The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena

Political Matronage in Urbanizing India

Tarini Bedi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438460307, 9781438460314
• eBook ISBN: 9781438460321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Rich in detail, this book tells the stories of women of Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army), a militant political party in Western India. It provides insight into the political networks powered by lower-level women politicians in postcolonial, globalizing cities and on their margins. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with the women of Shiv Sena, the work shows how women political activists in urbanizing India conjure political authority through the inventive, dangerous, and transgressive political personas known as "dashing ladies." Tarini Bedi develops a feminist theory of brokerage politics, arguing that political grids where women employ political, symbolic, and material resources through the political system may be seen as channels of what can be termed "political matronage."

1

“Just Doing Dashing” in Uncertain Places

How do constructions of political persona intersect with urban uncertainty and precarity in and around Indian cities to produce political possibilities of what Shiv Sena women call dashing? Here I will reflect on how the linguistic use of the term dashing by Shiv Sena women translates into collective and personal subjectivities and political practice. Arguably, dashing and its political possibilities are important to gendered forms of political mediation and are key to the life of the state and to political mobilization on the margins of the city. Indeed, the codes through which the discourses of dashing and daring become shared technologies of political effectiveness and subjectivity for Shiv Sena women are also shaped by changes in the urban and urbanizing spaces and places around these women and their constituents.

“Just Doing Dashing”: The Collective Politics of Action

I spent a great deal of time with Shiv Sena women connected to a party branch office in the Mumbai suburb of Kandivili. Four of the most active, appointed party workers in this area were women in their early fifties who had lived in their conjugal homes in the area for several decades. All of them recalled a time when the Kandivili area had wide open spaces and was very quiet until the bustling city of Mumbai expanded northward and crept up on all of them. They lived in adjacent blocks of a lower middle-class housing development. Until the late 1990s this had been the only three-story building in the area. By the mid-2000s, they were surrounded on all sides by luxury “towers,”1 a shopping mall, a multiplex movie theater, and a large supermarket. Together these women had spent much of the last decade lobbying against the private developers who they claimed were encroaching on their land, taking away their water and electricity lines, and forcing the agricultural economies in the area out of business. One afternoon we were gathered at the home of one of these women who simply goes by the name of Prabhakar. This is the last name of her Maharashtrian2 husband, though she herself is a practicing Roman Catholic from Goa. In private, Prabhakar told me that she prefers not to use her “Christian” name since she feels that this would unnecessarily separate her from her constituents who are mostly Hindu. So for everyone she was just “Prabhakar,” and throughout the time I spent with her, no one ever seemed to care.

All four women had been low-level, self-appointed party workers for over twenty-five years and all of them claimed that it was they who had first introduced women in the area to Shiv Sena’s work: “There was no party [Shiv Sena] influence here before we started working here.” All four also admitted to me in private that they felt that that they deserved “official” posts in the party because of all the work that they had been doing. All were somewhat bitter about not being recognized enough by party leadership; but they all wanted to keep working for the party at the local level in the hope that the notoriety they have accumulated amongst constituents and other urban stakeholders, like real estate developers and low-level municipal officers, would ultimately lead to nominations for electoral tickets to Mumbai’s civic body. It was the monsoon season. During the monsoons getting to the local party branch office required women to jump over several ditches created by the rampant construction in the area; this, exacerbated by the wet slush created by the Mumbai monsoons, meant that the party office, at least for women, had been moved for the time being to Prabhakar’s one-room home. A group of women from the surrounding areas had brought a complaint about a particular builder’s malfeasance with regard to encroachments on their land. They had already filed a formal complaint with the elected official in their area from another political party, but admitted angrily that they had heard nothing for several months.

Prabhakar and her companions chided the women for not coming to them first. They proceeded to tell the women a story. The story went as follows with each of the women narrating a piece of it.

1: I’ll tell you a story about Shiv Sena’s ladies doing. Two taxi drivers got into a fight on the highway and caused a big traffic jam.

2: A Congress3 party worker saw the jhamela [chaos] and came to see what had happened. He tried to talk to the angry drivers but could not make them see sense so he went away.

1: Then came along a Rashtrawadi4 party worker. He also tried to talk to them but they only got more angry. Then came a Shiv Sainik, a mahila [woman].

3: All she did was hit both taxi drivers on their ears and they immediately moved out of the way and the traffic jam was solved before you could count one, two, three, four. In the Sena there is no talking, there is just doing. And Sena ladies mostly, are just doing and dashing.

Arguably, in this actionist context of “just doing and dashing” these Shiv Sena women see dashing as part of a collective political personality: it constitutes both the political party and the individual persona. But they also reflect something more significant, namely that “dashing” is very much part of their “possible lives” (Bruner 2004). These are lived and “made possible” by the broader presence of a political party that has since its founding rewarded and encouraged public disorder, performative aggression, and a local brokerage-style political agenda that connects people to the material and affective resources of urban life. Low-level women politicos like Prabhakar see themselves as vital to the making of these urban networks. They are also vital to the ways in which these shared narratives become ways for women in a political party, where they are structurally subordinated, to collectively reclaim a transgressive form of female comportment and behavior (Butler 1993; Harcourt 2009).

The use of the English term “dashing” is significant here. Throughout my research, I found that several of the performative and nonconformist aspects of self-description were expressed in English. I initially thought that the use of English was for my benefit, but I later realized that Shiv Sena women would use the same English words when talking to each other, as well as in speeches to their constituents. It is not unusual in India for vernaculars to be regularly inflected with English (Bhatt 2001; Jeffrey 2010). However, for Shiv Sena women, this language of dashing acts and performs significant emotive and political work. Arguably, for many who engage in public, violent politics, the vernacular is often incapable of describing political personas and political performances that are seen as gender nonconformist. The use of non-vernacular communicative forms within the context of the “making” of vernacular social and political subjects and in guiding social action has been increasingly noted by scholarship on changing identities of class and gender in globalizing India (Jeffrey 2010). In the case Shiv Sena women the deliberate and performative use of English self-descriptors such as dashing for nonconformist and transgressive behavior is similarly socially and politically meaningful (Ahearn 2001; Bhatt 2001). It becomes part of a modern, gendered political discourse as much as it crafts new political selves for women through its very public ramifications.

The language of dashing and all of the practices that surround it is a vital communicative strategy through which women construct political personas as they carve out political spaces for themselves both in and outside the formal state. As we see from Prabhakar and her party colleagues, Shiv Sena women, through this performative language of dashing are very “present” within various emergent networks of influence, illicit, extra-legal, and brutally violent forms of political mobilization. This “presence” contests a lot of the emerging feminist literature on the “natural” femininities of non-Western women (for example, on home births and “return to nature” movements in North America) which reestablishes stereotypes about the apolitical and nonmaterialist engagement of Eastern women with their bodies and their communities (Canty 2004; Ruhl 2000; Teman 2003). The women here are deeply engaged with the material realities of their urbanizing environments, with the emotional and material demands of their constituents, and with the ways in which their very present bodies are important to their dashing and daring (Harcourt and Escobar 2005). Within the contexts of changing spaces and places around them and around their constituents, these are women who are aware of how to mobilize and constitute political networks and political relationships around urban degradation and change, and everyday frustrations that emerge in local environments.

Speaking Political Persona in Being

Dashing means to do things without fear. Why should you be in fear of anyone? Dashing is to be unafraid. Daring means to do work without fear. And dashing means to show what is true, to fight untruth; but not just to fight, but to show the truth to the world. To show what is real in front of everyone. Daring means to work without fear. Why should you be afraid? You need to tell the truth. I tell a lot of truth. I tell it in front of everyone, for everyone to see. In fact I am sometimes too truthful and the result can sometimes not be that good [laughs]. That is my problem, I tell the truth too much. I am too dashing and they do not like ladies to be like that.

—Vidusha, Shiv Sena party worker in Pune

Bakhtin reminds us that words and speaking are never neutral (Bakhtin 1981). “All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (Bakhtin 1981, 293). Dashing, often used with the word daring as speech and practice is so embedded in the political lives and political personas of Shiv Sena women that they have become in Bakhtin’s terms inseparable as “context” from the people who use them in speaking. Both are widely used self-identifiers by Shiv Sena women even when speaking in the vernacular. The terms are so widely used now that they have become entirely part of the vernacular. I would argue here that, despite a very rich vernacular, women simply do not see the vernacular as an adequate source for referents that do the same performative work as “dashing and “daring.” So terms like dashing and daring circulate as a very particular kind of language or, in Laura Ahearn’s terms, function as “social action” (Ahearn 2001). Through this dialogical approach to agentive action and meaning Ahearn provides a valuable definition of agency as the “socio-culturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn 2001, 112). This is a useful lens through which to examine Shiv Sena women’s capacity to “act” both individually and collectively. Action and indeed collective agency are mediated through the dialogical meanings that “dashing” and “daring” conjure up and make available. These dialogical processes are particularly evocative tools of mobilization and of autonomous selves. Arguably this is because the fashioning of political agency produced through dashing is enacted in urban spaces that are marginal both to the center of formal politics and government as well as to the normative confines of respectability for Hindu women.

Dashing and daring arguably describe a broad spectrum of political action. Some used dashing and daring interchangeably, while others tried to distinguish between the terms, although only when explicitly asked to do so. As Satam in Mumbai said to me: “Dashing means that I am outside the house a lot; but it can also mean that I am brave in my home; it can also mean that I am very dangerous, tikhat (spicy); See someone who is dashing is someone who is always ‘doing.’ Daring means someone who is brave; brave against the police, brave against lies. So dashing and daring means someone who is doing brave things all the time. Usually ladies are not doing these things all the time. But that is what our (Shiv Sena) ladies are doing. That’s what makes Shiv Sena ladies different—they are doing brave things, they are dashing and daring.” To take Satam’s suggestion a little further, I might add that while the “doing” is critical, the political subject is finally consolidated through the dialogical act of speaking and narrating the acts of dashing and daring. In J. L. Austin’s terms, the utterance is not simply a speech act, it also signifies the “doing” of something (Austin 1975). In the case of Shiv Sena, dashing, both the performance of it and its narration, is doing both political and personal work; for most women, the performance of dashing becomes inseparable from the persona (Bruner 2004). As Jerome Bruner points out, narratives are in fact important forms of world-making, where “[n]arrative imitates life, life imitates narrative” (Bruner 2004, 292). Both the dialogical narrative exercise and the performance remain critical to the consolidation of political community, political campaigns, and local brokerage. They also remain critical in producing political agents. However, in a departure from other feminist literature on political agency that theorizes all feminist agency as exclusively oppositional or “resistant” (Abu-Lughod 1990) the possibilities for agency that “dashing” produces here are not always oppositional or resistant to male structures of power even if they often critique the latter. Instead, the women here move between opposition, co-option of male language, and strategies to produce inventive political networks that often exceed those of men in the party. In this sense political agency and subjectivity lie in the possibilities for action that dashing signifies.

Dashing as Performance and as Narrative

The ways in which dashing is both enacted (performed) and then circulated (narrated) as a persona for women within the party is important to interrogate. The analytical paradigm that has come to be known as “performance” owes much of its intellectual debt to the “dramaturgical” approach that grew out of symbolic anthropology and the sociology of organizational communication (Goffman 1959). Using the metaphor of the dramatic performance that includes both “on-stage” and “off-stage” personas, Goffman explores the ways in which individuals in everyday life present themselves and their activities to others and the ways in which individuals guide and control the impression others form of them (Goffman 1959, 1963). While Goffman’s approach is self-professedly a theory of social interaction and social systems he also provokes an approach for the theorization of personality, social interaction, and society as they are constituted through performance. Therefore to be a kind of person is “not simply to possess the required attributes but to also sustain all those standards of conduct and appearance that one’s grouping attaches thereto” (Goffman 1959, 75). The communicative and strategic work that dashing and daring do are vital expressions of a Goffmanesque “face” as much as they are of a Goffmanesque “working consensus” for women in Shiv Sena (Goffman 1959, 9–10). However, Goffman’s approach to consensus assumes a unified public audience. For Shiv Sena women, performances of dashing are expressed across and to a wide range of publics. Therefore, what makes a dashing persona is often unstable. However, the body as the place “closest in” (Harcourt and Escobar 2005) is always the site through which these differential audiences are addressed. When it comes to the performative acts of gender, Judith Butler’s notion of gender acts or gender performativity inverts many assumptions about gender performance (Butler 1990a; 1990b). For Butler, “Gender is not, cannot be pre-cultural” (Butler 1990a, 25–26). However, Butler’s notion of performativity is most concerned with the individual, embodied gendered experience and the performative moment with far less attention paid to the collectively constituted categories of gender. There is a substantial collective dimension to the performances of gender and femininity in dashing. They are driven by individual women, but then they are collectively imagined, performed, and reproduced via narrative and narration.

Speaking specifically about life narratives, Bruner suggests that “One important way of characterizing a culture is by the narrative models it makes available for describing the course of a life. And the tool kit of any culture is replete not only with a stock of canonical life narratives (heroes, Marthas, tricksters, etc.), but with combinable formal constituents from which its members can construct their own life narratives: canonical stances and circumstances, as it were” (Bruner 2004, 294). The political party and the broader urban environment make dashing behavior a possibility, a hallmark for entry into the political arena for Shiv Sena women—though each of them implement that dashing in multiple, creative ways.

What is critical to the subject produced out of dashing and daring is the necessity for some form of audience, and it is in this recognition of the reality of audience and the production of face (Goffman 1959, 1981) before this audience that both political subjectivity and personal agency are located. Shiv Sena women work very hard to cultivate a very particular kind of face, through both accoutrement and through behavior. I found, through the many conversations I had with women in the party, as well as with their husbands and families, that the discourses of both dashing and daring, while generally originating in a public, performative dimension deeply tied to party action, were also frames through which women looked at themselves and were looked at as somewhat unconventional in their everyday, domestic lives.

It is however important to recognize that while dashing is an embodied descriptor of unconventional behavior and an enabler of spatial transgression, it is also expressed in spatial sites of uncertainty and change. For many women dashing is therefore the affective register through which anger and discontent comes out of the body (the place “closest in)” and the body comes out of the house in order to take on multiple forms of dislocation and space/place based politics.

Urban Uncertainty and the Politics of Urban Brokerage

In 2007, at a large outdoor meeting called the gata-pramukh medava, a meeting for the lowest level party workers in Mumbai, about four hundred gata pramukhs or neighborhood-level party organizers assembled to listen to speeches from some of the party’s top leaders. It was an election year for Mumbai’s civic body. The party had recently faced unsettling defections at the highest levels of the party. There had been rumblings that the party cadre were beginning to feel alienated from the top party leadership and a little at sea about how to keep expanding their political base. It was being reported that the base was turning to the new populist party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (Maharashtra’s Revitalized Army; hereby, MNS) founded by Raj Thackeray, former Shiv Sainik and nephew of Bal Thackeray. Hardikar, a male Shiv Sainik who had been an appointed leader in the party for over ten years and well-respected by men and women alike, took the microphone. He forcefully urged the party cadre to work as hard as they could to build liaisons with people outside the poor settlements of the city. “Build support among people in ‘buildings’ and housing societies. Soon everyone will be in pucca (permanent) housing and then we will have to appeal to their needs. So start now.” In the context of widespread discussions about slum rehabilitation in Mumbai and the changes to the everyday needs of the populations who live there, this proclamation by Hardikar is important. It suggested that sites of urban uncert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Prologue
• Introduction Dashing, Daring, and the Seduction of Political Persona
• Chapter 1 “Just Doing Dashing” in Uncertain Places
• Chapter 2 Performance, Dashing, Image
• Chapter 3 The Poetics and Politics of the Dashing Ladies
• Chapter 4 Political Machinations, Electoral Campaigns, and the Texture of Politics
• Chapter 5 The Public Event: Political Spectacle and Public Sites of Dashing
• Chapter 6 Intimate Politics and Alliance-Building
• Chapter 7 Women, Urban Wisdom, and the Illicit Politics of Housing in Mumbai
• Chapter 8 Politics and the Relations of Domesticity
• Chapter 9 The Gendered Politics of the Malkin in Pune City
• Conclusion (Re)-theorizing Political Brokerage: Political Matronage?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover