Book: RELIGION AND WOMEN IN INDIA: GENDER, FAITH, AND POLITICS 1780S–1980S

Author: Tanika Sarkar

Published by: Permanent Black/ Ashoka University

Price: Rs 1,095

Those of us who found their voice in articulating concerns about gender and women’s issues, thanks to the publication of the monumental Recasting Women (edited by Kumkum Sangari et al) in 1989, will find an equally compelling occasion to celebrate Tanika Sarkar’s new work. Not only does it provide an exemplary overview of the scholarship on gender and women’s history in modern India but it also moves decisively away from the colonial-nationalist paradigm in understanding and explaining women’s issues and aligns it to broader scholarship on labour, intersectionality and politics. In fact, it argues against the “grain of the general run of feminist certainties” and suggests that the real challenges to gender discrimination in colonial India came not from colonial policies but from Indian men and women. An equally important formulation that undergirds the work is the persistence of religion in understanding gender, even as it navigates the intersection of labour and gender.

In developing the argument, Sarkar offers in the first chapters, a short but significant excursus into the domain of lawmaking in colonial India, wherein she argues that colonial interventions in rearranging and redirecting community law were by and large tentative and half-hearted, leaving behind a legacy of ambiguity that post-colonial India with active political support capitalises on. The referencing of contemporary issues (the Ayappan controversy, the Gujarat government’s bill making parental consent for love marriages mandatory) is useful and elegantly done and helps the reader get the necessary perspective to understand the nature of colonial law and its intervention.

The redesigning of gender relations happened at multiple levels with several agents at work. We have a crisp treatment of liberal reform, of changes in tribal culture as a consequence of missionary proselytisation, of caste and self-respect movements that brought attention to caste and gender juxtaposed with slow institutional development like education and public health. We have on record the work of remarkable men and women who questioned the degraded status of women, some who read the scriptures and found solace, others who rebelled and demanded access to education and profession. There is one particularly interesting subsection on birth control and the articulation of female sexuality — something that has remained relatively under-studied. Even though the details in this section are sparse, the conclusion drawn from it remains important and compelling, namely, that the woman’s body mostly understood as a fictive site of tradition now became a readable and writable body.

Law, reform and discourse constituted but one aspect in the reordering of gender relations. In two substantial chapters, Sarkar draws attention to the working of labour economies and the political domain, both of which were crucial in impacting women’s lives and their articulation of rights and gender equality. Admittedly, the actual examples of female trade union activists and even political leaders are not as many as we would like, but they remain important as they suggest new ways of telling the story of modernity, nationalism and citizenship in which women are crucial stakeholders and agents. It is the foregrounding of women as historical actors that makes this work really significant as an example of how women’s history can be presented to both an academic and informed lay audience. There is one chapter on notions of holy and unholy gender that takes the reader through important debates on female sexuality and morality but does not quite cohere into the larger concerns she has on religion and gender in contemporary India, something she signposts in the very beginning.

The last two chapters of the book speak of post-colonial India where social issues of discrimination or legal issues of reformism (dowry, sati) remain to be fully resolved. Even with the case of widows, whose situation is no longer as dastardly as it was in the 19th century, issues of precarity and financial insecurity remain. The Shah Bano case revealed fault lines in the presumed secularism of India when the government capitulated to the opposition of the conservative Muslim lobby as a result of which the Muslim Women Act of 1986 removed the provision for the maintenance of a divorced Muslim woman from the relevant law. This only served to harden the position of the right-wing parties, which saw this as a concession to the minority community. The chapter also references the active campaigns of Indian feminists for change in criminal, especially rape, laws, the nature of State repression, especially in the Northeast and, finally, of gender in cinema. In its range of issues covered, the chapter is a compelling testimony to the paramountcy of gender as a site in contemporary Indian realities and representation and to the exemplary work undertaken by women themselves.

Sarkar’s work makes a major contribution to the field of gender studies. It is a comprehensive and synthesised textbook which opens up the complexity of gender relations in modern India with a fine-grained argument about female agency in
the articulation of gender rights and equality. What remains ambiguous is the intersection of faith and gender — it is an a priori assumption that the author works
with but in terms of actual empirical story-telling, it remains unclear.