Textualing Women as ‘Hindu’

Abstract

Institutional interpretation on Hindu womanhood is one of the vague areas of historical research in modern India. The rise and growth of ‘new’ Indian womanhood in late nineteenth century put forward a number of unresolved issues like domesticity, conjugality, sexuality public service, motherhood, companionate marriages and others into the nationalist arena and a few pamphlets were published in twentieth century to redress these issues from an ultra-gendered platform. One such interpretation came from the Bharat Sevashram Sangha which not only challenged the notions of ‘neo’ womanhood of nineteenth century, but also provided one sanctified ideal of Hindu womanhood based on the alternative mode of Hindutva, if not Hindu nationalism. Swami Vedananda’s Hindu Narir Adorsho O Sadhona (The Ideals and Vows of the Hindu Women) could be cited as an excellent example of how obscure references from classical Hinduism were used to ‘legitimise’ and ‘revive’ the past for the reconstruction of Hindu womanhood at a time when a hegemonic middle-class culture had already been consolidated on the language of nationalist modernity. Bharat Sevashram Sangha and, for example, Swami Vedananda completely rejected modernity as an offshoot of colonialism; a paradox which defined woman both as self-conscious subject and as passive recipients of reform. The present article seeks to analyse the text of Swami Vedananda as a counter narrative of colonial/nationalist modernity on Hindu womanhood and traces the reasons why the Sangh failed to resolve the question of ‘female masculinity’ it had once proposed to work on.