Charting cultural nationalism

Tanika Sarkar's book traces the changing links between the construction of the domestic space and nationhood in the evolution of Hindu nationalism. This is particularly pertinent, given the continuities with contemporary right wing discourse on the subject, says PATRICIA UBEROI.

THERE are a number of themes running through historian Tanika Sarkar's richly documented and lucidly written collection of essays on the development of Hindu cultural nationalism and the abandonment of liberal reformism in late 19th-century Bengal. Several of them are presented in the opening essay from which the book takes its title, to be refined and illustrated further in the detailed case studies that follow.

The first is the construction of the domestic space of the "home" as the last refuge of the colonised Bengali male's masculinity and self-esteem. A satirical ditty of the 1880s sums it up neatly:

The Bengali male goes out.

And gets thrashed wherever he goes.

The Bengali male appears terrible only within his home.

The second is the representation of the home, the family and, more specifically, the cloistered Hindu woman as the potent source of purity and national regeneration. Against the challenge of the Victorian ideal of companionate marriage, cultural nationalists of the late 19th Century sought to underline the distinctiveness of Hindu conjugality, in two successive modes. They argued, first, that non-consensual Hindu marriage was primarily a "spiritual" relationship, a higher form of "love" than that which underlay the contract of Western marriage, its initiation in infancy ensuring the perfect integration of the child-wife into her husband's family. While women's own accounts tell quite a different story - of the pain of the child-bride's separation from her natal family and the physical and psychological trauma of her initiation into wifehood - cultural nationalists invested the institution of child marriage with both beauty and sentiment: "People in this country take great pleasure in infant marriage", ran a typical description. "The little bit of a woman, the infant bride, clad in red silk. Drums are beating and men, women and children are running in order to have a glimpse of that lovely face. From time to time she breaks forth into little ravishing smiles. She looks like a little lovely doll".

Subsequently, according to Sarkar, the grounds of conservative defense of Hindu marriage shifted somewhat. The invocation of conjugal "love" was replaced by the celebration of a painful and coercive wifely "discipline". Represented in the institutions of infant marriage, ascetic widowhood, and self-immolation (sati), "this discipline is the prize and glory of chaste women, and it prevails only in Hindu society". If infant marriage sometimes resulted in bloody death or produced weak progeny, cultural nationalists defiantly proclaimed, this was merely the price to be paid for a higher goal, for "the Hindu prizes his religion above his life and short-lived children".

Having charted this shifting defence of Hindu marriage, Sarkar notes the beginnings by the end of the century of a changed emphasis. Conjugality recedes somewhat into the background and nationalist attention focusses instead on the Mother-Son relationship as both the core of family life, and the well-spring of patriotic devotion to the Motherland. This transition, and the tensions inherent within cultural nationalist discourse, is explored in two chapters on Bankim Chandra. Bankim's early works provide a bold critique of class, caste and gender oppression, along with a radical interrogation of the limits and possibilities of Hindu conjugality, but his later writings, such as the novel Anandamath (1882) in which the anthem "Vande Mataram" is embedded, celebrate and eroticise female heroism (including even sati), and align the Motherland with the Hindu Mother Goddess. Sarkar argues that Bankim thus prepares the ground for the transformation of Hindu cultural nationalism from an anti-British to an anti-Muslim focus, and points to ideological continuities linking Bankim's formulation with that of Sadhvi Rithambhara, the strident feminine voice of the Hindu Right a century later.

Other case studies in this book focus on the Elokeshi-Tarakeswar mohunt scandal, the subject of numerous plays and Kalighat prints in the 1870s; the Phulmonee case of the violent death of a child- wife, raped by her 29-year-old husband; and the beginnings of women's autobiographical writings in Rashsundari Debi's Amar Jiban (1876). Each study is fascinating and instructive in its own right.

At one point in her account, Sarkar differentiates three late 19th-century approaches to wifehood/nationhood: that of the revivalist-nationalists, fiercely opposed to any reformist intervention into the sacred space of Hindu domesticity; a broader category of Hindu revivalists who were not per se opposed to reforms in the domestic sphere; and the liberal nationalist voice of the Indian Association and the Indian National Congress. Sarkar focuses exclusively on the first of these formulations as the authentic voice of Hindu cultural nationalism. This is eminently justifiable, given the continuities with the contemporary discourse of Hindu Right-wing organisations that she seeks to underline. All the same, this muting of the other voices in the vibrantly fluid debates on Hindu conjugality rather leaves the impression of a one-handed clap.

Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Tanika Sarkar, New Delhi: Permanent Black, p.290.

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