Session 104: Gender Politics in India: Material and Symbolic Resources

Organizer: Dibyesh Anand, University of Bath

Chair: Rajani Kanth, Duke University

Discussant: Nishtha G. Singh, Princeton University

Keywords: India, gender, property, representation, identity.

Access to networks of resources (both material and symbolic) is a crucial question for gendered subjectivities. Gender politics in India is a part of wider networks of contestatory social relations, economic forces, identity discourses, political movements, and representations. The panel investigates the contours of gender relations in India from different disciplinary perspectives including economics, law, political science, international relations, feminism, history, and anthropology. It explores some of the ways in which ‘women’ act, and are acted upon, in the everyday politics of living—as ‘dependent’ in legal discourses that heavily circumscribe women’s access to property rights; as ‘communal resources’ to be fought over by masculinist right wing identity politics (e.g., Hindutva); as an ‘ornamental’ resource to generate the images of male-dominated Indian cinema; as ‘cultural resources’ that sustain a sense of belonging in diaspora (among Tibetan refugees in India). The papers provide critical analyses of current trends and foreground the impulses to progressive change. In doing so, they highlight the constitutive relations between material and symbolic networks of resources in relation to gender politics in India.

Gender, Colonial Rule, and Property Rights in India

Nitasha Kaul, University of the West of England

The aim of this paper is to investigate how continuing patriarchal assumptions and the historical experience of colonialism have framed women’s access to property (WAP) in India—the implications of this, and the directions for reform.

First, the paper offers a juridical analysis of the assumptions behind property inheritance laws in India, where an important factor is the ‘dependency’ status of women in conferring property rights. The concept of (male) coparcener has not been fully discarded from the law of Joint Hindu families, and the paper assesses the effectiveness of various strategies to reform the legal system in the postcolonial era.

Second, the economic dimension of access to property cannot be overstated in a (proto) capitalist context. Interactions of colonial institutions with local systems (mitakshara, dayabhag) in different Indian regions/communities is used to study the ways in which laws governing WAP were affected by colonial rule. In postcolonial times, this historical narrative can be enhanced with empirical evidence on the economic performance of different Indian states, and WAP within them.

Finally, the paper examines the implications of this gendered access to property, and discusses the potential avenues for reform. Women’s disadvantaged access to material and symbolic resources and networks (property as control over land, jewelry, labor power) is reflected in their lifelong economic outcomes and social voice, but not in the conventional measures of economic prosperity. This necessitates a greater engagement with development agendas (such as Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’) when assessing the impact of any legal or institutional reforms.

Carving a New Identity: The Changing Portrayal of Women in Indian Cinema

Rajesh Kumar, Kanpur University, India

Cinema is an integral part of modern Indian culture, and the Indian film industry, being the largest in the world, has a turnover second only to the U.S. The paper argues that Indian cinema (characterized by diversity of genre, language, regionality, budget, and so on) can be seen as a crucial resource for understanding the dynamics of gender and sexuality in contemporary India. The stereotypical representation of women as dependent on males characterized the cinematic landscape for a large part of the twentieth century. Although during the sixties and seventies, noted directors including Gurudutt, Bimal Roy and Basu Bhattacharya made movies that gave space to feminine sensitivities, the subsequent two decades were dominated by action (male) hero-oriented movies with women reduced to mere props for adding glamour and dance sequences. But since the nineties, there has been a marked trend of women-oriented cinema in which women are shown as holding top political-bureaucratic positions or having professional lives. Even if they are depicted as housewives, their characterization is far stronger. There have been many movies of late that have explored female sexuality and sensitivities, hitherto a taboo subject in Indian cinema. The paper will analyze the reasons behind the changing portrayal of women in Indian cinema (including the role of economic liberalization and the emergence of satellite foreign and domestic TV channels), provide a discursive analysis of the new representations, and argue that these new images are resources that might offer space for more egalitarian gender relations in India.

Constructing Hindu Masculinity: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Hate in India

Dibyesh Anand, University of Bath

This paper explores gender and sexuality as resources that are mobilized to both legitimate and resist the contemporary identity politics of hate in India. It foregrounds the processes through which ‘the Other’ is discursively produced as a source of insecurity to the Self. As communal riots such as those in Gujarat in 2002 have shown, the ‘real’ (and often gendered) violence against Muslim men and women requires an appreciation of the discourse of Hindutva (the Hindu nationalist movement) that has repeatedly sought to define a civilized and peaceful progressive Hindu Self against the ‘barbaric’ and inherently violent backward Muslims. The paper outlines processes through which discourses of masculinity and femininity are constructed in line with the politics of violence. The case of Hindutva reveals the constitutive links between personal, local, national, regional, and international levels of politics—images of rapacious Muslim men threatening the ‘dignity’ of Hindu women (thus exhorting the masculinity of hitherto ‘peaceful’ Hindu men to rise in defense), Muslims as traitors and pro-Pakistan, and Islam as being uniquely responsible for producing troubles and terrorists throughout the world (‘the war on terror’) all feed into each other. The monolith of Hindu India to be led by Hindu (real) men is sought to be produced through real (socio-political mobilization) and virtual (use of modern communications including mobile phone and internet, rumor, gossip, etc.) networks. The paper concludes by highlighting how the discourses of gender and sexuality can also offer resources for resisting the politics of hate and violence of Hindutva.

Reckless Engenderment: Changing Parameters of Tibetan Gender in Refugee Communities in India

P. Christiaan Klieger, California Academy of Sciences

In the forty-five years that the Tibetan nation has been in exile in India, one could reasonably expect that changes have occurred in what has been historically construed as traditional Tibetan society. In the multifarious category of ‘identity,’ however, the experience of exile has tended to harden both ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ self-perceptions. In the most general sense, Tibetans have become ‘more Tibetan’ since migrating to India, in an attempt to maintain a social distance with their Indian hosts. However, despite this apparent resistance to change, great modifications can be seen in social organization and gender role expectations in Tibetan refugee communities, especially those that are urbanized. To what extent have these identities changed, and why have they changed? Early data suggest that: (1) gender role expectations have adjusted to workplace opportunities afforded in modern India; and (2) marriage patterns and household organization have changed radically in exile. These significant adjustments may have been causal in the breakdown in essentialist categories of traditional gender expectations of old Tibet. For example, more latitude is currently being expressed in the realm of women’s role in society, gender role expectations, and sexual orientation in urban Tibetan refugee life, than ever was noted in pre-1959 Tibet and the first generation of Tibetan refugees. This paper will examine some of the recent work done on changing gender expectations among urban Tibetan refugees in India.

Hindu Ascendancy in India: Religion, State and Cultural Dominance

Angana Chatterji, California Institute of Integral Studies

This paper maps the incursion of Hindu nationalism in Orissa, eastern India. It interrogates Hindu cultural dominance and nationalist mobilization as it gains momentum in the postcolonial state, that operates as legatee to its imperial colonizer, inheriting and modifying its biopolitics. It speaks to majoritarianism in the context of liberal development, the related apparatus of nation making, mediated by issues of religion, caste, class, culture, tribe and gender. Hindu nationalism’s production of culture and nation is escalating, punctuated by breakdown and violence. What multiple and problematic affects result from the extension of politicized religious culture into private and social life? How is religion linked to state, to identity politics, to reinventions of history, to the normalization of difference, to gendered violence, to the fabrication of "internal enemies"? The paper, as history of a discontinuous present, offers counter-narratives of lives often reduced to "lack" or "spectacle," reciting minority-subaltern claims in rethinking nation, rights and difference.