Gender and Hindu Nationalism

Understanding Masculine Hegemony

Prem Kumar Vijayan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317235767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents an innovative approach to gender, nationalism, and the relations between them, and analyses the broader social base of Hindu nationalist organisation to understand the growth of 'Hindutva', or Hindu nationalism, in India.

Arguing that Hindu nationalist thought and predilections emerge out of, and, in turn, feed, pre-existing gendered tendencies, the author presents the new concept of 'masculine hegemony', specifically Brahmanical masculine hegemony. The book offers a historical overview of the processes that converge in the making of the identity 'Hindu', in the making of the religion 'Hinduism', and in the shaping of the movement known as 'Hindutva'. The impact of colonialism, social reform, and caste movements is explored, as is the role of key figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, and Narendra Modi. The book sheds light on the close, yet uneasy, relations that Hindu nationalist thought and practice have with conceptions of 'modernity', 'development' and women's movements, and politics, and the future of Hindu nationalism in India.

A new approach to the study of Hindu nationalism, this book offers a theoretically innovative understanding of Indian history and socio-politics. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of Gender studies and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian history and politics.

1 Introduction

The myths of India

‘…[W]hatever is [said] here is also [found] elsewhere; if it is not here, it is nowhere’ (cited in González-Reimann, 2011: 110). This fairly well-known quote from the Mahābhārata in many ways captures possibly the grandest mythology that India has ever produced – the mythology of India itself.

A similar observation was made by Dalit leader Dr BR Ambedkar, many years ago:

The first and foremost thing that must be recognized is that Hindu Society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mahomedans to the natives for the purpose of distinguishing themselves. It does not occur in any Sanskrit work prior to the Mahomedan invasion. They did not feel the necessity of a common name, because they had no conception of their having constituted a community. Hindu Society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes.

(Ambedkar, 1936: 20)

This, as well as the claims above, may all seem somewhat hyperbolic statements to make, given that the subcontinent has been a veritable cornucopia of myths and legends, from its famous epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to the universe of myths surrounding its apocryphal 36 million gods, to its parables and folklore that have inspired writers for centuries, in India and beyond. In fact, the mythology of India – the myth that is India – certainly encompasses these, but it is not restricted to them. It is also constituted of myths and legends that have been marginalised, deprecated, suppressed, even erased (but somehow still persisting, in fragments and echoes, or camouflaged as parts of other myths and legends). Further, it is teeming with myths often pronounced as facts, and conversely, with facts often denounced as myths (Dayal, 2012; Sarkar, 2017). This historical proximity of the idea and identity of India with its myths and mythologies becomes particularly significant when we consider that, at least since the Enlightenment, myths and mythology have been consistently posed as antithetical to ‘modernity’, perceived as ‘pre-modern’ phenomena that will recede before the spread of ‘rationality’. This perception has been referred to quite disparagingly as ‘the myth of mythlessness’ (Coupe, 1997: 12).

The significance of this lies in the fact that, as a ‘post-colony’, the pursuit of ‘modernity’ along the lines of its Enlightenment definition – i.e. the pursuit of the ‘the myth of mythlessness’ – seems to be a tendency coded into the post-colonial condition itself. This programme – of the pursuit of ‘modernity’ – is known more commonly in the ‘post-colonies’ by the generic term, ‘development’. However, what is often forgotten in this translation of ‘modernity’ into ‘development’ is that the history of ‘modernity’ is in many ways profoundly and fundamentally antithetical to the ‘development’ agenda. The ‘modernity’ of the colonial ‘West’ was arguably powered by, sustained on, and oriented towards, the imperial conquest and colonial exploitation and expropriation of the ‘non-West’. In contrast, the ‘development’ agenda of the ‘post-colonies’ that constitute this ‘non-West’ is largely driven by, and sustained on, scientific, technological, and financial aid from the same ‘West’ that they now claim to be independent of, as ‘post-colonies’. This irony is intensified by the fact that much of the capital-base from which these ‘post-colonies’ receive their aid was constituted by exploiting them in the first place; and it continues to thrive on the interest and fees (in multiple forms and kinds) charged on that aid, from the ‘post-colonies’ availing of that aid.

From here, the irony not only intensifies further, it borders on the tragic. The orientation of this ‘development’ agenda is ostensibly towards the modernisation of the ‘post-colony’. In actual fact, it usually aims to serve the interests of a small elite only, at the expense of the rest of the ‘post-colony’ (Fanon, 1967). The contradictions inherent to this condition of ‘internal colonialism’ are obvious. They are consequently also fertile ground for mythogenesis – i.e. for the manufacture of mythologies that can account for them, explain them, and render them acceptable to those exploited and/or victimised by them. Yet another irony emerges here: the pursuit of ‘modernity’, rather than leading to mythlessness, leads to more myths then, one of which in fact is the ‘myth of mythlessness’. However, since our usage of the term ‘myth’ here seems to facilitate its own cannibalisation, to the point of appearing completely self-contradictory – and since ‘myth’ is in any case a much-used and -abused term – it is best to clarify how we are using it here, before we proceed any further. At the same time, it must also be noted that, since this book is not concerned with myths and mythology per se, our clarifications regarding them will be no more than is required for and relevant to our arguments here.

Two perspectives on ‘myth’ are particularly resonant in this regard. The first is from mythologist Elizabeth Baeten, who argues that ‘myth’ is a term

used to describe what is ‘other’, what does not belong to the existential, intellectual, cultural or historical position of the person applying the label ‘mythical’…. [It] works to identify and classify aspects of human existence that are foreign to the observer.

(Baeten, 1996: 24)

This very general, generic definition of myth is inherently and fatally flawed in one sense, viz. in its location of the ‘mythical’ beyond all cognitive frameworks. It begs the question of how the ‘mythical’ is cognised in the first place, if it is not even available intellectually. Nevertheless, it thereby also serves very usefully to alert us to the fact that the category of the ‘mythical’ is an ontological paradox: its existence is defined by its non-existence. This paradox is explicable by differentiating the existence of the myth – as a form of representation, narrative, even discourse – from its ‘non-existent’, imaginary referents. ‘Mythlessness’ then refers to the putative condition in which myths, as real narratives of imaginary referents, are no longer possible. In the phrase ‘myth of mythlessness’, this putative condition is itself perceived to be imaginary. It is this quality of the ‘mythic’ that permits what we observed above as its propensity for self-cannibalisation.

In order to gain a better understanding of ‘myth’ however, this perspective must be read with the second perspective that I invoke here, from another scholar of myth: Laurence Coupe argues that myths may be paradigmatic (in the sense of offering a framework of understanding); may conceptualise perfection, in the social or cosmic order they articulate; and may also carry the ‘promise of another mode of existence entirely, a possible way of being just beyond the present time and place’ (Coupe, 1997: 9). Taken together, these two perspectives suggest the following points about ‘myth’:

1. The framework of understanding articulated in and by myths is necessarily a putative one – necessitated, in fact, by the absence of understanding about that which is posited as ‘alien’, ‘other’, and mythified through this framework.
2. The fact that it is a putative framework, that is often not provable or verifiable, is compensated for by its articulation of that understanding as a proviso for order (or ‘perfection’). That is, the credibility of the myth lies not in its verifiability but in the authority of its conception of ‘order’ or ‘perfection’.
3. This conception of perfection would have little significance or consequence, if it was not also articulated as a possible, viable, realisable order, its ‘otherness’ circumscribed by its realisability.

These points have multiple implications and ramifications for the understanding of the mythology of India, which we had necessarily digressed from, and to which we will now return.

These observations about myth and mythology are no doubt sketchy, to say the least. Nevertheless, they are sufficient to discern a crucial qualitative difference. On the one hand, there is the vast bramble of myths and legends that have sprouted from and flourished in the geographical and cultural space of the Indian subcontinent over millennia; these constitute the more conventional understanding of ‘the mythologies of India’. On the other, there is a range of narratives that refer to a variety of not always identical entities as ‘India’. Included in this are, for instance, accounts by travellers from different parts of the world, to and through the subcontinent at different times in history, from the ancient, through the medieval, to the colonial and the post-colonial periods. The entities they refer to as ‘India’ occupy more-or-less the same geographical location but differ, sometimes substantially, in political and demographic territorial dimensions. There is also another set of similar narratives that refer to geographical, territorial entities that are more-or-less identical, but with different names, e.g. ‘Bharat’, ‘Hindustan’, ‘Jambudweep’.¹

One of the understandings of ‘myth’ presented above, i.e. as a real narrative about imaginary phenomena, is almost applicable to these narratives – except that the place they refer to is not imaginary. The myth-like quality that accrues to the ‘India’ of the former kind of narratives, and to the geographical space with multiple names in the latter kind, does not derive from their being imaginary. It is, rather, the effect of an asynchronicity between the narratives and their referents, such that any narrative of ‘India’ is never a complete one but calls for an imaginative leap – a leap into the realm of the ‘mythic’ – as if ‘India’ always exceeds any attempt to comprehend it in its totality. (This perception is evident as much in the writings of the medieval traveller-historian Alberuni, as in those of the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.) This historical tendency to excess – to a sort of inherent celebration of the ‘mythic’ – continues to dog the ‘India’ of the ‘post-colony’, the India of today – except that, now, it is intersected by the additional, contradictory mythologies, of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. Contemporary India, then, is riddled with the intersections of these multiple mythologies: (a) the myths and legends of the past that have not only survived but continue to evolve as narratives and as cognitive frameworks; (b) the myths and legends of the past that have not survived in their entirety but as fragments and extensions of other myths; (c) the myth of mythlessness that is associated with its aspirations to ‘modernity’; (d) the entire mythology of ‘development’ that has evolved out of the post-colonial quest for equality with the ‘West’; and (e) the mythology of ‘nationalism’ that, in fact, gets articulated in and through the intersectional dynamics of these other mythologies.

Three crucial factors have shaped the contours of these intersectional dynamics: one, the fact that, in the long history of mythogenesis in the subcontinent, it was only with the arrival of the British that the entirety of the subcontinent was conquered and consolidated into a single administrative and political entity, occupying a contiguous geographical territory.² None of the several vast empires that had waxed and waned in the millennia preceding the British, whether ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’, had actually established such a unified dominion over the entire region. More significantly, the British were the first to establish an administrative infrastructure and economic circulatory system that could bleed the mythologies of ‘modernity’ into every colonised pocket of the region, even as it bled them of their resources. And perhaps most significantly, unlike any preceding empire, the British remained alien to the territory they conquered and exploited. Instead of dropping social and cultural roots in this terrain, they remained aloof, exercising social and cultural contact only to the extent that it facilitated their military, administrative, political and economic control over this domain. Till this happened, the upper-caste elite of the subcontinent, while vertically dominant everywhere, had remained laterally dispersed into the many princedoms and sultanates of the subcontinent. British conquest of the entire region effectively unified and substantially homogenised it into an elite that, perhaps for the first time in history, could identify itself as a pan-Indian one.

The mechanics of dominance of this elite is what I refer to in this book as constituting Brahmanical masculine hegemony; it is, in many ways, the central focus of this book. The structure of this hegemony as it evolved from the pre-colonial, through the colonial, into the post-colonial period will be discussed in detail in Chapters IV and V. Here, suffice it to note that the dynamic of this evolution – the kinetics, so to speak, of its adjustments, suppressions, and elaborations of caste, class, and gender power – is the second of the two factors impacting on these intersectional mythologies. Under British imperial conquest, this Brahmanical masculine hegemony not only had to contend with its own emergence as a pan-Indian, unified identity, it was also confronted with the new mythologies that came with the British, of ‘modernity’ and ‘secularism’, and later, ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. Like all mythologies, these were frameworks of explanation (insofar as they seemed to explain British imperial power) as well as of adjudication (insofar as they also found this elite wanting and weak on several scores). More importantly, they countered the mythology of caste supremacy that this Brahmanical hegemony was founded on, with the mythology of race supremacy. As we shall see later, the relations that developed between caste and race in the colonial theatre were complex, with profound consequences. They were also unprecedented, in that, till they encountered the implacable white supremacist mythologies of the European conquerors, Brahmanical masculine hegemony had managed to retain its dominance in social, if not political terms, through all preceding encounters, including even the Mughal and Arab conquerors – perhaps because racial difference in these cases (such as might have been perceived) had not evolved into a mythology of supremacy, as it did with the encounter with Europe.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that the mythology of racial supremacy is about colour, or physiognomy – those are just the symptomatology of the disease, so to speak. Perhaps the most prodigiously underestimated aspect of this mythology is its articulation, organisation, and deployment of sexual and gender relations. This is the third crucial factor impacting on the intersectional dynamics of these mythologies. The mythology of race is by definition about notions of purity, about the maintenance of communal bloodlines through the control of sexuality, and about representing this control in gendered terms. It seeks to represent this exclusivity as its supremacy; the power to control and maintain that exclusivity then becomes not only a sign of that supremacy but also a sign of its ownership of and control over ‘its’ women’s sexuality. It differs from other such mythologies of difference that seek a similar communal exclusivity – e.g. ethnic chauvinisms, religious communalisms – primarily in its ability to naturalise difference in ‘physiological’, ‘biological’, and ‘genetic’ terms. This, in turn, translates into a naturalised supremacy of gender and sexual relations, allowing non-white communities to be perceived and represented, variously, as weaker, effeminate, bestial, etc.

Thus, even before contemporary India was carved out of that racist British dominion in 1947 (along with Pakistan), this pan-Indian elite had begun seeking roots for itself in the pre-British past, as well as explanations for what it perceived as its conquest and colonisation in terms that would not represent it as weak, or inferior. Inevitably, then, the mythology of the current nation sought its roots in the mythologies of the past, to define and validate itself as a racial and communal power that was the equal of, if not superior to, the colonial master. It sought to re-masculinise itself in and through those mythologies, and thereby re-claim the nation-state that was created and established through colonialism, as being far older than either that colonial intervention or those of the empires that preceded it; and hence as its own. The two chapters following this, i.e. Chapters II and III, attempt to offer a theoretical and analytical framework within which to make sense of the complex gender dynamics that were effected through the intersection of these multiple mythologies. They cognise the fact that mythologies of nation are sourced as much from (imagination...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the myths of India
• 2 Towards a theory of masculine hegemony – I: modes of dominance
• 3 Towards a theory of masculine hegemony – II: patriarchy as masculine hegemony
• 4 The emergence of the Hindu right – I
• 5 The emergence of the Hindu right – II
• 6 From independence to the Emergency
• 7 The present
• 8 Of endings and beginnings
• Index