Feminist Review

Issue 49 Feminist Politics: Colonial/Postcolonial Worlds

Feminist Review Collective

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134805389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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WOMEN ON THE MARCH: Right-wing Mobilization in Contemporary India

Sucheta Mazumdar

Whenever among our friends young boys get angry and start a fight we say, ‘Bhai [brother], don't fight with another Hindu. Go and beat up or kill a Mussalman and cool your anger.

(Kishwar, 1993:24).

Hum Bharat ke nari hain. Phool nahin chingari hain [We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of fire].

(Ayodhya 1992, right-wing women volunteers, Basu et al., 1993:86).

The rise of fascism in contemporary India has been noted in the Western press primarily as ‘communalism’ as yet another riot [as pogroms are called in India] has devastated the Muslim community. However, as I hope to illustrate in this essay, what we are confronting bears a chilling resemblance to Italian and German fascism.¹ I am using the term ‘fascism’ consciously to define an ideology and social movement which has ideological links and parallels to Italian and German fascism, including anti-Semitism (Semite in the sense of both Muslim and Jew), a politics which posits an organic unity of race, religion, culture and nation, a movement which has the style and methods of European fascism: ‘the unshackling of primitive instincts; the denial of reason, the spellbinding of the senses by pageantry and parades’ (Nolte, 1965:39); and is above all an anti-communist, anti-Marxist movement supported by the middle classes and the petit bourgeois. The Indian movement is deliberately modelled after the European fascist movements and although much that is deemed ‘Western’ is rejected by the Indian movement, the Nazis remain figures of admiration in the writings of the main ideologues.

The goal of Hindu fascism is to seize political power and redefine India, not as a secular state, but as a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu Nation. In this formulation of the nation-state no identity other than the Hindu identity can be allowed to exist. Annihilation of Muslims (12 per cent of the population of over 850 million) and obliteration of all traces of Indo-Islamic culture and identity are its immediate goal, closely followed by the elimination of other undesirables such as Christians and those tainted by Western ideologies. During the course of the last decade, and with increasing frequency, the operations of the national government have come to a standstill as yet another round of pro-Hindu activism has been launched by the fascist groups. In the innumerable riots and bloody encounters between Hindus and Muslims that have accompanied the growth of this movement throughout the nation, thousands have been killed and maimed, livelihoods and entire neighbourhoods destroyed. Armed with the addresses of Muslim families and the locations of Muslim businesses, Hindu fascists have gone from house to house killing Muslims. During 1989–92, the scale of confrontations and riots increased markedly as the fascists sought to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque (a monument under state protection) and build a Hindu temple to the mythical god-king Rama. Finally, in December 1992 militant Hindus were successful in demolishing the mosque. While it has long been known that segments of the army and police supported the fascists, these sympathies became eminently clear as government troops and police disobeyed orders and walked away from their positions leaving the Hindu mobs to demolish the mosque. This event was followed by widespread pogroms against Muslims in several Indian cities. In Bombay, a city where the fascist group Shiv Sena has had control over the metropolitan administration, pogroms continued in January 1993. At least six hundred people were killed according to government estimates in the week-long January riots; independent witnesses put the toll at 2,000–4,000 killed. Over two hundred thousand people were dislocated and became refugees as their homes and shops were burned. Rape, the age-old weapon of fear and coercion has acquired a new dimension—public rape. In December 1992, after the anti-Muslim riots following the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya, thirteen Muslim women were raped under floodlights in Surat, Gujarat, and the rapes recorded on video. Seven of the women were then burnt alive. These videos are now making the rounds as pornography (Shah et al., 1993:50–8; Phulwani, 1993). The Nazis, one may recall, also took pictures of their victims.

Throughout these riots Hindu women have played a highly visible and vicious role. Women led mobs and dragged Muslim women and children into the streets, applauded their gang rapes and joined men in stoning Muslim women and setting them on fire (Kishwar, 1993:23).² Nationally, women engaged in the front ranks of the Hindu fascists have increased dramatically in recent years. At demonstrations, remnants of the feudal aristocracy from metropolitan centres march shoulder to shoulder with upwardly mobile women from district towns. Female religious preachers, draped in saffron robes, defy the judiciary and police and hold forth on why the temple to Rama must be built, ‘even if the waters of the Saryu (local river) turn red with our blood’ (Bharati, 1992:14). Cassette tapes with passion-filled narratives and songs spewing forth their incendiary messages of hate ring out in the voices of female acolytes. In this essay I am concerned not only with the role of these highly visible women but also with the ordinary female citizen who believes in ‘the cause’ and becomes its foot-soldier. A door-to-door strategy of ‘spreading the word’ is increasingly used by the women's networks of the Hindu fascists. What are the ways in which gender ideology is recast and manipulated to aid the growth of this political movement? While progressive Indian women's organizations have floundered in their search for a ‘nationalist feminist’ strategy, why has the call of Hindu religion struck a more responsive cord for the majority of women than the call for feminist struggles? Beginning with a look at aspects of the nationalist movement which privileged Hindu religious culture and, I argue, laid the groundwork for Hindu fascism, the essay focuses on the contemporary mobilization of urban Hindu women in the fascist cause.

From Hindu nationalism to Indian fascism: organizing the masses/engendering the nation

The division of the Indian polity into two discrete and fixed religious communities, i.e., Hindu and Muslim, and the assumption that all aspects of life were to be shaped by this exclusive and unitary religious identity was a process first implemented systematically under British colonial rule. Indian history came to be periodized as ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim India’,³ the legal structure was demarcated into ‘Hindu personal law’ and ‘Muslim personal law’, jobs and electoral seats were reserved on the basis of religious representation. Colonial tendencies emphasizing communal politics were undergirded by the various emerging Hindu religious revivalist movements in north India and Brahmanical caste-revivalism in Maharashtra and Bengal. Communal identities were further reified during the Indian nationalist movement.⁴

In 1885, seventy-two men came together to form the Indian National Congress and took it upon themselves to ‘represent’ some 250 million illiterate and impoverished peasants, women and workers. The vast majority of the founders of the Indian nationalist movement were comfortable with upper-caste Hindu identities and ‘each took pride in his Hindu culture as faith’ (John McLane, 1988:54). Alliances soon emerged between members of this group and the contemporary popular mobilization in north India under the auspices of the ‘cow protection league’. This movement was explicitly anti-Muslim. In a twist on the age-old Sanskritization process of upper-caste Hindus turning to vegetarianism to distinguish themselves from meateating Untouchables and Muslims, the cow protection league made meat-eating into an anti-Hindu position (John McLane, 1988:55–7). The rallies of the cow-protection league provided ready audiences for the fledgling nationalists. By the turn of the century the prominence of Hindu conservatives like B.G.Tilak in the Congress further determined the direction of the nationalist movement. West coast (Poona) Brahmanical revivalism provided support for other explicitly anti-Muslim activities. Religious festivals were promoted by Hindu landlords and converted into sites for mass political rallies; religion, nationalism and antiMuslim activism became one and the same. As a song from the Ganapati festival of 1894 declared:

Oh! why have you abandoned today the Hindu religion?

How have you forgotten Ganapati, Shiva and Maruti?

What have you gained by worshipping the tabuts [emblems taken out in procession during Muharram]

What boon has Allah conferred upon you

That you have become Mussalmans today?

Do not be friendly to a religion that is alien

Do not give up your religion and be fallen

Do not at all venerate the tabuts

The cow is our mother, do not forget her.

(Cashman, 1990:41–42)

As the freedom struggle intensified, both the Indian Congress and the Muslim League increasingly mobilized along lines of religious community identity; even the theme song of the National Indian Congress Party was selected from a tale of Hindu anti-Muslim struggle. There was little effort by either community to forge a national secular culture. Since the vast majority of the leadership came from upper-caste Hindu backgrounds, Hindu religious culture was effortlessly equated with Indian culture. In a process of ‘resacralization’, modernity, instead of separating the secular from the sacred, drew the two together into a new synthesis (Uberoi, 1990). Women from the two communities came to symbolize two distinct faces of the nation: the bold Hindu woman with her face uncovered, wearing the national dress of the ‘traditional’ sari, marching for the nationalist cause, and the burqa-clad Muslim woman excluded from public space by her community who seemed suspended in a web of religious conservatism (Mazumdar, 1992:6).⁵

In rural Hindu India seclusion was the norm for women from both Hindu and Muslim communities; among Hindus there had been separate spheres of women's rituals and men's worship. Modernization and urbanization changed both the space and contents of Hindu religious rituals and the ways in which seclusion for middleclass Hindu women was organized. For the men, who had to go out to work for the colonial state, a degree of Westernization in appearance and education were deemed necessary for career mobility. In many instances middleclass professional men retreated from overt religious practice. Going to the temple, assuaging the deities and keeping the faith became part of the wife's responsibilities. Women, as the guardians of the hearth, were also seen as the preservers of national (Hindu) culture as the nationalist movement coalesced (Mazumdar, 1992:1–24; Sarkar, 1991). From preserving traditional styles of clothing to learning rituals specific to caste-class status, women were to become the defenders of all that was Hindu. When educating middle-class girls became the norm, there was great concern that such education should not ‘denationalize’ the women (Ray, 1931; Sarkar, 1991). The educational curricula of many Hindu girls' schools sought to provide a large portion of religious teachings to counter-balance the supposed negative effects of education on women. Girls’ schools gave prizes for conducting the ‘best ritual worship’ (puja); books on great Indian (Hindu) women were produced for schoolchildren.

With literacy becoming increasingly common among urban women, they were now encouraged to read the new editions of the religious mythologies such as the Ramayana printed in the vernacular languages. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates depicting the more dramatic moments of the stories, the gods and goddesses became historical figures with whom generations of middle-class women could identify. Goddesses and heroines of the epics draped in elaborate Indian costumes were depicted in all too familiar circumstances: the tearful goddess Durga bidding farewell to her near and dear and leaving her natal home for her husband's abode; Sita waiting faithfully for Rama; Nala abandoning the sleeping Damayanti in the forest; a maternal Yashodha suckling Krishna (Guha Thakurta, 1991: WS91–9). As oleography printing became prevalent, paintings with religious themes became available as single prints for decorating the house. Religion as art moved from the altar into the living-room and the bedroom. This domestication of religion also fitted in well with the Gandhian model of a softer, more accommodating reformist Hinduism.

While many Hindu goddesses and Hindu mythology were invoked in the nationalist cause,⁶ the elevation of the epic Ramayana and the central figure of Rama to national prominence was very much the contribution of Mohandas K.Gandhi. Public readings from the Ramayana were prevalent primarily in Gujarat province and parts of northern India as the cult of Rama was part of popular Hinduism in this region. Gandhi's patronage of Rama, however, was based on more than just familiarity. As a figure drawn from folk-lore rather than Brahmanical Hinduism, Rama better served the political purposes of the Gandhian populist approach. The epic of Rama...

Table of contents

• Cover
• CONTENTS
• Copyright
• Women on the March: Right-wing Mobilization in Contemporary India
• Colonial Encounters in Late-Victorian England: Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage 1883–6
• A Social Theory of Gender: Connell's Gender and Power
• My Discourse/My-Self: Therapy as Possibility (for Women Who Eat Compulsively)
• Poems
• Maxine Molyneux and Deborah Lynn Steinberg on Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva
• Sue O'Sullivan on Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia
• Reviews
• Letter
• Noticeboard
• Back Issue