Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia

Leela Fernandes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471281
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia. The Handbook covers the central contributions that have defi ned this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focusing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new chapters, thus adding new areas of scholarship. The Handbook is organized thematically into five major parts:

• Historical formations and theoretical framings

• Law, citizenship and the nation

• Representations of culture, place, identity

• Labor and the economy

• Inequality, activism and the state

The Handbook illustrates the ways in which scholarship on gender has contributed to a rethink of theoretical concepts and empirical understandings of contemporary South Asia. Finally, it focuses on new areas of inquiry that have been opened up through a focus on gender and the intersections between gender and categories, such as caste, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. This timely study is essential reading for scholars who research and teach on South Asia as well as for scholars in related interdisciplinary fields that focus on women and gender from comparative and transnational perspectives.

Part I

Historical formations and theoretical framings

1

Gendered nationalism

From women to gender and back again?

Mrinalini Sinha

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043102-2

When Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, the pioneering work of South Asian feminist scholar Kumari Jayawardena, was published in 1986, few could have predicted that within a decade it would become a scholarly commonplace to study nationalism, especially anti-colonial nationalism, through the prism of gender (Jayawardena 1986). Jayawardena’s book, to be sure, intervened at a favorable academic conjuncture. Feminist scholarship, especially in the Anglo-American context, which had previously eschewed serious consideration of nationalism, was beginning to overcome its initial reluctance. In addition, the scholarship on nationalism was taking a new turn as scholars paid renewed attention to the cultural lineaments of nations (Sinha 2006a). Moreover, events outside the academy also pointed to the need for a greater dialogue between scholars of nationalism and of gender. In countries across South Asia, for example, revanchist religious and cultural nationalisms were on the rise; their claims to “authenticity” were frequently articulated, albeit in different ways, through the gendered subjectivities of women and men. Nowhere was the impact of these disparate developments felt more profoundly, perhaps, than in the scholarship on nationalism in South Asia. Indeed, there are arguably few areas of South Asian scholarship that have been more seriously impacted by the study of gender than that of nationalism, especially anti-colonial nationalism, but also a variety of other forms of nationalism both in the past and in the present.

What to make of the widespread currency of the concept of “gendered nations” – the idea that nations and nationalisms are irreducibly gendered – in a broad range of contemporary scholarship, both feminist and non-feminist, on South Asia (Yuval-Davis 1997)? This mainstreaming of gender in the scholarship on South Asian nationalisms poses something of a puzzle for the feminist scholar. To be sure, feminist scholarship pioneered the use of gender – as distinct from “sex” – as an analytical category; and, by now, feminist scholars, as well as gender analysis, have found a place at the main table of South Asian studies. Yet this visibility is deceptive: the lip service notwithstanding, it has not for the most part translated into sustained and serious engagement with feminist scholarship. Benign neglect is typically the norm; and many of the major debates and cruxes in the field of South Asian studies have proceeded as if in a parallel universe (Nair 2008a). Against this background, the scholarship on nationalism stands out as something of an anomaly. Its receptivity to the incorporation of gender as an analytical category, if not always to feminist contributions, is unusual. In this case at least, the attention to gender has fundamentally transformed the very object of study: nationalism.

The emerging scholarly consensus on nationalism thus affords an opportunity to reflect on both the uneven reception of feminist scholarship in the field of South Asian studies and its critical potential as yet to have a broadly transformative impact. The scholarly literature on nationalism in South Asia, as elsewhere, is diverse: scholars remain divided about the origins, nature, impact and changing contours of nationalism. The variety of nationalisms, each with its own spatial, temporal and political coordinates, to be found in the different countries, provinces and localities as well as among differently constituted collectivities in the region, is staggering. Even the mainstream anti-colonial nationalism in the erstwhile (British) Indian Empire was hardly a single thing: it differed over time and across space, and it contained several contradictory trends. Without flattening out the immense variety between and within different nationalist projects, however, the scholarship on anti-colonial nationalism in India provides a window onto some of the substantive and methodological contributions of gender analysis in this field of study.

Here gender is not a synonym for women. But gender is understood both as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes and the means through which a range of social relations of power – not just between men and women – are articulated and enforced (Scott 1986). The usefulness of gender as an analytical category – as opposed to a much longer tradition of academic and popular scholarship on women – rests precisely on its more expansive field of operation. The contribution of gender analysis, then, does not consist merely of adding women to the study of nationalism. Rather, and more importantly, it consists of a reconfiguration of nationalism itself through an expanded understanding of the “political.”

The most dominant, and best-known, example of the expanded understanding of the political has come from the realignment of the “domestic” or the “private” with the traditional political history of anti-colonial nationalism. Here scholars of colonialism in India have learned a useful lesson from the longer history of the region. The pre-modern and pre-colonial household, seldom restricted to familial relations alone, was never confined simply, as feminist scholarship has shown, to a privatized space; the household, in fact, was essential to a variety of public, political and economic processes. The most obvious example, of course, is the role of royal and elite households in consolidating dynastic succession and in sustaining particular forms of governance (Chatterjee 2004; Lal 2005). The “privatized” family, to which we have become accustomed in modern times, is thus “a very novel space, and no archaic sanctuary” (Guha 2004: 90). Even in the heyday of the production of a separate “public” and “private” sphere, expressed in the gendered model of men in the world and women at home, this separation was seldom more than ideological: the illusion of their separation obscures the political-economic forces that sustain the public and the private, in the first place, as distinctly gendered domains. The production of the family, as a zone of privacy, sequestered from political concerns, was itself created by the policies of the colonial state and sustained by the practices of indigenous elites. This crucial feminist insight – about the political, as opposed to the natural, construction of the public and the private – has come to inform contemporary scholarship on the colonial period in India with crucial implications for the rethinking of nationalism.

The public-private split, with its gendered ramifications, had its corollary in the division in the scholarship between nationalism proper, with its emphasis on traditional political issues, and social reform, which dealt with such things as the “woman question,” as well as with questions of caste, class and religious reforms in colonial India (Desai 1948; Natarajan 1959; Ram Singh 1968). This scholarly division of labor notwithstanding, few scholars could ignore the considerable overlap between the two. Their overlapping history, in fact, gave rise to certain stock questions in the field: Why did indigenous male elites in the early colonial period take up certain aspects of social reform, especially those dealing with upper-caste Hindu prescriptions and practices concerning marriage and widowhood, with such vigor? Why, especially in the erstwhile Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, did this broadly liberal interest in social reform give way in the last quarter of the century to a more socially conservative politics of cultural nationalism? What was the impact of the advent of M.K. Gandhi’s leadership of the anti-colonial movement in the twentieth century on the relationship between nationalism and social reform? The two all-India institutions, the Indian National Congress (1885) and the National Social Conference (1887), which represented the domains of nationalism and social reform respectively, sustained this narrative of separate but overlapping trajectories. Yet feminist scholarship on the history of social reforms in the colonial period contributed to a blurring of the once clear-cut distinctions between nationalism and social reform.

The “woman question” – especially the customs and practices affecting upper-caste Hindu widows and wives more than, say, the caste question – came to dominate nineteenth-century debates between colonial rulers and indigenous elites. This already tells us something about the priorities of the class and caste formation of a nascent nationalist elite in India. The privileging, in particular, of conjugality – over other social and familial relations, such as those of caste or kinship alliances – reflected an overlapping of the “civilizing” ideology of colonialism with the new material interests of an emerging professional and business class in colonial India. The latter found the conjugal family ideal, centered on the husband/wife dyad rather than the traditional co-parcenary household, more suited for consolidating their new property regime (Sreenivas 2008; see also Walsh 2004). This new family form – and the reformulation of gender relations that it necessitated – were both the desired objective of many of the social reforms in the colonial period and the locus for the political mobilization of national and community identity.

Colonial social reform for women, moreover, was always a highly charged political affair. Take the following classic example. When the practice of widow immolation (satidaha), or sati, as it was commonly called, was abolished in 1829, there was more than the plight of the widow at stake. The legislation passed by the Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, with valuable assistance from the Bengali reformer and publicist Raja Rammohun Roy, was the culmination of a long and tortuous process of reform that included the following: early European sympathy for, as well as condemnation of, the practice; the role of colonial debates on sati in converting a practice that was traditionally enjoined under certain circumstances only for upper-caste Hindu women, and was prevalent only in certain regions of the subcontinent, into a general symbol for “Indian” culture per se; the colonial state’s initial toleration for a sanitized version of the practice before becoming convinced of its abolition; the subsequent framing of abolition into an exemplar of the colonial “civilizing mission”; and the vigorous indigenous debate among rival factions for and against abolition. The feminist historian Lata Mani demonstrates that at the heart of the process were competing visions of Hindu-qua-Indian tradition. Women, she famously argues, were neither the subjects nor the objects in the debates about abolition; they were merely the grounds on which the meaning of “tradition” was debated (Mani 1987; 1998). While some of the details of Mani’s argument have been contested, to be sure, her larger point has remained extremely generative. The point that colonial debates on social reforms were often less about women per se and more about the nature of indigenous culture or tradition has resonated widely in the context of many different cases. The subsequent shaping and recuperation of “contentious traditions” in the debates on social reform have gone a long way in putting the “woman question” squarely on the agenda of scholars of anti-colonial nationalism in India.

The scholarship on colonial social reform, however, spills over into the domain of nationalist politics in multiple ways (Sarkar and Sarkar 2007). The history of social reform in colonial India, for example, was played out against the background of a colonial legal framework that codified separate “personal laws,” which drew upon the scriptures and customs of different religious communities. Once codified as such, these separate personal laws were generally left alone by the colonial state except under exceptional circumstances when particular practices could be shown to contravene the interpretation of the relevant personal law. The history of individual colonial reform legislations – including the contours of the public debates they generated, the state mechanisms mobilized for their passage, and the courts that subsequently interpreted the new laws – reveal a fraught process whose by-product was the consolidation and homogenization of distinct denominational communities in colonial India. The Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856, for example, was enacted to liberalize the condition of upper-caste Hindu widows who could remarry under the provisions of the Act. The Act, with more ambivalent results, brought under its ambit women from subordinate castes who had n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I Historical formations and theoretical framings
• Part II Law, citizenship and the nation
• Part III Representations of culture, place, identity
• Part IV Labor and the economy
• Part V Inequality, activism and the state
• Glossary
• Index