Women Speak Nation Gender, Culture, and Politics 9780367253998, 9780429294013

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Women speak nation: an introduction
Part I Gender, nation, and nationalism
1 Women and nation revisited
2 The Verma Committee report, 2013: notes on nation, gender, and crime
3 The gendered nation: to be recoded or rejected?
Part II Class-caste-community: negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern
4 Shia women and their ‘place-making’: gendered agency in the Muharram gatherings in Kolkata
5 Speaking in a different voice: Dalit women writing in Bengali
6 Dance of dissent: dancing Tagore in the age of nationalism
Part III Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances
7 Towards reparative readings: reflections on feminist solidarities in a troubling present
8 Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re)examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur
9 ‘Their’ suicide letter: an exercise in reading that is always incomplete
10 Inside/out: women’s movement and women in movements
Part IV Voices of dissent
11 Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation: an interview with Irom Sharmila Chanu
12 Narratives from Bastar: an interview with Soni Sori
13 Living in Curfewland: Kashmir 2016
14 Coal mining and ecological fragility: questioning development, questioning growth
15 Tale of a Brahmin and a Shudrani
Index

Citation preview

Women Speak Nation

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies. Panchali Ray is an independent researcher based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in Contemporary Kolkata. Her areas of interest include labour, migration, violence, sexualities, and collective politics.

South Asian History and Culture Series Editors: David Washbrook University of Cambridge, UK

Boria Majumdar

University of Central Lancashire, UK

Sharmistha Gooptu

South Asia Research Foundation, India

Nalin Mehta

Asia Research Institute & Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore This series brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialisation. A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as is often the case. There is a conscious attempt to publish regional studies and bring together scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other parts of South Asia. This series consciously initiates synergy between research from within academia and that from outside the formal academy. A focus is to bring into the mainstream more recently developed disciplines in South Asian studies which have till date remained in the nature of specialised fields: for instance, research on film, media, photography, sport, medicine, environment, to mention a few. The series addresses this gap and generates more comprehensive knowledge fields. Books in this Series Rituparno Ghosh Cinema, Gender and Art Edited by Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta State of Subversion Radical Politics in Punjab in the 20th Century Edited by Virinder S. Kalra, Shalini Sharma Women Speak Nation Gender, Culture, and Politics Edited by Panchali Ray For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ South-Asian-History-and-Culture/book-series/SAHC

Women Speak Nation Gender, Culture, and Politics Edited by Panchali Ray

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Panchali Ray; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Panchali Ray to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-25399-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29401-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributorsvii Acknowledgementsxi

Women speak nation: an introduction

1

PANCHALI RAY

PART I

Gender, nation, and nationalism17 1 Women and nation revisited

19

PARTHA CHATTERJEE

2 The Verma Committee report, 2013: notes on nation, gender, and crime

29

SWAPAN CHAKRAVORTY

3 The gendered nation: to be recoded or rejected?

39

ANURADHA ROY

PART II

Class-caste-community: negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern57 4 Shia women and their ‘place-making’: gendered agency in the Muharram gatherings in Kolkata

59

EPSITA HALDER

5 Speaking in a different voice: Dalit women writing in Bengali

79

NANDINI SAHA

6 Dance of dissent: dancing Tagore in the age of nationalism AISHIKA CHAKRABORTY

93

vi  Contents PART III

Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances

111

  7 Towards reparative readings: reflections on feminist solidarities in a troubling present

113

J. DEVIKA

  8 Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re)examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur

131

PANCHALI RAY

  9 ‘Their’ suicide letter: an exercise in reading that is always incomplete

150

SAYAN BHATTACHARYA

10 Inside/out: women’s movement and women in movements

163

MALLARIKA SINHA ROY

PART IV

Voices of dissent185 11 Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation: an interview with Irom Sharmila Chanu

187

PANCHALI RAY

12 Narratives from Bastar: an interview with Soni Sori

195

PANCHALI RAY

13 Living in Curfewland: Kashmir 2016

209

NATASHA RATHER

14 Coal mining and ecological fragility: questioning development, questioning growth

214

PRIYA PILLAI

15 Tale of a Brahmin and a Shudrani

222

KALYANI THAKUR (TRANSLATED FROM BANGLA BY SAYANTAN DASGUPTA)

Index224

Contributors

Sayan Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota. Sayan is a queer activist from West Bengal, India. He has an M.Phil. in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Through ethnographic and archival research in India, Sayan’s doctoral work interrogates how queer death haunts India’s queer movements. His research interests include social movements, feminist ethnography, caste studies, queer and transgender studies, popular culture, and critical disability studies. He has published articles in journals such as Samaj, QED: Journal in GLBT Worldmaking, Index for Censorship Journal, Kindle Magazine, amongst others. Aishika Chakraborty is Professor and Director, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. With her doctoral research on ‘Widowhood in Colonial Bengal,’ her current research looks at the politics of gender in contemporary Indian dance as her edited volumes Ranjabati A Dancer and her world and The Moving Space: Women in Dance (with Urmimala Sarkar Munsi) thrive at the interface of women’s studies and dance history. Her recent Bengali monograph Kolkatar Nach: Samakaleen Nagarnritya documents the historic trajectory of modern dance movement in Bengal, foregrounding subjectivity, voice, and agency of women dancers in contemporary performance. She is presently engaged in her research on the ‘barred world’ of Indian dance establishing its link with migration, labour, culture, and sexuality. Swapan Chakravorty is Rabindranath Tagore Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, Presidency University, Kolkata, India. He has been Professor of English, Jadavpur University and Director General, National Library, Kolkata. His books in English and Bengali include Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (1996), Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Bangalir Ingreji Sahityacharcha (2006), and

viii  Contributors Shakespeare (1999). His edited book Mudranersanskriti o Banglaboi (2007) won the Narasingh Das Award of Delhi University in 2009. He was a contributory editor of Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. ed.), The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 2008), and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Clarendon Press, 2008). He has co-edited three volumes on book history in India. Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. Among his many books are Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2001), The Politics of the Governed (2004), Lineages of Political Society (2011), and The Black Hole of Empire (2012). Sayantan Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. J. Devika is a feminist researcher and teacher at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala. She has contributed to the understanding of the history of gender, development, politics, and culture of modern Kerala. Her work is interdisciplinary and she brings to bear her training as a historian on contemporary issues. She is interested in opening up the boundaries between academic and public and pedagogic discourses, the social sciences and humanities, and English and Malayalam. She also translates literature and social science between Malayalam and English and writes occasionally for children, besides offering commentary on contemporary politics in Kerala on www.kafila.online. Epsita Halder is Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) Visiting Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2018). She has been working on the Muharram traditions in West Bengal, a part of which has been done with a grant from India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore. She is a recipient of the CWIT Short Term Fellowship and Sarai-CSDS Social Media Fellowship. She is interested in the interface between Muslim popular piety, visual culture, and new media in South Asia. Priya Pillai has been actively campaigning, along with Mahan Sangarsh Samiti, in the Mahan forests of Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh, against rampant forest and livelihood destruction due to coal mining. In January 2015, she was ‘offloaded’ from a flight to the UK by the Government

Contributors ix of India to prevent a discussion with an All Party Parliamentarian Group there, which was struck down by the Delhi High Court as a violation of freedom of speech and expression and liberty of movement. She has a background in law and has worked with organizations such as ActionAid, Oxfam, and Greenpeace India on issues relating to environment and human rights violations in the central Indian belt. Natasha Rather was brought up in Kashmir and has closely witnessed militarization and violence in Kashmir. She works as a human rights defender and is pursuing a PhD on the issue of gender justice in India and Pakistan. She is the co-author of the book Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, which talks about a mass rape perpetrated by Indian armed forces on Kashmiri Muslim women in a remote village in Kashmir in 1991. Anuradha Roy is Professor, Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her research is focused on intellectual and cultural history, particularly with reference to the Bengali bhadralok and bhadramahila. She has published extensively on the culture of nationalism and communism in Bengal, in both Bengali and English. She is the author of Nationalism as Poetic Discourse in Nineteenth Century Bengal, as well as Bengal Marxism: Early Discourses and Debates and Cultural Communism in Bengal 1936–1952, which won the Savitri Chandra Shobha Memorial Prize in 2015. She has edited for Sahitya Akademi and Paschim Banga Bangla Academy, two authoritative anthologies of nationalist songs and poems of Bengal. Her monograph Dukhini Sati Charit: Unish Shataker Banglay Meyeder Upanyas analyzes the novels written by women in nineteenth century Bengal. Mallarika Sinha Roy is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is the author of Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975) (2011). She has also published articles in journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Feminist Review, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Feminism and Psychology, and Journal of South Asian Development. Her research interests include social movement studies, gender and political violence, and the history and politics of South Asia. Nandini Saha is Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her areas of specialization include twentieth century British fiction, Indian writing in English, translation studies, and Bengali Dalit writing. She has some publications in her areas of specialization. She is currently engaged in projects translating Bengali Dalit Writing and a collection of writings on Disability Studies.

x  Contributors Kalyani Thakur has been the editor of the periodical Neer Ritupatra since 1994. She is a life member of Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sansad. Her published books of poetry include Dhorlei Juddho Sunischit, Je Meye Adhar Goney, Chandalinir Kobita, and Chandalini Bhone. She is the author of various short story and essay collections including Fire Elo Ulongo Hoye and Bibriti. Her edited volumes include Krishnachandra Thakur (Keshtosadhu) Smriti Sambhar, Loksanskritik Probondhosankalan, Matua dharma Prosonge, Sudhanshu Dulal, and Adhikarir Rachana Samagra. She has also published her autobiography titled Ami Kano Charal Likhi.

Acknowledgements

This volume emerges from a conference, ‘Women Speak Nation: Intersections and Identities’ (2016) held at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, in response to a number of political upheavals: the attack on public universities, the silencing of dissentious voices, the lynching of members of minority communities on the pretext of beef eating, and a general environment of fascism, intimidation, and attacks on culture and democratic politics. The response to the conference from the academic/activist/ student community was tremendous and there was a need to put down the conversations, debates, and disagreements on paper and thus, an edited volume. Some of the essays in the volume were added later as we invited scholars and activists to join us in the book project, and I thank the contributors, who, despite their busy schedules, rose to the occasion. The volume is enriched because of them. I thank Professor Aishika Chakraborty, Director, School of Women’s Studies, for her support, encouragement and constant cheer in seeing the volume through. While she co-convened the conference with me, she declined to journey the rest of the path. The loss is entirely mine. I also thank SWS for a grant that enabled me to travel to Chhattisgarh and Manipur to meet Soni Sori, Irom Sharmila Chanu and members of the Meira Paibi that further helped me conceptualize and contribute to the section on ‘voices of dissent.’ Students in the M.Phil. course in Women’s Studies have contributed in various ways, to both the conference and the subsequent volume, with insightful suggestions and critiques. I remain thankful to them for the rigorous debates, conversations, and dis/agreements, particularly Sayan Bhattacharya. I also take this moment to record my gratitude to my colleagues at SWS, whose goodwill made both the conference and the volume possible. There are many who have helped me in this rather arduous journey of putting the volume together. I thank Sharmistha Gooptu, Rajashri Dasgupta, Nishi Biswas, Anjulika Thingnam, Nandini Thockchom, Haripriya Soibam, Bela Bhatia, and Srijan Uzir. I also take this moment to thank my friends, whose presence in my life made the task of editing a volume so much easier: Parvati Chandran, Meenu Pandey, Sunit Talukdar, Ram Menon, Tanu Chabra, Ekta Hattangady,

xii  Acknowledgements Souvik Chakraborty, Anirban Roy Chowdhury, and Devraj Paul. Rajlaxmi Ghosh did not just give me a patient hearing but also offered advice and suggestions that helped me frame the volume. I thank my immediate family, Krishna, Bejoy, Gautam, Ishani, Sugata, and Atreyee. As always, I specifically thank my mother, Krishna, for holding on to me and then letting me go-grow. I dedicate this volume, despite all its faults, to her.

Women speak nation An introduction Panchali Ray

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in critical scholarship where feminists, historians, and political scientists produced a formidable corpus of literature that demonstrated the different ways in which women are implicated in nationalist projects: from the linkages between women’s bodies and community honour to the active participation of upper caste, middle class women in the Hindu Right.1 It has been argued that the category ‘woman’ has been produced in a mediated and metonymic relationship to the nation, drawing from a discourse on patriarchal protection and patronage. Frozen as symbols and tied to the nation as mothers, wives, and daughters, women became even more vulnerable to the gendered violence that arose from the twining of the female body and honour of the family/community/nation. The fixing of territories as the ‘motherland’ is not just an affective gesture but rather a political act that freezes both land and women as static ‘objects’ to be possessed, guarded, and defended but never to be allowed any subjectivity. Thus, the nation-as-woman/mother (Bharat Mata) is to be protected by male citizens (her sons), which is a reinforcement of the imagination of ‘men-as-protectors’ in the public sphere and ‘women-as-reproducers’ in the private domains. The iconization of the mother-goddess as embodiment of the national territory and symbolic of ‘biological national source’ is permeated with various imageries of emotions. To invest the nation with tropes of motherhood ensures a securing of borders and boundaries, as the body of the mother cannot be desecrated or redrawn. And, if the dutiful son of the Bharat Mata fights to protect the nation, what is the role of the daughter? Is she to replicate the mother (nurturing, empowering, and morally superior) or is she the disruptive daughter? This volume aims to seize the contemporary moment as a historical juncture, which is witnessing a heightened contradiction. On the one hand, there has been a resurgence of nationalism with the coming of a right-wing government in 2014 that deploy images of women as nation-mother (Bharat Mata) to legitimize violence. On the other hand, we are increasingly seeing an assertion of rights and legal reforms, as well as an expanding presence of young women in movements that demand changes in both cultural and political spheres.

2  Panchali Ray Feminist philosophers have argued that the body politic (public) is masculine and comes into being through a hierarchical relation with the feminine (the private), the latter symbolized as the ‘other’ of the male citizen.2 However, recent debates on the convergence of patriarchy and neo-liberalism have pointed to the rise of the ‘new’ Indian woman, who is located at the cusp of tradition and modernity, embodying a gendered resolution to the threat that liberalization of the economy posed to the sexual economy.3 Thus economically empowered, yet compliant with traditional gendered norms, the ‘new’ Indian woman became symbolic of the country’s growth and breaking out of its feudal past. However, while one may agree to the conceptualization of the ‘new’ woman, the flesh and blood Bharat Mata, one cannot ignore the questioning, dissenting, defiant, rebellious daughter, the one who holds up placards that read ‘hum bharat ke mata nahi banenge’ (we refuse to be India’s mother/Mother India).4 The recent challenges faced by the Indian women’s movements and feminist theorization was to negotiate women’s ideological role as signifiers and sites of cultural reinforcements. This volume is a step towards articulating feminist politics and solidarities at a time when the relationship between gender, culture, and politics is rearranging itself – when women are increasingly ventilating, voicing, censuring the ideological construction of the nation. Do these utterances spell the death of the nation (imagined as the Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother)? Or does it lead to its re-imagination? Is feminism emerging from the shadows into the mainstream? Does contemporary feminist articulations point towards new and powerful connections between movements based on intersecting inequalities? The inscriptions of gender, caste, class, communities, and sexualities appear to have new resonances for mainstream politics today. As more and more assertions based on identities appear to confront and confound already given categories and questions preconceived notions of the subject, it simultaneously opens up a plethora of possibilities. This volume will take these concerns as a starting point and trace how within the contemporary the past continues to influence the present, and the present leads us to question the past. It will open up debates on the continuities and ruptures of different kinds of nationalism and its articulations from the nineteenth century to the contemporary. We hope to explore spaces, movements, politics, performances, and literary representations that capture the continuous interactions between already constituted categories of resistance and unsanctioned spaces, thoughts, and movements that censure such ‘givenness.’ Thus, this volume asks, what are the interlocking webs of signifiers and representations that ideologies of nationalism (re)organize and communicate? Have such symbols remained constant through history or have they been revised? What do such revisions tell us? The collection of essays presented here makes no claim of either being representative or exhaustive in mapping the last few decades. Instead, it is a small attempt to build on existing scholarship to tease out nuances, grasp the rapidly changing relation between gender,

Women speak nation 3 culture, and politics, as it reorganizes to accommodate newer hegemonic practices. It is an attempt to critically look at the world we have inherited, as we set out to reimagine newer possibilities of thinking and being. It locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the crosscurrents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics.

The ‘woman question’: gender, nationalism, and the right-bearing subject The debates on the ‘woman question’ that informed most of the social reform movement (1850–1890) and cultural nationalism (1890–1930) meant that the signifier ‘woman’ could only have meaning within the contesting ideologies of reformism and revivalist-nationalism. While both these positions were invested in constructing ideal femininity differently, there was quite a bit of overlap between the two. And, more importantly for us, both denied agency to women. Influenced by European Enlightenment, stung by allegations of ‘barbaric’ gendered practices (such as sati, child marriage, etc.), and a growing need to assert their morale and cultural superiority, elite Indian nationalists/liberal reformers turned to the ‘woman question’ in a belated attempt to replenish dignity and nurse the wounds of colonial humiliation. Partha Chatterjee in an influential essay argued that the shift from reform to revivalism meant that the women’s question disappeared from the nationalist agenda. The gendering of the public/private divide, marked by the world/ home, necessitated that Indian women be assigned the task of maintaining the home as a mark of spiritual superiority of the Oriental over the Occidental. The sexual division of labour and gender segregation became a mark, not of discrimination, but of difference. Thus, the private sphere, symbolic of the East’s superiority over the West, constituted the power of the colonized to fight the colonizers.5 Feminist scholarship on women and nationalism draws heavily from the debates on colonial initiatives, social reform movement, and cultural revivalism/nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.6 Scholars have painstakingly demonstrated that women were neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘objects’ but merely the ground on which competing interpretations were articulated.7 Thus, for nationalists and revivalists, the ‘woman question’ became the means for class formation, as well as a mode to (re)claim a glorious past, and for the colonialist, the status of the Indian woman legitimized their rule.8 Needless to say, both these positions produced a homogeneous category ‘Indian woman,’ which largely represented the elite, upper caste woman; the lower caste or Dalit woman was obliterated from this discursive representation. While the elite Indian woman was subjected to various discourses, which included a reinvention of traditions to refashion a feminine subject that was at once non-secular and yet modern,9 the plebeian woman, masculinized by her sexuality, coarseness,

4  Panchali Ray and participation in the workforce was completely invisibilized. Thus, one can safely argue that both the reformist, as well as the revivalist movement, consolidated the identity of the ‘Indian woman’ as a member of the upper caste, middle class elite, who also became the repertoire of the national collectivity and its imagination. Globally, the last few decades have witnessed a rather large and sophisticated body of work, both historical and contemporary, that has examined in different ways how idealized images of women are used for the symbolic construction of national collectivity, borders, and boundaries.10 Thus, women, defined as signifiers of the national collectivity, remain as metaphorical images representing the nation. In this volume, Anuradha Roy asks a very different question. Tracing feminist scholarship on women and nationalism, she argues that instead of rejecting nationalism in total, Third World feminists can recodify their relation with the nation. While she explores both sides of the debates – the rejection of nationalism for an international sisterhood, as well as the elision of the historical-cultural specificities such a position engenders – she asks whether nationalism can offer any kind of liberatory politics for the ‘Third World Woman.’ Weighing the possibilities of the tension between a universal norm/principle for feminism that transcends all other identity markers, as against the centralizing tendency of the state, she concludes in favour of the former. Partha Chatterjee and Swapan Chakravorty, in this volume, ask questions completely different from Roy. They raise questions on the nature of the relation between gender equality, judicial reforms, and the nation to re-examine the relation between the gendered modern subject and the paternalistic state. Chatterjee, re-examines his argument on the ‘nationalist resolution of the women’s question’ to explicate the role of ideology that constituted the subjectivity of the ‘new’ woman, who emerged from the fatigued battlefields of contesting claims over her body. He further examines the contemporary controversies over the film Padmaavati and the debates on Triple Talaq to argue that the hegemonic designs of the centralizing state are often in conflict with the political mobilization of newer regional identities that emerge from contesting cultural claims rooted in community histories that may be real but are mostly imagined. The history of India’s political battles has often witnessed the resistance of regional movements to the doing away of group identities in the name of national integration. Chatterjee argues that collective interests of the community or the ‘peoplenation’ historically mediates the relation between women and the modern democratic state. Thus, he locates a tension between a unitary, centralized norm that governs the life of English-speaking, middle class, upper caste women and the regional, culturally diverse norms that appeal to mass mobilization. Chakravorty, too, in his essay argues that the making of the nation is inseparable from the question of gender, as the idea of a nation or state emerges from society and the cultural meanings it produces. He reads the introduction to the Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal

Women speak nation 5 Law January 23, 2013, to demonstrate that the humanist promise of the Constitution that promotes gender equality does not take into account the network of power in which concepts of ‘citizen’ and ‘rights’ are embedded. He urges his readers to go back to Rabindranath Tagore’s suspicion of an unexamined, ungendered nation to be able to fight against the increasing scale of crimes committed against women, in the name of the nation.

Class-caste-community: negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern The politicization of Hinduism, or the emergence of Hindutva, which is by definition exclusionary and genocidal in its language of violence, borrows generously from a gendered ideology that structures the family, community, and the nation. This, of course, has not happened in a vacuum. A modern-liberal democracy, such as India, has never shared an easy relation with its women-subjects. Modern democracies, which offer equal rights to both men and women, often in practice define citizenship exclusive of women and other equally disenfranchised sections of the population. Liberal modern democracies were premised on the ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ of citizens irrespective of gender, class, caste, and community. For instance, in liberal theory, women are perceived as an unmarked abstract citizen, protected from disparate patriarchies by constitutional guarantees of rights to equality and freedom. This notion of a right-bearing citizen governed by a secular-modern state renders invisible other identities, such as caste, class, and community. While in India, the very nature of the state as secular has been questioned by the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, which finally culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid (1992), leading scholars to argue that secularism as an ideology, though not alien to Indian society, has not contributed fruitfully to the emergence of a modern nation.11 In fact, secularism in the early years of Indian Independence was seen as an ideology that would contribute to national unity, defeating hostility amongst discrete religious and caste communities. However, the practice of ‘secularism’ has only consolidated the Indian state, to what Baxi refers to as a ‘Hindu-Secular State.’12 The fraught relationship between social identities and the state was brought to the fore by the Shah Bano case (1985) and the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC). This led to both the Hindu Right and those upholding secular values to criticize the Indian state for compromising the notion of an abstract citizen. Thus, Menon argues that both ‘secular discourse and Hindu communal discourse occupy the same terrain – that of claiming to be the true protectors of the rights of the abstract citizen.’13 This moment, is generally considered a watershed moment in the women’s movement(s) when feminists were faced with the fractured identity of the ‘Indian woman’, as well as the tenacious and fraught relation between the woman-citizen and the state, mediated by the community.14 Scholars argued that community-based identities were almost always constituted by

6  Panchali Ray gendered practices that defined citizenship in relation to the family and the community.15 The representation of the ‘Third World Woman’ as one controlled by her family and community, leading an essentially truncated life, is particularly truer when it comes to Muslim women. Located within a rising Islamophobia, represented as illiterate and passive, controlled by religious clerics and the patriarchal family, they are perceived as victims of the Islamic code that neither grants them minimum autonomy nor any subjectivity. As Talpade Mohanty points out, those representing women as already victims and men as aggressors assume that both are already constituted subjects that enter the social-political-economic system. This, she argues, allows an analysis by searching the ‘effects’ of kinship structures, colonialism, organization of labor, etc., on women, who are already defined as a group apparently because of shared dependencies, but ultimately because of their gender. But women are produced through these very relations as well as being implicated in forming these relations.16 She particularly flags how Western feminist’s production of the homogeneous category ‘Third World Woman’ depended on binaries of subjects possessing power and those who are pitted against them, the powerless. This allows feminists of the First World to represent themselves as subjects and produce the Third World woman as an object.17 Moving away from the debates on women’s fundamental right to equality as guaranteed by the Constitution and community rights to religious freedom, Epsita Haldar in this volume examines subject making amongst Shia women through their devotional practices. She reads the poetics and the politics of devotional practices of Shia women in Kolkata in their commemorative performances during the Muharram ritual to explore subject making. As Rajan argues, women are not perceived to be constitutive of community identities; instead they are seen as belonging to a community.18 Haldar, in contrast, looks at how the Imambara becomes a sacred space, which is integrally connected to the varied urban physical spaces that the community inhabits. Thus, it is the women of the community, who, through their devotion, move beyond being just a relational category to an agentic subject constitutive of the community’s scared and devotional lives. Despite India being a secular state, the Indian woman is the upper caste Hindu woman: the Muslim woman can neither be Indian nor Muslim, or to put it differently, if she is an Indian she cannot be a Muslim woman.19 Connecting Shia women’s devotional practices to the forces of urbanity, everyday life, and the community’s constant negotiation with regional, national, as well as transnational forces, Haldar explores how the Shia community consolidates its gendered identity, particularly in reference to Islam and the nation state. The anti-Mandal agitations further brought to the fore the impossibility of the universal category ‘woman.’ B.R Ambedkar’s explication on graded

Women speak nation 7 inequality takes gender as a central category in understanding how the caste system is upheld. For instance, the practice of endogamy, which exercised strict control over women’s sexuality, strengthened and reproduced Brahmanical patriarchy. Dalit feminists, therefore, point out that both domination and ideology have been central to the origin and development of the caste system: through control over reproduction, sexuality, and ideology.20 Sharmila Rege critiques the Indian women’s movement(s) for not acknowledging, or rather invisibilizing ‘caste,’ thus rendering both ‘woman’ and ‘Indian’ as upper caste and middle class.21 Thus, contemporary feminists working on the linkages between gender and caste, as well as trying to make sense of the silence of the mainstream women’s movements, in the face of increasing and continuing violence on Dalit women, argue that just ‘pluralising patriarchy is not enough. The task is to map the ways in which the category “woman” is being differently reconstituted within regionally diverse patriarchal relations cross-hatched by graded caste inequalities.’22 The agenda of the women’s movement has always been framed by the standpoint of the upper caste, middle class woman, thus successfully effacing the identity of the Dalit women, as well as criminalizing the Dalit male. During the anti-Mandal agitations, upper caste, middle class women, representatives of the secular-liberal generation, held placards which read, ‘We don’t want unemployed husbands’ implying that they cannot marry men from lower castes.23 These women claimed deprivation and injustice as an unmarked right-bearing citizen. Their claims to citizenship, rather than sisterhood, set them not only against Dalit men, but also against lower caste/class women. Both the UCC and the anti-Mandal agitations pitted women against women, whether in demands for removal of ‘privileges’ of minority men, or in support of egalitarianism, uniformity of law, and democratic politics within a framework of liberal notions of justice.24 Thus, Tharu and Niranjana (1994) have argued that there is a legitimization of the middle class, upper caste, Hindu, patriarchal subject. Nandini Saha, in this volume, takes up the very challenging task of examining how Bengali Dalit women writers have been completely invisibilized in Bengal’s literary circles. While Dalit women’s writing in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala have been given recognition and translated widely, in Bengal, the Dalit woman writer continues to face marginalization. While the masculine Brahmanical hold over both Bengali academic and literary society has been displaced by an inclusion (even if it is a token one) of translated work of Dalit women writers from other states, there is a certain refusal to recognize literature produced by Bengali Dalit women, as literary. Saha, thus, concludes her essay by pointing out the ‘sociological blindness’ of Bengali intellectuals towards the question of caste, which manifests in a non-recognition of Bengali Dalit women writers. Aishika Chakraborty, in this volume, reads a contemporary dance theatre, Tomari Matir Kanya (Daughter of your Earth), based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Chandalika (the Untouchable Girl), to explore how the late choreographer, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar, staged a challenge to

8  Panchali Ray the hegemonic sexual economy of the new nation. Chakraborty traces the emergence of a ‘classical dance,’ which was constituted by social and gender norms valued by Brahmanical patriarchy. She locates Chaki-Sircar’s staging of the untouchable female bodies of the mother-daughter duo as central to the dance drama, as a challenge to the hegemonic masculine Brahmanical order, as well as any claims of ‘universal sisterhood.’

The Indian women’s movement(s): identities, ideologies, and representations It has now become impossible to speak of gender as a self-evident, transparent category. To do so, is to privilege one axis of discrimination and power over others, ultimately resulting in the strengthening of power relations. In India, the question of class, caste, community, and sexuality has played a significant role in understanding how gender is structured and the category ‘woman’ produced. It has generally been accepted that one must ask questions on the intersectional nature of power and the subject-effect it produces, rather than looking to ‘add on’ different categories to the question of gender. The Indian women’s movement(s) has come under severe criticism for its blindness towards multiples axes of oppression. It is generally accepted that there are three major shift/challenges to the women’s movements, particularly in the 1990s, which saw a flaring up of different contesting identities that, once and for all, demolished the alleged ‘sisterhood’ of the Indian women’s movement(s). Termed as the ‘Mandal-Masjid-Bank’ years,25 the challenges emerging from caste, class, and community mobilizations led the women’s movement(s) to reflect that under different social and political moments, women united and aligned according to their social affiliations rather than as ‘women.’ Challenges from the LGBT movement and queer feminists compelled the women’s movements to pause and reflect on their usual grounds of mobilization, particularly within the framework of family and kinship. Mary John argues that the change in context during the 1990s led to the possibilities of a divergent women’s movement(s) in India. Instead of focusing on the cooption of the autonomous women’s movement(s) and feminist demands by the Hindu Right or even the funding agendas of transnational bodies, John urges one to examine how the movement became a product of a historical moment, a moment that radically transformed the political-economic-cultural milieu of the country.26 This section brings together essays that critically examine newer mobilization with the framework of the Indian women’s movement(s) (as well as outside it) and the emergence of newer subjectivities, modes of resistance, and articulations of agency. J. Devika, for instance, in her essay raises the question of feminist solidarities in the current anti-feminist, jingoist political environment, and the inability of ‘mainstream’ feminism to radically question women’s roles in the family and the dominant social order. Drawing from Ambedkar, Devika proposes a feminist maitri that is not just a space

Women speak nation 9 of acknowledging difference and generating knowledge but one animated by emotions and affect that allows privileged feminists to ‘unhome’ themselves, to be self-reflexive, thus altering the ways in which differences are addressed. This maitri, she argues, would deliberately move away from strategic essentialism, and instead, look at complex identities and affiliations, rather than privileging one or the other category as intersectional. Rajan contends that reading resistance requires a recognition of two important limitations: first, that resistance is always already structured by power of the dominant, though not reduced to it, and second, to critically examine the extent and effect of resistance.27 The abandoning of the rational subject, a deconstruction of essential identities, has often been accused of being anti-politics; however, Chantal Mouffe argues that for a feminism committed to radical democratic politics, it is essential to theorize the multiplicity of relations of subordination by bringing on board the contingency of social identities. She writes, We can then conceive the social agent as constituted by an ensemble of ‘subject positions’ that can never be totally fixed in a closed system of differences, constructed by a diversity of discourses among which there is no necessary relation, but a constant movement of overdetermination and displacement.28 Panchali Ray, in this volume, takes a post-structuralist feminist position to argue that a subject is constituted and reconstituted by the very social in which she is embedded, thus, any discussion on feminist agency must take into account the possibilities of reworking the very matrices of power, culture, and discourse that constitute the subject in the first place. Taking the oral narratives of the ‘mothers’ who protested naked at the Kangla fort in Manipur in 2004, against atrocities committed by the Indian army, Ray asks, how can an identity so deeply governed by the Law of the family/community/nation be subverted, questioned, and displaced? How does the act of disrobing in a public space, not as aged mothers but as angry women, question the foundations that govern and organize the language of resistance in their quotidian fight against the ‘occupation’? Sayan Bhattacharya in his essay argues that the language of law and the demand for rights necessitate a foreclosure of different intersecting identities. For the need for an injury to be addressed means a privileging of a wound that is foundational to the identity. Reading the film . . . And the Unclaimed (Ebang Bewarish), based on the event of a joint suicide by two lesbian girls in rural Bengal, Bhattacharya argues that representing the queer subject, as one whose death necessitates immediate redress, is only possible through closures, a repudiation of competing identities. Thus, he interrogates the politics of representation, as it has played out within the Indian queer movements, to ask that while the rights discourse demands that there be a harm which can be redressed by the nation state, what are the foreclosures that the spectacularization of

10  Panchali Ray the harm, in this case queer death, demand? Mallarika Sinha Roy’s essay examines the new ‘visibility’ of women, particularly the student movements on university campuses that question the way women have traditionally been ‘seen.’ Examining the new forms of protest, whether it is women’s bodies engaged in intimate acts publicly or using sanitary napkins as placards, Sinha Roy traces feminist theorization on visibility, politics of seeing, and visual representations and connects it with women’s movements, as well as agency and subjectivities. The essay examines a new language of politics that goes beyond the hyper-visibility of women in public spaces to understand the radical possibilities of ‘seeing’ women’s movements and women in movements.

Can women speak? Voicing dissent The autonomous Indian women’s movement(s) were more or less led by elite, urban, educated women, whose selective outrage and mobilization was based on a commitment of a ‘shared sisterhood,’ which meant they often spoke on behalf of the ‘other’ woman. This had far-reaching consequences for the course of feminist politics in India. The question of women, representation, and speaking/language has always been tricky. The ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ structure of language cannot accommodate women and their subjective experiences, thus, a lack of appropriate words inhibit women’s speech. Feminist scholars have consequently noticed the masculinity of language and, by implication, knowledge production which obliterates women’s agency and subjectivity: A ‘lack of fit between women’s lives and the words available for talking about experience present real difficulties for ordinary women’s selfexpression in their everyday lives.’29 Second, and of more consequence for this volume, is the discursive production of the subject, which works against other kinds of possibilities. For instance, feminist scholars have observed that women are simultaneously constituted and erased by discourse, thus, they are present as objects and not as semantic agents.30 The emphasis on the relation between the act of speaking and agency as self-evident is, thus, brought to question. Subject, as Butler argues, ‘is not produced in simply mechanical way, but power “attaches” a subject to its own identity. Subject appears to require this self-attachment, this process by which one becomes attached to one’s own subjecthood’31 (italics in original). Therefore, the subject’s intelligibility is dependent on the extent to which the self attaches itself to the norm, thus, we develop a sense of the self only through the mediation of socially sanctioned norms, which guarantees social existence.32 She further asks, ‘What speaks when “I” speak to you? What are the institutional histories of subjection and subjectivation that “position” me here and now?’33 As the subject comes into being within matrices of power and discourses, critiquing the subject is not negating but questioning the processes and the constructions by which the subject comes into being.34 The production of ‘woman’ in the context of nationalism and/or anti-colonial

Women speak nation 11 struggles as the mother who chooses the nation over her own, possibly feminist aspirations, have been crucial in delegitimizing women’s voices that tried to articulate emancipatory politics outside statist histories. As Murthy succinctly points out, women have largely been silenced by state historiography.35 Chatterjee, too, argues that ‘the nationalist discourse we heard so far is a discourse about woman; women do not speak here.’36 Gayatri Spivak, in her famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), questions the intellectual’s claim to be an authoritative representative of the subaltern, who cannot represent herself. The essay concludes with the clinching statement that the subaltern cannot speak. The category of the subaltern is not just a flesh and blood category; instead it is an empty signifier, a placeholder who is constituted by difference. The resistance of the subaltern woman, who has no access to infrastructure, is not recognized as resistance. The subaltern, according to Spivak, cannot speak because in the absence of institutionally validated agency, there is no listening subject. Thus, Spivak says ‘Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization.’37 Women enter the political landscape of Hindu nationalism as passive symbols encoded and embedded in a number of myths. As women’s bodies emerge as political signs, their own identities are subsumed in the process of nation building.38 V. Geetha, too, notes that women’s status as citizens was confirmed on the virtue of their belonging to the family, community, and the nation.39 The question of ‘marginality’ has always been a troublesome one and historically it has been used to justify colonialism, legitimize orientalism, and give credibility to imperialist-feminism. In the contemporary Indian women’s movements/women’s studies, who speaks for whom and the question of representations has also garnered much attention. While questions of appropriation, cooption, and exoticization have been levelled against middle class, upper caste, cisgendered feminists, particularly around questions of caste, community, and sexualities, it is the relation between women which has power accruing from access to resources, networks, social standing – in other words, Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of social capital that he defines as a ‘network of more or less institutionalized relationships of acquaintance and recognition,’40 which has come under scanner. The representation of the working class, lower caste, illiterate woman as those who cannot represent themselves, but must be represented, predominantly influences most scholarship on women and their relation to family/community/nation. Spivak writes, ‘In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the post-colonial intellectual systemically “unlearns” female privilege’41 (italics in original). The section on ‘Voices of Dissent’ is an attempt to go beyond academic feminists and scholars located in privileged spaces of knowledge production. While the search for a pure and unmediated voice holds great appeal,

12  Panchali Ray this section does not claim any authenticity or a ‘pure’ space, where women marginally located/excluded from institutional power, with no access to resources are able to now, without any mediation, voice their experiences. As Butler has argued, that adhering to social norms, which is constrained, allows the subject to recognize her own constraint, and this moment of recognition contains the possibility of agency.42 Those, whose voices are included in this section, are articulate women, of course in disparate and discrete terms. They do not claim to be subalterns or even representatives of their communities; in fact, most of them are celebrated activists and authors, both nationally and internationally and yet struggle with state repression and ideological interpellations. For instance, Irom Sharmila Chanu, constructed as the ‘tribal’ North East woman, victim of state indifference, as well as native/indigenous patriarchy, speaks powerfully about why, after 16 long years, she refused to continue with her hunger strike. Her subsequent delegitimization and marginalization by national, as well as regional political discourses, stem from her refusal to live (and die) embracing community and gender norms. Her body, frozen as the symbol of Manipur’s resistance to the Indian state, with its re-turn to the flesh and blood, challenged the phallogocentric social order governed by patriarchal and communitarian norms. Soni Sori, a fiery and determined activist from Chhattisgarh, whose fight against the corporate land grab of tribal land has invited tremendous state persecution, talks of how she stood up to patriarchal shaming after her experience of custodial sexual violence. Soni’s post-rape narrative, where she embraces the identity of a raped woman, does not draw from a discourse on chastity, shame, and dishonour; instead, she powerfully questions the dominant perceptions of rape as sexualized violence, which extinguishes the subject, either through silence or death. In fact, the discursive representation of the raped woman residing in the margins of society, in need of rehabilitation – the object of sympathy or the abject victim – the pathetic ‘other,’ is central to both questions of justice in the legal realm, as well as healing processes. Soni powerfully displaces such notions of honour and shame by tying together bodily harm and psychic trauma with the trauma of the collective, thus articulating an embodied language of resistance. Priya Pillai, in her essay discusses the state repression that women in movements face. Most mass-based movements in the country have been around corporate-state acquisition of land, where women have not only been active but played a central role within movements. Pillai describes how both bodily harm as well as labels such as ‘anti-nationalist’ are used to delegitimize women in movements. Her contention that the ‘othering’ of women who are seen as threats to the corporatization of the country, spearheaded by the media, is essential to silence voices that challenge the government’s agenda of unbridled privatization of tribal and community-owned land. While Pillai focus on women in movements, who confront gender norms outright, Natasha Rather’s writes of her experience of living under military rule in Kashmir and learning to question the efficacy of adhering to gender norms.

Women speak nation 13 Her recognition that adherence to the norm has not been repaid by patriarchal protection leads her to question the gendered order that a military rule necessitates. Kalyani Thakur examines the intersections of sexuality and gender norms in producing subjects. Thakur’s short story on the untouchable woman’s struggle resonates Tagore’s Chandilaka and the (im) possibilities of inter-caste intimacy. She questions the control the community exercises over the body of the woman, as well as her labour and sexuality, thus, displacing the very foundations of the modern nation.

Notes 1 Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation; Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” 233–253; Ramaswamy, “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India,” 97–114; Sinha, “Refashioning Mother India,” 623–644; Rajan, The Scandal of the State; Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Pandey, Remembering Partition; Bagchi and Dasgupta, Trauma and The Triumph; Sarkar and Butalia, Women and the Hindu Right; Bacchetta, Gender in the Hindu Nation. 2 Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Gatens, Imaginary Bodies. 3 Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India; Rajan, Real and Imagined Women; Nair and John, “Introduction.” 4 The Pinjra Tod campaign led by Delhi University students against patriarchy on university campuses often have placards and banners that question the trope of Bharat Mata. Their demands centre around a recognition of sexual autonomy and agency of women students. 5 Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” 6 Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women; Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 7 Mani, Contentious Traditions. 8 Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” 9 Chakrabarty, “The Difference – Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity.” 10 McClintock, “Family Feuds”; Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation; Ramaswamy, “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India.” 11 Engineer, “Religion, State and Secularism.” 12 Baxi, “The Constitutional Discourse on Secularism,” 231. 13 Menon, “State/Gender/Community,” PE-6. 14 Kumar, A History of Doing, 160–171. 15 For a detailed discussion, see Das, “Communities as Political Actors”; Rajan, The Scandal of the State. 16 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 340. 17 Ibid. 18 Rajan, The Scandal of the State, 163. 19 Tharu and Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.” 20 Rege, Against the Madness of Manu. 21 Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently.” 22 Rege, et al., “Intersections of Gender and Caste,” 36. 23 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 1. 24 Patel, “The Ideological and Politcial Crisis of Early Nineties.” 25 Tharu and Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.” 26 John, “Gender, Development and the Women’s Movement,” 103. 27 Rajan, “Real and Imagined Women: Politics and/of Representation,” 130. 28 Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics,” 372.

14  Panchali Ray 9 Marjorie, “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint,” 228. 2 30 Tirrell, “Language and Power.” 31 Butler, “Bodies and Power Revisited,” 190. 32 Ibid. 33 Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 8. 34 Ibid., 9. 35 Murthy, “The Birangana and the Birth of Bangladesh.” http://himalmag.com/ the-birangana-and-the-birth-of-bangladesh/ accessed December 4, 2018. 36 Chatterjee, “The Nation and its Fragments,” 133. 37 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 102. 38 Mani, Contentious Traditions; Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 39 Geetha, Undoing Impunity. 40 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”: 21. 41 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 91. 42 Butler, “Bodies and Power Revisited.”

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Women speak nation 15 Das, V. “Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights.” In Gender and Politics in India, edited by N. Menon, 441–471. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Devault, M. L. “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.” In Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, edited by S. N. Hesse-Biber and M. L. Yaiser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Engineer, I. “Religion, State and Secularism.” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 43 (1995): 2726–2728. Gatens, M. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1996. Geetha, V. Undoing Impunity: Speech after Sexual Violence. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2016. John, M. E. “Gender, Development and the Women’s Movement: Problems for a History of the Present.” In Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India, edited by R. S. Rajan, 101–123. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. Kumar, R. A History of Doing: Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1900–1990. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993. Laxmi, M. “The Birangana and the Birth of Bangladesh.” Himal Southasian (2012). http://himalmag.com/the-birangana-and-the-birth-of-bangladesh/ (accessed on 12.4.2018). Mani, L. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. McClintock, A. “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review 44 (1993). Menon, N. “State/Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 5 (1998): PE 3–PE 10. Menon, R. and K. Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. Mohanty, C. T. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 333–358. Mostov, J. “ ‘Our Womens’/‘Their Womens’ Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans.” Peace & Change 20 (1995): 515–529. Mouffe, C. “Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics.” In Feminist Theorize the Political, edited by J. Butler and J. W. Scott, 369–384. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Pandey, G. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Patel, S. “The Ideological and Political Crisis of Early Nineties: On Mandal, Mandir and Communal Tensions.” In Contradictions in Indian Society, edited by M. Savur and I. Munshi. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1995. Pateman, C. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Rajan, R. S. “Real and Imagined Women: Politics and of representation.” In Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, edited by R. S. Rajan, 129–146. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Rajan, R. S. The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Post Colonial India. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Ramaswamy, S. 2001. “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India.” Imago Mundi: 97–114.

16  Panchali Ray Rege, S. “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 44 (1998): WS39–WS46. Rege, S. Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy. New Delhi: Navayana, 2013. Rege, S., J. Devika, K. Kannabiran, M. E. John, P. Swaminathan, and S. Sen. “Intersections of Gender and Caste.” Review of Women’s Studies Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 18 (2013): 35–36. Sangari, K. and S. Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989 (Kali for Women). Sarkar, T. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Sarkar, T. and U. Butalia, eds. Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays. New Delhi, India: Kali for Women, 1995. Sinha, M. “Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late Colonial India.” Feminist Studies 26 (2000): 623–644. Sinha, M. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Spivak, G. C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 (1985). Tharu, S. and T. Niranjana. “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.” Social Scientist 22, no. 3–4 (1994): 93–117. Tirrell, L. “Language and Power.” In Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by A. Jaggar and I. M. Young. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Yuval-Davis, N. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Yuval-Davis, N. and F. Y. Anthias, eds. Woman-Nation-State. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Yuval-Davis, N. and P. Werbner, eds. Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed Books, 1999.

Part I

Gender, nation, and nationalism

1 Women and nation revisited Partha Chatterjee

The strength of nationalist patriarchy I am writing this essay in the middle of a controversy that has been raging in the public media for more than two months over a Hindi film called Padmaavati. The film is based on a classic sixteenth century poetical work called Padmavat by the Awadhi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, which narrates the story of Sultan Alauddin Khalji’s infatuation from a distance with a Rajput princess called Padmavati. Drawn irresistibly towards his imagined object of desire, Khalji lays siege to the fortress of Chittor, but, after many twists and turns in the plot, by the time his troops break the defences and enter the citadel, the Rajput king is dead and the queen Padmavati had thrown herself into the pyre in order not to be defiled by the touch of the invading monarch. Jayasi’s poem is analyzed by critics of Hindi literature as a Sufi allegory on the human quest for union with the divine. Once the publicity material for the film was released, however, the Rajput Karni Sena, an organization for the defence of the Rajput caste in Rajasthan, launched a loud campaign demanding that the film be banned, threatening to disrupt its screening if it was released. Underlying its agitation was a barely concealed reference to the history of the alleged cruelty of Muslim rulers towards infidels and their lust for Hindu women, a suggestion that clearly resonated with the heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric surrounding recent campaigns by Hindutva activists. After much dithering, the Central Board of Film Certification passed the film with a few cuts and a change of its title to Padmaavat so as to make clear that the story is fictional and not historical. But the BJP governments of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Haryana, fearing disturbances, declared that the film would not be allowed to be shown in their states, upon which the producers went to court. The Supreme Court ordered that once the film had been certified for national release, no government could ban it. As I write, the Karni Sena has gone on a rampage in several states, damaging cinema halls and vehicles and, defying court orders, has succeeded in creating an atmosphere of intimidation to dissuade distributors from showing the film and audiences from coming to the theatre. The debate over this matter, pertaining, of course, to the question of freedom of speech in the domain of art, has mainly hinged on the conflict

20  Partha Chatterjee between historical fact and creative fiction. The filmmaker’s side has argued that the movie is a creative cinematic adaptation of Jayasi’s classic poem and does not claim to be a depiction of history. In any case, historians agree that while the siege and conquest of Chittor by Alauddin Khalji is a documented fact, there is no evidence at all that the conqueror’s motives had anything to do with a Rajput queen and that the first textual reference to Padmavati (or Padmini) occurs in Jayasi’s poetical work composed more than two hundred years after the historical event. The Padmini legend circulated in various Rajput versions in ballads composed from the seventeenth century. These were probably the basis of James Tod’s inclusion of the Padmini story in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan published in the early nineteenth century. Tod’s story was picked up in the late nineteenth century by nationalist Bengali writers who seem to have been completely unaware of a seventeenth century Bengali translation of Jayasi’s poem (with interesting changes in the story) composed by Alaol residing in the court of the ruler of Roshang (present day Rakhine in Myanmar). The nationalist version of the story, in prose, poetry, and theatre, travelled from Bengal to northern India as a story of the bravery and fortitude of Rajput women refusing to surrender to an invading army. It was a story that could work as an inspiring metaphor for the participation of women in the struggle against British rule. For the purposes of this essay, I wish to focus on a relatively less noticed aspect of the agitations. Media reports in print and on television featured several interviews with Rajput women, many of them educated and articulate, who, when asked how they had decided the film was offensive without seeing it, declared that the very posters and publicity clips in circulation were an unacceptable slur on the honour of Rajput women. They were particularly affronted by the suggestion that a Rajput queen would dress herself like a dancing girl and perform in front of a public. This, they said, was outrageous since Rajput women were dignified and Rani Padmini, in particular, was remembered with reverence as a brave sati. The film, they were convinced, was an effort to commercially exploit and sully, in the name of cinematic art, the hallowed memory of a woman of exemplary virtue. The Padmaavati dispute has been generally treated in the Englishlanguage media not just as one more example of groups threatening violence for allegedly offensive speech or images in public circulation but also as an unwarranted recrudescence of socially regressive values that were meant to have been left behind. Thus, commentators have remarked on the sudden appearance in public of men from the so-called royal family of Mewar who were officially recognized as ‘stakeholders’ and invited by the Board of Film Certification to watch a special screening of the movie and offer their views. Royalty, it would seem, has still not disappeared even in the official circles of republican India. Moreover, the rhetoric used in the agitation involved a quite explicit glorification of the virtues of female seclusion, unquestioned devotion to one’s husband, and, most shockingly, sati. To

Women and nation revisited 21 many commentators, this looked like the spectre of traditional unreformed patriarchy suddenly making an authorized entry into the modern public domain. At the same time as the Padmaavati controversy, another debate concerning women occupied the attention of the national media. This was the bill moved through Parliament criminalizing the practice of Muslim men divorcing their wives by the mere utterance of the word talaq three times. This followed a recent judgment by the Supreme Court striking down the ‘triple talaq’ provision of the Muslim marriage and divorce law as a violation of fundamental rights and hence unconstitutional. The BJP government moved immediately to frame a new law declaring the ‘triple talaq’ practice as a cognizable crime. Given its large majority in the lower house, the government had little difficulty in passing the bill but met with opposition in the upper house which insisted that the bill be examined by a select committee. The government campaigned for the new law as an important step forward for Muslim women, highlighting the fact that the initial petition that led to the court judgment was made by members of a Muslim women’s rights group. However, critics have questioned the motive behind the attempt to criminalize a practice that concerns family law and there are apprehensions that it may lead to vigilante action against Muslim men.1 Nevertheless, the claim that Muslim women themselves are demanding the support of the law in order to achieve gender justice has blunted the long prevalent argument that a parliament with a very small representation of Muslims should not impose major changes in their personal laws unless there is a strong demand from within the community. Nearly 30 years ago, in a path-breaking essay, Lata Mani had analyzed the early nineteenth century debate over the burning of widows to show that it produced a reformist discourse on the condition of women in which, first, there was considerable collaboration between British colonial officials and Indian reformers and, second, the only voices were those of men.2 Although the first feature tended to disappear with the rise of a mass nationalist movement in the early twentieth century, it could be argued that the second feature remained largely unchanged well into the middle of the twentieth century, with the early generation of women political leaders having neither any significant influence within the nationalist organization nor an independent mass following. The nationalist cultural project of producing the new woman suitable for modern India was almost exclusively a male enterprise. The last four decades, however, have seen the rise of a distinct feminist movement in India. Combining critical scholarship with activism, feminists have opened up a visible and audible space for asserting gender justice and a greater role for women in public life. But has this dented the edifice of nationalist patriarchy? Even feminist scholars have expressed their doubts. The two recent examples I have given above show that there are organized and vocal groups of women today on all sides of the debate. Yet there is not much evidence

22  Partha Chatterjee that the feminist critique of nationalist patriarchy has taken hold in the arena of mass politics. It seems important, therefore, to not only re-examine the conditions that make the nationalist recasting of women so durable but also identify the cultural and political spaces where it remains strong.

Questions about nationalist patriarchy In an essay first written in 1987, I had attempted to critically examine the features of this new nationalist patriarchy.3 It was a critique in that it sought to identify the conditions and limits of the nationalist reconstruction of womanhood. Nationalism, in its attempt to define and defend a national culture that was different from that of the colonizer, did assert the existence and value of a tradition. But it was a reformed tradition, selectively reinterpreted to conform to the conditions of the modern world. Thus, the nationalist project also involved a severe critique of those aspects of tradition that were deemed inhuman and barbaric. In this, its criticisms often coincided with those of colonial observers. The crucial political aspect of the nationalist project was the claim that only a nationalist leadership, and not the colonial state, could use the power of the law to intervene in society to change those practices that made the condition of women unacceptably oppressive and iniquitous. The unstated, but plainly visible, assumption was that this nationalist leadership would consist of progressive and reformminded men. I then attempted to show that the key techniques of reform comprised a set of disciplinary rules governing the spaces where women may move, the activities in which they could engage, the image they could project of themselves, and the pedagogical process to which they were to be subjected. Underlying those disciplinary techniques was a framework of normalization defined by the difference in the normative standards to be applied to women as distinct from men. My analysis was deeply influenced by a Foucauldian understanding of the modern regime of power, derived from my reading of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume One.4 I discerned in the nationalist desire for freedom – from colonial rule as well as the unacceptable aspects of tradition – an accompanying urge to embrace the compulsions of disciplinary power, backed by the authority, both legal and moral, of a national leadership, in order to establish and protect that freedom. Contrary to liberal mythology, the power of surveillance was not opposed to freedom; rather, one was incumbent upon the other. Disciplinary institutions like the school, the workshop, and the hospital, by making the use of power a productive rather than a repressive force, produced the free individual of modern society. This truth of modern power underlay the nationalist resolution of the women’s question whose secret was to make the nationalist construct of the new woman an object of aspiration for women themselves. My article was rightly criticized by feminist scholars for suggesting that women who embraced the nationalist project were merely retailers of an

Women and nation revisited 23 idea prepared for them by reformist men and that in their enthusiasm for the cause of women’s education and freedom from domestic confinement there was no assertion of an autonomous will to resist patriarchy. These nationalist women were, it could fairly be argued, the precursors of the women’s movement of the mid-twentieth century. Had I not overemphasized the ideological strength, indeed elevated to an unsurpassable limit, the so-called nationalist resolution of the women’s question? Besides, the posing and answering of questions concerning the condition of women took very different routes in the different regions of India. How could one claim that a single ‘resolution,’ drawn solely from evidence from Bengal, holds for the whole country? And finally, why were the demands for suffrage and special representation for women, made in the first three decades of the twentieth century, abandoned later, rendering the distinct political demands of women illegitimate?5 These are important criticisms, based not only on questions that arose from a distinctly feminist angle of vision but, no less crucially, from the large body of scholarship that has emerged in the last three decades on the empirical details of the changing bodily and social lives of women, their struggles, experiences, and testimonies, their position in the home, at work, in education, and in public spaces. The empirical studies are part of the treasure trove of material that has been unearthed by recent research into the various print languages of the Indian subcontinent. This rich material on diverse aspects of the changing lives of women in different parts of India in the last two centuries was, needless to say, not available to those writing on the subject in the early 1980s. It is necessary, therefore, to revisit my description of the nationalist resolution of the women’s question.

The limits of progressive change As I have explained, the aforesaid resolution involved a process of normalization. But there are actually two different senses of the norm, and both are implicit in the three objections above. The first is the empirical average, which could be expressed qualitatively or as a statistical measure such as the mean or median. This is what, in ordinary language, is called the normal. It is in this sense that we ordinarily speak of a normal monsoon, or a normal volume of traffic, or a normal rate of tax collection. Pertinent to our present topic of discussion, we routinely compare against an all-India average the data for each Indian state on measures such as the sex ratio, enrolment of female students in different levels of education, or women’s employment in the formal sector. The normal as the empirical average can also be compared over time, showing a rise or decline in the particular rate. Thus, the proportion of girls amongst schoolchildren in a particular state could be observed to be improving or worsening over a certain period of time. But there is also a second sense of the norm in which it indicates not an average but a desirable standard. This is what is often called normative. It indicates not the

24  Partha Chatterjee existent empirical normal but something that has to be achieved as a value given by a set of moral or social preferences.6 The norm in the first sense, we could say, is discovered by applying the techniques of socio-economic observation while that in the second sense, i.e., the normative, is put in place by effective ideology. If we turn to the criticisms of my old essay, the first objection involves an undoubtedly correct empirical claim that the struggles of the early generation of women reformers carried within them a desire to break the chains of patriarchy and assert the autonomous claims of women. Hence, the fact that many women summoned the strength to overcome the pressures of family and community to come out of seclusion, seek formal education, mobilize other women to follow their lead, and engage in public discourse with as well as against men surely must have changed to some extent the empirically observed normal behaviour of women, at least amongst the new middle classes. This is clearly evident from a wide variety of data over the past hundred years or so on women’s education, formal employment, participation in public life, etc., initially amongst the urban middle classes but later spreading to other sections of society. This change in the empirical normal is justifiably regarded as a sign of progress in which the autonomous efforts of women were often crucial. But did this also represent a change in the normative structure of the nationalist construct of the new woman? Did the change in the empirical normal even require such a change of the norm? Or could the former have been accommodated within, indeed touted as evidence of, the sturdy normative frame built by nationalism? One must remember that the norm in this case consists of the difference between the normative standards to be applied to women as distinct from men. Hence, the nationalist espousal of the modern legal-constitutional idea of gender equality, implicit in the fundamental right to equality guaranteed to both men and women by the Indian constitution, is necessarily qualified by a culturally determined difference between the normative standard that applies to women as opposed to the one for men. As a result, even though we now have large numbers of women in schools and colleges, places of formal employment, and public spaces of gathering, transportation, and leisure, it is arguable that there are still differential disciplinary rules that are sought to be enforced on women. True, practices that were not approved fifty or a hundred years ago may be allowed now, indicating a change in the empirical normal. But is not such a change always accompanied by a new normative difference between what is appropriate for women as distinct from men? Are not considerations such as the special need for security of women, or a cultural value such as modesty or sacrifice, or the biological difference between the sexes, adduced as ground for denying to women what is allowed to men in matters of dress, speech, manners, freedom of movement, and work opportunities? If one keeps in mind the key conceptual innovation of normalization that underlies the effectiveness of modern disciplinary power, one would be less inclined to underestimate the flexibility and robustness of the nationalist ideology.

Women and nation revisited 25 The second objection requires an extended answer, because this is where the results of recent research into the massive and varied products of the dozen or so major print languages of India have alerted us to the multiple strands of cultural criticism and social reform efforts in the different linguistic regions in the last two centuries. Feminist historians have made major contributions to this recent literature. What is relevant here is that just as power relations and patterns of mobility within the jati formation were different in each linguistic region, so also were the structures of traditional patriarchy and the movements launched by men and women reformers to change them. As a result, what is often summarily described as the nationalist project of recasting Indian women for citizenship in the modern nation state actually consisted of distinct cultural projects in each linguistic region. We must remember here that, in India, the nationalist ideology was forged for mass instruction through print, visual, and aural media in the regional languages. Hence, on hindsight, it is not surprising that feminist historians working on the regional print and visual archives found many variations in the way traditional patriarchy was criticized or defended, or the ‘new woman’ imagined, in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, the Hindi region, Bengal, and so on. My next point can be made more clearly if I bring another distinction into the discussion. Nationalist ideology merges two distinct relations of identity: people = nation and nation = state. But these two identities have divergent histories. In the Indian case, the history of the nation state is traced through time as a sequence of state formations in which the high points were the great empires, which signified the possibility of bureaucratic states exercising sovereign authority over most of the territory of the subcontinent. This history culminates in the British Indian empire from which sovereignty was finally transferred to the Indian republic. The history of the nation state acknowledges the reality and effectiveness of the British Indian institutions of law, economy, bureaucracy, army, and higher education, which had to be appropriately nationalized into the institutions of the new united nation state. This history is produced by professional historians working through universities, learned societies, archives, major publishing houses, and academic journals, and is practised, in its authoritative version, in the English language. On the other hand, the history of the people-nation is a much more fragmented, disparate, and contentious history, produced almost entirely in the regional print languages, about caste, sectarian, and religious identities, local and regional histories of political conflict and domination, social reform, linguistic identity, etc. Academic historians writing in English tended to dismiss these histories as insufficiently rigorous in their methods and unacceptably ideological in their motivations. The allegation was that there is no systematic attempt in these histories to separate historical facts from myths, legends, folk memory, and fabulous imagination. But as politics acquired a more democratic mass base from the 1920s, this regional stream of history writing acquired new political significance. The political process by which

26  Partha Chatterjee something called ‘the people’ was mobilized as a political subject in different parts of India also energized the production of these vernacular histories. It is there, not in the academic histories of professional historians, that ‘the people-nation’ was imagined as a political community. If we keep this distinction between the historical constitution of the nation state and that of the people-nation in mind, we will better understand the complex structure of the normative construction of the new nationalist patriarchy in multilingual India. There is one normative structure, claiming to be authoritative for the whole country, which tends to prevail within the institutions of the higher judiciary, the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, the elite universities, and the urban upper-middle class. Enunciated mostly in the English language, this discourse of equal rights-bearing citizenship has given birth to some of the most progressive gender laws and judicial pronouncements as well as a large body of outstanding feminist scholarship. But the field of mass electoral politics, where an appeal to ‘the people’ as victims of unjust oppression by an entrenched elite carries enormous emotive potential for large-scale mobilization, it is the unauthorized and fractious vernacular histories of the people-nation that hold sway. That is what we are witnessing today in the continuing Padmaavat controversy. Consequently, the second objection to my formulation of the nationalist construction of the new woman calls for a somewhat complex answer because the relevant normative structure is itself complex. The norm of equal citizenship for men and women enshrined in constitutional rights is qualified by the culturally prevailing difference between the normative standards that apply to women as distinct from those for men. The equal citizenship norm claims to be normative for the nation state as a whole, whereas the culturally sanctioned norm, which pertains to the people-nation, necessarily varies between linguistic regions. This variation is not simply a matter of the empirical normal, but in fact marks dissimilarities in the construction of, and contests over, the normative disciplinary principles that are expected to govern the lives of women in the different regions of the country. What adds further complexity to this already complex structure is the web of hierarchical relations that seek to connect the authoritative and purportedly universal norms of the law with the varying regional normative practices, marked by the conflicts of class, caste, religion, and language. As the Padmaavat row shows, the assertion of the fundamental rights of citizens, even by the Supreme Court, could be ignored, evaded, or resisted on the ground it is inconsistent with the culturally authorized practices of this or that regional, linguistic, caste, tribal, or religious group. The third objection to my essay refers to the campaigns by women leaders in the 1920s and 1930s for voting rights and political representation for women. One must remember that these demands were made under conditions of limited franchise and special representation, not only for religious minorities and the so-called Depressed Classes but also for officials, landlords, chambers of commerce, labour, university graduates, and

Women and nation revisited 27 women. With the institution of equal citizenship under the new republic, adult franchise was established and separate electorates as well as special constituencies were abolished for the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies. The exception was made, initially for a period of ten years, for reserved constituencies for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in which candidates would, however, be elected by the general electorate. All other demands for special political representation as qualifications to equal citizenship were overruled. It is interesting that in the 1990s, when the reservation of seats for women was established in local elected bodies, the demand was stoutly resisted for Parliament and the state assemblies on the ground that it would tilt the composition of those legislatures in favour of the upper caste and elite sections of society. This suggests that in relation to the republican norm of equal citizenship, while the special political representation of scheduled castes and tribes is now recognized as a permanent exception, that of religious minorities or women has not gained acceptance. Since I began this brief essay with a reference to some recent events, let me conclude with one more remark concerning the present political conjuncture. The decline of the inherited nationalist hegemony of the Congress was followed by nearly two decades in which regional mobilizations of caste coalitions were able to widen and deepen the practices of democratic claimmaking in the states, exert influence on the central government, and shift the federal balance away from the centre. But since the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2014, one is witnessing a purposeful attempt to build a new hegemonic ideological formation that seeks to unify the Hindu population under the banner of Hindutva and combine it with an economic slogan of vikas (development), which can be spun to include both pro-business reforms and populist spending programmes. Where does the question of women and the nation stand in relation to this new hegemonic strategy of the ruling political bloc? If we recall the distinction I made earlier between the nation state formation and the people-nation formation, and the complex normative structure that seeks to bind the two, we will see that the former has been constituted by discursive conventions enunciated primarily in English, whereas the latter exists in the various regional languages. It is arguable that the foundations of a new normative structure for the people-nation has been laid in most of northern India, in the print, visual, and aural media, in the Hindi language, through school and college textbooks, popular literature, public ceremonies, television, and cinema. In this ideologically grounded discourse, nationalism is equated with the historical aspirations and struggles of the Hindu people. Further, the deepening of democratic mobilization has meant that the normative authority of the modernizing nationalist elite has been challenged by claims that local or ethnic cultural norms are equally, if not more, legitimate. That raises a difficult question: have the efforts of feminist scholars and activists to fight for greater civil rights, legal protection, and development benefits for women met with relative success

28  Partha Chatterjee in the legal-administrative domain of the nation state but failed to have any impact on the norms that regulate the lives of women in the people-nation? Surveying the state of women’s studies in India, Mary John remarked in 2008: ‘it is not fortuitous that women’s studies is effectively located at the very apex of a system of higher education with English as our effective means of communication.’7 The recent resurgence in the national arena of some of the most regressive patriarchal attitudes towards women shows that the struggle to challenge and reconstitute the normative figure of the woman as an equal member of the people-nation remains to be carried out within the different regional cultural formations.

Notes 1   For example, see Agnes, “The Triple Talaq Bill and BJP’s Selective Concern for Muslim Women,” 9. 2  Mani, Contentious Traditions, 88–126. 3  Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” 233–253. 4  Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One. 5   These criticisms of my essay are summarized in Nair, 2011. 6   I have explained the conceptual form and power effects of normalization in Chatterjee, 2012, 167–176. 7   John, “Introduction,” 16.

Bibliography Agnes, F. “The Triple Talaq Bill and BJP’s Selective Concern for Muslim Women.” The Wire (2018) New Delhi. Chatterjee, P. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by K. Sangari and S. Vaid, 233–253. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989 (Kali for Women). Chatterjee, P. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish. Translated by A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. John, M. E. “Introduction.” In Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, edited by M. E. John, 1–19. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008. Mani, L. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by K. Sangari and S. Vaid, 88–126. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989 (Kali for Women). Nair, J. “Indian Historiography and Its ‘Resolution’ of Feminists Questions.” In Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, edited by A. Ghosh, T. Guha-Thakurta, and J. Nair, 35–61. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

2 The Verma Committee report, 2013 Notes on nation, gender, and crime Swapan Chakravorty

On September 26, 1949, the Constituent Assembly met at 10 am in the Constitution Hall, New Delhi, to debate and adopt the draft Constitution of the Indian Union. The Chairperson, President Rajendra Prasad, reminded the legislators that ‘Whatever the Constitution may or may not provide, the welfare of the country will depend upon the way in which the country is administered. That will depend upon the men who administer it.’1 Prasad goes on in this strain, remotely anticipating tendencies to judge right and wrong (or, by an arguable extension, the effect of ethical action) in terms of the agents’ dispositions and motives that one might find in such recent agent-based virtue ethicists as Michael Slote and Linda Zagzebski.2 Prasad says that elected ‘men’ must be ‘capable and men of character and integrity.’ Such men would ‘make the best even of a defective Constitution.’ The Constitution is no guarantee of integrity in public life: it is ‘like a machine . . . a lifeless thing.’ India needs honest ‘men’ of ‘strong character and vision’ who can ‘control it and operate it,’ men who are able to rise above petty prejudices and not sacrifice the interests of the country.3 In addition to the exemplarist virtue-ethics Prasad shows symptoms of proposing, there is a further point worth noticing. At the moment of the birth of a democratic republic, when the guiding principles of the state are being established on behalf of the governed, the good President is thinking not merely of a republic, nor a state, but what he refers to as ‘the country.’ We may guess that the notion he had in mind in using the word was closer to the idea of desh than that of rashtra or nation, jati-rashtra. Although Indian nationalists swore by the ‘nation’ they called ‘Bharat’ or ‘Hindusthan,’ Rajendra Prasad, author of India Divided,4 was possibly thinking of the idea of desh or country that had inspired the nationalist struggle, especially at a time when the scar of partition was still raw. Prasad goes on to invoke the idea of the country and its people, ordinary people rather than the star leaders crowding the Constitution Hall. For that indeed had been the experience of the struggle for freedom for Prasad and his comrades. When leaders of the Congress were imprisoned, without being given the time to plan how the campaigns would be carried out in their absence, ‘people arose from amongst the masses who were able to continue and conduct the

30  Swapan Chakravorty campaigns with intelligence, with initiative, with capacity for organization which nobody suspected they possessed.’ He expresses the confidence that ‘a set of honest men who will have the interest of the country before them’ will be found in the more difficult task ahead. During the movement for freedom, there were no ‘conflicting claims to reconcile, no loaves and fishes of office to distribute, no powers to share.’5 The President’s hope – although moving, given the current inclinations of our leaders and their followers – seems innocent of the conflicting claims of genders: his hopes are for ‘men of strong character, men of vision, men who will not sacrifice the interests of the country.’ Curiously enough, the first of the quoted passages reappears in Paragraph 11 of the Introduction to the Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law 23 January 2013, set up with Justice J. S. Verma as Chairperson in the wake of the country-wide protest against the hideous gang rape of a young woman inside a Delhi bus in December 2012.6 Whatever may be the appearances, President Prasad was not blind to the fault lines that underlie the unity of the assembled ‘nationalists.’ More curious is the fact that Hon’ble Justices Verma, Leila Seth, and Gopal Subramanium use strategic ellipses points to skip precisely the couple of sentences in the first passage where the President reminds Members of the cracks and seams. The sentences appear in the records immediately after the mention of ‘a set of honest men who will have the interest of the country before them’: ‘There is a fissiparous tendency arising out of various elements in our life. We have communal differences, caste differences, language differences, provincial differences and so forth.’7 The omission does not seem inadvertent. Their Lordships needed to propose a liberal, what was somewhat awkwardly labelled ‘humanist,’ view of the ‘country’ indifferently elided with the ‘nation’ in the Report – a view that was articulated at its inaugural moment through the President’s illocutionary speech act. Their Lordships also needed to identify it with the state and people it governs. This is especially necessary to goad the state, which had appointed the Verma Committee, into recognizing that its ‘humanist’ claims have failed marked genders and, in this particular instance, the citizens unmentioned in Prasad’s speech, that is, women. In Paragraph 2 of the Report, there is the apparently superfluous reminder that ‘the Constitution guarantees fundamental freedoms to women.’ Article 15(3) enables the State to make special provisions for women and children. After invoking the provision, the Report reiterates the issue regarding gender-neutrality, stating that Constitutional rights such as Article 21 and 21(A) which speak of the right to education and Article 23 which prohibits trafficking, apply equally to women and children. From neutrality, the Report moves on to the especial protection women are provided in the Constitution: ‘It may also be noticed that Article 51A(e) provides that it shall be the duty of every citizen of India to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women.’8 I term this preamble ‘apparently superfluous,’ although many such preambles in

The Verma Committee report, 2013 31 legal reports are admittedly redundant, because in the absence of the Constitutional provision the appointment of the Committee would be unjustifiable. More important, it is emphatically not the Constitutional guarantee that had occasioned the appointment, since an ‘Amendment’ as mentioned in the Report’s title would in that case be hardly necessary. The Committee was the result of people’s protests on the streets against the failure of the state to guarantee the so-called humanist promise of the Constitution. The Preface opens with this candid, if not astute, admission. The immediate cause was the gang rape of a young girl in a bus in Delhi, but, the Preface clearly states that, The constitution of this Committee is in response to the country-wide peaceful public outcry of civil society, led by the youth, against the failure of governance to provide a safe and dignified environment for the women of India, who are constantly exposed to sexual violence.9 Hence, the Committee is constrained to indict the state, albeit indirectly, of failing he nation and its people. Its Report states in Paragraph 7: ‘A fortiori, the duty of the State, therefore, is to provide a safe environment, at all times, for women, who constitute half the nation’s population; and failure in discharging this public duty renders it accountable for the lapse.’10 President Prasad had taken what some may prefer to describe as almost an ethical instrumentalist11 position with regard to the Constitution. But he was thinking of a country newly liberated and divided, rather than an abstract state and a lifeless Constitution. It is odd that the Committee chaired by Justice Verma should have clubbed Prasad’s remarks with Amartya Sen’s reflections on capability and agency secured through social and economic empowerment. The Report resorts to some deft footwork to distance Sen’s position from Prasad’s and its own and avoids the crucial question of whether we could think of citizenry and rights abstracted from the networks of power. There are two passages quoted in the Report from Sen, the first from The Idea of Justice (2011) and the second from the 2005 essay ‘Human Rights and Capabilities’ published in the Journal of Human Development. The first makes the point that democratic institutions do not ensure the success of a democracy nor of their own safety: ‘The working of democratic institutions, like all other institutions, depends on the activities of human agents in utilizing opportunities for reasonable realization.’ The second passage concerns ‘capability’ or the ‘opportunity aspect’ of human rights. ‘Capability’ is defined as ‘the opportunity to achieve valuable combinations of human functionings – what a person is able to do or be.’ Sen observes that the capability approach would enable one to distinguish between whether she is actually able to do what she values doing and whether she possesses the ‘means or instruments or permissions’ to pursue what she would like to. Actual ability to pursue such ends would hence depend on many ‘contingent circumstances.’12

32  Swapan Chakravorty Leaving aside the question of Sen’s pointed choice of the markedly gendered pronoun, it should be obvious that in speaking of agency and capability he is thinking of the means of empowerment and exclusion and not of the assumed good faith of the ‘motherland’s’ selfless ‘sons.’ The Report appears eager to sneak in Sen’s insight without unduly upsetting the institutions, which the Committee is entrusted to uphold. The lurch for balance unsettles its tight-lipped prose in Paragraph 17: While the Committee is of the view that there is merit in the capability approach propounded by Prof. Amartya Sen, it must also be borne in mind that the ability to dictate needs and desires (including the capacity and ability for consumption as well as income generation) are not irrelevant factors. The Committee is unable to disregard the subjugation of women, which has been occasioned in India on account of the lack of financial independence and security. Hence, while acknowledging that the capability approach does address a series of other issues in relation to women, it is necessary, as a part of the overall change of consciousness, that women must be made equally capable and productive for the purpose of becoming self-sufficient financially, which would be one of the intrinsic safeguards for ‘feeling’ and ‘perceiving’ equality. Naturally, this cannot detract from the reality that political power, domestic violence, education and social status are indeed vital concerns.13 If women are to be ‘made equally capable’ it seems more than probable that they would ‘feel’ ‘equal’ and capable.’ The circularity implies that Sen’s point – including ‘the reality of political power, domestic violence, education and social status’ – needs to be, as indeed it has been, reiterated after the initial gesture towards an attempt to distinguish it from the Committee’s primary focus. I believe that enough has been said to make one see that at a moment when the protest against an unspeakable crime against a woman had taken on the dimensions of a political upheaval, it was hard for the Committee to pretend that the liberal (I am calling the Committee ‘liberal’ for want of a better word than this haplessly overused adjective) basis of citizenry and the nation state could be sustained without self-doubt. Hence the question and minatory tone at the end of the allusion to Rajendra Prasad’s speech in the Constituent Assembly in Paragraph 11 of the Report: ‘Is the fervent hope belied? If so, the faith has to be restored.’14 In other words, it was not possible for even a state-appointed Committee to treat the state and the nation in isolation from questions of gender. If sociologists and historians from Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm to Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith had confined gender relations to a minor theme in studies of the nation, and if nationalism was ignored in the feminist scholarship of their time, the reason, as Nira Yuval-Davis says in her 1997 book Gender and Nation, is that the public and political sphere, the civil society and state, were thought of as sequestered from the family and not as concentric

The Verma Committee report, 2013 33 fields demarcating the operations of power.15 In a 2010 essay titled ‘Gender, Nationalism and Individualisation,’ the Hungarian scholar Gábor Gyáni writes that the idea of individuals as ‘equal’ members of the state, enshrined in the March Revolution of 1848 which abolished the exemption from taxation enjoyed by the nobility in Hungary and liberated serfs, and in the 1876 law which transferred the legal notion of citizenship to one based on legitimacy (by naturalization or marriage) rather than simply on lineage, took for granted the premise of ‘the legal inferiority of women as compared to men.’ Its analogues are to be found in the Italian Civil Code of 1865, the German Act of 1870, and the Switzerland Act of 1876.16 That the equal citizenry promised by the Indian Constitution was also flawed by reason of such a prejudgment was an arguable issue that presumably fell outside the Committee’s remit. The Report of a legal Committee appointed by the government is not a confessional document. But this Report, remarkable by ethico-legal standards, came close. The compulsive indirection it resorted to was to harp on prejudices that obtained in society, even amongst legislators and those who wielded other forms of state power. Hence, Paragraph 23 of the Report cites instances of astonishing public remarks made by politicians ranging from Om Prakash Chautala of the Indian National Lok Dal, Haryana, who applauded the khap because it had taken steps to save Hindu women like the males in their community had reportedly done heroically in the Mughal era by getting their young women married before the Mughals could lay their hands on them, to Anisur Rahman of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), West Bengal, who spat out an unabashed question for raped women who were being considered for compensation, ‘What is your fee?’.17 Of course, chilling threats of rape by sitting legislators in the country, including the infamous instance of the guntoting film star-turned-MP from West Bengal, were not staunched by either the protests on the streets or the amendments to the criminal law proposed by the Committee.18 At a time when civil society was outraged by the hideous instance of gender violence that is far too common in the country for the state to claim that it has redeemed the pledge of the Constitution it adopted in 1949, the Report seized its moment to gesture at the unsurprising point that feminist scholars and activists have long been making. The making of the state or the nation, or of the ‘nation state,’ is inseparable from questions of gender. By the same token, it is futile to try and seal off a political sphere from the civil society or from cultural practices. The very notion of a nation always already in the making is reliant on the fugitive character of culture, always caught on the hop between contesting claims. The ideas of jati (nation) and rashtra (state) are, in the long run, dependent on what the desh (country) and samaja (society/community) make of the concept of lokatantra (republic/democracy). In this matter, Rajendra Prasad’s instincts were sharp and observant at the foundational moment of the republic. If the legal structure of the state enjoins a certain idea of nationhood there are bound to be contesting claims from intersecting fields. If the secular

34  Swapan Chakravorty state directs that you get its gender right, there will also be challenges from religious groups that addressing the ‘nation’ as ‘mother’ is bad grammar for a member of the flock – and they will call the Indian Constitution to witness.19 The unease centred on the concept of the ‘nation’ as ‘mother,’ and, worse still, ‘goddess,’ amongst sections of the Muslim population has a long history stretching back to precolonial debates on Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s song ‘Vande mataram’ and the image of ‘Bharat Mata’ painted by Abanindranath Tagore, a female icon inscribed within the map of undivided India. But the current situation is more about the majoritarian – and largely repressive – understanding of what makes for the ‘modern feminine in India’ than idolatrous iconography or of the new patriarchy that had sought since the late nineteenth century a fragile truce with the project of ‘improving’ the lot of women along Western lines.20 Conversely, if the state – as sought to be reinvented by the current leaders of India – wishes to wear its secular credentials for all to see, the ruling majority will less than subtly alter the concept of ‘Hindutva (or Hindu-ness)’ to identify with the nation and with ‘Indianness,’ even when it cannot amend the Preamble to the Constitution. The nation may then be the ghar to which the prodigal Hindu will return.21 Certain things refuse to evolve the more cultural practices change. We recall that Pandita Ramabai was stigmatized as a traitor to the ‘nation’ when she converted to Christianity in the late nineteenth century.22 The Report of the Committee headed by Justice Verma made an earnest attempt to recover the foundational tenets of the Indian Union, which were, in a loose sense, liberal, offering equal rights to citizens irrespective of gender. It recalled a speech of President Rajendra Prasad in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 to remind the government that it failed the Constitution if it could not guarantee the security of women, and that its obligation did not end with just punishing gender crimes but included their prevention. In the wake of popular protests against the ghastly incident that occasioned its appointment, it also hinted at, and also clearly alluded to, the fact that questions of gender justice and safety were inseparable from those of women’s equity, empowerment, and capability. The Committee went to the extent of openly condemning the obscene display of machismo with threats of sexual violence by men in power directed towards women in politics, women constituents, and women dissidents – a sort of covert proxy of the male will-to-power that fuels such crimes at a more creatural level of the polity. The proposed amendment of the criminal law hence brought into sharp focus the centrality of gender in the idea of a nation, be it glorified as mother, refused obeisance as personified female icon, divided into the gendered domains of the public and the private, or simply imagined as the amalgam of non-transferable virtues safely lodged in the bodies of its spiritually impenetrable women. The hideousness one saw, or chose not to see, in the streets of the national capital is at present routinely displayed in the name of a gendered nation. In this, the Committee was acute, if not prescient. In the current scene,

The Verma Committee report, 2013 35 I believe it may help us to recall Rabindranath Tagore’s suspicions about the imagined ‘nation’ held together more by chains of servitude than bonds of belonging. Tagore, we know, insisted that India was never a ‘nation’ in the European sense. What held India together was the samaja or community and not the rashtra or political state. Hence, he conceived of community bonds, kalyansambandha, that would build a samaja in a colonized country rather than lead to a welfare state. Many of his political notions changed since the heady swadesi phase, but he hung on to this concept of Bharatvarsha even in his late political writings. He had written about his political views himself in the essay titled ‘Rabindranather rashtranoitik mat,’23 first published in the magazine Prabasi of Agrahayan 1336 BS, that is, December 1929 – January 1930. It was written in response to Sachindranath [Sochin] Sen’s book Political Philosophy of Rabindranath.24 Tagore revisited some of his major ideas, which he had been expressing since the popular ‘Swadesi samaja,’25 written when Bengal was facing a serious shortage of drinking water. It was drafted a few months after the partition of Bengal was mooted and a year prior to the declaration of the partition, signalling the start of the swadesi movement. We often hear of Tagore’s disenchantment with the political movement he briefly led, but it is important to remember that his ideas of swadesi, different from those of the leaders of the boycott, had been clearly articulated in the address delivered at the Minerva Theatre and then again, on popular demand, at the Curzon Hall (Grace Cinema). This may not be the occasion to discuss Tagore’s politics or his political beliefs. What may be pertinent to the theme of the volume and to our times, however, is what he had to say about the dangers of an unexamined, as also ungendered, nationalism. Let me end by quoting from the lecture ‘Nationalism in the West’ delivered in the United States in 1917. Tagore said that the historical problem that India as a country faced was the proliferation and incursion of races. The solution was not along the lines that forged nation states in Europe: the political state apparatus from which the ‘India’ of homes, self-governing villages, schools, and temples stayed aloof. The situation has changed with the coming of British rule, and India is aspiring to a Western form of political nationhood. Idealized though this might sound, Tagore’s alternative of a ‘nation’ based on samaja was a canny strategy for building a new idea of India with which one could encounter and challenge the reality of political subjection. The additional benefit of this strategy was that it laid bare the seams in the Western idea of the political state that brought forces in civil society and the family into conflict. Tagore is far from suggesting the immanence of power or guessing that there is no exteriority to power. Nevertheless, he sees that an idea of the nation sponsored by the state would lead to conflicts that could only be inimical to a colonized people: A nation, in the sense of a political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a

36  Swapan Chakravorty mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being.26 Having broached the familiar distinction between the organic society and the inorganic state, Tagore suddenly strays into the question of gender conflict. He warns his listeners that habit may have made them indifferent to the snapping of the ‘living bonds of society,’ and to the ‘merely mechanical organisation’ taking its place. The decay of natural ties that hold them in harmony has resulted in the ‘war . . . between man and woman.’ Man is driven to producing wealth for him and others; ‘continually turning the wheel of power for his own sake or for the sake of the universal officialdom, leaving woman alone to wither and to die or to fight her own battle unaided.’ Natural ‘co-operation’ thus yields place to mechanical ‘competition.’27 There is much in this passage that would give offence to present-day readers, as it did to Tagore’s American audience. Not only was the poet claiming cultural superiority to his hosts, he was suggesting that women depend on men for fighting their battles, that they produced little wealth in a capitalist economy, and that the fight for women’s emancipation was an unfortunate result of a nation that had compromised its society for the sake of the state. The War was not yet over, and although America was relatively unscathed, Tagore’s audience would not have been amused with his unseasonable comments on the battle of the sexes. Indian social scientists would accuse Tagore of pleading for a new patriarchy that would shift the blame for the failure of its own programme of social reform, seen in such instances as the resentment of the speaker’s countrymen against educated Indian women and remarried Indian widows, onto the ‘unnaturalness’ of Western industrial capital. The relevance of the passage for our theme, however, is that Tagore guessed – as his mature fiction clearly demonstrates – that there was no way of skirting issues of gender when speaking of the modern – that is, Western – idea of the nation. Ungendered ideas of the nation lead to deeply unsettling consequences elsewhere in Tagore, in Ghare-baire (1916) and Char adhyaya (1934), novels that could find a new resonance amongst Indian readers of our times.28 If parts of Tagore sound tired and dated, he promises more than Reports of government Committees. I would like to believe that he might be our ally in the fight against variants of the egregious crime that brought people to the streets. Such variants are perpetrated almost daily in other places and against other groups of Indian citizens in the name of the Indian ‘nation.’

Notes 1 Constituent Assembly of India, 11, 12 vols., accessed April 11, 2016. 2 Slote, Morals from Motives, 14; Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory, 160. 3 See note 1 above. 4 Prasad, India Divided.

The Verma Committee report, 2013 37 5 See note 1 above. 6 Ibid., 12. 7 See note 1 above. 8 Verma, et al., Report of the Committee on Amendments, 1–2. 9 Ibid., i. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Biehl, “Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,” 353–369. 12 Verma, et al., Report of the Committee on Amendments, 5, 7. 13 Ibid., 8. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 2. 16 Gyáni, “Gender, Nationalism and Individualisation,” 11. 17 Verma, et al., Report of the Committee on Amendments, 11. The Khap panchayat, of course, has no legal standing. It is a traditional community of village elders in some parts of northern India. Chautala, then in opposition, made the remarks in October 2012. See www.ndtv.com/india-news /girls-being-raped-marry-themasap-says-om-prakash-chautala-backing-khaps-501345 accessed April 11, 2016. 18 The reference is to the address of the actor and Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Tapas Pal delivered in Choumaha June 14, 2014 in which he allegedly threatened political opponents with violence, including rape. See www. thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/west-bengal-women-commission-slamstapas/article6176900.ece accessed April 11, 2016. 19 Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and a threeterm MP from Hyderabad, declared on March 14, 2016 that he would not chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ as demanded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena since it was not a requirement of the Indian Constitution. On March 16 Waris Pathan, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Maharashtra and a member of AIMIM, was suspended from the Assembly for the rest of the Budget session for refusing to say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai.’ See www.ndtv.com/indianews/i-wont-say-bharat-mata-ki-jai-owaisi-to-bhagwat-1287037 and www. ndtv.com/india-news/owaisis-legislator-waris-pathan-suspended-refused-to-saybharat-mata-ki-jai-1287819 accessed April 11, 2016. 20 On the history and interpretations of the issue, see Bagchi, “Representing Nationalism,” 42–43; Bagchi, Interrogating Motherhood; Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation; Guta, 2009, 132–137; Ghosh, Different Nationalisms, 274–277. For a more indirect, though influential approach to the problem, see Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution of Women’s Question,” 233–253. 21 Ghar wapsi or home-coming is a campaign run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Visva Hindu Parishad to convert (or, as the claim goes, re-convert) non-Hindus to Hinduism through certain public rituals. The campaign has been in the news since 2014. See Katju, “The Politics of Ghar Wapsi,” 21–24. 22 See Kosambi, “Multiple Contestations,” 193–208; Burton, Heart of the Empire, 72–110. 23 See Thakur, “Rabindranather Rashtranoitik Mat,” 436–444. 24 Sen, The Idea of Justice. 25 See Thakur, “Swadesi samaja,” 526–552. In the 1930 essay, Tagore emphasized the distinct spheres of samaja and rashtra in India, harped on the need to serve the country and its people more than simply agitating for the control of the machinery of state, and denounced the idea of charka as a retrograde gesture of denial and rejection rather than genuine service of the nation. 26 Tagore, Nationalism in the West, 37. Spelling as in source edition. 27 Ibid., 38. 28 Rathi, Tagore’s Ghare-baire and Char Adhyaya, 185–200.

38  Swapan Chakravorty

Bibliography Bagchi, J. “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal.” [Review of Women’s Studies] Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 42 (1990): 65–71. Bagchi, J. Interrogating Motherhood. New Delhi: Sage, 2017. Biehl, J. S. “Ethical Instrumentalism.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8, no. 4 (2005): 353–369. Burton, A. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in LateVictorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Chatterjee, P. “Nationalist Resolution of Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by K. Sangari and S. Vaid, 233–253. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989 (Kali for Women). Constituent Assembly of India. Vol. 11. http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/ vol11p12. Ghosh, S. Different Nationalisms: Bengal 1905–1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017. Gupta, S. Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, C. 1867–1905. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Gyáni, G. “Gender, Nationalism and Individualisation.” In Gender, Nation, Narration: Critical Readings of Cultural Phenomena, edited by L. Tuuli, 9–23. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2010. Katju, M. “The Politics of Ghar Wapsi.” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 1 (2015): 21–24. Kosambi, M. “Multiple Contestations: Pandita Ramabai’s Educational and Missionary Activities in Late Nineteenth-Century India and Abroad.” Women’s History Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 193–208. Prasad, R. India Divided. Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1946. Ramaswamy, S. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Rathi, B. M. “Tagore’s Ghare-baire (Home and the World) and Char adhyaya (Four Chapters): Rethinking Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Gender.” In Tagore and Nationalism, edited by K. L. Tuteja and K. Chakraborty, 185–200. New Delhi: Springer, 2017. Sen, A. “Human Rights and Capabilities.” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 2 (2005 July): 151–166. doi:10.1080/14649880500120491. Sen, A. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009. Sen, S. Political Philosophy of Rabindranath. Kolkata: Asher, 1929. Slote, M. Morals from Motives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tagore, R. “Nationalism in the West.” In Nationalism, Introduced by Ramachandra Guha. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009. Thakur, R. “Swadesi samaja.” Atmasakti, Rabindra-rachanbali, 3, 526–552. Kalikata: Visvabharati, 1940 (1347 BS). Thakur, R. “Rabindranather rashtranoitik mat.” Kalantar, Rabindra-rachanbali, 24. Kalikata: Visvabharati, 1947 (1354 BS). Verma (Retd), J. S., L. Seth (Retd), and G. Subramanium (Retd). Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law January 23, 2013. New Delhi: PRS Legislative Research, 2013. Yuval-Davis, N. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Zagzebski, L. Divine Motivation Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

3 The gendered nation To be recoded or rejected? Anuradha Roy

The divine-bovine women-mother-nation of India Let me begin by telling a story. It was written in 1947 by Raja Rao and looked back on Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s.1 The name of the story is ‘The Cow of the Barricades.’2 The story has two main characters – the Master and Gauri, the cow. Every Tuesday the cow comes to the town to visit the master living in a hermitage, who would give her food. She is a mystery to the local people, because they do not know where she comes from and she would simply disappear after paying her visit. Only the Master seems to know about her whereabouts. But the locals love and revere her. They consider her to be Goddess Lakshmi. Various kinds of people would come to her with various wishes to be fulfilled. Students would pray for good marks, girls for handsome husbands, widows for purity, the childless for children, and so on. Therefore, every Tuesday there appears a veritable procession of men and women at the Master’s hermitage. But the graceful Gauri would pass by them quite unaffected by the attention she receives. Then, one day, the scene changes to a fight for freedom. On the advice of the Master, people stop serving the British government, paying it taxes, and buying foreign cloth. The Master wants the movement to remain strictly non-violent. But after some time, the fight is joined by men from the mills and factories, who have no faith in non-violence. The Master resigns from the presidentship of the body of local self-government and sits in meditation in order to avert bloodshed. Gauri, the cow, feels sad about it and sheds tears. A showdown becomes inevitable as some militant people armed with scythes, crowbars, swords, and even stolen rifles put up barricades and the military gets ready to fire. The ordinary people are utterly confused. Suddenly Gauri arrives on the scene. Everyone expects her to save the situation and greets her with the cry ‘Vande Mataram.’ Gauri clambers to the top of the barricade. The soldiers are puzzled at first, wondering if it is an overture for truce. But when they see the cow and its looks and ‘the tear, clear as a drop of the Ganges,’ they have a change of heart. They shout out, ‘Victory to the Mahatma! Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai’ and join the rebel crowd. Their

40  Anuradha Roy Chief, however, gets furious at this and fires a shot, which ‘goes through Gauri’s head, and she falls, a vehicle of God among lowly men.’ Only then is peace restored. The character of the Master in the story is none other than Mahatma Gandhi, with his insistence on non-violence, his lack of faith in the industrial workers’ commitment to non-violence, and his habit of fasting and meditating to bend to his will those who did not see eye to eye with him. Of course, it was his ‘love for all creatures, the speechful and the mute’ that facilitated the bond between him and the cow. But actually there is more to it. The cow stands for Mother India. A graceful creature, repository of benevolence, she nurtures by providing milk and distributing largesse; she ensures the spiritual purity of the nation; yet she is utterly passive and helpless. But her strength lies in valiant self-sacrifice. Thus she becomes a martyr to save her people, her children. Indeed, this cow is not just Mother India but a symbol of motherhood itself. And thus we can easily establish a link between Gauri, Mother India, and the women of the nation. Women-asmothers are like cows, upholders of the spiritual superiority of the nation. Only, the cow is always a symbol of purity and benevolence, while women have a strong potential for evil and have to be strictly controlled to remain within the great cultural tradition defining the nation. And of course, when one connects Mother India and women through the symbol of the cow, she cannot be a mother to non-Hindus. Towards the end of the story, the Master says, ‘Gauri is waiting in the Middle Heavens to be born. She will be reborn when India again laments her subjugated state.’ Our question, with due sympathy and respect for the eternally giving and self-sacrificing womanhood dedicated to the cause of the nation, is – Do we really want this holy cow to be reborn? Maybe we would we like her to be reborn not as a cow, but re-embodied in some other form? Or would we rather, she rest in peace forever? This is the question we have raised in the title of this article. ‘The gendered nation: To be recoded or rejected?’

How gender and nation construct each other Our understanding of the divine-bovine Indian nation should be helped by a theoretical underpinning of the subject of the gendered nation in more general terms. That the nationalist imagination is highly gendered has become a cliché by now and needs not be elaborated upon. A number of feminist scholars have made this very clear to us since the 1980s. I would particularly refer to Nira Yuval Davis, Floya Anthias, and Cynthia Enloe.3 Indeed, it has become as cliché as the idea that nations are imagined communities. Imagining the nation involves imaging its women too, in order to appropriate them on nationalist terms. Thus men and women are differentially integrated in a nationalist project. What needs to be specially pointed out is that the nationalist imagination has to be different in the colonial world/‘Third World’

The gendered nation 41 and here its gendered character, too, is somewhat different from that of Western nationalism. This has been revealed by a number of scholars whose writings focus on the Third World women vis-à-vis their national movements. Kumari Jayawardena’s book deals with a number of such instances.4 There are works on specific nationalist projects as well. A number of works are there on India. One may cite many names – Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, and others.5 Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias have identified four aspects of the relationship between nationalism, women, and gender, differentially emphasized in different nationalist projects.6 Let us briefly mention them and see how far they are applicable to Indian nationalism and how they have shaped up in Indian history. 1 Women as biological reproducers of the nation.7 Women’s reproductive roles are particularly important in cases where nationalist and racist ideologies are closely interwoven: in the Nazi eugenicist discourse, for example. Indian nationalism was Hindu nationalism from the very beginning and the Hindu image is often ethnicized too. Also being Hindu is more often than not linked with the institution of caste and caste requires maintenance of ritual purity through control of female sexuality and reproductive agency. It imposes various restrictions on women – in matters of marriage, in confining them to home, and the like. Caste had been there in India for centuries, but the nationalist urge strengthened caste concerns.8 Everywhere in the world women have been pressurized in various ways by male national/state leaders who want to control their reproductive role. If the Nazi eugenicist discourse made many women undergo forced sterilization in order to prevent contamination of ‘pure blood’ and birth of weak and unworthy human beings, Israel and the Soviet Russia after the Second World War called upon the reproductive power of women to have more children. Women’s wishes or convenience does not seem to matter at all in such cases. Kim Campbell, who was holding the office of the Prime Minister of Canada in 1993, felt apart from, and not a part of, Parliament, when the issues of birth control and abortion were debated there. The unease that she felt as an ‘outsider’ in Parliament despite holding the highest office in the land has clearly come out in her political memoirs.9 The autobiography of Manikuntala Sen, a leader of the Communist Party of India during late colonial and early Independence years and very active in the women’s front of the Communist Party, tells us about the difference of opinion between the Communist Party and its women workers in post-Independence India on the same issue.10 2 Women as cultural reproducers of the nation. That is, women mainly in their domestic roles as key actors in the transmission of the nation’s

42  Anuradha Roy cultural values, women constructed as symbolic bearers of the nation’s identity and honour, and hence women carrying the ‘burden of representation.’ Hence, in any war situation, violence against women by way of dishonouring the enemy community is very common. Even within their own community, a strict cultural code keeps them in an inferior position, in an object rather than a subject position. This aspect of gendering the nation is very important for colonial countries like India that had to take on the claim of cultural superiority of the colonizers and assert its autonomy at least in the cultural sphere. The nationalists had to fashion a national culture for this, which they perhaps considered as the inner spiritual domain of the nation, where they could assert their sovereignty, though actually it engaged them in multifarious activities, many of which were quite materialistic and took place in the outer world. Anyway, this cultural concern made women the symbolic ‘border guards’ of the nation’s cultural domain and tightened the hold of patriarchy on them. Educational and other reforms in their lives were to be subservient to the dominant patriarchal ethos. Actually the nationalists tried to use women as a prominent trope in their negotiation between the past, the present, and the future, trying to make them both traditional and progressive. This was a very intricate project, overlain with the dilemma of ‘colonial modernity.’ Much has been written on this project of making of the ‘new woman’ as well as the ‘new patriarchy’ and there is no point in repeating all this.11 We would just remind the reader that the ‘women’s question’ in colonial India was closely related to the caste question too.12 In the flush of the national movement, as a large section of lower-ranking caste groups became aware of their deprivation and tried to be upwardly mobile, as they denied their lowliness by emulating the cultural and ritual practices of the upper castes, as caste became the embodiment of progressive spirituality and national honour to them, restrictive rules for women dictated by the Brahmanical gender code were universalized and imposed even on women of lower castes.13 3 Women as embodiment of the homeland. The object-like characteristic of women finds its strongest expression in this. The country is mother to most peoples of the world – Mother India, Mother Ireland, Mother Russia, and so on, who give birth and nurture. Women-as-mothers do the same and thus female power assumes easy identification with the power of the motherland. Bharat Mata often pictorially resembled the fleshand-blood sari-clad Indian woman, especially the middle class mother presiding over the home as a nurturer, looking very soft and affectionate.14 Indian women were her human surrogates, who represented both home and the homeland. Mother India was supposed to be present in each and every woman of the country. This of course meant that protecting ‘womenandchildren’ (Cynthia Enloe’s coinage) along with the

The gendered nation 43 motherland was considered an important task of the men of the nation. One remembers in this connection a song from Dwijendralal Roy’s play Rana Pratap – ‘Dhao dhao samarkshetre, gao ucche ranajayagatha.’ It gives out an urgent call to the patriots – ‘Go to the battlefield, singing the song of victory/Listen, Bharat Mata is calling you to defend the religion under attack.’ This was followed by ‘Who can care for his own life, when mothers and wives are in danger? / Will your sword remain in its sheath when the women of Bharat are being oppressed?’ The line ‘Victory to Mother India, victory to Mother Kali’ is repeated several times in this song as a refrain to inspire courage and militancy among patriots.15 Actually both Mother India and Indian women often acquired an iconic stature modelled on some of the mother-goddesses of the Hindu pantheon – basically Shakti – manifest in the valorous images of Durga or Kali, and sometimes the rather peaceful goddess Lakshmi. Sometimes mythical images of empowered women from both mythology and history (Sati, Savitri, Durgabati, Lakshmibai are some of the popular examples) served as models too. Of course, this aesthetic iconography of the mother-goddesses or mythical heroines that valorized traditional womanhood had not much to do with the social reality. Perhaps such images sometimes had some subversive potential for assertive women, but the deployment of the images was problematic on the whole, for they carried with them the baggage of the nationalist construction of the chaste and virtuous wife-mother-nation.16 Thus it is evident that the three above-mentioned aspects were very important for Indian nationalism from the nineteenth century and they found a pithy expression in the cow story we have narrated in the beginning of this article. The gendered nation in this story acquires a distinctive Indian character, not only in terms of the story’s setting, that is, a location in India during a well-known agitational phase of the Indian national movement, but, more importantly through its richly nuanced imagination based on religious symbolism rooted in the Hindu tradition. 4 There is a fourth aspect to the nation-women ideational nexus: women as citizens. Citizenship is basically a Western idea, which assumed its modern form during the French Revolution. And the very influential theory of ‘social contract’ in revolutionary France was linked with a ‘sexual contract’ giving men the right to represent women (and children) in the public domain.17 Western women had to fight a lot to win the right to vote and other civil rights. In India, women have acquired these rights comparatively easily. The independent Indian state brought women within its democratic political framework quite early by enshrining their rights in its Constitution. How far this has actually empowered them is a different issue though.

44  Anuradha Roy

A gap between women in nationalism and women’s nationalism Thus women in the male discourse of nationalism were just its passive objects. This discourse was not only restrictive for women, it was meant only for Hindu upper and middle class women, not for labouring women, nor for Muslim women. Some changes came with time, but nationalism remained an overwhelmingly gendered discourse. As nationalism wanted women to step outside home to participate in the national movement in the twentieth century – from the Swadeshi Movement onwards and particularly in the phase of Gandhian nationalism – the traditional images of women that had been used in the nineteenth century to keep them confined behind the purdah in passive dedication to their men and families were now used to legitimize their role in the outside world. This was a discourse of activism, yet entirely modelled on a concept of traditional womanhood. As women became active in the national movement, their own voices could sometimes be heard in the nationalist discourse. Women’s nationalism seemed to be somewhat different from women in nationalism. But whatever female counter-discourse emerged was drowned by the mainstream nationalist discourse, which most of the activist women more or less internalized. For example, they continued to draw inspiration from the traditional feminine images invoked by nationalism. An incident from the autobiography of Sarala Devi (Chaudhurani) would be revealing in this connection. Sarala was exceptionally proactive in the national movement and quite early too. She took the initiative in cultivation of physical prowess amongst young men in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with the ultimate aim of using it against the alien rulers. Thus she is considered a pioneer of militant nationalism in Bengal. She recounts in her autobiography how she put up on the wall of her room a picture of herself alongside one of Kali, both with open hair and looking spirited and redoubtable, on seeing which her guest, the Raja of Baroda, jokingly asked – ‘Which Kali should I pay attention to? This one or that one?’ Sarala Devi took it as a compliment and recounts this incident in a proud tone.18 Gandhian nationalism closely linked the women’s cause with the country’s freedom. But his concept of man-woman equality did not mean that they would perform the same tasks. To him, women were homemakers and nurturers and he wanted them to play a key role in the country’s regeneration in this capacity. Indeed, he subverted the glory of masculinity, highlighted the moral strength of femininity, and also asserted the suitability of women to his non-violent movement. Whatever the limitations of his thought in this regard, he hugely inspired women by infusing in them confidence and courage and many of them joined his movement with great enthusiasm. Very soon, however, they became impatient to go beyond their permitted sphere of participation. In Bengal, during the Non-Cooperation Movement (1921), a number of women courted arrest by selling khaddar

The gendered nation 45 and picketing. Gandhi now recognized the value of having women form picket lines and advised women in other parts of the country to follow the brave example of Bengali women. But the Gandhian nationalist discourse actually reinforced the patriarchal assumptions of women’s nature and role, and remained full of platitudes about the self-sacrificing Indian womanhood.19 Moreover, most of the male Congress leaders did not share Gandhi’s concern for women’s advancement and paid very little attention to women’s issues – the reason why a separate women’s congress had to be convened in Calcutta amid the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1931, which was presided over by Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and where she made a hard-hitting speech against the Congress for its negligence of women’s cause.20 Women’s active participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement – the way they faced police atrocities, courted arrest, and served prison sentences – has especially drawn the attention of historians. And it is this movement that formed the background of Raja Rao’s story ‘The Cow of the Barricades,’ valorizing the divine-bovine-feminine nationhood. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani’s speech, however, highlighted an entirely new dimension of the activist spirit of the nationalist women and also militated against the glorification of womanly self-sacrifice. She protested that women were being rewarded by the male Congress leaders with flowery speeches but were not appointed to Congress sub-committees or councils, that the Congress wanted women as lawbreakers and not as lawmakers, that the Congress picketed liquor shops only and not brothels, which were harmful to women only. This was a very forceful feminist speech with a list of women’s demands like equal rights to inheritance, guardianship of children, fair wages, punishment of sex-related crimes, etc. But her radicalism was not shared by the majority of her audience. On the whole, compared to what women contributed to the national movement, they did not get back much from it. Geraldine Forbes argues that as they were allowed only limited autonomy in the political sphere, which valued modesty and practised sex-segregation; political participation did not mean politicization for them. Forbes calls women’s participation in the Indian national movement a ‘politics of respectability,’ which seems to apply particularly to the congresswomen but more or less to women of all streams of the national movement. Forbes also points out that politics without politicization could not ensure continued political participation for women and thus after Independence they became rather marginalized in Indian politics.21 We have to admit that all women nationalist activists were not mere puppets in the hands of patriarchy. Perhaps they could not display much autonomy effectively, but the autonomy of their minds was sometimes registered in their writings, particularly in fictive literature where they could transcend the restrictive reality by imagination. Such writings were rare, but they are worth highlighting because of their unmistakable radical and feminist spirit. One such example is Santisudha Ghosh’s novel 1930 Saal (The Year

46  Anuradha Roy 1930).22 A brilliant student, Ghosh was engaged in the Congress-led social work in Barishal and also close to militant nationalism.23 The heroine of her novel, Sibani, is daughter of a loyalist Ray Bahadur. She is highly educated, headmistress of a girls’ school, and a litterateur too. She is spirited, does her own thinking, and has leadership quality. She not only heads a militant organization but also makes efforts to unify the fragmented militant politics of Bengal to strengthen the national movement. It seems women often made attempts, consciously or unconsciously, to make the national movement more broad-based by rising above narrow and mechanical party lines as well as above factionalism that fraught the movement. This is surely a ‘womanly’ dimension that they sought to bring to the national movement. They could reach out to a large number of people on the basis of sheer humanism, both within and outside politics, and could do this more easily than male activists. We may also mention Natun Diner Alo (The Light of a New Day), a novel by Bimal Pratibha Devi in this connection.24 Like Santisudha, Bimal Pratibha too was involved in both Congress politics and militant nationalism. She was imprisoned quite a few times as a result. During the 1940s, she wholly dedicated herself to the task of organizing the industrial workers in Bardhaman as a member of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, a Trotskyite group. In the above-mentioned novel written in jail in 1933–1934, we have a number of remarkable women characters, who provide leadership to a socialist movement with full dedication and competence. Though not based on a ‘nationalist’ ideology strictly speaking, we can consider socialism and even communism in India as a broadening of the nationalist movement. Among the women characters in Bimal Pratibha’s novel there is a young woman from Maharashtra, Krishna, who falls in love with a Bengali youth named Nripesh. But she does not want to marry Nripesh and rather wants to come close to him through their joint mission of serving the socialist cause. She says, Can’t we do without the priests chanting mantras or ourselves signing up the marriage register? – We have to live our lives outside the rules of the present-day society, we do not need any kind of social bondage. – We are true to the rules of life, hence we do not need to worship the rules of society. (Natun Diner Alo 1935) Elsewhere in this book we have a direct critique of women’s repression in family and society. Once again we can refer to the autobiography of Manikuntala Sen, who was active in the communist movement from the 1930s. It is clear how uncomfortable she felt with a number of policies adopted by her party, the Communist Party of India, including the decisions not to join the Quit India Movement, to support the partition of India on the basis of the ‘Two Nation’

The gendered nation 47 theory, and so on. She was particularly cross with the party for neglecting women’s issues. She found compassion and cooperation more important than narrow party politics in fighting for women’s cause, and hence did not hesitate to make friends and work with congresswomen as well as apolitical women. Even the communist women who have featured in her autobiography seemed to be more like her sisters and friends. Indeed she found it difficult to use the alien sounding word ‘comrade’ to address them.25 Needless to say, the lives of such political women were full of tensions. They could not get over the patriarchal values upheld by the male leaders, but at the same time wanted to move ahead. Sometimes this led to a hiatus, even open conflicts, between the nationalist movement and the women’s movements. Sometimes it took on a different kind of expression. Meena Alexander has shown how the poetry of Sarojini Naidu, who enjoyed great prominence as a political figure and indeed became President of the Indian National Congress in 1925, invoked in her poetry the image of a lonely and melancholic woman suffering emotional deprivation, even psychic imprisonment, which perhaps stood as a direct foil to the public life she embraced so valiantly. Then there came a time when she abandoned poetry-writing altogether and got herself fully engaged in politics. Alexander asks, Was she indeed able to cauterize her private pain through her poems and then move outward into the public sphere? Or did the poems with their sometimes cloying diction, their female figures trapped in an unredeemed sexuality, force her to leave them behind?26 Women in all streams of Indian national movement were subject to similar tensions. Women themselves could not get over the primacy of feminine and familial roles in their lives and suffered considerably for this. And the tension remained even after Independence. When the freedom movement was going on, women were told that their house was on fire and they should come out of their burning house and help fight the fire. After Independence, that is, after the fire was put out, they were asked to go back inside the house. Indeed, women much lauded for their participation in the anti-imperialist nationalist movement became almost invisible in politics now. The newly independent state perceived women primarily as wife, mother, daughter, and widow and thus her individual rights as a citizen did not really seem important. The notion that women constitute the weaker sex was used to assign them to subordinate roles in the social structure, though this also called for making ‘special provisions’ for them.27 The way both Indian and Pakistani governments tried to keep their patriarchal hold on the refugee women through the Inter-Dominion Treaty is one example.28 And yet different shades of nationalism after Independence continued to use women to serve their own purposes. The film ‘Mother India’ (1957) sending out the message of Nehruvian nationalism, for example,

48  Anuradha Roy portrayed the motherland as a poor peasant woman who, in a dire situation, literally took upon her shoulders the plough of Nehruvian ‘development.’ When a terrible famine hit her land, her husband abandoned her and her bullock died too, she performed the task of the bullock by ploughing the field herself in order to save her children, broadly speaking, her country. The bovine-divine nationalist role of women was thus stressed in a novel way in this film and the image of the beautiful Nargis as Radha, the peasant woman, wielding the plough became famous all over India. Even the communist movement which helped flourish women’s capability and increased their visibility more than any other political party, was a prototype of the larger patriarchal society and gave primacy to women’s roles as wives and mothers. We have already noted how this led to a gulf between the party and its women’s front, which is responsible for a sense of betrayal pervading Manikuntala Sen’s autobiography.29 Even the Naxals of the 1960s and 1970s known as Maoists in later days and far more radically left, did not think very differently on women’s issues. The CPI(ML) People’s War in Andhra was perhaps most eager amongst all the Maoist groups to advance the women’s cause. Women were very active in its armed squads as well as women’s mass organizations. They were deeply involved in many radical Maoist movements in Andhra – anti-arrack agitation, land-reform movement, ‘equal pay for equal work,’ etc. Yet a Central Committee circular published in 1999 candidly admitted – Looking down upon women, treating them as weaklings and as objects that fulfill the sexual desires of men, abusing and beating wives, making them feel inferior, regarding them as personal property, suspecting wives when they move closely with other men are prevalent to some extent among the male members of the party. It also registered the realization that the fight against patriarchal thinking and behaviour ‘is more difficult than the fight against the armed enemy.’ But of course, one might say that the very candidness of this document is commendable.30 The gender ideology of Hindu nationalism that has been on the rise since the 1980s and has recently taken the form of a swelling backlash is most restrictive in this respect. Apotheosizing the nation above everything else, capitalizing on the concept of Bharat Mata, and glorifying the Go Mata, it makes its stand on women very clear. Though this brand of nationalism has eminent women votaries, there is also a tension between the politics of its male leaders and aspirations of women cadres. The women have often refused to remain mere puppets in the hands of men, condemned sati, showed sympathy to contemporary women’s movements, and so on despite their glorification of ancient Hindu womanhood and emphasis on self-sacrifice of women for their men folk. The politics of Hindutva indeed highlights the militant role of women side by side with domestic ideology. This made the

The gendered nation 49 women in its fold defy the order of their male elders not to participate in the Kar Seva during the Babri Mosque demolition incident. However, once they did participate, the role of Kar Sevikas was hailed as ‘Matri Shakti kaabhyutthan’ (Rise of the mother power) by the leaders, thus seeking to blunt the edge of women’s militancy by stressing the role of motherhood in their life. Also, the baby Ramlala image – the image of a crawling and chubby infant, a posture traditionally associated not with Ram but with Krishna – was now consciously popularized by Hindu nationalism. The appeal of a homeless and helpless baby would be a general one, but it was believed to be especially poignant for women. The message was – when her baby is in danger, how can a mother sit at home?31

Should women have a different nationalism or reject it altogether? In this last section we go beyond strict academic limits and address a rather ideological question – whether women keen on advancing women’s cause should remain within the confines of nationalism, trying to recode it, or whether they should wholly reject nationalism? Though the question may not seem quite academic, we find it important in a time when some people are holding a gun to our heads and asking us to be ‘nationalists.’ And I shall try to address it with academic resources derived mostly from feminist scholarship, which is more often than not regarded as a foundation for political action. I, however, do not have a definite answer to the question. I will present some arguments and counterarguments in this regard, not only on ideological but also on practical grounds. What can be the reason for women disowning nationalism as an ideology and as a platform for struggle? We can think of two broad and mutually contradictory rationales for this – 1) women’s struggle has to be an international struggle. Indeed, the feminist movement projected itself in this way from the very beginning and upheld the idea of international sisterhood. The idea was – why should women bother about nationalism that does not bother about them and just use them? Didn’t Virginia Woolf declare long ago, ‘As a woman I have no country’?32 2) The universal category of women is not really valid, not even within a nation. It is actually considered a ploy of Western feminism to universalize and hegemonize the women’s movement. Today, it is strongly felt that the specific historical contexts in which women live are important and that the fault lines of race, class, caste, religion, age, various disabilities, etc. have to be taken into account if one wishes to improve their lot. So we should avoid essentializing women. And therefore, down with not only internationalism, but also nationalism! The problem, however, is that the big gap between the two rationales – one upholding internationalism of the women’s movement and the other, sectional interests of women – gives an opportunity to nationalism to seep in and strengthen itself. Let us see how.

50  Anuradha Roy As against the internationalist assertion of the Western feminists, Third World feminists have been arguing for long that the women’s movements in their countries were born out of the matrix of their national movements. It was nationalism that made them aware of gender discrimination and whetted their appetite for freedom. They stress the endogenous roots of Third World feminism and claim that they have been carrying on their feminist movement out of their own urge and in their own terms and not in emulation of Western feminism. Kumari Jayawardena has delved into history and shown this with reference to a number of Third World countries and their national movements.33 She moreover points out that in countries like China and Vietnam the national movements turned into radical movements for social changes, in which even labouring women participated. Thus she argues that it is not true that the Third World feminism is a movement of Anglicized bourgeois women emulating Western feminists. Uma Narayan argues from a rather ideological perspective that a woman’s relationship with her motherland is just like her relationship with her own mother.34 This relationship may be fraught with problems, but it cannot and should not be dispensed with. She reminisces about her own childhood experiences in this connection. Though she settled in America later, she had spent her childhood in India. She loved both her mother and her paternal grandmother, but her mother used to complain to her about her grandmother’s torture. And when little Uma did naughty things, her mother would warn her that considerable harassment was awaiting her at her inlaws’ place, particularly at the hands of her mother-in-law. At the same time, however, her mother wanted her to be well educated, self-reliant, and selfconfident so that the daughter would not have to suffer in the same way as she had. Uma asserts, Both mothers and mother-cultures often inspire some sort of complicated emotional responses from their feminist daughters – love and fear, the desire to repudiate and the desire to understand and be understood, a sense of deep connection and a desperate desire for distance.35 Thus, argues Narayan, the feminist movement has to have roots in mother cultures as an inevitable source of self-confidence and self-assertion. Otherwise it will ‘run the risk of waving the international flag as an empty rhetorical gesture.’ Thus both Jayawardena and Narayan present arguments in favour of nationalism as well as against international feminism. But then there are counterarguments as well. It has been argued that falling back on Third Worldism and celebrating nativism can be dangerous for women. For example, it can take them back to the culture of wearing hijab and accepting polygamy in an Islamic country. Indeed, a number of post-Independence and post-Revolutionary Islamic countries have witnessed such backlash. This has been called a new orientalism or neocolonialism apparently generating a political potency but actually attempting to

The gendered nation 51 theorize the Third World into silence, submissiveness, and backwardness. Of course, wearing hijab or accepting polygamy has been justified, too, by some feminists, not only on the ground of nationalism but on the ground of pragmatism – security above all. Scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty have argued that hijab or polygamy can be useful to women in certain situations. For example, in a situation where triple talak can come very easily and women are not brought up to be self-reliant in life, polygamy can at least help them to survive.36 The Third World women themselves appear divided on the issue of national culture. Some want women to progress along the modernist Western line, others under the impact of post-modernism and postcolonialism resent Western/ international feminism and argue that if the feminist movement does not take into account native cultures, it would remain elitist and alienated from the majority of women of the land.37 For me, one basic problem with this view seems to be the equation of international feminism with Western feminism. If we agree that there can be no one feminism across the world, can there be a homogenous ‘Western feminism’ either? Another problem is its simplistic assumption that there can be one ‘national culture’ ignoring all the complexities and even contradictoriness that the concept may embrace. And this brings us to rationale 2, that is, the view that sectional interests of women should be privileged over nationalism. Indeed, within a particular national border there may be many borders of race, class, caste, religion, region, etc. and considering them may seem only practical. Now, so far as the understanding of gender and its workings is concerned, this may be an excellent suggestion. But I would like to make a distinction between our epistemic ability to understand the reality (maybe a complex reality) and our political agency to encounter that reality and transcend it. I believe that the actual elevation of women has to be done on the basis of some universal principles of human rights and not stressing narrow social bindings based on so-called primordial ties. In their actual struggle, women’s cause can be severely compromised if they continue to be entwined in the traditional structures of caste, communities, etc. While social positionality cannot be wished away, ‘single subject-positional politics’ can be bad for them. Caterpillars have to come out of their cocoons to become butterflies. Of course, there are some social divides that are not primordial and yet very real. Broadly speaking, there are class divides: the rich-poor, educateduneducated, urban-rural divides amongst women. Indeed, feminists are often accused of being too elitist and thus unable to reach out to the poor, the uneducated, and so on. This is a real problem, but perhaps this can be addressed with a spirit of inclusiveness and humanitarianism. We must also remember that if this is a problem, then collapsing gender into class can be problematic too. We have seen that the communists did just that and it left communist women aggrieved. This brings us back once again to the desirability of an alignment between nationalism and feminism. However, there can be more arguments both in

52  Anuradha Roy favour of and against nationalism. Here are a couple of favourable arguments. One is that forces of patriarchal and masculinist aggression can form formidable networks at different levels – the top global level to the familial level. If the feminists have to take on such forces, and try to contain them collectively, doing this at the national level by forging nationally bounded movements would perhaps not be a bad idea. Perhaps nationalism can provide the basic groundwork of solidarity and democratic norms to the feminist movement. Seeking the help of the state by bending it to their will may prove to be an added advantage in this respect. A second practical argument is – it seems nations are going to stay for some more time in history and even though we find opportunist people trying to tyrannize others in the name of nationalism today, still one advantage of the ideology of nationalism is that it yields to different visions of the nation. Indeed, a more liberal category of nationalism is also staking its claim to the nation. So perhaps women can reimagine their nation to their own advantage. But of course there can be counterarguments. If this is still an age of nationalism, it is also witnessing the rise of post-nationalism, which does not remain confined to the ideological/academic realm and is being manifest in a number of actual movements expressing common people’s aspirations. Our attention is being drawn to a number of intimate communities having specific relationships with particular habitats and with various aspirations and assertions as against the centrist perspectives of the nation state. Women are participating in such movements and in the process are becoming conscious of their own rights. The Chipko and Narmada Banchao movements are two such examples. Then there are also other situations of absolute alienation from nationalism. The Indian state in its overriding preoccupation with unity and integrity of the nation has been suppressing different ethnic movements dubbing them as anti-national or anti-state. North-east India, for example, with its unique ethnic composition, has seen many such movements. Women of this region, who are traditionally more independentspirited than in the rest of the country, play a major role in these movements, are routinely tortured by the police and the army, and fight back. The protest of ‘Manorama’s mothers’ parading naked in Manipur (2004) and Irom Sharmila Chanu’s hunger strike for more than 15 years (2000–2016) readily come to mind. It will surely be futile to invoke nationalism in such situations. But then we must also point out that Chanu ultimately ended her fast and decided to take a plunge into national-level politics in order to achieve her goal. The pull of nationalism indeed remains strong and feminism has to take this into account. So there are arguments on both sides. And I do not really know the answer. Perhaps, the feminist struggle is best fought on an autonomous feminist platform, at international, national, and sectional levels as deemed necessary. The Me Too movement, the upholding of the Visakha Guidelines, and the campaign against instant triple talak can be cited as examples of the three respective categories. This is only practical. But ideologically speaking,

The gendered nation 53 shouldn’t feminism set a far-reaching goal for women’s advancement based on some coherent universal principles, going beyond all borders and also beyond issue-based politics? And what about a unifying vision of a better collective life – not only for women but also for both women and men?

Notes 1 See Rumina Sethi (1999). The entire book is a critical analysis of Raja Rao’s famous novel Kanthapura, which described how a small village responded to Gandhi’s call for Civil Disobedience. The chapter ‘Involvement and Resistance of Women’ has been particularly helpful. 2 Raja Rao (1947). 3 Yuval-Davis (1997, 2001), Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989), Cynthia Enloe (1983, 1990). 4 Kumari Jayawardena (1986). 5 Partha Chatterjee (1989, 1993), Tanika Sarkar (2001, 2009). 6 Yuval Davis (2001). 7 One remembers Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s coinage ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ as something vital for the ideology of nationalism. See Spivak (2010). 8 Susan Baily (1999), particularly the chapter ‘Caste and the Modern Nation: Incubus or Essence?’, also Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (2004). 9 Memoir of Campbell (Time and Chance: The Political Memoirs of Canada’s First Woman Prime Minister, Toronto, 1997), cited by Wendy Robbins (2007). 10 Manikuntala Sen (1983). 11 Partha Chatterjee (1993). 12 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (2004). 13 Ibid. The chapters titled ‘Caste and Gender: Social Mobility and the Status of Women’ and ‘Caste and Social Reform: The Case of Widow Remarriage.’ 14 Sumathi Ramaswami (2010). 15 Dwijendralal Ray (1905). 16 Samita Sen (1993). 17 Carole Pateman (1988). 18 Sarala Devi (1944–45). 19 A lot has been written on women vis-à-vis Gandhian nationalism, for example Madhu Kishwar (1985), Sujata Patel (1988). Also useful: Bharati Ray (1995), Geraldine Forbes (1988, 1996), Tanika Sarkar (1984, 1987). For Gandhi’s writings on women’s issues, one can look up Pushpa Joshi (1988). 20 Geraldine Forbes (1996). 21 Geraldine Forbes (1988). 22 SantisudhaGhosh, 1930 Saal (n.d.). 23 A volume of selected writings by Santisudha Ghosh (1998), edited by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, would be helpful to understand her both as a woman and a writer. 24 Natun Diner Alo (1935). For more information about Bimal Pratibha’s life see Sandip Bandyopadhyay (2010). 25 Manikuntala Sen (1983). Santisudha, Bimal Pratibha, and Manikuntala – all three mentioned here not only tried to help the cause of revolution in their country (in both political and social senses), they also led lives that appear quite revolutionary in themselves. They dared to assert their autonomy and agency based on the idea of gender equality in many ways, going against the conservative social ethos and its prescribed belief systems. 26 Meena Alexander (2000). 27 See Aparna Mahanta (1994).

54  Anuradha Roy 8 Urvashi Butalia (1997). 2 29 Manikuntala Sen (1983). 30 The circular was entitled ‘Let us cast away the alien class tendencies regarding sex, marriage and families from our Party! Let us cultivate Communist consciousness, ethics, culture and values!!’ It has been cited by Amit Bhattacharya (2016) in the chapter entitled ‘Women and Revolution.’ 31 Tapan Basu et al. (1993, 78–83). 32 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938). 33 KumariJayawardena (1986). 34 Uma Narayan (1997). 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). 37 The conflict between these two feminist discourses in Turkey – one forming part of the traditional Islamic nationalism and the other of the secular Westerninspired nationalism – has been vividly presented in Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2004).

Bibliography Alexander, M. “Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance.” In Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature, edited by A. Thorner and M. Krishnaraj, published for Sameeksha Trust by Orient Longman, 2000. Baily, S. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteen Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bandyopadhyay, S. Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Domain in Colonial Bengal. Sage, 2004. Bandyopadhyay, S. “Bidrohi NariBimal Pratibha Devi.” In Shahid Preeti lata Waddedar Smarak Baktrita – 11/12 (2009–10). Kolkata: School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University in collaboration with Dey’s Publishing, 2010. Basu, T., P. Datta, S. Sarkar, T. Sarkar, and S. Sen. Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Tracts for the Times Series – 1). Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993. Bhattacharya, A. Storming the Gates of Heaven: The Maoist Movement in India: A Critical Study 1972–2014. Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2016. Butalia, U. “Abducted and Widowed Women: Questions of Sexuality and Citizenship During Partition.” In Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity, edited by M. Thapan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Chatterjee, P. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by K. Sangari and S. Vaid. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989. Chatterjee, P. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Devi, B. P. Natun Diner Alo. Distributor: Arya Publishing Company, 22, Kolkata: Cornwallis Street, 1935. Devi, S. Jeebaner Jharapata. Serialized in the magazine Desh in 1944–45, put together and published posthumously in a book form, 1985. Enloe, C. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Enloe, C. “Women and Children: Making Feminist Sense of Persian Gulf Crisis.” Village Voice 19, no. 2 (1990a).

The gendered nation 55 Enloe, C. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990b. Forbes, G. “The Politics of Respectability: Indian Women and the Indian National Congress.” In The Indian National Congress: Centenary Hindsights, edited by A. Low. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Forbes, G. Women in Modern India (New Cambridge History of India). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ghosh, S. Saal. N. D. Kolkata: Gurudas Chattopadhyay and Sons, 1930. Ghosh, S. Nirbachita Rachana Sankalan, edited by S. Duttagupta. Kolkata: School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University in collaboration with Dey’s Publishing, 1998. Jayawardena, K. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books, 1986. Joshi, P., ed. Gandhi on Women: Collection of Mahatma Gandhi’s Writings and Speeches on Women. New Delhi: Centre for Women’s Development Studies and Navajivan Trust, 1988. Kishwar, M. “Gandhi on Women.” Economic and Political Weekly (1985 October 5–12) two-part article. Mahanta, A. “The Indian State and Patriarchy.” In State and Nation in the Context of Social Change, edited by T. V. Sathyamurthy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Mohanty, T. C. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003. Narayan, U. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Patel, S. “Construction and Reconstruction of Women in Gandhi.” Economic and Political Weekly (1988 February 20). (Included in Ideal, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History, edited by A. Thorner and M. Krishnaraj, published from Sameeksha Trust by Orient Longman, 2000). Pateman, C. The Sexual Contract. California: Stanford University Press, 1988. Ramaswami, S. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Rao, R. The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. Ray, B. “The Freedom Movement and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal, 1905– 1929.” In From the Seams of History, edited by B. Ray. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Ray, D. Saal. N.D. Dwijendra Rachanabali. Vol. 3. Kolkata: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, for the play Rana Pratap written in, 1905. Robbins, W. “Gendering Imagi Nations: Stories by Some Canadian ‘Mothers of the Nation.’ ” In Nation in Imagination: Essays on Nationalism, Sub-Nationalism and Narration, edited by C. Vijayasree, M. Mukherjee, H. Trivedi, and T. Vijay Kumar. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007. Sen, M. Sediner Katha. Kolkata: Nabapatra Prakashan, 1983. Sen, S. “Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal.” In Gender and History 5, no. 2 (1993 Summer). Sethi, R. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

56  Anuradha Roy Spivak, G. C. Nationalism and the Imagination. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2010. Tanika, S. “Politics and Women in Bengal – The Conditions and Meaning of Participation.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 21, no. 1 (1984). Tanika, S. Bengal: Politics of Protest, 1928–1934. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Tanika, S. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Tanika, S. Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Yuval-Davis, N. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Yuval-Davis, N. “Nationalism, Feminism and Gender Relations.” In Understanding Nationalism, edited by M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson. Cambridge: Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001. Yuval-Davis, N. and F. Anthias. Women-Nation-State. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989.

Part II

Class-caste-community Negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern

4 Shia women and their ‘place-making’ Gendered agency in the Muharram gatherings in Kolkata Epsita Halder In this essay, I will inaugurate a reading of agency through the poetics and politics of the sacred space of Shia mourning rituals, facilitated by the community women who participate in the ritual and act on that space. Here, Shia women in several fringes of the city of Kolkata offer their lives as they inhabit their everyday to engage with the sacred space – the imambaras – where the Shias gather to remember and lament over the martyrdom of Prophet’s grandson Imam Husayn in the battle of Karbala (AD 680) as the core of their religious sensibility. To study the integral connection between religiosity, religious identity, gender, and women’s agency under the prism of my ethnographic experiences and observations between 2011 and 2014 in several Shia quarters in the city of Kolkata, I have taken ‘place-making’ as my analytical category that emerged out of the congregation, interaction, and exchange of social groups in the private and public spheres in recent studies in sociology.1 The sacred space becomes the ‘place,’ not for its sacred attribute and content but for how these women take part, engage with, and inhabit it. The ‘urban’ settings which act as the site for the sacred mourning of the Shias, my essay will show, simultaneously facilitate the dynamic forms of the ritual performances – the muharram complex. In this context, how the gendered experience of community women in the structure of religion can be the possible/impossible domain of agency is my concern. In this interdisciplinary move, the everyday and the sacred experience of the Shia women, integral to each other, will offer an analytical lens to study how the agency of Shia women could be marked in the way they organize their sacred place. Place-making, according to Patrick Desplat in his study of Muslim religious actions in urban spaces, marks the way Muslims transform abstract and empty space by investing in it particular social and symbolic meanings. This discussion of place-making entails the broader cultural grounding of Muslim religious practices and forms of control and contestation that remain integral to the diverse practices to claim their sacredness. Also, how such ‘diverse practices of rendering places sacred intertwine with the opportunities and constraints of urban space.’2 In this essay the analytical possibilities of place-making are explored to situate the issues of women’s

60  Epsita Halder agency and subjectivity in the religious domain. This essay reads women’s agency and subjectivity in the sacred space as forms of social practices by placing them in the context of their place-making abilities and inabilities. To accomplish this, I have located the discussion of place-making within the broader framework of feminist debate around community-state-gender to interrogate women’s agency as a part of a pre-given structure called religion. The last few decades have seen a considerable amount of debate on the nature of the Indian public sphere, the crisis of secularism, and feminist theorization of agency and resistance. It has more or less been understood that women’s relation to the state as well as demands of gender justice have often been mediated by the family and the community, promises of the Indian Constitution notwithstanding. This, we see in recent controversies generated by the Supreme Court verdict on the Sabarimala temple or around the film Padmavat.3 Both bring to the fore that women are not autonomous individuals, modern subjects of post-Enlightenment, but a relational category. In the Indian context, one could argue that women were significantly constituted by community mores that defined their relation to the public sphere, as ‘our’ women. Muslim women particularly have had to negotiate rougher terrains. The nationwide debate raised by the Shah Bano controversy, the repudiation of the proposed Uniform Civil Code, and the recent legislation of the abolition of the ‘Triple Talaq’ have made it even more important to talk of agency and subjectivity of Muslim women within a structure apriori and even contradictory to the notion of independent choice. In these debates, individual choice in the emancipatory discourses stands as a binary opposition to human lives integral to structures, here to be understood as religion. Such opposition is the resultant of a modernist discourse that produces religion as static and regressive and anachronistic to the progressive flow of modernity. The complete realization of progressive, liberal, and secular sensibility is predicated upon the nullification of the religious; the eradication of religious sensibilities stands as the precondition for the emancipation of the individual autonomous self. At the current moment in the state vs. community debate, while the state is considered to be the external factor capable of offering community women the agency and freedom that they are deprived of within their collective grouping, the counter-narrative posits the interiority of the collective (like the religious discursive truth and religious sensibility) as an immutable autonomy that can’t go through any dynamic form of negotiation. This essay, while extending a critique of such binaries as attempted by feminists such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood to explore the possibility of agency in the women’s religious acts, neither upholds the autonomy of the religious interiority of the community nor explains religious structure as fully capable of facilitating women as actors in the sacred domain.4 Rather, my essay engages with forms of Shia women’s place-making function between their everyday experience and the sacred doings and thus looks at possible multiple definitions and forms of gendered agency within a broader

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 61 context of urbanity, change in religious discourses, and the community’s constant negotiation with the regional, national, and transnational forces. To accomplish this, Saba Mahmood’s formulation, as an import, might not be wholly adequate to explain agency and subjectivity of ‘pious’ women in the Shia quarters of Kolkata for agency. My essay will show how this needs other contexts of analysis that an interdisciplinary reading of place-making will offer. Agency has become a very important analytical category in the emerging fields of cultural studies and feminist scholarship, ethnic and migrant studies. Discussions on modernity and its discontents, redundancy of national boundaries, and the rise of very complex and critical forms of collective identity across geo-political and social borders and an individual’s position vis-à-vis them necessitate a discussion on the agency and subjectivity of women.5 Women’s participation in the fundamentalist movements worldwide opened up new challenging and productive understanding of women’s agency in terms of sexual difference that their religious norms ascribe.6 The gendered stereotype of the Muslim community operates on an ‘othering,’ where the Muslim woman is devoid of voice, agency and constructed as a pitiable object controlled by the fundamentalist Muslim man. Here in a bid to contextualize the idea of structuring of religiosity in the Shia public sphere of Kolkata and community women’s participation in it, I will engage with the ritual practices of the Shia women who act, interpret, and arrange their sacred space by following the embodied ethical codes and also their exclusive urban everyday experience and material affective activities. This necessitates a study of the broader framework within which the Shia community in this area (the eastern part of India) consolidates itself – locally, regionally, and trans-territorially – by rearranging sacred material, sacred site, and mourning ritual in the public and private spheres. Here, ‘place-making’ of women cannot remain autonomous in the interiority of the sacred sites and rather should be discussed vis-à-vis the socio-religious constraints imposed on the Shia communities– the conflict within the community, administrative control over the ritual, and the possibility of state protection allowing the community access to the public space for performing the ritual of muharram.

Agency in women’s place-making: the feminist question Lila Abu-Lughod, in the 1990s, examines the dangers of feminist ethnography of assuming a universal ‘women’s experience’ and marks a need to struggle with the nuances of representing ‘other’ women and working across difference.7 Abu-Lughod brings in the critical claims of cultural relativism in understanding agency by looking for gestures, attitudes, and actions that exhibit possible traits of ‘resistance’ in a traditional Bedouin society in Egypt. But her choice of actions with the potential of resistance overlooks other gestures as they cannot be immediately identified as acts of resistance.8

62  Epsita Halder Saba Mahmood, in her ethnographic work on the participation of Salafi women in the Islamic revivalist movement in Egypt, looks at other forms of life and action, which might not have subversive possibilities. She wants to: question the overwhelming tendency within poststructuralist feminist scholarship to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms, to locate agency within those operations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power. (Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 2005, 14) Mahmood’s insights offer crucial expansion of Foucauldian deconstruction of both subjects and sovereignty and critiques the teleological connections between empowerment and liberation and the notion of universal freedom to talk about agency in women’s pietistic actions.9 For Mahmood, agency can be fully realized and articulated in an embodied ethical practice like piety and ‘there is no inherent reason why women must resist their oppression since agency can be fully articulated in an embodied ethical practice that transcends western liberal distinctions of public and private’ in the way we understand resistance and defiance within a liberal progressive emancipatory discourse.10 Thus, Mahmood makes agency culturally specific, embedded in localized norms, customs, and practices to explain multiple forms of desire for freedom. In this framework of absolute contingency and historicity of agency, Mahmood proposes the idea that norms can also be ‘inhabited’ by coupling it with the Foucauldian paradox of subjectivation. Mahmood explores Foucault via Judith Butler who considers subjection as the possibility of agency itself. ‘[S]ubjectivation’ . . . denotes both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection – one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to a power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency. . . . Subjection is, literally, the making of a subject, the principle of regulation according to which a subject is formulated or produced. Such subjection is a kind of power that not only unilaterally acts on a given individual as a form of domination, but also activates or forms the subject. Hence, subjection is neither simply the domination of a subject nor its production, but designates a certain kind of restriction in production. (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1997, 83–84) Though Mahmood’s radical overwriting of the feminist conception of agency and her deliberate dissociation between feminism and progressive politics to formulate agency in being religious invited many critiques, she offers a provocative theoretical lens to accommodate the complexities of embedded experience of women in religion, which cannot be reduced to a

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 63 uniform will for ‘resistance.’ Here, Saba Mahmood’s feminist ethnography to understand agency in the Salafi mosque movement in Egypt prompts us to look at religion as an eligible trope to discuss modernity and its discontents in a globalized world. Religious attentiveness, ethical disciplining of the self, and surrender within this framework can be considered forms of capacity building liberating for the community and for the individual that inhabit them, instead of being forms of regressive sensibilities opposed to personal or collective freedom. Following Judith Butler, Mahmood talks about capacity not as the ‘residue’ of an undominated self and as synonymous with resistance, but ‘as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable.’ But unlike Butler, who, according to Mahmood, is committed to progressive politics with her clear agenda of resisting heteronormativity, Mahmood talks about discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of enactment.11 Mahmood interjects that Butler’s model of radical transitivity of doing and undoing of social norms through performative iterability is still dependent upon an idea of norm that can either be confirmed or subverted. Being informed by Saba Mahmood’s ethnographic reading of the Salafi revivalist piety amongst women, my ethnographic study necessitates a study of other formulations of the categories. But Sunni fundamentalist movements in the Islamic heartlands, more specifically the Salafi mosque movement in Egypt, can only inaugurate other interpretation of the categories like agency in religious sphere, which might neither be fully applicable nor productive in the context of an imambara-based Shia religious sensibility in a vernacular region in the Indian regional context. Pietistic movements of the Shi’i women in Lebanon have different interpretive contexts in the Sunni Islamic state, which also can’t do justice to the question of identity formation and women’s participation in religious actions in the vernacular regional context.12 A different interpretive framework is required to place the semantics of women’s actions and the contextual complexities of diverse Shia religious practices. In the context of Kolkata, while the transnational flow of digital and online material transformed the modes of claim over identity as the Shias by structuring more fluid forms of ritual lament with the formalization of the mode and site of performance, refurbishing the interiors of the renovated imambaras, and reciting the elegies read by the nawhakhans (composers and performers of elegies) in Pakistan, it is yet to be designated as a moment of Shia revival as religious movements in the Islamic heartlands.13 Henceforth, categories related to the revivalist movements might not be appropriate to understand layers of formalization of the Shia religiosity that lacks a singular form in Shia quarters. As the reception of the new medial technologies vary, dimensions of standardization are multiple with different contexts for women’s engagement in ritual lament. I am not essentializing here the affective experiential activities of women in imambaras and I would rather add that by looking at the embodied ethical practices in the lament rituals, we

64  Epsita Halder need to consider what Mahmood proposes as ‘the different ways in which people live [moral] codes’ and ‘not simply the values enshrined in [them].’14 Thereby it is ‘the work bodily practices perform in crafting a subject – rather than the meanings they signify.’15 Here, one needs to be cautious while employing Mahmood’s categories about her defense of pluralism/relativism, as it were, against secular formations and her dehistorized and depoliticized employment of modern varieties of Salafism, which does not include many material contexts and conditions of its growth.16 Also, Mahmood does not show the extent to which moral dispositions in the ritual space impact the external reality where these women live and act upon or are regulated. Or, whether such moral disciplining undergoes thrusts of change becomes conflicting in connection to the changing contexts of the religious institutions and performance sites. As Peter van der Veer notes, ‘her focus on the micro-processes inside the mosque seems to prevent her from looking at the micro-practices outside the mosque.’17 Consequently, one may enquire ‘whether piety defines the entirety of these women’s lives.’18 In this essay, all these issues cannot be addressed together, but the autonomy of the sacred and the pious self is questioned and contextualized by exploring the place-making capacity of women to open up possibilities of agency. Liminality, as the integral element of place-making, will connect the interiority of moral self with the exterior material context or the dynamic socio-political forces that the community experiences and responds to.

Shias in the city: a double minority status and sense of belongingness Shias are a minority Muslim sect with 14.2% of the Muslim population in India and 27% of the Muslim population in West Bengal with various economic, cultural, linguistic variations, and migration status. Generally, the Muslim communities in Kolkata are Hindi-Urdu speaking as the families have mostly migrated from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Bengal since colonial times. The asymmetrical distribution of resources within the city and the intermittent flow, asymmetrical growth, and spread of the Shia community in the economically marginalized layers of the city invariably add to and translate the community’s religious marginality within the Muslim community and in relation to other socio-religious groups. Religious activities always carry the thrust of such imprints of marginality, exacerbated by the public perception of mourning and self-flagellation being too disturbing, sensory, and obscure. This perception further pushes the community to social and religious marginality. But the Shias are not a monolithic community and economic-linguisticsectarian differences mark multiple gradations across the community spread across the state of West Bengal without much internal functional bonding. As a result, their sacred practices, while having the immutable core of a

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 65 Husayn-centric piety and shared and common ritual forms that are inherently trans-territorial, do not remain a transcendental autonomous realization. Rather, their connection to the varied social-cultural and locational experiences, different approaches taken by religious authorities to orient the institutions, and struggles over identity in location-specific relational terms give the various pockets of the community various shapes and structures and offer macro-variations for women’s engagement in the sacred space. Against the backdrop of a double minority position and an incommensurable gap between the mainstream social sphere and Shia religious discourses and popular piety, the role of the imambaras as institutions to sustain the community, the performance of muharram as a social yet autonomous community event, and forms of laments should be studied to engage with women’s participation in the sacred sites. These different contexts of the space for lament as a site of contestation and embodiments of the sacred proclaim the sectarian claim over prophetic inheritance through an intercessory piety towards Imam Ali and his son Imam Husayn. This very multifariousness carves out different possibilities and impossibilities for women, offering different contexts for becoming subjects of piety. Their mobility and restriction, preparation, and participation vis-à-vis the sacred follow the contested socio-sectarian contexts of their sacred. Beyond gender, the gendered actions of women at sacred sites also become a community question. The city landscape and the formation of the Shia community have a curious connection. When Shia Awadh was felled by the British colonial power and Awadh ruler Wajid Ali Shah became exiled from his capital Lucknow to the southern fringes of colonial Calcutta, Wajid Ali created a second Lucknow in Metiabruz. Shias of different classes started to migrate here from different parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Also, there was a more localized migration of the extended royal family from the Shia state of Murshidabad to Calcutta, who also set up imambaras as a part of the Murshidabad estate. Following years of intermittent migration and uneven growth, the Shias of different economic classes can now be seen clustered as small communities living in a ghetto-like formation in the alleys, lanes, and bylanes in the far southern, central, and northern parts of the city. The imambaras, more conspicuous for having been built in colonial times by wealthy Shias or even the smaller ones tucked in an alley or on some floor of a dilapidated building behind a bustling market, came to fulfill the needs of localized middle or lower economic groups. These structures attest to the Shia presence and distribution within the urban landscape of Kolkata. The battle of Karbala marks the first sectarian schism within the Muslim community based on the debate on the claims over the prophetic inheritance. Shia intercessory piety centres on the imamate with Ali as the first Imam refute the Sunni caliphate and Ali’s position as the fourth caliph. This rival claim challenges the Sunni caliphate and the majoritarian sect. In central Islamic states, the marginalization of the Shias and their forms of devotionalism centring on the commemoration of muharram by the Sunni order

66  Epsita Halder are discernible both in terms of religious doctrine and political position.19 But in the frontier Islamicate world such as the Indian subcontinent where the Shias possess a minority within minority status, there is a discernible difference.20 Religious difference-within results in social segregation and ostracizing the Shia muharram commemoration by the Sunni mainstream religiosity is the marker of such differences in a rival field without direct state political endorsement of the Sunni.21 This double minority position obscures Shia religiosity in the Islamic community. But it also motivates the Shias to connect to the state as their protector during the inevitable ShiaSunni conflicts during muharram. In my ethnographic journey, I repeatedly heard Shia men and women praising the state government for facilitating their muharram processions while referring to the unchecked Sunni antagonism in neighbouring Islamic states. These contexts interpret the Shia communities’ social marginality and otherwise inconspicuous and unmarked nature of religious events. Performing grief over the loss of Imam Husayn and other martyrs of the battle of Karbala repeats itself as a ritual act throughout the year, and women of a particular locality cluster regularly at the nearby imambaras to perform lamentations one after another, especially in the month of Muharram. Majlis, the mourning session, in the interiority of the imambaras, commemorates the visceral daily tragedies of the battle of Karbala starting from the first day of Muharram month. The tragedy culminates on Ashura, that is, the tenth day of Muharram, when Imam Husayn was martyred. The performance of majlis is strictly gender-segregated and takes place at separate time slots allotted to the community men and women inside the imambara. Women in this subcontinent engage in reciting the elegies while beating the chest in the interiority of the imambaras. Women never take part in self-flagellation performances in the Ashura procession for self-flagellation, shedding of the blood being a strictly male form of devotional enactment. Women engage in these public male-centric rituals by walking along the processions to become a visible and integral part of the Ashura. To understand how the sacred is constructed according to the participators’ gendered actions, belonging, and other social connections and affiliations of the site of sacred performance, I have taken three imambaras, located in close spatial proximity. These three imambaras will offer three different contexts of the complex dynamics of religiosity and diverse forms of ritual practices to understand women’s sacred action as the possibility of agency or will explain the lack of it. These three are: Haji Lane Imambara, Haji Lane Bibi Anaro Imambara, Ripon Street (within 1 km radius of Haji Lane imambara) Haji Kerbelai Imambara, Portuguese Church Street (4 km from Bibi Anaro)

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 67 The identification and organization of the sacred are integrally connected to the varied contexts of sacredness and urbanity in which the imambaras are situated, access to the sacred space allotted to women, and what the women enact through their bodily presence and actions centring on the sacred. Thus, the forms of agency, even within the single urban space become multiple. The community, in the question of sexual difference and women’s action within the sacred, becomes different at micro-levels very specific to the imambaras. According to the dynamic and changing elements of organization and the needs of the sacred space, women’s agency multiplies. Both Bibi Anaro imambara and Haji Lane imambara were consecrated on lands donated by women. Bibi Anaro imambara was established in early nineteenth century on a land donated by Bibi Anaro, a lady from a local elite family, for the community’s ritual congregation and remained a modest onestorey building on a modest open space acting as the courtyard for ritual congregation till 2010. Haji Nusrat Bibi donated her very modest house situated in a lower economic bylane called Haji Lane near Ripon Street for the exclusive gathering and ritual mourning of women even though all the nearby imambaras, especially Bibi Anaro, had equal space for women to access the sacred space of lament. Having another imambara nearby did not dilute the participation but rather expanded the pilgrimage network for women.

Haji Lane Imambara: women’s gathering in sacred space I met Firdaus Ara Begum, in her early 1940s, at a mourning ritual of Bibi Anaro imambaras before she was leaving for Haji Lane imambara. She took me to Haji Lane imambara – ladies’ imambara as they called it – and then to all the nearby sacred sites of mourning.22 We talked, sitting in the intimate and small verandah of Haji Lane imambara, which, when empty, still had the air of a small privately owned house in a lower economic group bylane. The harsh sound of the broom scratching the cemented courtyard and the high-pitched voice of a woman cleaning the courtyard before joining the mourning with other women almost drowned Firdaus ji’s voice, choking with emotion about the battle of Karbala and the sacrifice of Imam Husayn. Women were coming in groups to attend majlis, which was about to start with the sermon-giver’s emotive speech about the grief of Karbala. Women were in black, the colour of mourning, shorn of ornaments, casually sharing recipes before the coming of the zakera, the sermon-giver. The women discussed the gradual lack of interest in women to come to this imambara, which had so far been providing a warm and exclusive space to them. Women, even though integral to the community’s mourning ritual, took second position in the imambara space to the Shia men across generations. Strictly segregated, women could mourn inside the imambara at stipulated times. But Haji Lane, though much smaller than Bibi Anaro, was always a

68  Epsita Halder sacred place produced through the women’s full participation in the everyday and in sacred chores. Sitting at the corner of the mat freshly spread by women in charge, I came to know that because of the recent revamp of Bibi Anaro imambara with a more decorated space allotted to women for their ritual performance, women in general flocked there at Bibi Anaro and were not that enthusiastic anymore about rituals here in Haji Lane imambara. ‘They just come here,’ as Fatima Zohra, a woman in her mid-40s, said, ‘Only a few women like us still consider Haji Lane imambara to be central to our mourning sessions.’ By that time the zakera arrived to deliver sermon, a woman in her early 50s sat at a small stool covered with black cloth and adjusted a small microphone in front of her to make herself heard to the little two rooms with more women. Women started to stream in as the zakera began with Surah Fatiha and the narration of the events of Karbala. At the peak of her recital, women burst in tears, chanted the elegies, and beat their chests lightly. I was allowed and welcome to sit amid them, listen to them, and take notes on their speech and movements. Women were coming in with their individual food offerings, which, after the ritual, were collected together and distributed as sacred blessings – as nazr or tabarrukh. Inside the imambara there was the typical arrangement of sacred relics, green velvet flags with the sacred names of the panjatan pak, emblems of the panjatanpak made of tin, a picture of Husayn’s horse Duldul, a replica of the cradle of Ali Asgar, the infant child of Imam Husayn also martyred during the war. Plenty of roses, tuberoses, and marigold covered the replicas of the graves of Imam Husayn and another one or two martyrs. There was enough incense to fill the air with the aroma of transcendence. Like any other imambara. But it was also more intimate with women sitting on the floor, very close to each other, transmitting and absorbing the energy of lament within a group, the room accommodating more bodies than it could have comfortably contained. Thus, when they stood up to recite the elegy, all the women could not always be facing the rowza as they should, following the sacred custom of showing reverence, because of the lack of space and the spatial arrangement of rooms and the veranda as/within the imambara. The whole area, situated within the lower economic belt of the city, teeming with its tailoring shops, food vendors, and electrical goods repair shops, would transform its materiality to allow these Shia women to create a map of their journey, a sacred trail to claim their sacred place from one imambara to another, both as individual devotees and as a collective. As lament over the tragedy of the battle of Karbala at the sacred sites is a strictly gender segregated ritual, Haji Lane imambara as the women-only imambara offered a unique emergence of a religiosity performed by women in a space organized only by women, with the mourning ritual led by a woman sermon-giver. When the zakera arrived, Syeda Nusrat Begham, a woman in her mid-50s, the whole gathering immediately structured itself without any instruction or signal, as if her presence itself was a kind of a

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 69 primordial code embedded within the women present. A female zakera was not an integral part of a more impressive structure of Bibi Anaro, where every other thing was arranged with respect to the primacy of a more structured male lamentation and which also had a board of trustees without any female representative.

Place-making as agency: boundary of the sacred and beyond It was 2012 and Bibi Anaro imambara was already emerging as a landmark two-storey building with two massive open halls on each floor. Since 2011, renovations had started. From a nondescript local brick structure, it was transformed with replicas of Iranian architectural motifs so apparent in the older and impressive imambaras of Kolkata with a direct Lucknow connection. Another imambara was the Portuguese Church Lane one, which housed a whole lot of relics and sacred artefacts in an interior that resembled the Bara Imambara of Lucknow. Renovations at Bibi Anaro Imambara enhanced its ritual significance over older imambaras in the southern and central parts of Kolkata though the interiors with its newly acquired ritual relics lacked the authenticity of the Lucknow connection. A separate hall on the first floor for the exclusive performance of women increased gendered difference spatially and materially. But there was no exclusive sermon session for women here like Haji Lane imambara. Women sitting in the veiled section on the ground floor listened to the main sermon delivered by a male preacher in the ground floor hall to the male audience. Now, how to read these situations observed through ethnographic means by exploring the category of place-making to discern women’s agency and subjectivity? A study of liminality, as Patrick Desplat offers, might be useful. Being performative and physical in nature, the Shia commemoration ritual always exceeds the scriptural codification, which is the precondition of Sunni Islam. As doing pain, i.e., the showing of grief, is the essential core for the moral conduct for the Shias, the enchanted body-mind in the ecstasy of pain always creates the possibility of differentiating place produced through the action of the lamenting body from space – i.e., location. As Desplat says, ‘Both terms [space and place] are complementary and . . . Muslim sacred places are always made of diffusion, appropriation and movement in space’; doing pain as sacred acts by gendered groupings can be seen as informed by and constitutive of how the Shia women makes the sacred space and meaningful for their everyday living too.23 When Shia women now gather at the upper storey of Bibi Anaro imambara, not only does sexual difference get reinscribed through patriarchal religious normativity at the time of the overall modification of religious sensibilities in the Ripon Street area, other things start to happen in the coming together or grouping of women who perform sacred actions. The open area enables women to come and sit in groups before the ritual lament and stay back after it ends, which could not be done before the renovation when

70  Epsita Halder women shared the male space without stretching the stipulated time. In Haji Lane imambara, for its smaller veranda and rooms for gathering, such extended and multiple groupings are not possible for all due to the acute space crunch. Bibi Anaro, while accommodating a huge number of women, opens up the scope for several possible kinds of grouping for women and children and as a result tends to lose its tight sacred autonomy. It becomes a habitable space for women who occupy the imambara space with various dimensions of bodies and different intentions behind their actions. They are seen to choose reading a chapbook of elegies or the Qur’an, lying down at the corner after a hard day’s work, simply waiting silently or making groups in various impromptu combinations to share their experiences connected to their everyday. Bibi Anaro imambara offers the possibility of such groupings exclusively in the name of the sacred to women who do not generally have any other social space or occasion to come together. If we specifically consider the sacred ritual of lament, because of the sheer charge of physicality of grief induced by the episodes of Karbala, it defines the imambaras – a particular built-in environment – as depending “not only upon a symbolic conquest of construction of place, but also upon the temporal process of ritual and practice, memory and narrative, and the ongoing engagement with historical factors and change.”24 Liminality, between the transcendental truth of martyrdom and the everyday functioning of that pain in the socio-political dynamic context, offers an interpretive dimension in the Shia commemorative ritual that makes mourning sessions susceptible to its exterior.25 The gradual exposure to the new media experience brought the pan-Shia template closer to the vernacular communities which now access digital religious material available online – visuals, texts, and audio-visual material – quite easily to respond to the transnational forces of religious sensibility. Architectural innovation and a more structured sermon session and other rituals can be seen as a direct response to such new media experiences that mark newer choices within the community. As an effect, the forms of religious gathering, embodiment, and disciplining of the self have changed and along with that the idea of the sacred space had to go through dynamics transformations to equate with the newly emerged sensibilities. Though generally, community women todate have not really become active consumers of digital material or users of the social media, their sites of ritual performance and offline activities have become integrally connected to the reformulated Shia public online. When the upper floor was consecrated and allotted to women, a curious spatial arrangement took place. Women had to walk on the first floor with the rowza (grave) of Husayn and the sacred standards carried by the sacred figures of Shi’ism were placed below on the ground floor. The gendering of a space to formalize sexual difference went against the logic of the sacred by placing the female audience physically above the level of the sacred. There was an opening so that the women did not really walk physically over the

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 71 sacred sites and rather could look down at the sacred standing against the railings. Women gaze up while reciting the elegies and beating their chests and look downwards to seek blessings from sacred sites. Such liminality creates a different kind of mobility amongst women who move between two kinds of gazing at the sacred. When asked, I was told that the rowza and relics were kept at the dried up miraculous well that Bibi Anaro dreamt of after coming back from hajj. So, there was no overruling this divine hierarchy despite this reversed spatial placement of the sacred and the women. Rather, the pious gaze of the women, cast downwards at the rowza that was once the well, was extended to create this new symbolic spatial relation between the sacred and the devotees. The spatial arrangements and movements attest to the parameters of place-making through ‘active making and significant practices of human actors’26 with the women gathering, resting, grouping, chatting, exchanging g familial secrets, taking and giving counsel. Amid all this, women take part in the core ritual as it starts impromptu through a call-response signal amongst them, create improvisational groups and start reciting elegies. This hall, with its high ceiling and windows without bars or grilles, imitate feebly the Iranian architectural forms Women who come from the closed cloisters of their houses through the overcrowded dingy lanes to enter this vast interior, bring to the space more than piety. They transform this sacred space into their own place of relaxation amid constricted urbanity and gender strictures. Not only does the upper floor become a playground for the children coming with women, the women too on many occasions lose their rigid sacred stance as their bodies relax once the ritual ends. This gender-secluded space, when constructed, needs gatekeeping so that gender segregation does not get violated. While the upper floor is open for women all the time, they can enter the ground floor only when the stipulated time for sermon and male majlis is over. A mother and her two daughters from the nearby locality started acting as gatekeepers once such gendered spacing was done. Children of their family, being physically present at the sacred place more than the other children coming from outside, developed a more intimate connection with the place, even as a playground. We should consider the value of such vast interiors in a metropolis where the urban landscape hardly offers any open space for creative or leisurely activities. Movement of the communities, other than the regular work or education related ones, does not take them beyond their ghettos and their to and fro movement to the imambaras is the only occasion when they occupy the streets with their religious identity beyond their regular inhabited space. But, the children who come with their mothers or grandmothers from outside do not indulge in such playfulness like these children of the gatekeeping women’s family. The children of the gatekeeping family, on the other hand, make the imambara an extended space of living with a new secular urban vocabulary, extending the scope of the sacred space by making it an inhabitable fluid place. They hold each others’ hands and walk on the mats

72  Epsita Halder to imitate how they walk on the streets but with a smoothness impossible to reproduce on the over-congested streets with their unruly traffic. When I requested photographs, young girls immediately posed reclining on the sacred mimbar (wooden seat of the male sermon-giver, stacked at the upper floor where there is no sermon session) and the young boy imitated the pose of a film hero. These three gatekeeping women show a unique formulation of agency, who, by the virtue of their task of monitoring the women’s quarters in both storeys, have to spread mattresses covering the huge hall and collect the small booty of incense or donations. On Thursdays, they keep the outer gate closed during the male sermon and majlis and let the women enter for blessings at the rowza. These three women briefly control the space once the sermon-giver’s microphone stops, opening the door not more than two inches and peeping in to check whether men have really dispersed from the rowza. By transforming the public ritual sacred space into their own inhabitable space, by reaffirming sexual difference to display an air of possession over the space, and by regulating women coming from different classes, these three women invert class relations for themselves. Coming from a Hindi-speaking lower economic household, which does not generally show any aptitude for reciting the nowha and maintaining copybooks of elegies, they have become pious and, moreover, agents of place-making by making a theatre out of the gatekeeping task entrusted to them. This was only an example. The enactment of the actors to connect universal symbols of the Karbala complex with particular lived experiences might not follow a singular pattern everywhere. The ways in which women imbibe the discipline of piety could be multiple and site-specific. Such multiplicity is both abstract and context-specific and, in turn, pulls us back from theorizing on any singular form of agency within the sacred sites of enacting grief.

The ambiguity of the city: marginalization and possession Nobody could respond properly about the lament ritual when I reached Haji Kerbalai Imambara at 3 Portuguese Church Street. The typical colonial interiors with a sprawling courtyard and a hanging grilled veranda on the first floor looked deserted in the afternoon. One room had a signboard with the name of the imambara on it, and all the other rooms on the ground floor were individually locked from the outside with nameplates and letterboxes indicating the owners’ origins in some other regions of India. If in the courtyard the emblematic green flag of Islam and blackstriped white flag of martyrdom were not hung, it would have been impossible to identify the courtyard as a part of a sacred Shia monument. On the first floor, against the bars of the closed windows, some green flags were seen. There was an open and empty staircase at the right just after the main façade but as soon as I started to climb up, I was stopped. This was strange. The inclusionary nature of the sacred ritual has so far been deeply reflected in

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 73 their willingness to accommodate me, the ethnographer, throughout the Shia hubs. I had come to know about this imambara on a website www. imamproperty.com in one of my desperate searches for imambaras in Kolkata. I found www.imamproperty.com had an online archive of Shia sacred properties that the community had lost to trespassing and illegal possession by migrant individuals and/or their families. This could happen as most of these imambaras did not have any managing body and the maintenance of and decision-making about the sacred site were generally the onus of a khadem (literally servant or caretaker of the sacred site). The hereditary system of caretaking, a sacred status otherwise, did not let the community be a part of the functioning of the imambaras, resulting in, according to the website, mishandling of the sacred property. Thus, most imambaras in this category have been going though long drawn-out legal procedures to reclaim their property from illegal possession. Nowadays, in many cases, such hereditary systems are being either dismantled or sidelined by introducing a representational managing trustee for the imambaras. These trustees come together to contribute to online archives to preserve copies of all the legal documents and High Court judgments. The online archives are especially particular about including and showcasing the court order that give the rights of the imambaras’ possession to the managing trustees, whenever it is the case. Though the Sunni Waqf Board (Central Waqf Board) was established way back in 1964, Shia property in West Bengal became a part of the Islamic waqf estate regulation in 2002 only after much public demonstrations and agitation in front of the Kolkata office of the Waqf Board. This process of administrative and juridical legitimization helps the community reclaim their sacred properties and to enact the sacred in order to possess them socially. The day I first visited this imambara, I waited under the external façade. A few men from the bustling road and nearby shops asked me what I was doing there. After much interrogation I was taken upstairs with warmth, when people understood my intention of ‘writing a book on muharram.’ The long veranda with glass windows, leading to the trustee office, was empty. The great hall of lament, across an unassuming dark corridor, was opened for me. It was a huge hall with coloured glass windows, magnificent chandeliers floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and an impressive collection of relics very similar to the Great Imambara of Lucknow and also its replica – the Metiabruz Imambara. But the air of decay was oppressive and unbearably sad. The interior blue walls shimmered in the neon glow of tube-lights as all the floor-to-ceiling colonial windows were shut. This imambara has all the relics from Lucknow from the time of its inception, Abbas Ali, the secretary of the managing trustee declared with an air of pride. He resided on the same floor in a small flat. In response to my question, he said, ‘No, this is not a place where the women come for lament rituals. Already much trouble here, you see.’ The secretary nodded sadly. ‘Otherwise we would have loved to have female rituals like other places.’ The only Shia woman in this

74  Epsita Halder building, Naseem Ara Begham, the wife of the secretary, shared that she performed her mourning alone in her room without entering the imambara. She went to some house in the vicinity and performed lamentations together with other women in a small circle. With legal and police intervention the managing trustee managed to take the possession of the property, but without any further social and political acknowledgement. Connections between the sacred and the habitable could not be re-sought and forms of piety could not be built as an everyday practice here. But without a clear government policy about compensation and relocation of tenants used to unbelievably low rent, litigation went on for years and claim to ownership became tough. Whereas this imambara organized various processions after taking possession – including the muharram commemorations, which went out of the imambara, took to the streets, and then came back – the courtyard remains otherwise inert and unable to accommodate sacred rituals. The inability of women to act in the sacred domain was not a function of the gender segregation within but an outcome of urban planning, of patterns of migration to the city, and of the adequacies and inadequacies of a legal system to handle the sacred and the non-sacred lands. But when such immobility subject to external factors is imposed, seclusion of women from the domain of lament occurs as its inevitable result, making the ritual procession and place-making strictly masculine. The capacity of place-making took on a male-ordained articulation and archivization where women did not become an integral part.

Conclusion To come back to Saba Mahmood’s alternative understanding of agency as context-specific, which was the takeoff point of this essay, we must admit that her reading remains a self-enclosed counterpoint to Western liberalism,27 where she conflates liberalism with secularism.28 We need to add layers to the micro-processes taking place inside the imambaras by including forms of internal competition, negotiation with the transcendental signs, and realignment of sacred discourse and patterns of performance. My article touches on these micro-practices within the broader social domain connected to and influencing the modalities of place-making and the position of gender within them. We need to keep in mind that piety cannot be the only constituting element of female (also male) individuals or collective living and that several other everyday material and affective forms, aspirations, and deliberation are as relevant. Place-making, as an analytical category in my article, engages with various connections and mutual seepage between the pious and the profane to study the context and configuration of women’s agency in vernacular Shia religious practices. It is not easy to demarcate the fine line between individual deliberation and internalization of norms, studies reveal. Forms of women’s place-making show that women’s pietistic actions may

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 75 take up different shapes and forms as being performed in several contexts between the sacred transcendental and the everyday. Thus women’s agency cannot be defined as a fully developed auto-referential domain of religious action,; rather, the semantics of place-making actions in various contexts of the sacred show several forms, developed through different stages. Placemaking by women comes in diverse ways and induces forms of agency that are not readily recognizable as social or religious agencies as they are often performed as contingencies. Also, a lack of female agency might be an outcome of the lacunae that the community as a whole experiences, the causes of which again can be as varied as its double minority status, insufficient space inside the imambara, or a land dispute most acutely realized in my third case study.

Notes 1 Rather than looking only at the ritual and religious moorings of the sacred sites, this article places the imambara, the Shia sacred site of mourning, within a network of social habits and situations where the sacred site is meaningful only through its connection with the everyday. Following a set of scholarships which have started to explore ‘space,’ ‘place,’ and ‘landscape’ as separate analytical categories since the 1980s this article focuses on modes of place-making that emerge out of the interaction and exchange of social groups with the private and public spheres. The previous concepts of space, place, and landscape interchangeably signifying location with a static concept of religion at that locale are problematized to look at the ambivalence of the sacred site produced between structured religion and ritual practices, between the urban and rural, between elite codes and popular folk practices. Thus a sacred space has come to be read as the site of contestation and struggle varied in terms of different layers of exchange and interchange within broader socio-cultural-economic-political contexts. Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Casey, The Fate of Place; Desplat and Schulz, (eds), Prayer in the City. 2 Patrick Desplat, “Representations of Space, Place-making and Urban Life in Muslim Societies,” in Prayer in the City: The Making of Muslim Sacred Places and Urban Life, eds. Patrick Desplat and Dorothea E. Schulz (New Burnswick and London: Transcript, 2012), 10. 3 In Sabarimala temple, dedicated to Lord Ayyappa in Kerala, India, women devotees of menstruating age were not permitted pilgrimage to respect to the celibate god legitimized by a Kerala high-court judgment. In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled an inclusive verdict according to which all pilgrims regardless of gender and menstruating status should be allowed entry to the temple. This caused a massive controversy, resulting in heated debates on identity-based politics, traditionalism, and values of gender in the normative framework. But what emerged out of this polemic is that when rights to religious space are claimed as the rights of an individual woman, the notion of emancipation and related choices has to be reformulated. Padmavat, a film adaptation of Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padumavat, released in 2018, also unleashed violent parochial waves of protest from Rajput Karni Sena who felt their symbol of community honour – Padmavati – was violated in the film. The alleged violation of a regional community’s honour took on the shape of ‘assault on Hindutva,’ which engulfed Brahmin-led patriarchal outfits, the Jat fraternity and Muslim platforms.

76  Epsita Halder 4 Abu-Lughod, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography,” 7–27; Veiled Sentiments; Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 5 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 6 Sarah Bracke, “Author(iz)ing Agency: Feminist Scholars Making Sense of Women’s Involvement in Religious ‘Fundamentalist’ Movements,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10 (2003): 335. http://ejw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/ abstract/10/3/335 accessed December 10, 2017; Reilly and Scriver, (eds), Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere; Saghal and Yuval-Davies, “The Uses of Fundamentalism.” 7 Abu-Lughod, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography.” 8 Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1(1990): 41–55;“First, how might we develop theories that give these women credit for resisting in a variety of creative ways the power of those who control so much of their lives, without either misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience something like a feminist consciousness or feminist politics or devaluing their practices as prepolitical, primitive, or even misguided?” Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, 47. 9 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 10 Selim Samah, “Book Review.” 11 Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent,” 202–236. 12 Deeb, An Enchanted Modern. 13 All these contextual factors demand separate and detailed analysis to situate the identity formation of the Shia community in vernacular West Bengal, which is not possible in a single essay. This essay only articulates the academic necessity to theoretically unpack and organize all these contextual elements. However, I have initiated a discussion elsewhere about the connection between new media technologies and the Shia community formation and attempted to define ‘religious attentiveness’ and ‘aesthetic formation’ as the major elements of new media practices. Fragments can be found on http://sarai.net/ the-attentive-heart-and-its-apparatuses-facebook-bluetooth-whatsapp/ 14 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 120. 15 Ibid., 122. 16 Sindre Bangstad, “Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Feminism after Virtue,” Theory, Culture and Society 8, no. 3 (2011): 28–54. 17 van der Veer, “Embodiment, Materiality, and Power,” 811. 18 Ibid., 812. 19 Among the Islamic states, the political governance in Iran, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan are Shia affiliated leading to the open and visible demonstrations of muharram affect with state patronage. 20 In Islamic states in South Asia, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, sectarian differences are articulated in terms of political domination and intervention where the government is ruled by the Sunni majority authorities. 21 Following the age-old heterodox sensibility of sharing the pain for Imam Husayn in many regions Sunni masses are seen to be taking part in muharram commemoration in various capacities. Differences are more articulated and performed in social domains more inclined to orthodox interpretations. 22 There are a few other places where imambaras are not public trusts but private properties, but it remains outside the purview of this essay to discuss the dynamics of women’s engagement. 23 Desplat does not include a discussion on the Shias and remains focused on the diversity of Sunni sacred practices; but he nonetheless proposes that we go

Shia women and their ‘place-making’ 77 beyond the mosque-shrine dichotomy, which provides us with a wonderful point to take off from. 24 David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, (eds), American Sacred Space (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995), 25. 25 It is not only the prerogative of the Shias, Sunni Islam too, going beyond its closed demarcation between the sacred and the profane, the transcendental and the prohibited, creates other ‘Islamic imperatives’ in Sunni Islam’s choice of the narrative on the Prophet’s life or the lives of his companions. 26 Casey, The Fate of Place, 13–52. 27 van der Veer, “Embodiment, Materiality, and Power,” 809–818. 28 Bangstad, “Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Feminism.”

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, L. “Can There be a Feminist Ethnography.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 5, no 1 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07407709008571138 (accessed on 25.07.2017). Abu-Lughod, L. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. CA: University of California Press, 2000. Ahmad, S. Transforming faith: The Story of al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Bracke, S. “Author(iz)ing Agency: Feminist Scholars Making Sense of Women’s Involvement in Religious ‘Fundamentalist’ Movements.” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2003) http://ejw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/335 (accessed on 12.10.2017). Butler, J. Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Casey, E. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. CA: University of California Press, 1996. Deeb, L. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Desplat, P. and D. E. Schulz, eds. Prayer in the City: The Making of Muslim Sacred Places and Urban Life. New Burnswick and London: Transcript, 2012. Frisk, S. Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia. Copenhegen: Nias Press, 2009. Hafez, S. An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movement. New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. Ibrahimhakkioglu, F. “Embodies Affective Experience in Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: Reformulating Agency for an Inclusive Transnational Feminism.” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2012Fall). https://pages. uoregon.edu/uophil/files/Ibrahimhakkioglu_PHILmatters_2012.pdf (accessed on 14.03.2018). Lefebvre, H. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996 [1974]. Mahmood, S. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001). Mahmood, S. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Reilly, N. and S. Scriver, eds. Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere. New York and London: Routledge, 2014.

78  Epsita Halder Saghal, G. and N. Yuval-Davies. “The Uses of Fundamentalism.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by R. Lewis and S. Mills. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Samah, S. “Book Review: Saba Ahmad, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.” www.jadaliyya.com/Details/23539/Politics-of-Piety-TheIslamic-Revival-and-the-Feminist-Subject (accessed on 15.01.2019). Samile, Z. Between Feminism and Islam, Human rights and Sharia Law in Morocco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Schrock, R. D. “The Methodological Imperatives of Feminist Ethnography.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 5 (2013Fall). www.jfsonline.org/issue5/pdfs/Schrock_ FINAL.pdf (accessed on 02.01.2019). Selby, J. Questioning French Secularism: Gender Politics and Islam in Parisian Suburb. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sidre, B. “Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Feminism after Virtue.” Theory, Culture, Society (2011). http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/28/3/28 (accessed on 11.08.2017). Spano, M. “Book Review: Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.” Foucault Studies, no. 16 (2013September). van der Veer, P. “Embodiment, Materiality, and Power: A Review Essay.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (2008July). Ziba, M-H. Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999.

5 Speaking in a different voice Dalit women writing in Bengali Nandini Saha

A commitment to feminist politics demands that the limited political and analytical use of the category of ‘difference’ be underlined. . . . It is imperative for feminist politics that ‘difference’ be historically located in the real struggles of marginalized women.1 Literature plays a significant role in the social movements of oppressed people.2

Introduction In a postcolonial society like India, given its diverse resident communities, it is crucial to address the complex issues of nation and nationalism. The idea of one-nation and one-state served well for the early twentieth century Indian nationalists in their battle for India’s freedom from British colonial rule. Independence gave the impetus to the voices from the margins in their struggle to establish their identity and reclaim their place in the new India with vigour. Even in those early days of the Indian nation state a man of vast learning and a far-sighted intellectual like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar preached against the caste system prevalent in Indian society. More recently, with the advent of the new millennium, it has become imperative that issues of class, caste, and religious communities be addressed in relation to all their problematic dialectics with gender. This paper thus seeks to address some of these issues pertaining to caste and gender in its two sections. Part I deals with issues relating to the interface between caste and gender. Part II will focus and explore the subdued voices of the ‘twice removed’ Dalit women, once as a woman and secondly also as a member of the lower caste, through the writings of Bengali Dalit women, who continue to publish their works in spite of adverse circumstances and a lean readership. This paper attempts to locate the ‘difference’ in the voices that are heard from the margins, in this case in Bengal, and explores this body of literature to situate the struggles of these voices through their writings and aid in acquiring their space in contemporary Indian feminist politics.

80  Nandini Saha

Part I In his intended speech to the Jat Pat Todak Mandal that Dr. B R Ambedkar was supposed to deliver in 1936 in Lahore but never did, and published later as the Annihilation of Caste, he delineates and rejects the system that divides society and draws the lines between human beings on the basis of one’s birth. Dr. Ambedkar rather propagates a system where one’s profession should be determined not by birth but by one’s capabilities. In his powerful and seminal texts Why I am not a Hindu (1996) and Post-Hindu India (2009), Kancha Ilaiah critically discusses the structure of Hindu society – the social labelling and issues related to Dalits or the ‘untouchables.’ The structure of the Indian social hierarchy consists of four Varnas – the Brahmanas, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, and the Shudras. There is difference of opinion regarding how the Varna functions. Nonetheless the lowest section of society, the Shudras, are the ones known as dalits or untouchables. The dalits themselves prefer to be known as ‘dalits’ rather than ‘untouchables’ or even ‘Harijan,’ the name given to this section of society by Mahatma Gandhi, meaning ‘Children of God.’ Despite academic engagements with the issues of caste, the general populace of India remains oblivious of the caste question. Gopal Guru would term this oblivion as the ‘sociological blindness’ of the upper middle class Hindus who remain largely unaware of the ‘existential dimensions of caste.’3 There is an enormous body of work that is dedicated to the analysis and study of caste and its various dimensions. The intent of this part of the paper is to focus on the issues of gender and its intersectionalities with caste that have risen to prominence with the very determined and strong voices of Dalit feminists since the 1990s. Women’s role in the construction of the ideas of nation and the ideologues of nationalism has gained in importance over the last few decades. The worship of woman as the mother goddess in India and the deification of the woman as the mother nation (Bharat Mata) belie the fact that women are still secondary citizens. Sociological and cultural analyses that engage in gender debates would include ‘all’ women and overlook the differences that demarcate upper caste and lower caste women in India. The Dalit woman faces oppression and ignominy even from their female counterparts – the women of the upper castes, as well as the men of their own community. Any study about Dalit women would need to be careful about these distinctions that easily tend to get blurred. Women figured prominently in the Ambedkarite movement. Dr. Ambedkar would always organize meetings with and for women along with all his general meetings and Sabhas.4 Women met and participated in these conferences to pass resolutions for the betterment of the lives of women. He always included women in his plans for social development. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the economist, philosopher, and the man behind some of the key features of the Indian Constitution, through his speeches and writings, has scrutinized the inequality and injustice inherent in the Hindu social order – how it

Speaking in a different voice 81 perpetuates inequality and subordination of dalits and women in a systemic manner. In his various treatises ‘The Rise and Fall of Hindu Women,’ ‘The Women and Counter Revolution,’ ‘The Riddle of Women,’ and ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,’ Dr. Ambedkar has analyzed the manner in which gender relations are artificially constructed under the Hindu Brahmanical social order. He critiques the innumerable ways in which the Indian social structure intends not only to shape the attitude of Hindus towards their women but also conditions women to conform to a stereotypical feminine behaviour. Babasaheb Ambedkar also stressed the importance of gender equality and the significance of education for women. He wanted women to speak freely and without fear. ‘Women’s participation in the Ambedkarite movement must be read in the context of the fact that in Ambedkar’s theory of caste there is also a theory of the origins of subordination of women and that he saw the two issues as intrinsically linked.’5 Dr. B. R. Ambedkar strove for an adequate inclusion of women’s rights in the political vocabulary and in the Constitution of India. He vociferously propagated that women should be given all round development, most importantly social education, and aspects of their physical and psychological wellbeing and socio-cultural rights need to be safeguarded. Babasaheb put the stress on women demanding equal respect and dignity even from their male partners. It is significant that Babasaheb always spoke of the downtrodden and deprived castes and that he was not speaking of upper caste women. When he spoke of the development of women he meant the development of lower caste women. ‘Leela Dube, the noted feminist anthropologist, has argued that women play an important role in maintaining caste boundaries through the preparation of food and in maintaining its purity.’6 Gopal Guru assesses the political marginalization of Dalit women accurately – ‘In the post-Ambedkar period, Dalit leaders have always subordinated, and at times suppressed, an independent political expression of Dalit women.’7 Babasaheb had insisted on the Hindu Code Bill to be passed in Parliament, which he failed, but which was later split into four Bills and passed – The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955; The Hindu Succession Act, 1956; The Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956; and The Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956. These Bills give independent status to women and endow them with the right of adoption, succession, and property. While with these laws the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his law minister Dr. B. R. Ambedkar expected to have established a uniform civil code and to protect women’s rights in the 1950s, in current times feminists like Nivedita Menon would point to the lack in such laws. Menon rightfully makes a demand for justified rights for women in the public sphere today – matters relating to wages and work benefits.8 While Babasaheb Ambedkar’s work goes back to the 1920s and a strong demand for education and property rights for women – the two elemental features in his theory for gender equality, the Dalit feminist organizations, finally found a voice in the 1990s. The well-researched analytical and critical

82  Nandini Saha works by scholars like Sharmila Rege, Gopal Guru, Ashwini Deshpande, Anupama Rao, Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid, and Uma Chakravarti shed important light on the complex interphase between caste and gender. All these works are important in situating feminist politics historically in the struggles of marginalized women and stresses the need for the Dalit woman’s voice to be heard. These works aid in the ‘historical reinscription of Dalit women’s struggles into the historiography of modern India.’9 Uma Chakravarti precisely assesses how even in the current age things have not progressed much from where it was even a century ago. The dalit castes, at the bottom of the hierarchy, have hardly experienced substantial change. Large sections of their ranks remain a class of toilers; being landless they have only their labour power to sell and continue to have very little access to education, to health and to secure livelihood.10 And this is why Babasaheb’s demand for education and economic security for the lower caste women seems so justified even today. In spite of progress in several aspects of Indian social and economic life, where the women today are much better placed than ever before, the divide between the upper caste women and those from the lower castes has only increased. Since power is related to economy and education, and power in India is vested in the hands of the upper castes, even the upper caste woman is better placed than the lower caste and the Dalit woman in matters of economy and education. A survey of these two sections of society – of the haves and the have-nots – of the upper and the lower castes will prove the marked disparity in the number of Dalit girls who can actually reach the threshold of institutes of higher education or are well placed in important professions and the number of upper caste women who do get a proper education and can get good jobs. It cannot be for nothing that there are always a larger number of women from the higher castes who can be found in seats of power and in influential positions of all-important offices of the state. A woman striving to make a mark in her respective field of work always receives an added advantage if she is from an upper caste background. As Uma Chakravarti reasons, If we look at women today their lives are located at the intersection of class, caste and patriarchy/ies. These structures can all work to oppress them, as in the case of dalit women, but most other women are located in a way that they can be both subordinated and also wield a degree of power. This is so especially if women belong to an upper caste and have access, through their menfolk, to economic resources and social power.11 So it is ironical if a woman who is better or should I say higher placed questions the difficulty of the Dalit woman’s existence. Based on experiential

Speaking in a different voice 83 knowledge or rather the lack of it, a woman from the upper caste who belongs to an affluent educated family can never gauge the extent of the suffering or oppression the Dalit woman faces in her regular existence. Gopal Guru perceptively argues how: the claim for women’s solidarity at both national and global levels subsumes contradictions that exist between high caste and Dalit women. The latent manifestations of these contradictions involve subtle forms of caste discrimination as practiced by upper caste upper class women against Dalit women in the urban areas and resorting to slander of Dalit women in rural areas. The contradictions also take a violent form as when the Shiv Sena women attacked dalit women in Sawali village of Chandrapur district in 1988.12 Again Guru assesses the political marginalization of Dalit women: ‘In the post-Ambedkar period, dalit leaders have always subordinated, and at times suppressed, an independent political expression of dalit women.’13 Being a Dalit and moreover a Dalit woman only makes her position twice removed from the centres of power and also twice oppressed in the social structure – once for being from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchical ladder and again for being a woman in her own community. ‘Dalit women justify the case for talking differently on the basis of external factors (non-Dalit forces homogenising the issue of Dalit women) and internal factors (the patriarchal domination within the dalits).’14 Hence the Dalit women ‘talking differently’ need to differ from not only the upper caste women but also from Dalit men – men of their own communities. India may have progressed by leaps and bounds in all aspects but as far as granting equal status to women is concerned Indians still have a long, a very long way to go. And the only way of knowing or creating a space for these doubly oppressed women in the social framework is to allow these ‘different’ voices to speak for themselves, to let them be heard – and also the rest of society must learn to listen. Society in Bengal is not used to recognizing the existence of the Dalit communities who have lived on the margins for centuries. It is not the norm for the common people here to accept and be aware of the body of literature that has been produced from these margins. There is also no organized body of Dalit women in Bengal that might help to represent these women and their literature to society. Through scattered events and in few and far between publications, literature by these groups have finally begun to make an appearance and thus be noticed in Bengal. In Ambedkar’s formulation, caste is a system of ‘graded inequality in which castes are arranged according to an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.’ That is, as you go up the caste system the power and status of a caste group increases; as you go down the scale the degree of contempt for the caste increases as these castes have no power, are of low status and are regarded as dirty and polluting . . .

84  Nandini Saha we need to recognize that cultural oppression as it operates in the lives of dalits and women, especially on women of the lower castes, is far more dehumanizing than economic exploitation, which we understand as the dominant feature of class, by itself.15 Chakravarti reaffirms my stand of the gorges that differentiates an upper caste and a lower caste woman. She writes about how the lower caste women suffer from triple oppression. Further dalit feminists have formulated the position of the three-way oppression of dalit women: (i) as subject to caste oppression at the hands of the upper castes; (ii) as labourers subject to the class-based oppression, also mainly at the hands of the upper and middle castes who form the bulk of landowners; (iii) as women who experience patriarchal oppression at the hands of all men, including men of their own caste.16 And I would like to add a fourth to this list, for I feel it is crucial for a feminist politics to be specific: that which a Dalit woman suffers in her interactions with the upper caste women, which of course Chakravarti herself also asserts. It is an essential requirement in this age, for any further democratic progress of society, to recognize the ‘differences’ and gaps between the upper caste and the lower caste women. As V. Geetha specifically outlines about the way in which the roles of an upper caste woman differs from that of a lower caste woman. In the Indian context, a woman has necessarily to be a good wife and a mother. . . . The latter [the dalit woman] cannot and do not devote as much time to wifely duties and responsibilities. They spend a lot of their time working outside the house, alongside their men or separately.17 Even society acknowledges the ‘place’ of a lower caste woman as ‘different’ from that of an upper caste woman that is intrinsic to its structure. Gopal Guru in his lucid and pithy style states how in the gendered marginalization of Dalit women the ‘dalit men are reproducing the same mechanisms against their women which their high caste adversaries had used to dominate them.’18 It seems only fitting to end this section of the paper with that which it started – the first epigraph. Sharmila Rege, as quoted in this said quotation emphasizes the importance of ‘difference’ and of placing it in the real struggles of marginalized women. In her article Rege however rejects the value of ‘the notion of difference’ as ‘an analytical and political tool’ as limited. ‘A shift of focus from “naming difference” or “different voice” to social

Speaking in a different voice 85 relations that convert difference into oppression is imperative for feminist politics.’19 Even if it is limited as an analytical tool, I would like to argue that the expression of ‘difference’ is necessary. It might not be a full proof methodology to resolve the problematics of the dialectics of caste and gender, but the statement of ‘difference’ helps to foreground the areas of conflict. And hence in following Sharmila Rege to locate this ‘difference’ as a stepping stone in the process of marking out the ‘areas’ of oppression and thus probably aid in its being alleviated, the next section explores the writings of Bengali Dalit women.

Part II Writings by Gopal Guru, Sharmila Rege, and others mention the ‘different’ social positions of the Dalit and the upper caste women. This brings us to the important argument that Rege specifies regarding the perspective that Dalit women’s writing needs to be addressed from and as she constantly demands a separate space for a Dalit feminist politics. Her stress on ‘difference’ points out how important it is to not only work on the rights of women but to recognize the ‘different’ status of the Dalit women. The focus in this section of the paper will be on a specific body of writing that happens at the regional level in West Bengal. This also brings us to the second epigraph quoted at the beginning of the paper. Literature is indeed an important tool in the battle against social oppression. It lends voice to the hitherto unheard oppressed voices – in this case those of the Bengali Dalit women. It has been proven by scholars working in this field, on several occasions, that there is social ignorance about Dalit life and literature in general. However, Marathi Dalit movements and literature have been more rigorously documented and publicized than any of those in the other regional languages. The one literature that still remains to be recognized is the body of literature by Bengali Dalit women. In Bengal, sadly the usual attitude is to ignore the existence of the Dalit communities and their literature. Literatures by Dalit writers from all corners of India strongly reiterate the existence of a strong Dalit identity. While religion is important to the cultural identity of the Dalit community, being able to strongly etch the Dalit identity as being distinct and unique in its own right seems to be the most important struggle for Dalit writers in Bengal today. This section examines the writings and thus the emphatic and resilient efforts of the Bangla Dalit women writers to create a space for themselves in the literary scene in Bengal and thus expose the double erasure such voices face.20 Dalit writing in Marathi has had a remarkably powerful, long, and influential history. Dalit literatures in Telegu, Tamil, and Kannada have also had a fair amount of visibility. Bengali Dalit writing on the contrary has failed to make a mark on the literary and academic scene in Bengal. Dalit writing is taught and discussed in certain academic departments in Bengal. But these are all literatures by the dalits from states outside Bengal. There is a certain

86  Nandini Saha determined refusal to recognize the works of Dalit writers writing within Bengal. Or more importantly the ‘sociological blindness’ towards the existence of the Dalit communities is most evident in Bengal. The predominance of the feeling of caste that deters academics from including these writers in their literary and scholarly endeavours is sad because Bengal prides itself amongst the more progressive of cultures and as an important centre of development in this nation of a ‘Democratic Republic.’ Gopal Guru states in his essay ‘Understanding the Dalit Feminist Identity’: Dalit women are thus marginalized both within the academic discourse and in the domain of politics and participation. By implication the possibility of a serious perspective on dalit feminism gets substituted by a self-comforting rhetoric that is deployed both by the state and the male dominated dalit politics in the country. (Gopal Guru, ‘Understanding the Dalit Feminist Identity’) The histories of the Dalit communities in our country are a trajectory of pain and suppression. Such stories most often remain untold and that is the way society prefers it, so it has stayed that way. In recent times, however, we have had the publication and translation of biographies and autobiographies of some of the male Dalit writers from Bengal. The writings of the women from these communities still remain comparatively in the dark. The women Dalit writers in Bengal are members of the large marginalized communities variously named ‘Dalits’, ‘Bahujans,’ or ‘Untouchables.’ In their quotidian struggle for existence and in their individual battle for literary recognition, these women Dalit writers from Bengal strive to express their female identity through their works. These women, enmeshed in the complex relations of caste, class, and gender, find it an arduous task to even get their works published. The canon of English literary studies in India has long centred and focused on British literature. It was only in the 1980s and 1990s that Indian English Writing found a place for itself in the syllabi. This was predominantly as an effect of the postcolonial movement that gained its primacy in literary studies in India around the same time. Nevertheless it was not till late in the millennium and well into it when the marginalized voices in the regional languages got translated, spoken about, and studied. It was also at this time that such voices spoke about the emergence of their identities. The mention of Bangla Dalit writing brings to mind names like Manoranjan Byapari and Manohar Mouli Biswas. Especially after Meenakshi Mukherjee’s article on Manoranjan Byapari in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2007, the voices of Bangla Dalit writers have been more audible. It has been several years since then and the women writers from these communities are still struggling to find a publisher who will publish their works and readers who would care to read the literature being written by them. While their struggle for survival continues it is their sheer grit that in spite of all obstacles they still persist in their literary endeavours. One

Speaking in a different voice 87 journal that these women writers publish of their own accord, like much of their literature, is titled Neer and is edited by Kalyani Thakur Charal (b. 1965). This journal publishes writings by Dalit writers or critical writings on the works of dalits, especially women. It is by their collective effort that they still continue to have the strength to write and publish even if society continues to ignore and marginalize them. Their single-minded yet feminine, socially conscious yet resolute persistence to write makes me wonder what else is needed to either get published or be known as an author. Literary history is witness to the fact that women writers have always had a raw deal at any point of time in the literary tradition, whether it be in the mainstream canon of English literary tradition or otherwise. And so is it the case of the Bengali women Dalit writers. Ashamed, we sought forgiveness on behalf of the bare civilization O Tathagata, things are going on the same As they were, two and a half thousand years ago You fought hard, same are we doing.21 The truth strikes one on reading such lines – things really have not changed much over time, as has already been alluded to in the earlier section of the paper. Kalyani Thakur’s poem echoes similar sentiments that Uma Chakravarti expressed in her book, even at the risk of repetition, that dalits have not ‘experienced substantial change’ and still ‘have very little access to education, to health and to secure livelihood.’22 Poems like Kalyani Thakur’s compel one to take cognizance of the lived reality of our contemporary situation. Apart from Kalyani Thakur, names in the female Dalit community writing from Bengal include Smritikana Howlader, Manju Bala, Monalisa Das, Pallabi Mandal, Suniti Poddar, Swaptadeepa Adhikary, amongst others. In this large number of female voices, along with the considerable number of voices that resonate from the margins, is the one very strong and powerful voice of Kalyani Thakur Charal. Kalyani Thakur was born in 1965 in Bagula, Nadia district in West Bengal to a farmer’s family. Fighting the odds and all the difficulties that life on the margins entail, Kalyani Thakur managed to complete her education and secure a central government job in the railways. Staying away from home and fighting her own battle she constantly wrote to express herself – whether on the walls in the form of a magazine in the government hostel she lived in or expressing herself in print and editing the literary journal titled Neer. There are very few such socially aware and conscious writers like Kalyani Thakur. Her journal Neer meaning ‘Nest’ has had issues relating to folklore, folk culture, on environmental issues like the one devoted to disaster and its management that was published after the devastation caused by the tsunami, on the issue of refugees which today is an important global crisis, on the importance and crises of water. While one issue of the journal has a collection of women Dalit writers’ poems in Bengali, another is a collection of Dalit writing from all over India – in Marathi,

88  Nandini Saha in Tamil, Telegu, and Kannada, and all having been translated into Bengali – probably one of the first and only such instance. One of the other issues of the journal has a collection of critical essays by scholars of Dalit writing expressing their views on Bengali Dalit writing. Krishna Sen views this availability of Dalit literature by women and, if I may add, the voices from the margins being heard, as ‘a forward movement from agony to assertion’ (from a speech she delivered at a seminar on ‘Feminism and Beyond’ held at Jadavpur University, in 2014). Kalyani Thakur is assertive and she strongly believes she expresses herself more spontaneously in verse. Her collection of poems include Ashwo Series (2004, incidentally which is also the only one of her publications to be translated in whole), Je Meye Aandhar Gone (first published 2008), Chandalinir Kobita (2011), and Chandalini Bhone (2015). Her collection of essays is titled Chandalinir Bibriti (2012). Most of her works are usually published during the annual book fair in Kolkata. All her publications are also self-financed. Kalyani Thakur’s writing speaks of her struggle both in the public sphere and within her personal space. In spite of the fact that her writings give a glimpse of the regular life of an educated Dalit woman, she still finds it difficult to get publishers for her works and translators for her poems. She is an activist who has faith in her work and demands her due respect as a creative artist. Kalyani Thakur’s writing has strong images of power and its use and misuse is dealt with in incisive language. Her use of dark humour and symbolism in stories like ‘Abetting Suicide’ and ‘The Pen’ are markers of the literary finesse of her art. It is only by translating her works and letting her works reach a wider audience can we aid hers and the other women’s struggles to sculpt a space for themselves in the Dalit feminist politics in India. Is it justified that publishers look for ‘poetic quality’ in her works? Is it not imperative that such verses be read, that such works reach a wider readership? And anyways who decides the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ worth of a literary work? Is it not more critical to lend a voice to the hitherto inaudible voices from the margins? Intriguingly most of her contemporaries face much the same fate. Through her poems, essays, and short stories, Kalyani Thakur’s writings constantly reaffirm her position as a Bengali Dalit woman. Whether in her poems or her prose writings, she sketches the power relations that tend to influence the lives of the members of her Dalit community. Most of her characters are taken from the society and people around her. Thus it is a recounting of her life amongst the innocent, naïve, and resolute Dalit people. Her writings also document her interactions as a member of the important Matua cult of dalits in Bengal with members of the upper castes and upper middle classes in society. In her attempts to document her experiences as a Dalit she writes in all genres – poems, short stories, plays, nonfictional prose. ‘For me, writing poems is participating in cultural movement. I write poems to register my thoughts and feelings.’23 ‘I write to participate in the literary revolution. . . . My poetry is to write about the problems of regular life and to speak about the neglect that the dalits have suffered for

Speaking in a different voice 89 ages.’24 While true to her confession, her writings deal with issues from various walks of life and her recent collection of poems (ChandaliniBhone) are those that do not have titles. There are page numbers but no titles. The poems are nameless. Curiously it brings to mind the fact of how nameless actual individual human existence is. Not only for dalits but even upper caste men and women live not by their names but by the names of their caste identities. Kalyani Thakur’s poems are extremely personal poems – poems of love, of her life, of death, of her observations of society’s attitude towards the dalit, and more importantly of the Dalit women’s experiences. At some point history, identity, and the female perspective all combine to fire up these discourses in verse and prose but essentially boldly etched in the voice of a Dalit woman. While most of her poems have a prosaic quality, some like the one titled ‘Sunyata’ (in the collection of poems titled Je Meye Aandhar Gone or The Girl who Counts the Dark) meaning emptiness and void, almost have a musical quality to it. In her interviews Kalyani Thakur speaks of the importance of her caste identity that she intends to strongly underline in her writings. Having given up her central government job in the railways, Kalyani Thakur strives to earn her living as a writer battling the insurmountable hurdles that she is greeted with. She informs me that the first part of her autobiography has recently been published, even while I write this paper, and Dalit scholars I am sure would wait eagerly to get a glimpse of ‘her world.’ Some other names in this feisty group of Bengali Dalit women writers are Manju Bala and Smritikona Howlader. Manju Bala’s poems like ‘SadhobarSankha’ or ‘The Bengali Married Woman’s Bangle’ and ‘MagajDholai’ meaning ‘Mental Trauma’ are poems that depict the gendered and casteist ways of both the upper caste Hindu life and of a lower caste. Manju Bala writes in her easy style to speak of grave issues of gender discrimination or construction of the ritualistic life of a Hindu woman and caste-based ways of life in Bengal. Smritikona Howlader’s subjective viewpoint comes through her poems where she speaks of regular lives of the Dalit women. Smritikona’s poems like ‘Chaitra Mash,’ ‘HanshiKanna,’ and ‘Dashi’ are poems that delineate the regular lives in an ordinary village. The seasons’ and nature’s empathetic involvement with the regular highs and lows of the lives of the women of the lower castes are poignantly depicted in these poems. The list of names that Kalyani Thakur’s journal ‘Neer: Dalit Narir Dalit Kobita’ includes is a long one. The list includes names like Bina Roy Sarkar, Sujata Biswas, Lakshmi Mandi, Pallabi Mandal, Monalisa Das, and there are many more. The writings of these women depict a battle not only for existence but also for emergent identities that these women writers from Bengal fight everyday of their lives. Their lives as reflected in their works are a regular conflict in hostile environment on a day-to-day basis. There is not much room for fancy and imagination in their writing, so enmeshed is it in the depiction of the struggle and power politics they face in their lives. The expression of the oppression that they suffer and of their views regarding

90  Nandini Saha their lives in chains seems more exigent than the record of any imaginary account of far off lands or distant dreams. Bina Roy Sarkar’s poems like ‘JatpaterPochagola Sab’ meaning ‘The Rotten Carcass of the Caste System’ and ‘Protyasha’ or ‘Expectation’ are clear indictments of the caste system in Bengal and the concerted efforts to break free of such a ‘rotten’ system. Monalisa Das’s poems, contrary to the lucid use of the regular Bengali language used by the other members of this group of women Dalit writers, use the dialect of the Dalit community she belongs to. Her poems are titled in the same way: ‘KaitcheKal’ meaning ‘The days Pass By’ and ‘Raastato’ or ‘The Road.’ Several of these women write poems on Ambedkar and ChuniKotal.25 Some of their poems are a call for a revolution to break down barriers built by the age-old caste system. The struggle of these Dalit women writers for their emergent identities has just begun and probably has a long way to go before it is given its due. It is hence more elemental to focus on the publication of these voices of the women from the margins and let the word spread about the ‘difference’ in the lives of those on the fringes. It cannot be denied that it is central to feminist politics to accept that there is no alternative to reading or listening to these voices – their stories of struggle and endurance, to be able to democratize the movement for women’s empowerment. It is an undeniable fact that it is time to register these voices as an indispensable part of the social movements in Bengal. Kalyani Thakur’s works, along with the writings by all these Bengali Dalit women, recount tales of their lived experiences and are an expression of their suppressed Dalit selves. This makes it indispensable that their works be translated and circulated widely. The works of all Bengali Dalit women writing in contemporary times need to be brought to print – Smritikana Howlader, Manju Bala, Monalisa Das, Pallabi Mandal, Suniti Poddar, and of course Kalyani Thakur. And these are not the only ones. The inclusion of the experiences of these women residing on the margins as expressed through their literature will only help to enrich the feminist movement in Bengal. Feminist politics can no longer afford to disregard these women’s voices and relegate them to the sidelines of mainstream feminist dialogues.

Conclusion In conclusion, this paper’s intent was to map the writings of Bengali Dalit women writers in contemporary times. These women are still speaking or seeking in their speeches rather to reside in a nation that does not regard them as the ‘other.’ Whenever I have presented papers on Bengali Dalit writing the only reaction that I have received is the question whether this can be regarded as literature at all? Even the justification of writing and presenting papers on such literature is queried. A version of this paper was presented at the annual School for Women’s Studies seminar, Jadavpur University, in April 2016, which intended to map the intersectionalities of women with nation formation. In trying to deal with the writings by Bengali Dalit women

Speaking in a different voice 91 writers, it has been my endeavour to chart the different voices in which these women speak in their writings. Partha Chatterjee’s ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,’ in Recasting Women,26 would no longer suffice to evaluate the interphase between nation and gender. As Sharmila Rege points out, his categories seem inadequate in the recognition of the struggles of these women who Chatterjee categorizes as ‘women of the lower classes.’ Chatterjee’s categories, much like most other works on gender and nation in Bengal, are those where caste fails to figure as a category. ‘The continuance of a distinct cultural “problem” of the minorities is an index of the failure of the Indian nation to effectively include within its body the whole of the demographic mass which it claimed to represent.’27 Barring Chatterjee’s reference to the ‘ “problem” of the minorities’ or the exclusion of the category of caste, it is true that discourses of the nation have failed to include all categories of race, class, caste, and gender in its ambit. To end with what I started and what I have time and again reiterated through this paper – these voices need to be heard and read because they mark out that ‘different’ space in Indian feminist politics, which it is time to recognize. I hope a hundred years after Dr. Ambedkar we can at least show the strength to recognize the need to facilitate the printing and circulation of such literature for the betterment of Indian society in its entirety.

Notes 1 Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” WS-39. 2 Contursi, “Political Theology,” 3. 3 Guru, “Politics of Representation,” para 3. 4 Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” WS-42. 5 Ibid. 6 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 147. 7 Guru, EPW, 1995, 2549. 8 Menon, EPW, 1998. 9 Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” WS 41. 10 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 141. 11 Ibid., 144. 12 Guru, EPW, 1995, 2549. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 2548. 15 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 7. 16 Ibid., 143. 17 Geetha, Gender, 5. 18 Guru, EPW, 1995, 2549. 19 Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” WS-40. 20 Parts of this section of the paper have been presented as papers in seminars/conferences and also published as seminar proceedings titled “Emergent Identities: Women Dalit Writers from Bengal” in Emergent Identities in Literature. Edited by Margaret L. Pachuau and Thongam Dhanajit Singh. Noida: Headword Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2016. 21 Charal, Ashwo Series, 5. 22 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 141.

92  Nandini Saha 3 Dutta and Sarangi, Youtube interview. 2 24 This quote is from a lecture delivered by Kalyani Thakur in a Translation Workshop, organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, in December 2014. 25 All these poems have been taken from the collection titled Neer: Dalit Narir Dalit Kobita. 26 Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 233–253. 27 Ibid., 251.

Bibliography Chakravarti, U. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Kolkata: Stree Samya, 2003. Reprinted 2009. Page references are to the 2009 edition. Charal, K. T., ed. Neer: Dalit Narir Dalit Kobita. Kolkata: Chaturtha Duniya, 2011. Charal, K. T. “A Poem against War.” In Ashwo Series. Translated by S. Roy. Kolkata: Pratyush Publication, 2013. Chatterjee, P. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonia History, edited by K. Sangari and S. Vaid, 233–253. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1989 (Kali for Women). Contursi, J. A. “Political Theology: Text and Practice in a Dalit Panther Community.” www.jstor.org/stable/2059650 (accessed on 04.04.2016). Dutta, A. and J. Sarangi. “Conducted Youtube Interview of Kalyani Thakur.” www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2012&issid=46&id=3729 (accessed on 02.08.2016). Geetha, V. Gender. Kolkata: Stree Samya, 2002. Reprinted 2006. Page references are to the 2006 edition. Guru, G. “Dalit Women Talk Differently.” In Economic and Political Weekly (1995 October 14–21). Guru, G. “Politics of Representation.” www.india-seminar.com/2001/508/508/ gupal guru.htm (accessed on 12.08.2016). Ilaiah, K. Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. Ilaiah, K. Why I am not a Hindu. Kolkata: Samya, 1996. Third reprint 2012. Menon, N. “State/Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India.” In Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 5 (1998 January 31). Reproduced on JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/4406347?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (accessed on 05.08.2016). Pardeshi, P. “Dalit Women Talk Differently.” Dr Ambedkar Aani Streemukti Vaad. Pune: Krantisinh Nana Patil Academy. As quoted in Sharmila Rege’s article. Rege, S. “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position.” http://sharmilarege.com/papers (accessed on 02.04.2016).

6 Dance of dissent Dancing Tagore in the age of nationalism Aishika Chakraborty

It was May 8, 1926. On the occasion of his sixty-sixth birth anniversary at Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore staged his first full-length dance drama, Natir Puja (worship of a dancing girl). A one-off performance, this allwoman production marked the beginning of Tagore’s journey as a dancemaker, inaugurating a new genre of an experimental narrative performance interweaving text, dance, dialogue, and songs in theatrical action. An adaptation of his own poem, ‘Pujarini’ (the female worshipper), Natir Puja wrote in history the protesting body of Srimati, a court-dancer turned Buddhist nun, who was executed by the order of tyrannical Hindu king, Ajatsatru, for defying the royal order. The original Buddhist text from Avadanshataka, while offering Tagore an entry point, also served as a point of departure, as the poet invested in the murder of Srimati the glory of martyrdom, hailing her defiance that triumphed unequivocally over the coercive despotism of the state by choosing death over her faith. Situated in the immediate political context of the devadasi abolition movement and the moral anxiety surrounding the dancing woman’s body, Natir Puja also marked a deliberate idealization of the dancing girl by Tagore who wrote in history her deathdefying dance at a time when her eviction from nation’s history was being mandated by cultural nationalists of India.1 Critics saluted the ecstatic performance by Gauri Basu in the role of the Srimati as a ‘rare and bewitching aesthetic treat,’ where she ‘brought her inside out’ through an unstructured act of emotion.2 The play, as a precursor of its kind, came as a landmark moment in Bengal’s stage history, heralding the journey of Tagore’s eponymous heroines in radically transgressive roles. From uncertain beginnings, the innovative kinesthetic also made visible a discernible idiom and style, presaging an alternative dramaturgical force with a range of quotidian practices that increasingly gained artistic, theatrical, and intellectual credibility and popular acclaim in Calcutta’s cultural world. When the sanskritized body of the female dancer emerged pivotal to the contesting ideologies of colonialism and nationalism, Tagore stepped out of the nationalist frame in creating a structure-defying free style in his subversive texts. In a significant upending of the canonized tradition, a counter-discourse of performance was brought into being, contesting social,

94  Aishika Chakraborty historical, and ideological constructions of the female body. Resisting any simple and single nationalist paradigm, his heroines appear as willful and wayward agents in intriguingly intricate dance narratives of contemporary times. This paper maps the discursive trajectory of the first modern dance of India instituted by Rabindranath Tagore, setting off an array of eclectic idioms of diverse physical traditions within and against the hegemonic nationalist narrative of classical dance. With a quick overview of his early theatrical ventures, the last section of my paper revisits Tagore’s Chandalika that celebrates the unruly desire of an untouchable woman who reaches out to an ascetic monk infringing taboos of her bodily pollution. Overlapping the written and bodily texts, I move forward to postcolonial times to focus on a contemporary dance theatre, Tomari Matir Kanya (Daughter of your Earth), choreographed by a contemporary dancer, Manjusri ChakiSircar, who translates the cultural fiction into a contemporary saga of feminist resistance, contravening, by extension, the socio-sexual politics of the nation.

History, text, and style: the classicized body Natir Puja, premiered in 1926, nudged open new performative spaces for middle class respectable women beyond the gendered cultural tradition offering alternative forms of dance modernity through resistive bodily performance. The same year, in a landmark moment of Indian history, unearthed the ‘nation’s first relic of dance.’ After an extensive field session at the Indus valley a team of archaeologists discovered the dancing girl of Mahenjo-daro, simultaneously pushing back India’s civilizational timeline by a few centuries. Putting her right fist on her hip, she stands naked in ‘a half-impudent posture,’ says Mortimer Wheeler, with ‘legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet.’ Despite the absence of flesh this 10.6 cm metallic girl is ‘remarkable for its dynamism of pose and the cultural proclivities that it demonstrates.’3 Her discovery came at a reassuring moment when cultural nationalists desperately wanted a rejoinder to the colonizer’s charges of India’s civilizational lack, offering nationalists a chance to revive the dance tradition of the nascent nation. The succeeding trail of cultural revivalism, however, showed another twist in the tale. The ensuing journey of dance revivalism reveals that this nude metallic dancing girl, albeit her prehistoric worth, never quite appealed cultural nationalists as a ‘classical’ point of reference. Her insolent attitude with erect posture and relaxed feet was not the exact ‘style’ that the nation was looking for. Locating tradition within a more legitimate and authentic history, nationalists were impelled to realign tradition along the hierarchic classification of race, caste, and class. A newly reinvented classicized body came into being as a locus of the nation’s cultural purity, overriding aberrant, irregular, and non-Aryan others.

Dance of dissent 95 The construction of the sanskritized body was, however, never free from tension. In an influential essay, Uttara Asha Coorlawala explains the deep ambivalence that marked the discursive construction of the ‘body’ that emerged as ‘the central object’ in this contentious narrative, where nationalist rhetoric like ‘pure’ and ‘refinement’ or ‘samskriti’ surfaced as the ultimate arbiters of attire, emotions, subjects, repertory, and technique of a reinvented tradition. This Sanskritized body, in spite of being generously ‘endowed with mango breasts, wasp waists, and elephant hips,’ was to be sublime enough to purge ‘all emotions relating to lust, greed and sexuality.’4 Evicting the dark, sexual, and unabashed body from the newly upraised stage, nationalists thus reinvented a new persona of the classical Indian dancer as the ideal carrier of the nation’s honour, morality, and tradition. The classicized body was desired to express austere geometrical precision without explicit hip deflections or torso movements, wiping out all references of lust and greed, so far associated with the slanderous low-caste devadasis. Displaying virtuoso combinations of rhythms with head, hands, and feet with less and abbreviated torso movements, she stood out as an epitome of middle class housewifely respectability and a national pedestal of culture.5 Sanskritization as a legitimizing exercise of cultural nationalism also induced a deeper engagement with Vedic text and history.6 Harnessing the authority of tradition, revivalists also offered a nationalized ‘pan-Indian’ reading of aesthetic history, which coincided with the paramount ascendance of Sanskrit as the lingua franca of the ancient culture. Revivalists inherited the conviction from the renaissance reformers of the preceding generation that Brahmanic (Sanskrit) scripture, with its strength of authenticity and intellect, can only legitimize the cultural foundation of the desired reform. As scriptural tradition, the exclusive preserve of Brahmin males, emerged as the most powerful device to implement social change process of revivalism cut off its social roots amongst localized non-Brahmin communities.7 At the heart of the revivalist movement stood Rukmini Devi Arundale, the young Hindu wife of a British theosophist, George Sidney Arundale.8 It was under her aegis that sadir or dasiattam was rechristened as ‘BharataNatyam’ and a local dance of Tamilnadu was slowly elevated as the ‘emblem of the nation,’ making a straightforward claim to be ranked as the finest and highest achievement of national culture.9 Through an unproblematic ascendance from regional to national, local to hegemonic, Bharatanatyam was soon to be emerged as a quintessential marker of national heritage. In this transformed cultural sphere, Bharatanatyam emerged as a new discursive style of the upper caste middle class elite who were now ready to present the ‘essence’ of Indian culture in its portable kinetic version.10 According to Uma Chakravarti, the ‘crucible of change in the construction of dance traditions’ was a newly emerged ‘literati that was simultaneously regional, national and international in its orientation, comprised almost entirely of the upper castes, especially Brahmins.’11 They were the key players who salvaged dance from its social location in temples, where its earlier

96  Aishika Chakraborty ‘high’ traditions were regarded as having degenerated. As sexuality emerged as the highly charged symbol in the discourse on revival, Rukmini’s agenda primarily involved regeneration of ‘the ancient gold behind the degenerate dross that had accumulated over Indian dance.’12 In course of this decisive reclamation of tradition, Rukmini Devi not merely rinsed dance of the lascivious devadasis but also seized the performance space on behalf of the middle class women, dissociating dance from the stigma of prostitution, courtesanship, and temple service. Not accidentally thus Rukmini’s first public performance in 1935 coincided with the introduction of the devadasi abolition bill proposed by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy. Both movements fostered the obliteration of impure bodies who held and catered so far the cultural capital of the nation, erasing the newly stigmatized prostitute-performers from the sanitized space of performance. Priya Srinivasan finds the gains of revival rewarding for the elite women as Rukmini Devi used the male dominated nationalist frame to renegotiate a space in public sphere for high caste middle class women, displacing the devadasi women before them.13 Denouncing traditional dancers’ historical existence while appropriating their tradition, the revivalist movement dealt a severe blow to the original, integral link of the dance with human physicality, reduced from sensuality through historical circumstance to sexuality – from the holistic to the mechanical. In a meticulous analysis of the style and technique of Kalakshetra, dancer-scholar Ranjabati Sircar demonstrated the geometric precision of the new style, handed down to the posterity as ‘one of the finest fruitages of the revivalist movement.’14 The new dance reflected obsessive preoccupation with women’s sexuality, now developed at the cost of the separation of the upper and lower body. The body had been perfected through the pulled up abdominal muscles and backward sway of the pelvis – as if negating the openness of the mandala position. Linear clarity recalls the sculptural blueprint, but the two-dimensional staccato quality characteristic of Kalakshetra calls for extraordinary muscular tension, denying the body’s fluidity. Even abhinaya is pushed far beyond being stylized expression and set into rigorous technique.15 Here the traditional training system played a crucial role in refining and regimenting the body, breath, and will of dancers along starkly gendered norms. Although the training-system, which was rooted in the guru-shishya parampara, was sanctified by a religious aura, Sircar noted, ‘The gender dichotomy, without regard to the sexes involved, is clear. Here the system is authority, the body is object; the disciple is female, the guru male; the body feminine receptive, the system masculine penetrative.’16

The natural body and the free-styled modern Whereas classical dance erases the natural and the individualized body by shaping, moulding, controlling, and perfecting its given social structure, in

Dance of dissent 97 sharp contrast the modern dance privileges a natural body where feeling and form are organically connected. Taking the dancer’s body as the object of discourse, modern dance construed it through multiple constructions and deconstructions speaking about the body, stressing its materiality lived experiences, by scrutinizing and subverting patriarchal eye of representation.17 Drawing from the pioneering work of Elizabeth Demspter, it can be argued that Tagore’s innovative quotidian practices wrote new cultural meanings on the unmapped bodies of untrained dancers, making the ‘body’ itself the theme of his dance.18 Far from being a codified demonstration of a specific form, dance of Tagore was marked by an eclectic synthesis of styles, created by way of drawing, quoting, subverting, and manipulating varied dance lexicons. Tagore’s dance experiments, being ‘generous in its acceptance and generous in its bestowal’ refused to reproduce another national classical.19 Pallabi Chakravorty assumes rightly, ‘Tagore ultimately did not see his dance as something that would or could be codified to render the same movement vocabulary everywhere it was performed.’ Rather he ‘envisioned an integration of language with human emotion/empathy and somatic consciousness.’ Tagore’s involvement with Indian dance can be read as ‘the creative impulse of a polemist who rebelled against conventional notions of knowledge, tradition and identity.’20 In a historic point in time, much before Bharatanatyam, as we know it today, was elevated as the epitome of the national classical culture with Rukmini Devi Arundale, modern dance stormed the global stage under the auspices of Tagore and Uday Shankar, as a new transcultural aesthetic traversing across class, race, and national boundaries. Never keen to build up a dance tradition with an unchanging duplication of hand and body movements, Tagore refused to follow an art ideal that takes ‘fixed root in a narrow soil of tradition developing a vegetable character, producing a monotonous type of leaves and flowers in a continuous round of repetitions.’ His ideas resonated more clearly in his writings on Indian aesthetics where he uttered, ‘art is not a gorgeous sepulcher; immovable brooding over a lonely eternity of vanished years. It belongs to the procession of life, making constant adjustment with surprises, exploring unknown shrines of reality.’21 At a critical crossroad of colonialism and nationalism, Tagore’s travels across the globe brought several intercultural trends together, assimilating European expressionism with American modern, blending the grandeur of Kathakali with the flamboyance of kandy and chhau, interspersing Manipuri lasya with Gujarat’s cymbal dancing and garba. Despite playing a key role in cultural regeneration, he differed from the antiquarians by expressing his weariness with the routine formula of the pure and specialized forms. While nationalists revived antiquated or disappearing forms as unchanging and unchangeable treasures of India’s glorious tradition, Tagore used his cultural past as a catalyst for moving towards an artistic future. While nationalist projects were intent on safeguarding Indian culture from the corrupting experience of colonialism, Tagore pushed forward to create new

98  Aishika Chakraborty boundaries, carving simultaneously an alternative variant space within the inner domain of Indian culture.22 While speaking of dance as a non-mimetic but systematized correlation of motion playing through the human body, Tagore saw dance as a perfect articulation of his songs and poetry and took the expressionist line of choosing movements that would bring out the emotional action inherent in the text. In a counter-discourse of performance, his dance challenged rigid formality and artificiality of classical technique, to the superficiality of themes and to the obsessive preoccupation with religiosity over material realities. According to dance historian Mandakranta Bose, this aesthetic scheme made Rabindra-Nritya an essential constituent of Indian modernity by claiming for the individual artist the unfettered freedom of imagination and expression.23 And, the modernity evident in his literary creations is suffused throughout his abstract and surrealistic paintings where the rhythm of dancing lines comes alive. In this visual representation, dance is portrayed in its unbound openness, as ‘neither classical nor Western but reflective of a particular mood or ethos.’24 With a drastic departure from the stylized romanticism of the Bengal School of Art or the nationalist representation that idealized woman as Bharat Mata or woman-as-nation, Tagore’s art is best pronounced in the iconoclastic representation of women where he introduced them as unplaced, unmapped, and of varied complexions. In Tagore’s paintings, women emerge as individuals, in their own self.25 And in his dance too, Tagore broke apart the stereotypes of astanayikas as per Natyashastra’s nayikabheda. Departing from the trajectory of the classical-spiritual, Tagore chose real women of flesh and blood to occupy the centre stage of his dance dramas. Prarthana Purkayastha has redefined Indian modern dance as a veritable expression of colonial modernity as the bravura is marked by absolute rupture from temple and court tradition. Detailing a combination of factors that had triggered the dialogue between the dancing body and its sociopolitical surround, Purkayastha finally underpins the politics of nationalism as the deciding pull: “a complex relationship shared by the body with ideas around ‘nation’ and the concept of the ‘national’ which gave rise to an altogether different representation of Indian identity in dance,’ she claims, ‘one that openly and consciously celebrated a dialogical relationship between India and the world beyond it.’ ”26

Setting the stage: the musical, the lyrical, and the theatrical A visible shift occurred at the turn of the century when Tagore put in order a whole new repertoire of dance dramas with a discernible shift in style – from the lyrical to dramatic, from the musical to histrionic. The years between 1908 and 1925 were a period of brisk experiments, trying out free style with non-dance theatrical movements and mimes. Though there was ‘no particular posture or fashion of expression,’ Amita Sen remembered that Sharodatsav (the autumn festival) in 1908 came as a landmark performance with a full grown dance text which ‘transcended the elementary stages of

Dance of dissent 99 dancing.’27 After a successful theatrical performance of Raja (The King of Dark Chamber1911), Tagore staged his full-fledged dance-theatre, Phalguni (a celebration of spring), in 1915. A ‘splendid dramatic treat,’ according to Indian Daily News (January 28, 1916), it drew applause from the nationalist organ, Bengalee (January 23, 1916) for its ‘free and bold’ performance. ‘On the whole,’ the review ran, ‘it was the indomitable spirit of the Bohemians that was ruling over the stage.’ The critic added that ‘we felt a complete relief when we saw that the young actors of Phalguni did not belong to any particular sect of histrionic art.’28 An alternative regional identity was already in the making on the Calcutta stage that refused to acknowledge any specific sect of dance, soon to be branded as the national classical. Further mention was made about the riveting atmosphere, wonderfully improvised dress, equipment and stage furnishing, designed by the artistic genius of Abanindranath Tagore, the champion of the Bengal school of art.29 If Phalguni was a curtain raiser, Vasanta, another musical staged in 1923, was a chartbuster. Untrained and amateur, performers made their marks by spontaneous bodily movements in this improvised choreography. ‘The dance was neither classical nor folk,’ recalled Shantidev Ghosh who joined the carnival as a young performer. ‘In the absence of any previous training we were advised to scatter and spread all over the stage making brisk and sprightly strides.’30 With the last song, ‘Ore pathik, Ore premik,’ Gurudev started dancing round and round the stage, joining hands together with Leonard Elmhirst. Amritabazar Patrika reflects, ‘the vision arose in our mind of the East and West joining hands in the dance of destruction of the present which forebodes the unknown fruit of radiant future.’31 Indian Daily News applauded the free-spirited bravura of Tagore who embodied the advent of spring stealing a march on others. Nimble, virile, graceful and master of the histrionic art, he was the life and soul of the whole performance. Now dancing with the chorus of boys and girls, now beating the time with a graceful move of his hands and always adding his mellow voice to the chorus, he was here, there and everywhere throughout the play. Who thought that he was on the other side of 60?32 Before long, Tagore, wary with these non-dance theatrics, invited Buddhimantra Singh from Tiperah to impart Manipuri classical lessons to young boys. Gosthalila (the dance of the shepherd boys) was introduced as an ostentatious move of inculcating good physique amongst boys. Shantidev Ghosh recalled, ‘[e]very evening, in the open court, the boys with bare bodies used to practise dancing together, in tune with the mridangam.’33 And, girls soon followed suit and a more serious engagement with Manipuri started with the advent of Nabakumar Singh, who joined in 1926 as a regular teacher and a chorographic collaborator of Tagore’s dance dramas. While rehearsals went on behind closed doors in a private corner of Konark, the

100  Aishika Chakraborty first show, a special item of Manipuri Raas, was held in public to welcome Lord Lytton, the then Governor of Bengal, to Santiniketan.34 Gradually in the pedagogic village of Santiniketan, ‘pure dance forms’ were absorbed and arranged with the ‘dance of emotion’ resulting in a splendid mixture of a modern body language.35 The dance dramas of the 1930s marked a definite transition from loosely choreographed mimetic acts of emotion (or bhabanritya) to a distinct flair of movements, exhibiting an assimilation of varied physical traditions. Critics marked the conspicuous panache of Santiniketan dance, which showed signs of an evolving art – ‘a synthesis of all the forms handed down by tradition.’36 The dance texts penned by Tagore during his late years again reflected a different mind of the genius, each reflecting the socio-political tension of his time, deriving ideas from alternative cultural repertoire of India. Tagore set his narrative not merely within the power relations between men and women but also against the entire web of patriarchal structure that shape and condition his characters. As Tagore privileged his dancers to write their voice, agency, and subjectivity in the most intriguingly subversive dance dramas of the twentieth century, he facilitated a new identity formation for women dancers, setting them free in a new future of performance.

Chandalika: breaching lines of caste and gender While the Buddhist text of Shardulakarnavadan is acknowledged as the main source of inspiration in the prelude of Chandalika, two of Tagore’s poems, ‘Kuar Dhare’ (by the side of the well, 1905) and ‘Jalapatra’ (water pot, 1932) stand out clearly as its proximate precursors. Significant is the common use of recurrent imageries like the ‘well,’ the ‘water pot’ (as the signifier of ostracism), ‘a thirsty man’ (as an ideological intervention), and ‘an untouchable girl’ (as the desiring protagonist). Chandalika, the dance drama, however, far exceeds the elusive imageries of the two poems in privileging the visceral transgression of the untouchable women in devising a far more strident attack against the hierarchic structure of Brahmanic patriarchy. The historic setting is in Sravasti, an ancient town of India, where by the fifth century BC the protestant movement of Buddhism made rapid inroads into the power-structure of the historic Magadhan Empire. Deprioritizing Brahmanical privileges, Buddha did not merely divest Hinduism of their religious dominance but also supplanted Brahmanic priesthood with a new rank of Buddhist monks. Chandalika takes its dramatic spin when Prakirit, the untouchable girl braves her caste to offer water to Ananda, the Buddhist monk, who stops by her well on a sweltering summer day to quench his thirst. While offering water to the monk, Prakrirti does not merely infringe her bodily pollution but also falls in love with this serene monk demanding, almost as a matter of right, a consummation of her desire. The drama develops into a heightened moment of tension when Prakriti implores her

Dance of dissent 101 sorcerer mother, Maya, to seduce and bring the monk back to her by casting her magic spell. As the hesitant mother takes up the challenge to reclaim the monk by conquering his oath of celibacy, the tussle between Ananda’s ascetic renunciation and chandali’s unbridled sexual desire unfolds an eerie combat between the two worlds, summoning the magical, the supernatural, and the unworldly. In its immediate political backdrop, Chandalika was set against Mahatma Gandhi’s Harijan movement, which came in the wake of Ambedkar’s demand for a separate electorate for depressed castes critiquing and challenging the politico-moral unity of the Hindu nation. In September 1932, Gandhi began his historic fast at Yeravada jail in Poona to contain the Dalit’s constitutional demand. In a significant note of solidarity, Tagore too vetoed for social and individualistic solution to the problem of untouchability though he came closer to Ambedkar in discovering an alternative solution to India’s deep-seated social injustice. Sekhar Banerjee argues in a discerning study that through Buddhism Tagore invoked a tradition from the cultural repertoire of Indian civilization, which signified transcendence from the restrictive strictures of caste and thus confirmed his idea of an inclusive historic nation. Years later Ambedkar too found in Buddhism a true solution to the social problems for the nation’s outcasts and organized mass conversion as a collective celebration of protest. Mahatma’s harijan movement faced stiff resistance from orthodox Hindus and when Bengal witnessed a particularly nasty high-caste Hindu backlash, Tagore penned Chandalika as his rejoinder.37 Austere and bold in its rendition, the first performance of Chandalika on August 17, 1933 was a lucid recital of the entire narrative by Tagore, who played both the characters of the play – Prakriti (daughter) and Maya (mother). In a post-performance review, The Advance observes that Chandalika ‘is a mystical representation of the problem of untouchability which is pitched to the summit of a sublime imagery rendered in the inimitable prose-verse of the poet.’38 Reviewing a later production staged in 1939, The Statesman draws attention to the ‘technique of the dance drama,’ which was, according to the reporter, ‘in many ways a revival of the ancient Indian form in which the dialogue is converted into songs as background music, and is symbolically interpreted by the characters through the dances.’39 Tagore who was of course responsible for both the libretto and the score also choreographed the dances, this time with the help of trained classical dancers. In general, ‘the symbolism of the Manipuri school was followed by the blending of South Indian styles.’ A couple of compositions also reflected ‘Buddhist dances of the Tibetan type,’ which gave the dance drama added richness. The review maintains that ‘the music was also very individualistic and obviously aimed at the primary function of giving expression to different thoughts and emotions and sometimes even to a passing mood.’40 The same report drew attention to the graceful dancing by Nandita Devi in the role of the untouchable girl, which reflected a keen sensitiveness to

102  Aishika Chakraborty delicate difference in emotional expressions. On February 9, 1939, the Hindustan Standard notes that the prolific use of Manipuri and Kathakali in the compositions where Kelu Nair, ‘the court dancer to the Maharaj of Travancore’ played a key part. Finally, however, it was ‘the magic touch of a transcendental poetic genius’ that blended motion and music into a ‘superbartistic creation.’41 And unlike Tagore’s other plays like Tasher Desh and Shapmochan, the stage craft of Chandalika, designed by Nandalal Bose, Pratima Devi, and Surendranath Kar, wore a minimalist look. Amritabazar Patrika adds, ‘the simplicity and economy of stage-paraphernalia have been observed almost to barrenness. The costumes are all “dulce et decorum,” interpreting the personalities they clothe.’42 In her autobiography Mrinalini Sarabhai, who joined Santiniketan as a young dancer in 1939, remembered clearly the day when Tagore called her in his room to hand over the script of Chandalika and said, ‘Here is the music. This is the story. Dance it as you wish.’ Mrinalini was thrilled as she later recalled, ‘He gave me a leading role in his dance drama Chandalika and asked me to choreograph my own part. It was the first time that Bharatanatyam was introduced in Gurudev’s dance drama and he appreciated the style very much.’43 While Mrinalini studied Kathakali and Manipuri under veteran gurus like Kelu Nair and Amubi Singh respectively, she felt the urge to find new forms from traditional techniques in order to express herself. Recent scholars shed new light on Chandalika reading Tagore’s politics of performance from different vantage points. As a postcolonial performer, Ranjabati Sircar, who made her performance in the role of Prakriti memorable in its contemporary retelling, made sure that Prakriti should have a strong physicality, rough hands, and a resilient torso while the body’s vulnerability has also been emphasized to convey the unwieldy emotional truth. Sircar said, ‘I tried to explore them as oppositions within the body (the push and pull that create muscular tension) and between different kinds of movement (hard and soft).’ Studying the contrasting imageries and metaphors used in the narrative, she said, ‘Repeatedly, I found images of contrast: aridity/abundance; heat/coolness; the sun/the well; fire/water; earth/sky; mother/ monk; attachment/denunciation.’ A line of development can be established in the journey of Chandalika where the character travels ‘from micro to macro, self to universe, from selfish desire to self-realization. I saw Chandalika as a saga of transformation, where Prakriti, caught in a conflict of opposing forces, finds resolution in her selfhood.’ For Ranjabati, ‘the death of the mother signifies the beginning of a new life for Prakriti and also the death of old values and beliefs and the movement towards a new world.’44 Sutapa Chaudhuri in a recent essay explores the dichotomies further, ‘It is through dance that Prakriti gains her freedom from the constricting binaries of pure/impure, body/soul, ethical/unethical, self/other that bind her.’ Her dance ‘becomes a medium that liberates the soul and the body from a repressive culture that negates her identity, self-worth and female desire.’45

Dance of dissent 103 A rather intriguing analysis has been offered by Esha Niyogi De who focuses on the dancing body of the desiring woman as the embodiment of desire, degradation, and also of her defiance and dissent. While taking in stride the disgrace perpetuated by psycho-biological hierarchies, Prakriti defies all existing norms by demanding reciprocity from the elite ascetic man. It is Ananda who breaks the taboo of bodily pollution by accepting water from Prakriti and by gracing her with an exalted status with the most decisive refrains on egalitarian humanism. For Prakriti, it is not enough to be accorded in principle the dignity of commonality with a man from a higher order, but it is also imperative that the principles of equality and autonomous worth be embodied in socio-sexual practice such that the crucial caste/race boundary between the pure and the polluted body be dismantled.46 According to Niyogi De, Tagore mobilizes the Hindu metaphysics of gender by setting the ascetic purush or male principle, the one repudiates worldliness, against prakiriti or the female fertile woman/earth who embodies pravritti or the cravings of this world. Going further ahead of the Victorian principle of manhood or Indian nationalist abstraction of masculinity, Niyogi De argues that Tagore invokes a critical query striding across ‘the caste/race division of purity and pollution to shake the foundation of contemporary filiative order.’47 In Chandalika, Prakriti begins to interpret the vocabulary of human equality not in original metaphysical usage but, rather, viscerally, in a corporeal way. The course of exchanges with her mother unfolds constant shifts and transitions in the dance drama as the rhetorical tone of Prakriti’s lyrics acquires more histrionic and intense matter-of-fact edges with escalating tension embodied in her disruptive bodily movements. At the end, Prakriti prevails upon her mother to cast her mayajal or magic spell to entice the monk. The drama takes another turn, another momentum.

Tomari Matir Kanya: dancing resistance in a contemporary dance theatre Moving forward in postcolonial India, the last section of my paper will look at the contemporary performance of Chandalika, renamed as Tomari Matir Kanya (Daughter of Your Earth, 1985, hereafter TMK) by feminist anthropologist-choreographer, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar. Interlacing two existing textual versions by Tagore, Manjusri’s choreography came up with a distinct dance-text, representing and problematizing the various frames of textual and performative references. In juxtaposing the tactile and the verbal, dance and dialogue, Manjusri foregrounds the mother-daughter dyad at the core of the performance, carving out an autonomous feminine space beyond the male/Hindu/upper caste religious order. As Maya resolves to conquer the sexual abstinence of Ananda with her seductive spell, her unrelenting magic power overpowers

104  Aishika Chakraborty not only the monk’s sexual abstinence but takes on, by extension, the religious dominance of the Brahmanical-Buddhist priesthood and the entire patriarchal order. Transforming an ancient Jataka tale into a feminist text of resistance, Manjusri takes the story even farther. Displacing the love plot between the ascetic and the untouchable, TMK works within/without a phallogocentric universe, taking the untouchable female body as the central object of discourse to counter the Brahmanic patriarchal game of seclusion, alienation, and discrimination. Inscribing dance as her discernible signature in the contemporary feminist movement, Manjusri steals the language of power to write toward the difference, turning individual woman’s struggle into a wider narrative of subaltern revolt. The textual journey of Chandalika culminates in the collective political resistance of TMK when Manjusri transforms the solo act of Chandalika into a choral drama making deft use of the collective body of dancers to double as the outcast’s revolt against oppression. From disembodied entity to collective stand-in, the chorus appears under various guises to participate, alternate, and symbolize the trauma and triumph of the untouchable protagonist intensifying the dramatic mood of the play. Departing from the standard representation of Chandalika as a shunned pariah thrown into the off-centre corner, Manjusri places her at the centre, teamed up with a cluster of untouchable bodies, bracing together and leaning against each other as a cohesive community. This unified chorus of empathetic bodies vindicates the power of many voices speaking as one when the dehumanization of Prakriti corresponds to the disgrace of her entire community. In Manjusri’s choreography, untouchables round up together in one body; they quiver in pain, roll and wriggle on the fulcrum and also rise up together against the order joining hands in one clenched fist, in a gesture of defiance. Transgressive of the sanskritized body, they throw up legs in open pelvic movements and flick in frontal kicks drawing heavily from the indigenous folk and martial arts. They own the centre and also the corner, claiming the stage, each time with unprecedented aggression. The narrative faces sudden disruptions when high caste flower sellers intrude the space of the untouchable to remind the audience that caste is crucial in maintaining boundaries, powerful enough to divide women amongst themselves, erasing the possibility of sisterhood.48 ‘Impurity’ emerges once again the repressive ideological arsenal as a means of discrimination when upper caste flower sellers set boundaries of segregation on behalf of the Brahmanic patriarchy. Bedecked in bright silk and shining jewelries, they make proud entries, in condescending classical style, weaving flawless geometric lines and shapes. They spread a little at the front before tightening up in circles within themselves. They divide the stage along sharp diagonal lines, drawing borders, pushing back and kicking out the impure outcast bodies from their marked sanitized zones. At that critical juncture, Ananda arrives at the doorstep of Prakriti seeking water from the untouchable girl. In a decisive moment of transgression,

Dance of dissent 105 when Prakriti leads the way to offer water to Ananda, the untouchable ensemble of women joins her in a body to offer water to the thirsty monk in a collective act of defiance. As the entire stage falls into stark silence with a sole streak of light coming from the rear left wing, the cluster proceeds to the wing in a chiaroscuro of hope, hesitance, and creeping courage. In an unpredictable choreographic move, Manjusri does not show the monk on stage, rendering him ‘invisible’ as an absent performing body. He remains as a signifier of liberation and desire, manifest in Prakriti’s recurrent allusion to love, sin, desire, dissent, rebellion, and emancipation. A possible explanation regarding the deliberate erasure of Ananda from stage has been offered by Esha Niyogi De, In choosing not to personify the ascetic on stage, Manjusri effectively arrests any inclination her spectators might have of linking her work with the Hindu imagery of saffron-clad virile celibacy that had begun to populate commercial media and government-sponsored television by the mid-1980s. This choreographic choice, in other words, blocks the possible suture, and seeming agreement, of her liberal indigenous Hindu imagery of saffron robes with the Hindu nationalism and ‘misogyny germinating in the popular gaze in popular media creates a feminist spectatorship at odds with the prevailing scopic drive.’49 Tagore’s Chandalika outstripped the Buddhist legend in condoning the reciprocity desired by the untouchable Dalit girl from the ascetic man thereby sending a moral panic within and beyond boundaries of caste. Manjusri moves a step further by privileging the untouchable girl’s agency with or without any empowering male agent. Prakriti’s refusal to yield to the sexual craving of a princely suitor appears as a threat to the controlling authority of the higher castes. This rejection triggers a deeper moral anxiety, defying in no uncertain terms the power relations spawned by the Brahmanic order where the untouchable girl’s sexuality seems available to the upper caste men. As a South Asian postcolonial feminist choreographer, Manjusri reasserts her indigenous cultural autonomy, resisting not merely the bowdlerizing policies of the mainstream national but also decolonizes the female dancing body of the inherited and imported legacies of colonialism. Dancing beyond the nationalist canonical structure, the sanitized Rabindrik and Shankar’s new-orientalist canon of dance, Manjusri exudes another unmatched style, offsetting the inherent self-objectification of the female body. Seizing Tagore to fit into contemporary cultural experience of Dalit movements, TMK stands out as a performance of dissent against Brahmanic patriarchy. Imbued with second wave feminist thought and a new wave dance movement, Manjusri returned to India in early 1980s. But this was an India that witnessed a recreation of a particular vision of a nation in mainstream

106  Aishika Chakraborty media, reinforcing the Hindu Indianness as the symbol of its dominant cultural identity. With the proliferation of masculine Hindu chauvinism and middle class consumerism, the Sunday soap operas on the national television network began to telecast homogenized narratives of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the serials that reiterated a new Hindu (national) identity, legitimizing once again a caste-gendered hierarchic order. Given the anxieties around the border, sparked off by secessionist movements in Punjab, Kashmir, and the North East, and the discomforts surrounding the backlash against the Mandal Commission at the heart of India, it became all the more necessary to rebuild a public culture, which could visibly ensure and demonstrate Hindutva sentiments and middle class sense of entitlements. But, the 1980s also saw autonomous women’s movements gaining new grounds by seeking justice for Mathura, Roop Kanwar, and Shah Bano, questioning the authority of the state on issues of death, rape, sati, and talaq. Tomari Matir Kanya, subsuming Dalit feminism within a liberal middle class feminist framework, is incontrovertibly located within this political landscape. Staged widely all over India, from Konark temple festival to state sponsored television (Doordarshan), the performance contravened to a certain extent the dominant visual economy of the nation. But whether the successful staging of a dance drama forged a necessary connection between performance of protest and actual lived conditions of the Dalit communities of Bengal is a matter of some introspection. In what way does Manjusri position her feminist vision within/against the prevailing visual culture of the nation? Did the staged performance of Chandalika, by grafting Dalit marginality on high caste elite women bodies, strike a chord with reality? Or was Manjusri, a liberal left feminist, oblivious to the actual caste conflicts of her own state, believing in the ‘political myth’ that caste-politics never existed in communist-ruled Bengal? Indeed, how and why did caste, hyper-visible in colonial Bengal till 1947, disappear all of a sudden, from popular political discourse in postcolonial times?50 Recent researches have made significant inroads into the ‘notoriously understudied’ caste politics in West Bengal, alluding to several factors that actually conjured up this myth, while abetting the upper caste/upper class to retain their continued and undisputed hegemony in every sphere of life including formal politics, economy, and culture. In his incisive critique of Bengal caste politics by the communist state, Dwaipayan Sen finds the ‘disappearance’ of a ‘deliberate and intentional process,’ which is certainly a willed and coercive process, sustained and perpetuated by several forms of ‘sexual, corporeal and psychological violence’ carried out by the upper caste bourgeois aspirants in power.51 Far from going into decline after 1947, caste-based politics ‘enjoyed a robust life’ in Bengal, Sen maintains. This is achieved by a consistent ‘de-emphasizing of caste’ as a ‘superstition’ in favour of more palatable idioms like class struggle as the legitimate, progressive, and germane category and as ‘modern tropes of social justice by

Dance of dissent 107 left-liberal ideologies.’52 In a situation of stark discrepancy, while the state records the second largest number of scheduled castes in India, leadership of the Party had been almost monopolized by the three upper castes, Brahmin, Vaidya, and Kayastha. Whether Manjusri’s critique of Brahmanic patriarchal politics and exploitation of low-caste women’s labour and sexuality actually opened up new cultural space and opportunities for low class/caste women is not beyond scrutiny. Her intellectual engagement with urban middle class ‘body’ of performers undeniably reinvented yet another regimented repertoire of hegemonic modern aesthetics as a parallel development to contemporary classical culture. With her strong reservations against loose-bodied folksy and libidinous Bollywood or filmy dance, Manjusri inadvertently moved in conformity with the progressive elite’s obsessive crusade against apasanskriti or decadent culture, which created yet another rank and hierarchy of high bred performers in the neo-liberal cultural space. But again, no one can outweigh her contribution to feminist dance movement, as the way she reversed and confused the gendered and sexed definition of dance patriarchy on the Bengali-Indian stage by ‘claiming movements from the androcentric worlds’ of folk and martial arts for her female dancers.53 Not just a fictional retelling of an outcast in revolt; TMK remains with us as a viable critique of Hindu nationalist canons of dance as Manjusri countenanced the collective strength of the female body – in fierce and sensuous celebration of sexuality, in unbound jumps with open pelvic and leg-raising gestures, affronting in one go the genteel middle class and nationalist sensibility.

Afterthought I wonder whether Chandalika still carries the same appeal in today’s India given the escalating controversies around religion, caste, and gender, all inextricably linked with ideas of nation and nationalism. Can it generate the same impact and excitement today – like Ramayana, Ramleela, or Krishnaleelas? Is Tagore still of relevance? The Dalit movement has changed its course and Buddha’s liberal rhetoric has been critiqued by feminists. Yet, the questions raised by the outcast mother-daughter, standing by the well on a scorching summer day, interrogating and critiquing notions of birth, sexuality, and pollution still reverberates across time and space. All this echoes more loudly because on January 17, 2016, a young Dalit student of Hyderabad University, Rohith Vemula, committed suicide, leaving an unanswerable question for this nation and its people: Maybe I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. . . . All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.

108  Aishika Chakraborty I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. . . . I don’t believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars.54 Other words, other Chandalikas. An other nation?

Notes 1 See also Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism, 31. 2 Cited in Chakraborty, Rangamancha O Rabindranath, Samakaleen Pratikria, 214. 3 Cited from www.quora.com/Culture-of-India-What-significance-do-we-findabout-the-bronze-Dancing-girl-of-Mohenjodaro accessed March 4, 2019. 4 Coorlawala, Uttara Asha, “The Sanskritized Body,” Dance Research Journal 36, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 56. 5 Ibid. 6 Discovered in fragments between 1866 and 1888 and ‘pieced together’ in 1894, the texts of Natyashastra and the subsequent reference of Abhinavagupta (1930s) to the dance movements (Karanas) in temple sculptures rendered the classical the much-needed historic antiquity. Soneji, (ed), Bharatanatyam, XXV. 7 Coorlawala, “The Sanskritized Body,” 53. 8 It was in 1928 on the deck of a ship to Australia that Rukmini Devi met the celebrated ballerina Anna Pavlova who was then touring that country with her ballet troupe. While Rukmini was enthusiast about learning Western ballet, Pavlova advised her to return to her ‘roots’ and revive the ‘classical’ Indian dance. Thus, after a brisk experimental balletic performance at Kalakshetra in Madras, Rukmini discarded her ballet tutu forever to emerge as a key player in the revivalist movement of Indian dance. 9 Janet O’Shea, Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage: At Home in the World (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2009), 83. 10 Rustom Bharucha makes a brilliant observation on the proliferation of sanksritization in the postcolonial context. In an overflow of nationalist ardour in the post-colonial nation, sanskritization, by investing an unmistakable intellectual authority, also spawned a system of power that promote(s) cultures on the basis of political exigencies, fashion, and the demands of international market. Bharucha, Theatre and the World, 10. 11 Chakravarti, “The Devadasi as an Archaic Historical Artefact,” 26. 12 Ibid. 13 Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 110. 14 Chakraborty, (ed), Ranjabati, a Dancer and Her World, 45. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 47. 17 See Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporality,” 81–97. 18 Dempster, Elizabeth. “Women Writing the Body,” 224. 19 Tagore, On Art and Aesthetics, 53–54. 20 Pallabi Chakravorty, “From Interculturalism to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, eds. Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 247. 21 Tagore, On Art and Aesthetics, 55. 22 Ibid., 24. 23 Bose, “Indian Modernity and Tagore’s Dance,” 195.

Dance of dissent 109 24 Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 74. 25 See, Jasmin Cohen, “Nationalism and Painting in Colonial Bengal”, SIT Study Abroad, independent study project collection, 2012. 26 Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, 7. 27 Sen, Joy in All work, 38. 28 Chakraborty, Rangamanacha, 127. 29 Ibid., 129–130. 30 Ghosh, “Tagore and Manipuri Dance,” 15. 31 Chakraborty, Rangamancha, 183. 32 Ibid., 182. 33 Ghosh, “Tagore and Manipuri Dance,” 69–70. 34 Ghosh Shantidev, Gurudeb Rabindranath O Adhunik Bharatiya Nritya (Kolkata: Ananda, 1983), 20. 35 Sen, Joy in All Work, 25. 36 Chakraborty, Rangamancha O Rabindranath, 288. 37 Banerjee, “Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts.” 38 Ibid., 264. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 272. 41 Ibid., 273. 42 Ibid. 43 Sarabhai, The Voice of the Heart, An Autobiography, 55. 44 Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 80. 45 Sutapa Chaudhuri, “Signifying the Self: Intersections of Class, Caste and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s Dance Drama Chandalika (1938),” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 2, no. 4 (2010): 552. 46 Niyogi De, Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman, 106. 47 Ibid. 48 Chakravarti, Gendering Caste, 34. 49 Niyogi De, Empire, Media, 162. 50 Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, (ed), The Politics of Caste in West Bengal (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016), 6. 51 Sen, “An Absent-Minded Casteism?” 108. 52 Ibid., 106. 53 Purkayastha, Indian Modern Dance, 132. 54 The Wire Staff, “My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Rohith Vemula’s Searing Letter is an Indictment of Social Prejudices”, https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemulaletter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices accessed April 2017.

Bibliography Banerjee, S. “Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nation, and Its Outcasts.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2013). Bharucha, R. Theatre and the World: Essays on Performance and Politics of Culture. Columbia: South Asia Publications, 1990. Bose, M. “Indian Modernity and Tagore’s Dance.” In Rabindranath Tagore: Reclaiming a Cultural Icon, edited by K. M. O’ Connell and J. T. O’Connell. Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2009. Chakraborty, A., ed. Ranjabati, A Dancer and Her World: Selected Writings of Ranjabati Sircar. Kolkata: Thema, 2008. Chakraborty, R. Rangamancha O Rabindranath, Samakaleen Pratikria. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1995.

110  Aishika Chakraborty Chakravarti, U. Gendering Caste, Through a Feminist Lens. Kolkata: Stree Samya, 2003. Chakravarti, U. “The Devadasi as an Archaic Historical Artifact: Culture and Nation in a Transitional Moment.” In The Moving Space: Women in Dance, edited by U. S. Munsi and A. Chakraborty. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2018. Chakravorty, P. “From Interculturalsim to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by A. Carter and J. O’Shea, 273–283. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Chakravorty, P. “Intercultural Synthesis, Radical Humanism and Rabindranritya: Reevaluation of Tagore’s Dance Legacy.” South Asia Research 33, no 3 (2013): 245–260. Cohen, J. “Nationalism and Painting in Colonial Bengal”, SIT Study Abroad, independent study project collection, 2012. Dempster, E. “Women Writing the Body: Let’s Watch a Little how She Dances.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by A. Carter and J. O’Shea, 229– 235. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Ghosh, S. Gurudev Rabindranath O Adhunik Bharatiya Nritya. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1983. Ghosh, S. “Tagore and Manipuri Dance.” In Something Old, Something New: Rabindranath Tagore, 150th Birth Anniversary Volume, edited by P. Pratapaditya, 69–70. Mumbai: Marg, 2011. Lopez y Royo, A. “Classicism, Post-Classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s Work: ReDefining the Terms of Indian Contemporary Dance Discourse.” South Asia Research 23, no 2 (2003): 153–169. Niyogi De, E. Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. O’Shea, J. Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage: At Home in the World. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2009. Purkayastha, P. Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Sarabhai, M. The Voice of the Heart, An Autobiography. Ahmedabad: Darpana, 2004. Sen, A. Joy in All Work. Kolkata: Book Font Publication, 1999. Sen, D. “An Absent-Minded Casteism?” In The Politics of Caste in West Bengal: New Delhi, edited by C. Uday, G. Heierstad, and K. B. Nielsen. Routledge, 2016. Soneji, D., ed. Bharatanatyam: A Reader. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. Srinivasan, P. Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Tagore, R. On Art and Aesthetics, A Selection of Lectures, Essays and Letters. Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 2005. Wolff, J. “Reinstating Corporality: Feminism and Body Politics.” In Meaning in Motion, New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by J. C. Desmond. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

Part III

Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances

7 Towards reparative readings Reflections on feminist solidarities in a troubling present J. Devika

The present reflections are on the challenge of building feminist solidarities, a need all the more urgent in the face of rising Hindutvavaadi politics in India. I seek to reflect on them from the state of Kerala, where feminism has been irreversibly pluralized in the new millennium and where feminists have often been implicated deeply in ‘governmentalized feminism,’1 which arrived through global initiatives towards gender mainstreaming in roughly the same period, between the mid-1990s and the turn of the century – through the Urban Basic Services for the Poor Programme of early – mid1990s right up to the massive network of women’s self-help groups set-up under the state’s poverty alleviation mission, called the Kudumbashree, in the late-1990s. Like the feminist movement elsewhere in India, feminism in Kerala too has had a complicated engagement with the state and public policy, especially to do with national development.2 Having gathered steam somewhat later than elsewhere in India, the feminist movement in Kerala launched powerful campaigns against state complicity in rape almost in the years of its emergence as a distinct form of politics in the late 1980s.3 After the mid-1990s, feminists took on powerful politicians and trade unions in widely publicized cases against sexual violence.4 This feminism was committed to raising political questions centred around women in all three fields of the state, market, and civil society and may be referred to as ‘political feminism.’ Distinct from this, around the same period, engagements with development produced ‘developmentalist feminism’ from sections of the mainstream left, which went on to inform the gender mainstreaming measures undertaken in Kerala in the wake of democratic decentralization from the mid-1990s onwards.5 This feminism differed from ‘political feminism’ in its emphasis on civility, closeness to the state’s development initiatives, faith in pedagogy as a socially transformative force, and a general preference for reform over revolt. Together, these two strands of feminism formed the core of ‘mainstream feminism’ in the 1990s and after, standing a clear distance away from other articulations that identified gendered intersectional social hierarchies, rather than just ‘women,’ as their core concerns – such as the mobilizations of sex workers, the LGBTQ groups, and Dalit feminism. In other words, in ‘mainstream feminism’ unlike in these latter articulations,

114  J. Devika there was little doubt that the central subject of feminism was an unproblematic collective ‘Women’ clearly identifiable and countable.6 This core of ‘mainstream feminism,’ which was often perceived to be ‘authentic’ feminism, remained unshaken even when the voices of organized sex workers and non- heteronormative groups began to question its key assumptions in the first decade of the new millennium,7 partly because ‘Women’ continued to be the central focus of the very visible ‘governmentalized feminism’ which was articulated by the mainstream left in Kerala, and partly because feminist groups in Kerala tended to work mostly along with the state in governance initiatives, often assuming a pedagogic role (as gender trainers, for instance) and often following the broad directions of global ‘governance’ feminism hegemonized by US-based radical feminists, such that their earlier protests against sexual violence, which emanated from local concerns, now blend rather seamlessly with these global concerns.8 Meanwhile, feminist interventions in the market have separated out of this mainstream in the present.9 The present, however, seems to be a moment in which a rethinking is in order. In the present, these feminisms stand questioned in a number of ways. First, feminism in Kerala now gathers force from young people interested in non-normative sexual lives; it now seems associated in public discourse with not so much the fixedness of the category of ‘Women’ as a challenge to the rigidities of the regime of normative binary gender. Especially, the threats emerging in the wake of Hindutvaadi cultural politics, which have alerted us to the need to distance ourselves from heteronormative constructions of sexuality pegged on procreation, which is now peddled to women too.10 It is evident, for instance, that the constitution of self-help groups, a key strategy of governmentalized feminism, is pivoted on the woman’s procreative role in the family, as mother and secondary provider, something that does not clash at all with right-wing understandings of women’s social roles. Also, the concern about pornography, sexual violence against women and adolescent girls, which often shade into a certain governmental protection, so evident in mainstream feminism today, can easily become the focus of inadvertent alliances with right-wing concerns about women’s sexual purity and protection of its procreative potential. If feminism cannot develop self-reflexive distance from these dangerous possibilities, then it cannot pose any challenge to Hindutvavaadi ideologies of gender. Second, the dilemmas involved in the implication of feminists in governmentalized women’s empowerment projects seem more evident now than ever before. Despite two decades of gender mainstreaming, both in decentralized governance and self-help11 and in the manifestation of global governance feminism in Kerala in the form of sexual-protectionist state policy,12 it appears that the most disadvantaged of women in Kerala continue to be physically insecure and their access to welfare seems ambiguous at best, as revealed by the recent horrifying rape and murder of a young Dalit woman student.13 Besides, it appears that despite the ample evidence from the first decade of the new millennium that Dalit and tribal women were indeed being counted amongst the ‘bad subjects’

Towards reparative readings 115 of what Barry Hindess has called ‘post-imperialist liberalism’14 – excluded from the neo-liberal order of self-help which sets up women, globally, as its ‘good subjects’ – privileged-origin feminists in Kerala (including myself) have failed to reexamine their relation to the state and development here critically and thoroughly.15 Third, new political subjects have been rising up against diverse forms of patriarchal power in this period, and they include women and men who identify themselves as the ‘secular youth’ rebelling against unfair gendered restrictions, women workers in the primary and tertiary sector, and the transgender community protesting against police violence. Not all identify themselves as feminist. Fourth, while nondevelopmentalist feminism has faced much suspicion from the leftist ­mainstream in Kerala since the 1980s (which included their depiction of feminism as ‘a foreign, Western agenda’), a much wider range of newer political formations now view feminism often through the lens of suspicion, especially the post-Mandal, post-Babri Masjid Dalit, and Muslim formations.16 It is important to recognize that this moment may well be one of the opportunities rather than a danger for mainstream feminism in Kerala. Most crucially, it creates the conditions under which such feminism in Kerala could break decisively from the mould of civil social formations set by the twentieth century caste-community reformisms. These reformisms, which placed caste – community identities refurbished through modernization as the central pivot of their competitive community politics, have remained rigidly defined and completely immune to any form of questioning and recasting. They were also the major vehicles of naturalizing heteronormative gender in twentieth century Kerala. Though mainstream feminism in Kerala arose as a critique of these, as mentioned before, it stayed within the terms of binary gender and has, until very recently, remained less open to welcoming critiques of heteronormativity. In contrast, the subject of Indian feminism – and the field of Indian Women’s Studies – has been open to questioning for nearly one and half decades at least, and this was achieved precisely through productive engagement with new and critical forms of politics emerging from marginalized groups.17 Nevertheless, as a feminist who has engaged with all these different streams of Malayali feminism, it appears to me that opening mainstream feminism to criticism and anger of excluded groups is not easy, if by this we mean the effort to build alliances and new spaces of political education that enable active mutual transformation of the many participating groups with (differing) stakes in the struggle against patriarchy. This is different from the common practice of ‘tolerating’ critiques by marginalized groups and from passive responses, expressed in ways that include even self-flagellation, self-policing, and retreat from dialogue. None of these can produce the kind of ‘un-homing’ necessary for openness to the other. At best, they can undergird strategic alliances; at worst, they induce a paralysis of transformative dialogue and critique. Worse, they can be driven only by either sympathy or empathy towards the struggles of marginalized women and others who

116  J. Devika critique the feminism of the women of privileged origin. Trying to relate to their struggles with instant and uncritical concurrence and endorsement (sympathy) or understanding the reasons behind the critique of the feminism of women of privilege origin by others even if one does not agree (empathy) leave the elite – non-elite hierarchy more or less untouched. Feminists have long recognized the epistemological value of politicized anger of the marginalized,18 and as Sara Ahmed has pointed out, the wilfulness of the marginalized has been, and will be, fundamental to feminism.19 Nevertheless, if only because anger and wilfulness are still primarily male monopolies, and because all women are only too often oppressed by patriarchal anger and masculine wilfulness (and not just because even politicized anger need not be always progressive or pure), it is only too easy to react rather than respond to the anger of the marginalized. For this reason, it needs to be used carefully. As Audre Lorde, whose arguments in favour of the open expression of anger by black feminists are extremely persuasive, reminds: In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally towards those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence. We were poised to attack, not always in the most effective places.20 How may we construct new spaces of feminist political engagement and education that would create conditions under which the fully expressed anger of non-elite women criticizing mainstream feminism may not evoke reactions from privileged-origin feminists, but a genuinely self-transforming response? How may the insights opened up by that anger produce not guilt and paralysis of dialogue, but troubling, ‘un-homing’ knowledge that opens up fresh critical inquiry into the ways in which privileged-origin feminists have experienced, used, or fought against class or caste privilege? Also, how may the latter insights be ploughed back into the task of forming spaces of education that encourages self-transformation and listening amongst all interested in combating Hindutva politics? Any such thinking today is immediately referred to as intersectional analysis, widely advanced as the most valid method to analyze power from the standpoint of marginalized groups, as a flowering of feminist standpoint theory (e.g., by Nira Yuval-Davis).21 Usually, the discussion of the approach begins with a reference to Kimberle Crenshaw’s use of it as a judicial intervention – which revealed that black women’s injuries are shaped not by just either race or gender relations, but at the intersection of the two, and highlighted identity as contextual and contingent,22 though the idea does have a far richer history in black feminism. In this essay, I try to think aloud on how it may be fine-tuned to serve the above end of reconstructing feminist space in the interest of inclusive belonging for all so that listening and

Towards reparative readings 117 self-transformation are possible. In feminist knowledge, some such experiments have indeed taken off powerfully – with, for instance, Sharmila Rege’s Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonios, which refuses to exoticize, decontextualize, or render singular the experience of caste, the experience of Dalit women and their voices, and proposes to ‘re-render’ their testimonios rather than ‘recover’ them.23 How could such experiments be imagined apropos the debates in/around feminism amongst politicized groups with stakes in anti-patriarchal struggles? Recent political struggles in Kerala have reminded us once more about how difficult a task this could be. I came to think of this during the Kiss of Love (KOL) protests in Kerala, during which two distinct positions emerged amongst privileged-origin feminists here.24 One was largely humanist – it treated Hindutva and Islamic conservatism which condemned the protests as immoral as essentially the same and sometimes even participated in a Christopher Hitchens-kind of Rationalist Islamophobia. The other sought a dialogue with Muslim and Dalit groups that either condemned the KOL or were sceptical about it even as they continued with the protests. While the first ended up reinforcing the secular vs. Islamist binary, the efforts of the latter to reach out (for instance, through proposing an alternative way of conceiving secularism to state-centric models; by asking questions about the difference between Islamic approaches to sexuality, sexual pleasure, and desire and Brahmanical models; by openly criticizing humanist feminism’s reinforcement of imperialist stereotypes) to sceptic/hostile groups were not fully effective. Dalit feminists reached out to the latter position critically, while many Islamist activists and organizations and prominent Dalit male intellectuals remained staunchly hostile, accusing KOL activists of misleading youngsters onto immoral and venal paths and/or of being elitist and anti-Dalit.25 A good instance of the latter was an essay jointly written by A S Ajith Kumar and K Ashraf, both leading opponents of the KOL, who perceived all its articulations to be (1) a manifestation of state secularism and thus patently anti-Muslim and, indeed, against all Dalit and Muslim critiques of liberalism, (2) marked by elitism in its claim on public space, and (3) implicitly proclaiming the values of ‘universal love’ and ‘sexual liberation.’26 In this reckoning, the KOL is merely ‘Western’ and ‘liberal’ and directly antagonistic to Dalit and Muslim politics suspicious of liberalism. According to these authors, the attack that sparked off the KOL – the Yuvamorcha violence at a Calicut restaurant, Downtown, alleging ‘immoral activities’ there – should be viewed as an attack on Muslim economic enterprises and not as an instance of moral policing. While the Muslim ownership could certainly have been a major consideration for the attack, it is not sufficient to explain it fully. In other words, it does not offer a sound answer to the question of why this particular establishment was chosen and not another, from the numerous successful Muslim commercial establishments in Kerala. Also this judgment ignored statements by KOL activists to explicitly

118  J. Devika accommodate the Muslim critique and engage with it, by reimagining secularism, and to use it against majoritarian Hindu fascism, the Hindutvatriggered claims about ‘Love Jihad’, and the violence against inter-caste marriages and Dalit-Bahujan people.27 It also makes no distinction between statements, views, or representations framed by the mainstream media and that of the KOL activists and supporters. Dalit feminists who offered qualified support to KOL were ignored. For example, the Dalit feminist Rekha Raj shared her experiences of marginalization in elite public spaces similar to Downtown and agreed with the claim that the KOL had a strong middle class orientation but pointed out that even Dalit intellectualism in Kerala, to some extent at least, was characterized by the latter. Invoking Ambedkar, she argued: ‘because compulsory endogamy is how the caste order is maintained through control of women’s bodies, I will support any struggle/ politics that seeks to free women’s bodies. If that is fully the choice of she who struggles.’28 In Facebook debates, feminists who tried to probe the sudden upsurge of distrust amongst radical Muslim activists towards feminists and others who had fought Islamophobia together with them were accused of being ‘condescending’ or ‘playing mamma.’ These distrusts, unfortunately, have only proliferated since, with many KOL activists actually endorsing Islamophobic analyses of radical Muslim politics here.29 This disappointing scenario, however, perhaps ought to have been anticipated. The manner in which groups have formed and function in the Malayali oppositional civil social public bring to mind strongly Hannah Arendt’s caution about identity politics forming small, limited circles, which bring comfort and confidence to members of marginalized groups, but effectively keep them away from a larger shared arena of politics.30 While these circles certainly provide vital support, which heals the wounds of humiliation and voicelessness, they also generate suspicion as the major mode of relating to the larger world. Each group then reserves difference solely for themselves or shares it partially with others perceived as potential allies, excluding the rest. The claiming of difference by each restricts any critical scrutiny of the univocity or self-evidence of the identity that is ostensibly the bearer of difference. The degree to which identity is thus rigidified within particular groups differs from group to group – and the just-mentioned different histories have a lot to do with it. This formation can at best provide spaces of alliance. The deep polarization of the anti-Hindutva thrust into ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ groups around the KOL, both of which indulged in belligerent and damaging caricaturing of each other’s position – the violent unravelling of the strategic alliance against Hindutva – seems to have completely stamped out the very hope that the diverse groups in the oppositional civil society might be able to build a bond of trust that may support more than strategic alliance. It posed real dilemmas for feminists who did not want to adopt the language of global governance feminism or Hitchensian-style rationalism and did want to enter into fruitful and mutually transforming

Towards reparative readings 119 dialogue with Islamist and Dalit activists and movements. It naturally led to the question: how do we construct new spaces of new political education that will help us turn our differences into strengths and will not let them play into the enemy’s hands? Here, by ‘we,’ I mean feminists of privileged origins who are faced with the previously mentioned dilemmas. And by ‘new feminist spaces’ I do mean spaces that can be shared by all sorts of people who have a stake in the struggle against the many forms of patriarchy and not just better spaces for privileged-origin feminists to sort out their political dilemmas. Surely, new exclusive spaces, however critical they may be, can only replicate the logic of caste, which rests not on mutual interaction but through keeping difference at bay, through non-interference and non-interaction.

Spaces of alliance or spaces of feminist maitri? This is not to say that spaces of alliance are not useful. What one wants to emphasize, however, is that they are not sufficient for a politics capable of inducing self-transformation through collective self-reflection and engaging effectively with other political subjects who advance critiques of it. Spaces of alliance always allow for less than this. They call for an entirely different code of conduct – not the letting out of fears and emotions but tactful behaviour that may allow for airing disagreements but still keep them at arm’s length. If they ensure the autonomy and integrity of the identity of the marginalized groups in the alliance and have indeed been effective in many struggles, they also leave all involved largely unreconstructed. I am, however, wary of imagining feminist spaces of self-transformation in terms of ‘home’ and ‘safety.’ The dangers of the use of the ‘home’ metaphor are now widely recognized: as Julia Kristeva notes, this often betrays a fear of those who do not share our values and is related to the desire to ‘stick to an archaic primitive common denominator,’31 given that the possibilities of love, care, non-violence, and other such familiar values for feminist solidarities are ambiguous at best. In the Indian context, perhaps, we could possibly turn to Ambedkar’s reflections on maitri in his Buddha and his Dhamma as an alternate value to ground new feminist spaces of belonging. Aishwary Kumar’s excellent reading of the idea of maitri as deployed by Ambedkar in his search for an ethics that would address ‘the absolutely other, the finite mortal in its irreconcilable difference, rather than those who belong to one’s own family, tribe, kingdom, and nation[?].’32 Kumar notes that in Ambedkar’s discourse, maitri acquires meanings richer than what it is commonly understood to be, i.e., friendship; this is because it is a gesture that one makes to enemies, offenders, or strangers. Maitri, Ambedkar argues, is superior to love, care, and non-violence (all values that ground the Gandhian vision of relating to the other) as all these can be given over to mastery and separated from an unconditional commitment to awareness that rejects empty adherence to duty.33

120  J. Devika Most importantly for our purpose, maitri does not exclude force – it only separates it from faceless state power and embeds it within equality and justice. Thus critique, even penalty, is possible in a relationship or space animated by maitri. Kumar points out that for Ambedkar, ‘The antithesis of justice . . . is neither force nor sacrifice. The antithesis of justice is hostility, or worse, indifference, both of which lead to a disregard for the vulnerability of others.’ Second, this is linked to Ambedkar’s ‘struggle to formulate an ethics of autonomy for the weak, indeed, their sovereignty, which must, at the same time, save itself from becoming a justification for mastery of the weak.’34 Maitri, then, Kumar says, is pivoted on a shared sense of finitude ‘a shared finitude within the framework of difference.’35 Third, Ambedkar proposed maitri as a means to a political relationship that is also an ethical one, based on a shared faith focused unwaveringly on justice for the fully other, and therefore that takes us beyond mere alliance-building for predetermined short-term or long-term goals. How may the feminist of privileged origin prepare herself for such spaces? Surely, many of us do share the feelings Minnie Pratt described in her critical recollection of her struggles with home and community as a privileged white woman from the south in the US, as ‘homesick[ness] with nowhere to go,’ induced by her discovery of her family’s history of racism and slaveholding.36 I do think that first of all, the feminist of privileged origin must take this sense of homelessness seriously and politicize it sharply. Pratt’s memoir offers salutary caution about privileged women building such spaces and then inviting non-elite women to join. Indeed, the new spaces that we need ought to be ones that will help privileged-origin feminists ‘unhome’ themselves. In their analysis of Pratt’s memoir, Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin note that it seeks to break out of white feminists’ response to criticism by others, which they note is either guilt-induced paralysis or the demand that non-elite women should educate them. Also, they point out that ‘the tendency on the part of some women of color to assume the position of ultimate critic or judge on the basis of the authenticity of their personal experience of oppression’ is not helpful either.37 Pratt’s narrative offers another way out: of ‘un-homing’ herself from community and home through a critical understanding of the intermeshed, mutually implicating histories of social hierarchies and the groups caught in them, and the recalling of memories of home and family in a way that the ‘essential relation between blood, skin, heart, home, and identity is challenged without dismissing the power and appeal of those connections.’38 In other words, in this kind of narrative in which both guilt-induced paralysis and the reversal of the pedagogic role are avoided in favour of self-reflexive narratives about the self, there is a call to do one’s own critical work. Recalling how she drew upon the cultural resources of black Americans to use them for her own political ends, Pratt says that she realized that this had to end: I needed to do my own work: express my sorrow and my responsibility myself, in my own words, by my own actions. I could hear their songs

Towards reparative readings 121 as a trumpet to me – a startling, an awakening, a reminder, a challenge – as were the struggles and resistances of other folk, but not take them as replacement for my own work.39 What kinds of political-intellectual work will the spaces of feminist maitri make possible? It may be immediately evident that this entails a refusal of the tendency to reify and essentialize any identity. Maitri underlines the ultimate mortality of all bodies; it may also call for an understanding of identities as constructed and therefore subject to revision. That is, when we imagine feminist maitri, we may have to move way beyond (and not simply move away from) ‘strategic essentialism,’ for the simple reason that the call for ‘strategic essentialism’ has more often than not led to the continuation of the habit of treating identities as essential.40 However, it will also need us to move beyond the equally popular post-structuralist feminist approach that treats identities as perpetually ‘becoming’ and points to the diversity and contestations in the meanings of identity-categories.41 Instead of these, the spaces of feminist maitri call for a strong recognition of identities as political and even antagonistic, but never permanent and fixed; they are mutually shaped through constant engagement. The political engagement that such spaces allow is therefore rooted in discernment and awareness rather than in the desire to protect central identities. If the spaces of liberal alliancebuilding require the temporary suspension of mutual differences and tactful exchanges which however leaves the different players as separated as they were, spaces animated by feminist maitri allows for strong exchanges but without either indifference or hostility, passive or active. Also, this opens up a space in which privileged-origin feminists can do their ‘own work.’ This is not to say that privileged feminists in India have not done their ‘own work’ at all – surely Uma Chakravarti’s work on Brahmanical patriarchy and the history of upper caste widowhood, and the many critiques of mainstream feminism testify against that.42 But my imagination of spaces animated by the value that I call feminist maitri is not of one built merely on knowledge that acknowledges the complexity of the experience of gendered lives but also on shared values and emotions. In other words, I imagine these as spaces in which the inseparability of affect and interpretation will come to be explicitly affirmed – it is comparatively easy to accept intellectually and politically destabilizing interpretations than rebuild over relations of affect and emotions, if they remain separated. Also, I imagine them as spaces in which privileged-origin feminist engagement with the other marginalized groups, which is often either sympathetic or empathetic, will be transformed into a more equal engagement since feminist maitri requires them to bring to the table more sharply critical insights about their own struggles against their caste and religious communities of birth and reflect on how these may strengthen the push towards a hegemonic anti-caste politics. In other words, the spirit of feminist maitri enjoins privileged feminists to eschew passive participation that only serves to leave largely under-discussed the privileges that privileged-origin feminists enjoy; instead, they are directed towards

122  J. Devika the responsibility of contributing actively to the critical discourse not just through the production of critical knowledge capable of addressing complexity but also by expanding self-reflexively the range of everyday experiences that could potentially be objects of critical scrutiny. Also, the embrace of feminist maitri would encourage collective effort to make critical sense of political choices exercised by Dalit and minority women activists which would mean exiting the unhelpful reversed-pedagogic relation (mentioned above) that Mohanty and Martin warn against, which fixes positions by claiming authenticity of personal experience of oppression. As they usefully remind, the dynamics that such pedagogic relations sets up ‘seem to exempt both parties from the responsibilities of working through the complex historical relations between and amongst structures of domination and oppression.’43

Rethinking the intersectionalities framework The question of whether new feminist frameworks of research, particularly that of intersectionalities, do not already open up spaces of dialogue at least similar to those of feminist maitri may arise at this point. The debate on the relevance of the intersectionalities framework to Indian feminism has, on the one hand, often remained suspicious of its potential political effects arising from its integration into global governance feminism and, on the other, sought to emphasize that feminism in India was not alien to (a richer) intersectional practice, even though the name was not ever used.44 However, as many others have noted, the term intersectional analysis can – and frequently does – denote a kind of analysis that prejudges certain axes of power as all-important irrespective of history and context. This is particularly relevant when one considers the manner in which it has been integrated into the global feminist activist and research discourse.45 These axes are inevitably gender and caste or gender and minority identities in the Indian context. This is not to say that these identities are insignificant – surely not – but to indicate that these axes of power are often taken to be uncomplicated (not troubled by other possible axes of power) and always primary. In other words, the methodological approach of intersectional analysis has been what Leslie McCall terms ‘inter-categorical complexity,’ which refers to adapting existing analytical categories, documenting relationships of inequality amongst different social groups and documenting the changing configurations of inequality along multiple dimensions.46 The focus is on already-constituted social groups and the relationships between them. And precisely because this interpretation of intersectionalities does not deliver its original promise, i.e., it continues to remain additive, this framework is not grounded in what I imagine to be spaces of feminist maitri. Clearly, such an interpretation of the intersectionalities framework does not help critical feminist social analysis in Kerala. Limiting our focus to the axes of gender and caste or gender and religious community would render

Towards reparative readings 123 other axes invalid or invisible. In Kerala’s context, demographic change is making age a significant axis of social power and now tensions in privileged groups often take the form of a confrontation between young people and parental- disciplinary authorities. The entry of new elite women – that is, women of communities that benefitted from the social democratization in early twentieth century Kerala – into higher education combined with the changing nature of marriage and the pervasiveness of extraordinarily high dowry payments along with the continued exclusion of women from the labour market deepens the gender fault line within privileged communities, manifest in the intensification of misogyny and women’s overt and covert, explicitly or implicitly anti-patriarchal struggle against it. In the context of massive economic change via the Gulf migration, and the failure of the mainstream left’s neo-liberal welfarism to alleviate the inequality, class differentiation within Muslim and Dalit communities is evident too. Also, today, sexuality politics differentiates all existing social groups. Transnationalism is today an important axis that shapes identity politics of all kinds in Kerala. Limiting intersectional analysis to gender and caste or gender and religious community obscures more than it reveals. In this form, intersectional analysis contributes to the problem rather than resolves it: it seems to mirror, for example, the confrontation during the KOL protests and after in which the ‘rationalist’ (who are actually a very mixed group advancing anti- patriarchal politics), Dalit, and Muslim identities were projected by both sides as internally coherent and mutually exclusive – and eternally fixed. In other words, it is not clear how the intersectionalities framework, understood in this limited fashion as essentially a two or at best three-axes analysis, helps us think of how the resistance of young women and men from and within Kerala’s new elite communities to gender disciplining by parental-pedagogic and male authority may be brought into dialogue with the resistance of Dalit and Muslim groups against oppression, discrimination, and abjection, so that caricatures of both are avoided. However, as Mary John points out in her response to Nivedita Menon, the concept is used in very different, even mutually opposing, ways now, globally.47 Jennifer Nash, for example, asks whether the intersectionalities framework is particular to non-elite identities or whether it would apply for all identities, oppressed or otherwise.48 It has been advanced as precisely an antidote to the rigidification of identities, as for instance, by Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani who propose ‘feminist conjuncturalism’ as a reminder of how the ‘post-colonial’ is in effect a construct internally differentiated by its intersections with other unfolding relations.’49 As Nash notes elsewhere, intersectionality is often shorthand for the expressed need to acknowledge and address complexity of lived experience in eminently non-reductive ways.48 A framework of intersectionalities adequate to the spaces of feminist maitri would perhaps be a version that can be deployed as a tool of self-reflexive analysis to theorize the different experiences of all feminists who have quarrelled with their respective caste – communities of

124  J. Devika birth. In other words, we must forge it as an ‘unhoming tool’ – that makes us feel sufficiently not-at-home in our familiar environments. I do think that such analysis is a precondition, for example, of any effective engagement by privileged-origin feminists who resist caste (what name to give ourselves? Something analogous to those who renounce masculinity and embrace femininity voluntarily?) with minoritarian feminists who question them, who in turn may need to be more attentive to the ways in which other axes of power have shaped their identities. Nira Yuval-Davis’s proposal that intersectionalities research ought to pay attention to three analytical levels of belonging to avoid reifying identities may be germane here: social location, people’s identifications, and emotional attachments, and the value systems from which they judge their belonging and those of others. Identity is only one level of belonging, and other levels of location and position are not to be reduced to it. Such a version of the intersectionalities framework may then relate to a version of the ‘transversal politics’ that Yuval-Davis speaks of. Yuval-Davis understands ‘transversal politics’ as based on (1) feminist standpoint epistemology which recognizes that different positionings yield different views of the world and a dialogue between differently positioned people is unavoidable, (2) the recognition that differences are vital and deeply respected but are not hierarchical; they are encompassed by equality, (3) a clear conceptual and political differentiation between positioning, identity, and values.50 This means that values may enable connections (in the present case, feminist maitri) across positionings and identities – that enable collective, if limited, campaigns. For instance, in the anti-Hindutva KOL protests, the thrust of the protest – against the abjection of the body – was read by many Islamist women activists and prominent male Dalit activists as a call for immoral ‘free sex’ by a decadent elitist class of youth, and they refused to reconsider this reading despite much clarification, which led to a hardening of the ‘rationalist’ position into one that bordered Islamophobic rhetoric. As a participant who could not side with either, it appears to me that something like feminist maitri – one could have allowed each side to reach out and avoid caricaturing the other – would have healed this rift. While maitri would not have smothered differences, it would have surely altered the way in which each side approached the other – respecting the other’s absolute difference, yet underlining common vulnerabilities, and from that common ground which eliminates rancour and suspicion, seeking collective, if limited, action. Feminist maitri shapes relationships and spaces that would always exceed temporary alliances for limited ends, based on rational calculation, or against a foe perceived to be external.

Conclusions At the end of this essay, I cannot help remembering Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was marked by her extraordinary ability for self-critique and

Towards reparative readings 125 her insistent effort to theorize beyond binarisms. In a sense, I too am trying to search out ways to balance what she called ‘paranoid’ readings of our troubled collective present with more ‘reparative’ readings. Sedgwick does not deny the significance of paranoid readings in that they have forced the academic and political mainstream to pay attention to the forms and effects of social marginalization; she also recognizes her own contribution to such readings. However, she insists that we recognize their damaging effects, especially for marginalized groups themselves: heightened suspicion, negative affect, a naïve belief in the political efficacy of exposure, setting up ‘strong theory’ that tautologizes and, through selective scanning and amplification, reinforces the sense of oppression instead of obviating or alleviating it.51 First, paranoid readings set themselves up in such a way that one is unable to see that there are other ways of reading and relationships with a text that a reader can have. Second, simply producing a paranoid reading does not mean really anything as far as ending the oppression being read. Conversely, a non-paranoid reading need not deny the oppression at all. Reparative readings, in contrast, surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; for the reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments or part-objects she encounters or creates. My hope about feminist maitri is that this mode of engagement will give rise to non-paranoid readings alongside the necessary paranoid readings of the ills that hamper trust-building in the field of feminist politics – on less totalizing and more localized interpretations, hopefully bringing a delicate balance. Further, it would facilitate perhaps a move away for upper caste born feminists interested in anti-caste feminisms, from mere self-flagellation and guilt production that can produce little more than paralysis, and towards Alice Walker’s Womanist advice to love oneself, Regardless.52 As far as the question of the relevance of intersectionalities as a framework appropriate to spaces of feminist maitri is concerned, to be clear, I am not proposing a new identity knowledge field like ‘whiteness studies.’ Rather I claim that these spaces demand a different reading of the framework than the more familiar two-axes models of intersectional analysis, only because they promise more than strictly strategic alliances between different and unequal groups with common stakes against patriarchy. From being a mere tool of feminist/womanist analysis, attention to intersectionalities could be transformed into an ‘unhoming’ tool for privileged-origin feminists and for non-elite feminists as well, such that both elite condescension and the

126  J. Devika inversion of the pedagogic relation are rendered redundant. This does not challenge the vital significance of the emergence of women of marginalized groups as subjects and objects of knowledge in the field of feminist knowledge and politics. The concern here, then, is about the kind of selfpreparation that all feminists have to undertake to generate truly hegemonic anti-caste and anti-Hindutva feminisms.

Notes 1 This thrust was governmentalizing because women were treated not as a politicized category claiming rights and making demands on the state for both welfare and justice but as a governmental category that received welfare. Further, it aimed at mobilizing below-poverty-line women into a state-centred civil society that would manage and implement welfare distribution activities at the local level. Devika, 2016. 2 For key discussions, see John, (ed), Women’s Studies in India. 3 Devika, “Feminism and Late Twentieth-Century Governmentality in Kerala, India.” 4 Devika and Kodoth, “Sexual Violence and Predicament of Feminist.” 5 For the significance of ‘women’ to the attempt to refurbish the hegemony of the mainstream left in Kerala through democratic decentralization, see Devika, “Participatory Democracy or ‘Transformative Appropriation’?” 6 It may be queried whether these ‘mainstream feminisms’ deserve to be recognized as ‘feminism’ anymore, but that is a question for feminist praxis, evolving as it is. For the purposes of this essay, I do not dismiss the self-claims of such formations to be feminist, but awareness of the limitations of their claims is one of the starting points of the present exercise itself. The two strands may seem distinctive but may be viewed as a single mainstream feminism because they take ‘Women’ as their common object despite many other differences. 7 For an overview of the issues and debates of the early years of the new millennium, see Bharadwaj, “Mitthyakalkkappuram.” 8 This is evident from the websites of Kerala’s leading feminist NGOs, Sakhi and Anweshi. http://sakhikerala. org/?page_id=10; http://anweshi.org/ accessed August 10, 2016. For ‘governance feminism,’ see, Halley, et al., “From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking.” 9 SEWA Kerala, which recently gained trade union status, is the oldest of these; many new women’s trade unions, including the one formed in the wake of the Munnar women tea-garden workers’ struggles, are very recent. Most of them continue to be highly local, and their formation is often spontaneous. 10 The Kiss of Love protests in Kerala (2014–2015) brought this to light. See https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 2014_Kiss_of_Love_protest accessed August 9, 2016. 11 See Devika and Thampi, New Lamps for Old?; Scaria, “A Dictated Space?”; Nair and Moolakkattu, “Women Component Plan at the Village Panchayat Level in Kerala”; Williams, et al., “Making Space for Women in Urban Governance?” 12 The latest attempt was through the ‘Nirbhaya’ project, launched in 2013, aimed at protecting women from sexual violence, setting up special mechanisms to aid victims, and mobilizing civil society through special committees and groups. This combined seamlessly with anti-trafficking measures and was guided by the well-known anti-trafficking activist like Sunitha Krishnan and right-wing social activists like Sugatha Kumari, who chaired the five-member expert committee that recommended the programme. There was no representation of Kerala’s feminist organizations on the committee. Krishnan’s effort to set up Nirbhaya on the

Towards reparative readings 127 lines of her own anti-trafficking work through Prajwala, however, was not successful and she resigned in 2014, citing official apathy. See http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/Nirbhaya- project-adviser-SunithaKrishnan-resigns/articleshow/39667075.cms accessed January 9, 2017. 13 See, Meera Velayudhan, “Kerala Rape Case.” See also, Devika, “Aspects of Socioeconomic Exclusion in Kerala, India.” 14 Hindess, “Liberalism – What’s in a Name?” 23–39. 15 See Prakkanam, “Becoming Society”; Janu, “We Need to Build Huts All Over Kerala, Again and Again.” 16 In my own efforts to engage young college students from Kerala in conversation during 2014–2015 to collect themes for my forthcoming introductory book in Malayalam on gender and politics, this question came up again and again, and not just from students of the leading mainstream left student organizations, but more stridently from students engaged in Dalit and Muslim politics as well. 17 See Turner, “Reconciling Feminist and Anti-Caste Analyses”; Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist; John, (ed), Women’s Studies in India. 18 See Spelman, “Anger and Insubordination,” 263–273; Woodward, “Anger . . . and Anger,” 73–96. 19 Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys.” 20 Lorde, Sister/Outsider. 21 Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” 193–209. 22 Crenshaw, 1989, 139–167. 23 As Turner, “Reconciling Feminist and Anti-Caste Analyses,” argues about Rege’s, Writing Caste/Writing Gender. 24 For a detailed account of the early events in KOL, see, Sasi, “License to Kiss?” 25 For the contours of the continuing feud between KOL opponents and its support ers, see the news report in Times of India, December 19, 2015. http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/kozhikode/Activists-divided-on-Manava-Sangamam/ articleshow/50242847.cms accessed August 9, 2016. Also see, ulFarrooque, “ ‘Fascisathe Ethirkkunna’ ‘Manushyarum’ ‘Amaanavarum.’ ” 26 Sudha, “Down Town to Kiss of Love.” 27 See, Maganti, “I Organized Kiss of Love.” The edition of KOL held in Thiruvananthapuram was purposefully named ‘Kiss Against Fascism’ and explicitly condemned as secularized untouchability in public spaces as a major means of bolstering existing distances between caste – communities in the interest of upper castes. 28 Raj on Facebook, “Otta Nottil Teeratha Rashtriya Dharma Sankadangal.” 29 See, Devika, “Beyond Trumpism and Rumpism.” Also, “ ‘Radical’ Critics and KaBodyScapes.” https://kafila. online/2016/04/30/radical-critics-and-kabod yscapes/ accessed January 9, 2017. 30 See Cutting-Gray, “Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity.” 31 Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism. 32 Kumar, Radical Equality, 334. 33 Ibid., 332. 34 Ibid., 331. 35 Ibid., 335. 36 Pratt, “Identity,” 29–77. 37 Mohanty and Martin, “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” 85–105. 38 Ibid., 94. 39 Pratt, “Identity,” 59. 40 Paul Gilroy, quoted in Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” 4. 41 Ibid. 42 Chakravarti, “Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India”; Tharuand and Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.” 43 Mohanty and Martin, “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” 93.

128  J. Devika 4 Menon, “Is Feminism About Women? A Critical View.” 4 45 Nash, “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” 46 McCall, “The Complexity.” 47 John, “Intersectionality.” 48 Ibid. 49 Frankenberg and Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk,” 124–145. 50 Yuval-Davis, “What Is Transversal Politics?” 94–98. 51 Sedgewick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 146. 52 Walker, “Womanist,” p. xii.

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Towards reparative readings 129 Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism.” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 29 (2006): 335–423. Hindess, B. “Liberalism – What’s in a Name?” In Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, edited by W. Larner and W. Walters, 23–39. London: Routledge, 2004. Hooks, B. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. Janu, C. K. “ ‘We Need to Build Huts all Over Kerala, Again and Again’: Interview with C K Janu, Interviewed by Rekharaj.” In No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and S. Tharu, 431–451. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011. John, M. E., ed. Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. John, M. E., ed. “Intersectionality: Rejection or Critical Dialogue?” Economic and Political Weekly L, no. 33 (2015): 72. Kristeva, J. Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Kumar, A. Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Lorde, A. Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 135–136. Trumansburg: Cross Press, 1984. Maganti, R. “I Organized Kiss of Love in Mumbai, and Here’s Why I Support It.” www.youthkiawaaz.com/2014/11/kiss-of-love-protest/ (accessed on 09.01.2017). McCall, L. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1777– 1800. doi:10.1086/426800. Menon, N. Seeing Like a Feminist. New Delhi: Penguin Zubaan, 2012. Menon, N. “Is Feminism about Women? A Critical View on Intersectionality from India.” Economic and Political Weekly L, no. 17 (2015): 37–44. Morley, D. Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2000. Nair, N. V. and J. S. Moolakkattu. “Women Component Plan at the Village Panchayat Level in Kerala: Does It Live up to Its Promise?” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21, no. 2: 247–276. doi:10.1177/0971521514525156. Nash, J. “Re-Thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89 (2008): 1–15. doi:10.1057/fr.2008.4. Nash, J. “The Institutional Lives of Intersectionality.” Economic and Political Weekly L, no. 38 (2015): 74–78. Prakkanam, S. “Becoming Society: An Interview with Seleena Prakkanam.” Economic and Political Weekly, Interviewed by J. Devika XLIX, no. 17 (2014 April 26), Interviewed by J. Devika, 40–45. Pratt, M. B. “Identity: Skin Blood Heart.” In Yours in Struggle: Three Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, edited by E. Bulkin, M. B. Pratt, and B. Smith, 29–77. Long Haul Press, 1984. Raj, R. “On Facebook, ‘Otta Nottil Teeratha Rashtriya Dharma Sankadangal’ [Political Dilemmas that are not Resolved in a Single Note].” www.facebook.com/ notes/rekha-raj/%E0%B4% 92%E0%B4%B1%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B1%E0%B4%A8%E0%B5%8B%E0%B4%9F%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%9F%E0 %B4%BF%E0%B4%B2%E0%B5%8D-%E0%B4%A4%E0%B5%80%E0%B 4%B0%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%A4% E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A4-%E0%B4% B0%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B7%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%9F%E0%B5%8D% E0%B4%B0%E0%B5%80%E0%B4%AF-%E0%B4%A7%E0%B4%B0%E0

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8 Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance (Re)examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur Panchali Ray Introduction In 2004, the city of Imphal was shaken out of its stupor when 12 women stripped naked in front of the Kangla Fort, with banners reading ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh.’ The protestors were no ordinary women; they were imas (mothers) belonging to the sacred and revered Meira Paibis (a mother’s group), and Imphal is no ordinary city; it is the only city (except Srinagar) subjected to the draconian AFSPA (Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act). Who were the Meira Paibis? Why did they take to such a bold act to register their protests against sexual violence and atrocities of the Indian army? We know the facts: the brutalization, rape, and murder of Thangjam Manorama Devi, who was accused of terrorism by the Assam Rifles commandment; the subsequent naked protest of the 12 imas in front of the Kangla Fort, and the shock waves it sent through the country. They are well documented and well reported facts, and yet, I wonder if one can recoup a history of an event which has been widely recorded but with so little said and written of the affective and emotive spaces it occupies. How did this event break from the traditional methods of protests by the women’s movements, and what are its implications in terms of feminist theorizing on resistance and agency? Manorama’s death sparked a protest that went beyond the traditional understandings of agency, yet this embodied language of pain, resistance, and agency sits uneasily with the identities of the protestors, i.e., of a mother – an identity that is essential for the performance of their everyday resistances in Manipuri society, an identity that legitimizes their non-conformism to traditional rituals, customs, and norms and which subsequently allows them to take to the streets in their demands for justice. I went to Manipur (2016) to speak to some of the imas who protested in front of the Kangla Fort. I was not interested in the facticity of the event; what intrigued me was the act of remembering and the meanings given to it. Given that nationalist projects almost always use the image of the ‘mother’ to claim legitimacy and garner social and political support, what are the ramifications of a nude protest by the ‘Mothers of Manipur’? After more than a decade, how do the same women remember their protest? How do

132  Panchali Ray they reconcile this one instance of a spectacular protest that ruptures all norms of intelligibility with quotidian relations embedded in a patriarchal society? Manipur has been facing intra-sectarian/ethnic rivalries and armed secessionist movements for a number of decades, and, like most conflict zones, women have taken the role of peacemakers and negotiators between the state and the rebels, as well as between different ethnic groups. The Meira Paibis are no exception. Drawing their strength from rituals, customs, and norms (both sacred and religious), and acting on their purportedly maternal dispositions to protect and nurture, the Meira Paibis have been a leading force in peace processes in the state. Thus, this essay grapples with the double bind that the notion of ‘political motherhood’ poses: on the one hand, the members of the Meira Paibis operate within a benevolent patriarchy and draw their strength and legitimacy as mothers from sacred and religious traditions to take on roles of crusaders and peacemakers in a conflict zone. On the other hand, the instance of the protest destabilizes and ruptures all norms that make intelligible and recognize the 12 women as mothers. I argue that the radical embodied language of resistance destabilized all norms of recognition that interpellates the protestors as respectable mothers acting on their maternal instincts. This essay, thus, raises questions on power, subjectivities, agency, and resistance within broader contexts of nationalism and inter-sectarian conflicts.

Gender, violence, and nationalism Sexual violence has been central to feminist theorization on the relations between gender, violence, community, and nationalism. The enunciation of the discourses on rape emerged from a recognition of women’s bodies as sexualized sites of control and domination that reinforce male power.1 From perpetuating and solidifying ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’2 as a process of intimidation,3 to violating community honour,4 sexual violence is conceptualized as preemptive, retributive, and a tool to mark the body of the ‘other.’ Brownmiller notes that rape is primarily a political act that operates within the larger matrix of male domination over women, but it is also an act that expresses this political dominance.5 In India, rape is theorized and politicized as not just as an expression of patriarchy but is located at the interstices of other structural and institutional social and political inequalities: most reported rape has been institutional rape (custodial rape), structured by social inequalities (to strengthen class and caste norms), and perpetuated by moral and community gatekeepers (punishing women for transgression).6 V. Geetha contends that sexual torture is derived from a heterosexual imagination that tends to inflict on the non-normative body sexual acts that are considered ‘immoral’ and ‘unnatural’ – whether they are women, transgender, political, or religious dissidents – as a way of inscribing ‘otherness’ onto them.7 In fact, sexual violence does not necessarily operate on existing inequalities but actively scripts such inequalities into being. Rape

Political motherhood 133 constitutes subjectivities, reinforces feminine vulnerabilities, and constitutes victimhood; the ‘gendered grammar of violence’ uses existing social inequalities to produce notions of both illegitimate and legitimate violence, where the latter enjoys social acceptance and minimum/no opposition.8 Particularly, in the context of national security, rape is a legitimate, in fact even a necessary tool to punish and ‘fix’ women who are perceived as a threat to national integrity and security.9 The fraught relationship between nationalism and gender, and the role of sexual violence in shaping national identities, is a well-researched field, particularly for postcolonial nations. The histories of nations whose birth were accompanied by a redrawing of borders, partitions, and ethnic genocide cannot be extrapolated from the history of women’s bodies, which were sites of contests over meanings, as well as inscriptions of nationalisms.10 Feminists also argue that women located in militarized and conflict zones face an intensification of violence in their own intimate spaces, such as forced marriages, family honour, selfless motherhood, enforcement of chastity, and wifely virtues.11 It is now commonplace knowledge that women’s bodies are both the sites of contesting cultures, as well as the mediums of cultural transmissions and repertoires of national collectivities. Particularly in South Asia, women’s bodies and sexualities have been intricately linked to honour and shame of the family, as well as the community.12 The female body is the signifier of cultural purity, the medium of producing progeny for the community, a symbol of honour, and embodies the aspirations of nationalist imaginations. Rape is not just about women’s bodies and femininities; it is also about masculinities. The loss of agency for men, as they helplessly watch their ‘own’ women being raped, and their inability to prevent the ‘dishonouring’ of their community, is a failure of the trope of male-protector of the woman/nation. Cynthia Enloe demonstrates how the projection of a ‘dangerous world’ makes men embrace hegemonic masculine ideologies of protector-saviour, while women behave as the self-sacrificing mother who will think only of the protection of her children.13

Manipur and women’s movement(s): the Meira Paibi or the ‘torch bearers’ The recent focus on Irom Sharmilla Chanu and the breaking of her 16 years of hunger strike (August 2016)14 has brought both national and international attention back to Manipur, and the various movements, organizations, and individuals that have been resisting and demanding the removal of AFSPA. In this section, I focus on the women’s movement in Manipur, known as the Meira Paibi (torch bearers in Meiteilol language), which has been resisting the ‘occupation’ of Manipur by the Indian state. Manipur is located at the far eastern edge of the country, and shares its boundaries with Myanmar. Ever since its formation, Manipur has been witnessing multiple separatists and inter-ethnic rivalries leading it to being classified as ‘disturbed’ by the

134  Panchali Ray Indian Government (1980–2004); this classification also meant an increasing and unjust militarization, as well as extraordinary laws that constituted and defined the quotidian life of the people. The many separatist movements and insurgencies have led the state to witness decades of violence, no/minimum development or employment, armed extortions, and civic dysfunction.15 The imposition of AFSPA, in particular, has precipitated much of the civil and guerrilla resistances. AFSPA allows extraordinary powers to the Indian Armed Forces, as well as the paramilitary forces. An armed personnel can fire on any individual acting in contravention of any law and order, or for carrying weapons (or anything capable of being used as a weapon), or even assembling in a group of five or more. Under AFSPA, persons suspected of unlawful activities can be detained for 24 hours with unlimited extensions/renewals, and any premises can be searched without a warrant. Most significantly, the AFSPA guarantees impunity to members of the armed forces operating in disturbed areas.16 The mass protests, including the naked protest at the Kangla Fort, led to the removal of the ‘disturbed’ status in the Imphal valley in 2004, but AFSPA has not been withdrawn to date. The Meira Paibi came into being, as a mother’s movement (1970s), in response to the production, distribution, and consumption of illicit alcohol and drugs within the community. Initially, the collective was named as Nisha Bandi, whose members were biological mothers of the community. The change in name came with a change in context and the nature of oppression, as well as resistance: from reforming the community and preventing consumption of drugs and alcohol as well as domestic violence, the focus of the collective became state atrocities on the Meitei community. As one of the members narrates, The Indian army picked up one of the boys from the neighbourhood for no fault of his, and illegally detained him. We protested outside, and said we will not leave till he was handed over to us. The whole night we stood in front of the gates with torches in our hands. They finally released him. He was brutally tortured, but he had not ‘disappeared’ like many before him. That is when we realized our power. As women we could fight the occupiers. And that is how we got our name, Meira Paibi: Meira meaning torch and Paibi meaning bearer.17 The Meira Paibi is traced to the two Nupi-Lans (women’s war) that were waged against the colonial British Government and local ruling classes, once in 1904 and then in 1939, for preventing export of rice, as well as initiating constitutional and administration reforms. Women were central to Manipuri democratic politics that fought against colonial and feudal powers to bring social change.18 The members of Nisha Bandi were women who formed groups in their respective localities to prevent alcoholism and domestic violence, even taking punitive action against drunken men, brewers, and distributors with the approval and sanction of the community. Women’s

Political motherhood 135 participation in the public sphere is not new to Manipur; some scholars trace it to the existence of certain institutions, such as Lallup-Kaba (which prevailed in Manipur in the 1800s). According to the Lallup-Kaba, all ablebodied men had to render forced labour to the state for a certain number of days. Thus, it was not benevolent patriarchy but feudalism that led women to enter the realm of economic transaction towards the maintenance of the family. Consequently, women became active participants in trade and commerce which has now taken the shape of the famous ‘Women’s Market’/‘Ima Keithel.’19 The Meira Paibis are exalted members of the society, drawing their strength from sacred traditions that few dare to challenge. Strict rules guide their organization, and non-attendance of meetings and protests can socially isolate a member. The members wear a costume that has both religious and mourning significance – a white shawl and a beige-coloured phanek (a kind of wrap around skirt that covers the lower torso).20 When I met two of the imas (who had protested at Kangla Fort in 2004) at a ceremony that enacted ritual mourning and celebration of martyrdom of a teenage boy killed by the Indian army, all the members of the Meira Paibi were dressed similarly. As one of the ima said, ‘This is our costume, we identify with this dress. It is religious. It is sacred.’21 The members of Meira Paibi take torches and patrol the streets at night, sometimes as a vigilante group and sometimes in protest. Their resistance and collectivity is based on an opposition to ­oppression – in this case, it is the shared experience of being oppressed by the state rather than the family. Their identity as mothers is central to their politicization and their articulations of resistance. As Ima Lourembam Nganbi says, ‘when our children are suffering, can we as mothers remain silent?’22

The Kangla Fort protest: performance of politics/politics of performance Women in democratic movements have often fallen back on the framework of motherhood to articulate their demands, anger, grief, and frustrations. Some well-known mother’s groups that emerged initially in the decades of 1970s and 1980s were in dictatorial and fascist regimes in Latin America: ‘Madres de La Plazo de Mayo’ (Argentina), ‘Co Madres’ (El Savador), and ‘Grupo Apoyo Mutuo’ (Guatemela). Their primary demand was government accountability on the abduction and disappearance of their children. In Europe and Central Asia, there were ‘Mothers for Peace’ (Belgium), ‘Mothers against Silence’ (Israel); in South Asia, there are the ‘Mothers’ Front’ (Sri Lanka), ‘Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons’ (Kashmir, India). In North East India, which has been witnessing intense militarization and inter-ethnic strife, almost every state has a mother’s association that is instrumental in negotiating peace between the Indian state and the secessionist movements. A famous example is the Naga Mothers’ Association.

136  Panchali Ray Scholars, however, have pointed out that while such mothers associations do politicize motherhood in an attempt to open up legitimate spaces that allow women to engage in issues of peace and security hitherto denied to them, this did not necessarily challenge the militaristic gendered order. Moreover, it is not a fight for universal peace, but protection of their children that led to the mobilization of women as mother’s groups.23 Thus the struggles of the mother’s groups are deeply embedded in nationalist and ethnic identities and movements. The debate on ‘political motherhood’ is an old one: while feminists agree that mother’s groups fall back on tropes of sacrificing motherhood – appealing to the state through ‘tears and curses’24 – which re-establishes both biological and social norms that legitimizes nurture, care, and guardianship as the sole responsibility of the woman-mother; these groups also open up spaces for collectivities, communities, and mobilization of women in otherwise impossible spaces. Feminists have pointed out that the exclusion of women from the category of ‘political actors’ has meant that it is men who are accepted as citizens and women as the necessary ‘outsider,’25 thereby making the identity of the ‘mother’ an important way for women to enter the political arena. Samir Kumar Das in his provocative essay on the Kangla protest makes a distinction between ‘pure motherhood’ and ‘political motherhood’; the former longs for reunion with her child irrespective of the politics s/he is involved in, and the latter stands up for the political cause that the child is engaged in. The mother is committed to the justness of the cause, and this commitment is what makes motherhood not only political but also connects ethnicity to democracy. While Das does point out that motherhood is possibly the only entry point that women have for engaging in peace initiatives, he also asserts that all women are mothers – political mothers. He states, ‘every woman is mother – potential or real – and there is a mother in every woman.’26 I find the positioning of all women as mothers, even if it is political, a rather slippery slope for feminist politics. I am not suggesting that agency be perceived as teleological where women must shed their gendered identity to be ‘good subjects’ of feminism, but to argue that all women deploy tropes of maternal care and nurture to resist, question, challenge, and hold accountable militarized state regimes is to tie such affects to biologically defined heteronormative imaginations of the sexed body. In anticipation of such a counterargument, Das states that feminist agendas that expect women’s movements to question patriarchal norms are ‘pure’ and ‘clinically sanitized’ and largely result in women’s movements remaining autonomous from ethnic movements.27 This is a tension that has accompanied most popular movements. Feminists have demonstrated that though women have participated in armed/ democratic/popular movements on equal terms with men, patriarchal norms that discursively produce masculine and feminine subjectivities have been hard to displace.28 This is not unique to Third World women. American feminists have also expressed their disappointment and anger when

Political motherhood 137 male comrades insist and expect hierarchical gender norms operating within the household to be automatically extended to democratic public spaces.29 However, the constant focus on oppressive patriarchal norms that freeze Third World women into passive victims has played an important role in the divide between liberal feminists in the Global North and feminists of the South. As Mohanty points out that the over-emphasize on ‘achievements’ and ‘failures’ as opposed to imagined free white liberal democracy is central to the humanist tropes of the ‘free’, ‘knowing’ individual without taking other cross cutting axes of oppression in account. Instead, focusing on coalitions rather than identities, identifying struggles rather than shared oppression, which disrupts the representations of the Third World woman as frozen in a congealed universal narrative of victimhood, would be more productive for feminist politics.30 Maternal love has almost always been central to the politics of sexualities and cultures of revolutions; while radical Left groups have been critical of bourgeois display of emotions such as love, longing and desire, maternal love has been central to the birth of both the male revolutionary and the nationalist ‘hero.’ The supposed power and force of the natural feminine urge towards nurturing and care drives her to seek objects of nurture – in this case, the disappeared-incarcerated rebel-victim. The sacrifice and devotion inevitably associated with such quests in turn underlines innate feminine virtue. It is this affective space that ‘pure’ motherhood occupies that leads her to form collectives, build solidarities, and take on the role of a vigilante to prevent further incarceration/forced disappearances/torture of members of her community – thus reinforcing the women-biologyreproducer matrix. In this context, it is difficult to imagine the pure and the political as binaries but rather as mutually constitutive categories. When does affect remain pure and when does it get politicized? Are affect and politics necessarily in opposition? Does ‘pure motherhood’ not include rage against larger inequalities and injustices and is ‘political motherhood’ devoid and drained of emotions? How does pain enter politics? How do women opposing state oppression in militarized zones articulate their resistance? The feminist task then would be to foreground the oppressive structures in which women in movement(s) operate, to tease out the fissures and gaps, to locate moments that rupture norms of ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ that govern and produce subjects. The locking of masculinity with revolutionary impulses and femininity with maternal instincts even within militant movements has often functioned as a double bind. On the one hand, the norms of motherhood allows women to rupture gendered spatiality of the public/private divide through the performance of grief, thus forcing patriarchal authorities (state/army/ community/nation) to recognize the politicization of such bodies and affects. On the other hand, the performance of motherhood pivotal to resistance and movements reduces and objectifies women as mothers. The question remains, what does the performance of affect (maternal grief, for

138  Panchali Ray instance) that challenges militarized masculine states, by using the very idioms of patriarchy imply for feminist politics? How does one dodge charges of ‘essentialism’ within feminist politics, when one tries to locate mother’s groups agitating for peace? The question of essentialism is a dogged one. The last few decades has seen a protracted battle between social constructionist feminism and feminism of difference, where the latter has argued that the very act of naming/ defining/categorizing ‘woman’ has been to essentialize her. In this context, I find Elizabeth Grosz’s argument regarding the contamination of feminist politics quite persuasive. Arguing against the ‘purity’ of feminist politics, she claims that there can be no feminist position that is not, to some degree, almost always implicated in patriarchal power. Feminists are not faced with pure and impure options. All options are in their various ways bound by constraints of patriarchal power. The crucial questions are, which commitments remain, in spite of their patriarchal alignments, of use to feminists in their political struggle? . . . the decision about whether to ‘use’ essentialism or to somehow remain beyond it . . . is a question of calculation, not a self-evident certainty.31 It is, but understood, that in a highly masculinized, militarized society, political motherhood could be a way of opening up otherwise closed doors for women to participate in political processes. The cultures of politics that renders agency/victimhood to bodies caught in the matrices of politics, revolution, movements, and nationalism are destabilized with the performance of political motherhood. On the one hand, women asserting themselves in male dominated spaces are surely feminist, and, on the other, the idioms used to enter these spaces are grounded in discourses that have historically secured women’s submission to male authority. Women mourning for the dead, particularly the image of the mother mourning for her lost child, is tied to (hetero)normative nationalist fantasies. The performance of mourning which operates within sanctioned boundaries of domesticity, femininity, and kinship is challenged by political collectives even when if it is firmly anchored to the identity of the mother – mourning the loss of someone unfamiliar, unfamilial, unrelated, and unknown. The Meira Paibi play a symbolic and ritualistic part in public events that mark and mourn the ‘martyrs’ of Manipur’s struggle for freedom. The act of mourning by a mother in a public sphere is a political act that questions the sanctity and the singularity of both grief and loss, whose legitimate space of expression can only be the confinement of the private. However, patriarchal norms, even if stretched, allow the political mother to protest the loss of a child through tears, curses, and penance: with Manorama’s death, the performance of bereavement found expression that far exceeded patriarchy’s sanction of legitimate affective behaviour. Movements are built over a shared economy of affect: righteous anger, a sense of injustice, a need to assert one’s own humanity.32 An outpouring of grief that crystallizes into an assertion that deployed an

Political motherhood 139 embodied language of pain meant to shock and shame brings into focus the failure of institutional mechanisms of justice, and, in this context, pinning down the custodian of justice as the perpetrator. The outpouring of rage, pain, and hurt, and the effective manner in which such affect enters politics, leads one to ask about the heterogeneous nature of resistances. How does the project of assertion and insistence of right to be heard deploy affect? When I asked the imas of what led them to take such a radical step, the answers varied from grief, rage, and helplessness. ‘We were so angry, so filled with rage. This had to stop, it had to stop now. We decided we will challenge the Indian army. Manorama was the last nail on the coffin. We did as we thought best.’33 It was not just about failure (of constitutional justice), but the law itself (AFSPA) that became the target of the protest. The protest, therefore, was not just resistance against violations but against the State. The impossibility of appealing to legal apparatuses (where the State was the perpetrator) meant that some members of the Meira Paibi had to find other ways of expressing their rage, grief, as well as their helplessness. The Kangla protest thus embodied a language of pain and hurt which rejected liberal notions of justice, which would have meant asking the state-violator to protect its citizen-victim. Instead, the protestors invited the perpetrators to own up to what they really are – not protectors but violators. Most political protests are enacted through the body – from gathering in public places, marches, and picketing to self-immolation, etc. However, naked protests have to be located in historical and cultural contexts: the body as a site of humiliation and shame is not just about gender but is equally marked and constituted by ideologies of racism, classism, casteism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, and other markers of oppression. Dalit and tribal women, trans and other non-conforming bodies have always been stripped and paraded nude, as an exemplary punishment, for breaking norms and other similar transgressions. Only recently, two Dalit families including women and children were allegedly stripped naked publicly in the state of Uttar Pradesh by the police, for daring to seek justice under the Schedule Caste Atrocities Act against upper caste neighbours. When their complaints were refused, they sat in protest outside the police station leading the police to beat and strip them of their clothes.34 Stripping one of clothes and making bare the body to public spectacle is to reduce the body to its bare element. In this case, when a Dalit body is historically subjugated, routinely stripped, mauled, lynched, raped, made to perform degrading task (including eating excreta), and constituted as a polluting body, steps forward to demand justice, s/he destabilizes the politics of recognition, norms, and social order. Hegemonic politics and coercive practices constitute a Dalit body as abject, residing in the margins, peripheral to modern democracy. Any attempt to destabilize such centre-periphery is met with violent retribution, often to humiliate and teach a lesson that s/he will never forget, strip him/her of all rights (even the right to cover oneself), and make her/him forego all notions of (newly acquired) self-respect.

140  Panchali Ray Feminist scholars have written on the resignification of the naked body from shame and humiliation to anger, protest, and feminist agency. Many have drawn parallels between Mahasweta Devis’ short story ‘Draupadi’35 and the nude protest at Kangla Fort. Gayatri Spivak in the introduction of her translation of ‘Draupadi’ writes that Mahasweta Devi’s rewriting of the episode of Draupadi’s disrobing in Mahabharat shows where male leadership ends: in Mahabharat, Draupadi’s disrobing is thwarted by divine/ Dharma;36 on the contrary, Mahasweta’s Dopdi is stripped naked by the representatives of the law, and she remains publicly naked at her own insistence. This, according to Spivak, is where ‘benign,’ ‘divine’ male leadership ends.37 Whereas Draupadi was protected by Dharma, Dopdi was stripped by modern law; where Draupadi asks for protection (by being clothed), Dopdi insists that there is nothing she needs to hide, and ‘tears it [the cloth] with her teeth.’ Here a rapeable and vulnerable woman (read tribalterrorist) talks back to the highly masculinized state apparatus through her body, by refusing to wear clothes. This act of refusal displaces and questions the paternalistic claims of the Indian state. Sundar Rajan, for instance, argues that Dopdi’s resistance must be read as a ‘deliberate refusal of a shared sign system’ as well as an ‘ironic deployment of the same semiotics’ that produce ‘counter-effect of shame, confusion and terror in the enemy (what is a man?).’38 Deepti Misra, however, strikes a note of caution in drawing similarities between Dopdi and the protesting members of the Meira Paibi. She argues that with these utterances ‘Are you a man? . . . there isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed,’ Dopdi effectively reinscribes the relationship between shame, nakedness, and sexual violence, implying that if there was a man present, she would have been ashamed, and since she is unashamed, then the one gazing at her nakedness is not a man. Thus Misra argues, ‘the idea of masculinist protection remains.’ However, the protesting mothers frame their nakedness as a challenge rather than a taunt; they sever the causal relationship between the male gaze and female shame and redirect their utterances to the masculinism of state violence and not the manliness of men.39 Their protest, ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh’ taunts the failure of the Indian state’s liberal-legal claim as protectors. It is a critique of the rule of law, a mockery of its mechanisms. It is a critique of the claims of security forces as paternalistic and benevolent protectors; instead it reinforces and resignifies the armed forces as violators-perpetrators and, by extension, the Indian state’s ‘occupation’ of Manipur as violating. In the meeting prior to the protest, many imas gathered together to decide on the course of action and only a few decided to go ahead. ‘We never told our families, we did not talk to our (male) friends outside the organization in the movement. We decided to keep it to ourselves; if people knew they may want to stop us.’40 The creation of a feminine space for resistance, where male leadership, control, and patronage are rejected, allowed women to protest through their bodies, which effectively did not lean back on masculine idioms. The act of voluntarily removing clothes by protesting mothers destabilizes all imaginations that are associated with motherhood and

Political motherhood 141 with legitimate expressions of feminine resistance. The mother is central to imaginations of the nation – vulnerable to the threat of the ‘other’ but never sexually active, rather, tamed and asexual. Sexuality of the mother-nation is acknowledged only to foreground the nationalist narrative of a vulnerable nation-mother and valiant son-protectors.41 The nationalist readings of the naked protests have been that the Indian state’s violence was so terrifying that even mothers protested. For the imas, the identity of the mother is central to their memories of the protest: Manorama is our daughter, she is me. If my daughter lies naked, how can I be clothed? When Manipur has been stripped of its clothes, how can we as mothers be quiet? When your daughter has been stripped naked, how can you be clothed? I knew that we had to do this – for my daughter, for our children.42 It is an inversion of the anti-colonial narrative of women as nation-mother, needing valiant sons to protect her – it is now the ‘Mothers of Manipur’ that have stood up to protect Manipur from the aggressive, rapist Indian nation. Central to this nude protest was the performance of motherhood.43 Some scholars writing on the naked protests have emphasized on the ‘powerlessness,’ ‘hopelessness,’ ‘desperation,’ and ‘disempowerment’ that the naked protests symbolized.44 Headlines screaming, ‘Look what armed forces have reduced Manipuri women to’45 and ‘Protest Nude: Last Resort,’46 emphasized the brutality of the oppression that Manipuri people were facing, which led the members of the Meira Paibi to take such ‘desperate’ measures; as another feminist journalist wrote, ‘the women’s protests would have gone unreported if it had not been so dramatic . . . it suggests that they were truly pushed to the end of their tolerance.’47 This reification of female victimhood is a common narrative in trying to explain or appropriate women’s agency at a moment when it seems to have detached itself from gendered social relations. Such readings necessitate an obliteration of politics, struggles, and choices. To further locate the questions of resistance and its implications for feminist politics, I bring in the question of agency and norm. The historical and cultural specificity of the political participation of women in the North East has always been within the framework of motherhood – the members of the Meira Paibi are not just socially exalted, but deeply involved with the civic and religious life of the Meitei community. Does the conformism and participation of the members of the Meira Paibi in the social, religious practices that advocate patriarchal ideologies of docility and submission render them non-viable subjects of feminism? Their active involvement in socioreligious movements that sustain principles of female subordination is tricky terrain for feminists. One of the mothers of the Meira Paibi remembers her fear, guilt, and anxiety vis-à-vis her family to me, I did not tell anyone I am going to disrobe in front of Kangla fort. Before leaving, I touched my husband’s feet, asking for his forgiveness

142  Panchali Ray in my heart, for lying to him. A husband is equivalent to a god. And I have lied to him. I left the house with tears in my eyes.48 How does one juxtapose this narrative of submission with the radical act of disrobing in front of the Kangla Fort? Judith Butler argues that to shift from epistemological accounts of identity to one that is located in signifying practices and to understand identity as a practice, one must depart from the understanding that what is once signified as an identity remains fixed; instead identities come into being through a constant reiteration.49 Gendered subjectivity is maintained and reproduced by a continuous submission to norms, social power, and gender regulations. Thus agency becomes a question of reworking ‘passionate attachments’50 to subjection, which, in turn, allows a subversion of identity51 that provides opportunity for resistance. The act of the disrobing is a displacement of the normative role of the mother or even the ways an ideal Meitei woman can protest. To inhabit the norms of motherhood opens up possibilities of movements, mobility, and collectivizing otherwise denied to women in Meitei society. I do not intend to place the protest at Kangla Fort within the dualistic framework of agency/submission but to read it as a slippage in the performance of political motherhood – an act that exceeds the desired goal. Agency is no longer understood in terms of personhood, of the relative autonomy that the individual has from the social, but a singular moment that resignifies the very conditions that guarantee subordination.52 Interestingly, at the moment of protest there were no slogans, no banners that emphasized motherhood; the challenge remained outside the framework of gendered kinship, as the mothers presented themselves as sexualized bodies to the Indian army and not as the maternal, asexual, grieving mother. We knew we would protest naked, we had already decided. We did not wear any underclothes, tore the stitches of our lungis so that we could remove our clothes faster and without any obstruction. We moved from different directions so that no one would stop us. We already had the two banners with us asking the Indian army to rape us and to take our flesh.53 If identifying themselves as Manorama’s mother was what allowed them to mobilize, organize, and politicize, their performance of political motherhood far exceeded their goal. The understanding of gender as a constituted identity opens up the possibility of gender being constituted differently and thus possibilities of agency.54 The reliance on norms in the constitution of identities is useful in trying to understand the coexistence of submission and resistance. Whereas the mothers are bound up with the very norms that feminist seek to contest, how does one locate agency and resistance? The Kangla protest can be located as a singular, spectacular moment that actively contested, countered, and challenged gendered identities and

Political motherhood 143 normative subjectivities, thus opening up possibilities of newer identities. The protest successfully broke the binary of ‘political’ and ‘personal’ motherhood by drawing on pain, anger, and hurt to rupture powerful norms that interpellate them as grieving mothers. Though Meitei women are active in the public realm, it is only married middle-aged mothers who enjoy relative freedom. It is a rigid sex-segregated society, where young unmarried women are constantly supervised, disciplined, and expected to adhere to strict social norms. Women’s participation in political movements is restricted to married women who are biological mothers. Only such strict adherence to reproductive heteronormativity opens up the possibilities for women to break the private/public divide. As mentioned earlier, members of the Meira Paibi take great pride in their costume, the beige skirt and white shawl, symbolic of their exalted status as Manipur’s mothers, legitimized and sanctioned by religion, patriarchy, and culture. The shedding of this dress at the site of protest is symbolically a break with cultures and discourses that produce them, even if momentarily. It is this one moment of excess that breaks faith with all that constitutes a member of the Meira Paibi. The relation between norms of recognition and survival in the social world is reworked, as the very interpellations that constitute the members of the Meira Paibi are renegotiated. Wendy Brown argues that under certain political frameworks, ‘injury’ itself becomes essential to the identity of the oppressed. The politicization and mobilization around this ‘injury,’ what she calls ‘wounded attachments,’ ensures being constituted by it, successfully foreclosing possibilities.55 This fetishization of the wound, whereby protesting women are seen as injured mothers, where pain enters politics only through channels of maternal love means to be bound by the Law – family/community/nation. Mourning, lamenting, agitating for the disappearance/ loss/incarceration of their own successfully ties the movement down to familial, ethnic, and national allegiances. While the performance of mourning by women publicly in a strictly segregated society is an act of displacement, to tie it down to the identity of a mother is to allow norms of family/community/nation to flourish unhindered. In this context, the protest at the Kangla Fort remains a singular act – it breaks the ‘wounded attachments’ of the Meira Paibi to the ‘injury’ of the grieving mother, to reconstitute itself as sexually active women challenging the Indian state to ‘rape’ them: in this one moment, they undo and resignify their identity as ‘mothers,’ as well as the representation of the state as benevolent protector.

Concluding remarks I would like to end with Irom Sharmila Chanu breaking her fast and the backlash she faced from her community. It may seem that Sharmila and the Meira Paibi are divergent, but they are divergent only in terms of the differing norms within which they crafted their movement; in both cases, they

144  Panchali Ray appealed to extant tropes of gender. While Sharmila, unmarried and childless, went on a fast to protest AFSPA, the members of the Meira Paibi relied on the norm of motherhood to register their protests. Sharmila’s decision to end her fast, to marry, and to enter mainstream politics brought allegations of betrayal of the struggle of the Manipuri people against the Indian state.56 During her fast, Sharmila transcended the flesh and blood body and became synonymous with the abstract body of Manipur. Her iconization was premised on the pre-sexual, celibate ascetic model of political martyrdom. These factors contributed to her exalted status. For her to return to the social – to food, marriage, and elections – destroys the basis of her iconization. The return from the abstract to the feminine, everyday, desiring, hungry body delegitimizes Manipur’s struggle against the paternalist occupying Indian state. The exalted status of the Meira Paibi too depended on the asexual, maternal body of the mother; however, the Kangla Fort protest displaced the foundations of that very identity. The focus on the ‘desperation’ of the mothers is partly because of society’s obvious confusion of the rewriting of the script that confers intelligibility to subjects. The naked protests brought to the foreground the fictive claims of regulatory mechanisms that produce intelligible subjects. Vijaylakshmi Brara ends her essay, ‘Performance: The Gendered Space in Manipur’ on a rather dismal note, ‘today the women’s collectives are expected to remain in the background, ready to strike the moment the situation demands, and then retreat gracefully when the results present themselves.’57 This sounds familiar. Scholars working on women’s participations in democratic movements have argued that it is only when there is a crisis that women are allowed to step out of normative feminine roles to make cause against a common enemy, and, when the crisis subsides, they slip back into their gendered roles. But the question remains, can such transitions and transgressions be so easily co-opted? What does the politics of performativity imply for subjectivities? Can we shift the normative frameworks of recognition and intelligibility around, without in some way being undone by them? How does a singular moment of displacement rework or destabilize the framework of cultural and social intelligibility that enables future politics of resistance? I end this essay with some thoughts: can popular movements be feminist in terms of challenging fundamentally patriarchy’s agenda for women, of displacing gendered norms that produce us as intelligible subjects? Can women function within broader movements in languages that are completely new, without drawing on existing patriarchal constructions of ideal femininity? The fundamental relation between norms, subjecthood, recognition, and survival ensures that one can never fully operate outside social relations that govern patriarchy; instead one can seek multiple-singular moments that question, challenge, displace, and subvert norms and push for articulations of newer possibilities. A feminist politics that recognizes the role of discourses, language, and significations in constituting subjects, instead of a

Political motherhood 145 transcendental subject located outside the gendered hierarchy, may be more useful in understanding how we can think and understand articulations of freedom and agency of women, located in otherwise very patriarchal spaces.

Notes 1 Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” 26–35; Brownmiller, Against Our Will etc. 2 Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 631–660. 3 Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings. 4 Iveković, Captive Gender. 5 Brownmiller, Against Our Will. 6 Chakravarti, Rape, Class and the State. 7 Geetha, “Some Thoughts on Extreme Violence and the Imagination,” 85–91. 8 Marcus, “Bodies, Fighting Words,” 385–403. 9 Enloe, Manoeuvres. 10 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries; Chenoy, Militarism and Women in South Asia; Batool, et al., Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora. 11 Kannabiran, “Introduction,” 133–137. 12 Viswanath, “Shame and Control,” 313–333. 13 Enloe, Manoeuvres, 12–13. 14 Irom Sharmila Chanu also known as the ‘Iron Lady’ is a Manipuri civil rights activist, political activist, and poet and is best known for her hunger strike from November 2000 that demanded the repealing of AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) from the Indian state of Manipur. Sharmila, after witnessing the massacre of ten civilians on November 2, 2000, in the town of Malom by the Assam Rifles, one of the Indian Paramilitary forces operating in the state, went on a hunger strike which she ended on August 9, 2016, after 16 years of fasting against the draconian act that gave armed forces impunity. Sharmila has been recognized by many peace and human rights organizations and has been awarded the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights, the first Mayillama Award of the Mayilamma Foundation, a lifetime achievement award from the Asian Human Rights Commission, the Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize, and the Sarva Gunah Sampannah ‘Award for Peace and Harmony.’ In 2013 Amnesty International declared her a ‘Prisoner of conscience.’ She entered mainstream electoral politics in the state of Manipur in 2016 and lost. 15 Duncan, Borderland City in New India. 16 Mathur, “Life and Death in the Borderlands,” 33–49. 17 Personal interview with Ima Gyaneshwari on February 9, 2016. 18 Thockchom, “Meirapaibi,” 151–159. 19 Mukherji, “Meira Paibis: Women Torch-Bearers on the March in Manipur” www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2533.html 20 Brara, “Performance,” 335–349. 21 Personal Interview with Ima Lourembam Nganbi on March 9, 2016. 22 Ibid. 23 Gillath, “Women Against War,” 142–146. 24 Alwis, “Motherhood as a Space of Protest,” 152–174. 25 Chenoy, Militarism and Women in South Asia. 26 Das, “Ethnicity and Democracy Meet When Mothers Protest,” 63. 27 Ibid., 56. 28 Sanghatana, et al., We Were Making History; Roy, Remembering Revolution.

146  Panchali Ray 9 Sargent, “New Left Women and Men,” ix–xxix. 2 30 Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders. 31 Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism.” 32 Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 331–358. 33 See note 17 above. 34 Police allegedly strip Dalit family naked in UP for filing complaint. DNA. October 9, 2015. www.dnaindia.com/india/report-police-allegedly-strip-dalitfamily-naked-in-up-for-filing-complaint-2133171 Video of Dalit family allegedly stripped by police creates storm on social media. The Hindu, October 10, 2015. www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/video-of-dalit-family-allegedlystripped-by- police-creates-storm-on-social-media/article7742836.ece 35 Dopdi/Draupadi, a santhal (tribe residing in the state of Bengal) woman, is a Naxalite (radical left group) who had been ‘apprehended’ by the armed forces and gang raped. When presented the next morning to the officer (Senanayak) who ordered her rape, she refused to be clothed. She walks up to Senanayak and utters ‘What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but can you clothe me again? Are you a man? There isn‘t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my clothes on me.’ Devi, “Draupadi,” 19–38. 36 Draupadi is one of the most celebrated women in the Indian epic Mahabharat. Married to five princes simultaneously, she is the only example of polyandry in our ancient texts. Her husband loses her to his cousins in a game of dice and she is dragged to the court, and, being dependent on more than one husband, she is designated a prostitute. The victors pull at her sari with the view of stripping her naked in full court and she silently prays to the God Krishna. She continues to remain clothed as the sari miraculously keeps reproducing itself. 37 Spivak, “Draupadi,” 1–18. 38 Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 331–358. 39 For more discussion on the distinction, see Misra, “ ‘Are You a Man?’ Performing Naked Protests in India,” 621. 40 See note 17 above. 41 Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation. 42 See note 17 above. 43 Bora, “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal,” 341–360. 44 Brara, “Performance,” 340. 45 Gokhale, Tehelka, July 31, 2004 cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre. 46 Gokhale, Tehelka, July 21, 2004 cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre. 47 Sharma, “Manipuri Women’s Dramatic Protest” cited in Gill, The Peripheral Centre. 48 See note 17 above. 49 Butler, Gender Trouble, 145. 50 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 7. 51 Butler, Gender Trouble. 52 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 53 See note 17 above. 54 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 1. 55 Brown, States of Injury. 56 Yengkhom Jilangamba, however, argues that mainstream media’s highlighting of Manipuri people’s ‘rejection’ of Sharmila is a reenactment of an old binary of inhabitants of the North East as wild and savage; the imagery of the iconic figure rendered homeless by the very people she sacrificed her life for is a testimony to this binary. Jilangamba, “Sharmila and the Forgotten Genealogy of Violence in Manipur,” 15–19. 57 See above 44, 348.

Political motherhood 147

Bibliography Alwis, M. D. “Motherhood as a Space of Protest: Women’s Political Participation in Contemporary Sri Lanka.” In Women in Peace Politics, edited by P. Banerjee, 152–174. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Batool, E., I. Butt, S. Mushtaq, M. Rashid, and N. Rather. Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? New Delhi: Zubaan, 2016. Bora, P. “Between the Human, the Citizen and the Tribal: Reading Feminist Politics in India’s Northeast.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 3–4 (2010): 341–360. Brara, N. V. “Performance: The Gendered Space in Manipur.” In The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East, edited by P. Gill, 335–349. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010. Brown, W. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Brownmiller, S. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. London: Secker and Warbug, 1975. Butalia, U. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998. Butler, J. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–531. doi:10.2307/3207893. Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Butler, J. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Chakravarti, U. “Rape, Class and the State.” People’s Union of Civil Liberties Bulletin (1982 September). www.pucl.org/from-archives/Gender/rape-class.htm (accessed on 17.12.2016). Chenoy, A. Militarism and Women in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002. Das, S. K. “Ethnicity and Democracy Meet When Mothers Protest.” In Women in Peace Politics, edited by P. Banerjee, 54–76. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Devi, M. “Draupadi.” In Breast Stories, Translated and introduced by G. Spivak, 19–38. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1997. Duncan, M. Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Enloe, C. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Enloe, C. Manoeuvres: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Geetha, V. “Some Thoughts on Extreme Violence and the Imagination.” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 44 (2015): 85–91. Gillath, N. “Women against War: Parents against Silence.” In Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, edited by B. Swirski and M. P. Safir, 142–146. London: Pergamon Press, 1991. Gokhale, N. A. “ ‘Look at what the Armed Forces have Reduced Manipuri Women to’ Tehelka, July 31, 2004.” In The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East, edited by P. Gill, 363–366. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010a.

148  Panchali Ray Gokhale, N. A. “ ‘Protest Nude: Last Resort for Women’ Tehelka, July 21, 2004.” In The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East, edited by P. Gill, 366–368. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010b. Griffin, S. “Rape: The All-American Crime.” Ramparts 10 (1971): 26–35. Grosz, E. “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism.” In Inscriptions 5 (1989). http://ccs.ihr.ucsc.edu/inscriptions/volume-5/elizabeth-grosz (accessed on 22.12.2016). Helman, S. and T. Rapoport. “Women in Black: Challenging Israel’s Gender and Socio-Political Order.” British Journal of Sociology 48 (1997): 681–700. Iveković, R. Captive Gender: Ethnic Stereotypes and Cultural Boundaries. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005. Jilangamba, Y. “Sharmila and the Forgotten Genealogy of Violence in Manipur.” Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 36 (2016): 15–19. Kalapna, S. “Manipuri Women’s Dramatic Protest’ The Hindu, July 25, 2004.” In The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East, edited by P. Gill, 368–371. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010. Kannabiran, K. “Introduction.” In Women in Peace Politics, edited by P. Banerjee, 133–137. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Mahmood, S. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Marcus, S. F. “Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by J. Butler and J. W. Scott, 385–403. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Mathur, S. “Life and Death in the Borderlands: Indian Sovereignty and Military Impunity.” Race and Class 54, no. 1 (2012): 33–49. doi:10.1177/0306396812444819. Menon, R. and K. Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. Misra, D. “ ‘Are You a Man?’ Performing Naked Protests in India.” Signs 36, no. 3 (2011): 603–625. doi:10.1086/657487. Mohanty, C. T. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Mukherji, S. “Meira Paibis: Women Torch-Bearers on the March in Manipur.” Mainstream XLIX, no. 1 (2010). www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2533.html (accessed on 22.12.2016). Nandini, S. “Winning Hearts and Minds: Emotional Wars and the Construction of Difference.” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2012): 705–720. Ortner, S. B. and H. Whitehead. Sexual Meanings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Rajan, R. S. “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for Our Times.” In Signposts, edited by R. S. Rajan, 331–358. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. Rich, A. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–660. doi:10.1086/493756. Roy, S. Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sanghathana, S. S. We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising. London: Zed Books, 1989. Sargent, L. “New Left Women and Men: The Honeymoon Is Over.” In Women and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Feminism, edited by L. Sargent, ix–xxix. Boston: South End Press, 1981.

Political motherhood 149 Sarkar, T. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Spivak, G. C. “Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword.” In Breast Stories, edited by M. Devi, 1–18. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1997. Thockchom, N. “Meirapaibi: The Role of Women’s Movement in Meitei Society.” In The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East, edited by P. Gill, 151– 159. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010. Viswanath, K. “Shame and Control: Sexuality and Power in Feminist Discourse in India.” In Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity, edited by M. Thapan, 313–333. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

9 ‘Their’ suicide letter An exercise in reading that is always incomplete Sayan Bhattacharya

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference (1984)

On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India read down Section 377 of the Indian penal code. Section 377 was the colonial era law that criminalized any sex other than peno-vaginal penetration. In effect, it was used to persecute queer and transgender individuals in India. This judgment marked the culmination of more than two decades of legal activism by India’s queer movements. The first petition against the law was filed in 1994. Nivedita Menon writes that Section 377 was the marker of how the nation state reproduces itself through procreative sex by criminalizing non-procreative sex (Menon, 2007). Now with the decriminalization of consensual non peno-vaginal sex, could we then argue that the nation state is expanding its borders to include the non-heterosexual? In what ways then, do India’s queer communities reproduce the nation? Keshav Suri, a hotelier and one of the petitioners against Section 377, argued that homophobia cost the nation millions of dollars in tourism; that is, because of India’s regressive laws, queer tourists shunned the country.1 Another petition filed by students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai spoke about how despite being meritorious and contributing to the nation state’s development, they were marked criminal.2 In short, the plea before the state was that the homosexual subject could contribute to the nation’s growth if she was granted citizenship rights through decriminalization. Yet, which class of homosexual subjects can contribute to tourism? Also, the discourse of merit is steeped in caste violence. Historically, the bogey of merit has been repeatedly raised to push back against affirmative action in India even as Dalit students continue

‘Their’ suicide letter 151 to face casteist bullying in India’s educational institutions that often push them out of these spaces. Thus, what becomes obvious here is how the struggle for queer rights is concatenated with class privilege (Suri petition) and caste privilege (invocation of merit by the IIT students). By removing a regressive law, the nation state reproduces itself through its productive queer citizens, who are by default upper class, dominant caste. Against such a backdrop, the object of this paper is queer death, more specifically, the joint suicide of a working class, subordinate caste lesbian couple. On the surface, death is an event that marks an end and hence it departs from the modes of reproduction discussed so far. Moreover, being the other of both Suri’s queer subject (working class queer) and the IIT students’ queer subject (subordinate caste queer), what can such a death reproduce? This paper will demonstrate how such a death is instrumentalized by queer activists, mostly dominant caste, upper class, to demand citizenship rights from the nation state by demonstrating the dead bodies as evidence of homophobia. The death of two Dalit girls in love with each other performs a mode of reproduction – the Indian queer movement itself, its claim to legibility, and its demand for rights. In the first half of the paper, I give a background to the suicides and how queer activists intervened in the event. From there, I move on to show how the event becomes an instrument for the demand for queer rights. Finally, I offer a series of questions to critique such an instrumental use of death. These questions are meant to critique the modes in which queer rights are demanded within the framework of the nation state. I do so to examine what alternative imaginaries might be glimpsed that do not spectacularize queer deaths for queer rights in India.

Background In the wee hours of February 20, 2011, the two missing girls were finally found, lying still on a bed of hay. Hand in hand, a gamchha (cotton towel) tied around their waists. Their eyes closed, a little froth from the mouth of the girl who was married. The previous evening, both of them had jointly consumed Folidol. Swapna Mondal, 23, and Sucheta Mondal, 19, of Sonachura, a village in the town of Nandigram in West Bengal. Even in death, their families did not accept their dead bodies.3 After the mandatory sevenday waiting period ended (and nobody came to claim their dead bodies during this period), the police cremated them like they cremate other unclaimed bodies. Seven days after their death (on the day when their bodies were taken from the morgue and burned by the police), a fact-finding team from Sappho For Equality (henceforth SFE), West Bengal’s only support group for lesbian and bisexual women and transmen, reached Nandigram to ‘investigate’ the cause of their joint suicide. They ‘discovered’ a six-page suicide note (in custody of the local police station) left by Swapna where she had clearly stated that she loved Sucheta and that their love was a matter of dispute in their village and that Sucheta was married off against her will. They

152  Sayan Bhattacharya could not bear to live apart and so they had decided to die together. If by chance they survived, they would go far away and that nobody should try looking for them. Swapna signed off saying that her family was not responsible for her death. SFE took the letter from the police station and brought it to its office in Kolkata. All the interviews conducted by its fact-finding team were filmed on camera, based on which a 16-minute video was made as a conversation starting point for its advocacy exercises with the police, medical establishments, and student communities about violence faced by queer women. In November that year, one of the members of the team, who was also the cinematographer and director of the fact-finding video, Debalina, went back to Nandigram, this time with her film crew. She intended to make a film about the joint suicides of Swapna and Sucheta and the letter that Swapna had left behind. However, she had barely begun speaking to Swapna’s parents when some villagers interrupted the proceedings and refused to allow the team to film further. Debalina decided to fill this void in footage with four narratives of members of SFE.4 All these members are based in Kolkata and she filmed each of them reading Swapna’s letter to her parents in a variety of spaces, ranging from cabs, rickshaws, to hill stations, cafes, and home spaces. The resultant film, titled . . . And the Unclaimed (Ebang Bewarish), is still touring different queer film festivals across the world and has been featured in many international film festivals and shown across campuses, both inside and outside India. The film was produced by SFE.

From death to rights The joint suicides of Swapna-Sucheta, the disavowal of their dead bodies from their community, and the series of audiovisual representations of their deaths serve as an entry point for SFE to start a dialogue on violence meted out to lesbian women on various platforms. This entry point is by no means exceptional. Navaneetha Mokkil points out that often the event through which the lesbian body can become a figure in the imagination of India is through her suicide. ‘Suicide becomes the dark act of “coming out,” where the couple becomes established through dying together.’ She uses data collected by the Alternate Law Forum to show how the spate of lesbian suicides in Kerala has mobilized queer activism in the state (2011, 391–392). However, this form of mobilization needs to be historically situated. Queer activism in India has been largely dominated by legal interventions and protests against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized sexual intercourse ‘against the order of nature’ until recently. Ashwini Sukthankar succinctly points out in the first lesbian anthology from India, Facing the Mirror that: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code makes homosexual acts between men illegal but does not technically have lesbianism within its purview

‘Their’ suicide letter 153 since the legal definition of intercourse requires penetration. When it was suggested to Queen Victoria in 1885 that ‘Macaulay’s Law’ should be extended to address female homosexuality, she was horrified, refusing to believe that such acts between women were possible . . . the invisibility conferred on us by law . . . does not necessarily result in lesbians being ‘legal’ and therefore having legal recourse to fighting discrimination and harassment. On the contrary, invisibility means that the fact of our existence is still more shocking when it is revealed, and the very law that seems to ignore the reality of lesbian existence is employed to crush it out. (1999, XIII–XIV) This anthology was compiled in 1999 and since then the queer movements have come a long way in terms of mainstream visibility. Lesbian voices too have come to the forefront of the protests against Section 377. On a technical level, the new rape law in India that is the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, has expanded the definition of rape to include not just penovaginal penetration but also anal and oral penetration, penetration by foreign objects, and also by other body parts. Thus, in a perverse way, sexual acts beyond peno-vaginal or anal penetration have been allowed entry into legal discourse in India, rendering Sukthankar’s formulation of 377 and its technicalities somewhat dated. Yet, on the other hand, there has not been a single case of prosecution of lesbian women under IPC 377, although this law was used to blackmail women or separate lovers.5 Since much of this persecution happened without any formal documentation like charge sheets or court trials, these narratives remained invisible in state documents and mainstream discourse. So then, on the level of activism and strategizing around lesbian visibility, when one talks of violence against lesbian women, lesbian suicides become spectacular events that emphatically establish lesbian victimhood in public imaginaries. Thus, Sappho’s invocation of the joint suicide of SwapnaSucheta gives its activist interventions political and strategic valence. However, in positing Swapna and Sucheta as two women from rural Bengal who had to die because they loved each other, subsumes other aspects of their identities, creating a totalizing category of non-normative sexuality as the only marker of oppression, as if sexuality is not negotiated through other contexts and identity positions. Swapna Mondal and Sucheta Mondal were also two girls from a subordinate caste living in Nandigram, the site of massive agitation against forceful acquisition of farmland for industrialization in West Bengal in 2007. Yet, SFE’s documentation of the joint suicides, be it the fact-finding video or the documentary film, does nothing to explore the contexts of Swapna and Sucheta’s lives beyond the fact that they died and were left as unclaimed bodies. They become defined by the event of their deaths. In the essay titled, Chandra’s Death, one of the founders of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, takes up a series of testimonies by Bagdi (one of the

154  Sayan Bhattacharya most subordinate castes in India) women and men before a court of law, following the death of Chandra Chasani, a married woman, due to excessive bleeding post abortion, to ask, ‘How is one to reclaim this document of history?’ He argues that the apparatus of historiography documents the big events and phenomena, ignoring the ‘small drama and fine detail of social existence.’ So, historiography, in order to be critical, should bend ‘closer to the ground to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time.’ Guha, while exploring this archival document, shows how Law, an organ of the State, while recording the testimonies of Chandra’s mother, sister, and neighbour who gave the medicine for her abortion, reads the incident as a ‘case’ and the ‘death’ as a crime. In doing so, it reads the testimonies as confessionals (ekrars), thus kneading the lament, the sobs, the whispers of peasant women and men, in this case Chandra’s sister, mother, and neighbour into a univocal voice of confession. In short, Law subsumes the plurality of voices to document them as hard evidence of crime. On the other hand, when these voices do find space in a history book, it is just as bare bones of a death, a record culled out from the books of Law, a report of an incident devoid of context. Similarly, when we read Swapna and Sucheta’s deaths, we see that on one hand, there are a series of newspaper reports that talk of lesbian suicides in rural Bengal, incidents that happen in backward parts of the country, still under the yoke of feudalism, yet to partake of the fruits of urbanism and education. Alongside these reports, are the two families that do not accept the two women even in death. Between these two overarching narratives, what narrative does the queer activist produce? Drawing on Guha’s essay, Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, renowned queer activists and who have been involved in the petitions against Section 377, argue: Much in the nature of Chandra’s absent voice, the queer person remains absent in the telling of history in the colonial period. Since the queer person as a subject of history is still largely invisible, the task of recovering her voice remains an open-ended project. Similar to Guha’s attention to the ‘subaltern life in its passage through time,’ the focus of a queer legal history could be to discover the voice of the queer subaltern in existing legal records. (Narrain and Gupta, 2011, xx) One could extend such a formulation outside of law too. If the media and patriarchal family disavow lesbian intimacies, the queer activist resurrects it. So then, Debalina’s camera and SFE, as the producers of the films, are performing such a task. In focusing on Swapna’s letter and her passionate love for Sucheta, both the films are indeed pressing to the ground to recover what lies buried. Yet, isn’t their violence in this recovery? To borrow loosely from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to present is to represent (Spivak, 2003, 239). The discourse of rights needs to rehearse the violence that Swapna

‘Their’ suicide letter 155 and Sucheta endured (the repeated focus on their dead bodies, the reading of the suicide note on camera) to shore up the queer subject’s claim to injury that can be redressed legally. Hence, Swapna and Sucheta need to be instrumentalized to demand lesbian rights. Thus, on the one hand is the fatal homophobia that suppresses lesbian love. On the other is the violent resurrection of the dead figures as victims who died in love. Amid the two opposing narratives serving different motives, can we really hear Swapna and Sucheta? Can the subaltern indeed speak? What if we were to give up any authorial claim to representation and populate the domain of death with many speculative questions, each of which marks a possibility and a foreclosure to be opened up by another possible question? These questions are not simply about this particular suicide but they are about the very modes of queer organizing in India. The films by SFE indict the families for being ‘inhuman,’ for not accepting their daughters even in death because they loved each other, because lesbianism is such a transgression that deserves only persecution. However, such an argument is akin to losing sight of some other contexts. In her suicide note titled, ‘My Life,’ Swapna repeatedly says that she had a family that loved her. She says that despite economic hardships (for example they did not have any land, they earned some money from selling the catch from fishing), they were a happy family. Her grandmother taught her till she was in Class IV. Later she continued studying without any help and finally had to stop her education due to financial constraints. Swapna started giving tuitions to children in the neighbourhood. In fact, her household ran on her income as her father did not keep well. In the letter, she also asks her brothers to look after her mother. She states that her family was not responsible for her death; responsible were those who did not understand her, those who insulted and tortured her. She does not name anyone specifically in the letter. In the fact-finding video, Swapna’s mother, Chandmoni Mondal, states that Swapna was the sole breadwinner of the family. She says that it was ‘natural’ that two sisters would love each other (Swapna and Sucheta were also first cousins). She also informs the fact-finding team that Swapna taught Sucheta and sometimes Sucheta stayed over with them and that Chandmoni did not find anything wrong with it. Swapna’s father, Achintya Mondal, echoes Chandmoni. She repeats the same facts when Debalina goes back to film . . . And the Unclaimed, all the while crying. Yet, the film only stops at noting how Swapna’s family did not claim her body. It gets a humanities professor to comment on how claiming her body would mean that the family and the society were accepting her love, it would mean according dignity to the transgression and therefore they could not afford to do so. Doesn’t such a formulation overstate the family’s agency? Doesn’t it subsume the sobs, whispers, and emotions of the parents (Swapna’s brothers are not interviewed in the films) under what Guha calls ‘an abstract univocality’? What could have forced the parents who doted on their daughter not to claim her body? Newspapers report that a shalishi

156  Sayan Bhattacharya sabha (a village court where the elders of the community arbitrate between disputing families) was convened to discuss Swapna-Sucheta’s relationship after which Sucheta was married off against her will to separate the two girls. So then when, despite such community pressure, Chandmoni Mondal says that the love between the two girls was ‘natural,’ that Swapna was a dutiful daughter who looked after her family, when she cries for her dead daughter, isn’t this testimony itself an act of resistance against dominant voices of the community? However, what does the word ‘natural’ connote? Was romantic love subsumed under love between cousins? Or does Chandmoni mean that their romantic love was itself ‘natural’? Could ‘natural’ be the placeholder for any kind of love between two women? How do we negotiate the question of language itself? What is the vocabulary for expressing female intimacies in a context that is not the space of urban queer activism? On a different note, how do we talk of their love and their subsequent deaths without talking about the economic status of their respective families? Wouldn’t further education have accorded Swapna Mondal a degree of agency to live life on her own terms? Her education had to be terminated because of the dire straits of her family. Ironically, on the very site of agitation for not giving up one’s land, which subsequently brought a government down, we are talking about a family of landless labourers from a scheduled caste. Swapna gave tuitions and ran her household. How much did that leave for herself? Within such constraints, what hopes could she have of finding space for love that her community would not sanction? In short, how do we talk of her love, her sexuality, as it were, without talking of the other oppressions that she faced? In fact, the construction of non-normative sexuality as a singular means of oppression has often been justified by the Indian queer movements, given its relative invisibilization in the media and in feminist and left movements. Bina Fernandez and Gomathy N.B. in one of the first studies on violence against lesbian women in India argue that Section 377 was an implicit sanction of violence on lesbian women unlike ‘legal protections from violence based on ethnic identity available to Dalit and adivasi women under the Prevention of Atrocities Act.’ They argue that because one’s caste and religious locations are visible from one’s surname, unlike one’s sexuality, violence on lesbian women gets compounded (2005, 235–236). Naisargi N. Dave draws on these arguments to contend further: Difference among other subaltern groups is congenitally or spatially determined and collectively enforced through practices of social segregation – such as in the case of women, tribals, scheduled and backward castes, the uprooted poor, and even hijras. But lesbians are excluded from all social and cultural recognition, so that even the comfort of collective anger, the possibility of resistance, and the knowledge of what to resist and with whom is unavailable. Women know they suffer as women, the poor know they suffer as poor, and hijras know they

‘Their’ suicide letter 157 suffer as hijras; their very subordination is enforced through practices of segregation with others like themselves. (2012, 13–14) Yet these arguments seem far removed from ground realities. Just a cursory glance at the judgments under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989, show that most of the alleged perpetrators of caste-based violence are acquitted by courts in postcolonial India. A country where despite laws, manual scavenging continues to be a profession, where despite affirmative action, suicides by Dalit students are a regular phenomena, how do we claim that subordinate castes are more legible than marginalized sexualities just by the dint of laws and collectivization? On the other hand, how are these neat divisions drawn between genders, castes, and sexualities as if identities are constructed in unmediated compact units? Aren’t the oppressions emanating from these identity locations inter-constitutive? If yes, is the suicide of Swapna-Sucheta just an instance of lesbian suicide? Or are there layers within their narratives, which we are yet to read? This is not to argue that in terms of visibilization, talking of one’s sexuality as a cause of oppression is not a challenge, especially so in locations where one thinks that there is no one like oneself. But then, how does one describe these locations? Is sexual identity not informed by one’s class and caste position? Or is it that, as the SFE films will have us believe, the doing of desire and its subsequent persecution are uniform for all lesbian women? Uniformity that will forge universal sisterhood? I invoke the term sisterhood here not only as a comment on the films’ complete lack of rootedness but also because of how the documentary fills the gaps left by the community injunction against filming in Nandigram with voices that are far removed from Swapna-Sucheta’s location. There are four narratives of members of SFE, each of whom are from upper class, dominant caste positions and who are based in Kolkata. This is not to undermine their struggles or to suggest that they do not face hardships despite their sexual identities. However, what is significant here is that these tracks are not presented one after the other but the shots are edited in a way that there is a constant back and forth of all these narratives, intercut with interviews conducted in Nandigram. The resultant process seems to tie all the narratives together in a single thread that binds them with Swapna and Sucheta to prove that all these characters face persecution only because of their non-normative sexualities. This totalizing framework, I argue, subsumes Swapna-Sucheta’s locational specificities in what Chandra Talpade Mohanty would perhaps call ‘an enforced commonality of oppression’ (2003,7). Such an enforced commonality forecloses any examination of how caste and class capital also augment or diminish one’s life chances, irrespective of one’s sexual identity. In fact, the deployment of these aforementioned narratives to fill the gap in footage is also a comment on the ideology that operates through the cinematic text, for it is not merely a mimetic representation of truth, as

158  Sayan Bhattacharya it were, or a ‘mirror’ to the lives of Swapna-Sucheta. When the directorproducer of a film, in this case an LBT collective, tries to represent voices different from their own class, caste locations, they do wield a certain power of interpretation and therefore one’s reading of such a text cannot just stop at locating persecution of diverse subjects on the basis of their sexualities alone (McClintock, 1995, 305). Yet, the publicity materials of . . . And the Unclaimed like posters and DVD jackets describe it as a film about two lovers whose families and community did not accept them even in death. The dvd jacket reads, ‘Such was the intensity of hatred that their bodies remained unattended, uncared for days, disposed off by the police as unclaimed bodies.’ To highlight this monolithic construction of subjects, I find Rey Chow’s reading of Arjun Appadurai’s theory of ‘the aesthetics of decontextualisation’ useful. Appadurai notes that when an object is taken out of context, its diversion is the instrument through which its value gets enhanced. This enhancement through diversion from ‘customary circuits underlies the plunder of enemy valuables in warfare, the purchase and display of primitive utilitarian objects, the framing of found objects, the making of collections of any sort.’ This is how a new aesthetic is produced through diversion and the object, like human beings gets a social life. Chow takes off from here to argue that it is not just objects that get commoditized but persons too who, like objects, get a new social life through commoditization as ‘ethnic specimens’ (Chow, 1994, 133–134). Therefore, each viewing of . . . And the Unclaimed and the fact-finding video in locations far from that of the lovers, I argue, pins down the complex subjectivities of Swapna and Sucheta under the tragedy of their deaths and the subsequent rejection of their dead bodies. They become instrumental objects to channel the audience’s pity and horror at the plight of rural specimens. Such a construction of an object worth one’s pity is also premised on how the people of Nandigram refused to allow the filmmaker to film, as it is meant to enhance the horror of the community’s refusal to acknowledge Swapna-Sucheta’s love. The villagers stalled the shoot and the documentary corroborates this by showing villagers asking the director to stop filming. While we witness Chandmoni Mondal crying and speaking on camera, we hear a villager saying that the girls of Nandigram are different. They keep long hair and wear traditional clothes. He asks the director to shut the camera and go to the city and ‘teach these things.’ Another villager says that Swapna’s family could not eat for a month. He asks the crew why they had come to rake up the issue of the suicides after all these months. The film does not probe what the villager meant when he said that Swapna’s family did not have food for a month. Was it a result of grief, was it ostracization by the larger community, or was it because they did not have any earning member after Swapna’s death? These questions are not engaged with but what becomes important is the fact that the crew was driven out of the village.

‘Their’ suicide letter 159 Yet, this resultant gap in terms of footage in Nandigram could perhaps have a back story. The film masks over it completely. This was the same village where the fact-finding team had gone after the suicide in February 2011. The team had interviewed Swapna’s parents, Sucheta’s mother, and another relative. It had interviewed a sub-inspector and also a local politician. The shoot was not stalled then. In fact, Malobika, one of the founding members of SFE, is seen taking out a file and showing a photo of a girl to bystanders and Sucheta’s relatives. The photo was of a gender non-conforming person socialized in the female gender. Her head had been forcibly shaved and she was paraded naked in her village. The video shows Malobika telling the relatives that there are all kinds of genders and everybody has the right to lead life on her own terms. She continues to say that if Sucheta had not been forcibly married, then the two girls would have survived. As a women’s group, they felt that there was nothing wrong with Swapna-Sucheta. Akanksha, another founding member of SFE, adds that the relatives had failed to rescue Swapna-Sucheta. We see Sucheta’s relative, who remains unnamed in the video, listen silently. Some bystanders are seen giggling. We even see a local leader agreeing to an ‘awareness camp’ by SFE in Nandigram. After this, we see the fact-finding team leave the village and a caption comes on screen, ‘The sun has set in Nandigram. Will it see a new dawn?’ Why did the site of Sonachura and the love of two girls become the ground for data collection and ‘awareness generation’ only and not an occasion for engagement with ‘new’ contexts and ‘new’ forms of agency? The material heterogeneities of Swapna-Sucheta’s lives were thus colonized to produce a singular, stable, and ahistorically oppressed subject who needed to be rescued (Mohanty, 2003,23). However, this is not to negate the importance of SFE’s interventions post these deaths. This is also not to trivialize the tragedy of the deaths and ignore the complicity of the community in causing them but the question here is how, in completely different settings from one’s location, will an activist forum communicate its message and concerns? This activist intervention cannot happen without disregarding the locational specificities of the site for advocacy. When activist intervention is premised on a disregard of difference, it ends up assuming a teleological, linear progression from powerlessness (the disempowered lesbian body in the feudal land that needs to be rescued by the urban and empowered activist) to power. Implicit in this assumption is the reification of a category, in this case sexuality as a singular unit of oppression. Yet, there is no homogeneity of experience. When specificities of difference are disregarded, then the victim subject is the monolithic other, ideologically constructed as a fixed entity (Bhaba, 1983, 38). Coming back to the gap in footage, the question is, then, what could have changed in the intervening months between February 2011 when the fact finding was filmed and November 2011 when Debalina returned to Nandigram to shoot . . . And the Unclaimed that could provoke such a

160  Sayan Bhattacharya reaction? The documentary uses both fresh footage (shot in November) and footage from the fact-finding video without stating that these were taken almost a year apart. What comes across is an overarching hostility towards the film crew from locals whereas the chronology of events suggests otherwise. So then, could this hostility be read as not just a patriarchal display of power but also as a mark of resistance to the disregard of difference by the urban activist who goes to generate awareness about non-normative desires through one single intervention in the form of speeches and newspaper clips, completely disregarding the daily realities of the intended audience? If yes, is it not a form of resistance that questions the very modes of activism that is not informed by varied contexts?

Costs of grieving If we are to map the audience reception to . . . And the Unclaimed, we see that the film has been very effective in triggering conversation about violence faced by lesbian women. I have myself witnessed audience members at a college programme and at a film festival screening moved to tears because here is indeed a compelling narrative of the lives of two girls, there is a suicide note clearly stating their love, and then there are the articulate SFE members confidently speaking on camera. But most important is the recurring theme of the film, which is grief. Throughout the film we see characters reading Swapna’s letter in a wide array of spaces and its content invokes silence and tears. We see the protagonists grieve for Swapna and Sucheta. As the end credits of the film rolls, we hear the humanities professor tell Debalina, ‘Let that cry be there. Let it go on. Let there be a heart wrenching wail in your film.’ The act of grieving is extremely political for there are lives that are deemed worth grieving and there are those who are not grieved upon. Judith Butler takes the site of post 9/11 America to demonstrate how boundaries of grief are constructed. Those who died in the twin attacks on World Trade Centre are mourned but the innumerable lives lost in Afghanistan in the retaliatory strikes by America remain faceless. These lives remain on the borders of public discourse because they cannot be made intelligible. They cannot be represented and hence grieved upon because: Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and grievable death? (2004, XIV–XV) When the cinematic text of . . . And the Unclaimed invokes that the tears must stay, it induces an act of public mourning for lives that are always already invisible, that have been deemed unreal. Thus, to mourn for such

‘Their’ suicide letter 161 lives is an attempt at rendering the invisible real. To that extent, not only the making but also the viewing of . . . And the Unclaimed are deeply political acts, rendering real the love between two girls who were disavowed even in death. However, the question is on what terms is this mourning being incited? In other words, how are Swapna and Sucheta’s lives being represented to incite grief? This brings us back to the question of how SFE, through its films, reduces their lives to a monolithic and uniformly oppressed subjectivity. Hence, the very political act of mourning becomes depoliticized eventually because the terms on which it is worked out do not pay heed to the complex heterogeneities of the lives it purports to grieve. However, this is not to suggest that by marking the caste and class positions of Swapna and Sucheta or others like them, we might arrive at a complete reading of their lives. In fact, to acknowledge the failure of representation is the only proposition of this paper. I do so by interrogating the processes of fact finding that work as a top-down intervention, that try to set up false binaries between the enlightened urban activists and the unaware rural folks. By offering a series of questions about the contexts of Swapna and Sucheta’s lives, this paper interrogates the foreclosures engendered by the film . . . And the Unclaimed and the fact-finding video in the way their lives are being read. These foreclosures are questions that India’s queer movements must continuously contend with. In the times of legal recognition and the continuous reproduction of the nation state as marked by the legal petitions against 377, how might the Indian queer movements produce a struggle otherwise? I would contend that it is only by acknowledging the unknowability of some lives that we can approach the complexities of queer life and thus produce activisms that are multilayered and grounded.

Acknowledgements My thanks to SFE, Svati P Shah, Saptarshi Mandal and Panchali Ray for conversations on this paper.

Notes 1   The petition filed by Suri: https://barandbench.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ Arvind-Datar-Written-Submissions.pdf. Here is a video where he talks about the economic cost of homophobia: www.thequint.com/voices/lgbt/keshav-suri-thelalit-petition-against-section-377 accessed October 31, 2018. 2  The IIT petition: http://orinam.net/377/wrongness-of-koushal-iit-petitionmay-2018/ accessed April 4, 2019. 3  There were quite a few reports on Swapna and Sucheta’s joint suicide. Here is one such report from the Indian Express. “Same-Sex Relationships: Punished in Life, Death.” http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/samesex-relation ships-punished-in-life-death/755565/. 4   More details on the film can be found in this long interview that Debalina did with the author of this paper in 2013. “And the Unclaimed: An Interview with

162  Sayan Bhattacharya Debalina,” Kindle Magazine. http://kindlemag.in/and-the-unclaimed/ accessed April 4, 2019. 5   On the specificity of violence on lesbian women and how law is often used to separate lovers, Ponni Arasu and Priya Thangarajah’s paper titled “Queer Women and Habeas Corpus in India: The Love that Blinds the Law” can be instructive.

References Bhaba, H. “The Other Question.” In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Mongia, 37–54. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Butler, J. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004. Chow, R. “Where Have all the Natives Gone.” In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Mongia, 122–146. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Dave, N. N. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Fernandez, B. and N. B. Gomathy. “Voicing the Invisible: Violence Faced by Lesbian Women in India.” In The Violence of Normal Times, edited by K. Kannabiran, 224–265. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005 (an associate of Kali for Women). Guha, R. “Chandra’s Death.” In Subaltern Studies V, 135–165. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Lorde, A. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Freedom, CA 95019: The Crossing Press, 1984. McClintock, A. “The Scandal of Hybridity: Black Women’s Resistance and Narrative Ambiguity.” In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, 299–328. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Menon, N. Sexualities. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007 (an associate of Kali for Women). Mohanty, T. C. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practising Solidarity. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2003 (a sister imprint of Kali for Women). Mokkil, N. “Lives Worth Grieving for: Lesbian Narratives from Kerala.” In Intimate Others: Marriage and Sexualities in India, edited by S. Sen, R. Biswas, and N. Dhawan, 391–414. Jadavpur: School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University and Stree, 2011 (an imprint of Bhatkal and Sen, 2011). Narrain, A. and A. Gupta. Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011. Spivak, C. G. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Sukthankar, A. “Introduction.” In Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India, edited by A. Sukthankar, xiii–xxxix. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999.

10 Inside/out Women’s movement and women in movements Mallarika Sinha Roy

Introduction: ‘ladies hataao’ Monobina Gupta writes in Caravan Magazine in September 2015, On 24 August 2015, hundreds of men launched a vicious attack on the women passengers travelling by Matribhumi. Unabashed in their masculinity, they declared their resolve to not allow the Matribhumi local to run. Holding up the local train that runs along the route through the district of North 24 Parganas, furious mobs entered the coaches, abusing and manhandling the women, most of whom cowered under their seats. Some even hid underneath the train on the railway track. . . . Posters screaming ‘Ladies Hatao’ – Remove the Ladies – were plastered on the body of the train with the men declaring that they would not rest till the Matribhumi local was converted into a Pitribhumi – the land of the father.1 Matribhumi Special, the women-only local passenger train, covered one of the busiest suburban rail routes from the city of Kolkata. The newspaper reports on the Matribhumi ‘episode’ indicate that the resentment of male passengers against this women-only train, running at the peak hours of a working day, was increasing ever since it was launched in 2010. Resentment turned into mob violence and spilled over in August 2015 after a young man was allegedly thrown out of a running Matribhumi train earlier in August 2015.2 Though the police investigation of the incident found it a rumour, the media and male passengers vociferously condemned such behaviour of Matribhumi women passengers. Anandabazar Patrika, one of the popular Bengali dailies, carried detailed reports of the frenzied violence that was inflicted upon the women travelling by that train.3 How do we make sense of this explosion of masculine anger? In two post-editorials published in Anandabazar Patrika the metropolitan intelligentsia criticized the entire episode as ‘feminist fundamentalism’ and ‘bad feminism.’ Tilottama Majumdar, a noted Bengali novelist, argued on August 20, 2015 that women’s struggle for human rights is a long and arduous one, what women

164  Mallarika Sinha Roy passengers of Matribhumi did to retain their ‘privilege’ only strengthened hate and forced a situation of mob violence.4 Majumdar felt if feminism demands privilege just for women it would construct a virulent form of feminist fundamentalism and lose its status as a social movement. Sumit Chakrabarty, a teacher in Presidency University, called for new articulations of feminist discourses on September 9, 2015.5 For Chakrabarty, the unbridgeable gap between academic feminism and everyday feminism has resulted in ‘bad feminism’ or as he translated it in Bengali, bhranta naaribad (perhaps ‘misguided’ is a more apt translation of bhranta). In his conclusion, Chakrabarty argues that the Matribhumi episode reflects on the banality of ‘bad feminism’ where men are regularly put at the receiving end of feminist ire, are forced to stand in for patriarchy, and consequently men fail to understand the basic need for women’s liberation. Both articles elided the issue that the physical confrontation between men and women as warring collectives took away the last vestiges of nationalist benevolent patriarchy that had been the cornerstone of gender relations in Bengal from the late nineteenth century. The nationalist resolution of the woman question, we have come to understand, settled on the one hand the ‘inner domain’ of colonial home as feminine virtue as against the ‘outer domain’ of colonial public sphere as masculine ‘gentle-manliness,’ and on the other hand, the ‘effeminate’ native masculinity as against the ‘virile’ colonial masters.6 Gender was the operative category for both resolutions. While the ‘effeminate’ native masculinity struggled through different routes of becoming a man’s man – incorporating, negotiating, and contesting the British imperial ideal of masculinity; the feminine virtue has been carried over to the public domain even when ‘women’ have stepped outside home into the fields of waged labour and organizational politics. The complexities of carrying the private into the public domain when women’s bodies became visible in the public domain, however, had to be revisited as and when women disrupted the normative division between the home and world.7 The long history of women’s participation in movements – ranging from different traditions of nationalist movements to peasants’ and workers’ movements and women’s movements – bear testimony to such complexities.8 It is important to ask, at this juncture, whether the Matribhumi episode was an exceptional case or if it was rather symptomatic of a backlash against visibility of women in greater numbers in spaces and at times which were marked masculine. It is equally important to ask whether targeting feminist politics for ‘unruly’ women passengers of Matribhumi in popular dailies represent a crisis for metropolitan intelligentsia where women wrench free from the familiar discourses of women’s empowerment. Contextualizing this question in the intellectual debates on feminist politics and women’s movement in postcolonial India can help us in sharpening the focus. If we remember Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana’s valuable intervention regarding the problems of constructing an appropriate theory of gender in

Inside/out 165 the last decade of the twentieth century, it is easier to grasp the recursivity of the problem of women’s visibility. Tharu and Niranjana’s wrote in 1996, [s]uddenly ‘women’ are everywhere. Development experts cite ‘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 feminization of the Indian labour force.9 About 20 years after the essay was written, we are experiencing another historical moment of visibility – from the power corridors of policy-making to the arena of popular culture to the debates in student organizations. This time, it is not only the planners and experts, but celebrities from the world of popular culture also have joined the bandwagon of celebrating women, of worrying about their safety, and are busy in providing them with correct self-esteem.10 It may be possible to accept this widespread concern for women’s safety and well-being as expressions of gender sensitivity – one of the primary goals of the women’s movement. But, it is equally necessary to unpack the notion of ‘gender sensitivity’ beyond an instrumental understanding of condescension towards ‘women’ as an unqualified category. An event like the Matribhumi faceoff brings to the fore complex layers of privilege and power that cannot be smoothed over with binaries between force and compassion, benevolence and cruelty, condescension and respect, brutality and decency. It requires opening up the messy fields of perceptions, representations, intentionality, and contingent constructions of meanings around gendered bodies in the public domain. There is need for feminist discourses concerning the crisis of theorizing gender, which Tharu and Niranjana had indicated, to reflect on the ground-level realities that are characterizing women’s movement at this point of time. Drawing from the feminist political debates in the last two decades, it is possible to argue that discussions over the issues of caste, class, religious affiliation, and regional difference have resulted in a productive tension in the conceptualization of a unified political subject of women’s movement.11 Perceptions of ‘visibility,’ consequently, have undergone serious transformations, especially in the public sphere. This paper is situated at this intersection between feminist politics and the new modes of seeing women, looking at women’s bodies, and perceiving women’s visibility. If we are to make sense of this new visibility – which becomes glaring and blinding at the same time – we need to sift through the meaning(s) of ‘visibility’ in terms of the politics of seeing, the significance of visual representations, and the impact of visual representations on the differentiated political subject of women’s movement. My questions remain – are we experiencing a resurgence in the Women’s Movement? Is it connected to the visibility of protesting bodies on streets along with virtual solidarities in social media platforms, indicating debates on the layers of inequality and

166  Mallarika Sinha Roy discrimination that accrue at this juncture of economic liberalization and consumer culture? In the following sections of this paper I have attempted to look into some of contemporary mobilizations for gender justice, especially those led by a new generation of young women and men, and to situate the increased visibility of women in terms of the potential and limits of conceptualizing visibility.

Seeing women: visual construction of the political field Historian and visual theorist Patricia Hayes has made an important distinction between visibility and visuality to distinguish different relations of power in formulation of these ideas.12 In case of visibility the relation of power presumes an agent who is making certain things/people visible, which were not seen before, while visuality argues for accepting vision as a two-way process, where the agent and object(s) of vision engage in a larger discursive practice including tactile and haptic senses. The process of bringing something or some people to light for others to see entails an act of recovery: an act that has a long association with the feminist project of focusing on invisible women. Hayes argues that the feminist act of ‘making visible’ is as equally fraught with tension as the act of ‘giving voice.’13 Drawing from the scholarship on women’s histories in disparate contexts like Iran and several African societies, Hayes shows that making women visible can result in visual objectification. The colonial archives reveal that African women have been drawn, painted, and photographed relentlessly but rarely their voices accompany their visual images. Hayes raises several questions to make sense of this emphasis on visual documentation which are not easy to comprehend without looking into the older histories of the construction of ‘imperial eyes’ through European travel writings from seventeenth century and its consolidation into techniques of classification and record-keeping for the colonial administration to measure its subject population from the late nineteenth century.14 I would like to draw attention to two different aspects of the oppressive nature of visibility. One, the Panopticon that dissociates the dyad of see/being seen into, ‘one is totally seen, without ever seeing . . . one sees everything without ever being seen.’15 Two, the cultivation of a distinctive ethnographic eye that privileges observation as a method of representing the reality of the ‘other.’16 If we look into the historical formation of these two aspects, we will find that in both these cases specific knowledge-regimes came into being from the nineteenth century and developed through the twentieth century. While in the first instance, the rationale has been surveillance – initially only for those who have been identified by the legal system as deviants but increasingly turning into a disciplinary mechanism for everybody as potential deviants; in the second instance, the expressed intention has been production of objective knowledge. In both cases, the critical role of vision in knowledge production remain central and Donna Haraway’s

Inside/out 167 tour de force exposition of the persistence of vision unravels the ways in which the ordinary eye has been expanded endlessly with technological innovations. Haraway states that, [v]ision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere but to have put this myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.17 Haraway’s clarion call to expose this god-trick of unrestricted objective vision for what it is – there is no unmediated photographs or camera obscura with infinite mobility but rather wonderfully elaborate specificities and detailed difference in organizing the ways of seeing the world – gives us an opportunity to rethink the limits of making gendered bodies visible. It also offers us the occasion to reflect on the ethics of visibilizing the less privileged ‘other,’ not from the point of view of producing objective knowledge but from the practices we engage in showing forms of injustice to the rest of the world. Let me make an effort to illustrate the point with an example. The oppressive nature of visibility is perhaps experienced in the most violent manner in India (and in other South Asian countries) when women are stripped in public and forced to parade in the naked. More often than not, public stripping and naked parades of women are punishments meted out by the caste or village councils. The actual offender may or may not be the woman undergoing the punishment but she symbolizes the ‘honour’ of the family or caste at fault, at least in the eyes of the council. Making the naked body of the woman visible refers to the act of emasculating her caste or family – the ultimate form of humiliation. This mode of ‘making visible’ the woman’s body is often followed by gang rape and murder at times – completing the oppressive cycle of visibility and violation. It is probably belabouring the obvious that women from Dalit and other marginalized communities are at the receiving end of this violence.18 Through meticulous discussions of the many renderings of the episode of disrobing the epic heroine Draupadi in the royal court in Mahabharata, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out that public stripping of women has a ‘traditional’ sanction of controlling women and explains that the modern postcolonial nation state of India has not made any serious efforts to withdraw this sanction.19 Such sexualization of ‘honour’ on the woman’s body, Sunder Rajan argues, has more to do with voyeurism, sadistic desire, and domination than sexual gratification. Technological innovations in the last decade or so have made it possible to exponentially increase the number of people partaking in such voyeuristic pleasures through portable recording machines and innumerable virtual platforms for sharing visual material. This manner of humiliation is turning from the see/being seen dyad to the Panopticon of visibility layered with sadistic desire. The ethical aspect of visually exposing sexual violence

168  Mallarika Sinha Roy marked on women’s bodies is sadly lagging behind with merely blurring the image over some parts of the body and/or the face of the survivor. The ‘objectivity’ of showing the violence, committed over a woman’s body, feeds into voyeurism – in effect reaffirming humiliation of the survivor (or the departed). The problem of visibility in constructing the gender relations in contemporary India is, consequently, laden with trappings of sanctioned violence. In contrast to visibility, visuality or visual culture, Hayes comments, has a larger connotation in terms of discursive practices. In his key essay ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’ W.J.T. Mitchell acknowledges the role of the colonial gaze in creating racial stereotypes but continues to argue that vision is never a one-way street.20 Mitchell points out that unmediated vision is an impossible proposition and argues that visuality cannot be detached from tactile, auditory, or haptic senses. Visuality includes gestures, expressions – the whole range of ‘body language’, everyday objects and artefacts. Visuality incorporates writing as the painted word and contends that visual culture cannot be restricted to specific media like film, photograph, or painting. However, arguing that vision is mediated must not translate into the easy axiom of ‘social construction,’ which is possibly the most readily available conceptual stereotype in social sciences. It is as much the social construction of vision as the visual construction of social because mediated vision implies ‘looking back’ in addition to just ‘looking.’ Mitchell’s argument regarding the relations of power inherent in visuality helps in challenging the hegemony of colonial gaze as he succinctly underlines that ‘the political task of visual culture is to perform critique without the comforts of iconoclasm.’21 This distinction between visibility and visuality makes us aware of the partial effectiveness of the idea of male gaze. The importance of the feminist conceptualization of the male gaze, emerging in feminist readings of Hollywood in the 1970s, in shifting the grounds of visual construction of women can hardly be undermined.22 But, following Mitchell’s observation concerning the political task of visual culture it is perhaps crucial to think beyond the iconoclastic practice of discovering the male gaze at every instance of ‘seeing women.’ Developments in feminist film theory after Mulvey’s iconic essay can suggest the ways in which the visual construction of the social field from the analytical point of view of gender get complicated.23 Mulvey revisited her own argument of visual pleasure that objectifies women in 1981. Taking into account the critique of her conceptualization of the male gaze vis-à-vis the ambivalent figure of the female spectator, Mulvey reframed her argument in terms of unstable female sexuality that oscillate between accepted sedate femininity and subversive tumultuous ‘tomboyishness.’24 Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (2016) poses a nuanced critique to Mulvey’s reading of Hitchcock’s films through the male gaze. Modleski argues that Mulvey’s reading made the objectification of women in cinema so invincible that there

Inside/out 169 remains no scope for exploring the gaps, silences, and repressed areas of masculinity. Through a careful and painstaking unfolding of theorizing the female spectator, Modleski points at rupturing the field of visuality always already defined by the ‘man-centred vision.’ Following Modleski’s lead in locating the two-pronged resistance to patriarchy in terms of ‘knowing’ the weak-spots of masculinity (gaps, silences, repressions) and the unique pleasures of women loving women, it is possible to argue that the feminist fields of visuality can break the mould of visibilizing women either as objects of voyeuristic pleasure or victims of moral outrage. Instead of reverting to ‘masculinisation’ of female vision, which relies on the oppositional categories of femininity and masculinity as a rigid binary, Modleski’s theorization of the female spectator helps to expand the visual construction of the social field. Such a theorization introduces difference in place of reversal and multiple vantage points fused with agency, desire, resistance, and knowledge. Haraway’s formulation of situated knowledge is an ally in constructing this visual field of relations of power. Haraway argues that the alternative to totalizing vision is not relativism but ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the possibility of webs of connection called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.’25 Haraway’s situated knowledge includes accountable positioning of the lens to see and passionate detachment at the same time where difference is crafted through solidarity and sharing. Situating the vantage point, thus, also refers to framing the field of visuality with a chain of meanings: meanings that are responsible for explaining the relations of power captured through the frame of vision. If we accept that vision is not unmediated, that images can and do ‘look back’ in many unexpected manners, that objects and artefacts attain a life of their own internal to the traffic in vision – the political task of unpacking the meanings of the recent increased ‘visibility’ of women in contemporary India requires exploring the ways in which visibility and visuality are entangled in feminist politics and women’s movements. At this point of the conceptual scaffolding for seeing women, consequently, it becomes important to explore the ways in which framing as a methodological device becomes an entry-point for understanding representations of women in movements and women’s movement.

A closer look: some reflections on the mobilization for Nirbhaya Framing has emerged as an important conceptual structure in the social movement studies over last three decades and refers to the process of signifying meanings to a set of events for activists, antagonists, and bystanders.26 The principal function of framing is to tie together various punctuated elements within a scene so that one particular story is told rather than another. However, the sequential chain of meanings given to seemingly unrelated

170  Mallarika Sinha Roy events or occurrences are always subjected to change since unexpected actions or new events can alter the organizing principle of any sequence. Collective action frames, a term devised by social movement theorists to explain modes of collective mobilizations, are ‘like picture frames, [that] focus attention by punctuating or specifying what in our sensual field is relevant or irrelevant.’27 The element of vision, thus, is quite central to framing processes. My contention is that, in terms of visuality, framing indicates delimiting the visual construction of any social movement through the politics of seeing. I would like to highlight that in this visual construction the sites of ‘seeing’ are not limited by visual images but rather expand to locating how certain sequences of meanings get attached to the politics of seeing. This approach is markedly different from the politics of ‘making visible.’ Any attempt at ‘making visible’ presumes previous invisibility. Framing visuality in social movement studies argues for making sequences of meanings by examining the traffic in seeing – both ‘looking’ and ‘looking back’ – without any specific claim on recovering hitherto unseen passive figures or objects. The massive collective mobilization after the Delhi gang rape in December 2012 that signalled the beginning of an ‘event,’ can be an apt location for unpacking the process of framing visuality in the field of social movements. Jyoti Singh was referred to as Nirbhaya after her gang rape on the night of December 16, 2016 to protect her anonymity. She succumbed to the fatal injuries inflicted on her by her rapists but the protest became too widespread to be quelled even after her death. Marching on the streets, waving flags and placards, shouting slogans, facing water cannons and police batons in Delhi soon expanded into disparate modes of organizing different sections of the population around various kinds of ‘women’s issues’ across India. The sites and sights of protest against violence against women offer complex webs of seeing gendered relations of power in contemporary India. Discussing the details of all such sites is beyond the scope of this paper, though some of these protests are briefly recounted in the next section. However, this section concentrates on laying out the punctuated elements of seeing women through two different framing processes. The first one concerns ways in which the dominant masculine eye looked at the protest against the gang rape and how the alternative masculinities looked back to the male-centric vision of seeing women. The infamous remark of Abhijeet Mukherjee, a Member of the Parliament and the son of India’s President Pranab Mukherjee, that women who came out to protest were ‘pretty ladies’ and were ‘highly dented and painted’ drew much anger from the protesters as well as the general public.28 Though he apologized later and clarified that he had made the remark as a response to the media reports that students were the majority of protesters, his visual references for ‘feminism’ were not quite off the mark from the perception of a significant section of the middle class in India. If Mukherjee’s remark is an exemplar of the ‘male gaze’ towards women demanding justice after a

Inside/out 171 particularly gruesome incident of sexual violence, the gaze also looked into the mirror and argued, [t]he inability of the phallus to live up to all its myth making capabilities requires then the use of phallic replacements, harder metallic instruments that are more capable of performing feats. . . . The use of metal rods, guns shoved inside mouths, stones inserted into the rectum, knives used to carve the skin are all expressions that have rather erroneously being analysed as emanating from a crisis of masculinity. It is in the nature of masculinity.29 The above quotation from documentary filmmaker Rahul Roy’s passionate articulation of the malaise of dominant heteronormative masculinity that drives the various institutions of patriarchy has a visceral appeal. His words are moving not only because of his long engagement with multiple cultures of masculinity in a self-evident visual medium but also because of the ways in which he points at the visual construction of the gendered body of a woman in a social order defined by sexual violence.30 Roy has no qualms in admitting that the progressive Leftist activists have more often than not failed to question patriarchal norms within their own organizations and have repeatedly branded women’s mobilizations more as displays of solidarity based on a single identity than as challenges to the structural inequalities. Roy also draws attention to the critique of the protest, which claimed that it was more of ‘a dilettante outburst with no clear focus and dangerous demands like the death penalty and mob justice’ as the protesters had rarely come out on the streets after horrific sexual violence against women in Gujarat, Kashmir, or Manipur. It is interesting to remember, however, that in the large gatherings of protesters at the India Gate in Delhi in December 2012, placards carrying names of Kunan-Poshpora, Shopian, and Manorama were regularly visible.31 Kunan-Poshpora refer to two villages in Kashmir where allegedly mass sexual violence against Kashmiri women were committed by the Indian Armed Forces in 1991 and Shopian refers to the town in Kashmir where two women went missing in May 2009 and later their raped and murdered bodies were recovered.32 Manorama was the name of a young woman from Manipur who had been sexually tortured and killed in 2004, allegedly by the Indian Armed Forces.33 The visibility of women protesters, consequently, is reducible to neither a simplistic understanding that they were privileged urban oddities nor mute images constructed by the male gaze. Writing the names of Kunan-Poshpora, Shopian, and Manorama on the placards gave the protest at the India Gate in 2012 a larger context because ‘writing . . . stands at the nexus of language and vision . . . the visible language of a gesture-speech that precedes vocal expression.’34 In this framing of visuality, the sequence of meanings drew together spatially and temporally differentiated occurrences within a common structure of inscribing women’s bodies with sexual violence by sanctioned authority.

172  Mallarika Sinha Roy The references to Kashmir and Manipur expanded the meanings of sexual violence beyond the common sense interpretation of sexual violence in terms of women’s presence at the wrong place at the wrong time. The elements of sadistic pleasure and the social sanction of punishing women for any perceived ‘deviance’ get conjoined with militarized violence against women and the prolonged silence over such issues. The politics of seeing women, in this framing process, is located in demands for gender justice that go beyond demand for legal reform and keeps the process open for feminist solidarity across national or regional boundaries. The second framing process I would like to focus on also concerns international contextualization of this very incident, albeit with a distinctively different set of meanings for women’s freedom in developing countries. The visual construction of Jyoti Singh as an excellent example of the new, aspiring lower middle class in India who would like to grab the opportunities offered by the neo-liberal economy with both hands for upward mobility in Leslee Udwin’s controversial documentary India’s Daughter (2015) continues the older feminist framework of essentializing Third World women as victims par excellence. Udwin has made the clear division between the predatory Third World men and the struggling Third World women where the men unambiguously represent the remnants of an older social system that brutally prevents the new India from realizing its full potential. Udwin allows for the same exceptional status to her father as, perhaps, the social reformers of nineteenth century were allowed in their efforts to address the plight of Indian women. While Udwin, possibly with a noble intention, hammers the viewer with the brutal aspects of urban underclass masculinity and the abject poverty in the hinterland, from where the male migrant labourer comes to haunt the urban spaces with thoughtless violence, there is rarely any attempt, unlike Rahul Roy’s critique, to understand the constitutive elements of brutal masculinity. India’s Daughter designates the urban poor man with an indecipherable viciousness that realizes itself through sexualizing and mutilating women’s bodies. Making Jyoti Singh visible to the progressive feminist audience of the First World is a replication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927) with a twist, a twist that lies in the recognition of Jyoti Singh’s ‘agency’ to seek education and employment.35 Such a visual construction – through the words of her parents, mentor, one of her rapists, and families of her rapists – relies on the proliferating discourse of ‘women’s agency’ in the field of Development and Policy documents. Mary E. John has pointed out that the bilateral aid donors and the World Bank had been projecting women involved in the informal sector of the Indian economy as the primary candidates for ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’ since the economic liberalization of India in 1991.36 As the poor women are underwritten in the Development literature as people with incredible resourcefulness and managerial skills, poor men are being increasingly cast into the mould of degenerate brutes who squander away their potential and earnings. The critical shift in signification of poor women’s greater need for access to resources from the earlier period of documenting

Inside/out 173 women’s role and contribution to economic development, John has argued, is in turning their exploitation into a narrative of efficiency. Udwin’s depiction of Jyoti Singh and her family, thus, follows the script prepared jointly by the White Feminists’ Burden of ‘giving voice’ to their poorer sisters in the Third World and the neo-liberal Development discourses of ‘making visible’ the incredible efficiency of women from poorer sections.37 The figure that gets cast aside in constructing this visual field for poor women is that of the poor man – sullen, dangerous, unintelligible, and predatory. In this framing, the seemingly unrelated elements of sexual violence against women and the conceptualization of ‘women’s agency’ in neo-liberal Development discourses are brought together to make sense of the moral outrage in the Anglo-American press and the expressions of fear amongst foreign researchers (principally white women) to visit Delhi, the ‘rape capital.’38 References to the imperialist construction of ‘porno-tropics,’ the fear of the ‘degenerated’ East, disciplining the poor in the metropolitan centres of the British Empire, and civilizing the hyper-sexual and inherently criminal populations amongst the colonial subjects draw up the historical borders of this framing process.39 The art of governance practised by the Development establishment, located at the metropolitan centres of the Global North, bear the legacy of imperial disciplinary mechanisms.40 Through a modified and more elaborate economic control, especially over the production of knowledge, the donor/funder institutions define ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ of the developing countries and decide upon the areas required for modern developmental interventions. Bringing the larger framing of development within the interpretation of the Delhi gang rape of 2012, thus, opens up the possibility of connecting the intricate webs of meanings that ‘gender’ and ‘women’ accrue in contemporary India.

From Nirbhaya to napkin: assertive activism Let me make an attempt to catalogue some of the major collective mobilizations that have taken place since the nation-wide shockwave in the wake of the Delhi Gang rape in December 2012. ‘Justice for Nirbhaya’ became a rallying cry for citizens across social and political categories. Feminist slogans like baap se bhi azadi/Khaap se bhi azadi (Freedom from Patriarchy/ Freedom from Khap Panchayats) and shaadi karne ki azadi/na karne ki azadi (Freedom to marry/Freedom not to marry) soon resulted in night marches to ascertain women’s freedom of mobility in the urban space. The huge participation of young women and men in these mobilizations reflected entry of a new generation to the women’s movement in India. On the heel of the Nirbhaya mobilisation emerged a new collective – ‘Pinjra Tod: Break the Hostel Locks’ – in Delhi in 2013. The social media page of Pinjra Tod identifies itself as, [a] collective effort by women students and alumni across colleges and hostels in Delhi, that seeks to discuss, debate, share, mobilise and

174  Mallarika Sinha Roy collectivise struggles against restrictive and regressive hostel regulations and moral policing by hostel authorities; and as well as demand access to safe and affordable hostel accommodation and pro-active functioning of Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee Cells.41 The call for breaking free of cages: the literal meaning of pinjra tod, resonates with the long- standing feminist slogan of women’s emancipation and yet assumed a new significance of immediacy after 2012. The night marches across the streets of Delhi continued with this new collective and their assertive, buoyant activism has recently spread into other university campuses outside the National Capital Region. Representatives of Pinjra Tod collective can be seen in campus mobilizations and citizens’ protests around issues of social justice, human rights, labour rights, and student’s demands. Since the student population in college and university campuses is diverse, the demand for women’s freedom of mobility and safety has the potential to reach a wider public than the metropolitan middle class. Their insistence on formation of official bodies in colleges and universities for sexual harassment complaints indicate a new sense of awareness and their regularly updated social media page reports on their efforts to put a system in place for registering complaints. The Hok Kolorob movement in Calcutta also began with demand for justice for a young woman student in Jadavpur University who had been sexually harassed.42 Starting at Jadavpur University, the movement soon gained support from other university and college students and in September 2014 Calcutta experienced a huge citizens’ march for Jadavpur University students who had been beaten by the police while demonstrating in front of the Vice Chancellor’s office. The police repression during the Delhi Gang Rape Agitation in 2012 sparked citizens’ solidarity for protesters and in Calcutta in 2014 citizens came out to the streets in support of students. The next flashpoint, in Kerala, directly addressed the politics of sexuality and ‘moral policing’ through an ingenuous mode of protest – Kiss of Love. In November 2014, several young men and women decided to gather in Cochin to protest against mounting incidents of harassing and abusing especially young women for going out at night, for sitting with and talking to men, for not wearing explicit markers indicating marital status through kissing in public.43 It was a political articulation of love to claim the public space for consenting couples, for freedom of expression, and the body became the site of protest. As the police controlled the protest with a heavy hand, arresting and detaining activists, the protest became a movement in several other cities like Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Madras, and Pondicherry. By the end of 2014, Kerala became the site of another unique mobilization for gender justice when reports of strip-searching women employees of a gloves manufacturing company in the Cochin Special Economic Zone became public.44 It was alleged that women employees were subjected to

Inside/out 175 such a kind of surveillance after used sanitary napkins were found in ladies toilet within the factory premises. The mode of protest became mailing sanitary napkins to the manufacturing company while widespread social media campaign drew the attention of mainstream media. Protests against menstrual taboos picked up further momentum as women began to challenge the ban on temple-entry for all women within the reproductive age in several sites of Hindu pilgrimage.45 The ‘Happy to Bleed’ campaign launched the new visual medium of writing feminist slogans on sanitary napkins and pasting them in public spaces, especially within university campuses as university students led the campaign. This campaign, quite expectedly, generated certain unease amongst the public and the reaction to such an explicit visual language resulted in disdain for the ‘degeneration of the feminist politics.’ The success of these campaigns against menstruation taboos, surely, does not lie in generating public sympathy for hapless women; but rather in compelling the public to take notice of their demands, however, uncomfortable the public may be in recognizing them. They are gradually fashioning a new language of feminist politics through these flash-mob mobilizations on the street and on the virtual space of social media and their lingering aftermath. The search for a new language, however, was continuing amongst the activists and supporters of the women’s movement in India. The Pink Chaddi campaign in 2009 and the Slutwalk parades in 2011 had already indicated that visuality, rather than visibility, was increasingly taking a substantial role in constructing the messages and modes of women’s mobilizations. The visual symbol of mailing pink-coloured panties to the leaders and members of Mangalore based ‘Sri Ram Sene’ group who had beaten up women in a pub to teach them a lesson for transgressing boundaries of proper femininity46 had generated vituperative critique within the progressive groups as an exclusively metropolitan upper class form of resistance.47 The Slutwalk parades in cities like Delhi, Kolkata, Bhopal, and Hyderabad to protest against sexual violence took the Indianized name Besharmi Morcha (literally meaning the Shameless Group) even though they kept the English title to indicate solidarity with the global mobilization that had originated in Toronto, were also panned by a section of the progressive activists.48 The consequent debate amongst feminists regarding the nature of the resistance took place principally in the social media, and, perhaps, that drew in the interests of young men and women whose class or caste locations were not the necessary factors in determining the nature of protest against sexual violence. The significance of claiming the colour pink as a celebration of femininity and female sexuality rather than a code of slotting women as mute, soft, and subservient, however, can be noted in a wider visual construction of the gender politics. The Gulabi Gang in villages and small towns of Uttar Pradesh had already set up women’s resistance groups against domestic violence since 2006 under the leadership of Sampat Pal Devi.49 Members of

176  Mallarika Sinha Roy this group wear pink saris and carry bamboo staff and the ‘Pink’ women of Gulabi Gang do not shy away from confronting the forces of rigid caste division and patriarchal family cultures in one of the most ‘under-developed’ regions in northern India. It is undeniable that the fault lines that divide the pub-going urban women of Mangalore and the staff-wielding rural women of Banda district in Uttar Pradesh are many. The diversity of political ideologies which create ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of femininity and the gossamer shine of the neo-liberal Development discourses over stark experiences of exploitation tend to sharpen these fault lines. And yet, women’s ways of configuring the spaces of struggle, working through the tensions emanating from overlapping socio-economic and cultural hierarchies, allow us to rethink the calibration of feminist networks, of finding allies, of visualizing politics.

Conclusion: visualizing politics The cultures of seeing are multiple and the mediated experiences of vision vary according to the social, aesthetic, cultural practices of seeing in different spatial and temporal contexts. Writing about visuality, Patricia Hayes cautions, thus needs precise and embedded language and, following her advice, in conclusion of my argument on the dynamism between visibility and visuality in the contemporary women’s mobilizations, I would like to draw attention to some of the recurring themes.50 The circulation of images – photographs/hand-painted replica of photographs, cartoons, slogans, and posters – in different moments of women’s mobilizations in the last decade, or, more specifically in the last five years, indicate invocation of several genealogies of struggle against sexual violence, moral policing, and denial of human rights. These genealogies reflect not only on the dynamic between visibility and visuality but also the tension between visibility and invisibility, or partial (in)visibility. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan provides us with an excellent route map for tracing the genealogies when she reads the Epic heroine Draupadi’s story as a resource for ‘operating relations of power’ and opens up the scene of disrobing for reflections on the contemporary appropriations at both ends of ‘an ideological spectrum – from the patriarchal legitimation of the control of women by inflicting punishment upon them, to claims for Draupadi as a proto-feminist cultural icon.’51 Mahasweta Devi’s celebrated short story Draupadi – a play on the name of the epic heroine Draupadi – tells the story of a Santal woman Naxalite Draupadi or Dopdi who is captured and repeatedly raped by the police.52 Finally, she hurls her bruised naked body to her torturers affirming that she had no shame in front of cowards, those who do not flinch from brutalizing an ‘unarmed target.’ Draupadi is not just an addition to the legends of tribal guerrillas, a compensation for the oversight of women; Santal-Naxalite-Woman Draupadi acts as a palimpsest of each of these categories of exploitation, without whose story the history

Inside/out 177 of Naxalbari remains incomplete. Similarly, drawing a line of connection from Draupadi/Dopdi to Jyoti Singh must traverse through Khairlanji killings, Kunan-Poshpora, Thangjam Manorama, Tapasi Malik, Soni Sori, and Suzette Jordan53 – linking the politics of sexuality with politics of violence at different junctures of ethnicity, caste, labour, and development. Framing these genealogies within connected meanings of women’s movements and women in movements needs to draw from commentaries on gendered frames of social movement studies. Ferree and Merrill argue that framing often relies on ‘cold’ cognition to attach meanings to a set of events and puts ‘hot’ emotions out of the frame to emphasize rational political action.54 Such processes of framing deny any importance to affective meanings of collective action, consequently, failing to take into account the role of emotion in driving the ‘move’ of the movement. The politics of seeing women in acts of collective mobilization, however, is not ‘cold’ framing, but rather it refers to the analytical angle that allows for coexistence of passionate politics with passionate detachment.55 In this framing the event-based emotional content turns into a wider concept of emotional commitment. Emotional commitment reflects the ways in which a movement redefines emotions of its own members – how they articulate their feelings and actions, how collective identities are formed through collective performances and empathy, how belongingness and solidarity are forged through shared memories. It is this ‘re-framing’ of emotions ranging from loyalty, hope, and trust to anger, distrust, fear, shame, and contempt that a movement draws on to mobilize for collective action. The placards that connected Kunan-Poshpora and Thangjam Manorama with the Delhi gang rape – including all the other references to protest against sexual violence against women – unveil a particular way of memorializing sexual violence. They reflect the framing process in which the emotional commitment to feminist politics fuses the boundaries between public and private domains of gendered relations of power. One of the interesting elements of all these mobilizations lies in the ways in which one mobilization folded into the next despite geographical distance between places of ‘origin’ of these mobilizations as well as the cultural differences amongst different regions. The mass mobilization against an incident of gang rape founded a collective to fight against restrictions on women’s mobility and resulted in a political expression of kissing in public. Activists of Hok Kolorob kissed each other on one of the most populated crossroads in Kolkata and Pinjra Tod activists pasted sanitary napkins with slogans across universities like Jamia Milia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University. The basic commonality amongst these movements or specific moments of mobilization seems to be the emphasis on using the body – bearing different inscriptions of femininity – as both site and sight of resistance. Activists are challenging the modes of ‘looking at’ women by choosing to be ‘seen’ in the ways they want. Adopting certain gestures like kissing in public or using bodily objects like the sanitary napkin as placards for writing feminist

178  Mallarika Sinha Roy slogans reflect a self-aware method of intervention in cultures of seeing. The element of sensationalism and attracting voyeurs seem to be part of this intervention, perhaps an important part of changing the codes of shaming. Framing the politics of seeing women, consequently, invokes the critique of male gaze, whereby the gaps, silences, and repressions in the masculinist vision are knowingly exposed with deliberate action. Such an invocation alerts us, on the one hand, to the functioning of the dominant power relations that determine what is to be seen, what is to be shown, and what is to remain invisible; and, on the other hand, to the dynamic between visibility and visuality in many of these gestures and exhibition of objects. The troubling fallouts of this play must address the metonymic binary between masculine/feminine, mind/body, reason/emotion, and public/private. The centrality of the biological body and its social constructivism in Western philosophical tradition, argues Oyeronke Oyewumi, has resulted in imposing a hegemonic mode of visualizing the body.56 The cultures of seeing the body, making it visible, and perceiving it through visuality in locations outside the West (but bearing a colonial inheritance) must wade through the impact of the same Western philosophical tradition. Oyewumi further explains that, [t]he much-vaunted Cartesian dualism was only an affirmation of a tradition in which the body was seen as a trap from which any rational person had to escape. Ironically, even as the body remained at the center of both sociopolitical categories and discourse, many thinkers denied its existence for certain categories of people, most notably themselves. . . . Women, primitives, Jews, Africans, the poor, and all those who qualified for the label ‘different’ in varying historical epochs have been considered to be the embodied, dominated therefore by instinct and affect, reason being beyond them. They are the Other, and the Other is a body.57 This formulation of the Other as a body helps us to finally return to the Matribhumi episode and attempt an explanation for the veritable war between men and women passengers that stripped Bengali patriarchy off its benevolent form. The Matribhumi local train symbolized privilege for the ‘Other.’ The visual construction of the social field that stages the everyday bodily materiality of women, in the instance of Matribhumi local train inverted the hierarchical script of patriarchy. It made visible that women, who could be pitied, protected, violated, stared at, mocked or ignored, could disregard that already existing relation of power. Women as mere bodies, the ‘other’ of the masculine self, are incomplete beings beyond reason and science. Their privilege at the cost of those who have enjoyed entitlement at every nodal point of gender relations overturned the resolution of the ‘women’s question’ and brought in the ‘traditional’ sanction of chastising the transgressive bodies with physical punishment. Oyewumi’s argument of Other as a body also clarifies the metropolitan intelligentsia’s condemnation

Inside/out 179 of the mob violence precipitated by the refusal of women passengers of Matribhumi to let go of their privilege. The metonymic chain of dualisms are knotted at different points in terms of relations of power, and the suburban, daily-passenger ‘Other’ is a body to the metropolitan intelligentsia’s ‘Self’ as the mind. The power relations inherent to visibility put the gender politics in the Matribhumi episode in perspective – without reducing the ‘men’ as unintelligible brutes at the receiving of a privileged feminist ire. The flickering of visuality, perhaps, can be found in the everydayness of women’s increasing mobility despite the episodic clash with an overbearing masculine self.

Notes 1 Gupta, “ ‘Matribhumi’ No More.” The clash between women and men passengers was not limited to the day of August 24 and had happened before. From news reports in Bengali dailies it becomes quite clear that clashes continued until December 2015. 2 Bhattacharya, “Thele Fela Hoy Ni, Joy Meyederi.” 3 Roy Mullick, “Mar Kheye Benke Galo Churi, Chhitke Porlo Kaner Dul.” 4 Majumdar, “Jiban Ekar Hoy Na, Ei Asahishnuta Bhoyonkar.” 5 Chakrabarty, “Bhranta Naribad Ki Purushder Manush Korbe.” 6 Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution of Women’s Question”; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. 7 Rajeswari, Real and Imagined Women; Sen, 1999. 8 Kumar, History of Doing; Kumari and Kidwai, Crossing the Sacred Line. 9 Tharu and Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender,” 232. 10 Government policies at the central and state level have launched several schemes of financial insurance and assistance to families with girl children. Policies like ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao,’ ‘Dhanlakshmi Yojana,’ ‘Kanyasri Prakalpa,’ ‘Ladli Scheme’ are directed to maintain a favourable sex ratio for girl children, to prevent school drop out among girl children, and to prevent forced marriage before girl children reach the legal age of consent. Well-known film personalities or figures from the world of sports often star in the advertisements of these policies. 11 Rao, “Understanding Sirasgaon”; Loomba and Lukose, South Asian Feminisms; Gill, The Peripheral Centre. 12 Hayes, “Visual Genders.” 13 Alcoff, 1991–1992. 14 Pratt, 2008; Cohn, 1996. 15 Foucault, 1977, 201–202. 16 Grimshaw, 2001. 17 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581. 18 Teltumbde, Persistence of Caste; Rao, “Understanding Sirasgaon.” 19 Rajeswari, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 332–359. 20 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 86–101. 21 Mitchell, 1998, 91. 22 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 6–18. 23 Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 1–14. 24 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 29–38 [first published in 1981]. 25 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 584. 26 Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements,” 611–639.

180  Mallarika Sinha Roy 7 Snow, “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields,” 384. 2 28 “Delhi Protests Are by ‘Dented and Painted’ Women: President Pranab’s son,” NDTV, December 27, 2012. 29 Roy, “What Do Men Have to do with It?” https://kafila.online/2012/12/28/ what-do-men-have-to-do-with-it/ accessed March 4, 2019. The readers’ comments on this post reveal the debate regarding the intersections of class, caste, and region over the issue of violence against women. 30 Roy’s films When Four Friends Meet; Majma; Till We Meet Again are explorations of masculinity and gender relations in urban spaces and situate characters within labour and class relations and religious affiliations. Roy has recently published a graphic book on masculinities titled A Little Book of Men, Yoda Press, 2008. 31 Saha, “Kunan Poshpora.” 32 Pandit, “Shopian Rape, Murders a Family Feud?” 33 The protest against Manorama’s killing was perhaps the most spectacular demonstration by women in India when several elderly Manipur women had shed their clothes in front of Kangla Fort a few weeks after her death and held a banner with words ‘Indian Army Rape Us.’ 34 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 89. 35 Sinha, “Refashioning Mother India,” 623–644. 36 John, “Gender and Development in India,” 3074. 37 Talpade-Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 61–88; John, “Gender and Development in India,” 3071–3077. 38 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/Protest-against-strip-search-goesviral/articleshow/45696823.cms accessed April 4, 2019. 39 McClintock, Imperial Leather. 40 Escobar, “Beyond the Third World,” 207–230. 41 Pinjra Tod, www.facebook.com/pg/pinjratod/about/?ref=page_internal accessed March 4, 2019. 42 Interviews with student activists in December 2014. 43 Arafat, “Should Muslims Fear the Kiss.” 44 Thomas, “Protest against Strip Search Goes Viral.” 45 Sharma, “The Open Discussion on Menstruation Is #Happy.” 46 Dhawan, “ ‘Pink Chaddi’ Campaign a Hit, Draws Over 34,000 Members.” 47 G. Arunima, “Who’s Afraid of the Pink Chaddi Campaign, or the Politics of the Panty Protest,” personal communication, 2011. 48 Mendes, Slutwalk. 49 https://gulabigang.in/ last accessed April 4, 2019. 50 Hayes, “Visual Genders,” 522. 51 Sunder Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 333. 52 Devi, Draupadi, 100–111. 53 Tapasi Malik was a young woman from Bajemelia village in West Bengal who was killed during the Singur movement in 2006. Suzette Jordan was a rape survivor who decided to join the protest movement against sexual violence against women. For details see Sinha Roy, “Rethinking Female Militancy in Postcolonial Bengal,” 124–131; http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/suzettesstory/ accessed March 4, 2019. 54 Ferree and Merrill, “Thinking about Social Movements,” 247–261. 55 Passionate politics refers to the rethinking of the role of emotion and affect in political activism in the field of social movement studies. A number of significant essays, edited volumes, and book-length studies have appeared in the last couple of decades to mark the nuances of emotional attachment, commitment, and activism. For details see, Jasper, Goodwin and Polletta, Passionate Politics; Flam

Inside/out 181 and King, “Emotions’ Map,” 19–40; Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” 548–567. Passionate detachment as first used by Laura Mulvey (1975) to explain the dialectics between the look of the camera and the look of the audience and to break the voyeuristic pleasure in cinema. The idea has later been taken up by Annette Kuhn (1982) and Donna Haraway (1988) and developed as a feminist visual methodological perspective. 56 Oyewumi, The Invention of Women. 7 Ibid., 3. 5

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Inside/out 183 Rao, A. “Understanding Sirasgaon: Notes Towards Conceptualising the Role of Law, Caste and Gender in a Case of ‘Atrocity.’ ” In Gender and Caste, edited by A. Rao, 276–309. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2005. Roy, R. “What Do Men Have to Do with It?” (2019 April 4). https://kafila. online/2012/12/28/what-do-men-have-to-do-with-it/. Saha, A. “Kunan Poshpora: A Forgotten Mass-Rape Case of 2 Kashmir Villages.” Hindustan Times (2016 February 8). www.hindustantimes.com/india/kunanposhpora-a-forgotten-mass-rape-case-of-2-kashmir-villages/ story-1rmD1TqawP nMMB11LQzgyJ.html. Sen, S. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sharma, K. “The Open Discussion on Menstruation Is #Happy to Bleed’s Biggest Achievement.” Scroll.In (2015 November 25). https://scroll.in/article/771449/ the-open-discussion-on-menstruation-is-happy-to-bleeds-biggest- achievement. Sinha, M. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Sinha, M. “Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late-Colonial India.” Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 623–644. doi:10.2307/3178643. Sinha Roy, M. “Rethinking Female Militancy in Postcolonial Bengal.” Feminist Review 101 (2012): 124–131. doi:10.1057/fr.2011.56. Snow, D. “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields.” In The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, and H. Kriesi, 380–412, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Sunder Rajan, R. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1993. Sunder Rajan, R. “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing: Meanings for Our Times.” In Signposts: Gender Issues in Post Independence India, edited by R. Sunder Rajan, 332–359. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Talpade-Mohanty, C. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Solidarity and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61–88. doi:10.1057/fr.1988.42. Teltumbde, A. Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2010. Tharu, S. and T. Niranjana. “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.” In Subaltern Studies IX, edited by S. Amin and D. Chakraborty, 232–260. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Thomas, W. “Protest against Strip Search Goes Viral.” Times of India (2014 December 31). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/Protest-against-stripsearch-goes-viral/articleshow/45696823.cms.

Part IV

Voices of dissent

11 Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation An interview with Irom Sharmila Chanu Panchali Ray This interview was conducted in two parts. The first part was conducted in Imphal, Manipur on September 2, 2016, just three weeks after Sharmila had broken her fast (August 9, 2016) and a day before she embarked on her campaign in the Manipur Assembly elections to launch her party, Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance (PRJA). In March 2017 she lost the elections, quit politics, and moved to Tamil Nadu, and in August of the same year, she married her partner of many years. The second part of the interview was conducted on January 7, 2018 when Sharmila visited Kolkata, West Bengal.

September 2, 2016, Imphal, Manipur Manipur has a strong history of women’s movements and, you too, have been struggling for the last 16 years to get AFSPA repealed. How do you perceive the relation between women and politics? Women have always been in politics, however, there is a need to increase women’s representation in politics. I think women are not powerless but our political system is very masculine, and this needs to change. Allowing women to enter politics is a way forward. I believe that if more women enter politics, there will be a feminization of politics. The whole system of democracy, as per my ideology, needs to be transformed. People misunderstand me, when I say that democracy needs to be transformed; it does not mean I want to bring back monarchy, but democracy in its current form has to change. There has to be real connections between people, their hearts, and those who represent them – the bureaucrats and rulers. There is too much gap between the ruling classes and the people of the country. A real civilization is when everyone’s identities are respected. Only then there can be happiness, harmony, and peace. How do you locate your identity as a Meitei woman within larger identity politics that are taking place in the North East, particularly Manipur?

188  Panchali Ray How do you perceive the politics and conflicting demands that various groups in Manipur are making? I am a Meitei but I want to be seen as human. I do not like being defined in narrow identities of community, religion, and tradition. I want to be identified as a human who wants freedom for her state. There are too many walls that divide people, limiting them to their own identities. That cannot lead to harmony and peace in society. We need to live together with mutual respect. In this world we need to care for each other, otherwise we cannot live. We cannot be possessive of our identities, based on which we try and exclude those who do not fit in. There are many conflicts in Manipur, particularly conflicts between the Naga and Meitei community. I think identities should not be important, but the reality is that they are. My understanding is that all communities can coexist, if we can celebrate each other. This land is for us to inhabit, but we have become possessive and now land consumes us. Is your demand just removal of AFSPA or are you also asking freedom from the Indian state? How do you locate the various overlapping movements with various demands and your demand for removal of AFSPA? How do you locate your ideology and politics? The constitution has been amended a hundred times but our demand for repeal of ASPFA has not been heeded. This Act was inserted in the 1950s to deal with newly emerged states of Kashmir and some states in North East. It is part of the Indian state’s strategy of militarization, and ensuring that no newly emerged state can have any other aspirations. My focus is to repeal the draconian law; it has no place in a democratic country. Self-determination is extremely important. They (Indian army) are using the AFSPA to exploit and torture both women and men. In a democratic country, AFSPA has no place. The Kashmiris want self-determination, as far as Manipur is concerned, I do not want to go back to the colonial past to see whether we are part of India or not. The question for me is not whether India forcefully occupied Manipur, instead, I want to move forward towards justice and peace. Otherwise, this is not democracy. The militarization has to stop. The 1942 Quit India movement was to fight Arms Ordinance Act. They (Indian state) are using colonial laws such as the Arms Ordinance Act and giving it a different name, such as AFSPA, and using it against its own people. What the British government did to its colonial subjects, the Indian state is doing to Kashmir and Manipur. Thus, people are asking for self-determination. The Indians wanted freedom from the British, thus, they launched the Quit India movement. Now Kashmiris are asking for freedom. And so are the Manipuris. History is repeating itself.

Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation 189 You are standing for elections. How do you plan to deal with different competing claims? What is your vision of governance? It is yet to be decided. Only when the time comes, when and if I ever have the power as a Chief Minister, I will see what strategy I should use. It is too early for me to say anything now. I just want to topple this government. I do not want to be with any political party, if possible, I want to be an independent candidate. In a democratic country, as a representative leader of the society, one must collectively arrive at decisions. It cannot be an individual’s vision. It has to include all sections of society. I do not agree with this kind of governance: where you lose touch with people and take decisions alone. It is important that leaders, who are representatives of the people must take decisions collectively with different sections of society. The collective consent of society is important in good governance. Manipur has a strong tradition of collective politics, particularly of women. Historically women of Manipur have come together to protest and agitate against state and social oppression; and even in contemporary times, there is the Meira Paibis who have staged bold and radical protests against the state and the army. What is your relationship with the Meira Paibis? Do you think in a social context where collectivity is so important, an individual protest like the one you have staged is very isolating? When I heard the news that 12 imas had protested nude in front of Kangla fort, I broke down. I could not believe it. I garnered even more courage and determination to carry on my fight against AFSPA. Every time I was released, some members of the Meira Paibis would join me and guard me, particularly they tried to help me press for my demands to the concerned authorities. But joining hands is never enough. When my health deteriorated, they (Indian state) forced rice tubes down my throat, then the Meira Paibis did not protest against the state. They remained content with their own power and did not put anything at stake for me. They just blamed the government. I expected that they would use their power as leaders to support me more. The Meira Paibis come from different organizations and they are very strong and empowered as leaders, but they rarely used their power to give me support. They were also upset that I called off my fast without informing them, or I made a decision to join politics. How do you see your fight against AFSPA now? My real problem is, what should I do now? How do I go about my struggle against AFSPA? The 16-year hunger strike was a stand to fast unto the repeal of ASPFA, but people’s interpretation was that I fast unto death. What I really wanted was a movement – that people will join hands together with me to compel the concerned authorities to repeal AFSPA.

190  Panchali Ray When I garnered strength to change my strategy, there was a big uproar that I have betrayed them (Manipur) by breaking the fast. They made me an idol – they decided to represent me, as they saw me. But what I really want is to live for society and not die for it. Dying is real – we mortals are sure to die one day. We need to share our strength, our happiness, and our struggles and work together. I want to work together with other people, enjoying life’s beauty together, and not live in isolation and have people sing my glory. I have encountered tremendous negativity. I felt like a doll, sitting in a palanquin borne by humans. I am a real being, not some divine goddess. It is necessary that people realize that I am human being and not an idol. I want to forget the past and work towards achieving my goals, and if required, change my strategy. I need that freedom to be able to change and improvise and rethink how I will fight the Indian state’s draconian laws. Only my mother has remained unchanged through all of this. She continues to support me but my other relatives have constantly changed their minds according to circumstances and popular sentiments. My mother remains constant in her support of me, when I was fasting, and even when I announced the breaking of my fast. There were many people, such as the Meira Paibis who were negative initially, now they have come around, as well. They want reconciliation, they want to sit together and talk, and strategize. This is a good sign. The connection of hearts is required to be able to fight together. Similarly, the connection between the government and people’s hearts is possible. It is very much possible. How do you perceive India’s strategies and policies? How do you perceive the state of democracy in this country? Violence cannot solve problems, it only increases it. India is a multicultural country, there are many belief systems, and yet we are so unhappy. India’s biggest decline is the declining happiness index; people are exploited and discriminated against based on identity. There are so many violations. These are the real challenges now. When I went on hunger strike, I was influenced by the tactics and strategies by which India got Independence. The British left. But our successive governments have failed us. Our current governments are worse than the British, they are more imperialist. I wanted peace and I want violence to end. I just felt that the government failed me. The basic problem is there is no representation of women in governance, there is no real representation of any minority groups in the government. The masses are disconnected from the seats of power. They are, in fact, puppets in the hands of the government. Look what our Manipur government along with the central government is doing. They are dislocating people from their traditional lands in the name of development. What is this development they are talking of – construction of car parks, resorts, and tourist centres. People are displaced from their traditional homes, land, and livelihood to make way for urban lifestyles

Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation 191 without proper compensation and rehabilitation. It means you are telling a large section of the people that their lives are valueless; you are telling them ‘go away from here.’ You have no respect for the suffering of your own people. It is like you are commanding and ordering your subjects, ‘Go away. Vacate this land.’ Is this a democratic government? How do you perceive the back lash against your decision to break your fast or to marry? Is it because you are a woman that you have received so much criticism? People have represented me the way they want, not the way I want. They have different ideas about how I should live and what I should do. I am not some goddess or saint. I have desires like an ordinary woman. Why should a section of people tell me how to lead my life? I actually do not want to talk about it anymore, instead I want to live fully. That is it. I am right now living here, in this ISKCON guest house. I am wearing their beads around my neck but that does not make me a devotee of their Lord. It is just that I am living here, a recipient of their hospitality, and thus, conforming to their norms. When I leave this place, I will take it off. I should be free to do that. That is all I want to say, we should be free to live the way we want to.

January 7, 2018, Kolkata, West Bengal How did you look back at the elections? Why do you think people who supported you so unconditionally during your hunger strike did not vote for you when you entered electoral politics? From the beginning of the election, I felt it was unlikely that I will win, because of the mindset of people in Manipur. Electoral politics is dominated by muscle and money power. Apart from that, from the very beginning, I felt that the people in Manipur did not want me to stand for elections because they felt politics is very dirty. Of course, politics is very dirty and there is a lot of manipulation, however, criticizing is not enough. If we want to see change, we have to make those changes. I believe in that and that is why I gave up my fast and decided to join electoral politics. Without using the tactics of entering electoral politics I had no other means of breaking my isolation, of coming out of my predicament. I just wanted to get out of the hospital, I felt isolated and stuck. They did not want me to enter politics; they did not want me to break my fast. I believe people actually do not want to see any real change, they are just content in their own lives, and the way things are going. If we want to see real change, then we have to move out of our comfort zone. They wanted me to remain as the symbol of resistance, not speaking or thinking, but just fasting. They were content but I was not. I wanted to see life, experience life. Yes, I am resisting, but that does not mean I cannot enjoy life.

192  Panchali Ray Now that a whole year has passed by how do you look back at the backlash that you faced, for both your decision to join politics as well as to marry? Do you think because you were a woman you faced more hostility? I do not think it has anything to do with being a man or woman. The strategy of persisting for so long in this hunger strike was wrong. People forgot that I am an ordinary flesh and blood woman. They gave me the responsibility to ensure that AFSPA is withdrawn, as if I am some divine being, some demi-goddess, who can through fasting change the political situation. They were not considering me as a human being. I became the sacrifice. They expected me to sacrifice my life for the Manipuri cause and could not understand why I wanted to do other things. They wanted me to sacrifice my life for the nation. I challenged that notion. I am a human being with desires which they refuse to accept. There were other issues as well. When I was fasting, people were writing about me, inventing stories, all without my knowledge. I wanted to correct that, I wanted to intervene. I want to make my own history. There have created an aura around me, a fantasy, and they do not want to accept my reality. They have already pictured me as a goddess. Since the beginning, I insisted that I am a human being. I just wanted to tell them – observe my daily life, how I carry on my daily routine – and you will see I am a normal person. You see, they refused to sacrifice themselves, they want to blindly follow me, or an image of me, and absolve themselves of all responsibilities of fighting for justice. We are all social animals, we are interdependent. We make society; we all have rights and responsibilities. We need to share the fight for justice together; it can never be the responsibility of one person. They would never respect my wishes. From the beginning, they would want to tell me what is good for me, write about me, and speak on my behalf. For them I am a doll, sitting on a pedestal, from where I cannot step down. Or even a palanquin, from where I cannot put my foot down on the ground, where there is dung; they do not want the real me with all my thought, desires, and emotions. But the ground and dung is my reality, which is where I want to be. It is like a goat to a sacrificial fire, it cannot come out alive; it will be celebrated but it must die in the fire. I always believed life is very precious. Life needs to be celebrated. Do you think the backlash you faced because of your marriage was because you married outside your community? Some well-wishers told me that if I married within my community, I may not have faced such a backlash. But for me, that is not even an issue. Who I marry is my concern. No one can control my life; no one can tell me who I should marry. I will make my history, not others. They cannot tell me whether I should marry, not marry, or who I should marry.

Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation 193 How do you like your life in Kodaikanal? Do you miss Manipur? I am fed up with Manipur, and yet, I cannot forget Manipur. I am staying in Kodaikanal, which is beautiful and peaceful, but my heart lies in Manipur. Everywhere, there is problem; my life is not free of problems just because I have moved to Kodaikanal. When I moved to Tamil Nadu, a Jallikattu Dalit activist honoured me with a shawl, and I accepted it from him with my hands, instead of letting him garland me. The next day he went to the media saying that I am casteist and anti-social because I refused to let him garland me. I have been facing this kneejerk reaction everywhere. No one asked me what I think about caste, but interpreted my action in a certain manner, and straight away gave statements to the press. But this is nothing compared to the way I was insulted in Manipur, and the way I was made to feel like I committed a great sin by choosing life over death. Sometimes, I cannot shake off that sense of guilt, and other negative feelings. When I think of returning to Manipur, I remember how everyone felt that I had disgraced them, insulted them by giving up my fast, and stop; yet, I cannot stop thinking of Manipur. What is your strategy now? Last time we met you said entering politics was a strategic change in the fight against AFSPA, are you considering reentering politics again? I cannot avoid politics, it is a part of my life, my goal. I cannot turn away from it even if I want to. But my intention is to make alliances, lobby, and meet political leaders and bring up AFSPA in the parliament. Every state has its problems and issues and I want to work with local issues. Every state is a nation by itself. The current Central Government pretends that there is only one nation – one language, one community. This is the root of all problems; this kind of nationalism creates a lot of problems: it spews hatred, discrimination, separatism, and other kinds of identity politics. We need to respect differences as well as other people’s emotions. A democratic leader of the country should be the servant of the people, not a controller or a dictator. It only leads to more violence and bloodshed. What is your relationship with your family? Last time we spoke, you spoke highly of you mother and you were disappointed with your brother. Has it changed after marriage? My mother is very special to me but with my brother, it is different. He demanded that I accept that my breaking of the fast was wrong and he was right in demanding that I continue. The campaign that he launched in my name benefitted him. He never considered my rights, my desires; he used me. He claimed that because I was his sister, he had the right to

194  Panchali Ray speak on my behalf. He misused my name. I do not want the awards given to me, in fact, I will never write an autobiography. I really do not think it is necessary. I do not want people or anyone else to commercialize my life. I am not in touch with my mother at the moment. I got in touch with her after marriage, but now I leave it to God. The love and kindness, I know, is still there. I will return to Manipur. Nobody knows the future but my determination is that I will return to Manipur.

12 Narratives from Bastar An interview with Soni Sori Panchali Ray

This interview was conducted on July 20, 2016 at Geedam, a town in Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, at Soni Sori’s residence. Soni, a schoolteacher, was arrested on charges of acting as an intermediary for CPI (Maoist) in 2011 and granted bail in 2014. The custodial torture and sexual assault that she faced, her subsequent release, and her continuous struggle against the state’s excesses against the tribal population resisting corporate acquisition of tribal land has made her the face of adivasi resistance in contemporary Chhattisgarh. In 2014, she contested as a candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and lost the general elections in Bastar. Four months prior to this interview, in March 2016, she was attacked by miscreants who threw chemicals on her face and threatened her family with dire consequences if she did not resist from speaking out on state atrocities against the tribal population.1 The interview was conducted in Hindi and has been translated and edited by the interviewer. How do you see your journey from a schoolteacher to becoming the face of the adivasi resistance? How did you become the voice of the struggle? I was born into a reasonably well-off family of farmers in Dantewada district, and my childhood was quite idyllic. I was not enrolled in school, and spent most of my days grazing cows. Sometimes I would venture to the local school, and eat burnt dahlia (oatmeal) off cooking vessels that were left outside for cleaning. A teacher who observed me doing this regularly asked whether I wanted to study, and I said I would, if I was given dahlia to eat. That is how I got enrolled in school. Later, I was sent to a boarding school for higher education and subsequently I found employment as a schoolteacher, met my husband, and got married. My family was annoyed that I chose my own life partner, without consulting them, they felt I had compromised the family honour. For three years, my father refused to maintain any relation with me, but my mother reached out, and also tried to mediate between us. Initially he refused reconciliation, however, in the end he came around.

196  Panchali Ray My first job was at a school in Jabeli village, where the Naxalite presence in the area had increased considerably. I had never met a Naxalite and was scared of them. In 2006, an ashram opened in the village and I was appointed as the hostel warden. There were 50 orphan children admitted in the school, most of whose parents were Naxalites. Someone complained to the local Naxal group that I was not serving good food in the hostel, and they summoned me. I was scared and ran away to my father’s house. But the villagers counselled me that if I did not meet them, there was a possibility I would get killed, yet I refused. Finally, I agreed to meet them. I cannot tell you how scared I was, they were carrying guns, and I thought I would not survive the day. But then they spoke to me, offered me tea, told me of their ideology and practice and I was taken aback at their politics and their concern for the adivasi community, as I always thought they were rouges and murderers. They told me about orphaned children who were hiding in the jungle. I felt, as a teacher, it was my duty to find out. So I walked 30 km and found about 50 half-starved, sick children. They told me that they had seen their parents chopped to pieces by Salwa Judum members and were hiding from the police. They asked me ‘We have no homes, these jungles are our home. What will you do with us?’ I had to promise them that I would take complete responsibility for their education till they got jobs, and make sure that they are not sent back to the jungles. I promised them, that they would have pens in their hands, and not guns. When they were looking to arrest me, they went to my school, beat up my staff, and broke furniture. These children had already seen violence by uniformed men, so they did not hesitate, they immediately ran away. Even when I was in jail, I tried to send messages to the children to be patient, and wait for me, but there was no response. When I was released, some of the children sent me a message: ‘Madam had promised us that we will have pens, and not weapons in our hands, but tell madam, that she has failed.’ Can you imagine my pain? They had to take shelter with the Naxalites and now they, too, have become militants. My question to the government is that after I was sent into custody, why did the government not take responsibility of these children? When they speak of development, where do these innocent children figure? Why did they not find the children who ran away and rehabilitate them? Why did they have to take up arms? If I had not gone to jail, I can wager that these children would have had pens in their hands. Am I the one who is betraying the nation or is it the government who is doing so? In 2010, my husband was picked up for being a Naxalite, and that was only because he was my husband. We were a small family. I was a schoolteacher and he was self-employed; he was in the transport business. I was

Narratives from Bastar 197 in the village teaching and my husband lived here, in Geedam, with my three children. We were quite happy. We never imagined that the government would attack us like this. I was proud of being an adivasi teacher. The Naxals had broken five ashrams in the area (Jabeli and Someli village) and they called us (the wardens) for a meeting. They told us that the central police force occupied the schools during summer vacations, attacked villagers, molested women, and so, as a preemptive measure, they wanted to destroy the ashrams. I objected, and told them that if you are fighting for the people, then why are you opposing the education of these children? These adivasi children will lose all opportunities to study. They made me promise that in my ashram, I will not allow the forces to camp or even enter its premises. They told me that ‘if we know that you have betrayed us, we will kill you; so think before you give us your word.’ I thought of the two hundred children who had enrolled in my school, and the promises that I have made to them, and gave my word to the Naxalites. That night, except for two ashrams, they broke the rest. I spoke to our collector and informed him of my predicament, my location in the middle of a forest, and the aspirations I had for the children, and he gave me a lot of support. For two years I worked peacefully with my students; no forces occupied my ashram. Two years later, there were initiatives from the government to rebuild the ashrams that were broken. That is when Avdesh Gautam (a contractor and a Congress leader) in collaboration with local government bodies accused people randomly of being Naxalites. This led to arrests of political and social activists, particularly from the Communist Party of India (CPI). He always bagged tenders that came in the name of development and siphoned away funds, and at that moment he was bidding for the tenders for rebuilding the ashrams in Jabeli and Someli village. Avdesh Gautam has a long-standing political enmity with our family, as we are ideologically aligned with the CPI. When about 5 or 10 lacs of rupees were sanctioned for my ashram, he objected saying that it is not a good location for a school and the Naxals will not allow any rebuilding there. I said I would take responsibility, hire a contractor and get it built, and I will ensure that the Naxalites do not destroy the building. I even called a public meeting of villagers and had a debate: at every turn of the conversation, Avdesh would keep saying that the Naxals will not allow this, and they will not allow that. ‘Naxalism’ has become an excuse to stall any development, whether setting up aganwadi, schools, building roads, providing clean water and electricity. He felt threatened by my speech, and soon enough my husband was arrested, and a few months later, I was arrested from Delhi where I had fled earlier. In between, I faced tremendous harassment and pressure from the police to become an informer, which I refused. They pointed at the success of my ashram and said that the Naxals had spared it because I was helping them. They had issued four arrest warrants in my name but did not arrest me. They tried to frame me in the Essar case

198  Panchali Ray but they could not. I am a schoolteacher and they are a mining company, what relation could I have with them? After they arrested and produced me in front of the magistrate, they declared that I was absconding for a year. I informed the magistrate that she could check my bank book, I had been withdrawing my salary every month; she could check with my pupils and staff, I had been reporting to work every day. The magistrate did not listen to me. The government runs the judiciary here. There is no independent judiciary; the magistrate is the government’s slave. I was remanded to police custody for two days and the torture, both physical and sexual that I went through, it is all there on the internet. After two days, when I was sent to jail, I wanted to see the magistrate, tell her what happened to me, but she refused to see me. I was not able to stand and I was lying down in the police van. I told them (the police) that I would not sign the papers until the magistrate agrees to meet me. They came back and said that the magistrate had said, that if I wanted to go to jail then I should sign, otherwise I would be sent back into police custody. I got scared and signed. I did not want to be in Ankit Garg’s supervision any longer. He had humiliated and sexually tortured me. When I went to the jail, the warden seeing my state, refused to admit me, saying he could not take responsibility. They could not take me back to the court, so they admitted me to the hospital in Raipur. After sometime when I recovered, I was sent into custody. What happened after that is public knowledge. How we fought, how we struggled, and how our movement was built. I learnt to fight within the confines of the jail. The language of mainstream nationalism delegitimizes the adivasi struggle in Chhattisgarh as an obstacle to national development and growth. How do you respond to such allegations? We are not against development, on the contrary, we want development. The question is, what is the nature of development? Is this development beneficial for the common people? In the name of development, people are being killed, incarcerated, and their land seized. This is the Central Government’s logic for development. They will not ask the people what kind of development they want and how they perceive their relationship to their land. It is important to take people’s consensus before you start the project of development; that is the spirit of democracy. Not the way the government is going about it, which is, if someone has land that we need, let us snatch it without even asking them what they want. Why are people protesting so much? Take for example, Bastar, the government is forcing people to give up their land in the name of Chhattisgarh’s development. What kind of development is this, where impoverished adivasi men and women who own nothing, but land that has sustained them for generations are being sent into the jaws of death? In the name of

Narratives from Bastar 199 development their land are being seized and handed over to big corporate houses. We, in Chhattisgarh, want development which does not include murdering adivasi people and snatching their land and livelihood. We want development where people stay alive, not get killed, incarcerated, and raped while the government and corporate houses accumulate wealth. In the name of development, the Chhattisgarh government is labelling adivasi people who own land as Naxalites, and then incarcerating them so that their land can be easily seized. If the government wants land, let there be meetings where the Gram Sabha is involved, and a consensus built amongst people regarding sale of land to industrialists and the government. There is an Act that protects sale of adivasi land to corporate houses, and yet, no one refers to it, least of all the government. This naked display of power by the government is a reflection of their disdain for democracy. The government is labelling this struggle of the adivasi people as anti-development, and yet, they cannot explain to us, what is development? What will the indigenous community of Chhattisgarh get out of this kind of development? The government claims that Chhattisgarh is burning because of the Naxals, and we are saying Chhattisgarh is burning because the government is murdering adivasis. The government is trying to get rid of the local inhabitants so that they can appropriate land, because as long as the adivasis are alive, they will not give up their land. They have given up land before, for industry, and were cheated. They did not get any jobs, all the jobs were given to people from outside the state. They were made to sign over their land for amounts lesser than was promised, and in addition, they were not given employment. The Bailadila Hill belonging to the adivasi people was willingly given for iron ore mining, but where is the development? There is electricity only for the factory, and not for the villages nearby – no schools, roads, hospitals, or streetlights. All they want is to take our minerals and resources, and invest them elsewhere. Even the water is contaminated with the industrial waste from the factory. The red water that is discharged has destroyed the soil, and animals and livestock are sick and are dying. They are draining our wealth away, the adivasi wealth. We have learnt our lesson. We all know what happens when we give away land to big corporates. Before, we were ruled by the British, then the Congress, and now the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). None of them have done anything for our welfare or development. Thus, we have decided that our slogan shall be ‘Jal-Jangal-Zameen’ (water-forest-land). We have realized from our past experiences of ‘development projects,’ that if we give away what belongs to us, then we will be wiped out. Tell me some more about the slogan ‘Jal-Jangal-Zameen’? Can you tell me about your struggle, your fight a little more?

200  Panchali Ray We live in an agrarian society. We are dependent on land, forest, water for our livelihood. In the name of development, the government is grabbing our land, destroying fertile soil, killing and looting people. How can this be called development? If you want development, help farmers increase their produce, give them technology so that they can develop their land. Not kill them, grab their land, and hand it over to corporates. Land is being handed over to corporate houses that do not generate or generate unviable employment, with no security, and less than minimum wages. Farmers believe that land supports many generations, but cash compensation for land will be spent in one generation. Soil, if nurtured, lasts for many generations. The government gives chemical manure at subsidized rates in the name of development to farmers, and this manure destroys the fertility of soil after the first flush of crops. So farmers refuse to use the manure, and then the government claims that farmers are uneducated and primitive, as they refuse to take advantage of technology. It is a government ploy to destroy fertile land so that farmers, disheartened by crop failure, will hand over the land in lieu of minimum compensation. The government thinks that famers and adivasis are foolish; they are not foolish, they understand land. After 2014, with the BJP government at the Centre, the struggle has intensified. Three more Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) have been signed with corporate houses, and the atrocities have intensified. More and more adivasis are being killed and incarcerated. Today, I feel sorry for those who were part of the Salwda Judum. After it was disbanded, they completely abandoned the people they had recruited. They have not been given any employment, and their children have not been offered any educational subsidies. If the Supreme Court had not disbanded the Salwda Judum, we would all have been dead by now, because they were given unlimited power. But, today, look at what has happened to those who were formerly in the Salwda Judum. Turned against their own people, abandoned by the state, they live in misery. As long as they were with the state, they were supported, when they returned to the villages saying they have had enough, they started being persecuted. A new kind of Salwda Judum is being created now. They are picking up villagers, forcing them to confess to being Naxalites, and in return they are offered arms. The police lie to the villagers, saying there are arrest warrants issued in their names, and threaten them with imprisonment. They make them sign papers, dress them up in battle fatigues, click photographs, and call them surrendered Naxalites. They are arming these poor men, and trying to create a second Salwda Judum. We have started a campaign against this new project. As many who left the Salwda Judum are refusing to take up guns again, the government is recruiting new people to do the dirty work for them – so poor villagers misled and forced to ‘surrender’ are armed to lead the attack against their own communities. And this government is called a nationalist government.

Narratives from Bastar 201 How do you understand the recent assertions of nationalism in the public discourse? There are people who feel that you are ‘anti-nationalist’ because you are opposing ‘development.’ How do you respond to such labels? I do not understand these big words. I do not understand who the government calls nationalist and who, anti-nationalists. Take for example, the members of Salwa Judum – they are celebrated by the government as nationalists. Some of them are criminals; they have murdered people in cold blood, so how are they nationalists? The young men who are given a gun and told to shoot villagers, plunder homes, burn villages are called nationalists; and those who are fighting for social justice, class and caste equality, for humanity are being called anti-nationalists. When I try to speak for innocent women who are raped and murdered by security forces, I am labelled as anti-nationalist. Who is Bharat Mata? Kanhaiya Kumar, the Jawaharlal Nehru University student who has been arrested for supposedly shouting anti-nationalist slogans, asked how he can accept the figure of ‘Bharat Mata’ when his mother is not included in this image. In the name of nationalism, you are murdering and raping our women, then how can we look at the nation as a mother. It means that our women – the adivasi women – are not represented by this image of ‘Bharat Mata.’ Otherwise, how can you say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ (long live the Indian motherland) and then rape women with impunity? What is this contradiction – we have to say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and then sit back and watch women being raped by those who are supposed to preserve the nation? In all movements, we have seen that women are specifically targeted for sexual violence. What is your opinion? Let me narrate an incident. Two girls were detained in the marketplace, and then taken to police custody. They started shouting ‘Someone please inform Soni Sori!’ The police took them in custody illegally, but they knew that word had reached me. We had already started building a campaign on WhatsApp and the internet, and they did not hurt the girls; instead, they were released within a day. They told me later, that they were slapped a few times, and asked to confess that they were Naxalites. They said ‘We pleaded with them that we do not want the same fate as Hidme. We said, if you want to kill us, use the bullet, but do not do what you did to Hidme.’ Hidme was a woman from the village, who was picked up, raped and brutally murdered, and then labelled as a Naxalite. Her nose and ears were cut off, her eyes gouged, breasts mutilated, uterus pulled out. They broke her bones and brutalized her. Rape is a very common weapon used to punish women who will not cooperate with them or do as they say, which is confess to being a Naxalite and surrender. They feel that after facing sexual violence, women overcome with a sense

202  Panchali Ray of shame and loss of honour will commit suicide. Or, when they raid a village next time, the women will hide in the jungles and become easy targets. Most women do not leave homes; the men hide in the forest when they hear that security forces are coming. Women are adamant, they cling to the hearth. If women can be driven to the forest, where they can be easily ‘encountered,’ the claim that she was a Naxalit gets substantiated. They will argue that her very presence in the jungle implied she is a militant. Women do not want to leave their homes because of their children, but if they are repeatedly violated, they will run. How did you cope in jail? How did you deal with the memories of violence/ violations and how did you translate that into a political struggle? After I was sent to prison, the memories of my sexual torture haunted me. I felt so ashamed that I wanted to die, I believed that I should die. The officials in the prison would taunt me, saying that I should hit my head against the wall and kill myself. They would remark that if I had any shame, I would not want to live. I also started believing it: how would I show my face to the world? After everything that has happened to me, how will I live? What would I say to society? I had internalized all the customs and norms that society teaches us regarding shame and honour; I believed in it. I would think what would my family say? What will my relatives say? I would oscillate between despair and the desire for death. There were two girls, also inmates, who I had befriended. They were accused of Naxalism and sexually tortured by the police. When I would cry all the time, contemplating suicide, they asked me what happened. I confided my shame, humiliation, and my desire to die. I told them that I cannot tell my husband the truth, as he would hate me, and rightfully so. They told me of their experience of sexual violations and violence. They opened their clothes and showed me their breasts: their nipples were sliced off and their breasts mutilated. They asked me, what will happen to us? Who will listen to us? Who will fight for us? You are a teacher, you are educated, and you can fight. If you give in to despair, what will happen? I kept thinking that I should do something. I should fight. I was in so much pain, I could not pass urine, and I really believed that I would die soon. But, I wanted to tell someone about everything that has happened to me, so I started writing letters. I wrote to my mentor, Himanshu Kumar, a Human Rights activist who resides in Himachal Pradesh. I managed to smuggle the letter out. He took my letter seriously, initiated legal action which led me to being medically examined in Calcutta and the report confirmed sexual assault. After that a lot of support started pouring in. People wrote me letters and I got the courage to fight back. I realized that I had to do away with shame and fight back. I started talking. My husband reproached me: he told me that people were mocking him, and he was facing tremendous social pressure. He asked me to speak of other

Narratives from Bastar 203 violence but not the ones that were sexual in nature. The police were applying pressure on him to come to a settlement, and he in turn, started pressurizing me to keep quiet, and strike a deal with the police. We would constantly fight and there was really no love left. Finally, I asked for a divorce because I will not stop fighting injustices. I told him, that what has happened to me, has not happened to him. He does not understand my pain. He is only thinking of izzat (honour) and sharam (shame), and I do not believe in either. Why should I be ashamed? I asked him to stop meeting me and file for divorce. Even the police gradually realized that he had no control over me, and thus, gave up on him. When they realized my husband was of no use to them anymore, they beat him till half his body went into paralysis. I appealed to jail authorities and got permission to meet him at the hospital. He was kept in chains, continuously beaten, and not provided food and water. Finally, they released him. The last time I met him, he admitted he was wrong and I was right. He admitted his mistake in believing the authorities. He died soon after. In the same case, where all others (B.K. Lala and Verma) were given bail in three months, my leave application to see my husband, when he was dying, was rejected. I went on a hunger strike and a lot of people mounted pressure on the state government, and yet, I was only given leave for his cremation. I gain a lot of strength from these kinds of injustices. It does not weaken me. My mother fell ill when she heard of my experience in police custody. I did not want to tell her, but other people did. She lay in bed for three to four months and finally passed away. People tell me, that even till the last minute she kept thinking of me and what I had to go through. I have lost everything, and now I have no option but to fight back. How do women who have been sexually violated come together, given that there is so much of stigma and shame associated with sexual violence? People called me a whore, and asked me, why was I still alive? They said, I should commit suicide. They say that I had no shame. The police would point at me on the road and say she is a rand (slang for prostitute). I would look down and walk. But, today, I feel the same society that once called me a ‘whore’ or a ‘bitch’ gives me so much respect, all because I am part of a movement. When we work together we gain strength, respect, and support. In a recent raid in a village, the police pinned down a lactating mother and wrenched her breast for milk. She was very ashamed and did not want to speak about it. So I told her what happened to me in jail, I told her everything. And then I asked her whether she will speak up, fight back, or keep quiet. It makes a lot of difference if people share their experiences of pain and humiliation, as well as how they have moved on: it gives strength. So I told her that I will take her to the collector’s office, call the media for a press conference, but she will have to speak up. I can support her but it is her voice, her experience. She was not only able to

204  Panchali Ray speak, but she put aside all notions of shame, exposed her breast, and demonstrated how the men from the security forces humiliated her by wrenching her lactating breasts. The room went silent, all the men were looking down; they could not look into her eyes. She told them, ‘If I continue to be ashamed, then how will I live? If I give into shame I cannot live here. If I defy shame and fight back, only then will I stay alive.’ She is not an educated woman, but she has given up notions of shame and honour to fight against violence. That is when I feel my personal experience does not weigh me down. It helps me to communicate with other women going through similar experiences to come together as a collective. My case is pending in the Supreme Court, and they are just giving me dates; nothing happens, nothing moves. It will go on even when I die. I have stopped thinking about it. I do not want to look at this movement through the lens of legal justice; whatever will happen in the courts will happen. I rather seek justice by mobilizing women going through similar experiences and fighting back. This battle is bigger than a court battle, and I will gain victory here, today. From the times of Salwda Judum, we are witnessing sexual violence on women on an unprecedented scale. Previously, the villagers would question women detained in police custody, and believe that she is ruined. She would not receive marriage proposals. Basically, there was a lot of stigma associated with being detained, and kept under police custody. If something did happen to her and she shared it with others, she would be ostracized. Now, sexual violence has become common. Today, when I ask some men what do they think about the rampant sexual violence committed on their women kin, they tell me that it is the police and the state that should feel ashamed, and not them, or the women. They feel that because the women are fighting that is why they are safe today. This movement has a lot of women at the forefront. Whenever there is any atrocity and we go to investigate, I always make it a point to talk to women in detail. Society always blames women, particularly those who are part of a movement, and speak openly to the media. They face severe ostracism. But things have changed. We are now a collective. Whenever there is violence, we all go, we stand by each other. Adivasi women have to go through so much. Previously, when the security forces assaulted and raped women, they remained silent; they would not tell their husbands; they felt ashamed; they endured it. If they got pregnant they would talk to each other and undergo self-induced abortion with herbs. Now things have changed, there is a momentum, women have come together, and they are openly speaking about such things. There is no more shame, we have moved beyond that. It has been two years since you have joined Aam Admi Party (AAP). You have a struggle, a movement, and an identity of an adivasi woman

Narratives from Bastar 205 fighting for her community against land grab. The other is your identity as a candidate of a mainstream electorate party. How do you negotiate the tension between your fight against the state and your participation in electorate politics? Both platforms are equally important. When I was released on bail in 2013, I could not come back to Chhattisgarh. I wanted to come back, and though people counselled me against it, I insisted. Everyone was worried. People would call me in Delhi, and say that the administration and the police are laughing, mocking me, and claiming that I have abandoned the fight. They claimed that I would never return and that I had been successfully sent on exile. They boasted that those who fight the state can never come back. My friends, Himanshu Kumar, Colin Gonsalves, and Prashant Bhushan understood my longing for my land. Prashant Bhushan was involved in AAP, and he offered me a party ticket that would also give me a safe route back to Chhattisgarh. He told me that if I joined AAP, I could use the political platform to fight back. They were worried about my security and felt that a political platform would keep me safe. I took some time to think about it, they did not put any pressure on me. Finally I decided to join AAP. I am ideologically aligned with the CPI, but AAP approached me. My journey was uphill. I was already facing tremendous prejudice because I was branded as a Naxalite, over and above, they tried to shame me saying that I have no feminine modesty. They would spread rumours, call me out publicly, question my morality, because, despite being sexually assaulted by a number of men, I was still contesting elections. They would keep talking of sharm and lajja to dissuade, demotivate, and discourage me from entering politics. I lost the elections. But for me participating in the elections was itself a victory. First, I took on a government that had incarcerated me by labelling me as a Naxalite, and second, I could come back to my birthplace. The administration boasted that they had sent me on exile and I would never have the gumption to return to Chhattisgarh. Now, I have got my land back. There were, of course, a lot of problems. Even within the party, many objected to me being given a ticket. They said my politics did not match the party, and I was too busy trying to get justice for adivasi men and women than building and working for the party. They alleged that my struggles, my campaigns, and movements focusing on injustices meted out to my people were tarnishing the party image. I am responsible to both the party and my people. They said that if I am sent to jail because of my fight for my people then it will tarnish the image of a fledgling party. There were members of the party who felt that getting involved with me would also lead the administration to persecute and imprison them. I had to tell the party, that I am an adivasi woman from Bastar, and I reside in this land and in people’s hearts. If you say that my involvement or raising certain issues is tarnishing the party’s image, then I will leave the party,

206  Panchali Ray but I cannot betray my people. I came back to Chhattisgarh for the people of Bastar, and not for electoral politics. This reached Arvind Kejriwal and he came out in support of me. He understood my ideology and my politics, and his support was crucial in turning things around and now the party supports me. I tread very carefully. There are so many issues that I do not politicize because I need to bring different forces together. For example, Hidme’s rape and brutal murder. If I make justice for Hidme an AAP agenda, I will not get members and friends of Congress and the CPI, who are otherwise vocal, to join me. I cannot let such kinds of divisions break the adivasi fight for justice. Justice for Hidme’s rape and murder is a fight that all of Bastar, as well as the country should come together for. If I make it a party issue, I narrow down the possibilities. For the first time, Bastar shut down for Hidme; people were surprised. It had never happened before. This is what I want: alliances built across social and political hues. Politics should not divide people. Political parties come to an area, pick an issue, get some mileage, and leave. It is all over. The media will cover it for a few days, when the party leaders are around, and then leave. The victim is forgotten. If there is no political party and it is an autonomous people’s struggle, where people from different political ideologies participate, there can be some change. So I try and keep my AAP affiliation and my fight for my people on two different registers. The condition of Bastar cannot be solved by electoral politics. It is a social and political struggle. I try and keep a balance. AAP has given me a platform, when I had none, and I respect it. I am an adivasi woman who has been physically and sexually assaulted for opposing land grab by corporates. This is my fight, as much as it is a fight for my people. Both party and the people’s struggles are to be kept separate but both are equally important. What has been the effect of your struggle on your family, your three children? My children had to face a lot of trouble. When I was incarcerated, they faced tremendous prejudice and stigma. The administration threatened my parents and my children. They intimidated my father in an attempt to stop me from speaking out, saying he would be socially ostracized and his land taken away. When my children came to visit me they would talk of the food they did not get, or how there were no pickles in the house, because I was no longer there. They would complain that they do not get the quality of food they were accustomed to. When my daughter got older, her menstrual cycle started, and she accused me of not informing her beforehand. When I went to jail, she was a small girl, and I thought as she gets older, I will inform her. How was I to know that I would go to jail and not be by my daughter’s side? When her menstruation started, she was scared and confused. She was living in a hostel. She kept accusing me that she was humiliated because she was not well informed. My son was also resentful, that his parents were not around, no one visited him in the hostel or brought him goodies, like his other classmates. He would

Narratives from Bastar 207 cry. My children went through a lot and harboured a lot of resentments. When I was let out on bail, I tried to make it up. But today my children are very strong. When I could not provide proper food, and there was nothing but boiled rice to eat, I felt very guilty. Despite my release, my children continue to suffer, as I am not able to provide for them. I got many offers from the police; IGP Kalluri himself reached out to me to arrive at a compromise. The Chief Minister’s office also approached me to arrive at a settlement, which included immediate dismissal of the cases. They promised to reinstate me in my previous job, give me financial support, housing, help for the children, etc. And in return, my complete silence. Watching my children and my inability to provide for them, sometimes made me rethink. I sat down and spoke to my children, asked their opinion about the government’s offer. They insisted that I should not compromise with the government and I should continue my struggle. When I reminded them that we do not get two square meals a day, and all our problems would be solved if we accepted the administration’s offer, they refused. They argued that they had become used to a sparse life, and reminded me of how so many people have put their trust in me, and I could not go back on my word. They are paranoid that I will give into cynicism and reach a compromise with the government. When I was attacked with chemicals, I went through tremendous pain. You cannot imagine the pain, the agony of burnt skin, but more painful were the threats that they will attack my daughter, if I do not withdraw. They threw pamphlets in my house threatening me and my children. Lying in the hospital bed, I would think of my daughter and how she will never be able to bear this kind of pain. Can you imagine my state of mind? When I returned home, I confided in my children about my fear and anxiety. My 16-year-old daughter, Muskaan, insisted that we are not cowards, and said that she was ready to face whatever came her way. She goes to the market, and sometimes to the neighbouring district alone, and I fret. I am scared, she is not. She is aware that she can get hurt, even raped or killed, but refuses to bow down. My son is 13 and my youngest daughter is 11 years old. My youngest daughter is even more courageous. She goes to school alone and refuses any chaperoning. My children have only one complaint, they say, ‘When you are at home, be like a mother. When you leave the home you are a leader. When you are campaigning and do not come home for two to three days, we will not call and disturb you.’ The duality between being a mother and a leader really disturbs my everyday routine at home. So when I am at home, I try to normalize everything, maintain a regular household, and try and not bring campaigns home. It is not possible but I try. What is the biggest impediment to your struggle today? They keep calling me a Naxalite and this label works against me. Every time I say something, raise an issue, they delegitimize me as a Naxalite. This is

208  Panchali Ray their biggest weapon – labelling someone as a Naxalite. It delegitimizes dissenting voices that question lopsided growth and development.

Note 1  For more details, see https://sonisori.wordpress.com/ accessed March 4, 2019, which has both text and video clippings with Soni’s interviews describing her work, the manner in which she was persecuted, the custodial and sexual torture inflicted upon her, and her continuing fight for justice.

13 Living in Curfewland Kashmir 2016 Natasha Rather

There is a comfortable silence around, the sun shines bright, the sky is a brilliant blue, a cool light breeze touches my cheek, ruffles my hair. I can see mountains not very far away flecked with the last specks of snow from the winter bygone, a brook burbles as it flows downhill. It’s a beautiful summer. I am thinking of how it is the best time to be in Kashmir and the worst. As a routine of my afternoons these days, I fall asleep after sometime of contemplating about our lives in Kashmir. I feel at peace after a very long time, like someone lulled to sleep after days of agony. This reverie of mine is broken by incensed voices coming in from the nearby mosques. I distinguish the words Burhan and azadi. Lately, these sounds have been reverberating in the entire valley, more so in the outskirts of the city. My eyes start watering and my throat becomes dry. Close by protesting parties are being shelled with tear gas. I continue thinking of all the days that I have lived under a curfew. This year, the curfew began on the morning following the eve of July 8, 2016, when the valley was still abuzz with the festivities of Eid-ul-Fitr, after a sweltering month of Ramzan. The news of the killing of Burhan Wani came in. Festivity was to be short-lived this time as well. Burhan, the young commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen was killed along with two of his close aides in a remote village in the Southern District of Anantnag. In the Indian jingoistic circles he was known as the ‘poster boy of Kashmiri militancy,’ someone who was setting new trends as the non-conformist, techsavvy, modern age rebel. He was known for his rather handsome, chocolate boy looks. The Indian Army had ‘neutralized’ him, as they like to call it, and were greatly lauded for it. He kept the armed forces on their toes and gave them sleepless nights as he moved about in the impenetrable jungles of South Kashmir. One of his most dangerous acts was inspiring hundreds to join the militant ranks of freedom fighters. His ‘extermination’ in an ‘encounter’ was a great feat for the Indian Army. This was not the first time a militant and his aides had been killed and this would certainly not be the last. Everyone expected Burhan to meet his end in this way. A fighter knows his greatest achievement would be to die a martyr. But perhaps no one expected this to happen so soon. The reaction to this sad news was people gathering outside their homes to mourn and grieve.

210  Natasha Rather He was, after all, the hero of thousands of people in Kashmir, their hope incarnate, their greatest freedom fighter in a long time. Burhan’s killing was only a reminder of years of oppression and the limitless power of the Indian State. This was a reminder of the countless atrocities, shameless deceit and mendacity by the world’s so called ‘greatest democracy.’ Lakhs of people attended the funeral of Burhan and thousands organized funeral processions in absentia. Many such processions were faced with violence. The first one to be killed in this summer was a young boy from Kulgam, on the next day after Burhan’s killing. He and many others were killed because they were grieving. We, Kashmiris, did not know that an undeclared curfew had been imposed on mourning. But we went on resisting this imposition. And when our collective grief turned into fury, we did not mourn any longer. Instead, we called for justice. There is only one meaning of justice for the countless men and women that gave up their lives and let everything in their universe be toppled forever. That justice is freedom. In our enragement, we celebrated those who died and continue to celebrate. They were our martyrs. We sing praises for them, for their courage and sacrifice. They are the makers of our history, with their names embellished forever in the history of which we shall be the authors. There has been a curfew on celebrating the dead since then. They say we weren’t allowed to eulogize the ‘miscreants.’ We read it as martyrs. There has been a curfew on dissent. Our occupier is in a state of frenzy. There is panic. The regime seems to be losing its ground. And bullets are fired yet again – rounds after rounds of them on the masses that dare to break the curfew. They say they were trying to protect themselves from ‘murderous mobs, pelting stones.’ We find it preposterous and we say it. They try and reason with us. There is a war of words and they impose a curfew on speaking. Those who were not fired upon with bullets were fired upon by pellets. Many got injured and are still lying in the hospitals. But their resolve to resist is not injured a bit. Pellets have blinded hundred of young men and women. They lie in hospitals upon blood-soaked sheets, their eyes covered with bandages. The occupier aimed to blind. There is a curfew on their vision for a free Kashmir but the dream lives on, despite all restrictions and it is growing bigger. In times of curfew, counting becomes our prime engagement. We count years, months, weeks, and days of oppression starting from where our memory takes us. We count the number of dead, the disappeared, the half widowed, the buried in unmarked graves, and the number of olive-coloured boots stomping our land. We count the innumerable dreams that were shattered, the words left unsaid, and the promises left unfulfilled. We go on counting. We count the ounces of blood spilled on the roads this time and compare it to the last, the number of days of curfew and the types, the number of blind, the maimed and the injured. We are still counting. As I write

Living in Curfewland 211 this, one hundred days have passed, a hundred people have died, over five hundred are blinded and more than 15 thousand are injured. As long as I can remember, stretching from the period of my birth to growing up in the turbulent 1990s, I have lived in a state of perpetual curfew. A curfew is imposed at any time to control our ‘unruly people’ and to restore law and order. Law and order are maintained by those who are far above it. Curfew is a hackneyed term used in context of Kashmir, but what else can one think of when your life is totally delimited and your thoughts, words, actions, desires, and feelings are all confined and guided to suit your persecutor. These restrictions are inescapable and you get accustomed to them. I cannot remember a time when there has not been a curfew, whether imposed by the state or one that people have imposed upon themselves, shameful to accept it and thus calling it adjustment to the needs of survival of the powerless in a tyrannical regime. We are an oppressed people and the oppressor occupies us not only in the physical and perceptible sense of the term. The occupation manifests itself in imperceptible ways – in ways in which it occupies our mind. So on the surface, everything may seem well but deep down the occupation is constantly corroding our minds, carving a space for itself. We are helpless and we let our tormentor control us in every way. We put a curfew on the inflated sense of pride that is innate in every Kashmiri. It is a difficult one to impose but we do it, each time our hands are up while we are being frisked, letting our belongings being searched, producing identity proofs, allowing the questioning of motives behind carrying out our mundane tasks. When you live in a place like Kashmir, your life gets shaped by several self-imposed curfews and restrictions, more so if you are a woman. When I was growing up in Kashmir, I seldom went out alone, never after dark; I never walked through a street that met with a bunker. I never spoke or thought of the blood I saw spilled on the streets, never acknowledged that something was amiss in the scheme of things. I put a curfew on questioning what was happening. I consciously taught myself to be diffident and come across as defenceless. I effortlessly slipped into becoming vulnerable and turned it into my forte because somehow I was convinced that my vulnerability would protect me; that the oppressor would take pity on me and spare me the torment. I stuck to this notion like a child who believes in tooth fairy. My demon would be my confidence. So I never looked at an army wala in the eye and I walked with my head down, almost with a sense of shame and regret at being a girl. But that never seemed to help. There was always this intimidating figure in a uniform that winked or whistled at me or made lecherous remarks about me. I put a curfew on responding to him. I put a curfew on having respect for myself as a woman. I swallowed my pride as I was afraid. I reminded myself of the sense of shame at knowing that I had the genitals that I did. It was where the dignity and honour of every person and thing

212  Natasha Rather associated with me, rested and I was obliged to protect it. I was afraid that I’d lose my honour and if that would happen, it would be my mistake and that I would have failed to protect myself. Once on a beautiful autumn morning, when the city was still asleep in the month of Ramzan, I was walking myself to my college. I saw a man in olive uniform walking towards me. His personality was disconcerting. But I had my personal guards to protect me. Eyes downcast, head low. Slouch a little for that extra protection. I came closer to the army wala and I slouched more. Show no semblance of confidence, I said to myself. But it did not seem to work. The army wala had groped me. I froze. I saw the Ghanta Ghar moving about in circles, ready to come crashing down on me. How I wished it came crashing down on me! I can still feel his muscular arms around myself. A few God sent men came walking that way and he let me go. It was rather an inconsequential event and women have been through much worse under this regime. But I was in a state of shock for the next one week not because I had been groped but because my ideas of self-protection had failed me. I was overcome with regret at not having responded when I had the chance. I realized that the oppressor will enter into every realm of your life without hesitation. I had let my tormentor grow bigger and nothing could protect me. That was it. Being timid hadn’t helped. I had to try if being fearless would. I wasn’t ready to let the worse happen to me and I had to do my bit to stop it. So what would it be? Would it be a stone, a pen, or refusal to show that I was scared? I had to plan my retaliation, whatever its nature would be. I did. Today, amid all this mayhem and blood spilling, when someone asks me what it is like to be a woman under a military occupation in a problematic political environment, I say it is the same as being a man. I fail to see how my gender makes any difference, at least, not to the occupier. I am not my gender, but another intractable problem that needs to be dealt with. So if they rape a woman as means to instil fear and shame, they sodomize the men to the same effect. Every act of the oppressor is a reminder of the inconsequentiality of your existence in face of the bigger aim to control, regardless of what your gender is. So I take a stone in my hand, I invoke the god to save my land, I shout azadi, I take bullets into my bosom, I wipe my tears as my brother, my son and my lover sacrifices his life for a cause that is greater than any other. I look at the man wearing the camouflaged uniform in the eye and I tell him this is my land and he has no right to be here. I am no longer confined to my home. I resist this occupation like anyone else. If something reminds me of the supposed inherent weakness associated with me having the genitals that I have, the occupation reminds me that I can no longer let myself be a victim of my own physiognomy. Whether you are a man or a woman, there is a bullet waiting for you somewhere, a pellet perhaps to blind you, to maim you and to disfigure you for the rest of your days. The occupier sees everyone through with the same prism. You are the enemy. You are unruly. You need to be shown your

Living in Curfewland 213 place; you need to be occupied to the last of your senses. They want to make you grateful for the occupation that supposedly protects you from your own misguided and deluded self. If you turn rebellious and hurl a stone, there is the bullet to kill or the pellet to blind, as is the new trend. They tell you that stones are used to murder the protectors. Bullets are used as a defence against stones while ‘exercising maximum restraint’ and excessive and unquestionable power. If you dare to dream and dare to resist with concrete reasons and facts and expose their blatant lies, you become threat to public safety. Being a woman is the same as being the man. Your life is full of peril. You are both insignificant, destined to suffer to the same unfathomable extent, in different ways. It should not be hard to imagine how difficult it is to live under continuous siege and how easy it would be to allow yourself to give in. Curfew is a pressure tactic of the government to break the people, to slacken their resolve, to tire them of their efforts, to make them feel hopeless and dejected. They do this to make people drown in the realization that the dream of azadi is illusory. You are just an insignificant player who is caught in the middle of this blistering political battleground, where everyone but a Kashmiri shall have a say. But no matter how much suffering it may cause, the right to selfdetermination and azadi can never be snatched from a Kashmiri. Freedom is fundamental to the existence of every person who is born in this world and more so a Kashmiri. Resistance is our only real inheritance. A Kashmiri is not the bird that falls in love with its own cage and finds it impossible to break away.

14 Coal mining and ecological fragility Questioning development, questioning growth Priya Pillai It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. – Robert F. Kennedy1

It is interesting to trace how a campaign in support of a forest community opposing a coal mine, saving livelihoods, land, water, and forests against the economic interests of an Indian Corporation registered on foreign land, resulted in being branded an ‘anti-national.’ That is the cost of going against big business and of daring to question the government’s singular vision of development. In an era of crackdown on critical thinking, we are now at pains to prove how Indian we are – where patriotism too is put on public trial and many of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution including the right to speak truth to power, to speak up on behalf of communities under threat and the right to challenge ‘development’ – stand summarily revoked. Nationalism today is principally a religious assertion and unbridled pursuit of growth where there is no place to raise issues relating to justice, equity, equality, human rights, or environmental violations. The use of state power to crush all forms of dissent is rampant across board and dissent on environment and human rights is challenged using narrow nationalistic public discourses. However, apart from the general shrinking democratic space and aggressive and intimidating atmosphere in the country, which in turn reduces the space for environmental activists to raise pertinent questions relating to land, water, forests, development, environment, growth based economy, etc., we have recently seen the government actively and deliberately dismantling the environment regulatory framework to benefit the corporates. The government constituted the TSR Subramanium Committee in August 2014 and tasked it with reviewing six important environmental statutes that constituted the backbone of the regulatory framework.

Coal mining and ecological fragility 215 The committee’s recommendations clearly paved way for the dilution of the existing framework in order to facilitate corporate takeover of resources. Despite the Standing Committee scrapping the report the government has gone ahead and appointed a firm to see how the recommendations can be implemented.2 The strong nexus between the corporate world and the government is evident in the way the environmental regulations are being flouted to grant clearances.3 And any opposition to these moves is seen as a clear threat to the ‘economic security’ of the country. The way the government has been handling issues relating to economic security has been one where activists, organizations, and movements have been charged with false cases, sometimes even sedition,4 branded anti-nationals and put through a media trial. The media trail often ensures polarization of the citizens and creates an atmosphere where ultra-nationalism thrives and this helps in establishing a public narrative in favour of the government in which facts and rationale have little or no place. One has seen the emergence of media discourses that drive the public discourse which offer popular narratives to the linear stories that fit perfectly to help build an opinion in favour of the visions of growth and development that is corporate led and against environmentalists who have been advocating for a different kind of development. As put by Mohan J Dutt in ‘Creating the other – Media and Authoritarian regimes,’ buzzwords such as nationalism, development, and growth can be deployed creatively to mark the ‘other’ that stands in the way of the state and therefore must be silenced. Indigenous communities in eastern India resisting the occupation of their homes through state-sponsored privatized mining projects must be marked as ‘Maoist’ so development can be carried out. Minorities must be marked as ‘terrorist’ so an image of a homogeneous nation state can be propped up. Environmental activists must be marked as ‘foreign influence’ so unmitigated industrialization can be carried out. Universities must be marked as ‘anti-national’ so critical thoughts and conversations can be silenced in order to make way for the hegemony of the state inscribed on pedagogy.5

The Mahan story The Mahan story began on April 12, 2006 when the Union Ministry of Coal allocated the Mahan Coal Block in Singrauli district of Madhya Pradesh to a joint venture of Essar and Hindalco Ltd. The Forest Advisory Committee then considered the proposal four times and could not make a conclusive decision on the matter given the complexity of the issues involved.6 The proposed coal mine would have led to the loss of approximately 5 lakh trees, affected the livelihoods of over 50,000 people in 54 villages, displaced forest dwelling community, destroyed and fragmented good quality natural forests with rich biodiversity, and destroyed the catchment area of perennial

216  Priya Pillai rivers which provided water to the entire region. Besides these, there were blatant violations of the Forest Rights Act7 and other mandatory regulations.8 Clearing this coal block would also open doors for allowing other coal blocks in the region to be mined. The Coal Allocation scam (Coalgate) and the 2G Spectrum scam are just two recent examples of the government nexus with corporates aimed at promoting corporate interests. Mahan Coal Ltd. was allocated to Essar and Hindalco as part of Coalgate and this thread of corruption can be seen not only in allocations but right up to the grassroots where the local administration, police, and corporates work in a coordinated manner to facilitate land grab and intimidate communities. Essar is a multinational company that has a registered office in London’s Berkeley Square, a registered head office in Mauritius, with corporate offices in Bombay, Doha, New York and Mozambique, to name a few. Until early 2014, Essar was listed on the London Stock Exchange. As a company registered under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, Essar was playing fast and loose with Indian laws in Mahan. It threatened and intimidated the local activists, got them jailed on false charges, committed forgery, illegally used the state power to crush the opposition to the proposed mine in the past, and refused to comply by the provisions under the Forest Rights Act of India. Despite all this, Mr. Veerappa Moily, the Minister of Environment and Forests, went on to grant Stage II clearance to the Mahan Coal Block9 in February 2014. Both the State as well as the Central Government bent all rules to suit corporate interests.10 Battling threats, criminal intimidations, illegal arrests, character assassinations, midnight police raids, false cases, and SLAPP suits, the ground movement came a long way. The relentless protests over a period of five years by Mahan Sangarsh Samiti11 and Greenpeace India saw the coal mine finally being de-allocated by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in March 2015. Mahan is a perfect example of the growing opposition from communities against our growth-oriented economic system, accompanied by the increasing corporate government nexus and corruption, which puts profits above people. Our relentless pursuit for higher GDP based growth continues to dominate policy making, while ground realities make it clear that more GDP does not mean better lives for most people. The lives, dignity, and livelihoods of the vast majority of our country (farmers, fishers, forest dwelling communities, and others) is intricately entwined with nature and natural resources (forests, water, and land) and the current corporate investment based growth model clearly creates conflicts and violations (both environmental and social) and is based on the exploitation of natural resources in predominantly climate-sensitive sectors.

Growth vs. environment The Growth vs. Environment debate in India is not a ‘lifestyle environmental debate,’ instead, it’s a larger political debate interconnected with

Coal mining and ecological fragility 217 livelihoods, land distribution, caste, gender, resource grab, poverty, water scarcity, and equality amongst others. Inherently, environmental justice is intricately woven with cultural, economic, social, and spiritual justice and in that sense when seen holistically one has to challenge the economic growthbased paradigm, which paves for gross environmental and human rights violations. India is the second fastest growing economy in the world, and its hunger for energy to power this growth is enormous. The twelfth Plan period, which runs from 2012 to 2017, sets a national target of 100,000 MW installed generating capacity.12 This is double the target of the eleventh Plan and aims to add as much energy in five years as the country has since Independence. Coal is seen as the mainstay of this energy juggernaut. Such excessive reliance on coal is fast becoming unsustainable and the biggest challenges the country and the government face today is to cater for growing energy needs without compromising social and environmental justice. There are alternative energy solutions to coal, which will allow India’s last remaining forests and the communities and tribal populations living around them to be preserved and protected. In light of this, the debate around forests and coal mining essentially becomes one of ‘growth at any cost’ vs. ‘sustainable development.’ There are alternative energy solutions to coal, which will allow India’s last remaining forests and the communities and tribal populations living around them to be preserved and protected. We are waking up to the fact that India does not need much more coal power in the foreseeable future, as renewables ramp up generation.13 It is a sad irony that regions that are rich in natural and mineral resources are often so poor in human rights, suffering long histories of exploitation, deprivation, and development-induced displacement of local communities for others’ access to those minerals. Singrauli is no exception. The lack of basic facilities in the villages in the region is striking. Health centres, functioning schools, clean water facilities, and even electricity are absent. This is the paradox that is Singrauli: the energy capital of the country14 that lights up cities and powers our industries but has left the people who forfeited their land for the greater ‘public good’ with precious little.15 As per the International Accountability Project, the region has seen the systematic appropriation of prime agricultural land, firstly for a reservoir and dam (the Rihand Dam was constructed in 1961), and subsequently for coal mines, coal-fired power plants, coal slurry disposal areas, railroad lines and other infrastructure, and eucalyptus ‘forest offset’ plantations.16 In January 2010, Singrauli was one of the areas where the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) imposed a temporary moratorium on mining, whereby no new projects would be considered for environmental clearance, a requirement prescribed by the Environment Impact Assessment Notification of 2006. The moratorium was the result of the region being one of the areas identified as critically polluted by the Central Pollution Control Board and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in the Comprehensive Environmental Assessment of Industrial Clusters prepared for the MoEF. As part of this

218  Priya Pillai exercise, 88 industrial clusters including Singrauli were assessed with the aim of identifying polluted industrial areas and prioritizing the needs for intervention, with the larger purpose of improving the environment. Singrauli had a Critical Environment Pollution Index of 81.73, making it a critically polluted area as per the parameters of the report.17 Resettlement literature is full of case studies demonstrating how industrial- and infrastructure-related projects (dubbed as development) ignore the customary rights of the tribal and forest-dwelling communities and treat them as encroachers.18 Then, there is the most important question about whose development and at what cost? Is this mindless growth-oriented approach actually leading to development of communities on the ground? Is the current development model, based on increased investment and large-scale destruction of environment, natural resources as well as violation of human rights the one we want to pursue? Can we say that a system based on maximum profits for corporates against communities being displaced and livelihoods and resources being snatched away is an equitable and just system? How can a system that does not question caste, gender, class, etc. be just and equitable?

Shoot the messenger? When important questions relating to sustainable development, equality, human rights violations, corporate control of resources, government corporate nexus are raised by activists and concerned citizens the state brands them a threat to the ‘economic security of the country.’ The security narrative is often used as a basis for a crackdown on civil liberties in a generalized atmosphere of shrinking democratic space. In every region where women are taking a stand in favour of protecting their rights and natural resources they are being attacked and threatened with sexual assaults. Women are being sexually assaulted in land acquisition procedures, manhandled by policemen violating all norms, and legally laid down processes during forced evictions, jailed by charging them in false cases, molested, raped, and abused. The recent incidents in Hazaribagh in Jharkhand or in Raigarh in Chattisgarh stand testimony to the injustice meted out to women-led environmental movements in the country. In Hazaribagh, where there was a police crackdown on a women-led fight against a NTPC coal mine let to police firing and killing of four people. The womenled dharna site was attacked by the police early in the morning at 5:30 and they were not accompanied by women constables. Policemen snatched away clothes of community members and beat them up in their houses in the most inhuman manner possible. There are a large number of cases in Chattisgarh where women who have opposed land acquisition for mining projects are languishing in jails with no chance for a fair trial and when anybody including lawyers and journalists come forward in solidarity, they are subject to the same form of torture.19 A woman community member who refused to give away her land to a proposed Jindal developmental project in Raigarh

Coal mining and ecological fragility 219 district, was gang raped and threatened and she continues her fight to get an FIR filed against the accused. It was not a coincidence that the community opposition to the proposed coal mine in Mahan, Singrauli was led by the women in the forest villages. The women led opposition on the ground was meted out with violence, intimidation, and threats. When women moved in to peacefully stop the numbering of tress in Mahan, the forests officials along with company officials and agents tried to manhandle them. They were constantly threatened and abused (with sexual innuendos) by authorities with questions being raised about their character. The company agents morphed photographs of women in bikini and threatened to publish it in the local newspapers. When these threats did not work, they went around showing those photographs to community members using laptops calling us ‘Mayamohini.’ The local MLA threatened an all women team working in Mahan and challenged men to rape us. Every time we approached the police with complaints and evidence in the form of newspaper clippings and phone recordings, we were sent back empty-handed and had false cases charged on us instead. One has seen how the corporates have used the state machinery to maliciously put pressure on activists and curb dissent – through Strategic Litigations Against Public Participation (SLAPP Suits). In March 2014 Essar filed a criminal defamation complaint before the Chief Judicial Magistrate in Singrauli, accusing Kumi Naidoo, Samit Aich and me of allegedly ‘instigating a public gathering’ and publishing hostile articles and blogs against Essar. In October 2014 the CJM dismissed the complaint for failure to demonstrate a prima facie case. Essar moved the Sessions Court to review the CJM’s decision and, in April 2015, the Sessions Court overruled the CJM, ordering him to issue the summons. There are other false criminal cases that have been charged against many of us in Singrauli and Mumbai. Should corporations be allowed to use their economic clout to pursue private vendettas against civil society watchdogs or to bully private individuals by accessing the State’s power to impose severe criminal sanctions using the criminal justice system? Should corporations be allowed to escape exposure for malfeasance and shelter behind the express or implied threat of loss of liberty to watchdogs? It is clear that using criminal defamation against dissenting individuals violates the public interest in an open and democratic society committed to fundamental freedoms of association and expression. I too have been branded anti-national, a conspirator, a paid mercenary, a mole, and a ‘doodh mein makhi’ when I was unceremoniously and illegally offloaded from a flight to UK where I was going to speak about the environmental and human rights violations of Indian laws by a multinational company registered in London. The government put me on a watch list and under surveillance, which was a clear violation of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Having decided to challenge the illegal action by the government in the Delhi High Court, I was put on a trial not only within the legal framework of the country but also by pro-government

220  Priya Pillai media channels who branded me anti-national. The social media trolls and their attacks joined hands to strengthen the national rhetoric. The government’s ‘offer’ to me in the court was this: I can have my right to freedom of movement back, if I give up my right to free speech and not talk about environmental violations and human rights abuses. Naturally I refused this offer. Does the government really think a proud Indian would happily pack her bags, travel to the airport, present her passport, check-in her luggage then check-in her constitutional rights as the price of being allowed to fly? It is immaterial if you have won the legal case and established yourself as not working against the ‘national economic security’ of the country; instead what you were doing is exercising the rights guaranteed under the Constitution of this country to advocate for the rights of fellow citizens whose rights are being violated. The popular narrative of anti-nationalism has been established in the minds and imagination of the people of this country. It is this battle of ‘public narrative and perception on anti-nationalism’ that is being pushed by the ultra-nationalists, which is most dangerous and needs to be countered.

Notes 1 Kennedy, R. F. www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/unicape.php (accessed 08.04.2019). 2 Ghanekar, N. M. “Government hires top firms to implement TSR Subramaniam report on environmental laws.” https://www.dnaindia.com/india/ report-­government-hires-top-firms-to-implement-tsr-subramanian-report-onenvironmental-laws-2124979 (accessed 04.06.2019). 3 Bharee, M. “Indian Billionaire Gautam Modi finds a Savior in Modi government.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree/2014/07/17/adani-finds-asavior-in-the-modi-govt/#15357583639f (accessed 04.06.2019). 4 Janardhanan, A. “8856 ‘enemies of state’: An Entire village in Tamil Nadu lives under shadow of sedition.” https://indianexpress.com/article/india/indianews-india/kudankulam-nuclear-plant-protest-sedition-supreme-court-of-indiasection-124a-3024655/ (accessed on 04.06.2019). 5 Dutt, M. J. “Creating the ‘Other’-Media and Authoritarian Regimes.” https:// www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/7023/Creating-The-OtherMedia-And-Authoritarian-Regimes (accessed on 04.06.2019). 6 The observations made by the Forest Advisory Committee in its meeting minutes, www.moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/Mahan.pdf (accessed 04.03.2019). 7 The consent of the Gramsabha is mandatory for forest land diversion for nonforest use. In the case of the Mahan Coal Mine, the consent was illegally forged and the No objection Certificate for mining was granted based on the forged document. Chakravartty, A. “Deo slams MP government for denying forest rights to tribals in Mahan.” https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/deo-slamsmp-government-for-denying-forest-rightsto-tribals-in-mahan-41702 (accessed 04.06.2019). 8 Singrauli is among the ten most polluted Industrial clusters in the country according to the CEPI index. http://cpcbenvis.nic.in/industrial_pollution.html# accessed on March 4, 2019.

Coal mining and ecological fragility 221 9 Singh, P. V. “Government grants Stage II clearance to Mahan.” www.govern ancenow.com/news/regular-story/government-grants-stage-ii-clearance-mahan (accessed June 4, 2019). 10 Chakravartty, “Mahan at all costs” www.downtoearth.org.in/news/mahan-atall-costs-34230 accessed on June 4, 2019. 11 Community in and around the Mahan forests affected by the proposed Mahan Coal mine organized into a ground movement opposing the mine calling themselves Mahan Sangarsh Samiti. 12 Presentation by Planning Commission dated April 21, 2011. http://planning commission.nic.in/plans/planrel/12appdrft/pc_present.pdf accessed on March 4, 2019. 13 Jai, S. “India does not need more coal based capacity addition till 2022: Central Electricity Authority.” www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/ india-does-not-need-more-coal-based-capacity-addition-till-2022-central-elec tricity-authority-116121300042_1.html (accessed 04.06.2019). 14 The region produces 10% of the total coal-based energy of the country. 15 Pillai P. and G. Vinuta. “Singrauli: The Coal Curse- Fact finding report on the impact of coal mining on the people and environment of Singrauli.” www.green peace.org/india/en/issues/environment/1006/singrauli-the-coal-curse/ (accessed 04.06.2019). 16 The Advocates for Human Rights, https://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights. org/uploads/ch_8_2.pdf accessed on June 4, 2019. 17 In an office memorandum dated March 15, 2010, the MoEF gave a full listing of areas in each of the polluted regions that were being considered as critically polluted. Areas from both Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh portions of Singrauli were included on the list. 18 Pillai and Vinuta. “Singrauli: The Coal Curse- Fact finding report on the impact of coal mining on the people and environment of Singrauli.” www.greenpeace. org/india/en/issues/environment/1006/singrauli-the-coal-curse/ accessed on June 4, 2019. 19 Case History: Malini Subramaniam, Frontline Defenders. www.frontlinedefend ers.org/en/case/case-history-malini-subramaniam accessed on June 4, 2019.

15 Tale of a Brahmin and a Shudrani1 Kalyani Thakur (translated from Bangla by Sayantan Dasgupta)2

A Brahmin man had surrendered his sacred thread to a Shudra woman. The Shudrani even cut off his tiki, the thin tassel of hair that Brahmins sport ritualistically on their scalp. The Brahmin sat at the Shudrani’s feet and talked of social reform. The Shudrani had all these years pelted stones at the wretched society. The poor Brahmin man kept scurrying back to her again and again. The Shudrani had hounded him many times – Get lost, you wretch! But it had not deterred him. Like a pet, he had returned again and again. Seeing this, the Shudrani began to feel pity for him. Love and compassion, too, followed. They met and mated under the moonlight. But the Shudrani’s society was gradually distancing itself from her. They had thought they would send her to war. If she became a lover instead of a warrior, it flew in the face of their intentions. The Shudrani was caught in a dilemma. She would not go to the king for justice because she nursed resentments against the state. She then went to the trees. A deep, dense forest. The invisible Tree God dwelt there and listened to everything. The Shudrani articulated her predicament. Do you know what the invisible Tree God said? She said that all animals and plants were the earth’s offspring. No one had any business dictating how anyone else would conduct themselves, but it was wrong for anyone to flourish at the cost of others. What if someone helps the individual but harms the community? The Shudrani asked. This is beyond me, said the Tree God. This Brahmin is so close to your heart. What can I do? The Tree God added – how can one say anything like this? First see how far his actions are beneficial to the larger society – only you can be the judge of that. And it is you who has to take a call, no one else. And if he is close to your heart, it is up to you to prepare him. But my society will ostracize me, what of that? Not everyone has to give such importance to society. You also explain to your society. Just as it is not true that all Brahmins are enemies of Shudras, so is it not true that all your enemies are Brahmins. It is you who will decide how to balance your love and your vow.

Tale of a Brahmin and a Shudrani 223 After hearing all this, the Shudrani went up to a place midway between forest and human habitation. Then she turned to stone. A Shudrani’s statue stands there even today.

Notes 1   In the varna system of the Vedas there are four castes: Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra. The first three groups are supposed to emerge from mouth, arms, and thighs of the Creator and the last from the feet. The first three castes are twice-born, as they are entitled to don the sacred thread, denied to the Shudras. The untouchables are outside the varna system. For detailed discussions on the complexities of varna, jati, and caste system, see Dipankar Gupta. Social Stratification. Oxford University Press. New Delhi, 1991. 2   The original story ‘Ak Brahmin O Shudranir Golpo’ was published in Phire Elo Ulongo Hoe.

Index

Aam Admi Party (AAP) 195, 204 – 206 AAP see Aam Admi Party (AAP) adivasi resistance and struggle, in Chhattisgarh 195 – 200 AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) 131, 133 – 134, 139, 144, 187 – 192 agency 61; feminist ethnography 62 – 63; place-making and 61 – 64, 69 – 72; subjectivation 62 Alternate Law Forum 152 Ambedkar, B. R. 6 – 7, 79, 80 – 81, 83, 90 – 91, 101, 118, 119, 120 Ambedkarite movement 80 – 81 Amritabazar Patrika 102 Anandabazar Patrika 163 – 164 Andhra, Maoist movements in 48  . . . And the Unclaimed (Ebang Bewarish) 9, 152, 155, 157 – 161 Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Tod) 20 Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar) 80 anti-Mandal agitations 6 – 7 Arundale, George Sidney 95 Arundale, Rukmini Devi 95, 97 Asgar, Ali 68 Ashwo Series (Thakur) 88 Assam Rifles 131 assertive activism 173 – 176 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (Kashmir) 135 Avadanshataka 93 Babri Masjid 5 bad feminism 163, 164 Bala, Manju 87, 89, 90 Basu, Gauri 93 battle of Karbala (AD 680) 59 Bedouin society, Egypt 61

Bengal: Dalit women writings 85 – 90; militant nationalism in 44, 46; NonCooperation Movement 44 – 45; see also Shia women Bengal School of Art 98 Bharatanatyam 95, 97 Bharatiya Janata Party 27; ‘triple talaq’ practice and 21 Bharat Mata (Mother India) 1 – 2, 34, 42 – 43, 48, 80, 98, 201 Bollywood dance 107 Bolshevik Leninist Party of India 46 Bose, Mandakranta 98 Bose, Nandalal 102 Bourdieu, P. 11 Brahmanic patriarchy, dissent against 105 – 107 Byapari, Manoranjan 86 capability 31 – 32 caste and gender 80 – 85 castes 223n1 caste system 7 – 8 Central Board of Film Certification 19 Chaki-Sircar, Manjusri 7 – 8; Tomari Matir Kanya 103 – 107 Chandalika (dance drama) 100 – 103 Chandalika (Tagore) 7 Chanu, Irom Sharmila 12, 52, 133; on current status of fight against AFSPA 189 – 190; on decision of breaking fast 191; on demand for removal of AFSPA 188; on family relationship 193 – 194; on governance 189; on India’s strategies and policies 190 – 191; interview with 187 – 194; on life in Kodaikanal 193; on marriage 191, 192; on Meitei woman in identity politics 187 – 188; on

Index  225 politics 187 – 188, 191 – 192, 193; on women and politics 187 – 188 Char adhyaya (Tagore) 36 Charal, Kalyani Thakur 13, 87 – 89, 90 Chasani, Chandra 154 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 34 Civil Disobedience Movement 39, 45 classical dance 96 – 97 classicized body 94 – 96 Coal Allocation scam (Coalgate) 216 coal mining 214 – 220; growth vs. environment 216 – 218; Mahan story 215 – 216 colonial modernity 42 communist: movement 46, 48; state 106; women 47, 51 Communist Party of India 33, 41, 46, 197 community-based identities 5 – 6 Congress 27, 29, 45 – 47; leaders 45 Constituent Assembly 29 constitutional demand 101 constitutional guarantees 5, 31 constitutional justice 139 constitutional rights 26, 220 ‘Cow of the Barricades, The’ (Rao) 39 – 40, 45 CPI(ML) People’s War in Andhra 48 criminalizing non-procreative sex 150 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 152 Critical Environment Pollution Index 218 cultural nationalism (1890–1930) 3 cultural revivalism 94 curfew 209 – 213 Dalits 80 – 81 Dalit women 3, 7 – 8, 79, 81 – 82; Bengali writing 85 – 90; feminists 7, 80; men 7; oppression/suffering 80, 83; political marginalization 81, 83; talking differently 83 dance/dance dramas 93 – 107; Chandalika 100 – 103; classicized body 94 – 96; modern 96 – 98; Natir Puja 93 – 94; shift in style 98; Tomari Matir Kanya 103 – 107 dancing girl of Mahenjo-daro 94 Delhi gang rape, collective mobilization against see mobilization for Nirbhaya democratic institutions 31 devadasis 95, 96

Devi, Bimal Pratibha 46, 53n25 Devi, Mahasweta 140, 176 Devi, Pratima 102 Devi, Sampat Pal 175 Devi, Sarala (Chaudhurani) 44, 45 Draupadi 140, 167, 176 – 177 Eid-ul-Fitr 209 endogamy 7 environmental justice 217 environmental violations 219 – 220 Environment Impact Assessment Notification of 2006 217 European Enlightenment 3 Facebook 118 Facing the Mirror (Sukthankar) 152 – 153 feminism 2; bad 163, 164; governmentalized 113, 114; mainstream 113 – 114; political 113 feminist agency 9 feminist conjuncturalism 123 feminist philosophers 2 feminist scholarship 3 feminist solidarities 113 – 124; intersectionalities framework 122 – 124; maitri 119 – 122 Forest Advisory Committee 215 Forest Rights Act 216 Foucauldian deconstruction 61 Frankenberg, Ruth 123 freedom movement 47; see also Indian national movement free sex 124 French Revolution 43 fundamentalist movements 61 Gandhi, Mahatma 39, 40, 80 Gandhian nationalism 44 – 45 gang rape 30, 31, 167; see also mobilization for Nirbhaya garba 97 gendered violence 1; see also sexual violence gender equality 4 – 5 gender-neutrality 30 gender norms 12 – 13 gender segregation 3 Ghare-baire (Tagore) 36 Ghosh, Santisudha 45 – 46, 53n23, 53n25 Ghosh, Shantidev 99

226 Index Gosthalila (dance drama) 99 governmentalized feminism 113, 114 Great Imambara of Lucknow 73 Greenpeace India 216 grief/grieving 160 – 161 ‘Grupo Apoyo Mutuo’ (Guatemela) 135 Gulabi Gang 175 – 176 guru-shishya parampara 96 Harijan 80 Hazaribagh, Jharkhand 218 heterosexuality 132 hijab 50 – 51 Hindalco Ltd. 215, 216; see also Mahan Coal Block (Mahan story) Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 81 Hindu Code Bill 81 Hinduism, politicization of 5 Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 81 Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 81 Hindu nationalism 48 – 49 Hindu Right 5, 8 Hindu society 80 Hindustan Standard 102 Hindu Succession Act, 1956 81 Hindutva 1, 5, 34; Bharatiya Janata Party 27; strategic alliance against 118 – 119; women’s militancy 48 – 49 Hindutvavaadi cultural politics 113, 114 History of Sexuality, Volume One, The (Foucault) 22 Hizb-ul-Mujahideen 209 Hok Kolorob movement 174 homophobia 150, 155 homosexual subjects 150 Honour 1, 12, 20, 42, 95, 132 – 133, 167, 195, 202 – 204, 212 Howlader, Smritikona 87, 89, 90 human rights: universal principles of 51; violations of 219 – 220 ‘Human Rights and Capabilities’ (Sen) 31 idealized images of women 4 identity politics 123 Ilaiah, Kancha 80 imambaras 59; Bibi Anaro Imambara 67, 68, 69 – 72; Haji Kerbalai Imambara 72 – 74; Haji Lane

Imambara 67 – 69, 70; role of 65; see also Shia women India Divided (Prasad) 29 Indian Army 209 Indian Constitution, the 5 – 6, 31, 33 – 34, 43, 60, 80 – 81, 29, 30, 188, 214, 219 Indian Daily News 99 Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai 150 Indian national movement 43, 44 – 47; politics of respectability 45 Indian woman 3 – 4, 6 India’s Daughter (documentary) 172 inter-caste intimacy 13 inter-categorical complexity 122 Inter-Dominion Treaty 47 International Accountability Project 217 intersectionalities 122 – 124; intercategorical complexity 122; interpretation 122 – 123; non-elite identities 123 Islamic countries: hijab and polygamy in 50 – 51; Sunni fundamentalist movements 63 Islamic revivalist movement 62 – 63 Islamophobia 6, 118 Italian Civil Code of 1865 33 Jadavpur University 174 ‘Jal-Jangal-Zameen’ (water-forest-land) 199 – 200 ‘JatpaterPochagola Sab’ (Sarkar) 90 Jayasi, Malik Muhammad 19, 20 joint suicides 150 – 160 kandy 97 Kangla Fort protest, Manipur 131 – 132, 135 – 143, 167 Karni Sena 19 Kashmir 209 – 213; Kunan-Poshpora 171, 177; military occupation and oppression 209 – 213; resistance in 213; Wani, Burhan, killing of 209 – 210 Kathakali 102 Kennedy, Robert F. 214 Kerala 122 – 123; demographic change 123; feminism in 113 – 119; gender justice 174 – 175; identity politics 123; KOL protests 117 – 119, 123, 124; moral policing 174; poverty

Index  227 alleviation mission 113; sexualprotectionist state policy 114 khadem 73 Khalji, Alauddin 19, 20 Kiss of Love (KOL) protests 117 – 119, 124 Kudumbashree 113 Kunan-Poshpora 171, 177 Lallup-Kaba 135 lasya 97 LGBT movement 8 liberal modern democracies 5 literature 79 London Stock Exchange 216 Lorde, Audre 116 ‘Love Jihad’ 118 ‘Madres de La Plazo de Mayo’ (Argentina) 135 Mahabharata 167 Mahan Coal Block (Mahan story) 215 – 216 Mahan Sangarsh Samiti 216 Mahmood, Saba 60, 61, 62 – 63, 64 mainstream feminism 113 – 114 maitri 119 – 122 majlis 66 Majumdar, Tilottama 163 – 164 male gaze 168 – 169, 170 – 171 Mandal, Pallabi 87, 89, 90 Mandal-Masjid-Bank 8 Mandi, Lakshmi 89 Mani, Lata 21, 123 Manipur 171, 172; women’s movement and 133 – 135; see also Kangla Fort protest, Manipur Manipuri dance 99 – 100 Manorama, Thangjam 131, 138, 139, 142, 171, 177 Maoists: CPI(ML) People’s War in Andhra 48; Naxals as 48 Marathi Dalit movements and literature 85 March Revolution of 1848 33 marginality 11 Martin, Biddy 120, 122 mass-based movements 12 maternal love 137 Matribhumi Special, violent episode of 163 – 165 Mayo, Katherine 172

Meira Paibis 132, 133 – 135, 141 – 143, 189, 190 Meitei community 141 – 143, 187 – 188; state atrocities on 134 Meitei woman 142, 143 Metiabruz Imambara 73 Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) 217 mobilization for Nirbhaya 169 – 173; assertive activism 173 – 176 modern dance 97 – 98 Moily, Veerappa 216 Mondal, Achintya 155 Mondal, Chandmoni 155, 156, 158 Mondal, Sucheta 151 – 152, 153 Mondal, Swapna 151 – 152, 153 moral policing 174 motherhood 1; norms of 137; performance of 137 – 138 Mother India (film) 47 – 48 Mother India (Mayo) 172 Mothers against Silence (Israel) 135 ‘Mothers for Peace’ (Belgium) 135 Mothers’ Front (Sri Lanka) 135 mother’s groups/associations 135 – 136; mobilization of 136; struggles of 136 ‘Mothers of Manipur’ 141 mourning 138 Muharram 6, 59, 61, 73, 74; Shia vs. Sunni 65 – 66; see also imambaras; Shia women Muslims 6; battle of Karbala and 65 – 66; gendered stereotype of 61; in Kolkata 64; population 64 ‘My Life’ (suicide note by Swapna Mondal) 155 mythical images 43 Naga Mothers Association 135 Naidu, Sarojini 47 Nair, Kelu 102 naked protest at Kangla Fort see Kangla Fort protest, Manipur nationalism 27; arguments in favour and against 49 – 53; relationship between women and 41 – 43; of women 44 – 49 ‘Nationalism in the West’ (Tagore) 35 nationalist patriarchy: questions about 22 – 23; strength of 19 – 22 national movement see Indian national movement

228 Index nation and gender Natir Puja (dance drama) 93 – 94 Natun Diner Alo (Bimal Pratibha Devi) 46 natural body 96 – 98 Naxals, as Maoists 48 Nazi eugenicist discourse 41 Neer 87 Nehru, Jawaharlal 81 Nehruvian nationalism 47 – 48 neo-liberalism 2 Nirbhaya, mobilization for see mobilization for Nirbhaya Non-Cooperation Movement 44 – 45 normal as empirical average 23 normative 23 – 24 objectification of women 168 – 169 othering of women 12 Padmaavati (film) 4, 19 – 22 Padmavat (film) 60 Padmavat (Jayasi) 19 patriarchy 2 peno-vaginal sex 150 Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance (PRJA) 187 Phalguni (dance drama) 99 Pietistic movements 63 Pinjra Tod: Break the Hostel Locks 173 – 174 Pink Chaddi campaign 175 place-making: agency and 61 – 64, 69 – 72; concept 59; liminality 64, 69, 70, 71; overview 59 – 61 political feminism 113 political motherhood 131 – 145; see also Kangla Fort protest, Manipur Political Philosophy of Rabindranath (Sen) 35 political representation of women 26 – 27 polygamy 50 – 51 popular culture 165 Post-Hindu India (Ilaiah) 80 post-imperialist liberalism 115 Prasad, Rajendra 29 – 30, 32, 33 – 34 Prevention of Atrocities Act 156, 157 PRJA see Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance (PRJA) procreative sex 150 progressive change, limits of 23 – 28 pure motherhood 136, 137

queer feminists 8 queer movements 9 – 10; joint suicides 150 – 160 queer tourists 150 Raas 100 Rabindra-Nritya 98 Raigarh, Chattisgarh 218 – 219 Raj, Rekha 118 Raja (dance drama) 99 Raja of Baroda 44 Rajasthan 19, 20 Ramabai, Pandita 34 Ram Janmabhoomi movement 5 Rana Pratap (play) 43 Rao, Raja 39, 45 rape 132 – 133; see also sexual violence reformism 3 religion 62 – 63 religious symbolism 43 Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law January 23, 2013 4 – 5, 30 representation of woman 11 reproductive power of women 41 revivalist-nationalism 3 right to equality 6 Rihand Dam 217 rowza 68, 70 – 71, 72 Sabarimala temple 60 ‘SadhobarSankha’ (Bala) 89 Salafi mosque movement, in Egypt 62, 63 Sanskrit 95 Sanskritization 95 Sanskritized body 95 Santiniketan 93, 100 Sappho For Equality (SFE) 151 – 152 Sarabhai, Mrinalini 102 Sarkar, Bina Roy 89, 90 sati 20 Scheduled Castes and Tribes 27 Section 377 of Indian Penal Code 150, 152 – 153 secularism 5 seeing women 166 – 169 self-help groups 113 Sen, Manikuntala 41, 46 – 47, 48, 53n25 Sen, Sachindranath 35 Seth, Leila 30 sexual assaults 218

Index  229 sexual division of labour 3 sexual identity 157 sexuality of the mother-nation 141 sexuality politics 123 sexual torture 132 sexual violence 132 – 133; Kunan-Poshpora 171, 177; national identities and 133; Shopian 171; Sori on 201 – 204; visual construction of women and 171 Shah, Wajid Ali 65 Shah Bano case/controversy 5, 60 shalishi sabha 155 – 156 Shankar, Uday 97 Shapmochan 102 Shardulakarnavadan 100 shared sisterhood 10 Sharodatsav (autumn festival) 98 – 99 Shia community 6; double minority status 64 – 67; migration to Bengal 65; sacred practices 64 – 65; socioreligious constraints 61 Shia women 6, 59 – 74; Bibi Anaro Imambara and 67, 68, 69 – 72; Haji Kerbalai Imambara and 72 – 74; Haji Lane Imambara and 67 – 69; selfflagellation and 66 Shopian 171 ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’ (Mitchell) 168 Shudra woman and Brahmin man, tale of 222 – 223 Singh, Amubi 102 Singh, Buddhimantra 99 Singh, Jyoti 170, 172, 173 Singh, Nabakumar 99 Singrauli 217 – 218; as critically polluted area 218 Sircar, Ranjabati 96, 102 Slutwalk parades 175 social capital 11 social contract, theory of 43 social hierarchy 80 social identities 9 social reform movement (1850–1890) 3 Sori, Soni 12; AAP and 195, 204 – 206; on adivasi resistance and struggle 195 – 200; on her imprisonment and sexual torture 202 – 203; interview with 195 – 208; on ‘JalJangal-Zameen’ (water-forest-land) 199 – 200; on nationalism 201; on sexual violence 201 – 204

spaces of feminist maitri 119 – 122 Spivak, Gayatri 11, 140, 154 sterilization 41 strategic essentialism 121 Strategic Litigations Against Public Participation (SLAPP Suits) 219 subaltern woman 11 Subramanium, Gopal 30 suicide letter 150 – 160; see also joint suicides Sukthankar, Ashwini 152 – 153 Sunni fundamentalist movements 63 Sunni Waqf Board (Central Waqf Board) 73 Supreme Court of India 150 Suri, Keshav 150 Swadeshi Movement 44 Tagore, Abanindranath 34 Tagore, Rabindranath 5; Chandalika 100 – 103; Char adhyaya 36; dance and 97 – 103; Ghare-baire 36; idea of the nation 35 – 36; innovative practices 97; Manipuri dance and 99 – 100; ‘Nationalism in the West’ 35; Natir Puja 93 – 94; paintings 98; Phalguni 99; Vasanta 99 tale of a Brahmin man and a Shudrani 222 – 223 Tasher Desh 102 Thakur, Kalyani 13, 87, 88 – 89, 90 Tharu, Susie 164 – 165 theory of ‘the aesthetics of decontextualisation’ 158 Third World Woman 6 Tod, James 20 Tomari Matir Kanya (dance drama) 7, 94, 103 – 107 training-system 96 transnationalism 123 transversal politics 124 triple talaq 4, 21, 60 2G Spectrum scam 216 Udwin, Leslee 172 – 173 Uniform Civil Code (UCC) 5, 60 Union Ministry of Coal 215 upper castes 82 ‘Vande mataram’ (Chatterjee) 34 Varnas 80, 223n1 Vasanta (dance drama) 99

230 Index Vemula, Rohith 107 – 108 Verma, J. S. 30 Verma Committee report 29 – 36 Vietnam 50 vikas (development) 27 visibility 166 – 168 visual construction of women 166 – 169 visuality 166, 168 – 169 voting rights 26 – 27 Wani, Burhan, killing of 209 – 210 Wheeler, Mortimer 94 Why I am not a Hindu (Ilaiah) 80 ‘woman question’ 3 – 5 women: Ambedkarite movement and 80 – 81; as biological reproducers 41; bodies and sexualities 133; as citizens 43; as cultural reproducers 41 – 42; as embodiment of the homeland

42 – 43; ideological role 2; mythical images 43; nationalism of 44 – 49; as nation-mother 1; notion of 1; seeing 166 – 169; as static object 1; visual construction of 166 – 169; as weaker sex 47 women-led environmental movements 218 women’s movement 8 – 10; agenda 7; challenges to 2, 8; criticism 8; representations 11; state repression 12 Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, The (Modleski) 168 – 169 Yuval-Davis, Nira 32 – 33, 40, 41, 124

zakera 67, 68 – 69