Abstract
Amrita Basu and Tanika Sarkar (Eds.), Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 360 pages (Hardbound). ISBN 978-1009123143.
During the course of fieldwork on women’s activism and religious nationalisms in the mid-1990s, a journalist with the Hindustan Times in Mumbai told me of how Indian women’s groups had been foundationally shaken by two major events: the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid. While the ramifications of the former were perhaps greater for those associated with Left parties, the impact of the latter has indeed been wider. Gender in women’s organisations has been fractured irrevocably, its primacy as a political unifier thrown into doubt, and many vexed questions raised about what kind of subjectivities women in the religious Right express, if at all. Many of these earlier perplexities continue to preoccupy even veteran gender studies scholars, and Amrita Basu and Tanika Sarkar’s new edited collection of essays, Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism, is no exception. The first such collection of essays after Sarkar’s 1995 volume, Women and the Hindu Right (co-edited with Urvashi Butalia), this text positions itself as a fresh collection, if not quite an update. As many then-to-now shifts as this volume comparatively tracks, the original puzzlement remains unresolved: if feminism seeks gender equality, and if right politics in India exemplify a militant, violent, patriarchal outlook, then the ‘Hindutva woman’ is a paradox to be explained. Why do women choose to be part of organisations that have ‘never engaged gender reform…when there are so many gender-sensitive alternatives around?’ Sarkar asks in her introduction (p. 5). How is it that women participate in movements which are discriminatory, even to them? And the inverse: how do conservative ideologies make women’s empowerment possible?
Each essay offers a response of sorts to these important questions, considering the ‘specific location of Hindu nationalist women’ across Sangh Parivar organisations, and ‘Hindutva’s gender ideology’ more broadly (Sarkar, p. 4). The book has five sections but really three overarching and imbricated preoccupations: organisational histories, contemporary contests, and narrative strategies. Essays on organisational work set historical context: Ganneri tells us of how women leveraged traditional roles to edge into the male-dominated Hindu Mahasabha in pre-Independence years (in ‘Right wing mobilisation’). Katju offers a parallel account of the post-Independence formation of the VHP’s women’s wings (in ‘Sanskaras, Sexuality and Street Activism’), which Saluja buttresses with her accounts of the vernacularised practices of two women functionaries (in ‘Conflicting modes of agency and activism’), and Williams tracks the changing roles of women in the BJP as the party itself transitioned from street mobilisations to more institutionalised forms (in ‘Track Changes’).
Contemporary debates on ‘love jihad’ conversions make cameo appearance in some essays, while other conundrums take centre-stage in other accounts. Ung Loh reflects on how a transgender group like Kinnar Akhada could support building a Ram temple at the Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya; the essay examines the cultural and legal frameworks, which have allowed Hindutva organisations to embrace transgender groups (in ‘Trans Consciousness in an era of heightened Nationalism’). Devika writes of the women behind Kerala’s #readytowait campaign which rejected even a Supreme Court judgement lifting the prohibition on women’s entry to Sabarimala (in ‘The defence of aachaaram, Femininity and neo-savarna power in Kerala’). Basu and Pathan welcome the counter that the unusual forms of the Shaheen Bagh protests, largely by Muslim women, seem to offer (in ‘The Revolution will come wearing bangles…’). While these essays usefully mark out new terrains for analysis, most if not all in this collection invariably default to picking apart the rhetorical and narrative strategies that prop Hindutva ideologies. While Vachani (‘The shakha, the home, and the world’) and Tyagi (‘Spinning saffron yarns’) are both explicitly preoccupied with ‘shakha storytelling’ and analysis of the foundational mythologies and didactic games that produce future subjects of the RSS family, others, too, rely heavily on narrative analysis—for example to grapple with the implications of ascetic masculinity (as in Chakraborty’s essay on ‘Tracing the rise of ascetic masculinity in India’), or to underscore the series of elisions that veil the caste biases of aachaaram (ritual practices in Kerala), or equate ‘hijra’ with ‘transgender’ with Hinduness.
This treatment of Hindutva ideology as comprised of some stock, some evolving narrative strategies, and always with disturbing real-life consequences is bound to the book’s other main objective, and that is a ‘critique of majoritarianism’ (Sarkar, p. 4). It is difficult not to notice that all the volume’s contributors are Left and all the subjects are Right (save the Shaheen Bagh protesters)—and although the complexities of studying ‘Others’ are well-documented in the social sciences, none of our authors offer reflections on what this task entails for the present work. There are no obvious entanglements, grey areas or camaraderie of the kind that Kalyani Menon describes in her account of Hindutva women in Everyday Nationalism (2010) despite the friendships clearly forged. Moments of coming together, as with the games that Vachani’s crew play with RSS boys, quickly turn ‘malevolent’ (p. 88). That critique should be a goal of feminist or ‘through-the-prism-of-gender’ writings on religious nationalism is not new. It is necessary to ask, however, what bearing such avowedly oppositional frameworks have on the prospects of identifying and characterising expressions of gender subjectivity.
Women’s agency, as several contributors understand it, is framed by the deeply patriarchal nature of Hindutva politics. Echoes of Amrita Basu’s seminal insight that ‘while Hindu nationalism is a deeply patriarchal project, it has created possibilities for women’s expression of their subjectivities’ ring loud throughout (1996, p. 76). Authors tend, however, to emphasise delimitations over possibilities. Women on the Right may have voices of their own, but these are culled only from an existing traditionalist repertoire, are ‘fraught and fledgling’ (Saluja, p. 179), ever ‘under the patriarch’s protective gaze’ (Katju, p. 155), and never disturbing a certain pre-existing domestic status quo (Tyagi, p. 138). Women are constricted by ‘oppressive Hindu familial and social structures’, such that internal frustrations are readily transferred onto external Others (Saluja, p. 175). Authors offer only this explanation for why women would believe stories which clearly do not stand up to the kind of ‘fact checks’ Tyagi conducts. Female strength in these contexts thus derives on the one hand from traditional roles such as motherhood or asceticism, always-already limited and circumscribed, or a certain righteous anger which ‘is to be directed at non-Hindu Others and not against the social order in which [the women] themselves had been disciplined’ (Sarkar, 2015, p. 288). Only Devika paints a more complex portrait of women in the #readytowait campaign, whose assertions are inflected by a reconstituted traditionalism and ambivalence towards ‘patriarchy’.
Such mostly old and practiced critiques leave little room for fresh reflection. At no point in the volume do authors consider several women’s elisions of patriarchy or their quotidian workarounds as paradigmatically significant. A more-or-less tacit preference for systemic overthrow means that ‘patriarchy’ remains the only viable analytical frame, making it near impossible to consider alternative models of empowerment to which gender is not primary. Again, Devika comes closest, but she, too, reads the RTW women’s disavowal of patriarchy as maximising elite and caste power, delegitimising their positions in the process. To extend Meena Khandelwal’s observation from another context, equating all phenomena with forms of religions, caste, class or other orthodoxies makes it difficult to see their transgressive or other undetermined potentialities (2004, 197), not to mention the many moments of ‘dissonance’ (Menon, 2010) and the complexities of carving out subjectivities in fraught personal and political contexts. It bears mentioning that there are also no working definitions of ‘patriarchy’ proposed in this volume, nor any substantive indication that what counts as an ‘oppressive Hindu familial structure’ might vary a great deal regionally. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to make sense of all the many analytic bits and pieces proffered, especially when the essays vary so widely in coherence and analytic sophistication. Sarkar’s lengthy introductory summarisations of individual chapters are unfortunately not a substitute for a solid conceptual synthesis—a disappointment, given her prolific writings on these subjects. Also missing is some commentary on what ultimately distinguishes gender subjectivities vis-à-vis Hindutva in the present moment. The burden is on readers to deduce these insights piecemeal and independently.
Basu and Pathan fill several theoretical gaps in the conclusion, though their agenda is now less to define a framework than to find a path forward. They look to Shaheen Bagh’s ‘politics of refusal’ and its expressions of ‘destituent power’, which vacates, dissolves and empties extant politics of its powers in its search for remedy, reclamation and transcendence (p. 311). Insofar as Shaheen Bagh represents a kind of apolitical anti- politics, however, it is in fact a not-unfamiliar oppositional stance with ‘a long and distinguished history in the Indian anticolonial nationalist tradition from Gandhi on’ (Hansen, 2001, p. 229)—which includes now, alongside the Shaheen Bagh grandmothers, the VHP functionaries who cast themselves as social workers, the RTW women who uphold aachaaram as merely traditional, or ascetic figures in electoral office. Here is the rub, then: the pull of the apolitical comes from many sides, and motherhood marks possibility for Hindutva women as much as Muslim women in protest. Vachani notes that RSS stories are typically written for ‘already existing believers’ (p. 92) and therefore without the kind of nuance and detail needed to speak to sceptics; ironically, much the same can be said of this volume. Had this book been assembled with less aversion and more conceptual finesse, it might have pushed our understanding of the relationship of gender to religion and nationalism to tantalising new heights.