Middle-Class Values in India and Western Europe

Imtiaz Ahmad, Helmut Reifeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351384261
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Middle-class Values in India and Western Europe discusses the distinctive attributes of the middle classes in France, Germany and India. The construction of new norms of respectability is a universal feature of the middles classes, though their rhetoric has varied in different societies. Drawing on historical experiences in both western Europe and colonial India, the contributors to this volume try to understand the common inheritance of these newly emerging middle classes and the social and political impact they have had on their societies of origin. Each study is based on detailed research and combines both theoretical and empirical material.

The book is divide into three sections. The first section, 'The Rise of the Middle Class in India and Western Europe' has three chapters and they dwell on the middle class and secularization; the middle classes in twentieth-century India; and the values of the middle classes in Germany. The second section, 'Class Formation in the Twentieth Century' contains four essays which discuss the character of the Indian middle class; middle-class values and the creation of a civil society; the 'Grand Ecoles' in France; and the changing social structure of the German society and the transformation of the German bourgeois culture. The last section, 'Values and Orientations' consists of five papers on the Indian middle class and explore the cultural construction of gender in urban India; the Dalit middle class; the political orientation of the middle classes; the politics of the middle classes and their shifting class values.

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Part Three

Values and Orientations

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chapter eight

Middle-class Formation and the Cultural Construction of Gender in Urban India

● Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of a sizeable Indian middle class in the last decades¹ is widely regarded—with hope by the ‘modernizers’ and fear by the ‘traditionalists’—as the single most important development in the ongoing transformation of Indian society. Within this largely urban, college educated group, it is the woman whose attitudes, behaviour, values and role perceptions have excited considerable interest. The middle class woman is truly pan-Indian in her characteristic features. Whether she lives in cities like Agra, Varanasi, Patna and Hyderabad, or in the larger metropolises of Delhi, or Mumbai and Bangalore, her aspirations and fears are the same. What is significant for her identity formation is her social class, rather than any peculiarities of her local or linguistic culture. Initially, this brings up the question of how class and gender are related. To what extent did the ideologies of Indian womanhood and femininity influence the formation of a middle class? And to what extent is this identity-formation based on religious grounds? What does gender mean in these contexts? Having these questions in mind, I will focus on the cultural construction of Indian femininity and the dynamics of religious ideology in the urban middle class.

I will argue that an important theme in the process of shaping the Indian nation and its middle class has been the ideology of female shakti (power) and female chastity—cultural themes that have been taken up in the agenda of Hindu fundamentalist formations, such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Since the ideology of the pure and ‘perfect wife’, as well as the ‘powerful mother’ was one of the major elements in the bid of the Indian middle class to disassociate itself from other classes and social groups, I will look at how ‘ideal womanhood’ is being presently ‘renegotiated’ by the younger generation.

To clarify the link between female identity and social class requires a closer look at the ideology of the ‘perfect wife’—the pativrata—and the changes it is undergoing in the urban environment at present.

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY DURING THE REFORM AND INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS

The term pativrata is a strongly ideological and religiously charged concept, which is used as a term for an ‘ideal wife’ who has taken a vow (vrat) for her husband (pati). She should have qualities like obedience, patience and gentleness, and should serve her husband like a god. Her devotion contains submission, unlimited loyalty and sexual chastity. It is especially the idea of female chastity, which in connection with Victorian prudery became a dominant cultural paradigm in the nineteenth century; one that hasn’t lost its importance till today.

As I will show later, this paradigm is dosely related to the formation of the Indian middle class itself. It is well known that Sita,² the heroine of the Ramayana,³ has been the most cited example of an ideal pativrata and a role model for Hindu women. Traces of this normative model are still engraved in the imagination and self-perception of Hindu women today. Even though the idealization of women as submissive, sacrificing pativratas has been repeatedly emphasized in religious Sanskrit-texts, these texts are not a reliable witness to the social reality, either in the past or today. The texts, which were usually composed by high-caste men, reflect the interests and practices of a minor but powerful elite. Yet, repetitious themes and conflicts do give valuable information about cultural paradigms, particularly because ideas, values and role models are often substantially influenced by the powerful groups of a society (in the case of India by its highest castes). Therefore, although one should refrain from evaluating Sita as a mirror of high-caste female behaviour, the pativrata-ideal did influence the orientation and social status of middle class women by deeply moulding their perception and thoughts—and with it their gender identity.⁴ The Indian middle class was emerging by the end of the nineteenth century due to massive social and political changes and the establishment of a gigantic bureaucratic administration and legal system by the British. Since the entry into this professional class was through education in the English medium, the emerging middle class was predominantly high caste. Accordingly, high-caste values, like purity and sexual chastity, together with the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century values—such as national pride, education and Victorian prudery—led to a new ideal of Hindu womanhood. In the process of establishing high-caste (middle class) values and re-negotiating Hindu identity, women were to become symbols of stability and tradition as well as icons of purity.

I will show how this new ideal of womanhood was promoted during the Hindu reform movement and the rising independence movement by using the examples of the goddess Bharat Mata⁵ and Rabrindanath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World (Tagore 1961 (1919)).

The goddess Bharat Mata was invented in 1882 by the famous Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterji in his influential book Anandamath (Monastery of Bliss) (Chatterji 1992).⁶ With this novel, Chatterji inspired a new wave of patriotic writings and influenced a multitude of authors and intellectuals, as well as religious reformers, such as Aurobindo Chose⁷ and Vivekananda. Through their words and deeds they helped spread the popularity of the new goddess in the educated sections of society. Embedded in the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century, the goddess Bharat Mata became a symbolic figure for a whole nation. It was a commonly held belief that ‘true patriotism’ can only be created through the portrait of a powerful goddess. This was based on the conviction that the rising nationalism had a potential of endless shakti (Anderson/Damle 1987, p. 24).⁸ Shahti (power), however, is closely associated with female sexuality and the need to control it. The witty remark by Wendy Doniger, that women and demons are dangerous, but demonic women the most dangerous (Doniger 1985, pg. 97), refers to this potentially destructive power that women and goddesses are ascribed in the Hindu worldview. Shahti in connection with sexual desire and women’s inability to control it, is repeatedly mentioned in a variety of Hindu stories. To give an example, in a well known myth the goddess Kali danced wildly after having killed a gigantic demon. The gods started to worry because Kali’s ecstatic dance—her sexual energy—threatened the order of the universe. Therefore, her husband Siva threw himself underneath her feet. Only when she realized that she was stepping on her husband, did Kali stop dancing and the order was re-established. The myth refers to the ambivalent attitude towards the powerful but potentially destructive sexuality of women. It reflects the idea that female shakti will only be dangerous and destructive, when it is separated from the male. In this respect, to preserve order, women may and should direct their sexuality only towards one man, their husband. Marriage is thus a prerequisite for the control of women’s sexuality. The necessity of controlling women further led to the cultural conviction that they should never be independent. As we shall see later, this understanding has had far-reaching consequences for the lives of middle-class women. To subordinate herself first to her father, later to her husband and then to her sons was meant to assure women’s status by protecting them from breaking values like loyalty towards the males of a family and chastity towards their husbands.

The ambivalence towards women, connected to the concept of shakti is also illustrated in Tagore’s novel The Home and the World. Dealing with the fight for freedom in Bengal, Tagore creates, with his moderate hero Nikhil and the radical rebel Sandip, two poles between which Nikhil’s wife Bimala—goddess of freedom and symbol of the oppressed country—gets torn apart. In the novel, which is exemplary for the nineteenth-twentieth century Bengali cliche of womanhood, Bimala poses a danger for the freedom fighter Sandip, who has difficulty in resisting her sexual attraction. By equating ‘mother’ and ‘nation’, venerable women—like the protagonist Bimala—become symbols of Bharat Mata (Mother India). To mobilize and unite the citizens of Bharat (India), to ‘re-conquer’ the nation and restore the purity and dignity of the mother/nation (Bharat Mata), the image of a dishonoured woman proved to be a powerful symbol in evoking feelings of revenge by its humiliated children. In other words, the fight for freedom from colonial power takes place symbolically on the bodies of women. Says Sandip to Bimala:

‘Do you not know that I came to worship? Have I not told you that in you, I visualize the shahti of our country? The geography of a country is not the whole truth. No one can give up his life for a map! When I see you before me, then only do I realize how lovely my country is (Tagore 1961; pp. 90–1)’.

Tagore suggests that it requires integrative religious symbols—like the powerful mother goddess—to stir up nationalistic feelings. But with the riots that take place at the end of his novel, he critically condudes that fiery emotions (like uncontrolled shakti) will lead to violence and destruction.

By equating ‘nation’ and ‘woman’ during the independence movement, the Hindu ideal of womanhood got reformulated, proclaiming that women’s sexual chastity is a necessity to restore order, moral strength and spiritual power. By giving importance to the idealized notions of the ‘powerful mother’ but ‘chaste wife’, the moral power of women was assessed as being higher than the authority of men—a concept that Mahatma Gandhi advocated as well, when he saw in women that ‘strength made perfect in weakness’ (Lannoy 1999).

The deeply ambivalent attitude towards shahti and women’s sexuality climaxed in its combination with Victorian prudery: as a dominant value, chastity now became a means of identification for women of the rising middle class—also it differentiated them from other castes and classes. Looking at recent political developments and taking into consideration that wide sections of the urban middle class approve of national and patriotic ideals, it cannot be denied that there is a link to the deeply internalized idealization of the pure and sacrificing Hindu woman, whose dignity and chastity has to be protected. Let me illustrate this by coming back to the image of Bharat Mata.

In posters, prints and paintings from the period of the independence movement, Bharat Mata is often represented as a victim—for example as a suffering mother with sinister looking children⁹ or as a beautiful woman tied up in heavy chains, who cannot save herself.¹⁰ In militant pictures, however, where she is equipped with the weapons of the gods, her doseness to the goddesses Durga and Kali becomes more evident. Despite being an embodiment of shakti, Bharat Mata is primarily a portrayal of a humiliated, suffering pativrata who has to be avenged. Inevitably, her image evoked resistance to the British hegemony and during the independence movement she became a unifying symbol of national empowerment. As a symbol of unity, fundamentalist groups today have tried to revive her image. Being the ‘first mother’ of all Hindus and an icon of purity, she now offers herself as a vehicle for Hindu national identity in the communal conflict with Muslims. The VHP¹¹ ascetic Rithambara, for example, in her public, anti-Muslim speeches has created an image of Bharat Mata without arms. Her missing limbs symbolize the hostile countries Pakistan and Bangladesh, which got detached from independent India in 1947 (Kakar 1996). With polemics against the Muslims and using the fantasy of a mutilated mother, Rithambara contributed significantly in mobilizing thousands of Hindus to demolish the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.

By equating the female body with the nation, deeper levels of the Hindu mind were touched and allowed male assertion to manifest itself in violence under the pretext of protecting the weak and helpless woman/nation. But the question arises, how the cultural image of the chaste pativrata, who always seems to be in need of male protection, is being currently re-negotiated. Before looking at feminine values of the urban middle class today, let me give one more example why the ambivalent ideal of the helpless wife and powerful mother established itself during the course of the independence movement without being questioned, even though women started to move from the private to the public sphere and occupied revolutionary new spaces and roles for themselves.

Already in the nineteenth century, influential social reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy¹² and Dayananda Sarasvati’¹³ were demanding a wide range of reforms in the Indian social system that dealt with women’s issues such as education, sati¹⁴ or the right to remarry. No matter how authentic and honourable their commitment was to the improvement in the situation of women, the main force that drove them to fight for social reforms was to strengthen the nation—an ideal that is very much part of the agenda of nationalist and fundamentalist movements today and is supported by the urban middle class. To lift women’s status and to give legal rights to them was regarded as indispensable to modernize India and to free it from British rule. Even though women registered remarkable gains from these reforms, the idea was not to change their role in society. Rather, legal rights and education were considered important because they allowed women to become respectable wives and mothers who could serve the nation by raising proud and powerful sons. In other words, a new vision of the ideal woman was required to build a strong Indian nation, and with it the emergence of a powerful middle class. Says Gopal K. Gokhale in one of his speeches (1897):

A wide diffusion of female education in all its branches is a factor of the highest value to the well-being of every nation. […] every single act of our daily life is regarded as regulated by some religious notion or another […]. And naturally these ideas have a far stronger hold on the minds of women than of men. [… ] Combination of enforced ignorance and overdone religion not only makes them willing victims of customs unjust and hurtful in the highest degree but also makes them the most effective opponents of all attempts at change or innovation. [… ] It is obvious that under the circumstances a wide diffusion of education with all its solvent influences among the women of India, […] will not only restore our women to the honored position which they had one time oc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• The Rise of the Middle Class in India and Western Europe
• Class Formations in The Twentieth Century
• Values and Orientations