India, The Idea Of Nation And The Subaltern Indian Woman

By Cynthia Stephen

An excerpt from a chapter written for a book on subaltern women to be brought out by dalitbahujan student publishers

The idea of India as a nation has undergone extensive critique in recent years. Two such incisive critiques, Nationalism without a Nation in India (Aloysius,1999) and Debrahmanising History (Braj Ranjan Mani, 2006) were instrumental in bringing a fresh subaltern perspective to the idea/reality that is India. Thus while the mainstream view sets the start of the Independence movement in the middle of the 19th century, referring to the 1857 revolt as the “First war of Indian Independence”, others point to the anti-colonial struggle by the adivasis in central India many years earlier, and continuing parallel to, but independent of the “mainstream” anti-colonial struggle as constituting the first rebellion of the indigenous population against the colonisers. Thus social location and political position are likely to mediate understanding of India’s history, present and future, just as they also impact the role, position and location of the subaltern (Dalit, adivasi, tribal, minority or OBC) woman in today’s India.

The 1880s saw a major debate between the colonials who saw in India an “infantile civilization”, and the Brahminical pandits and upper-castes, on the prevalent practice in India of Sati, ritual in which the widow was burned on the funeral pyre of her husband. Raja Rammohan Roy, sensitized to the repugnance of the practice by his mentor William Carey (among many other things, a pioneering and eminent scholar/linguist of several Indian languages), called on the colonial government to ban the practice. The Indian socio-religious elites were opposed to the banning of the practice as they said Sati epitomized the height of Indian civilization and culture. The issue was framed as one of Modernity Vs Tradition, one that set up an opposition between Religion and Secular Values. This is one of several issues that throw into sharp relief the issue of the status and position of women in India, and highlighting the relationship between the situation of women in Indian society and the formation of the Indian national consciousness.

In Part 1 of this Paper I will show how the caste-class elites who “led” the movement look at woman’s question – her status, caste and location and how it becomes a metaphor for, and an examplar of, the idea of India. The elite-led anti-colonial struggle in India used gender imagery to construct an image of the Indian nation as one of a hapless woman, needing to be rescued from the (Masculine clutches of) colonial power. It had a powerful impact, which continues to resonate across the centuries and the length and breadth of India. In Part 2, I will show how this has come from the past to affect the day-to-day lives of millions of its poor and marginalized, especially its women. In Part 3, its caste-class-gender implications will become clearer as the argument is used to appraise contemporary Indian political trends and suggest some learnings.

Part 1: The Anti-Colonial Struggle and the Caste-Class History of the Congress

The history of the so-called Indian Independence movement, led by the stalwarts of the Indian National Congress which began as and still remains a party of the elite and upper-classes, is rife with sacrifices made of the interests of the subaltern classes, their leaders and women in particular, in the interests of the larger cause of Independence. One of the most blatant examples is the Poona Pact. Dr. B. R Ambedkar, champion of the cause of social and political justice for the masses, was forced by severe blackmail, by the use of caste, communal and religious pressure by Gandhi, the Congress, and the media into signing an unsatisfactory agreement, which ended any hope that the depressed classes, specifically the SC/ST population, will any time at present or in the future be able to raise up independent political leaders without being beholden to the dominant castes.

Thus we see that the anti-colonial struggle in India was less a “freedom” struggle and more a struggle to wrest political and economic power over India by the elite class of India. Earlier, they had been divided along class, caste, regional and linguistic lines and scattered all over the country in a hundred little principalities. A bonanza had come their way through the colonials: the uniting of the huge Indian landmass into a cohesive administrative and economic entity; the growing restiveness of the times, including the spread of modern thoughts on human rights and colonial conquest; and the compulsions of the Second world war on the colonisers, hastening the need for the British to exit India. Colonial endeavour and education had exposed them to enough modern thought to see the potential of their grabbing political power, combining to give the political elites of India the hope that they could now actually dream of ruling over a fiefdom of their own. Two of the many gifts of the colonial powers, which included scholars, lawyers, linguists and historians – were most helpful to these : access to English, enabling them to get up-to-date knowledge in Economics, law, politics and statecraft; and the construct of a pervasive Brahmanical socio-cultural regime – in short, a dim vision of an Indian nation.

Construction or Constriction?

Variously, Max Mueller, A O Hume, Annie Besant, M. K. Gandhi, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Tilak, Ranade, and many others conjured up a vision of an imaginary past, a golden age of India where Sanskrit-speaking gods dwelt, where the Vedas were the scriptures, where women were worshiped, where philosophical, theological, scientific and technological knowledge and expertise abounded, and where honour, truth, and justice were always upheld as the Dharma. Gandhi valorized Sanatana Dharma, upheld Varnashrama Dharma, and worked to bring “Ram Rajya” to reality. Religious imagery attracted the loyalty and participation of the common people in cities and small towns. These were usually local elites and land owners, from the upper and middle castes who then committed to the struggle for political freedom from colonial rule. This group also ran the media of the time – English and regional language papers, which then proceeded to disseminate far and wide the news of movement and the activities of these leaders. In no time, the masses, beholden to the local caste-class elites for both identity and livelihood, were also drawn into the equation and the recipe for a “popular” struggle was well set. The situation and role of women in the freedom struggle, and that of the outcastes – the “Harijans”, as Gandhi termed them – also formed a very visible and decisive role in the shaping of the present-day India, as we will see below.

Writers such as Bankim Chandra wrote several novels which captured the popular imagination and his poems, especially “Vande Mataram”, a hymn in praise/worship of the Motherland, here depicted as a verdant fertile land, yielding much fruit, pure and glowing with light, adorned with fragrant flowers. This image of the land as a goddess became the order of the day. Depictions of the map of the country, with J&K as the crowned head of the goddess, the Southern Peninsula as the lower part of the body, adorned with the sari, Gujarat being the right arm, holding the palm out in benediction came quickly. From there, to depict Mother India – Bharat Mata riding on a Lion as the incarnation of the Divine Female, Durga or Shakti – was just a flourish of the artist’s paintbrush. As this image was part of the popular religious imagination of the politically powerful East of India, and as Calcutta was at the time an important political and economic capital, this image became the dominant “popular” visual representation of the aspiration of the people of India. Soon Congressmen such as Tilak, and Deen Dayal Upadhyay – part of the Hindu Mahasabha which was then part of the Congress – began to speak of the Indian identity in a tone different from that of the Congress.

Gandhi’s Construction of India:

Dr. Etienne Rassendran, Professor of English at St. Joseph’s Autonomous College in Bangalore, explains how Gandhi constructed the values of the anti-colonial struggle, especially that of Satyagraha, on the idealized lines of that of the life of a Hindu Widow: her life – and that of the satyagrahi – would be one of renunciation and sacrifice, shorn of all adornment, ascetic. Gandhi was insistent, that widows and ‘redeemed’ devadasis (temple dancers/prostitutes) should not remarry, even if they were minor children. Thus sexual abstinence was also an ideal, with restrictions in food and a Spartan lifestyle, till the goal of freedom from the colonizers was realized. He upheld Varnashrama Dharma, and did not favour the changing of one’s caste-based occupation, one’s dharmic duty, even though he spoke against untouchability. He gave the name “Harijan” to the scavenger community, with the idea of “elevating” their image to that of the “children of God”. He named a paper that he published “The Harijan” even undertook to clean latrines, the work of untouchables. However, he said that a Harijan should not seek to give up scavenging, as it was his dharma, but should try to do it to the best of his ability. While the term “harijans” did find official acceptance and was used in government schemes, now the people reject this term, pointing out that it was actually a slur, implying that they were “illegitimate”. Thus they prefer to call themselves Dalit, meaning broken.

Gandhi’s term for his imagined Utopia was Ram Rajya, harking back to the time of Rama, the Purushottama, that is, the Ultimate Man. The role envisioned for women, of course, was of chaste, pious and submissive Sita, a recidivist image that the women of India are forced to live up to right up to the present day. The anthems of Gandhi’s mobilization are also telling – the bhajans “Raghupathi Raghav Raja Ram” and “Vaishnava Janato” – redolent of Vaishnavaite traditions, very mainstream, upper-caste and far from the beliefs and praxis of the Indian masses.

The India of Golwalkar and Savarkar

In keeping with the European zeitgeist, influential Indian thinkers of the time took the work of Max Mueller seriously enough to propose that the Brahmins of India, being the Asian branch of the Aryan race, were the true rulers of the world, the veritable “bhudevatas”, as termed in their scriptures. Thus Cultural Nationalism – Fascism – reared its head, its votaries mainly the Brahmin elite of Central India. The ideologues of this group, Hegdewar and Golwalkar, wrote influential books and monographs, and mobilized youth from a generation already reared on the idea of an ancient civilization which was held in the grip of a cruel and rapacious colonial power. The image of a nation as an enslaved mother, yearning for freedom evoked the corresponding image of her sons under the colonial yoke, who had to rediscover their masculine identity to fight for the honour of the enslaved motherland. The cultural productions of this school included the very popular and influential novels of Bankim Chandra including Ananda Math (which contains the hymn to the Motherland – Vande Mataram, and books such as “We, or our Nation Defined” and “A Bunch of Thoughts” by Golwalkar. The formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was mediated by these developments.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a well-known opponent of access to education for women and the lower castes, and a conservative on the woman’s question, played an important role in the discourse. His paper “Kesari” (Saffron) waged a continuous campaign on these issues. Parimala Rao, in her recent book (Published by Critical Quest) on Tilak’s position on women’s education, exposes the popular image of Tilak as a Nationalist. She quotes from the actual texts of the paper how he opposes education for women and the lower castes. Thus Tilak’s oft-quoted epigram –“Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it” strikes a more ominous note, than the patriotic tone that has popularly been read into it. And it was Tilak who popularized the practice, now spread all over India, of the public celebration of Ganesh Chaturti, as a strategy to mobilize people and unite them in a community celebration and generate heightened activities under which covert anti-colonial activities were undertaken.

Thus the nascent idea of India of the caste-class elites was backward-looking, Brahmanically inspired, conservative and anti-modern and anti-woman in its world-view. Women were stereotyped as goddesses, mothers and as Sati-Savitri types, whose realm was the home and who needed only to tend the family, hearth and home, bear sons for the service of the community and the nation, and play a supportive but subordinate role in the struggle.

The Subalterns’ Vision of India

The emancipatory discourse had taken a different tone among the subalterns in central India. Under the dynamic, sagacious leadership of Jotirao Phule, an educated youth from the subaltern class and his courageous and illustrious wife Savitribai – who both mobilized support among all sections in an effort to end the hegemony of the feudal classes: the Brahman-supported Peshwas who oppressed the lower classes in all spheres – social, economic, political, religious. They campaigned for the spread of primary education among the poorer sections and for government funding; set up schools for girls from the oppressed communities; wrote and published strident critiques of the repressive Brahmanical ideology; challenged the sexist and inhuman double standards practiced by the dominant castes against their women and girls, and set up the Satya Shodak Samaj (Society of Truthseekers) to counter the spread of conservatism by the Brahmanical elite through their “reformist” Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and Prarthana Samaj.

In short, they were soon able to galvanise a movement and start a process of education and social change in Central India, which was far superior to the work of the Brahmin reformers. In this they had to contend with opposition from the conservative social elites including Ranade and Tilak, who was a public and bitter opponent of education of women and the lower castes.

In contrast with the elite vision of India, the more vigourous and forward-looking imagination of the subalterns and the oppressed envisaged an India in which education, equality, and justice would prevail. Architects of this image included Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, Pandita Ramabai – a much-maligned, brave, and iconoclastic Brahmin widow who broke many taboos and showed a stunning capacity for leadership and institution-building, and Bhimrao Ambedkar, a multifaceted personality whose resplendent scholarship was second to none among his contemporaries, and whose sharp intellect still brings dividends to the Indian masses he loved and struggled for Bahiskrut Bharat – also the name of the paper he published (Bahiskrut means excluded). It is to these personalities we must turn to find an agenda to emancipate those still oppressed by the caste, class, gender and communal nature of today’s Indian polity.

However, before we do that we need to re-examine the rhetoric used by the Congress, and more specifically Gandhi, to mobilize the masses against the colonial powers, to pinpoint where the seed of today’s unequal India was sown.

To go back briefly to Dr. Etienne Rassendran’s analogy of the Sathyagraha and the life of a Hindu widow, one sees that the strategy also drew on Vedic, Vedantic, and Jaina traditions, all of which Gandhi could claim as a heritage. The asceticism and abstemious lifestyle of Jainism, which included inflicting violence on oneself as a means of service to the community, was used by Gandhi as a political weapon. In effect it was a serious form of emotional blackmail against anyone who disagreed with his
assessment of a situation – whether they were communal rioters, the British political establishment, or Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, leader of the large and voiceless excluded people of India –who came up against this tactic and was thus coerced against his will and better judgement to sign what is now known as the Poona Pact. [For a detailed treatment of this topic, see the last chapter of Debrahmanising History (Mani, 2006)]. As a result, till today, the Scheduled castes (now known as Dalits) and Scheduled tribes now have only a few reserved seats in the legislatures and Parliament, to be elected from which they will need the votes of the socially dominant community. It pits leaders from the scheduled castes against each other, thus making it almost impossible for an independent and empowered leadership and voice to emerge from the Dalit community.

Further – and more important for our discussion – the self-mortification of the Satyagrahi is similar to the structurally imposed gender and religious violence on the Hindu widow of the day, who was deprived of creature comforts and could hope for nothing more but a life of servitude, though considered an improvement over the extremity of Sati – the same practice earlier interpreted by the colonials as a sign of an immature civilization but which its votaries held to be the epitome of its culture and identity.

To be continued.

Cynthia Stephen is an independent researcher and is the State Programme Director, of Mahila Samakhya Karnataka.