The late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed a transitional moment in the evolving politics of gender in colonial Bengal. From this time onwards, there were definitive and important positional shifts in the construction of the normative ideals of femininity – shifts that took into account the changed context of women’s domestic and public roles, newer sensibilities of colonial romanticism and modernity, and the new challenges represented by the women’s movement and the increasing communalisation of politics. There was an endeavour to make women and the home into national icons really represented the efforts of bhadralok nationalists to define “the nation” in their own image, and to appoint themselves guardians of its political project. The new ways of communitarian ideologies – whether Hindu or Muslim – were becoming increasingly influential, and this posed several challenges for Indian feminism and its traditions of political secularism, which had sought to build cross-communal solidarities. Ideologically, it meant a reinforcement of older stereotypes of women’s “virtues” of self-sacrifice.
At the level of practical politics, it meant that women’s entry into formal political life came about less because of a radical groundswell from below, and more as the consequence of male patronage from above, implying considerable political dependence. It also meant that Indian women tended to subordinate their own concerns to those of male leaders. Such changes brought about transformations equally profound in the “inner” realms of moral sensibility and sexual identity. Sexuality here was not merely a matter of the “private” world of domestic life or individual sensibility. Sex and gender, public and private, masculine and feminine were linked in the processes through which sexual identities – as well as the moral realms in which they were lived – could be transformed.
The communalisation of the bhadralok political culture brought new challenges to the nationalist patriarchy and forced it to fashion new modalities of its control regarding women. It is critically important to note that within the burgeoning, alarmist Hindu discourse in these decades, the Hindu woman came to occupy centre stage, but in a novel way. She was to be not only protected, but also disciplined and controlled. Her sexuality and reproductive power could in no way be exposed to Muslim men, since that could cause the control of the Hindu male to slip away. From the mid-1920s, newspapers began to overflow with stories of how Hindu women were being oppressed and abducted by Muslim goondas (ruffians). By the late 1920s, Muslim men came to be perceived as the main threat to the “chastity” of Hindu women.
Newspapers and pamphlets cautioned Hindus not to allow their women and children to have any dealings with Muslim traders, teachers, and servants. Implicit here was also the fear of Hindu women losing control of their sexuality and falling prey to the desires of Muslim men. In northern India, this even led to an economic and social boycott, intended to facilitate the isolation of Hindu women from all Muslims and thus reduce the anxieties of the Hindu patriarchy (Gupta 2000). But Bengal followed not far behind. The upper-caste bhadralok paranoia about abductions led to the establishment of the Women’s Protection League in 1924 and a meeting of the League was held in Calcutta’s Albert Hall, which was attended by at least a thousand people. The record of the organisation in physically mobilising people was not impressive. But it managed to exert a profound impact on public life as it generated a discursive obsession with the issue.
Developments such as these bring us to a critical point – a reorientation of “the woman question” with which this book began. The bhadralok iconography of the “New Woman” in the 19th century was based on a critical distinction between two different kinds of women – the uneducated, garrulous, “old” or “pre-modern” women that repulsed the educated, reformist males, and the educated, refined, “New Women” that not only were perfect helpmeets to their husbands but also informed an emerging nationalist politics of gender. If this refinement of the mind was a distinguishing factor in the 19th century, the perceived threat to the body of the Hindu woman was a great leveller in the 20th.
It acted as an aggregate factor that bound refined and garrulous, educated and unlettered, elite and non-elite women together in an undifferentiated mass. The body of the Hindu woman, in other words, now became a site of contestation, a sort of battlefield for Hindu publicists. Overriding all social, intellectual, and discursive distinctions, the abstracted figure of the “threatened” Hindu woman now became a symbol of the purity and exclusivity of Hindus, and her movements thus had to be carefully regulated. Anti-abduction campaigns, shifting debates on widow remarriage, anxiety over declining Hindu numbers, fears created by alleged elopements and voluntary acts of conversions by some Hindu women (particularly widows, low-caste women, and prostitutes) created a complex discourse that strengthened community identities and sharpened the consequent polarisation.
Conversions now came to be challenged in an organised manner, and as part of their community and nation-making discourse, the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha launched the programme of shuddhi (purification) and samgathan (mobilisation) on a large scale. Both implied a strictly regulated code of conduct for women. Many stories were circulated around this period about abductions and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas, and such tales became a significant tool in the mobilisation of Hindus.
The propaganda campaign against “abductions”, often fed into the creation of the image of the sexually charged, lustful Muslim male, keen on violating the “pure” body of the Hindu woman. An obsession with numbers added a further dimension to this logic. The numerically-defined strength of the community became a significant component of communal consciousness, helping to stabilise Hindu identities around these new orientations. All Hindu women, including widows, came to be perceived as potential wombs, capable of producing “strong” Hindu progeny as an antidote to the numerical threat posed by the Muslims. This paranoid concern over numbers therefore, increased control over the sexuality and reproductive capacity of Hindu women.
Thus, in this period of heightened communalism, Hindu publicists were able to use the woman’s body as a key element in an increasingly polarising and paranoid discourse. The creation of this looming spectre of a physical violation, unleashed by the forced entry of the Muslim “outsider” into the innermost realm of the Hindu household marked a crucial shift from the earlier century, with the colonial “Other” replaced largely by the Muslims in the machinery of Hindu communalist propaganda. With the increasing communalisation of politics and rising complexity over lower-caste assertions and their accommodation within the high Hindu fold, a reorientation of the politics of gender took place in the first few decades of the 20th-century Bengal. “The woman question” – the centrepiece of a discursive struggle between colonialism and nationalism in the 19th century and coming to focus on the figure of the “New Woman” in the last quarter of that century – lost its pre-eminence inasmuch as the question had earlier tended to revolve round didactic elements of education and demeanour. In the new scenario, “the woman question” got inseparably linked with the demarcation of communal cultural identities.
In a curious shift, Hindu women now needed to be “protected” from the communal “Other” – that is, Muslims – and no longer from the coloniser’s intrusive reach into the “private sphere”. This turn in the nationalist cultural politics of gender produced a communally charged politics of the body, witnessed during the bloody years of the Partition. A similar kind of communalisation can be seen in the reinvention of the “quintessential Hindu/Indian womanhood” in the cultural politics of Hindu fundamentalism in more recent times. The gestation of these processes through the 1930s and 1940s might help in a better understanding of their origins and early evolution, processes which eventually developed to form an inescapable part of contemporary India’s politics and culture.
Excerpted with permission from For Home, Family, and Nation: Women and the Politics of Gender in Bengal, 1870–1947, Aparajita Dasgupta–Sengupta, Orient Black Swan.
