The Hindu : Gujarat and majority women

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 15, 2002

Opinion

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Gujarat and majority women

By Nonica Datta

"I DO not find anything wrong here" was the reaction of a young middle-class gynaecologist who drove through the roads of Ahmedabad littered with bodies burning all around. She was not stirred by the brutal savagery to which she was a witness on the first day of the Gujarat carnage. She was indifferent to the public brutalisation of Muslim women. Yet, her perception was not unusual. Many Gujarati Hindu women in fact shared it; they showed little inclination to soothe the pain of the victims and survivors. In fact, many of them either remained silent on the rape of Muslim women or justified it. Above all, many women were actively involved in looting, arson and destruction. Surely, their endorsement of the recent genocide is a testimony to their growing communal consciousness. And yet, one shudders to think how, why and to what extent has the Hindu woman become so communalised.

Today's communalised woman in Gujarat, and her ilk elsewhere, is produced by her forerunner in colonial India. With the strengthening of Brahmanic Hinduism and orthodox traditions, the Hindu woman's role within the family and community was redefined in the late 19th century. Hindu reformist organisations prescribed new rules for the role and status of women. Religio-communitarian forces and tenets shaped the everyday life of Hindu women, belonging to diverse caste and class backgrounds. In the process, women strengthened their position as mothers, daughters, wives, reformers, and professionals. With their limited access to political circles and institutional structures, they came to acquire a new position within the Hindu family and society. Their experience, shared by Hindu men, contributed to the growth of sectarian identities and Hindu nationalisms.

Women's participation in communal movements in contemporary India is widely recognised. However, little is known about women in localities who fortified caste identities, promoted communal tendencies, and forged their identities within a religio-communitarian context in colonial India. Consider the testimony of Subhashini, an 88-year-old Jat woman. She talks about the virtues of her Arya Samaj upbringing in rural Haryana. Educated at Kanya Gurukul Dehradun, in the 1920s, she committed herself to rural women's Arya Samaji education by establishing a Kanya Gurukul in Khanpur village in 1942. Though exposed to Gandhi's nationalist struggle in the 1930s, she was principally committed to the notion of a Hinduised Jat identity. She actively supported shuddhi (reconversion), sangathan (organisation), Ved-prachar (proselytisation) and cow-protection campaigns. Many of her pupils and teachers remained brahmacharinis (celibate), for the purpose of serving the Hindu community and nurturing patriotism.

Central to Subhashini's worldview was her obsessive fear of Muslims. She trained her girls in self-defence techniques, including the use of arms, as protection against imaginary Muslim attacks. She emphasised the threat of Hindu women's abduction by Muslims, but justified the reality of Muslim women being abducted by Jat men in the 1930s and 1940s. She celebrated Partition violence as a providential moment in which the Hindu Jats wiped out Muslims from her part of Punjab (now Haryana). The Partition was a final resolution of a long-standing conflict between her Jat community and Muslims. Her land was cleansed of the Muslims' presence. Her fear of Muslim menace vanished. She and her pupils felt safe, secure and liberated, and their sense of Jat identity fused with a supra-Hindu identity in the aftermath of India's partition.

But Subhashini was not alone in holding such beliefs. There were many women like her, in other parts of the country, who were active agents of a Hindu communitarian agenda and anti-Muslim sentiments. It was primarily through their adherence to religious orthodoxies that they came to occupy a respectable position within the Hindu family, community and society. This sort of space was neither available to women participating in anti-colonial nationalist struggles, nor to those subscribing to radical, secular traditions. Hindu communal organisations and leaders supported women's anxieties against Muslims, and co-opted their concerns into the broader Hindutva movement.

Women's agency was a critical factor in the shaping of a Hindu identity. Their agency worked subtly, and, at times, invisibly. Their agency drew boundaries between Hindus and Muslims in ways in which the homes of Hindus were closed to Muslims and their touch was seen as polluting. Their agency functioned in a way that they could not transcend or cross their family and caste-community boundaries to identify with their Muslim counterparts. Instead, they often identified themselves as vulnerable Hindu women threatened by the `sexually predatory Muslim male'. This stereotyping justified Hindus' violence against Muslims, for communal riots were often triggered by rumours of the sexual assault of Hindu women by Muslim men in pre-Independence India.

Today, the BJP draws on the same exclusivist language. The imaginary suspicion of the Muslim as an aggressor and a sexual predator continues to haunt the Hindu nationalist's psyche. Little wonder then that the Sangh Parivar has now circulated rumours about the abduction of Hindu and Adivasi women by Muslim men to mobilise diverse communities to attack Muslims, and to extend its base in rural and urban areas in Gujarat.

The participation of women activists in the movement in favour of Ram's temple in Ayodhya, and in Hindu right-wing organisations is an enduring legacy of the communalisation of Hindu women in colonial India. Indeed, the brahmacharinis of the past are turned into the sanyasins and sadhvis of today. This explains the prominent BJP women leaders' indifference to the rape and humiliation of Muslim women, and their refusal to take a gender-sensitive stand on the State Government's brutal attitude and the calculated inaction of the police forces in Gujarat.

The Gujarat carnage demonstrates the most horrifying divide between the majority and minority women — the majority women have emerged as tormentors, while the minority women appear as vulnerable victims. Everyday reactions of many ordinary Hindu women show how they, like their predecessors, continue to identify with majoritarianism, rather than empathise with the sorrow, fear and insecurity of minority women. This explains the refusal of the young gynaecologist and many like her to join the angst of the `other' in Gujarat. What they want is a `Hinduised society', what they desire is a sense of `Gujaratiness' deriving from an aggressive Hindu identity. Surely, most of them derive their ideological sustenance from their communalist inheritance. The BJP will continue to take advantage of their moorings. It is time that such women discarded their communal baggage, evaluated their historical legacy, and spoke the language of courage, sanity and personal freedom. If they change the way they think, they may blur the boundaries between Hindu and Muslim women — us and them — and forge a new kind of `us'.

(The writer teaches History at Miranda House, University of Delhi)

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