Tharu Niranjana 1994

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Social Scientist

Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender


Author(s): Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (Mar. - Apr., 1994), pp. 93-117
Published by: Social Scientist
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SUSIE THARU` AND TEJASWINI NIRANJANA**

Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender

Suddenly 'women' are everywhere. Development experts name 'gender


bias as the cause of poverty in the third world'; population planners
declare their commitment to the empowerment of Indian women;
economists speak of the feminisation of the Indian labour force. Over
1991-92, for instance, upper-caste women thronged the streets in the
anti-Mandal protests; the BJP identified women and dalits as the
principal targets of their next election campaign; women shot into
prominence as leaders in the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. The
People's War Group of the CPI-ML found themselves drawn
increasingly into popular women's campaigns against sexual and
domestic violence, dowry and the sale of arrack. Film after film
features the new woman as active, critical, angry-she also figures
prominently in Doordarshan programmes. In overwhelming numbers,
women have joined the literacy campaigns in Pondicherry and parts of
Andhra Pradesh. And now we have the anti-arrack movement that
threatens to destabilise the entire economy of the state.
How might we 'read' the new visibility of women in this variety of
domains and across the political spectrum? What does it represent? For
all those who invoke gender here, 'women' seems to stand in for the
subject (agent, addressee, field of inquiry) of feminism itself. In other
words the visible woman is one who might be, in some way, regarded as
feminist. The new visibility is, perhaps, an index of the success of the
womnen s movement. But clearly it is also problematic. Issues rendered
critical by feminism are now being invested in by projects that seem to
endJorse and extend femintist demands yet harness them to initiative
that an egalitarian feminism would find unacceptable. In addition,
possibilities of alliance with other subaltern forces (dalits, for
example) that are opening up in civil society are often blocked, and
feminists find themselves drawn into disturbing configurations within
the dominant culture.

CIEFL in Hyderabad.
English Department, Central University of Hyderabad.

Social Scientist, Vol. 22, Nos. 3-4, March-April 1994

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94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

In the 70's and 80's, an important task for feminist theory was to
establish 'gender' as a category that had been rendered invisible in
universalisms of various kinds. In Hyderabad, for example, the
campaign against 'eve-teasing' taken up by women students in the
early seventies brought into the open the hostile and sexually
threatening conditions all women had to deal with everyday, not only
in the university, but also on the streets and in every kind of work-
place. Through public interest litigation, as in the cases of injectible
contraceptives (Net-Oen) and police rape, as well as appeals against a
variety of judgements-on custodial rape, family violence, restitution
of conjugal rights-we tried to demonstrate the asymmetries and
inequalities in gender relations that underwrote the notion of rights
and the legal process. We demanded changes that would make the law
more sensitive to the cultural and economic contexts of women's lives.
Women's groups who investigated 'dowry deaths' demonstrated how
the designation of the family as private domain restricted women's
access to protection against domestic violence. They exposed the
collusion of the law, police, medical system and the family in
classifying these deaths as suicides. Feminist 3cholars worked to
salvage gender and women's issues from being subsumed by class
analysis, and sought to extend the Marxist understanding of labour to
include domestic production, and highlighted the marginality and
vulnerability of women in the workforce; disciplinary formations such
as history or literature were critiqued and alternative narratives
produced that foregrounded women. We demonstrated gross
inequalities in women's access to health care systems or to
'development,' and examined patriarchal ideologies as they operated
in a wide range of institutions. These initiatives extended our
understanding of the micro-politics of civil society, showing how
pervasively mechanisms of subjugation operated, and how processes of
othering worked in relation to women.
In the late 80's and the early 90's-the Mandal/mandir/fund-bank
years-however, we face a different set of political questions. Entering
into new alliances, we have begun to elaborate new forms of politics.
These have demanded engagement with issues of caste and religious
affiliation/community as well as with new problems emerging from
the 'liberalisation" of the economy, creating contexts in which the
conitradictions implicit in earlier initiatives have become increasing
apparent. For example, feminists calling for a uniform civil code in the
context of the Shah Bano case soon realized the difficulty of
distinguishing their position from that of an aggressively anti-Muslim
lobby, and began to back-track on the demand as 'Shah Bano' became
the rallying cry for Hindutva. Similarly, in Chunduru, sexual
harassmnent was cited as justification for the punishment met
dalits by upper-caste men. More recently, leftist women's organisations
in Hyderabad were placed in a dilemma about joining in a protest

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 95

against the arrest and mistreatment of a Muslim student accused of


'eve-teasing.' Debates around the introduction of hormonal implants
and injectibles into the national family planning programmes reveal
analogous contradictions which underlie notions such as women's
freedom, self determination or the right to choose. We feel that the
kind of contradictions that confront gender analysis also face class
analysis, caste initiatives and, more broadly, democracy and
secularism today. We hope to show that the contradictions arise as a
result of the hidden gender, caste, class and community composition of
the 'subject' in the dominant culture. The history and structuring of this
subject in civil society and its reworking in the cultural domain today
are naturalised by a 'humanism' that puts this subject into circulation
as politically neutral.
Although gender analysis, like class analysis, had pointed to how
the humanist subject and the social worlds predicated on it functioned
in such a way as to legitimize bourgeois and patriarchal interests, both
Marxist and feminist politics continue to operate with the premises of
secularism-democracy invoked by the humanist subject. They fail,
therefore, to account for inequalities of caste or community implicit in
that subject and its worlds or to radicalise the concepts of secularism
and democracy to meet political requirements in our times. We shall be
arguing in this paper that these problems call for an investigation and
critique of the humanist premises that not only underwrite the politics
of dominance, but also configure the 'subject of feminism.'

II

The notion of the 'human' as it appears in political theory and more


importantly in humanist commonsense is inextricable from what has
been called the metaphysics of substance. Framed by this metaphysics,
the human appears as a substantive base that precedes and somehow
remains prior to and outside of structurings of gender, class, caste or
community. In liberal political theory, it is this human core that
provides the basis for legal personhood. Humanist Marxism offers a
critique of the class investments of liberal individualism, but preserves
the normative idea of a human essence, principally in the concept of
alienation and in teleological notions of history but also in the notion
of ideology as false consciousness. Humanist feminism, too, is
predicated on notions of female alienation from a putative human
wholeness. Even across significant political and theoretical divides,
the notion of a human essence that remains resolutely outside
historical or social coding operates as 'commonsense'. It is not difficult
to see that these theories, and their politico-legal derivatives,
actually produce what they claim to recognise. For example, by basing
the rights of the individual on the fiction of a substantive hunlan core,1
the law creates that core, or more precisely, a core-effect; the idea of

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96 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

alienation gains force only as it measures itself against a human


fullness; teleological narratives of history find resolution only in a
fully and recognisably human world.
Thus produced, this human subject, on whom the whole question of
'rights' is predicated, was imaged as the citizen subject and the
political subject. In the Indian context, for example, this imaging (a)
articulated gender, caste and community (and initially even class) only
in the realm of the social; (b) marked these as incidental attributes of
a h urm a n self; and (c) rendered invisible the historical and
social/cultural structuring of the subject of politics. The shaping of the
normative human-Indian subject involved, on the one hand, a
dialectical relationship of inequality and opposition with the
classical subject of western liberalism, and on the other hand, its coding
as upper-caste, middle-class, Hindu and male. The coding was effected
by processes of othering/differentiation such as, for example, the
definition of upper-caste/class female respectability in counterpoint to
lower-caste licentiousness, or Hindu tolerance to Muslim fanaticism as
well as by a gradual and sustained transformation of the institutions
that govern everyday life.2 Elaborated and consolidated through a
series of conflicts, this coding became invisible as this citizen-self was
redesignated as modern, secular and democratic.3
Our strategy in this paper will be to examine certain 'events' such as
Mandal or the rise of the Hindu Right in which feminist analysis is
coming up against certain impasses, impasses, indicating on the one
hand a fracturing of the humanist consensus that has been the basis of
left as well as right-wing politics, and on the other an opening up of
possibilities for new political alignments and initiatives. These
events, it seems to us, characterize the moment of the contemporary and
might be investigated as metonyms of gender in which cultural
meanings are being contested and refigured.
Obviously each of these metonyms has a separate and particular
history. But since our focus here is on the contemporary moment, we are
concerned less with the emergence of these 'events,' and more with the
impress of history on the present. In a strict sense, then, our approach is
geniealogical. We want to explore historical conflicts as they structure
everyday life and affect political initiatives in our time. The aim is to
initiate a polemic that will render visible the points of collision and
the lines of force that have hitherto remained subterranean, and
construct instruments that will enable struggles on this freshly
configured ground.

III

MANDAL AND CHUNDURU

Our first metonym is Mandal-Chunduru, where we investigate the


articulation of the gender question in the hegemonic culture of the 90's.

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 97

In both Mandal and Chunduru, 'women' were foregrounded, although in


different ways. 'Women' came to be invoked here as, in a sense,
feminist subjects: assertive, non-submissive, protesting against injustice
done to them as women (Chunduru) or as citizens (the anti-Mandal
campaign). An examination of the hidden structuring of this feminist
subject would, we believe, reveal its similarities with the subject of
humanism, marked-in a way that requires the occlusion of the
marking-by class, caste and community.
The background of Mandal is one familiar to most of us. The then
Prime Minister V.P. Singh's announcement on 7 August, 1990, of the
implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations for
reservations of 27% for backward castes, apart from 22.5% for SC/STs
in government service and public sector jobs, sparked off student riots,
mainly in north India, but also in Hyderabad and a few other places.
The methods of protest ranged from street-cleaning and boot-polishing
to self-immolation; the discourses deployed most significantly were
those of Unrewarded Merit and the Salvation of the Nation. The
actual course of events is too well known to require recounting here.
What we would like to focus on is the imaging of women in the anti-
Mandal agitation, preceded by a brief discussion on the way in which
the agitation itself was represented in the media.
The Indian Express editor Arun Shourie, rousing the upper caste
youth to action in his editorials, spoke of 'the intense idealism and
fury' of the students (Indian Express, September 29, 1990). A well-
known intellectual denounced the reservations for OBCs as a
'transgression of moral norms' and as a political practice which would
'destroy the structure of democratic politics' (Veena Das, Statesman, 3
September, 1990). She spoke of the 'hidden despair' of the 'youth', and
the government's refusal to recognize that 'people' 'may be moved by
utopias, not interests'. The media's invocation of students, youth and
people was marked by a strange consensus on usage-these terms were
obviously unmarked, yet referred only to those who were upper-caste or
middle class. An editorial in the Independent bemoaned the fact that
the middle class now had no place in India (4 October, 1990), suggesting
somlehow that they were, in fact, the only legitimate political
suIbjects/actors in a democracy. Only the subject of humanism could
claim the utopias of the Enlightenment.
The Nation was a central figure in the anti-Mandal discourse.
Claiiming the heritage of Jawaharlal Nehru (a 1950's speech of
Nehru's which was widely circulated had asserted that reservations
would produce a 'second-rate' nation), the anti-Mandalites saw
themselves as the authentic bearers of secularism and egalitarianism.
Equality, they argued, would be achieved by a transcendence or a
repudiation of caste, community and gender. For feminists who had
struggled for years to inscribe gender into the liberal model, the
Mandal issue posed a difficult question. Young middle class women

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98 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

began to declare that they were against the reservations for women
which had been announced in Andhra Pradesh, for instance, as well as
against the idea of keeping seats in public transport reserved for
women. Reservations were concessions, and would make women 'soft',
they said, reducing their ability to be independent and strong. In the
anti-Mandal protests, women often appear not as sexed beings but as
free and equal citizens, as partners of the rioting men, jointly protesting
the erosion of 'their' rights. The nearly unanimous media celebration of
the upper-caste students framed them within a non-sectarian
nationalism and humanism; these young men and women were truly
egalitarian and therefore anti-Mandal, whereas pro-Mandal groups
were accused of supporting a resurgent casteism.
We asserted earlier that 'the Indian' comes into being in a
dialectical relationship of inequality with the Western subject of
humanism. In the first two decades or so after independence, the post-
colonial 'Indian' lays claim to a more egalitarian liberalism than that
produced in the age of empire and in the heart of empire. Nehruvian
socialism took shape after the Soviet example of state planning,
although allowing for a 'mixed' economy that retained large numbers
of middle-class professionals in the public sector. In the new global
configuration that has emerged after the collapse of the second world,
in the context of economic 'liberalization' in India and the gradual
erosion of the public sector, the neo-nationalist Indian subject proclaims
its Indianness even as it internationalizes itself; now claiming equality
with the western subject of humanism totally on the latter's own terms,
the 'Indian' aggressively demands the rejection of everything that
would come in the way of its achieving an equal place in the new world
order.
Whereas in the Nehru years the retarders of progress were seen as
casteism, fundamentalism, or feudalism, and the role of the state was
to help overcome these, in the fund-bank years these 'evils' are imaged
as being located in welfarism and in the state-controlled public sector
itself. The 'failure' and 'inefficiency' of the public sector is seen as the
outcome of the reservations policy; if becoming 'efficient', therefore, is
the only way of integrating India into the world economy, then the
obvious means of achieving this is to abolish reservations and
establish a meritocracy. The sociologist Andre Beteille argued recently
that no one wants to defend a caste hierarchy today;4 but what he did
not add, however, was that the new 'secular' hierarchy-a
meritocracy premised on efficiency-itself refigures, transforms and
redleploys caste5. In an article written during the anti-Mandal
agitation, BJP leader K.R.Malkani mentioned 'a vice president of the
IBM' who 'joked' that they have so many Indians, and they are so
good, that they in the IBM have decided not to employ any more, since
they could just take over the IBM! Read the Brahmin for the educated
Indian, and you have some idea of our wealth and brain power' (The

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 99

Daily, 11 October, 1990). After the self is marked upper class/upper


caste, the process of marking, as we have already suggested, becomes
invisible. The recomposition of the middle class, the class that stands
in for the nation, is thus predicated on the redeployment and othering
of caste. In the consolidation of the middle-class and in the othering of
caste, 'women' play a crucial role. 'Apolitical' women students
participated enthusiastically in demonstrations and blockades,
mouming the 'death of merit' and arguing that the nation was in need
of saving; wives of IAS officers demonstrated in the capital on behalf
of their children, who they claimed were being denied of their
rightful share in the nation. The fact of women 'taking to the streets'
became in the hegemonic culture iconic of an idealism that recalled the
days of the freedom struggle. The marking of 'women' as middle class
and upper caste has a long genealogy which, historically and
conceptually, goes back into nationalism as well as social reform.6
Marked thus, 'women' are seen as morally pure and uncorrupted; hence
the significance of their protest, which becomes a 'disinterested' one,
since they have no place in the organised political process.7 However,
as a powerful strand of nationalism asserted, it was women who were
entrusted with the task of saving the Nation. In fact, the nation was
frequently imaged as 'woman' (Bharatmata, Mother India).
The re-emergence of women in the public sphere as claimants to the
nation and to citizenship results in a masculinization of the lower
castes. To rephrase the title of a well-known feminist book, in Mandal-
Chunduru, all the women are upper caste (and, by implication, middle-
class Hindu) and all the lower castes are men.8 In the anti-Mandal
agitation, we argued earlier, 'women' were apparently not gendered.
But the representation in the media of their undeprived and well-
nourished faces and bodies visually marked them as upper caste and
defined the lower castes as Other.9 The photographs of the anti-
Mandal women suggested that caste (read lower caste) is defined
against and endorsed by gender, and by the assertive and articulate
subject of feminism. Sexuality was a hidden issue in Mandal, as an
interview with an anti-Mandal woman student suggested. The student
had held in a demonstration a placard reading-'We want employed
husbands'. When asked why, she said that reservations would deprive
their men of employment. In that case, why should they not marry
'backward' boys? ' "But how can that be . . .", her voice trailed off'
(Jyoti Malhotra, The Independent, 26 August, 1990). The anti-Mandal
women had learned to claim deprivation and injustice, now not as
women but as citizens, for to ground the claim in gender would pit them
against middle-class men. The claiming of citizenship rather than
sisterhood now not only set them against dalit men but also against
lower caste/class women.
Interestingly, it is the claim to sisterhood that accomplishes the
sarne effect in Chunduru. To sketch the context: in the culmination of a

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100 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

series of hostile encounters spread across at least two to three years, on


August 6, 1991, in the village of Chunduru in coastal Andhra Pradesh,
thirteen dalits were murdered by upper caste Reddys. The catalysing
'event' appeared to be the incursion into the cinema hall space
reserved by tradition for the upper castes by a young dalit graduate,
who was later beaten up, forced to drink liquor, and marched to the
Chunduru police station, where he was 'accused of harassing upper-
caste women in an inebriated condition'.10
After the carnage of August 6, the mourning dalits organised a
funeral procession, during which some haystacks and thatched roofs
were set on fire. Most of the Reddy males had left Chunduru to avoid
arrest. The upper caste women who stayed behind complained loudly
of harassment by the dalits, suggesting that their present accusations
stemmed from a long history of grievances against dalit men.
Shortly after, the Reddys of the region formed a
'Sarvajanabhyudaya Porata Samithi' along with the Kammas,
Brahmins, Kapus, Rajus and Vaishyas, and organised processions,
dharnas and roadblocks to protest their 'oppression' at the hands of
dalits.11 The upper-caste women, they contended, had been
systematically harassed by dalit men. Accusations of eve-teasing and
assault multiplied, post-Chunduru. On August 13, in Kollipara village
near Tenali, a Dalit boy was beaten up by upper caste boys for teasing
'a schoolgirl'; a report dated August 11, 1991, said that in early August,
a Dalit student was stabbed on the pretext that he had teased 'three
girls'. The original cinema hall story, in which a young dalit man was
accused of putting his feet up on the seat in front of him that was
occupied by an upper-caste man, was recoded as one about 'a Harijan
youth putting his feet up on the seat in front in the cinema hall
occupied by a caste Hindu girl' (Statesman, 9 August, 1991). In
Chunduru itself, the story went, just before August 6, when dalit
labourers were no longer employed for transplantation and women from
the landlords' family had undertaken the task, dalit men were
supposed to have accosted the women one day, quarreled with them,
stripped them naked and forced them to remove the transplanted
seedlings and plant them again. Enraged upper caste women attacked
the convoys of Chief Minister Janardhana Reddy and former CM
N.T. Rama Rao, faulting the State for not providing them protection
from the dalits.
Years of sexual abuse of dalit women by upper caste men appear
under the sanction of 'custom' while the alleged 'eve-teasing' of upper
caste women by dalit men invokes the horrors and
prohibitions/punishments of major transgression, the penalty of death.
Chunduru drew the attention of urban women's groups, but especially
for those feminists who had refused to be part of the anti-Mandal
agitation and were attempting to build fragile alliances with dalit
organisations, the hegemonic articulation of the gender issue as one of

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 101

'molestation' (of upper caste women) was deeply problematic.


However to counterpose this against the molestation of dalit women
was equally problematic.
Feminists can grapple with this problem only, we feel, by
addressing the key role played by caste in the making of the middle-
class woman. For example, in the 19th century bhadratok campaigns
against Vaishnav artistes as much as in the anti-nautch initiatives in
Madras Presidency, the virtue and purity of the middle-class woman
emerged in contrast with the licentiousness of the lower caste/class
woman. It is a logic that continues to operate, as for instance in the case
of Rameeza Bee and the Birati rapes: since the women crying rape were
'prostitutes', they therefore had no right to complain of sexual
harassment. A woman's right over her body and control over her
sexuality is conflated with her virtue. So powerful does this
characterization become that only the middle-class woman has a right
to 'purity.' In other words, only she is entitled to the name of woman in
this society. Again we see, as in Mandal, the masculinization of the
lower castes-the dalits are only male, the women only uppercaste.
The category of woman, and therefore in a very important sense the
field of feminism as well as the female subject, emerges in this context
by obscuring the dalit woman and marking the lower caste as the
predatory male who is the legitimate target of feminist rage.

IV

The introduction into national 'family welfare' or population control


programmes of long-acting hormonal implants and injectibles and
possibly also of RU 486, the abortifacient pill, is another metonym
through which we would like to explore contradictions implicit in
feminist demands for freedom, choice, and self-determination.
Women's groups and health activists in India have opposed these
contraceptives principally on three grounds: first, the number of side-
effects (mainly disturbed menstruation, hypertension and risk of
embolism, but also nervousness, vomiting, dizziness, weight gain, acne,
excessive facial hair growth or hair loss) and contraindications
(women with any history of liver problems, heart problems, diabetes,
clotting defects, cancer, migraine, recent abortion, irregular cycles or
smoking cannot use the contraceptives); second, that such technologies
require (and assume) well-equipped health care systems if they are to
be administered safely and existing public health facilities are
nowhere near adequate to screen potential users, insert and remove
implants and provide continued monitoring of user health; third, these
drugs were not developed for women in India and should not be used
before conducting epidimological and biochemical studies that take
into account differences in weight, diet and so on.12 Considered as
contraceptives for Indian women who are not part of the urban middle-

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102 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

class, and often even for them, the profile of Norplant or Net-Oen is
abysmal.
International organisations such as the Planned Parenthood
Foundation (IPPF) and the Population Council who underwrite the
research and promote the use of these contraceptives and the
multinational corporations that produce them, invoke the founding
demands of the women's movement itself as they market these drugs.
Women's lives, their rights of self-determination and choice, their
privacy, autonomy, and empowerment is now on their agenda.
Important feminist lobbies, such as the Feminist Majority in the USA
endorse these claims. In a widely publicised statement made recently
in Bombay, Werner Foros, president of the Washington-based
Population Institute cited resource shortage as an important factor in
population planning ('over 65 nations are in danger of not being able to
feed their population by the turn of the century'). Population control
had to be the priority in these countries. However, he was more
distressed that a majority of women had no control over their fertility.
He cited a survey in which 300 million women worldwide had said
that they hadn't wanted their last child and added, 'women today do
two-thirds of the work, earn only one-tenth of the money and own less
than one per cent of the property. So the empowerment of women is
perhaps the most important intervention we can pursue.' He wants a
population control programme in which the 'poorest of poor couples has
the means to make a choice.'13
Similarly, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the scientist who is a consultant
and spokesperson for the multinational Roussel-Uclaf who have
developed the abortifacient pill, RU 486, speaks of it as the 'moral
property of women.' It is a duty, he claims, to make the right to this
property available in the third world: 'Denying this pill is basically
signing the death warrant for the 200,000 women who die [worldwide]
annually from abortion.'14 Fred Sai, President of the IPPF, feels that
the most serious problem facing India's otherwise praiseworthy efforts
at population control is the lack of 'contraceptive options' that are
offered to the Indian woman and the consequent limits to the choices
she can make as an individual with an individualised profile of
requirements.15
The pro-woman, indeed feminist, credentials of those who research
into and promote these contraceptives are further consolidated when
their initiatives are seen as enabling and empowering women in
c(nservative or religion-bound contexts. Thus the campaign for the
abortifacient pill stressed women's control as well as the privacy and
the promise of technologically bypassing social or legal prohibition:
'What could be more private than taking a pill, how could a state
control swallowing?'16 In the US the Feminist Majority spoke of anti-
abortionists as the common enemy of women and science, since 'both
women's health and freedom of research are being sacrificed by

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 103

allowing anti-abortion extremists to block the production and


distribution of RU 486.'17 Proponents of Norplant and Net-Oen in India
argue that long-acting implants or injectibles that do not interrupt
intercourse and do not require women to do anything on a regular basis
are particularly suitable for an illiterate and backward population.
They also point out that these drugs expand the options open to women,
and allow Indian women to take decisions about contraception that do
not require the co-operation of their husbands or the sanction of their
families. Choice and privacy are both invoked in the battle which is
set up as one between the good, progressive, pro-woman scientists and
promoters of these contraceptives, and their conservative, anti-woman
opponents. Thus the 'limited options' offered by our population
programme are attributed 'to the conservative Indian medical mindset,
which has reservations about hormonal contraceptives,' (Times of
India, 1 November, 1992) while the stalling of Net-Oen and Norplant,
first by feminist litigation and later by the drug controller who has
called for further trials, is decried respectively as 'unfortunate and
politicised' (The Independent, 22 October, 1992), the handiwork of a
few 'vociferous and clearly misguided' groups (The Week, 16
November, 1992) and as inefficiency and 'procrastination that hinders
real progress' (Times of India, 1 November, 1992).
The figure of the woman who is being liberated/endowed with
rights in these discourses requires careful scrutiny. The use of these
contraceptives is premised on the notion that wise planning and
scientifically developed products can fulfill women's demands for
liberty and self-determination (and catapult them into modernity)
without changes in existing family relations or in society at large; in
other words, the promise is of a technological fix that can bypass
sexual politics and indeed the network of relations in which women are
gendered and subjugated. For example, the fact that most women who
die attempting abortion, die not because existing methods are unsafe
but because abortion is illegal, finds no place in these statements;
neither does the fact that problems arise even in countries like India
where abortion is legal, because a 'standardized' medical education
does not train doctors to perform abortions. The abortifacient pill is not
going to change that situation; in fact as a technology it is designed to
evade such issues and ends up (a) placing the entire burden for what
continues to be a difficult and often illegal procedure on the individual
woman, (b) putting women's health in considerable danger, and (c)
ruthlessly expanding what might be thought of as reasonable risk and
tolerable pain or discomfort, to make up for the irrationality of the
system.
Norplant was developed as a drug that could be used on unruly and
recalcitrant populations not only in the third world but also in the
first. It is long-acting, targets the woman, does not need a literate or
numerate user, does not require the user's co-operation after it has been

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104 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

implanted, and can be monitored by the authorities with a glance at


the woman's arm. Despite the huge investments in propaganda about
woman's choice, Norplant's potential as an instrument of control was
immediately recognized. In the USA, less than a month after it was
passed by the FDA, a judge ordered that a convicted woman not be let
out on probation unless she agreed to have the implant. A newpaper
editorial suggested that because of growing poverty among the blacks,
welfare mothers should be offered incentives to use Norplant
(Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 December, 1990). Norplant is now promoted
in much-advertised ppulation control programmes in some of the most
coercive regimes in the third world-Chile, Indonesia, the
I'hilippines, China-and the somewhat less obliging Indian
government is described as 'lacking political commitment' or indulging
in 'procrastination . . . that hinders real progress' when the country is
'hurtling towards disaster.'
Women's freedom, agency and choice is invoked only within the
closed-off, private domains of the family and of reproduction which
are in turn imaged as extremely-and unchangeably-conservative and
chauvinist. These assumptions underlie the production and marketing
of these contraceptives, but they are socially endorsed, elaborated and
reproduced in the family welfare programmme as a whole through, for
example, their massive advertising campaigns, institutional
arrangements, and attitudes. The wide range of sexual and familial
relations that exist in the country and the variety of subject positions
that are therefore available to a woman are, in the process,
homogenised and naturalised regressively, in this conservative mode.
For example, these contraceptives assume that women have no control
over the conditions in which they get pregnant; that contraception
cannot be negotiated or discussed by the couple; that the woman has no
right to refuse sex. No attempt is made to reinforce or envisage more
egalitarian relationships or place more responsibility on the man. In
the world of the family welfare programme, a man who is not a male
chauvinist is a contradiction in terms. No questions are asked about the
nature and quality of existing health care systems and the complex
factors that mediate different women's access to them. The politics of
the private are not addressed and no questions are asked about
contradictions between various women's requirements and the national
and international agendas of population control. Women's freedom
begins to look alarmingly like the freedom to consume these expensive
and dangerous multinational products in a climate of disinformation
that makes a mockery of 'consent.' These discourses continue to address
the question of women's rights and invoke women as free agents in
vocabulary drawn from feminism, but only within the once-again de-
politicised private domains of the family and of reproduction.
The problem is that a whole range of issues that constitute the
subjugation of women, and indeed their differential subjugation in

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 105

relation to class, caste and community, are naturalised in the 'woman'


whose freedom and right to privacy is invoked and who becomes the
bearer of the 'right' to choose. The very same move also makes it
possible to bring this individual's rights into alignment with the
interests of population control and multinational profit. For instance,
hormonal injectibles/implants might be considered as expanding
contraceptive options for women in a situation where they have ready
access to an efficient and well-equipped medical set up. To put it in
different terms, for a woman whose class, caste and comraunity
positioning matches that of the citizen subject, hormonals can, with
some reservations, be regarded as genuine 'choices.' Yet, ironically,
these contraceptives were never developed for this woman. As their
profiles clearly indicate, they were intended for 'less desirable'
demographic groups: the teeming millions of the third world, first
world immigrants, criminals. Corresponding groups in the national
context are the rural 'masses' and the urban poor (a majority of whom
are dalits) and of course Muslims as a category. Feminists using
arguments about women's health have been able to wedge their way
into one fault line in this structure. Yet untouched, however, are issues
of class, caste and community that require us to expand the problematic
beyond that of the rights of the liberal body. Women-as individuals
or in groups-have to bear the increasingly heavy burden of these
contradictions as they invent resources with which to negotiate their
ever more demanding citizenship, as well as to survive.

WOMEN IN HINDUTVA

Women on the Right have also opened up a space that might in many
ways be regarded as feminist. As Tanika Sarkar points out in an
important study of the Rashtrasevika Samiti (the women's wing of the
RSS), women are 'active political subjects' not only in the samiti, but
also more generally in the domain of communal politics.18 The women
leaders of the BJP are not daughters, wives or mothers of deceased
male leaders. They are there in their own right and seem to have
carved out distinctive political roles and identities for themselves.
Equally significant is the articulate and often passionate involvement
of women who otherwise seem to have little interest in public life in
issues such as reservations, the appeasement of Muslims or corruption in
the bureaucracy. Riots now have a new profile with women, sometimes
even middle-class women, actively participating as in Bhagalpur in
1989, Ahemdabad in 1990 or Surat in 1992. News photographs showed
a sizeable number of women among those arriving for the kar seva in
Ayodhya in 1992. Several papers carried reports of Sadhvi
Rithambara and Uma Bharati cheering on the crowd that tore down
the Babri Masjid.

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106 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

More striking-and in some ways more disturbing-than the


appearance of this militant individual on the public battlefields of
FIindutva is her modernity and indeed her feminism. The new Hindu
woman nearly always belongs to the most conservative groups in Indian
society-upper class/caste, rural land-owning, urban professional or
trading sectors-but she cannot be regarded as traditional in any
sinmple sense of the term, any more than Hindutva can be read as
fundamentalist.19 There is very little talk of going back to tradition.
The focus is on injustice, for which the Babri Masjid serves as symbol.
At issue in the war of Hindutva, which is defined after Savarkar as
love for the motherland, is not Hinduism, but the Indian nation.
Predictably, self-respect is an important theme. However, hitched
onto women's aspirations for self-respect is the idea of Hindu self-
respect. One account of the origin of the Samiti is that Lakshmibai
Kelkar had founded it after she saw goondas (interestingly not
Muslims) raping a woman in the presence of her husband. Since Hindu
men (who are in this story both lustful and weak) could not protect
their wives, Hindu women had to train to do so themselves.20 As in
authoritarian politics the world over, the emphasis is on discipline
and on purging or cleansing the social body of corruption, using force if
necessary. While the immediate object appears to be Indian society,
the Muslim enemy is very close to the surface here. In the
RSS/VHP/BJP imaginary the matrubhumi is presented as a
repeatedly raped female body, while the myths of the enemy within
and of Muslim lust play key structural roles. Thus, they claim for
Muslims 'aurat matrubhumi nahin hai, bhog bhumi hai.'21 The
violence women experience and their need to fight against and gain
respect within their own society is all but obscured as the well-made
enemy steps in, suggesting that self-respect is best gained in the
protection of the motherland. The fact that in the projected Hindu
rashtra Muslims would not be allowed four wives and that women will
be protected by a re-affirmed 'common' personal law is cited as an
index of the respect women would receive in that utopia.
Like the anti-Mandal agitation, Hindutva would seem to have
enabled an articulate, fighting individualism for women and for men.
Its power is productive in the Foucauldian sense, inciting its subjects to
speak out and act, to become independent, agentive, citizen-
individuals. One notices increasingly the confident exponents of
Hindutva (students, otherwise unremarkable middle-class men and
women) who speak up at seminars and public meetings and write letters
to the editor. These subjects are marked as authentically Indian and as
having found an ethos within which their natural-and national-
expressive selves can emerge and be sustained.
It is important to understand that though this new Hindu self is
represented as discriminated against and embattled, it has the
confidence of occupying a 'neutral' ground that provides the basis for a

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 107

new moral authority. Hindutva, for example, is represented as a


potential national ethos within which all other religions and
communities might be justly housed. The claim is commonly backed
two arguments. One, a redeployment of nationalist versions of Indian
history in which Hinduism is represented as having a long tradition of
tolerance; the other an invocation of Western nation-states and the
endorsement of dominant religious traditions in the secularism they
practice. The history of violence through which those national-
bourgeoisies established authority, which is also the history of
colonialism, is never discussed. The new Hindu subject speaks the voice
of a reason that opposes false dogmas (western theories, pseudo-
secularism, welfarism), challenges the bias of existing institutions (the
courts, the constitution) on the grouind that they are not sensitive to the
desires of the majority and appeals to truths that are self-evident to
'genuine' Indians. Thus Girilal Jain writes about the 'bloated rhetoric
of secularism, constitutionalism and the law' (Times of India, 12
December, 1992) while Swapan Dasgupta comments after the
demolition of the Masjid: 'In effect the kar sevaks presented Hindu
society with a fait accompli. They could either disown the illegal act
on account of both politics and aesthetics. Or they could come to terms
with their own assertiveness, equate it with the storming of the
l3astille and the collapse of the ancient regime, and prepare to face the
coisequences' (Sunday, 20-26 December, 1992, p. 9).
In moves that are surprisingly quickly effected and apparently hold
conviction for increasingly large numbers of Indians, the virulent anti-
Muslim history of Hindutva, the political agenda focussed on pulling
down a mosque and building a temple, and the record of communal
violence, is gilded over and legitimised as Hindutva reoccupies the
discourses in which bourgeois nationalism established authority in its
European birthplace-and, more important from the point of view of
our argument in this paper, the forms of subjectivity that emerged in
tandem with it. Thus L.K. Advani (invariably represented in the press
as mature, soft-spoken and charming) insists that his is actually the
only 'secular' party. The demolition of the Babri Masjid is only a
'temporary setback.' A.B. Vajpayee (honourable, reasonable, cultured)
exonerates the real BJP by locating communalism only in its 'young and
over-enthusiastic party workers' (Indian Express, 26 December, 1992).22
The angle on neutrality that appears in the context of the gender
question is more telling. Members of the Rashtrasevika Samiti
distinguished their position from that of other women's organisations
by saying 'when we arbitrate we do not always take the woman's side.
We are neutral . . . Hum ghar torne-wale nahin hain' (TS 2062).
Similar evidence of neutrality in relation to class or caste is not
difficult to locate.
The politics of this neutrality-effect demands more careful scrutiny.
The BJP/VHP/RSS combine are pressing in on a whole set of existing

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108 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

figures, logics and institutions as they lay claim to the nation and to
neutrality. As their allusions to European history and to first world
nationalism also indicate, a figure that is repeatedly referenced is the
bourgeois citizen-subject and the world that was 'legitimately'-and
ruthlessly-recast in his interests and in his singular image. Closer
home is the neutrality of the Nehruvian state and of planned
development in which the 'social' problems of cast , class and gender,
and colonialism are addressed and analysed by scientific planners and
handed over to the bureaucracy for redress. The problem, briefly
summarised, is that though this state acknowledges social disbalances
and accepts responsibility for righting them, it functions on the basis of
an executive centrality in which the state is authorised to speak and
act for the people. The task of shaping this executive centrality and a
social imaginary that authorised it, has dominated cultural politics in
the post-independence period. Identities that had taken shape in
major pre-independence class, caste and gender struggles and might
have provided the basis for another social imaginary of the nation
were fractured and disorganised as they were re-written into
narratives of humanity and citizenship. The task is an ongoing one, for
hegemony is continuously pressured by new demands just as it is
continuously under threat. Films, novels, histories, television
programmes, the press in general, the curricula and a range of other
institutions of civil society address potentially rupturing questions of
caste, gender or community and rework them into narratives that
legitimate the middle-class, upper-caste Hindu, patriarchal and
internationalist markings of the hegemonic subject.
As a result of this alliance with the subject of humanism, the
commonsense of the new Right has a much greater hold than the
formal/electoral support received by the BJP might suggest. Thus
whether one looks at the mainstream press or at the apparently non-
political programmes put out by Doordarshan (the morning chat shows,
the evening serials, the children's programmes, the afternoon women's
programmes) or ways of thinking, feeling, reasoning and arriving at
conclusions that govern the daily lives of the growing consumer
population, Hindutva seems well set to becoming hegemonic. Powerful
new discursive articulations are thus effected between this
individualism and organic-conservative themes of religion, tradition,
nation, family, personal integrity, order and discipline. The discussion
on minorityism, injury/appeasement, pseudo-secularism, and
nationalism have brought these subjects into focus in a virulently anti-
Muslim frame and feeds directly into a genealogy of modern Indian
womanhood that marks it not only as Hindu, but as upper-caste/class.
The Muslim woman is caught in a terrible zero-zero game. She cannot
really be woman any more that she can be Indian. As woman and as
Indian, she cannot really be Muslim. As for the women on the Right,
they are indeed empowered by these new movements, but in a way that

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TIHEORY OF GENDER 109

sets up the feminist project as one that endorses class/caste hierarchies


as well as the othering of Islam.

VI

ANTI-ARRACK MOVEMENT

We have been arguing that the hegemonic articulation of the gender


issue sets up the feminist subject in an antagonistic relationship with
for example class-caste (Mandal-Chunduru), or community (women on
the Right). We now turn to our last metonym, the anti-arrack
movement in Andhra Pradesh, in which the dominant figuring of
'women' seems to work in such a way as to erase and delegitimize
earlier feminist initiatives. The process is not a simple one, and we do
not claim that we have been able to map all-or even most-of its
complicated strategies. The radically anti-hegemonic feminist politics
of the anti-arrack movement are obscured in media depictions that
annex it into a variety of contemporary discourses about the nation, its
women, and the purification of the former by the virtue of the latter.
Feminists are caught in a curious double-bind: the portrayal of the
anti-arrack women as the only authentic feminists paradoxically
involves (1) a denial that their struggle is concerned specifically with
women's issues and (2) a reinscription of it as an anti-feudal struggle, or
as a struggle to cleanse the body politic and save the nation.
What are the implications of this event for feminist theory and
feminist practice? How might we reclaim this struggle for a feminism
that also sets up new agendas for democracy and secularism?
A series of struggles centred around government-backed sales of
arrack (sara in Telugu) have been taking place over the last decade or
so in various regions of Andhra Pradesh. In each region, different local
configurations have sustained arrack as an issue; while in the
Telengana region and in a few other districts the CPI(M-L) groups have
initiated or supported the agitation, in some of the coastal Andhra
districts the movement seems to have emerged in conjunction with other
events, such as the adult literacy programme. Women all over rural
Andhra Pradesh have been attacking excise department jeeps and
police, burning arrack packets, punishing arrack sellers and fining the
men who continue to drink. Although the current phase of the
movement is already more than a year old, it is only since September
1992 that it appears to have gathered rapid momentum, spreading
from village to village in a manner that no organised political party
has been able to predict or control. [Since we wrote this paper in
December 1992, there have been further developments: the Andhra
Pradesh government has announced a ban on arrack in Nellore district
from 15 April, 1993 and in the entire state from 1 October, 1993.] 23
Each political organisation, however, seems to be appropriating the
sara women, laying claim to their struggle, and configuring them as the

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110 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

true subjects of feminism. The range is an astonishing one: from the


Marxist-Leninist parties to the traditional left (CPM and CPI) to the
Dalit Mahasabha, from the Gandhians to the Lohiaites to the Telugu
Desam to the BJP/RSS; not to mention the women's organisations across
the spectrum: from the Arya Mahila Samiti to the Mahila Dakshcta
Samiti (headed by the state Governor's wife), from the AP Mahila
Sangham to the two Progressive Organisations for Women backed by
different M-L parties. Unlike in Mandal-Chunduru, the woman in the
anti-arrack struggle appears as a 'Romantic' subject, and predicated
onto her are an assortment of complex narratives of which she is the
sole heroine.24
The BJP MP Uma Bharati, praising the anti-arrack women, wanted
'women' to 'also campaign against dowry, the craze for foreign goods
and corruption'; she felt they should 'help create national awakening
(.swadeshi jagran)' (The Hindu, 20 October, 1992). In Nellore District
where the movement is very strong the BJP are said to have named the
women as Shakti, Kali and Durga, just as the all-India vice-president
of the BJP, Jana Krishnamurthy, declared that 'matru shakti [mother's
strength, power] had caused others to fall in line' (The Hindu, 12
October, 1992). Taking a slightly different but related stand, K. Ilaiah
of the Dalit Mahasabha speaks of the movement as asserting 'the
mother's right to set the family right'.25 Vavilala Gopalakrishnaiah,
an old freedom fighter, argues that the anti-arrack movement is
'similar to the freedom movement' and that 'care should be taken to see
that it will not be politicised' (The Hindu, 16 October, 1992).26
'Mothers with babies in their arms walk miles to come for
demonstrations', writes Vimala of the POW (Nalupu, 1-31 October,
1992). The imagery is that of a woman 'who has come out into the
street [veedhiloki vacchindi]' [film actress Sharada, in Eenadu, 5
October, 1992); and, as in the anti-Mandal agitation, or in the
nationalist movement, this woman becomes the icon of purity and
idealism.
In trying to explain why women are out on the streets, writers
appear not to address the issues that might have enabled the rebellion
to find articulation, such as the removal of the rice subsidy, the
increase in arrack sales, the literacy classes and the stories about
arrack in the literacy primers. What is offered instead is the picture of
the village woman's eternal tears and suffering, and how sara 'sucks
the blood of the poor' (Nalupu, 1-31 October, 1992). When driven to
extreme despair, suggest the dominant narratives, the woman's human
essence asserts itself and allows her to claim the status of citizen-
subject.27 Interestingly, the assertion of her 'civility' is premised on her
being wife and mother, on her concern for her children and husband.
What the woman desires, as Sharada would have it, is 'happiness in
the family' (Eenadu, 5 October, 1992) and that the auspicious marks of
her marriage [paspu-kumkumam] not be taken from her. This refiguring

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TI-IEORY OF GENDER 111

of the authentic subject of feminism seems to be an implicit critique, for


example, of urban feminists as they are customarily imagined in the
dominant cultural representations of our time as homebreakers and as
westernized, alienated and selfish (putting their interests before that
of the family). This authentic feminist subject is characterized by a
retired judge as a rural woman with 'a specific nature of her own'; 'she
lives as a slave to custom as long as she can, and when she cannot
tolerate that life anymore and begins to break barriers, neither men nor
the urban women can imagine the manner in which she will struggle.
She has nerve' (Justice Arula Sambasiva Rao, in Eenadu, 6 October,
1992). The woman's militancy is coded as that spirit which makes her
a good wife and mother; the true sati demonstrates her pativratya not
by being passive but by acting aggressively to save her husband from an
untimely death.
By emphasizing the 'familial' impulse behind the women's
militancy, dominant explanatory narratives deny the status of the
political to their actions and seek thereby to contain their scope. A
celebratory report in Indian Express (13 October, 1992) described the
anti-arrack issue as 'a burning social question'; N.T. Rama Rao of the
TDP, who has been vociferously demanding prohibition on behalf of
the women, invoked the memory of Gandhi's desire to impose
prohibition and his [Gandhi's] opinion that 'only womenfolk could
bring about this social change' (Indian Express, 15 October, 1992).
Ramoji Rao, editor and publisher of Eenadu Telugu daily which has
given extensive coverage to the sara struggle, said: 'Every individual
who keeps trust in the values of social life shouild wholeheartedly
welcome the Great Movement [Mahodyamami . . . Everybody with
flesh and blood, who has a sense of shame, and humanism, is cheering
the struggle' (Eenadu, editorial, 25 October, 1992). Analysts on the left
seem to veer between seeing the movement as one for social reform
(personal conversation with CPM members) or seeing it as 'part of the
anti-feudal struggle' (Nalupu, 1-15 November, 1992). That the
movement is perceived by some as leaderless helps to push towards a
characterization of it as 'non-political'. As Ramoji Rao put it in an
editorial, the movement had 'transcended caste, religion, class and
party' although, after it had gathered momentum, various 'political
parties and women's orgarnisations are now hurrying after it' (Eenadu
editorial, 13 September, 1992).
The obverse of the refusal to image the women as political actors is
the bestowal on them of a social role, that of rescuing not only their
families but also 'saving the nation'. The hegemonic narratives
authorize the women, give them 'moral authority' to cleanse a body
politic 'stinking of sara' (Eenadu editorial, 13 September, 1992). Once
again, the consensus in terms of analysis and solution is stunning. Across
the political spectrum, writers set up an elaborate demonology inl
which the valiant women battle the forces of evil, represented by the

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112 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

politicians, the arrack contractors, government officials, industrialists


and the whole 'corrupt' apparatus of state and civil society.28 The
meaning of sara (K. Balagopal calls it the 'obscene fluid') here becomes
that which is unnameable and disgusting beyond belief, stands for the
'uncivilised politics'29 abhorred by the enlightened secular humanist.
Repeatedly, sara is evoked not only as being 'responsible for all the
violence and atrocities on women' (Suman Krishna Kant, Mahila
Dakshata Samiti chair, in Eenadu, 3 October, 1992) but also as
signifying the source of all evil and corruption; and it is rural women
who are 'blowing the conchshell of battle to destroy the atrocious sara
demon' (Eenadu editorial, 25 October, 1992). As K. Balagopal puts it,
'The supreme courage and tenacity of thousands of rural women has
pitted itself against the abysmal humbug of the state's rulers . . . [and
the women] have taken up sickle and broomstick to drive the obscenity
out of all our lives' (Economic and Political Weekly, 14 November,
1992, p. 2457). The anti-arrack movement will 'cleanse us of corruption'
(a CPM supporter, in personal conversation); a polity that has fallen
away from the idealistic days of nationalism will have its moral
impurity washed away by the sara women.
But what about the meaning of arrack for the women in the struggle?
What do they have to say about it, and in relation to what are they
'placing' the issue? We would want to argue, against the persistent
imaging of it as dealing with a social issue, that the sara movement is
a significant elaboration of the politics of everyday life. The
observations that follow, necessarily impressionistic, are based on our
visit to twelve villages in three mandals of Nellore District in
November 1992.30 While the women's success in reducing or e
preventing arrack sales has directly affected the state and can be seen
without much effort as a classical 'political' action, the movement also
seems to have resulted in a reconfiguring of power-and gender
relations-within villages. Women do not usually confront individual
men in their homes but attack the local sara shop and the excise jeeps
which supply liquor. The women are also articulating many domains of
their life in political terms or as political issues (even areas that class
analysis would see as 'economic'). As Kondamma of
Thotlacheruvupalli put it: 'Why does the government send us sara? Let
them give us water instead, and we could have two crops a year. Now
we have nothing.' Commenting on the state's indifference to their
lives, she pointed out that while they had 'home delivery' of arrack
they had to go nearly twenty miles to the nearest town to treat a
simple case of diarrhoea. In this village (Udaygiri Mandal, Nellore
District), the women had pulled down the arrack shop and collected
donations to build a stone platform over it which they used for public
meetings. 'Why should we care', said Kondamma, 'if the government is
losing money on sara because of us. When they had profits, did we see
any of it? If the government has losses, let them cut your salaries'.

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TIIEORY OF GENDER 113

Marvelling at the state's obtuseness, she renarked: 'You should feed a


buffalo before you milk it, otherwise it'll kick. And we've kicked'.
'This year we won't vote for anyone', she continued. 'They're all the
same. And if our men want to vote, there'll be war between us'.
Other women, in the village of Kacheridevarayapalli (Anantsagar
Mandal, Nellore District), drew up a figurative balance sheet that
assigned a different set of meanings to sara. The cost of the
government's Rs. 850 crores of excise revenue was death (caused by the
men's drunkenness-the deaths were those of themselves as well as of
the women, the latter often suicides), hunger, ill-health, lack of
education for the children, constant debt, their belongings-all the
pots and pans and all their clothes-pawned for buying sara, their
mental anguish. When they got rid of sara, said the women, they
began to eat twice a day, the village streets stayed clean ('no drunks
vomiting all over the place'), everyone's health improved ('the men
are getting fat and contented'), they had peace of mind ('ippudu
manasushanti undi'), freedom from abuse, and solvency. The village
landlords expressed the fear that labourers who had stopped drinking
sara and had started saving a little, would stop coming to them for
loans. Not only that, agricultural wages would now have to be paid in
real money rather than partly in sara packets obtained at a discount.
Women's growing control over wages was beginning to undermine long-
standing structures of dependency.
Many of the women in the movement speak of the significance
education, or literacy, has for them. One of the stories we heard about
the beginnings of the movement was about an inaugural function in
Ayyavaripalli village for the government-initiated Akshara Deepam
programme designed to eradicate illiteracy. The function, attended by
a state cabinet minister and the District Collector, was disrupted by
some drunken men. The women of the village, as in all other villages
the only ones who attended the night classes, demanded the closure of
the local sara shop so that their classes could be held in peace.
Willing to promise anything to ensure the success of the literacy
programme, the officials complied. This and other narratives about
women's achievements were written into the post-literacy primers,
stories such as the one about Dubagunta village (Adavallu
Ekamaithe-If Women Unite) where three drunken labourers lost
their way and drowned in a tank. A hundred women first stopped the
local arrack cart from entering the village; then they turned back 'a
jeep full of sara packets'; after this, the lesson goes, the police arrived
to enforce the right of the contractor to sell arrack. The women stood
their ground, saying they would go to the Collector if necessary. 'This
year', the lesson concludes, 'no one came forward to bid for arrack in our
village'.31 Women also spoke of other lessons, charts and topics for
discussion in their literacy primers, such as 'Seethamma Katha',
'Unity' and 'Who's Responsible for this Death?', which inspired them

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114 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

to join the struggle against arrack. 'We want our children to go to


school', said Kondamma of Thotlacheruvupalli. This claiming fromrr
below of the right to education makes evident one of the most
important agendas of the anti-Mandal agitation, the denial of
education to the lower castes.32 The upper caste anxiety about educated
dalits, as in Chunduru, is to prevent them from occupying the space of
the modem as it has been marked out in the post-colonial nation. The
sara women's claiming of education seems to recognise this logic and
challenge the exclusions of modernity itself.
The women in the movement are predominantly from the scheduled
caste, backward caste and Muslim communities, but their jointly
undertaken efforts to stop the excise officials claim the tacit support of
the upper-caste women of their village. Although it is an
understanding obtained from the women's perspective that allows
them to claim sara as 'their' issue, the movement has seldom pitted
them against the men, or against women from other
castes/communities.
A unique feature of the anti-arrack movement is the refusal of the
women to take up initiatives beyond their village. As Mastan-bi of
Kacheridevarayapalli put it, 'Are the women of the other villages
dead? Why should we go there to fight against sara?' In tying their
politics to the specificity of their location (their slogan is Maa ooriki
sara vaddu-'We don't want sara in our village'), in demarcating a
domain over which they can exercise control, the anti-arrack women
seem to be envisaging, and engaging in, a politics of the possible.33

VII

CONCULSION

Each of these metonyms display the tensions set up for feminist politics
and gender analysis today by the hegemonic representations of the
'feminist subject' and its world. These tensions emerge in the context of
a rapidly globalizing economy, and the refiguring of the nation and its
dominant classes. On the one hand, the metonyms mark the uneasy
alliance of feminism with structures of domination and their particular
deployments of gender, caste, class and community. On the other hand,
Mandal, Hindutva or sara provide us with configurations that
crystallize and precipitate the possibilities of new alliances.
The 'Indian' subject who lays sole claim to secularism and is the
figure addressed by our democracy, as we have argued, is shaped
historically through a process of differentiation as Hindu and upper-
class/caste. Feminist politics and theory today needs to help make
visible this formation from the perspective of those it necessarily
excludes, and reveal its complicity with that which claims to be both
naturally Indian and truly international. Our initiatives for new
political alliances have drawn on feminist understandings of the micro

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TIHEORY OF GENDER 115

politics of everyday life and the processes of othering. These


initiatives, we hope, will work towards re-energising visions of
secularism and democracy into performing as critical resources rather
than as structural guarantees. In functioning as critique, secularism-
democracy will perhaps underwrite the new forms of politics required
for the refashioning of the nation and for working towards an
alternative internationalism.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

This paper was first presented at the Anveshi/Subaltern Studies conference on


Subalternity and Culture held in Hyderabad, January 1993. We thank K. Lalita, Veena
Shatrugna, Mary John, V. Geeta, Parita Mukta and Lata Mani for discussing this paper
with us, Mr. Dasgupta and the staff of the Eenadu library for letting us use their
collection of press clippings and Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies for
creating a context where such issues are engaged.

1. For a relevant discussion of the metaphysics of substance and the question of


rights, see Mary Poovey, 'The Abortion Question and the Death of Man', in Joan
Sibtt and Marilyn Butler (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London:
Routledge, 1991).
2. The historical emergence of the citizen-subject in India has been explored in the
impressive work of scholars like Kumkum Sangari, Uma Chakravarthi, Lata
Mani, Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey, K. Satyanarayana and others. See
Kumkum Sangari, 'Relating HIistories: Definitions of Literacy, Literature,
Gender in Nineteenth Century Calcutta and England'. in Svati Joshi (ed.),
Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, HIistory (Delhi: Trianka,
1991); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Introduction to Recasting Women:
Essays in Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); Uma Chakravarti,
'Whatever HIappened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism. Nationalism and a
Script for the Past'; Lata Mani, 'Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in
Colonial India'; Partha Chatterjee, 'The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's
Question', all in Recasting Women; Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of
Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); K.
Satyanarayana, Indians and Others: Nationality, Gender and Caste in Gandhi,
M. Phil Thesis, University of Hyderbabad.,1992.
3. For a fine account of how Satyajit Ray effects the consolidation of this human,
citizen-subject in the freshly minted realism of the Apu Trilogy see Geeta Kapur,
'Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray,' Journal
of Arts and Ideas, 23-24 (anuary 1993), pp. 17-50.
4. In a public lecture on caste in modern India, delivered at University of
Hyderabad, January 1992.
5. The media always uses the term 'caste groups' or 'caste organisations' to refer to
lower caste groups. As K. Satyanarayana has pointed out, 'caste' usually refers
only to lower caste. See also Vivek Dhareshwar et al., 'Blaming the Victims'
Illustrated Weekly of India, 28 October, 1990, pp. 4345.
6. See the articles in Recasting Women by Partha Chatterjee and Uma
Chakravarti, as well as the introduction to Tharu and Lalita K. (eds.), Women
Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present Vol. II (New York: Feminist Press, 1993).
7. That 'this student movement' 'articulates political processes that lie outside the
domain of organised politics' was Veena Das characterisation of the anti-
Mandal agitation in 'A Crisis of Faith' (Statesman, 3 September, 1990).

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116 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

8. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds.), All the Women
are White, All the Blacks are Men, but some of us are Brave (New York: The
Feminist Press, 1982).
9. As Varavara Rao puts it in 'Deja-Vu', a poem about the anti-Mandal agitation:
'The newspapers of the rich/write about you/The hearts of the cameras go click
. . . Your agitation is like a wedding in a great house/Your dissatisfaction/Like
the ritual complaints of wedding guests. . . ' Translated by Tejaswini Niranjana
and K. Satyanarayana.
10. We base this narrative of the events on Samata Sanghatana's report, published
in Economic and Political Weekly, XXVI: No. 36 (1991), pp. 2079-84.
11. For this information, we are indebted to K Balagopal's report. 'Post-Chunduru
and Other Chundurus', in Economic and Political Weekly, XXVI: No 42 (1991),
pp. 2399-2405.
12. The high costs of the contraceptives (one set of Norplant implants will cost the
Indian government around 750 rupees) and that profits that will accrue is also an
important issue, but was not raised by activists.
13. 'Men's attitudes are big hurdles,' Interview with Sonora tha Nambiar, The
Sunday Times of India, 1.11.92, p. 11. In what appeared to be a well organised
campaign, Fornos, Sai and other functionaries of these and similar organisations
seemed to have been brought to India mainly to endorse the government's
Norplant programme, that had been stalled by a writ filed by some feminist
organisations. They were provided high profile coverage in the press (Rahul
Singh, Bachi Karkaria, Darryl D'Monte and Rashme Seghal interviewed them
and discussed Norplant). The articles invoked the horrors of an exploding
population, welcomed scientific advances such as Norplant and decried women's
protest against it as 'vociferous and clearly misguided,' misinformed,
'unfortunate and politicised' and as holding up progress when the country was on
the brink of disaster.
14. Fern Chapman, 'The Politics of he Abortion Pill' Washington Post, 3.10.89, p.
13. Cited in Renate Klein, Janice G. Raymond and Lynete J. Dumble, RU 486
Misconceptions, Myths and Morals (Melbourne: Spinnifex, 1991).
15. Quoted by Sara Adhikari in 'Countdown to disaster,' The Sunday Times of India
1.11.92, p. 11.
16. Ellen Goodman, 'Moral Property,' The Boston Globe, 17.7.89, p. 11. Cited in Klein
et al, RU 486, p. 25.
17. Klein et al., RU 486, pp. 5-6. The recent decision to make RU 486 available in
the US was seen as a feminist victory.
18. Tanika Sarkar, 'The Woman as Communal Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and
Ram Janambhoomi Movement,' Economic and Political WMeekly, 31 August, 1991,
p. 2062. Henceforth cited in the text as TS.
19. Each one of the office bearers of the Rashtrasevika Samiti, Tanika Sarkar
points out, denounced sati. What about voluntary sati? 'A young activist said
with genuine revulsion: Woh ho nahin sakta. Aurat jalengi kyoon?' Shakha
members do not use their caste names and everybody cats together. The Samiti is
not against inter-caste or even inter-communities marriage-provided their
families agree (ibid.).
20. Tanika Sarkar, 'The Woman', p. 2061.
21. Pradip Datta, Biswamoy Pati, et al. 'Understanding Communal Violence:
Nizamuddin Riots,' Economic and Political Weekly (10 Nov. 1990) p. 2494.
Henceforth cited in the tex as PD.
22. The Left Front government in West Bengal distinguised itself at the time of the
Bantala and Birati rapes by very similar evasions. See Tanika Sarkar,
'Reflections on the Birati Rape Cases: Gender Ideology in Bengal,' Economic and
Political Weekly, (2 February, 1991).

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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 117

23. G.O. No. 402 dated 24.4.93. Announcing the ban the chief minister, Vijaya
Bhaskara Reddy said that total prohibition was the 'policy of the Congress
Party right from the start' and the ban had nothing to do with the crusade
launched by the Telugu Desam.
24. We use the word 'Romantic' as shorthand for the free, agentive, expressive,
spontaneous rebel subject typical of the nineteenth-century literary-cultural
movement of Romanticsm.
25. K. Ilaiah, 'Andhra Pradesh's Anti-Liquor Movement', Economic and Political
Weekly, XXVII: 43 (1992), p. 2408.
26. There are interesting parallels with the anti-Mandal agitation, which many
intellectuals acclaimed as a manifestation of nationalism, at the same time
warning against any attempt to 'politicse' it.
27. 'The tears of thousands of families are pushing them into the struggle', says the
actress Sharada (Eenadu 5 Oct., 1992).
28. See, for instance, civil liberties activist K. Balagopal's 'Slaying of a Spirituous
Demon', Economic and Political Weekly, XXVII:46 (1992), 2457-61.
29. The phrase is from the AP Civil Liberties Committee's press statement, issued
by K.G. Kannabiran and K. Balagopal (Eenadu, 18 Sept., 1992).
30. We were part of a team sent to Nellore by Anveshi Research Centre for Women's
Studies, Hyderabad. Our account of the movement draws heavily on the
Anveshi report of the visit.
31. Chaduvu Velugu and Akshara Deepam, literacy primers. We are grateful to TSS
Lakshmi and K. Sajaya for providing translations of the lessons.
32. A popular anti-Mandal refrain was that educational opportunities for lower
caste people would wean them away from their traditional occupations, turn
them into clerks, and thereby destroy the handicrafts and textiles which
symbolised lndian culture.
33. We take this phrase from Kumkum Sangari's well-known artide, The Politics
of the Possible', reprinted in Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek
Dhareswar (eds.), Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993).

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