Developing Powers: Modernisation and the Masculine

Hegemony of Hindu Nationalism

By Prem Kumar Vijayan

The mistake, as so often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms of substance.

- Raymond Williams

In this paper1, I shall attempt to trace the relations between development,

modernity, and masculinity within the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism and its

discourses of power and gender. To do this I shall begin by exploring the scope of the

terms themselves in their relations to each other. While arguing and demonstrating the

relations between masculinity and power, I make the necessary conceptual distinction

between masculine hegemonies and hegemonic masculinities, understanding

patriarchy to imply the condition of hegemony as masculine. It must be remembered

that the discourses and operations of power per se are always socio-historical.

Patriarchies (as the fundamental, comprehensive gendered organization and

distribution of power and privilege) and the hegemonic masculinities that they

generate and sustain alter constantly, both subtly and dramatically. Within the context

of the Hindu right and my examination of it, discourses of power in the relation to

masculinity are situated within the socio-historical formations and processes of

contemporary India. Given the above, it is necessary to understand altering

patriarchies within the historical phenomenon of the rise of the Hindu right, which has

gendered and sexualised discourses of power palpably and distinctively. It is in and

1
through this that the specific kinds of patriarchies, the hegemonic masculinities that

they shore up and the significance of these separately and together, become clearer. In

cognition of the interactive and mutually generative nature of social phenomena and

specifically of the manoeuvres and modus operandi of the Hindu right, I have offered

an understanding of Hindu nationalism, its discourses and practices of power as

cultural, social, political and historical; and not just any one of these.

The formation of the nation-state itself, the conditions of its formation and the

relation between modernity and the nation-state have a complex causality in the

context of post-colonial nations (Kaplan et al 1999, Baxi and Parekh 1995)2. While

several scholars have made the links between gender and nation, the reasons why

discourses of nation and nationalism are gendered and sexualized are now being

explored more thoroughly (K Jayawardena 1986, Parker et al 1988, C Enloe 1989, Anthias

& Yuval-Davis: 1989, D Kandiyoti 1991, Sangari and Vaid (eds.) 1989, Z Hasan (ed.) 1994).

This returns us to the original intent of the paper: to demonstrate that the masculinities

of Hindu nationalism are intimately formed as much by the processes of modernity as

by discourses of the past. Because of the sizeable scope of this paper, I have of

necessity compressed some of the arguments3.

Modernity and Developmentalism

In one well-known rendition of what development has come to mean, Andre

Gunder Frank wrote, ‘[d]evelopment meant following step by step in our (American

idealised) footsteps from tradition to modernity. The measure of it all was how fast

the modern sector replaced the traditional one in each dual economy and

society.’(Frank n.d.) Tracing some of the details of what happens in the process of

that replacement, Pat Howard writes,

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 [t]he myth of the neutrality of scientific knowledge and the rationality of economic

reasoning in particular disarmed the victims of progress by inculcating a conviction

that their own ways of knowing and economic, political, and socio-cultural

practices based on these alternative knowledge systems were backward and in need

of modernization.

That is, '[d]evelopment typically involves an attempted transfer of Western scientific

knowledge and technologies based on these scientific knowledge systems.’ (Howard

n.d.)

Benjamin Schwartz (1993), asks the question, ‘What is the center or the heart

of that whole which we call modernity?’ He then proceeds to identify what he sees as

the core issue underlying the question. After agreeing that ‘the scientific revolution

and Max Weber’s notion of the unlimited “rationalization” of every sphere of social,

economic, and political life’ are immediately obvious instances of modernity,

Schwartz points to the growth of individualism (whether as moral autonomy, romantic

individualism or economic individualism) and

the philosophic perspectives with which [these] are associated – particularly, the

radical post-Cartesian disjuncture between the human realm conceived of as totally

encapsulated within itself and a nonhuman realm to which we relate only in

theoretical, scientific and technological terms. It seems that it is this perspective

[…] which has deeply affected every other aspect of modern culture. (1993: 216-7)

What is immediately pertinent is the point Schwartz proceeds to make from here, on

the conceptual location and role of nationalism in this debate. It takes the form of

attempting to locate the formation of the modern idea of the state in relation to that of

the sense of nation-hood or nationalism4. For Schwartz,

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 There can be no doubt that what attracted the eye of many in the non-Western

world to the powerful nation-states of the West was the entirely unprecedented

growth in the wealth and power of these states. Indeed, the fact that they were all

more or less equal entities striving with each other in a battle for ascendancy as

well as the more continuous fact of the inability of others to compete with them in

this Darwinian agon led to a concentrated attention on the power of nationalism as

an organizing and mobilizing force. (1993: 223-4)

What Schwartz fails to note is that both such organisation and mobilisation had a

significant gender quotient that was picked up later and critically by feminist thought

in social and political theory, gender studies, development studies and cultural studies

for instance. It is this in the specific context of the evolution of the nation and its

underlying premises and contradictions that is of immediate concern now.

Gender, Nation and Modernity

Part of the contested terrain between individual and collectivity – as state,

nation, or community, and whether in economic, ethical or psychological terms – was

the embattled space of women’s rights and issues as collective issues, both in the

collectivities of women and in that of the larger group of nation, etc. Defining

individualism as equal rights claimed by anonymous, and in principle, equal persons -

as opposed to subjectively differentiated and unequal selves - implied on the one

hand, that the empowering rights would be those that sanctioned the power of the

empowered, and on the other, rather contradictorily, that its very anonymity meant it

sanctioned the extension of those rights to the weak and the disempowered. The

problem of the social organisation of these rights therefore proved enormous, in that,

their continued legitimacy depended rather paradoxically on equalising social and

4
economic discrepancies and inequalities. Cynthia Cockburn notes how the

development of a female industrial labour force

meant [the] coming out of the enclosed sphere of the patriarchal family into the

more public sphere of the patriarchal firm…. The feudal and the early capitalist

domestic system of manufacture had made the home a far from private place. In a

sense the home became a truly private sphere only once production had left it. The

constitution of "home and work", the "private and public" as we know them was in

many ways a cultural artefact of the industrial revolution. (1992: 206)

In other words, the process of modernisation in Europe was accompanied by an

engagement at the social, political and economic levels with negotiating the roles,

functions, status and rights of women, within the discourse of rights, and without

losing the power of the universal legitimacy of its claims - however fragmented and

incomplete this process remains.

This led to a gradual recognition of women's rights as individuals, and of their

claim to public space, however grudgingly, precisely because the distinction between

public and private, as indicated in Cockburn's statement above, was at best a tenuous

one, given the overwhelming importance of female labour to the new industrial

economy5. Additionally, as Linda Nicholson notes, one consequence of the Lutheran

Reformation was the devolution of power over women from the priest and Church to

the male head of household6, who was accountable more to the state than to the

Church. The weakening of divinely sanctioned authority over individuals, combined

with the strengthening and spread of the discourse of rights, and with the pressures of

a burgeoning capitalist, industrialising economy to ensure that the two most

significant aspects of modernisation - the idea of the liberal democratic state based on

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the sanctity of individual rights, and the technological transformation of life brought

about by the industrial revolution - were in an intimately dynamic relationship with

the growth of feminism and the (albeit incomplete) accommodation within these

transformations of women's issues.

All this was eventually to become part of the baggage of nationalism-

development-modernity7 that was imported into non-western ex-colonies, in their

search for development-into-modernisation. Satish Deshpande in an insightful

overview8 of the political economy of modern India, writes,

At its most fundamental level, the rhetoric of development provided the former

colonies with a dignified and distinctive way of obeying the imperative towards a

modernity already indelibly marked as western. Thus, development acquired a

powerful emotive-nationalist charge in the non-western world, because the West is

“always-already” the norm for most modern institutions and ideas, including those

of the nation, development and progress…. [D]evelopment comes to be seen as a

national mission and not only as a world-historical process of the modern era.

(149)

The significance of this lies in the reconstruction of public and private in the target

societies of development, to suit the processes of industrialised modernisation; but

without the history of feminisms that had struggled to make the new-found ‘modern’

public spaces hospitable to women, through contesting and claiming rights as political

and economic individuals. I have argued elsewhere9 that the absence of this historical

process was not accidental but the consequence of a particular conjunction of colonial

patriarchies with indigenous ones, in their complex power-negotiations, and with the

emerging discourse of development in the course of the transformations of power-

6
relations under political, social and economic modernisation. It has however had some

unexpected consequences for feminist positions in India, particularly in searching for

the historical legitimacy of women’s rights. Madhu Kishwar, for instance notes that

Feminism in the West came as an offshoot of individualism - the doctrine which

holds that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests

of the social group, family, or the state. However, in India, despite the cultural

diversity among its various social, caste, and religious groups, there is a pervasive

belief shared equally by men and women that individual rights must be

strengthened not by pitching yourself against or isolating yourself from family and

community, but rather by having your rights recognised within it.10

The inability/unwillingness to acknowledge the notion and discourse of rights as

indelibly marked by modernity leads Kishwar to adopt a stance on women’s issues

which is dangerously close to that propounded by the Hindu right, as we shall see

duly.

The Indian Case: Nationalism, Patriarchy, Masculine Hegemony

The Indian case is thus interwoven by the complexities of, on the one hand,

modernisation-as-development, and the transformation in social relations demanded

by this process; and on the other, by the adoption of a political system that enshrines

the rights of individuals over communities, even as it acknowledges the rights of

communities to safeguard their 'Cultures'.11 In practice then, even as the Westminster

model of liberal democracy, with its ideological roots in individualism, was adopted

as the form of post-colonial government by the newly independent nation, the rights

of its individuals remained frequently tangled in the issue of community rights12.

These are frequently vehemently and violently maintained, as communities adjust,

among other things, to the reconstruction of the public-private dichotomy, for

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instance, and the realignments in gender relations, in the carrying out of the "national

mission" of development. Even if this is changing today, with gender becoming an

increasingly important consideration in planning and policy making, as Saskia

Wieringa notes rather despairingly of the concept of gender, it ‘is used in such a

watered down version [in present-day development literature] that women’s issues

have become depoliticized, that sexual oppression has been rendered invisible and

that concern for women’s issues have been reduced to the socio-economic component

of women’s lives.’13 There can be little doubt that this is fundamentally because the

dominant understanding of development-as-modernisation has been and remains

instrumentalist and economistic, without taking account of the social, economic and

cultural history of its target contexts. Yet it is this model that most newly liberated

nations and their states - like India - aspire to as ideal, in their developmental

programmes.

In such a context, how does one conceptualise masculinity/ies? In the themes

sketched above, the fact that early women’s rights movements emerged in the context

of modernity, yet remained significantly excluded from the modernity and

development debates for a very long time, indicates the silent persistence of

masculinist biases through the evolution of these processes. How then does one figure

these masculinist biases? As constructed into the very processes and conditions of

modernisation? Are they effects or causes of these processes and conditions, or do

they have a more complex relation than can be captured in cause-effect formulations?

The opening of the possibilities for accommodating women's issues in the public

sphere - in fact, the weakening of the very construct of the public/private divide - all

indicate the extent to which modernisation actually proved enabling for women, and

counter-active to these masculinist biases. Yet there is little doubt that this, in practise,
8
meant a dispersal of masculinism into other spheres of human activity, with a

concomitant increase in masculinist control over these.14 One thinks of the

masculinisation of technological and scientific knowledge, and of the social power

that these represent, possess, as well as give access to in modernity. How does one

conceptualise this 'new' set of masculinist biases? It is this bias, often referred to in

the generic term 'patriarchy', that I now wish to briefly address.

I propose for this – albeit in a highly rudimentary and sketchy form – a

renewed deployment of the idea of patriarchy15 as a masculine hegemony16. The

specifics of this may differ from context to context, and between specific hegemonic

forms of masculinity, but it is in all of them indicative of a general condition of the

dominance of men – essentially over women, but also over other oppressed men, the

old, the very young, the infirm; and through whatever cross-sections of caste, class or

race obtained – and consequently of the masculine, in whatever the currently

dominant, specific form of hegemonic masculinity. This apparent truism would do

well with a brief closer look, if it is to pass theoretical muster.

Critiques of patriarchy-theories of male dominance17, while drawing attention

to the inadequacies of its conceptual and analytical power tend to ignore its primary

case, that of a general – not universal, nor eternal – condition of oppression and

exploitation, of women by men. To acknowledge this is seen as tantamount to

accepting a transhistorically essentialist and inexorable reality, and a consequent

denial of agency, when in fact, it is no more than an initial insight into the bases – the

conditions of possibility, the load of the dice in different situations – of gender and

other relations in individual hegemonic masculinities. What is required is not so much

the debunking of the concept of patriarchy, as its qualified understanding, in its

relations with the specific dynamics of individual hegemonic masculinities. That is,
9
the term ought to be understood as an analytical proposition referring to the

condition of dominance that permits the hegemonic power of specific hegemonic

masculinities – rather than as is currently understood, as an (inadequate) descriptive

proposition with a stultifying universal applicability. In such a proposition, any given

hegemonic condition may be characterised as masculine only in terms of the

sustaining investment in it – as routine practice – of discourses of masculinity as a

means of protecting its interests, i.e., the extent to which its hegemonic power

generates discourses and practices of masculinities as legitimising, sustaining and

expanding its hegemonic status. The most significant gain from such a theoretical

position is the possibility of reading the gendering of hegemonies – economic,

political, cultural, social – rather than the hegemony of individual gender-forms. It is

in this sense that one may speak of patriarchy - the hegemonic system itself - not

merely as if it was an impersonal objective system "out there", but as a set of

hegemonic subjectivities,18 themselves inter-locked in relations that are defined

economically as much as socially, politically and culturally, lived and practised by

individual selves, both men and women. Without engaging in two disconnected

realms of analysis, the macro and the micro, and without permitting the collapse of

‘femininity’ to ‘women’, and ‘masculinity’ to ‘men’, per se, it retains the strength of

making them generalisable in terms of the relations that obtain in the material

practices of individual men and women. It follows from this that different masculine

hegemonies may obtain in different times and places, themselves constituted by, and

constituting, different hegemonic masculinities within them. But that such

configurations need not and do not always obtain – or that, even when they do, they

may be inflected differently in each case – is no refutation of the primary analytical

potential of the proposition, patriarchy as masculine hegemony.19

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 Given such an understanding, it is possible to see how patriarchal systems

generate masculinities. With the emergence of new forms of power, new types of

hegemonic masculinities are manufactured which may sometimes relegate existing

hegemonic types to subordinate forms of masculinity, and simultaneously produce

hegemonic femininities20 that correspond to, and are compatible with, these changed

masculinities. This should not imply that these forms of hegemonic masculinity are

necessarily always competitive for they often emerge through dynamic interaction

with extant ones. Hence both the co-operation and the correspondence between forms

of hegemonic masculinity, a phenomenon that explains for instance features like

Sanskritisation, Victorianisation and what might be termed the ‘privatisation’ of

(secular) Law21. Even while the forms and even needs may have changed, the interests

insofar as these pertain to the distribution, management and access to power, have not.

It is possible to see how, as new discourses, forms and practices of material power

emerge, and are deployed in challenging existing masculine hegemonies, they are

accommodated into an already changing socius, the hegemonic equations of which are

already in transformation, in the generation of new kinds and forms of masculinities

to suit the new discourses and practices of power. Certainly this helps explain for

instance, the continued masculinisation of political power on the one hand, and

technological power on the other, despite the inroads made into both by women's

movements internationally.

How does one employ such a conceptual framework in the examination of the

Indian case? For convenience, I will begin analysis with a historical glance at the

dynamics between the post-colonial state as the engine of development-as-

modernisation in India, and the communities and identities it sought to govern and

11
provide for in this process. Satish Deshpande, commenting on the idea that nations

need to invent a past, notes that

it is less often noticed that nations have as much if not greater need to invent a

future – a vision of the collective destiny that its members have been elected to

fulfil, a certain telos or trajectory through history. The greatest contribution of

development is that it provides just such a telos, one which allows the ethnos or

people, in a sense, to grow roots into the future.(150)

In the period immediately after 1947 – a period dominated by Nehruvian

development policies in economics and the domination of the Congress Party in

politics – two small ruling elites, consisting of an urban, upper-caste, national elite,

and a rural social elite of the dominant peasant castes and rural upper-castes, together

constituted a small middle class22. Pavan Varma lucidly describes the infatuation of

this class, particularly its English-educated component, with the Nehruvian

imagination of a socialist, industrialised and modern Indian future, even as it almost

unconsciously worked to dilute this vision through its ceaseless consolidation of its

own hegemonic position and character23. At this point in time, immediately after

independence, it would be fair to say that the dominant nationalism was in fact a

secular one: not so much because of a weakening of religion in the public sphere, as

the preoccupation with nation-building that had fired the imagination of this class,

with the Nehruvian vision of dams (and their metonymic expressiveness of progress,

redistribution of largesse, and the generation of power) as the 'temples of modern

India'. Not only had the Hindu Right been driven underground and lost substantial

credibility for its role in the assassination of Gandhi; but more pertinently, this

hegemonic class was still dominantly a westward-looking one, seeking the economic

12
fruits of their 'independent' control over industrialisation and technological growth

promised by Nehru.

This hegemonic domination remained in place for almost three decades; yet,

through the period, a gradual process of social change was already under way, largely

due to the state’s affirmative action policies which, though tardily implemented,

allowed the emergence of a new, small but vocal political leadership for the lower-

castes. With the recommendations of the Mandal Commission (on affirmative action

for lower castes) being announced in the early 1980’s, and the weakening hegemony

of the Congress – in its increasing inability to maintain and accommodate the diverse

emergent social groups and claims within its ranks – the stage was set for a more

dramatic set of changes in the social and political fields. Not only did new, locally

strong political parties emerge – representing, differently, the interests of regional

elites and of minorities, and indicating an increasing trend towards alliance politics at

both the regional and national levels – they also represented new, economically

empowered groups that clamoured for entry into the middle class in status terms that

refused to acknowledge anymore the old caste affiliations and statuses. The state as

chief agent of development, and therefore of resources, became the field of

competitive rivalry between these various groups.

This kind of competitive bidding for state resources leads to a situation where

individually attainable demands render themselves unattainable because they call

forth competing demands from rivals…. The operation of an international as well

as inter-class demonstration effect leads to the ironic situation where improvement

in living standards, especially among the middle classes, actually breeds

frustrations because expectations are forever racing ahead.24

13
In contrast to modernisation in say, Britain, on the one hand – where the market has

more or less always been a strong force, and dictated the dynamics of modernisation –

and China on the other – where the state extended its strength to authoritarian

dimensions and strongly repressed alterities or heterogeneities in the socius – the

Indian state modelled itself as socialist in economic functioning and liberal in political

functioning. This meant that lobbies that emerged politically could dictate terms

economically, with a multiplier effect. Most of these new arrivals to middle class

status were intermediate caste, land-owning peasants, like the beneficiaries of the

Punjab Green Revolution. But as Yogendra Singh notes, their new status was not

economically sustainable in the long term through continued dependence on

agriculture, and the lack of investment in business and industry25. What were desired

were the security - and the prestige - offered by state employment.

This economic anxiety coupled with the sense of arrival into middle class

status created conditions ripe for the emergence of right-wing nationalism in three

ways. Firstly, the new arrivals came - rather paradoxically - with a sense of the failure

of the state to deliver on its promises of a developed industrialised economy: if heavy

agricultural subsidies (undertaken increasingly for populist reasons) had generated

wealth for them, it could not sustain the generation of this wealth. Secondly, this new

constituency came into a public sphere that was till recently under the hegemonic

control of English-educated 'westernised' industrial bourgeoisie, professionals and

bureaucrats26, and which was dominantly upper-caste. Much as they aspired to the

lifestyles of these societies, there existed another legitimating discourse that they

could lay claim to, in opposition to the vaunted social superiority of the existing elite,

and as critique of it. The Hindu nationalist discourse had already made a renewed

political impact through its participation in the broad-based anti-Emergency

14
movements of 1975-7. It now found an extended and susceptible constituency to

begin taking root in27. Thirdly, part of the process of being accepted by the existing

upper-caste, middle class elite was the indoctrination into its till-now dormant

religiosity – in other words, a process of Sanskritisation that ensured the cultural

hegemony of the caste elite. Each of these three phenomena displays the centrality of

the issue of control and power to them, and the readjustments and accommodations

this provoked within the Indian socius, of the existing hegemonies. What remains to

be shown are the relations of these to the dominant masculine hegemony of

Brahminical Hinduism.

Patriarchy and Hindu Nationalism

It is to a large extent in response to these social differentiations that the recent

surge to political power of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, has come about: acutely

aware of the numerical minority of its own (upper) class and (upper) caste

constituencies, it incites and exploits anxieties of weakness and vulnerability, and

displaces it onto a generalised Hindu community28. The growth of Hindu nationalism

as an ideology has been too well documented29 for extended elaboration here. Suffice

it to draw attention to two processes in it. [1] The reliance by colonial authority on

Brahminical authority and sources for the codification of a 'Hindu' personal law that

would apply to all Indians who were not Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, or Parsi.

This meant for instance that, in the crucial question of inheritance of property, even

after various amendments to the original Indian Succession Act of 1865, culminating

in the apparently empowering Hindu Succession Act of 1956, the strong

patriarchalism of Brahminical codes of succession remained well in place.30 [2] The

splitting of the ideals of masculinity along the lines of power sharing that Louis

Dumont controversially described as existing in the caste system in pre-colonial

15
India31 - the ascetic, Brahminical conception of power, and the warrior, Kshatriyaic

one, and their corresponding codes of masculinity. What matters here is not whether

Dumont was right or wrong in extending this conception to an analysis of power in

caste-relations in the country. Rather, it is the existence of these discourses of power

as types of hegemonic masculinities, specifically in a context of state-sanctioned

'impersonal' (read gender-less) individual rights.

The coincidence of views of Brahminical and Victorian codes in the process of

framing Hindu personal laws - on the issue of the public/private divide and its deep

gendering - though arising out of different histories and intended somewhat

differently, translated into the common law/ personal law divide, and the differential

construction of masculine hegemonies within each of these new social realms. But

these also demanded different kinds of masculinities as ideals, for the sharing of

power - in the personal realm, on the one hand, and in the public on the other.

Personal laws, created on the deeply gendered issue of how each community could

control marriage and inherited property, demanded an aggressively masculinist

attitude towards its maintenance, enforcement and command, as the line that defined

and came to distinguish individual communities from each other. Common law

contrarily, demanded that the power of being majoritarian be renounced, in favour of

an ascetic tolerance of the other communities that were thus equally defined through

their personal laws.

It must be noted however that the personal law/common law divide is at best a

juridical and schematic distinction and can be misleading. While the practices of

gender were and are sought to be controlled through such a distinction, they render it

porous in their very performance32, and form the bases of significant overlaps between

the two kinds of laws. The imperatives of the ‘private sphere’ and its personal laws
16
are frequently carried over into and legitimised in the ‘public sphere’ and by common

law. As intimately associated with the control and determination of the practices of

gender and sexuality, personal laws form the bases of the gender attitudes that

underlie the assembling and the interpretations of common laws. A recent instance of

the practice of ‘Sati’ illustrates the gendered nature of the juridical divide. Although

legally and officially proscribed as criminal, the case of Roop Kanwar who allegedly

committed sati on September 4, 1987, raised an ethical and political storm. Strong

arguments were raised on the right of communities to maintain and perpetuate the

practice of Sati as a religious right, with temples built and rituals performed

worshipping the dead women, in the face of secular feminist anti-Sati protests33.

The several judgements on the case were eventually to exonerate all involved

in the act, interpreting the act itself as voluntary despite substantial evidence to the

contrary. What was noteworthy in the controversy was the aggressive, almost

hysterical defence of the incident and its perpetrators by large sections of the Rajput

community – to which Roop Kanwar belonged – specifically, and the Hindu upper

castes in general. What came to be understood as being at stake was not just the right

to worship of individual communities, but the right of communities over their

women’s bodies and lives. The challenge moreover, was not from another community

but from a different understanding of the nation, community, rights and gender,

derived from the secular public sphere of common law: hence the aggressive

masculinism of the response34, and its vociferous, violent claims on the traditional and

the private.

The quashing of the cases against the accused in this instance, and the

subsequent administrative indifference toward judicial directives to prevent repetition

or encouragement of such incidents is indicative of the fact that common law in no

17
way necessitates gender equality and the annulment of masculine hegemony; it

merely operationalises another yet co-operative mode of masculinity35. Indeed, this

mode of masculinity is in many senses more hegemonic than the directly aggressive

mode, since it operates through ‘consensually’ established legal norms to construct

the national community. For instance, judicial protection of the legal rights of

minority women helps reinforce the understanding of the dominant community as

progressive and benefactorial, even as judicial decisions relating to its own women

remain dubious:

The Supreme Court in its judgements in the Mohammed Ahmed Khan versus Shah

Bano Begum ((1985) 2 SCC 556) and the Mary Roy versus State of Kerala ((1986)

2 SCC 209) and their fall out, contrasted to the Supreme Court's April 29, 1992

order in the sati issue dramatise [sic] the women-law-tradition nexus in a political

situation that is blatantly communal. In the former the scales were tilted in favour

of women while in the latter, the court invoked Article 25 [which guarantees the

fundamental right to worship]36.

What the emergence to power of intermediate castes did was to render

frictioned the public sphere where common law applied, by claiming the right to

occupy it on equal terms with the resistant upper-castes. It manifested as the

emergence of regional and caste based political constituencies that lay claim to their

share of political and economic - at least in terms of employment - power. But it also

was susceptible to Sanskritisation, and in that the hegemonic demand for ascetic

restraint and toleration as the ideal of masculinity, in the sharing of 'public' power -

particularly since their power over the personal sphere was defined in a common way,

through the common (highly Brahminical) 'Hindu' law applicable to all castes. As

Maria Mies writes,

18
 Since in the family ideology of the educated Indian middle classes Brahminic

ideals were combined with puritan-Victorian ones, so through the mechanism of

"Sanskritization and westernization" all groups were declared as inferior the family

conception of whom did not agree with that of the dominant groups.'37

In many senses the infamous Shah Bano case catalysed this process of de-

frictionalising through Sanskritisation of the Hindu community, and its currents of

homogenisation into a 'simple' majoritarian community. Even earlier, the aggressively

masculinist definition of the community had re-emerged, almost inadvertently, and

rather inversely, through the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984. (Inversely in the sense that it

was the Sikh identity that was starkly defined as different, and implicitly served to

draw attention to the identity "Hindu".) By the late 1980s then, the type of hegemonic

masculinity that became increasingly preferred was the warrior type, demanded by the

sharpening of community differences defined through increasingly equivalently

competitive personal laws.38 If the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report

re-introduced a violent heterogeneity it was to some extent deliberately39 neutralised

by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, promoting thereby the hegemonic

masculinity of the warrior type as the defining identity of the community. What was

at stake for the Hindu nationalists in doing so was the extension of the ideology of the

personal law realm into the realm of the public - the 'Hinduisation' of the world of

secular relations governed by common law. What was at stake was the capture of state

power itself, and the exercising of its hegemony through the instruments of that

power.

The Imagination of the Hindu Nation

It is worth noting here that the terms on which Hindutva has traditionally

defined the Hindu nation are constituted by a constellation of keywords: Matrubhumi

19
(motherland), Dharmabhumi (land of one’s faith), Karmabhumi (land of one’s dutiful

actions), Punyabhumi (holy land) and Mokshabhumi (land of one’s salvation)40. It has

as also been influentially rendered as the Pitrubhumi (fatherland)41 by V D Savarkar.

These may be separated into two sets: terms of origin (Matru- and Pitrubhumi) and

terms of attributes, attitudes and actions (Dharma-, Karma-, Punya- and

Mokshabhumi). The separability, though not water-tight, suggests that belonging to or

claiming the nation is as much a matter of volition as it is of birth. Further, the

organisation of spaces in these terms is less a matter of the ‘secular’ distinction of the

‘public’ and the ‘private’, than of the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’

spaces. A crucial relation is then established between ideas of sacred space – or holy

land – and the space of the nation. An important aspect of this is the weightage given

to Hindu places of worship that are scattered throughout the country: they, defined as

pilgrimage spots, realise in a concrete way the presence of the sacred in the profane.42

The value of this to design a national imagination is borne out in the political practice

of the yatra or pilgrimage, first undertaken by Gandhi, and most effectively used in

recent times by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in mobilizing support for

Hindutva. In an inversion of the modernist relegation of religious and theological

issues to the realm of the ‘private’, this conception of the nation situates the religious

inextricably in the domain of the ‘public’, rendering statist distinctions between

personal and common realms effectively meaningless. The discourse of rights thus

gives way to these discourses of righteousness in the public sphere.

There is a further distinction that is of some significance, within the other set

of terms: between the motherland and the fatherland. Where the former connotes the

nation-as-mother – productive, fecund, referring to the earth and to origin – the latter

connotes proprietorship – land inherited patrilineally, bestowing the inheritor with

20
rights and claims to it, as well with (patrilineal) identity. When this is further marked

by notions of sacrality, it becomes clear why the Hindutva discourse on religious

minorities is as treacherous, disinherited, and therefore without rights, witness the

traditional demonisation of Islam by Hindutva and its more recent and intensified

attacks on Christians across the country. In contrast, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are

sought to be incorporated into the Hindu nation, through conceiving of these religious

communities as extensions of the family of Hinduism.

Of specific importance here is the now hardly examined dupe through which

pan-Islamism is rendered anti-national while pan-Hinduism is deemed nationalist.

While the Hindutva is now certainly not alone in its anti-Islam campaign, the

distinctive historical dynamics of Partition and the tension between Hindus and

Muslims in the sub-continent have driven this inclination uniquely. In this context the

tension between Hindus and Sikhs – though similarly fraternal - is different but

related in an important way to Hindu-Muslim tension. Sikhs were at pains to on the

one hand differentiate themselves from Hindus and yet concealed their identity by

shaving for instance and ‘blending’ in. A dominant ‘Hindu’ discourse on Khalistan

appropriated the Sikh communities anguish in a gradated move. They accentuated the

Hindu sense of betrayal and by drawing attention to the ‘Hindu-ness’ of the nation,

claimed the violence as appropriate. In the case of the attacks against the Christian

community, a new angle had of necessity to be introduced, given the relative lack of

historical violence between Christians and other communities43. To understand how

the Hindu right succeeded in demonising Christians it is necessary to see why the

government shifted the terms of the debate from the (legal) issue of murder to (the

emotive) one of conversion and the implications of such a move for political ethics. If

the Muslims and Sikhs were designated treacherous because of their willingness to
21
break the (maternal) body of the nation, Christians were shown to attack its very

spirit. That Christians have somewhat of a monopoly over education and are

relatively a wealthy community made them a more obligatory target. Thus it was not

just killings and arson that were necessary, but degradation and humiliation – raping

nuns, forcing them to drink urine, the reclamation of these acts as inspired by

nationalist feeling and so on44. The implications of Prime Minister A B Vajpayee’s

stand on the ethics of politics can hardly be underestimated. But what he also

succeeded in doing was ratifying the violence and appropriating the distress of the

community in service of the promotion of a morally righteousness and outraged

Hindu community. It then comes as no surprise that it was the Christian community in

India was conflated with the ‘western’ world, with the Roman Catholic Church and

was thus expected to apologise for its existence within the country. Yet again in this

instance In all cases what was spoken were the ‘new’ foundational terms of the

nation, the terms of national occupancy within it and the retention of these debates

among men even while women’s bodies were central in the ‘realisation’ of these. This

therefore served also to historically invisibilise yet again the terms in which women

have been incriminated in projects of national definition and consolidation45.

In this process of the expansion – consensual and coerced – of the 'national'

community, several other factors are also of interest. The mother organisation of

Hindu nationalism, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, promoted a careful

programme of 'Swadeshi' (self-reliant) economics, that argued for a controlled process

of economic reform that would effectively increase the economic power of local

business and industry entrepreneurs through protected privatisation. Along with this,

its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made political stability a major

issue, suggesting that the process of economic reform required a consistent and stable
22
government. These two campaigns served to bring large sections of the middle class -

essentially the educated elite - that were earlier less attracted to the idea of a right-

wing nationalist government at the centre, into the folds of the Hindu nationalists,

aided to no small extent by the demonisation, in deeply gendered terms that

accompanied the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It permitted the coming to power of

coalition governments headed by the BJP in the mid 1990s, supported mainly by

regional parties that represented regional elites that more or less shared the BJP's

understanding of nationalism - hawkish, aggressively patriarchal in the resistance to

forms of perceived 'westernisation' yet already in the process of liberalising the

economy towards the benefiting of the coalition elites. It is significant that the call for

liberalisation came almost simultaneously with the implementation of reservations.

I.e., the withdrawal of the state from the production and market sectors also means

that the state will, in the course of time, have fewer jobs to provide, since it is the

market and the needs of private corporations that will determine employment.46

The transformations in the masculinity of the multiple hegemonies articulated

by Hindutva are thus evident in the types of ideal masculinity that are called on to

govern each kind of hegemonic exercise. The process of modernisation that should

have delegitimised personal laws served, instead, to sanction their gendering and to

enforce them. Through the processes of Sanskritisation that it induced and catalysed,

modernisation actually served to reinforce masculinist biases, even as it demanded

their reorganisation into different but articulated masculine hegemonies, through the

deployment of different hegemonic masculinities. (This is instantiated starkly in the

repeated references in public media to the ‘two faces’ of Hindu nationalism in India

being represented by the ‘moderate’ A B Vajpayee and the ‘extremist’ L K Advani.

One could add to this the kind of lumpen masculinist iconicity of the Shiv Sena chief,
23
Bal Thackeray.) Hindu nationalism’s projection of the Hindu nation as utopia at one

level dovetails innocuously with the existing hegemonic discourses of development

and the desire for progress; its ulteriority however, is in the deliberate insertion of its

own agendas within this developmentalist framework of discourses and policies, as

the agendas of and for the nation – and desired by the nation. It is this that allows real

and pressing issues of governance and redistribution to be compromised, in favour of

projecting issues like ‘political stability’ and nuclearisation as crying needs, and

religious conversions as a pressing crisis, and therefore demanding of precedence.

Even as welfare programs, particularly those affecting rural development like the

subsidised public distribution system, were – and are – being rolled back with a

vengeance, resulting in an already perceptible increase in over-all income level

disparities, there has been a concomitant increase in the social display of wealth, and

of conspicuous consumption, and not just in urban areas. This consumption then

becomes an index both for social power, as well as for ‘progress’ and advancement -

mapping the desire for personal satisfaction through consumption, onto the desire for

the future, advanced nation, the signs of which are ceaselessly generated and

displayed by the advertising industry that incites much of this desire in the first place.

In such disparate conditions of access to the market, it is very easy for generated

‘needs’ to solicit consent to and investment in the new imaginary of the nation, and

more importantly in the economic policies that promise to deliver it – thus further

expanding the hegemonic power of Hindutva’s brand of ‘swadeshi’, along with the

idea of stability, and its effectiveness as an instrument against dissent or resistance to

Hindutva’s political hegemony. The masculine ‘load of the dice’ of this phenomenon

is not so difficult to identify: it is no coincidence for instance, that it is in Bangalore (a

city that perhaps more than any other is representative of the speed of the

24
transformation to a consumer life-style) that there has been a sharp increase in

reported ‘dowry deaths’ over the last two years47; and this is only the most visible

evidence of the pressures that this process brings to bear on women. In recognition of

the intersections between women’s subordination and phenomena as diverse as those

tracked in this paper, the women’s movement in India has striven to accompany

discourse analysis with social, political, cultural and legal reform.

Conclusion
I have tried to sketch the relations that obtain between several rather diverse

processes in the above arguments. I have tried to indicate the ways in which

modernisation, while generating new forms of masculine hegemony, through new

types of hegemonic masculinities, nevertheless did serve to open out areas and

spheres of experience and functioning for women, in the European context, even if

this was class and race defined and determined liberation. The concern that I wish to

draw attention to through the heterogeneous composition of the nation-state, the terms

of its formation, the complexities in co-ordinating hegemonic masculinities, the rise

of the Hindu right, and the terms on which these have had to deal with the Indian

feminist movement and vice versa, is the differing dynamics which altered this in the

Indian case. One of the reasons for the difference trajectories in the Indian case is

largely because modernisation was understood less as process than as goal; it was an

end that had to be reached irrespective of the consequences of the playing out of its

processes in a different social, economic and political context. It has, as I have

attempted to show, served to consolidate existing patriarchies, even as it has made

room for new ones to emerge under the umbrella of the masculine hegemony of those

patriarchies. In other words, the processes of development-as-modernisation have re-

drawn the figures of hegemonic masculinity and femininity, in lines that are no longer

25
particularly recognisable as either 'western' or 'Indian'; it remains to be seen whether

these processes may yet be re-appropriated into gender equitability, in a possible

reassertion of an idea of India as composite, heterogeneous yet secular. If the analysis

above seems to imply that this is unlikely, we would do well to heed William's

warning, used as epigraph to this paper. For, as Gramsci himself recognised, all

hegemonic forms generate their own counter-hegemonies….

26
Bibliography
Cora Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem, (eds.) Between Woman and Nation. (London: Duke

University Press, 1999)

27
1
This paper has benefited enormously from discussions with and input from Karen Gabriel. I am also thankful to Radhika
Chopra, Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella for their comments.
2
I shall be discussing issues relating to the problematisation of the modernity project in some detail later in the paper.
3
For a more extended theorisation of the relation between development, modernity and gender see my paper forthcoming in
Cleaver (ed.) 2002.
4
Schwartz notes: 'While it may be true that something like nations, nationalities, or ethnic groups existed before modern
times, it is a fact that [the territorial states of early modern Europe], which witnessed the rise of many other aspects of
modernity, also created the most vividly articulated and full-bodied image of the nation which has ever existed. They
strongly promoted the official vernacular language, fostered the notion of a national high culture, affirmed the idea of the
supreme sovereignty of the secular nation-state, and played a crucial role to the extent that they could in promoting the kind
of early industrial development so much stressed by Ernest Gellner.' (1993: 221) Like with the issue of development, there
is an extensive debate on the modernity of nationalism, with arguments ranged either for the existence of nations – and
therefore of nationalisms – prior to the spread of modernity; or for nationalism as an entirely modern phenomenon,
emerging consequent to the (modern) formation of states that attempted to cohere their subject communities into governable
‘nations’. For a comprehensive overview of this debate see Anthony Smith’s classic Nationalism and Modernism (1998),
though I do not share all of Smith’s views.
5
For discussions of the problems with a public-private divide, among others, also see Nancy Fraser ‘Politics, culture and
the public sphere’ and Chantal Mouffe “Feminism, citizenship and radical democratic Politics’ in Nicholson & Seidman
(eds.) Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Catherine
MacKinnon ‘Feminine, Marxism Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’ in Diana T Meyers (ed.) Feminist Social
Thought: A Reader N York: Routledge 1997.
6
'Feminist Theory: The Private and the Public', Linda J. Nicholson, in Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender
Division, ed. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle (Milton Keynes: Polity, 1992) p. 42. I use 'Church' here not with
reference to any denomination so much as the general representative of sacred authority in Europe.
7
It goes without saying that this trio does not have a necessary relation so much as a contingent, historical relation. They
therefore do not automatically imply each other.
8
Satish Deshpande, ‘After Culture: Renewed Agendas for the Political Economy of India’, in Cultural Dynamics 10(2).
Page references are incorporated parenthetically.
9
See my ‘Nationalism, Masculinity and the Developmental state: Exploring Hindutva Masculinities’, op. cit.
10
Madhu Kishwar, 'Women, Sex and Marriage: Restraint as a Feminine Strategy' in Manushi No. 98, March-April 1997.
Kishwar is known for her strong arguments for an 'indigenous' feminism, that will negotiate with and work within the
demands of the dominant (mainly Hindu) cultural codes.
11
There is now a wealth of documentation of the history of how this rather peculiar political condition came to be in India.
See for instance, among others, Dalmia, Vasudha and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.) Representing Hinduism: The
Constructions of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage, 1995); Pandey, Gyan (ed.) Hindus and
Others: The Question of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1993); Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1997); Vanaik, Achin’s The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularisation
(London: Verso, 1997); van der Veer’s Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 1994); Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?
(London: Zed Books, 1986).
12
For an excellent discussion of the relations that obtain between patriarchies and communities, see Kumkum Sangari’s two
part article ‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies’, Economic and Political Weekly,
December 23 and December 30, 1995.
13
Saskia Wieringa, Rethinking gender planning: a critical discussion of the use of the concept of gender. (Working papers
series, ISS) The Hague: ISS, 1998.
14
There are several studies of this, but a useful sketch of the main themes in this issue is provided by Rosalind Gill and
Keith Grint, in their introduction to their edited volume, The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and
Research (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995).
15
For reasons of space, I am not here offering a discussion of the enormous literature on the concept patriarchy. Also, my
use of the term is with specific reference to its relevance for understandings of masculinity. The significance of a
rudimentary understanding of it as the rule of the father for other and different social organisation lies primarily in its
association of masculinity with power. I however use it to signal the organisation of power between men and women and
between these social categories which are crucially intersected by other social formations such as caste as I shall show in
due course.
16
In the discussion that follows I use the Gramscian sense of hegemony as involving both force and consent, and as
demanding the internalisation of hegemonic values and principles by the oppressed or dominated groups, even if resistantly.
See for instance, his ‘Americanism and Fordism’ and ‘State and Civil Society’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed.
and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1996)). In fact, the process of
resisting hegemonies is crucial to their maintenance, as much as it may lead to the possibility of their replacement by
alternative forces striving for hegemonic control.
17
See for instance Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis’ introduction to their edited volume, Woman-Nation-State (London:
Macmillan, 1989) and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997) p. 7
18
As Raymond Williams notes, the concept of hegemony ' sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their
forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living - not only of political and economic
activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth
that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to
most of the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense.' See his Marxism and Literature, Raymond
Williams (Oxford: OUP, 1977), p.110.
19
For a different, very thoughtful and useful theorising of patriarchy, see Sylvia Walby's classic Theorizing Patriarchy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, 1995). My main point of departure from Walby's analysis is in the importance I give to changing
conceptions of masculinity as changes in the subjective engagements with patriarchies, and the effects these have on the
hegemonic operationalising of patriarchies. For all the complexity of Walby's analysis, she tends to theorise patriarchy as an
external, objective system – the weakness of most theories of patriarchy.
20
Understood not as the dominance of the feminine – which would correspond to a ‘feminine hegemony’ – but as the
dominant conceptions of femininity.
21
I refer here not just to the immediately evident move by the Hindutva faction to ‘Hinduise’ the Uniform Civil Code (See
the Economic and Political Weekly Report), but to the frequent superimposition of the values, codes and practices of the
‘private’ realm on the ‘public’ judicial realm as for instance in rape trials.
22
For a compact and incisive examination of these issues, see D L Sheth’s ‘Secularisation of Caste and Making of New
Middle Class’ (Economic and Political Weekly Vol. XXXIV, nos. 34 and 35, pp. 2502-2510), from which I draw for the
immediately following remarks.
23
See his The Great Indian Middle Class (Penguin: New Delhi, 1998).
24
Deshpande, 157. Deshpande goes on to argue that this eventually leads, rather ironically to the failure of development as
ideology.
25
'In a generation or two even a land holding of a size within the ceiling limit permitted by the state…gets fragmented. And
without avenues for mobility to non-agricultural employment the younger generation of peasants finds itself exposed to
unavoidable downward mobility or even pauperization.' (Quoted by Pavan Verma, op.cit., p.116-17)
26
Pranab Bardhan, in The Political Economy of Development on India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), defines three categories
in the middle class, the industrial bourgeoisie, the rich farmers and the professional classes. Here, I have merely opened the
category of professionals to indicate the difference between state-employed bureaucrats and professionals in the public and
private sectors. In this sense, with the inclusion of the rich peasantry, there would be four categories constituting the new
middle class.
27
See Pavan Verma for the same point p. 142.
28
See Tanika Sarkar's ‘Pragmatics of the Hindu Right: Politics of Women’s Organisations’ (Economic and Political Weekly
Vol. XXXIV no. 31) p. 2161. Relatedly, for a good analysis of the role of communication systems, as instruments of
development, in the creation of exclusionary conceptions of communities in India, see Dipankar Sinha’s ‘Indian
Democracy: Exclusion and Communication’ (EPW, Vol. XXXIV No. 32.)
29
See notes 15 and 26 above for some references; but also the writings on this of Gyan Pandey, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika
Sarkar, Urvashi Butalia, Bhagwan Josh, Peter van der Veer, Aijaz Ahmed, Uma Chakravarthy, Christophe Jaffrelot,
Thomas Blom Hansen, Walter Andersen and SD Dalme, etc.
30
See for discussions of this Maria Mies' Indian Women and Patriarchy: Conflicts and Dilemmas of Students and Working
Women (New Delhi: Concept Publishing House, 1980) and more recently, Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur, Subversive
Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1996)
31
Op.cit. Even if Dumont’s classification has been strongly contested, the point of importance for us is that power was
distributed and not concentrated, socially and discursively.
32
It is interesting to note that Judith Butler shifts to the term ‘heterosexual hegemony’ from the more totalizing
‘heterosexual matrix’, in seeking to establish the fluidity – what she terms the ‘malleability’ – of the practice of gender as
‘performance’ in her later work (See her ‘Gender as Performance: an Interview with Judith Butler’, Peter Osborne and Lynn
Segal. Radical Philosophy, Summer 1994. I am grateful to Filippo and Caroline Osella for drawing my attention to this.)
33
See Ashis Nandy’s ‘Sati in Kalyug: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death’ in his The Savage Freud and Other
Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Delhi: OUP, 1995) for a review of opinions and his own controversial stand on
the issue. For a more secular feminist stand and their overview of the debate, see Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s
‘Institutions, Beliefs and Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan’ in Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi
de Alwis (eds.) Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996)
34
This has been well-recorded by Anand Patwardhan in his documentary film, Pita, Putra aur Dharamyudh (1991).
35
The feminist insistence on say reservations for women or women’s courts has at its heart the insight that the public sphere
is interpenetrated by private prejudices and mores, that being a judge or a legislator as in this particular instance, does not
necessarily neutralise the sex-gender continuum.
36
Susan Abraham, ‘The Deorala Judgement Glorifying Sati’, originally published in The Lawyers Collective. 12(6); June,
1997.p.4-12. Cited here from http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/grhf/SAsia/forums/sati/articles/judgement.html
37
Op.cit. p. 89. She illustrates this process with the telling example of the transformation of the complex patriarchy of the
Nair caste from a matrilineal, matrilocal community to the more mainstream patriarchalism of the upper castes.
38
It may well be asked, Different to whom? For what was shared by all these communities in their personal laws was the
retaining of male control over the sexuality, property and status of women, albeit in different ways. For a discussion of these
issues, see Zoya Hasan's edited volume Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India (New Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1994).
39
See for instance the aggressive rhetoric with which leaders like LK Advani of the Hindutva swore to replace Mandal with
'kamandal' (the ascetic's pot, temporary symbol of a united Hindu identity.
40
M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashan, 1996 [1966]) p. 81. The translations of the
terms are mine.
41
"A Hindu is one who acknowledges Hindustan as his fatherland (pitrubhumi) as well as his holy land (punyabhumi).
Whether he or she is a devotee of sanatan dharma is unimportant. Anyone who is or whose ancestor was Hindu in undivided
India — including someone who was a Hindu but was converted to Islam or Christianity — is also welcome back to the
Hindu fold provided he accepts India as his fatherland-cum-holyland." V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? [1923]
(Delhi: Bharati Sahitya Sadan, 1989)
42
Peter van der Veer works this out to some extent in drawing the relations between cosmologies, sacred spaces, the act of
pilgrimage and private experience, as ‘a ritual construction of self that not only integrates the believers but also places a
symbolic boundary between them and “outsiders”.’ van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994) p. 11.
43
It is absolutely important here to resist the popular and populist Hindutva conflation between Indian Christians and the
Western world.
44
I believe that the view that the Muslims had become old hat and that the Hindu right needed a new target is limited for
two reasons. The first is that, as is clear from the scale of the present animosity toward Muslims, they remain a popular and
attractive target. Second, violence against Christians is not new. What is new is the illegality that the government promoted
through its politically expedient deflection of the issue of murder.
45
See for instance Menon and Bhasin (eds.) Borders and Boundaries (N Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), Urvashi Butalia
and Tanika Sarkar (eds.) Women and the Hindu Right (Delhi: Kalifor Women, 1996).
46
Gail Omvedt makes a similar point in her article on the subject in The Hindu, dated 24 March 2000. While I disagree
substantially with her perception of the current economic reforms as beneficial in the long term, I do agree with her on the
issue of across-the-board reservation, irrespective of class differentials within the backward caste communities.
47
See the ‘Social Issues’ section of Frontline Vol. 16, no. 17 for an extensive coverage of this. See also Sarkar’s
exploration of this issue in fieldwork among Hindutva women social workers, and their belief that women should learn to
tolerate such violence, in her ‘Pragmatics of the Hindu Right’.