Nation and Imagination
UNIT 2 THEORIZING THE NATION-2
P. K. Vijayan
Structure
2.1
Introduction
2.2
Objectives
2.3
The Emergence of Nationalism in India
2.4
2.3.1
The Colonial Period
2.3.2
Partition
2.3.3
The Post-Independence Period
Recent Tendencies in Nationalism in India
2.4.1
From Periphery to the Centre
2.4.2
Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization
2.4.3
Debates on Mandal versus Masjid
2.5
Nationalism in India Today
2.6
Let Us Sum Up
2.7
Unit End Questions
2.8
References
2.9
Suggested Readings
2.1 INTRODUCTION
In the previous Unit, you have been introduced to some of the major
theories of and approaches towards nationalism. You have learnt how to
understand and define the concept of the nation, as well as the various
factors involved in these understandings and definitions, such as ethnicity,
culture, language, race and gender. You have also been introduced to some
of the issues that have been central to the debates around nationalism,
such as territoriality, common heritage, the invention of histories and
traditions. In addition, you have been introduced to feminist perspectives
on nations and nationalism, on the issues noted above, as well as on the
ways in which masculinity and femininity are deployed in these nationalist
discourses.
The current Unit aims to extend and deepen your understanding and analysis
of these issues. The Unit will explore the specific case of India in some
detail, to draw out the ways in which nationalism evolved under colonialism,
and the complex gender dynamics of this process. Specifically, it will focus
on the complex ways in which nations and nationalism relate to patriarchal
formations, drawing on them but often also reinventing them and/or
reinforcing them.It will attempt to elaborate the dynamic between
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constructions of gender masculinity in particular which you have already
Theorizing the Nation-2
studied in the MWG-OO2, Block1, Concepts, Unit 3, Masculinity and the
operations of patriarchal formations. The Unit will also attempt to outline
some of the limits and limitations with the idea of the nation.
2.2 OBJECTIVES
After completing this Unit, you should be able to:
•
Discuss the emergence of nationalism in the Indian context;
•
Analyze its roots in colonial discourses, as well as its complex evolution;
•
Establish its relations to patriarchal formations, as they evolved under
colonialism; and
•
Comment on the impact of independence and the subsequent trajectories
of nationalism.
2.3 THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONALISM IN INDIA
Central to understanding the emergence of nationalism in India, is the
question of understanding the nation that is India. It is often forgotten that
the territory that we today recognize as India did not exist in this specific
form as a nation-state prior to the colonization of the subcontinent by the
British. The subcontinent has historically seen the rise and fall of several
empires, many kingdoms and innumerable princedoms; but although some
of the largest empires, like Asoka’s or Akbar’s, almost covered the entire
subcontinent, at no point did any of these cover the territory that today
constitutes India. Even the territory established as an integrated colony
under British rule, during colonial times, does not coincide with the India
of today. British colonial India stretched as far as, and included, places like
Myanmar (or Burma as it was then called) in the east and Afghanistan in the
west. It also did not include places like Pondicherry (which was a French
colony), and Goa (which was a Portuguese colony), but which subsequently
became parts of modern India. Furthermore, these different territorial
formations have all had different names at different times – ‘Bharat’,
‘Hindustan’, ‘India’ – but which are now all in use, often interchangeably,
with reference to the contemporary Indian nation-state. The question that
arises then is, how do we understand the emergence of this contemporary
Indian nation-state? What are the discourses of nationalism that have shaped
it, and how have these discourses, in turn, emerged? Let us try to respond
to these questions with the help of a historical perspective.
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Nation and Imagination
2.3.1 The Colonial Period
One of the defining moments in the formation of the contemporary Indian
nation-state was the battle of 1857, or the first war of independence.
Although it was treated as a mutiny and brutally crushed by the British, this
momentous event served to bring together and consolidate the various anticolonial movements and sentiments that had begun taking shape across the
subcontinent. These movements and sentiments emerged primarily as a
result of upper caste and elite disaffection and unhappiness, amongst both
Hindus and Muslims, with the policies and actions of the British East India
Company. This disaffection and unhappiness was not confined to the elite,
and was generally quite widespread, but it integrated into a widespread
revolt against the British only when the elites of the different communities
decided on concerted and coordinated action. In other words, the origins
of a contemporary sense of an Indian nation – i.e., of contemporary Indian
nationalist discourses lay in the consolidation of anti-imperialist and anticolonialist sentiments in the nineteenth century (Zavos, 2000, p.34).
Of course, the battle of 1857 was not the only factor in this consolidation.
Even before this, social and religious reform movements (such as those
initiated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Sir Sayyid
Ahmad Khan, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy). Mahatma Phule had begun redefining
the sense of community amongst Hindus and Muslims respectively. Much of
this redefinition occurred in response to criticism of India’s social and
religious practices by the European colonizer. While a lot of this criticism
derived from Orientalist and racist prejudices, there were also substantive
issues like untouchability, sati, the treatment of women in general, child
marriage, etc. – practices which the Indian subjects of British imperialism
found impossible to defend. It is of particular significance that a large
number of these issues centred on the treatment of women as a register
of civilizational sophistication – we will return to this particular point shortly.
Apart from these issues, the British found the sheer diversity of customs,
traditions, rituals, etc. baffling, especially since, although the caste system
was supposed to be pervasively present throughout the subcontinent, it
appeared to be practised differently in different regions. The reform
movements sought to remove such practices that were perceived to be
negative, but simultaneously also treated them as corruptions and
degradations that had set in over the centuries, into social and religious
traditions that had ‘originally’ been far superior.
This sense of a ‘golden past’, uncorrupted by the flaws of the present, is
evident for instance, in the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay;
but it was also substantially supported by European scholars like James Mill
(1817) , who made similar arguments in his book, A History of British India
the reform movements not only drew inspiration from such understandings
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of India’s past, but also sought to integrate the diversity of customs, etc.,
Theorizing the Nation-2
specifically of the ‘Hindu’ communities, into a more homogeneous whole.
This was to serve not only as a counter to the criticism about the
contemporary spiritual and cultural poverty of the ‘Hindus’ (as contrasted
with their ‘golden past’), but also as a means to integrate the diverse
communities of the subcontinent into a single community. As Zavos (2000)
argues, this was true of the other communities as well, because reform
movements also took place in the Muslim, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh
communities. Effectively, it was responsible for the close connection in the
Indian case between nationalism and communalism.
A third factor in the emergence of a nationalist spirit under colonialism was
the new political and administrative policies that came into effect after
1858. After the suppression of the revolt, the British ensured that the
resistance to colonial power was blunted substantially, by introducing a
system of seemingly participatory governance, which was constituted through
representation (Kaviraj,1997, p.231). By introducing the rationalistic idea
of equality before the law, the perception of collective identities as
constituted on religious lines, as well as the principle of collective
representation in and for governance, the British fundamentally transformed
the socio-polity. These measures, along with the Orientalist perception that
contemporary ‘Hinduism’was corrupted and degenerate, were instrumental
in the multiplicity of reform and social-work organizations that sprouted in
this period. These were in fact often in ideological and philosophical
disagreement with each other (e.g., the Arya Samaj versus the Sanatana
Dharma Sabha), often caste-based (e.g., the Satyashodak Samaj) and often
region specific (e.g., the Arya Samaj in Punjab, the Sanatana Dharma Sabha
in the Uttar Pradesh region). It would be helpful for you to review some
of these ideas introduced earlier in MWG- 001, Block 1, Unit 2 and all Units
of Block 2. Nevertheless, they all projected the idea of a common Hinduism,
even if each one of them interpreted that commonality differently. In
almost all these cases, at least one purpose of the organizations was to
organize their perceived communities and become their representative voices
under the new imperial policy of representation (Zavos, 2000).
According to Mrinalini Sinha (1995) the reinvention of Hinduism undertaken
by Gandhi was of particular significance in this regard: it directly addressed
the colonial and Orientalist perception of ‘Hindu’ civilization as degenerate,
of the ‘Hindu’ male as ‘effeminate’, and of the caste-system as barbaric,
by inverting them. Gandhi sought to redefine the perception of degeneration
as a rejection of materialism; the perception of effeminacy as a disposition
toward spiritualism and non-violence; and the barbarism of the caste system
as the corruption of a rational and just labour-distribution mechanism (Mohan,
2008). Gandhi’s ideas were strenuously opposed in various quarters: the
modernists in the Indian National Congress (INC), led by Nehru, argued
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Nation and Imagination
insistently on the need for industrial and economic growth, and not just the
minimalist, agricultural, village-based economy propounded by Gandhi; the
Hindu nationalists were vocally opposed to Gandhi’s propagation of nonviolence, arguing that it was effectively emasculating the community and
the country; and lower-caste leaders like B.R.Ambedkar categorically rejected
the defence of the caste-system offered by Gandhi, as being an essentially
exploitative and oppressive system (Bilgrami, 2003).We will come back to
the implications of these debates for the imagination of the nation shortly.
Taking the three factors noted above together, it is clear that the resultant
sense of community and identity that emerged was thus shaped by
•
the fact of imperial conquest;
•
a sense of inferiority, humiliation and the desire to reform; and
•
the new political and administrative structure of representative
participation in governance.
The Indian elites were thus sharply aware of being economically and
technologically ‘behind’ the European colonizer, and desired the power that
was evidently a consequence of being economically and technologically
‘advanced’ (Seth, 1999). Keeping in mind the sense of humiliation and
inferiority in comparison with the colonial power, it is not surprising that
the nationalism that emerged – under colonialism and after – was not only
dominated by a sense of religious majoritarianism but was also strongly
masculinist in nature. The evolution of the personal law system, which
effectively allowed individual communities to maintain separate, faith-based
legal systems to oversee matters relating to marriage, inheritance, adoption,
etc. ensured that the patriarchal interests of individual communities was
protected. Even where it sought to present itself as favourable to women,
before and after independence, it was registering, not the dismantling of
existing patriarchal structures but their transformation into what has been
referred to as the ‘new patriarchy’ (Chatterjee,1993, p.128). These factors
are crucial to understanding the nature of the nationalism that emerged as
the gradual consolidation of these senses of community and identity, because
it is from these factors that the ‘two-nation theory’ was born, that eventually
led to the partition of India (Larson,1997, p. 127).
2.3.2 Partition
The mainstream Indian nationalist movement – as represented by the Indian
National Congress (INC) under Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi –
explicitly professed itself to be secular. However, the fact that Pakistan was
carved out of what was perceived to be a Hindu majoritarian country, by
implication meant that the nationalism of the INC would also be perceived
to be ‘Hindu’ in many quarters. Thus, even though the explicitly Hindu
30
nationalist organizations that emerged in the last few decades of colonial
Theorizing the Nation-2
rule, like the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
were relatively small and ineffectual as compared to the INC, the INC itself
was often seen to be dominated by Hindu upper castes, and its imagination
of the nation as similarly coloured (Gould, 2004). It is for this reason that,
despite the influence and popularity of the INC across the country, the
number of incidents of communal violence and riots began to escalate in
the early decades of the twentieth century, to eventually culminate in the
formation of Pakistan.
We have already noted how the carving out of communal blocs along religious
lines was accompanied by an intensification of regulation over women,
women’s bodies and sexuality – even in the case of almost all the reform
movements too. In effect, as we noted above, patriarchal forms changed,
patriarchy itself did not. But the direct association of community delineation
with ‘the woman question’ under the colonial regime did mean that
community patriarchates and their engagements with this question became
more visibly masculinist. The terms of that masculinism could differ from
community to community, patriarchate to patriarchate: but there was no
doubting its common expression as the control over women. These different
hegemonic masculinities were thus characterized by protectionism, deriving
from each community’s perception of the ‘other’ community as predatory,
and therefore of the community as in need of protection. This is one of the
ways in which women and community become synonymous: women became
bearers of the religious and cultural identity of the community precisely
because personal laws and customary practices that served to differentiate
one community from the other, were mostly oriented around women; and
women’s bodies and sexuality were reduced to serving as the means for the
biological reproduction of the community – a phenomenon that is common
to the dynamics of nationalism around the world (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Apart
from the restrictions this imposed on women’s mobility and use of space –
and the concomitant gendering of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces into
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ respectively .It is important to note here that
these were neither actual nor very clear distinctions and separations and
perhaps most significantly, they were applicable mostly to upper-caste,
upper-class spaces, if at all.
This patriarchal regime (and this is true of the patriarchies of all communities)
also began to characterize women in terms of sexual purity and sexual
profligacy. The community’s ‘own’ women were seen as, and expected to
be, sexually ‘pure’, untainted by desire, wishing only to serve as the
ideological and biological reproducers of the community. At the same time,
women of the ‘other’communities were represented variously as ‘impure’,
sexually desiring, sexually available and promiscuous, and crucially, in need
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Nation and Imagination
of ‘rescuing’ from the oppressive gender regimes of their own community
(Bhasin and Menon, 1998). Women were also routinely demonized as fecund
reproduction machines whose sole objective was to procreate and multiply
the numbers of the ‘other’ community as rapidly as possible and such
women are often represented as predatory and rapacious themselves. (The
film series Species I, II and III is a good example of the representation of
this anxiety.)
You will have the opportunity to explore these issues in greater detail in
subsequent Units. For now, let us focus on the consequences of such
understandings for women during the partition of India. Arguably one of the
most massive forced migrations in human history, involving the movement
of between 12 to 14 million people from one side of the border to the
other, Partition was accompanied by an unprecedented scale and intensity
of violence, with at least half a million people killed and much of it
committed on and experienced by women, irrespective of community. David
Lester notes that “about 75,000 women were abducted and raped by men
of other religions and sometimes by men of their own religion” (Lester,
2010, p.2). Thousands of other women committed suicide, often in
anticipation of the rape, to avoid the ‘shame’ and trauma of not being
accepted by either community after being raped and/or mutilated. There
are no precise figures available for this violence: but even the conservative
estimates give an indication of the extent to which women, their bodies
and their sexualities were rendered into objects of possession and exchange,
and became the site for the brutal articulation of communal and nationalistic
sentiments. This is particularly revealing in the international agreement
between the governments of India and Pakistan, to exchange abducted
women:
“Having agreed to an apportioning of assets and a division of the
armed forces, civil services and the CID, India and Pakistan entered
into an inter-dominion agreement on December 6, 1947, to recover
all women and girls who had been abducted in either country and
restore them to their families: Hindu and Sikh women from Pakistan,
Muslim women from India. In four years, 30,000 women were
recovered”.
(Ritu Menon & Kamla Bhasin, 1997)
An even more telling indicator of the extent to which the discourses of
communalism and nationalism instrumentalize women lies in the fact that
any children borne by these women during the period of abduction were
not allowed to ‘return’ with their mothers: they were deemed as belonging
to the paternal community. These are issues that you will revisit in other
Units in greater detail: for now, it is sufficient to note that the highly
patriarchal lines along which communities had come to be defined, thus
32
had a profound impact on the nature of the nationalism that evolved, on
Theorizing the Nation-2
the women of these nationalistic communities, as well as on the set of
gendered social relations that came under state regulation after
Independence, in the form of the Hindu Code Bill.
2.3.3 The Post-Independence Period
We must now return to the point we had made earlier, about the significance
of the fact that much of the reformism of the nineteenth century was
woman-centric. The sense that ‘Hindu civilization’ was mistreating its women
was also evident in the protracted debates around the Hindu Code Bill in
the 1950s (Williams, 2005). However, as Williams makes clear, the debate
focused less on how women would benefit and more on the argument that
if there was no uniform code for Hindus, the community (and the sense of
the nation arising out of it) would fall apart. The opponents of the bill
demanded a similar code for all other religious communities, besides arguing
that it was state interference in matters that ought to remain in the
purview of individual communities. The bill was eventually passed, albeit
in a highly diluted form. But what is clear from this debate is
a)
that the imagination of the ‘national community’, even amongst
apparently secular formations like the INC, was dominantly Hindu;
b)
that even though there were multiple discourses on the ‘Hindu’ identity,
and consequently multiple nationalist visions of the nation, they were
all, without exception, strongly patriarchal imaginations; and
c)
they were competitive imaginations of the claims of the patriarchal
community, in terms of the apprehension that only the Hindu
community’s laws were being interfered with, while the others were
given free reign.
An additional theme in this debate was the importance of being ‘modern’.
Modernity was understood not just in terms of industrial and economic
advancement, but in terms of the political, administrative and judicial
structures that were adopted, with the Preamble to the Constitution
emphasizing that India was a ‘sovereign democratic republic’. The two
‘modern’ terms there, ‘democratic’ and ‘republic’, were later complemented
by two more ‘modern’ terms, ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’, in 1976, through the
42nd Amendment. The imagination of the nation that was emerging, because
of the investment in wanting to be a ‘modern’ nation, had to grapple with
a problem. It had to ensure that the patriarchal privileges of the nation’s
various communities were not affected, even as women and other
marginalized members (lower-castes, tribal communities, minority religions
and sects, etc) were at least seen to have equal opportunities under the
law. The pressure to protect patriarchal privileges came in particular from
the conservatives within the INC and from the Hindu nationalists inside and
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outside the INC. But there were also modernist voices pressing for change
– albeit not because they were pro-women as much as because they were
keen to sustain the reformist agenda of the nineteenth century, which was
to erase the impression of Hinduism as a degenerate religion. The
assassination of Gandhi allowed these contradictory tendencies to resolve,
albeit partially and somewhat uncertainly:
i)
the presence and influence of the Hindu nationalists reduced dramatically
(albeit temporarily) with the banning of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh;
ii)
the opposition to Nehru’s modernisation agenda also fell sharply,
permitting the re-imagination of the ‘temples of modern India’ as its
dams and industrial plants; and
iii) the caste question was sought to be resolved through the reservation
policy, thereby acknowledging the system’s inequality as well as
implementing a corrective.
The resultant discourse of the nation was a complex amalgam of these
developments.
Check Your Progress:
i)
Discuss the colonial period in India with regard to nationalism.
ii) Narrate the partition debate with the help of any film/s you
have seen on partition.
34
2.4 RECENT TENDENCIES IN NATIONALISM IN INDIA
Theorizing the Nation-2
In the previous Unit, you have read about the narrating of nations and the
importance of such narratives to the understanding of nationalism. In the
case of this particular amalgam, the narratives that constituted it did not
always appear as a homogeneous narrative – expectedly, since the
communities covered by that discourse are not homogeneous. Postindependence, two processes were mainly instrumental in the shaping of
this narrative. Let us look at each one of these below:
2.4.1 From Periphery to Centre
The growth and proliferation of non-Congress political parties, especially
along caste, linguistic and regional lines played a significant role in this
narrative. Linguistic (e.g. Tamil) and regional (e.g. Marathi) chauvinisms
multiplied and grew, some of them (e.g. in Nagaland) unresolved from preindependence times, and others (e.g. Kashmir) complicated by developments
after independence. Although the communist parties formed the main
opposition to the Congress in the first decade after independence, and
although the RSS had been banned for a year in 1948, the gendered
imagination of the nation that had shaped the politics of both, the INC and
the Hindu nationalists continued in many respects to retain sway. Nevertheless
or perhaps precisely because of the replication of the exclusivism that was
so central to Hindu nationalism – the other kinds of political formations
noted above, taken together, soon became politically powerful enough to
challenge the Congress. The earlier pan-Indian dominance of the Congress
gradually began getting eroded, first at the peripheries, as they lost control
of state governments in the south and east in particular, and then later,
even in the traditional strongholds of the Congress, in the Hindi heartlands
of the north. Alongside this was the gradual but steady dissemination of the
effects of the reservation policy, which led to greater visibility and
participation in the public sphere, by the lower castes. These developments
led eventually to the declaration of Emergency, and its subsequent overthrow
in 1977. By the time of the Emergency in 1975, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh,
which was the Hindu nationalist precursor to today’s Bharatiya Janata Party,
was a respectable – and respectably visible – presence on the political
stage. In fact, by the end of the nineteen eighties, it had grown enough to
provide crucial support to minority non-Congress governments, but, it had
to wait till the nineteen nineties before it could actually try to form a
government itself.
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Nation and Imagination
2.4.2 Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization
Although the various regional and caste-based parties could not match the
strength of the Congress, either singly or even in alliances, for any sustained
period of time, they (perhaps inadvertently) played an important role in
fostering the politics of exclusivism that had been the defining characteristic
of Hindu nationalism. But this exclusivism also had another dimension, one
that the re-emerging Hindu nationalist forces shared with the Congress: this
was the economic exclusivism that was born out of the steady move towards
liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) that marked the period
after the Emergency, especially from the middle of the nineteen eighties.
This had a very complex effect on the gendering of social spaces, as well
as on the gendering of nationalist discourses. It is important to remember
that through the seventies, the women’s movement in India had also grown
steadily, but had remained dominated by urban, upper-caste women
(Subramaniam, 2004). After the Emergency was lifted, a larger number of
non-urban, lower-caste oriented women’s organizations began to become
visible. But this is also the period when the Hindu right began to expand
the activities of its own women’s organizations such as the Rashtriya
Swayamsevika Samiti and the Durga Vahini. In sum, the earlier easy
association of women’s bodies with, and as, the bodies of communities, for
instance, was no longer so easily possible. Furthermore, LPG brought with
it its own mechanisms of gendering and sexualizing – for instance, through
a suddenly expanded exposure to American films and television, the demands
of the advertising industry, beauty pageants, etc., on the one hand; and,
on the other, by bringing more women into the public sphere, through a
sudden expansion in the demand for skilled and semi-skilled female labour,
in the new kinds of service industries. The transforming political economy
made it difficult to maintain women as segregated, de-sexualized and ‘pure’;
at the same time, perhaps for this very reason, the discourse of the womanas-national-honour grew even more strident in the Hindu right. Two incidents
that indexed the Hindu right’s communalized approach to women that
occurred at this time, were the Shah Bano case and the Deorala Sati
incident. You have read about the Shah Bano case in MWG -002, Block III,
Unit 3. It would be helpful for you to review our previous discussion on this
case. In the former, the Hindu right vehemently opposed the Congress
decision to overturn the Supreme Court’s judgement, which effectively
favoured Muslim women, because they saw in it a vindication of their
perception of the Muslim woman as oppressed within her community (Cossman
and Kapur, 1996). In the latter case, they vehemently opposed any attempt
to intervene in or prevent cases of sati, or widow self-immolation, because
they saw it as an infringement of the right to worship (Abraham, 1997).
36
2.4.3 Debates on Mandal versus Masjid
Theorizing the Nation-2
In 1989, the V P Singh government implemented the recommendations of
the Mandal Commission on reservation for Other Backward Castes. The
controversy that surrounded this decision polarized the polity along lines of
caste. The Mandal recommendations directly addressed the nature of castebased inequality, and questioned the privilege of caste hindus over the
state and the economy. It was at this time that serialized adaptations of the
two Indian epics, the Ramayan and the Mahabharat (in that order), appeared
on television, in the late nineteen eighties. The Hindutva forces deployed
such cultural productions as an antidote to the Mandal commission (Rajagopal,
2001). According to Arvind Rajagopal,the Ramayan was also used to circulate
their ideology in the context of the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, after the
Shah Bano case. The Muslim patriarchate and the Hindu patriarchate were
appeased through the Shah Bano Judgement and the opening of the Ram
Janmabhoomi shrine at Ayodhya for worship (Subrahmaniam, 2003).
During this time Congress government and other organizations like the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal took the lead in the campaign
to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Reactionary forces among Hindus and
Muslims politicized the religion through their claims related to Ram
Janmabhoomi shrine and Babri mosque.
India witnessed the demolition of Babri mosque in 1992 and consequential
communal riots. These became the central concern for a spate of films like
Bombay, Hey! Ram and Black Friday. These films strove to reconcile the
explicitly Hindu nationalist agenda that was now dominant, with the official,
state-maintained position of secularism (Gabriel, 2010). The conclusion of
the decade saw the Kargil war, and the rise to governance of the Hindu
nationalists. Significantly, all of these developments were marked by a
hyper-masculinist, aggressive and blatantly sexist rhetoric that has now
become characteristic of such right-wing nationalism.
2.5 NATIONALISM IN INDIA TODAY
Arguably the nature of nationalism today is changing, but not substantially
so. Indian democracy is constantly questioned by the communal forces. It
has challenged the secular fabric of the nation. It also revealed the ways
in which issues of religion and secularism are contested by prominent
political groups. Simultaneously, economic nationalism has also emerged
through the projection of sheer economic independence. This sort of
economic nationalism is totally detached from the harsh Indian realities.
Indeed, the disparities and inequalities continue to grow, and, as always,
women continue to bear the worst effects of those inequalities. Issues like
the terribly skewed sex-ratio, which led Amartya Sen to speak of ‘missing
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Nation and Imagination
women’, and the continued imbalance between men and women in almost
all indices of Human Development – literacy, education, employment, health,
mortality – remain poorly addressed. Instead, the issues that dominate the
political stage continue to orient around the failed ideologies of nationalism.
2.6 LET US SUM UP
In this Unit, we have engaged specifically with the question of nationalism
in India. We have explored some of the circumstances in which it arose and
evolved under colonialism. We noted the factors that played a significant
role in that evolution, e.g., the uprising of 1857, the Orientalist perception
of Indian religions, the reform movements, the administrative policies of
the British, etc. We outlined the ways in which the nationalism that emerged
was therefore strongly communal, patriarchal and masculinist, and spelt
out some of the ways in which women, women’s bodies and their sexualities
in particular were regulated and given meanings by these patriarchal
nationalisms. We then traced the consequences of this communal nationalism
in and for the partition of India, and the ways in which this event was
inscribed on the bodies of women. This was followed by a brief discussion
of the relationship between gender and nationalism in the post-colonial
period. We saw how ideas of modernity came together and also conflicted
with nationalist sensibilities on the ‘woman question’, and how this was
resolved. The subsequent trajectories of nationalism were also explored, in
relation to the changing political economy, as well as the events leading up
to the Emergency of 1975. We then studied the factors that permitted the
gradual weakening of the Congress, and the re-assertion of Hindu nationalism,
and the violence this unleashed in the country through the nineteen nineties.
Finally, we commented on the state of nationalism in India today. The
purpose of this Unit was, in that sense, to give you a historical-theoretical
grasp of the issues involved in understanding a phenomenon like nationalism
specifically in the Indian context. In the Units that follow, you will have
more opportunity to engage with these and other issues pertaining to gender
and nationalism, and to do so with a more specifically literary or film text
based process of analysis.
2.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS
1)
What were some of the factors that shaped the evolution of nationalism
in the Indian context, under colonialism? Discuss each of these
individually.
2)
How did Gandhi tackle the Orientalist criticism of Hinduism? How did
this in turn affect his understanding of nationalism? Discuss in your own
words.
38
3)
What were some of the ways in which women and women’s bodies were
Theorizing the Nation-2
shaped and regulated by nationalist understandings? Critically analyse.
4)
Outline the main trajectories of nationalism in India after independence.
5)
Write a short note on the power of television to shape the imagination
of the nation in gendered ways.
2.8 REFERENCES
Abraham, Susan (1997). The Deorala Judgement Glorifying Sati. The Lawyers
Collective 12(6), pp.4-12.
Aloysius, G. (1999). Nationalism without a Nation in India. Delhi: OUP.
Bhasin, Kamala & Ritu Menon (1998). Borders and Boundaries: Women in
India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Bilgrami, Akeel (2003). Gandhi, the Philosopher. Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 38(39).
Chatterjee, Partha (1993). “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s
Question”. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Eds.), Recasting Women: Essays
on Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali.
Corbridge, Stuart & James, Harriss (2000). Reinventing India: Liberalization.
Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Communalism Combat, Special Issue (2002). Genocide. March-April . 8(76).
Concerned Citizens Tribunal – Gujarat (2002). Crime Against Humanity: An
Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat. Vols. I and II. Mumbai: Citizens for
Justice and Peace.
Cossman, B. & Kapur R. (1996). Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements
with Law in India. New Delhi: Sage.
Geetha, V. (1999). “Gender and the Logic of Brahminism: Periyar and the
Politics of the Female Body”. From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender.
Kumkum Sangari and Uma Chakravarti (Eds). Delhi: Manohar.
Gould, William (2004). Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in
Late Colonial India Cambridge: CUP.
Gabriel, Karen (2010). Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of
Bombay Cinema 1970-2000. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Hansen, Thomas B. (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu
Nationalism in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
39
Nation and Imagination
Ilaiah, Kancha (1996). Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva
Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy. Calcutta: Samya.
Jaffrelot, Christophe (1996). The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian
Politics: 1925 to the 1990s. New Delhi: Penguin.
Kaviraj, Sudipta (1997). The Modern State in India. Dynamics of State
Formation: India and Europe Compared. Doornbos and Kaviraj (Eds.) IndoDutch Studies on Development Alternatives - 19. New Delhi: Sage.
Larson, Gerald James (1997). India’s Agony over Religion. Delhi: OUP.
Lester, David ( 2010). Suicide and the Partition of India: A Need for Further
Investigation. Suicidology Online, 1, pp.2-4.
Menon , Ritu & Bhasin, K. (1997). An Exchange of Women, Outlook: Special
Issue on Partition, Retrieved on June 27, 2012 from http://www.outlookindia.
com/article.aspx? 203611,
Mill, James (1817) The History of British India. London: Baldwin, Cradock
and Joy, first edition.
Mohan, K. (2008). Nationalism and sexuality: exploration in Gandhian
epistemology. Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan, 15(2),
pp.29-42.
Rajagopal, Arvind (2001). Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism
and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: CUP.
Sen, Amartya. (1990). “More than 100 million women are missing”. The New
York Review of Books 37. Retrieved December 20, 1990 fromh ttp://www.
nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/dec/20/more-than-100-million-womenare-missing/
Seth, Sanjay (1999). Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: the Politics of
Moderate Nationalism in India, 1870-1905. American Historical Review, 104(1),
pp.95-116.
Sinha, Mrinalini (1995). Colonial Masculinity:‘The Manly Englishman and the
‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the late 19th Century. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Subrahmaniam, Vidya (2003). “Ayodhya: India’s Endless Curse”. Open
Democracy. Retrieved August 6 2008 from http://www.opendemocracy.net/
conflictindia_pakistan/article_1568.jsp
Subramaniam, Mangala (2004). ‘The Indian Women’s Movement’.
Contemporary Sociology. 33(6), pp.635-639.
Tharu,Susie & Tejaswini N. (2004). “Problems for Contemporary Theory of
40
Gender”. In Maitrayee Chaudhuri (Ed.), Feminism in India, pp .259-270.
New Delhi: Kali for Women and Women Unlimited.
Williams, Rina. Gender, Nation, Religion: The Discursive Construction of
Theorizing the Nation-2
Identities in India’s Democracy, 1952-1956. Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Ward man
Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, Sep 01, Retrieved
June 12, 2006 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p41853_index.html.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997). Gender and Nation. London: Sage.
Zavos, John (2000). The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India. Delhi:
OUP.
2.9 SUGGESTED READINGS
Geetha, V. (1999). “Gender and the Logic of Brahminism: Periyar and the
Politics of the Female Body”. From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender.
Kumkum Sangari and Uma Chakravarti (Eds). Delhi: Manohar.
Hansen, Thomas Blom. (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu
Nationalism in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sen, Amartya (1990). “More than 100 million women are missing”. The New
York Review of Books 37. Retrieved April 4, 2014 from http://www.nybooks.
com/articles/archives/1990/dec/20/more-than-100-million-women-aremissing/
41