Women Speak Nation

Gender, Culture, and Politics

Panchali Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000507270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics.

The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation.

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

Part I
Gender, nation, and nationalism

1 Women and nation revisited

Partha Chatterjee

The strength of nationalist patriarchy

I am writing this essay in the middle of a controversy that has been raging in the public media for more than two months over a Hindi film called Padmaavati. The film is based on a classic sixteenth century poetical work called Padmavat by the Awadhi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, which narrates the story of Sultan Alauddin Khalji’s infatuation from a distance with a Rajput princess called Padmavati. Drawn irresistibly towards his imagined object of desire, Khalji lays siege to the fortress of Chittor, but, after many twists and turns in the plot, by the time his troops break the defences and enter the citadel, the Rajput king is dead and the queen Padmavati had thrown herself into the pyre in order not to be defiled by the touch of the invading monarch. Jayasi’s poem is analyzed by critics of Hindi literature as a Sufi allegory on the human quest for union with the divine. Once the publicity material for the film was released, however, the Rajput Karni Sena, an organization for the defence of the Rajput caste in Rajasthan, launched a loud campaign demanding that the film be banned, threatening to disrupt its screening if it was released. Underlying its agitation was a barely concealed reference to the history of the alleged cruelty of Muslim rulers towards infidels and their lust for Hindu women, a suggestion that clearly resonated with the heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric surrounding recent campaigns by Hindutva activists. After much dithering, the Central Board of Film Certification passed the film with a few cuts and a change of its title to Padmaavat so as to make clear that the story is fictional and not historical. But the BJP governments of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Haryana, fearing disturbances, declared that the film would not be allowed to be shown in their states, upon which the producers went to court. The Supreme Court ordered that once the film had been certified for national release, no government could ban it. As I write, the Karni Sena has gone on a rampage in several states, damaging cinema halls and vehicles and, defying court orders, has succeeded in creating an atmosphere of intimidation to dissuade distributors from showing the film and audiences from coming to the theatre.

The debate over this matter, pertaining, of course, to the question of freedom of speech in the domain of art, has mainly hinged on the conflict between historical fact and creative fiction. The filmmaker’s side has argued that the movie is a creative cinematic adaptation of Jayasi’s classic poem and does not claim to be a depiction of history. In any case, historians agree that while the siege and conquest of Chittor by Alauddin Khalji is a documented fact, there is no evidence at all that the conqueror’s motives had anything to do with a Rajput queen and that the first textual reference to Padmavati (or Padmini) occurs in Jayasi’s poetical work composed more than two hundred years after the historical event. The Padmini legend circulated in various Rajput versions in ballads composed from the seventeenth century. These were probably the basis of James Tod’s inclusion of the Padmini story in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan published in the early nineteenth century. Tod’s story was picked up in the late nineteenth century by nationalist Bengali writers who seem to have been completely unaware of a seventeenth century Bengali translation of Jayasi’s poem (with interesting changes in the story) composed by Alaol residing in the court of the ruler of Roshang (present day Rakhine in Myanmar). The nationalist version of the story, in prose, poetry, and theatre, travelled from Bengal to northern India as a story of the bravery and fortitude of Rajput women refusing to surrender to an invading army. It was a story that could work as an inspiring metaphor for the participation of women in the struggle against British rule. For the purposes of this essay, I wish to focus on a relatively less noticed aspect of the agitations. Media reports in print and on television featured several interviews with Rajput women, many of them educated and articulate, who, when asked how they had decided the film was offensive without seeing it, declared that the very posters and publicity clips in circulation were an unacceptable slur on the honour of Rajput women. They were particularly affronted by the suggestion that a Rajput queen would dress herself like a dancing girl and perform in front of a public. This, they said, was outrageous since Rajput women were dignified and Rani Padmini, in particular, was remembered with reverence as a brave sati. The film, they were convinced, was an effort to commercially exploit and sully, in the name of cinematic art, the hallowed memory of a woman of exemplary virtue.

The Padmaavati dispute has been generally treated in the English-language media not just as one more example of groups threatening violence for allegedly offensive speech or images in public circulation but also as an unwarranted recrudescence of socially regressive values that were meant to have been left behind. Thus, commentators have remarked on the sudden appearance in public of men from the so-called royal family of Mewar who were officially recognized as ‘stakeholders’ and invited by the Board of Film Certification to watch a special screening of the movie and offer their views. Royalty, it would seem, has still not disappeared even in the official circles of republican India. Moreover, the rhetoric used in the agitation involved a quite explicit glorification of the virtues of female seclusion, unquestioned devotion to one’s husband, and, most shockingly, sati. To many commentators, this looked like the spectre of traditional unreformed patriarchy suddenly making an authorized entry into the modern public domain.

At the same time as the Padmaavati controversy, another debate concerning women occupied the attention of the national media. This was the bill moved through Parliament criminalizing the practice of Muslim men divorcing their wives by the mere utterance of the word talaq three times. This followed a recent judgment by the Supreme Court striking down the ‘triple talaq’ provision of the Muslim marriage and divorce law as a violation of fundamental rights and hence unconstitutional. The BJP government moved immediately to frame a new law declaring the ‘triple talaq’ practice as a cognizable crime. Given its large majority in the lower house, the government had little difficulty in passing the bill but met with opposition in the upper house which insisted that the bill be examined by a select committee. The government campaigned for the new law as an important step forward for Muslim women, highlighting the fact that the initial petition that led to the court judgment was made by members of a Muslim women’s rights group. However, critics have questioned the motive behind the attempt to criminalize a practice that concerns family law and there are apprehensions that it may lead to vigilante action against Muslim men.¹

Nevertheless, the claim that Muslim women themselves are demanding the support of the law in order to achieve gender justice has blunted the long prevalent argument that a parliament with a very small representation of Muslims should not impose major changes in their personal laws unless there is a strong demand from within the community. Nearly 30 years ago, in a path-breaking essay, Lata Mani had analyzed the early nineteenth century debate over the burning of widows to show that it produced a reformist discourse on the condition of women in which, first, there was considerable collaboration between British colonial officials and Indian reformers and, second, the only voices were those of men.² Although the first feature tended to disappear with the rise of a mass nationalist movement in the early twentieth century, it could be argued that the second feature remained largely unchanged well into the middle of the twentieth century, with the early generation of women political leaders having neither any significant influence within the nationalist organization nor an independent mass following. The nationalist cultural project of producing the new woman suitable for modern India was almost exclusively a male enterprise. The last four decades, however, have seen the rise of a distinct feminist movement in India. Combining critical scholarship with activism, feminists have opened up a visible and audible space for asserting gender justice and a greater role for women in public life. But has this dented the edifice of nationalist patriarchy? Even feminist scholars have expressed their doubts. The two recent examples I have given above show that there are organized and vocal groups of women today on all sides of the debate. Yet there is not much evidence that the feminist critique of nationalist patriarchy has taken hold in the arena of mass politics. It seems important, therefore, to not only re-examine the conditions that make the nationalist recasting of women so durable but also identify the cultural and political spaces where it remains strong.

Questions about nationalist patriarchy

In an essay first written in 1987, I had attempted to critically examine the features of this new nationalist patriarchy.³ It was a critique in that it sought to identify the conditions and limits of the nationalist reconstruction of womanhood. Nationalism, in its attempt to define and defend a national culture that was different from that of the colonizer, did assert the existence and value of a tradition. But it was a reformed tradition, selectively reinterpreted to conform to the conditions of the modern world. Thus, the nationalist project also involved a severe critique of those aspects of tradition that were deemed inhuman and barbaric. In this, its criticisms often coincided with those of colonial observers. The crucial political aspect of the nationalist project was the claim that only a nationalist leadership, and not the colonial state, could use the power of the law to intervene in society to change those practices that made the condition of women unacceptably oppressive and iniquitous. The unstated, but plainly visible, assumption was that this nationalist leadership would consist of progressive and reform-minded men. I then attempted to show that the key techniques of reform comprised a set of disciplinary rules governing the spaces where women may move, the activities in which they could engage, the image they could project of themselves, and the pedagogical process to which they were to be subjected. Underlying those disciplinary techniques was a framework of normalization defined by the difference in the normative standards to be applied to women as distinct from men.

My analysis was deeply influenced by a Foucauldian understanding of the modern regime of power, derived from my reading of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume One.⁴ I discerned in the nationalist desire for freedom – from colonial rule as well as the unacceptable aspects of tradition – an accompanying urge to embrace the compulsions of disciplinary power, backed by the authority, both legal and moral, of a national leadership, in order to establish and protect that freedom. Contrary to liberal mythology, the power of surveillance was not opposed to freedom; rather, one was incumbent upon the other. Disciplinary institutions like the school, the workshop, and the hospital, by making the use of power a productive rather than a repressive force, produced the free individual of modern society. This truth of modern power underlay the nationalist resolution of the women’s question whose secret was to make the nationalist construct of the new woman an object of aspiration for women themselves.

My article was rightly criticized by feminist scholars for suggesting that women who embraced the nationalist project were merely retailers of an idea prepared for them by reformist men and that in their enthusiasm for the cause of women’s education and freedom from domestic confinement there was no assertion of an autonomous will to resist patriarchy. These nationalist women were, it could fairly be argued, the precursors of the women’s movement of the mid-twentieth century. Had I not overemphasized the ideological strength, indeed elevated to an unsurpassable limit, the so-called nationalist resolution of the women’s question? Besides, the posing and answering of questions concerning the condition of women took very different routes in the different regions of India. How could one claim that a single ‘resolution,’ drawn solely from evidence from Bengal, holds for the whole country? And finally, why were the demands for suffrage and special representation for women, made in the first three decades of the twentieth century, abandoned later, rendering the distinct political demands of women illegitimate?⁵

These are important criticisms, based not only on questions that arose from a distinctly feminist angle of vision but, no less crucially, from the large body of scholarship that has emerged in the last three decades on the empirical details of the changing bodily and social lives of women, their struggles, experiences, and testimonies, their position in the home, at work, in education, and in public spaces. The empirical studies are part of the treasure trove of material that has been unearthed by recent research into the various print languages of the Indian subcontinent. This rich material on diverse aspects of the changing lives of women in different parts of India in the last two centuries was, nee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Women speak nation: an introduction
• Part I Gender, nation, and nationalism
• Part II Class-caste-community: negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern
• Part III Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances
• Part IV Voices of dissent
• Index