes political domination over the Muslim community.

The point this lecture is trying to impress is that the Hindu Nationalists in India have resurrected a sacred feminine myth and inserted it into the overarching patriarchal myth of the nation. So women are not essentially reduced to appendages of men and their ideologies, but in fact do have their own space within the discourse of the Hindu nation. What results, in our view, is the strengthening of Hindu women as carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy. This movement of Hindu women is in some senses posited against the Western feminist movement led by elite Indian women.

So the overarching problem that women in India seem to be grappling with is not whether there is need for reform (there is an agreement that there is), but where should this reform take place? Should the reform take place within the existing religion/culture/tradition? Should the process of reform and empowerment align itself with Western notions of reform and then launch an offensive against parochial ideologies? This process of interrogation has produced diverse responses ranging from Hindu women seeking to empower themselves in abstract notions of purity and finding a ritualistic voice that is sought only in times of communal crisis and solely for purposes of jingoism and incitement; to grassroots mobilization and finally the elite-led liberal and left traditions.

For instance, Tanika Sarkar points us to the ‘voice of Sadhvi Rithambara’. The Sadhvi is a female holy-woman involved with the right’s political parties and organizations. She is most known for delivering hateful speeches where she decries the Muslim community. In doing so Sadhvi Rithambara also legitimizes all acts of violence carried out against the Muslim community, especially women. Her ‘voice’ is a proxy for voices of Hindu women who incite their husbands, brothers etc to go ahead and battle Muslims. More importantly as one writer puts it, women in the Hindu right are ‘ideological pallbearers’. They drag the right-wing patriarchal ideology along with them into the arenas of family, politics and state. To reaffirm a point made earlier - in doing so they are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy.

The appropriation of gender by the Hindu right in India posits a serious challenge to notions of gender equality based on universal principles of liberty and equality. Again, appropriating gender is crucial to the Hindu right since without the inclusion of women, they can never portray the Hindu community as an un-fractured, collective whole. The Hindu right’s appropriation of the feminist agenda is a grave setback to Indian women’s movement(s) as a whole. Within this agenda, Hindu women cannot interrogate Hinduism and patriarchy; Muslim women are targets of communal hatred and violence, and liberal feminists cannot talk in terms of equality, entitlements and a uniform civil code for fear of unwittingly aligning themselves with the Hindu right. To conclude, women in the Hindu right can be mothers, sisters, wives, sages, – but never queens (in the political sense)!