Tharu Niranjana 1994
Tharu Niranjana 1994
Tharu Niranjana 1994
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SUSIE THARU` AND TEJASWINI NIRANJANA**
CIEFL in Hyderabad.
English Department, Central University of Hyderabad.
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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
II
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96 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
III
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 97
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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
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100 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 101
IV
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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
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104 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 105
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
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF GENDER 107
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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
VI
ANTI-ARRACK MOVEMENT
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110 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TI-IEORY OF GENDER 111
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112 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
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PROBLEMS FOR A CONTEMPORARY TIIEORY OF GENDER 113
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114 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
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
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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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